One of the great paradoxes of recent times is that Japan—a nation that has proved just as prolific at environmental destruction, overconsumption, and extreme waste of resources and energy as any other modern industrialized nation—has somehow acquired a reputation for possessing a “unique” form of “waste consciousness” that dates back to the prewar era and allegedly even premodern times.
In her groundbreaking study, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan, Eiko Maruko Siniawer traces the evolution of waste consciousness in Japan from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She argues that after acute shortages during the war and the immediate postwar era produced an intense waste consciousness, Japanese writers, intellectuals, and business figures struggled to overcome the wartime injunction that “luxury is the enemy,” and briefly succeeded during the high-growth 1960s in replacing this idea with a notion of consumption as a “virtue” that helped drive economic expansion....
