Postwar Economic Growth Research Articles

Technical challenges and innovations in existing pile extraction and associated borehole backfilling in Japan

This paper critically evaluates and proposes innovative approaches to address the technical challenges associated with extracting existing piles and backfilling the associated boreholes, specifically in the context of Japan. Japan's rapid post-war economic growth has resulted in an infrastructure that is now aging, necessitating the demolition and subsequent reuse of structures. The prevalent use of pile foundations in soft soil conditions in Japan presents unique challenges following demolition, including differential settlement and complications for future construction on the same site. Current practices in Japan for pile removal are outdated and rely heavily on field experience without the support of standardized guidelines, leading to unresolved issues in improving the removal process. This paper provides an in-depth review of the status of technological advances in pile extraction and removal, as well as the development of backfill materials, with a focus on Japan's unique geological, demographic, and urban development factors. It highlights the risks associated with the traditional wire rope method and presents an innovative pile tip gripping and lifting method that aims to improve safety and efficiency by minimizing friction and preventing accidents. It also discusses the critical role of backfill treatment in preventing subsidence and outlines the performance requirements for fill materials, emphasizing the need for materials that provide uniform strength, prevent material segregation, and resist groundwater infiltration. Specifically, the paper discusses the development of cement-based fillers for borehole backfilling in Japan and demonstrates the effectiveness of sodium carbonate and thickeners in improving the physical and rheological properties of cement slurries. Finally, the paper emphasizes the urgent need for innovative technologies and methodologies for pile extraction, removal, and borehole backfilling in the Japanese context, highlighting their importance in ensuring safe, sustainable, and efficient land use in urban areas while addressing environmental concerns and stakeholder interests in land transactions and construction projects.

Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Marni Davis Allison E. Schottenstein. Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2021. 415 pp. During the postwar era, a significant proportion of whites who participated in civil rights actions and organizations were American Jews of European descent. This phenomenon has given rise to popular assumptions of a civil rights–era political alliance—a “golden age” of Black-Jewish relations, inspired by a shared history of marginalization and common liberal political leanings. But such notions beg for closer and more critical examination. The history of interactions between Blacks and Jews in the United States has been shaped by immense socioeconomic disparities that have influenced their conceptions of one another, often generating tensions between them, since the abolition of slavery. Black Americans and white American Jews have also disagreed on political issues like immigration, urban renewal, and Zionism, which unsettles the idea of an uncomplicated Black-Jewish coalition. Indeed, the very concept of “Black-Jewish relations” might conceal more than it illuminates, as it suggests an inherent distinction between the two categories and overlooks the historical presence of individuals and communities who identified as both. But any historical analysis of this subject should also include consideration of geographic region. Most historical studies of Blacks and Jews have focused on the cities of the American North and Midwest. In Changing Perspectives, Allison E. Schottenstein looks south, applying the framework of Black-Jewish relations to the history of Houston, Texas, in the twentieth century. Today the most enthnoracially diverse city in the South, Houston has been a central player in the Sunbelt’s postwar economic growth. But Jim Crow was a totalizing force there midcentury, as it was throughout the region, and Black Houstonians were consistently obstructed from sharing the benefits of the city’s growth. Houston’s small Jewish population, on the other hand, found general social acceptance and significant upward mobility throughout the Jim Crow era—in no small measure because they were of European origin, and could avail themselves of neighborhoods, schools, and other civic amenities limited to whites. Still, many Jews feared that their acceptance was provisional, their status vulnerable; for this reason, or perhaps because they simply accepted the racial hierarchy from which they benefited, the Jews of Houston were peripheral players in the city’s civil rights movement. [End Page 205] With a focus on the actions of communal leadership and elected officials, Schottenstein’s community-study approach provides a detailed top-down account of Jewish Houston’s internal discourse on race and politics. (Her study of the city’s African American leadership and institutions is far less thorough and consistent.) A few of Houston’s Jewish leaders had expressed support for racial desegregation in schools and other public accommodations, even before Brown v. Board of Education, and were enthusiastic participants in municipal organizations that advocated interracial cooperation. But the larger community’s approach to the subject had been “to take a back seat” in the movement proper, to “leave the vocal roles to others” (103). The principal reason for their unwillingness to take a public stand on the matter, Schottenstein contends, was unease. Houston’s Jews encountered social antisemitism in the form of restrictive covenants and exclusionary elite country clubs. In moments of local anti-Communist fervor, they were blamed for “creeping socialism” because of Jewish participation in liberal interracial organizations. Occasionally, more vicious and frightening forms of antisemitism surfaced, as when George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party founder who blamed Jewish Communists for racial integration, came to town. They also feared violence, and not without cause; in early 1960—a few years after a rash of synagogue bombings throughout the Southeast—Houston’s Congregation Emanu El suffered a bomb threat, and a swastika was graffitied on a nearby Jewish-owned grocery. Anxious that their status and their physical safety were conditioned on their willingness to abet white supremacy, Houston’s Jewish leadership, with a few exceptions, tended toward silence. They distanced themselves from those who spoke out, took a gradualist approach to the desegregation...

