`Made in Japan': the cultural politics of `home electrification' in postwar Japan

Abstract

This article examines the advertising images of home appliances and their technology in contemporary Japanese society. I view these images at the intersection of two sets of boundaries: Americanism/nationalism, and between genders. While home appliances had been in use in Japan since the early part of the century, it is only after the mid-1950s that appliances as commodities became linked in the popular imagination with images of the nuclear family. Since the mid- 1950s, home appliances have been designed and consumed to evoke the connections with both an American style of life symbolic of `affluence' and a Japanese national identity as they are appreciated under the name of ` Sanshu no Jingi' (three sacred treasures). This article analyses the imbrication of Americanism and nationalism within the advertisements for home appliances through the 1930s to the 1970s. Historically, the advertisements have emphasized both housewives as the subject of promoting home electrification and democracy in their homes and male engineers as another subject of advancing `Japanese technology' under the `world's eye'. This image of home appliances containing both Americanism and nationalism finally started disintegrating in the late 1970s and the new image of `personal' technology has taken the place of the image of `home' technology. In the 1980s, the image of `home' where the subjectivity of a housewife is constructed and the image of `nation' where the subjectivity of an engineer is constructed have lost their correspondence. This article indicates that a social acceptance of technology in daily life has been transformed in connection with a wider scale of cultural and political transformations.