Like Bamboo Shoots after the Rain: The Growth of a Nation of Dressmakers and Consumers

Abstract

The female consumer stands — in advertisements quite literally — as one of the most prominent symbols of Japan’s astonishing post-war economic rise to global prominence. Even in the impoverished aftermath of war, her smiling figure beckoned to her compatriots to share in the ‘bright life’ enabled by purchase of the fruits of modern industry. One of the goods she bought and used with greatest intensity — whether measured in the rate of diffusion or the daily hours of use — was the sewing machine. Perhaps because of the difficulty of neatly defining its economic or social character, the sewing machine is a product often overlooked in standard accounts of Japan’s post-war consumer revolution. It was at once an object of consumer desire and a producer good used to make clothing not only for the family but also for the commercial market. But for this very reason I see the extraordinary spread of the sewing machine as both a harbinger and an example of a broader story: the heroines of Japan’s post-war consumer revolution brought to the task of managing the household and filling it with all manner of goods a professional spirit not unlike that of their male counterparts, the ‘salarymen’ who designed, made and sold these products in Japan and around the world.