The 60-year downward trend of economic growth in the industrialized countries of the world

This report, using data from a range of authoritative sources, studies the long-term postwar economic growth of the industrialised North and shows that this has fallen continuously, with only brief and limited interruptions, since at least the early 1960s. The trend is extremely strong and includes all major Northern economies without exception. It is confirmed by both Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) and a range of standard real GDP measures, by a variety of weightings of the growth rates, and a variety of aggregations of different countries. The Newly-Industrialised Countries (NICS), after early high growth rates, joined the general trend of other industrialised countrieds after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. It is thus an extremely well-confirmed historical trend. Recent data show no evidence of any post-COVID reversal. These results sheds new light on the current difficulties of the world economy and have many implications. They conflict with any idea that Secular Stagnation as it is increasingly referred to even in mainstream literature, originates in some recent upset such as the 2008 crash, or in the incidence of, or problems created by, a putative new régime of accumulation such as neoliberalism or financialisation. In fact, the roots of the present crisis lie in a long historical process which set in very shortly into the ‘Golden Age’ of postwar expansion.

ЕКОНОМІЧНА РЕКОНСТРУКЦІЯ: ВПЛИВ ДРУГОЇ СВІТОВОЇ ВІЙНИ НА ПІСЛЯВОЄННЕ ЕКОНОМІЧНЕ ЗРОСТАННЯ

In order to achieve post-war recovery of the country, integrate the economy into the European space and global value chains, Ukraine needs to implement a large-scale recovery program. With the current development of information technologies (big data, cloud technologies, high-speed internet coverage, modern satellite systems, etc.), the world has not seen recovery projects on the scale of Ukraine's future recovery. Therefore, Ukraine needs to create its own recovery model using the best principles of recovery from natural disasters and military conflicts, as well as modern digital tools. To achieve this goal, this study examined the international experience of post-World War II recovery. The main focus of the analysis was on approaches and tools that produced the maximum result. The study also showed the necessity for Ukraine to form a new paradigm of economic thinking and development. Its content lies in the transition to thinking in terms of reconstructive type of economic development. It is shown that reconstructive development is possible both on the basis of economic growth and under certain conditions with zero or even negative rates of economic growth. In analyzing the issues outlined in the title of the article, it is relevant to refer to the experience of developed countries around the world. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze the main factors that helped countries recover and develop after wars and military conflicts, in order to take them into account when creating a new concept for the reconstruction of Ukraine's economy. Looking at the examples of state intervention in post-war economic growth processes that have been analyzed, there are somewhat common features in foreign experience that indicate the importance of targeted international assistance for the recovery of production capacity and stable economic growth. The Golden Age of capitalism was characterized by an unprecedented growth in international trade combined with impressive rates of global economic growth, and modern thinking and development practices are largely a result of it. Long-term economic planning was recognized as important, and industrialization was promoted as a means of promoting economic development in less developed countries.

