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Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary
O'Bryan reviews Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary by Michael P. Cronin.
Book Review
Growth solutions: Economic knowledge and problems of capitalism in post-war Japan, 1945–1960
This thesis explores the preoccupation with economic growth that came to dominate political-economic thought and practice in Japan after World War II. Tracing the history of growth as social science theory and national ideal, the work illuminates the technical and ideological conditions that enabled the naturalization of growth as the overriding definition of national purpose and power in the mid-twentieth century. As the discipline of economics rose to greater prominence after the war, a new breed of public economists helped legitimate growthist ideology by combining new modes of macroeconomic analysis with prewar Marxist critiques to mobilize old fears of economic “backwardness.” The study examines the history of growth along two connected axes: its epistemological foundations and its deployment as a solution to what critics perceived as the peculiar ills of Japanese capitalism. As aggregative empirical methodologies attracted increasing attention within economics after the war, bureaucrats and scholars transformed the infant national accounting statistic of GNP from an obscure academic exercise into one of the key conceptual instruments by which macroeconomic growth was imagined, measured, and pursued. Meanwhile, with powerful new empirical techniques at their disposal, a broad spectrum of intellectuals and planners championed high growth as a modernizing solution to the “deformities” of the Japanese economy that militarism during earlier decades had failed to remedy. As part of this growthist agenda for national reformation, economic technocrats also strove to supplement a canon of frugality and thrift—long evoked throughout Japanese history and a constant refrain during the war—to legitimate private consumption as a virtue. Neither the ascendancy of economics and econometric techniques nor the faith in rapid growth as a prescription for postwar peace was unique to Japan. This constellation of developments reflected, rather, a mid-twentieth-century romance with technocracy common to industrial nations the world over. Speaking to the larger trans-national history of this technocratic ideal, this work charts the ways that growth as theory and practice was employed in the specific context of Japanese capitalism after defeat and the end of empire.
Dissertation
