Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer

by Simon Partner

Assembled in Japan investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s.

This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products.

Throughout, the author relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.

Genres: Japan, School

323 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 1999

Reviews

[Alice Jennings]

Its alright. I gives what it says on the tin, providing general facts about popular electrical appliances in postwar Japan. I found it a bit boring, but only because its not my subject. Easy to read.