UKRAINE’S POST-WAR ECONOMY: INTERNATIONAL AID AND GROWTH POLICY

The full-scale war unleashed in 2022 by the Russian Federation against Ukraine is accompanied by massive destruction of infrastructure and industrial facilities. Their rapid recovery is impossible without international assistance. However, it is known from history that the use of such aid did not always lead to accelerated post-war recovery of countries whose markets and economies are developing. Knowledge of such facts urged Western scientists to search for a mechanism of aid's impact on economic growth. Researches that began in the 1960s did not shed light on this mechanism. However, they did show that aid speeded up economic growth and recovery in countries that conducted better fiscal, monetary, and trade policies and succeeded in establishing the rule of law. In the article, a slightly different scientific approach is substantiated. It assumes that when the country implements not only a better fiscal, monetary, foreign trade, institutional, but also structural economic policy, the impact of international aid on postwar economic growth can significantly increase. The proposed approach gives grounds for the statement that the limited amount of aid in Ukraine should not be dissipated on the reconstruction of all industrial facilities destroyed and damaged by the war, but it is advisable to concentrate it on the restoration of enterprises that are able to start production and sale of increased technological complexity products on international markets within a short period. The advantages of such use of the aid are shown by calculation. It shows that directing international aid at expanding exports of high technological complexity items would create in Ukraine favorable conditions for increasing the post-war annual growth rates of commodity production to 10% and reduce the period of recovery of this indicator to the 2021 level from 12 to 6 years. At the same time, arguments are given that the proposed use of aid is only a means of shortening the terms of the economy's exit from the crisis and its transition to a state of accelerated growth. It will be possible to turn this state into a long-term economic trend only if an effective mechanism is introduced for encouraging the companies’ innovative activities and attracting foreign investments in industries producing items of increased technological complexity. Modeling possible scenarios of the post-war recovery of Ukraine's economy somewhat expands the scientific understanding of the mechanism of aid's effect on a country’s economic growth. In particular, it is supplemented by the idea that in the post-war period, international aid plays the role of a driver of high rates of a country’s economic growth to the extent that it contributes to economic restructuring of the production from military to civil mode transforming it from technologically simple to more technologically complex.

ПОВОЄННА ЕКОНОМІКА УКРАЇНИ: МІЖНАРОДНА ДОПОМОГА ТА ПОЛІТИКА ЗРОСТАННЯ

The full-scale war unleashed in 2022 by the Russian Federation against Ukraine is accompanied by massive destruction of infrastructure and industrial facilities. Their rapid recovery is impossible without international assistance. However, it is known from history that the use of such aid did not always lead to accelerated post-war recovery of countries whose markets and economies are developing. Knowledge of such facts urged Western scientists to search for a mechanism of aid's impact on economic growth. Researches that began in the 1960s did not shed light on this mechanism. However, they did show that aid speeded up economic growth and recovery in countries that conducted better fiscal, monetary, and trade policies and succeeded in establishing the rule of law. In the article, a slightly different scientific approach is substantiated. It assumes that when the country implements not only a better fiscal, monetary, foreign trade, institutional, but also structural economic policy, the impact of international aid on postwar economic growth can significantly increase. The proposed approach gives grounds for the statement that the limited amount of aid in Ukraine should not be dissipated on the reconstruction of all industrial facilities destroyed and damaged by the war, but it is advisable to concentrate it on the restoration of enterprises that are able to start production and sale of high technological complexity products on international markets within a short period. The advantages of such use of the aid are shown by calculation. It shows that directing international aid at expanding exports of high technological complexity items would create in Ukraine favorable conditions for increasing the post-war annual growth rates of commodity production to 10% and reduce the period of recovery of this indicator to the 2021 level from 12 to 6 years. At the same time, arguments are given that the proposed use of aid is only a means of shortening the terms of the economy's exit from the crisis and its transition to a state of accelerated growth. It will be possible to turn this state into a long-term economic trend only if an effective mechanism is introduced for encouraging the companies’ innovative activities and attracting foreign investments in industries producing items of high technological complexity. Modeling possible scenarios of the post-war recovery of Ukraine's economy somewhat expands the scientific understanding of the mechanism of aid's effect on a country’s economic growth. In particular, it is supplemented by the idea that in the post-war period, international aid plays the role of a driver of high rates of a country’s economic growth to the extent that it contributes to economic restructuring of the production from military to civil mode transforming it from technologically simple to more technologically complex.

