That foreign things will corrode local identity is a fear as old as trade itself. The cross-cultural flow of things and images has exponentially increased in the modern period. This much is obvious. What is less clear is how local cultures have responded. Has the influx swept away collective identities such as caste and nation, leaving behind a ‘flat world’?57
‘Where could you find a Japan not Americanized?’ the writer Murobuse Takanobu asked as early as 1929. ‘I dare to declare that America has become the world; Japan is nothing but America today.’58 A new world order seemed to be taking shape, based not on military power but on a material civilization of goods and dreams. Such fascination with American culture was home-grown, less a Hollywood import than a tool of modernization. It intersected with an interest in the material foundations of everyday life: clothes and cinema made people. Such ideas were in part inspired by Marx and Heidegger, but in Japan they took a different direction. Rather than lamenting how modern things killed authenticity, many Japanese writers celebrated American movies, bars and the modern home as vehicles of emancipation from feudal customs. For Kon Wajirō, an early ethnographer, consumption was a source of subjectivity.59 Instead of being told how to dress and behave, people could fashion themselves.
American things multiplied with the American occupation after the Second World War. In 1949, the Asahi newspaper started the comic strip ‘Blondie’ which gave Japanese housewives a snapshot of the American way of life. Chewing gum, jazz and, soon, rockabilly found new fans. Roppongi, the Tokyo base of the US army in the 1950s, attracted trendy Japanese youth, the Roppongi-zoku. Urban housing adopted a standardized Western layout, or LDK (living-dining-kitchen). On the inside, however, these foreign spaces were domesticated. Most families set up a Japanese-style room with tatami mats or built alcoves (tokonoma) to display antiques, flowers or a scroll. The Japanese room doubled as space for individual relaxation and for religious celebrations. It was here, in the middle of a Western-style apartment, that one still showed one’s Japanese taste.
Technology, too, was redefined as Japanese. Japanese firms marketed TVs and other appliances as a fusion of tradition and modernity. A Matsushita advert in the late 1960s quoted a Japanese painter: ‘the dehumanized mechanism of the West came to Japan and evolved into something suited to the warmth of human skin. This thing is the National colour television set.’ Only a Japanese colour TV was able to reproduce true ‘Japanese colour’, adverts promised. Stereo commodes and television sets integrated Japanese design features. It was now possible to watch baseball and at the same time feel connected to the imperial past. Matsushita even dressed one of its refrigerators in teak finish and named it Kiso, after a valley in the Japanese Alps which had been Emperor Go-Daigo’s stronghold in the early fourteenth century.60
Americanization has attracted disproportionate attention in Asian countries less because of the volume of imports than because of fears of cultural contagion.61 After all, Singapore and its neighbours also buy plenty of Japanese goods without worrying about Nipponization. Japanese products are viewed as a useful gadget rather than an alien virus. In 1992, the Japanese television station Fuji launched Asia Bagus!, a Sunday-night talent show, co-produced with Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia; Taiwan joined two years later. Every season, half a million aspiring performers threw their name in the hat in the hope of becoming the next Asian Idol. The show was hosted jointly by a Japanese and two Singaporean presenters who switched between Japanese, Malay and Mandarin.62 Such forms of Asianization are probably more important now than Americanization. Japanese popular music has been a major export, in spite of being officially banned in South Korea until 1998. By the 1990s, the future was Japan, not America. Many pan-Asian films would include shots of Tokyo Tower to give them an air of modernity. The Korean wave since and the success of Cantopop from Hong Kong and Mandarin pop from Taiwan in the People’s Republic of China reflects the growing importance of this pan-Asian circuit; K-pop (Korean pop) is nurtured by the government with a $1 billion investment fund, another example of the significant role played by states.63 Similarly, on the Indian subcontinent, Muscat and Dubai have been at least as influential for ideas of modern life as Paris or New York. It was in the Gulf states that economic migrants from South Asia picked up air-conditioning and other new appliances and leisure habits such as dining out.
