Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan

Abstract

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.

How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities

“…The front cover of Guan Feng’s 1952 guidebook features the iconic imagery of a “worker-peasant-soldier” alliance (see Figure 1), popularized in the Yan’an era and later widely used in propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution (Xiaomei Chen, 2011). The cover illustration of Yu Min’s 于民 1958 How to Write a Diary and Take Notes has a small emblem depicting a sturdy nib pen and blank notebook resting on a bushel of golden wheat under the upper half of a cog (Yu, 1958)—a variation on the combination of symbols found in the national crest (see Finnane, 2016: 774–75).…”

Interweaving influences and adaptations: sartorial endeavors of Okakura Kakuzō and M. K. Gandhi

“…Another contribution of the paper is to initiate an intellectual dialog between the histories of modern India and Japan, which continues to be understudied in a period of Inter-Asia studies (Finnane 2016; Ghosh 2021; Harper and Amrith 2012; Stolte and Fisher-Tiné 2012) and make inquiries about the historical parallels and divergences.…”