Body-mind discipline for life: The non-conformity of contemporary Japanese tea ceremony practitioners

The Japanese tea ceremony has taught its practitioners how to discipline one's body and mind through the acquisition of specific body movements. This self-discipline has urged tea ceremony practitioners to conform to authorities and the patriarchy, most notably the iemoto , or specific families patriarchally monopolizing the right to issue permissions to tea ceremony practitioners. This paper elucidates how contemporary tea practitioners have been succeeding but also appropriating the self-disciplinary attitudes for their own self-serving purposes. Based on ethnographic data, the paper argues that married women practitioners during and after Japan's postwar economic growth, and young company workers-practitioners in the 21st century, are distancing themselves from the iemoto system and the patriarchy, while making use of them in their respective ways. These cases indicate that body-mind discipline can help one become an autonomous individual who does not need to submit even to the very authorities from whom that self-discipline was learned.

POST-WAR RECOVERY OF EUROPE: EXPERIENCE AND LESSONS FOR UKRAINE

The paper studies the problems of a country’s recovery after a war or a military conflict. The European experience of restructuring the economy after World War II is investigated. The main focus of the paper is on the analysis of post-war Modernization and Re-Equipment Plan of France, entitled the Monnet Plan, and European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. The plan for recovering the French economy is of interest to Ukraine due to the similarities in problems and challenges faced by France in 1946 and Ukraine now. Therefore, the paper reviews the methods and approaches employed by the French experts trying to modernize their country. It also determines the risks that the French tackled while implementing the Monnet Plan. The author highlights the progressiveness and identifies the peculiarities of the Marshall Plan used to restructure post-war Europe. Suggestions for its adaptation opportunities in the current Ukrainian conditions are based on the results of the generalization and systematization of the European experience. The author argues that Ukraine’s recovery should start from the structural transformation and transition from the agrarian raw economy to an industrial and innovative kind, achieved through establishment of modern high-tech digital Industry 4.0. Notably, Ukraine itself must show initiative in this if it wishes to avoid being side-lined as a middling agrarian state. Here, a strong and unyielding position of the national elite is of paramount importance, as is their defence of the national interests and the right of the Ukrainian state to innovative development EU membership. It is of key importance that the issue of granting Ukraine financial support is resolved, as it is a condition of ensuring its resilience and sustainability of its post-war economic growth. On its part, Ukraine must ensure transparency in the use of the international aid, eradicate corruption and misuse of funds allocation.

THE ECONOMY OF WAR AND POSTWAR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: WORLD AND UKRAINIAN REALITIES

The subject of the research is the study of global economic growth during the war in Ukraine, the analysis of the war economy and the postwar economic development in Ukraine. Methodology. The study used general scientific methods, in particular: theoretical generalization; methods of positive and normative analysis and statistical analysis. The aim of the work is the process of studying the world economic growth during the war in Ukraine, the analysis of the war economy and the postwar economic development in Ukraine. The conclusion of the study. The forecast for global economic growth during the war in Ukraine assumes that the rate in developed economies will reach a 38-year high of 5.7 percent, while price growth in developed and developing countries will accelerate to 8.7 percent, the fastest decline since the global financial crisis of 2008. The acceleration is projected to decline by 2.5 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, starting in 2023. Global socioeconomic development will depend on the most significant factors: energy and food contributed to rising inflation in 2021, when oil and gas supplies were constrained after several years of restrained investment and geopolitical uncertainty; rising food prices will affect every country in the world as extreme weather has reduced crop yields and rising oil and gas prices have increased fertilizer costs; factory closures, port restrictions, ship congestion, container shortages and staff shortages will continue to disrupt some sectors; labor shortages, especially in high-contact industries, are driving up wages, although inflation has caused them to fall. It has been researched that according to estimates of national and other international expert institutions, the reduction of Ukraine's GDP in 2022 will be 35%. The analysis showed that in April 2022, regions where significant hostilities are taking place or part of the territory is under occupation account for almost 20 percent of Ukraine's GDP, in particular: Kharkiv – 6.11 percent, Donetsk – 4.89 percent, Zaporizhzhia – 3.96 percent, Mykolaiv – 2.29 percent, Luhansk – 1.02 percent, Kherson – 1.62 percent. It is established that during the three months of the war in Ukraine there was a deep decline in economic activity, and the introduction of a number of tax changes to mitigate the shock in the economy led to a significant reduction in tax revenues. The directions of post-war economic growth for Ukraine are suggested.

