Waste

<p><b>In </b><b><i>Waste</i></b><b> Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste--in terms of time stuff money possessions and resources--from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present.</b> She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment and revealing people's ever-changing concerns and hopes. </p><p>Over the course of the long postwar Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive an impediment to progress a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption incontrovertible proof of societal excess the embodiment of resources squandered and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative a moral good an instrument for advancement a path to self-satisfaction an environmental commitment an expression of identity and more. From the late 1950s onward a defining element of Japan's postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics costs and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being a good life or a life well lived. <i>Waste</i> is an elegant history of how people lived--how they made sense of gave meaning to and found value in the acts of the everyday.</p>