Making Sense of Japan’s “Lost Decades”
May 15, 2013 6:30 PM (finished)
Andrew Gordon
(Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University)
| Date/Time | May 15, 2013 6:30 PM |
|---|---|
| Location | Room 549, Akamon Sogo Kenkyuto, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo [map] |
| Abstract | The change in domestic and global understanding of Japanese society and economy over the past twenty years has been extraordinary, from Japan as miracle, model, or menace in the 1960s-80s, and into the mid-1990s, to Japanese as declining land of systemic failure. Surely the former perceptions were exaggerated, and the recent drumbeat of a discourse of decline may be so as well. How might we parse the grammar of the discourse of decline? And how does it connect to social trends and political economy? At the early stages of a project to examine these questions, I hope to use this occasion to raise them (rather than to answer them), and to seek thoughts and guidance from the audience on ways to approach them. |
| Bio | Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. His most recent English publication is Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011), on the emergence of the modern consumer in Japan, using the sewing machine as window on that story. A Japanese translation will be published in July 2013. Gordon’s first book was The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies Monographs, 1985). A Japanese translation and expanded edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2012, with two additional chapters covering the period from the 1960s to the present. His talk will focus on issues addressed in the final chapter of this translation, which examines the 1990s and 2000s. |