Sino-Japanese Engagement in the Making of China’s National Champions

ABSTRACT Japan’s rapid post-war economic growth prompted Chinese leaders to look to their neighbour as they initiated market reforms from the late 1970s. How did movements of people and ideas between China and Japan occur, and what were their effects on Chinese enterprise policies? From the 1970s through the 1990s, Chinese officials, scholars, and enterprise representatives invited Japanese advisors to China, conducted myriad exchanges through associations like the Sino-Japanese Economic Knowledge Exchange and the Japan-China Economic Association, and actively studied Japan’s economy and companies. Chinese policy-makers gained insights from Japan about market-responsive forms of corporate structure, organisational solutions to state ownership dilemmas, evidence that consolidation could aid economic performance and technological upgrading, and strategic commitment to building large state-owned enterprise groups. However, this episode of intense engagement between China and Japan generated neither unilateral ‘diffusion’ nor unitary influence. Instead, it reveals how China has developed its own path of economic development through what I term ‘policy collaging’: seeking, selecting, and creatively combining policy ideas and practices from international sources.

Daily Life of the American Embassy in Czechoslovakia in 1945—1948

The article is devoted to the study of various aspects of daily life of the US Embassy in Czechoslovakia in 1945—1948. The author considers the main areas of its work, major problems and difficulties that American diplomats had to overcome being in difficult conditions of the post-war economic recovery and international tension growth. Special attention is paid to the role of Ambassador L. A. Steinhardt, his methods of leadership, interactions with subordinates, with the Czechoslovak authorities and the State Department. This allows to reveal some new aspects of American diplomacy functioning, as well as to identify poorly explored factors that influenced American politics in Central Europe during the years when the Cold War was brewing and tensions between Moscow and Washington were rising. The article is based on unpublished primary sources from the American archives.

Technical Appendix: Accounting for U.S. Post-War Economic Growth.

This is the Technical Appendix of Accounting for U.S. Post-War Economic Growth. Here we include some results not presented in the paper.

Accounting for U.S. Post-War Economic Growth

We develope a growth accounting method using the whole neoclassical growth model. We obtain three primary findings from our analysis of the U.S. economy during 1954--2017. First, the efficiency wedges in the entire period accurately account for the evolution of U.S. productivity and labor share. Second, the labor wedge was the main force driving the recovery of output and worked hours per capita in the eighties and nineties as well as after the Great Recession. Finally, if factor shares adjust competitively, the main force driving the U.S. growth slowdown of both the seventies and the first decade of this century was the capital-efficiency wedge and the forces driving the U.S. Great Recession are not very different from the forces working in other OECD economies and those driving the 1982 Recession in the United States.