In India, the legacy of empire made for a more complicated, touchy relationship between consumption and nationalism. Empire gave consumption a bad name. Fashion, foreign goods and the desire for distinction were denounced as an imperialist scheme to keep Indians in subjugation. National identity was defined in opposition to the British empire. Since the empire flaunted its modern goods, to be a free Indian necessarily meant asceticism. The historical irony was that this anti-colonial approach continued to do the work of empire after it was officially dead, by reinforcing the idea of a two-tier world where only some were privileged to be comfortable and the rest were meant to work.
The liberal opening since 1991 has put an end to this dichotomy. Suddenly, to be modern meant to be a consumer. ‘We have a great feeling for Gandhi,’ one young Kerala woman of the second-rank Hindu Nair caste confessed, ‘but I don’t think we practise his ideas. In our family we like things from other places.’64 There are not many left who subscribe to Gandhi’s belief that the rich need to live more simply so that the poor may simply live. An IT worker put the new orthodoxy bluntly: ‘I think materialism is good . . . it’s pathetic the way we think. You know, “I don’t need a fridge, I have a black-and-white TV.” I mean, come on! That’s all crap . . . Somewhere along the line, we’ve gone and made a virtue out of our poverty and I think it’s time to stop doing that.’65 When Hindu nationalists (BJP) rediscovered swadeshi in the late 1990s, it was pro-global as well as pro-nationalist.
If frugality has been thrown overboard it would be difficult to say the same for India-ness. Being modern in India means buying global products, not adopting a global identity. Individualism remains checked by commitments to family and community. The middle classes in Baroda, in Gujarat’s ‘golden corridor’, for example, perform a delicate balancing act. At the same time as they buy cars, appliances and decorate their homes, they try to preserve traditional values. When they talked in 2004 about their new lifestyle, they compared it unfavourably to an idealized village community. Spending on oneself, fashion and conspicuous display were seen as a moral threat to tradition, family and status. Thus, paradoxically, while consumption has gone up in real terms, it has remained marginal to the group identity of those who do most of it. At least in Baroda, the middle classes take their cue from local ideas of moral worth and community, not from global consumer culture.66 Elsewhere, expatriate IT workers and businessmen return to live in the motherland so that their children grow up Indian, with respect for family and customs.
Far from killing Indian identities, consumer culture has provided fresh opportunities for articulating them. Female IT workers go to their offices with traditional hairstyles and wearing a salwar kameez. When foreign firms entered the Indian market, after 1991, it also created a space for Indian companies to stand out by trumpeting their own distinct value. And what better marker than Indian food. ‘Indian Terrain’ advertised its casual cruise shirts under the headline ‘I made Pizza go Tandoori’, with a stylish modern Indian, coiffured with hair gel, giving his philosophy as a consumer:
Ever heard of the Vegetable Hamburger? Or Masala Tea? Or a Tandoori Pizza? All creations inspired by my refusal to eat exactly like the rest of the world does. So the food chains read the message on the wall (or on their cash registers) and tailored a whole new menu to my taste.67
Class and caste were based on one’s place in the system of production. Has the rise of consumption eroded them? For the Indian elite, the end of Nehru’s bureaucratic ‘licence raj’ opened up new sources of status. Working for a foreign corporation started to carry more weight than a post in the civil service. Inevitably, liberalization prompted fears th
at India’s elite was ‘westoxicated’,68 sacrificing their national soul and concern for the poor on the altar of global materialism. In reality, IT managers and professionals are fairly conservative consumers. Their main priorities remain those of their parents: to buy a house, help the family and invest in their children’s education.69 For social status, a fancy car or fl t-screen TV is no substitute for an MBA from an elite institute of technology or a foreign university. In some respects, the economic miracle has hardened inequalities between and within classes. In rural India, big landlords and rentiers have increased their share of consumption, while lowly peasants have lost out, no longer receiving subsidies and at the mercy of moneylenders. In cities, owners and managers in the retail and service sector have gained, while unskilled workers are spending proportionally less.70