Introduction

Introduction Paul Poplawski e ‘hilarious depression’ of the 1920s Oen referred to as the ‘roaring twenties’ or the ‘gay twenties’, the popular image of the 920s, as I have suggested elsewhere, is of ‘a carefree, frivolous, even anarchic’ age.1 is is an image strongly coloured by the American experience of that decade, but it applies to Britain too, not least because this was precisely the decade when American influences started to become widespread in Britain, especially within popular culture. Part of this common view of the era is that it was also, apparently, a ‘golden’ age for a whole host of things: motoring, air travel, wireless broadcasting, jazz, movies, musicals, revues, detective fiction — all things which seem to testify to a certain degree of post-war economic recovery and growth,2 to the continuing survival of a class of the affluent elite (from whom were drawn most of the ‘Bright Young ings’ of post-Waugh fame),3 and to a gradual spreading of a broadly middle-class lifestyle. But this was also, famously, a boom-and-bust decade and, in Britain, even before the Wall Street Crash of 929, there were severe swings in the economy throughout the 920s. Whatever relative prosperity might have existed for the population seen as a whole, this was always unevenly spread geographically, and some regions of the country continued to suffer extremes of poverty and hardship. High levels of unemployment and a pitiful lack of decent housing were persistent blights across the land and were compounded in the immediate post-war years by the return of huge numbers of war-wounded who were oen given no significant support or help in finding homes and employment. us, although the 920s saw ‘a period of psychological release aer the war and there was something of a hedonistic mood of “living for the moment” — among the middle and leisured classes at least’, Paul Poplawski, ‘e Twentieth Century, 90–939’, in English Literature in Context, ed. by 1 Paul Poplawski, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207), pp. 470–540 (p. 492). And, speaking of things golden, in 925 Britain confidently restored the gold standard, which 2 had been suspended since 94. Unfortunately, the consequent overvaluation of the pound seems to have exacerbated the economic slump later in the decade — and the gold standard was abandoned again in 93. is was the phrase popularized in the period’s tabloid press, which is satirized in Evelyn 3 Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (930) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 938; repr. 965). Waugh’s own phrase in the novel is actually ‘Bright Young People’ (pp. 59, 92). Yearbook of English Studies, 50 (2020), –2© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 these years clearly had their grimmer side too, with a major economic depression, mass unemployment, constant industrial unrest and an underlying sense of wartrauma . Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (925) is in this sense a brilliant analysis of the divided nature of the 920s, where, on a glorious June morning in London, an upper-class woman exults in ordering beautiful flowers for her carefully planned dinner party while, in the park over the way, a former soldier relives the horrors of the trenches as he begins his chaotic slide into a suicidal nervous breakdown.4 As this suggests, the war hung very heavily over the decade and tropes reflecting variously on the war’s derangement of civilization are not hard to find in the literature of the period. Indeed, Vera Brittain’s blunt summation of the war in her classic memoir, Testament of Youth (933), could stand as a convenient motto over the entrance into the 920s too: ‘e world was mad and we were all victims.’5 On the one hand, then, we have images of a war-wearied decade of depression, despair and disenchantment;6 on the other, images of general well-being and high spirits, of a burgeoning of popular pastimes and entertainments for the masses and of positively riotous partying among the idle rich and their hangerson : Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else...

Introduction

Introduction Paul Poplawski e ‘hilarious depression’ of the 1920s Oen referred to as the ‘roaring twenties’ or the ‘gay twenties’, the popular image of the 920s, as I have suggested elsewhere, is of ‘a carefree, frivolous, even anarchic’ age.1 is is an image strongly coloured by the American experience of that decade, but it applies to Britain too, not least because this was precisely the decade when American influences started to become widespread in Britain, especially within popular culture. Part of this common view of the era is that it was also, apparently, a ‘golden’ age for a whole host of things: motoring, air travel, wireless broadcasting, jazz, movies, musicals, revues, detective fiction — all things which seem to testify to a certain degree of post-war economic recovery and growth,2 to the continuing survival of a class of the affluent elite (from whom were drawn most of the ‘Bright Young ings’ of post-Waugh fame),3 and to a gradual spreading of a broadly middle-class lifestyle. But this was also, famously, a boom-and-bust decade and, in Britain, even before the Wall Street Crash of 929, there were severe swings in the economy throughout the 920s. Whatever relative prosperity might have existed for the population seen as a whole, this was always unevenly spread geographically, and some regions of the country continued to suffer extremes of poverty and hardship. High levels of unemployment and a pitiful lack of decent housing were persistent blights across the land and were compounded in the immediate post-war years by the return of huge numbers of war-wounded who were oen given no significant support or help in finding homes and employment. us, although the 920s saw ‘a period of psychological release aer the war and there was something of a hedonistic mood of “living for the moment” — among the middle and leisured classes at least’, Paul Poplawski, ‘e Twentieth Century, 90–939’, in English Literature in Context, ed. by 1 Paul Poplawski, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207), pp. 470–540 (p. 492). And, speaking of things golden, in 925 Britain confidently restored the gold standard, which 2 had been suspended since 94. Unfortunately, the consequent overvaluation of the pound seems to have exacerbated the economic slump later in the decade — and the gold standard was abandoned again in 93. is was the phrase popularized in the period’s tabloid press, which is satirized in Evelyn 3 Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (930) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 938; repr. 965). Waugh’s own phrase in the novel is actually ‘Bright Young People’ (pp. 59, 92). Yearbook of English Studies, 50 (2020), –2© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 these years clearly had their grimmer side too, with a major economic depression, mass unemployment, constant industrial unrest and an underlying sense of wartrauma . Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (925) is in this sense a brilliant analysis of the divided nature of the 920s, where, on a glorious June morning in London, an upper-class woman exults in ordering beautiful flowers for her carefully planned dinner party while, in the park over the way, a former soldier relives the horrors of the trenches as he begins his chaotic slide into a suicidal nervous breakdown.4 As this suggests, the war hung very heavily over the decade and tropes reflecting variously on the war’s derangement of civilization are not hard to find in the literature of the period. Indeed, Vera Brittain’s blunt summation of the war in her classic memoir, Testament of Youth (933), could stand as a convenient motto over the entrance into the 920s too: ‘e world was mad and we were all victims.’5 On the one hand, then, we have images of a war-wearied decade of depression, despair and disenchantment;6 on the other, images of general well-being and high spirits, of a burgeoning of popular pastimes and entertainments for the masses and of positively riotous partying among the idle rich and their hangerson : Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else...

The effects of barriers to technology adoption on japanese prewar and postwar economic growth

Following the start of modern economic growth around the end of the 19th century, Japan’s economy had substantially lagged behind leading economies before World War II, but achieved rapid catch-up – the growth miracle – after the war. To explain the patterns, we build a dynamic model and examine the role of barriers to technology adoption. We find that such barriers hampered catch-up in the prewar period and explain about one-third of the postwar miracle. Taking a historical perspective, we argue that factors that acted as the barriers include low capacity to absorb technology, economic and political frictions with the outside world, and a lack of sufficient competition.

Conflict and Consensus: The Steel Strike of 1959 and the Anatomy of the New Deal Order

This article places the 1959 steel strike—the largest work stoppage in US history—within the trajectory of the New Deal order. We provide a multiscalar account of the strike that stretches from the mills and corporate boardrooms, to Congress and the Oval Office, and back to the homes of steelworkers themselves. The strike crystallized the limits of postwar collective bargaining and Keynesian policy making to manage postwar economic growth. Those limitations allowed steelworkers to lay claim to the New Deal’s promise of industrial citizenship and defend the moral economy of their home life—but only for a brief time. Therefore, unpacking the steel strike along these lines recasts the entire New Deal order as a complex formation composed of multiple layers of social activity, each powered by its own internal dynamics, and each in contradictory relation to the others.

Disquieting growth: urban space in Kawashima Yūzō's film Suzaki Paradise Red Light

This article examines how Japanese postwar cinematic texts manifest and comment upon contemporary political and economic events, and considers the usefulness of cinema for a more complete historical understanding of the period. In particular, it argues for the significance of fūzoku eiga, or ‘films of customs and manners’ by analyzing a representative text of that genre, Kawashima Yūzō's 1956 film Suzaki Paradise Red Light. Although Kawashima's film has been treated as an apolitical melodrama, a close textual analysis reveals it to be a counter-narrative to the success story of postwar economic recovery and growth that the Japanese state sought to promote. Key to this analysis is an examination of the urban space of the Suzaki neighborhood in Tokyo, as depicted in the film. Kawashima's tour of Suzaki addresses the issues of the economic stagnation within the metropolis, uneven development, and the liminal space of muen, or ‘no ties,’ which offers a brief refuge from an increasingly disciplined everyday life.

French Political Culture in the 1970s

Abstract French politics in the 1970s is notoriously hard to decipher. The increasingly violent attacks on Gaullism and Communism, the decline in French geopolitical power, and the end of postwar economic growth led to unprecedented unease about the nation’s collective future. But rather than treat the 1970s as an endpoint, I argue in this article that the 1970s represented a new beginning. I explore how more modest conceptions of political action, the emergence of a new kind of liberalism, and the development of identity politics led to a profound transformation of French political culture – one that tried to reconcile France’s long statist tradition with the realities of an ever-more fragmented polity.

Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects by Jordan Sand (review)

Reviewed by: Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects by Jordan Sand Sally A. Hastings (bio) Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects. By Jordan Sand. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013. xiv, 208 pages. $75.00, cloth; $34.95, paper. In his acknowledgments, Jordan Sand says that this book on Tokyo began as autobiography and took an anthropological turn before becoming history. He was a student of architecture when he thought of writing autobiography, and this study is above all a history of preservation. Sand aspires to historicize the process by which, in the decades since 1969, the people of Tokyo have rediscovered the history of their city as a distinct place and sought to preserve and record it. Three of his four substantive chapters address the topics included in the subtitle of the book: common spaces, local histories, and found objects. In the fourth, Sand turns from grassroots activities to the leadership of the metropolitan government in the construction of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which opened in 1993. Sand uses “vernacular” as a term of urban analysis to refer to “a language of form, space, and sensation shaped by the local history of habitation” (p. 2). The traits he identifies as Tokyo’s vernacular include small lots, construction in wood, and low-rise buildings. The vernacular city stands in contrast to elements of the city intended to be monuments to the nation. He argues that vernacular urbanism in Tokyo is primarily a reaction to the postwar nation that staged the 1964 Olympics and the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 rather than to the imperial state that built the Diet Building. Sand contrasts citizen engagement in preservation not only to state monumentalism but also to the monumental form taken by the mass demonstrations that culminated in Anpo 1960. Complicating the standard narrative of postwar economic growth, Sand draws attention to the dematerialization of wealth since 1971, linking floating currencies to real estate speculation, the decline of manufacturing, and the transformation of the Tokyo landscape from low-rise wooden construction to a landscape dominated by high-rise office buildings made of inorganic materials. Such changes were, of course, characteristic of economies worldwide. Sand is equally aware that the preservationist movements he documents in Tokyo were part of a worldwide enthusiasm for public history. While preservation was often populist, “heritage became part of a global industry” (p. 1). In his chapter on commons, Sand treats the protests of the late 1960s in the plaza at the west exit of Shinjuku Station as different in nature from the Hibiya Riots of 1905, the May Day demonstrations of the occupation era, [End Page 163] and Anpo, all of which addressed national issues and occurred on state-owned property where permits were required. What distinguished the Saturday evening antiwar gatherings staged by the activist group Beheiren and others was that they were built around interaction among strangers. Sand suggests that the participants were claiming “the common right of access to open space by virtue of being an inhabitant of the city” (p. 38). Whereas Hibiya Park, the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace, and the grounds of the National Diet Building, the sites of earlier mass protests, were all spaces indisputably owned by the state, the Shinjuku West Exit Underground Plaza was designed by the sponsoring transport companies to facilitate movement through the space. In contrast to the regimented marches of political protests, the actions of the “folk guerillas” who opposed the Vietnam War were carnivalesque. The playful free exchange of ideas stimulated by the folk guerillas ended on May 28, 1969, when the Metropolitan Police changed the signage at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station, substituting the word thoroughfare for plaza and thus justifying the removal of the demonstrators for impeding the flow of office workers necessary for Japanese capitalism. Sand is attentive not only to what citizens did in common places but also to how historians, architects, urban theorists, and other intellectuals thought about such spaces. He asserts that both the spontaneous nature of the demonstrations at Shinjuku and the expulsion of the protesters in 1969 affected “perceptions of urban space and what citizens could do with it...