The top positions in the professions and business continue to go to upper-caste Hindus, but there are signs that caste has softened. An anthropologist ‘hanging out’ with young men in Bangalore between 2001 and 2006 found that friends shared clothes, cigarettes and motorbikes, irrespective of caste or income.71 In Uttar Pradesh, outside Delhi, it became common for Dalits, too, to brush their teeth with branded toothpaste rather than chewing on twigs from the local neem tree. Consumer goods have long been vehicles for lower castes to assert themselves, going back at least to the early twentieth century when Dalits, fortunate to acquire a bit of land, put on artificial silk saris. At the top, Brahmins began to sit down to dinner in a shirt rather than a dhoti, eat meat and drink alcohol.72 This does not mean caste has disappeared, however. In Kerala in the 1990s, the low-caste Pulayas dressed to kill, in red satin shirts and trainers, their hair coiffed like film stars. None of it shook the caste system. The group of labourers above, the Izhavas, looked down on such displays as flashy and foolish. To them, being respectable meant spending on a house, furniture and gold jewellery.73 Consumption continues to be about securing recognition in one’s own group rather than emulating that above.
Low castes are poor, but this does not mean they all live alike. Some consume more than others. In 1993, the Labour Bureau investigated the living conditions of ‘scheduled castes workers’ in Indore. Families making shoes, it found, ate more meat and drank more milk than sweepers and scavengers, probably because working with leather had lowered a ritual resistance to animal products. Yet sweepers and scavengers had more possessions. Many owned a TV, an electric fan, a bicycle and a wristwatch; several had a sewing machine, a record player and a fridge; one even a camera. By contrast, the homes of shoemakers were barren.74
Upper-caste members who find themselves at the bottom of the income scale today are almost ten times as likely to own a TV, a fridge and a car as equally poor, lower-caste Indians. Caste, then, matters, but not on its own. It is connected to a material divide between town and country: upper castes are more likely to live in cities and thus are relatively better off to begin with.75 Among lower-caste members who have done well and moved to the city, the ownership of TVs and other appliances is closer to that of higher castes. Significantly, it is in the poorest regions where the gulf between castes is highest.
So much of Western commentary equates consumerism with individualism that spending on the family deserves special emphasis. In India, the nuclear family was already the norm before the recent boom, and yet rupees continue to be showered on the extended family. A century of social reformers’ denunciations of lavish weddings and funerals have fallen on deaf ears. Arguably, spending on family and customs has increased with the rise of consumer culture, not diminished. In 1994, the film Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . . ! (Who am I to You . . . !), took India by storm with a drama that rolled family, love and home comfort into one. In this lifestyle romance, the new kitchen and opulent interior are as important as the fashionably dressed stars. Prem, the heart-throb played by Salman Khan, even has a dog, Tuffy, the ultimate sign of a middle-class lifestyle. What sealed its success at the box office was that the love story was framed by a harmonious extended family, including nephews, distant relatives and happy arranged marriages. For audiences, the film proved that it was possible to have more stuff and stay true to the large family ideal.76 In real life, love and weddings continue to be demonstrations of family loyalty and reciprocity. Dowries, wedding festivities and gifts have soared in value. An Indian wedding outfit can cost as much as a car. Most Indian brides and grooms today marry for love. Yet they would rather wait and not marry than lose their parents’ approval; among software engineers, two thirds of marriages are still formally arranged, although the couple is already romantically attached.
Across Asia, the family continues to shape consumption patterns. The washing machines for cousins, the school fees and other remittances sent home by migrant workers all indicate where the priorities lie: with family obligations, not personal luxury. It is the orientation of family life – more than family ties as such – that changed once consumer durables crossed the threshold. The sociologist Ronald Dore lived in a Tokyo ward in 1951 and captured a society in transition. ‘Is there any article for use in the home,’ he asked housewives, ‘which you often think to yourself you would like to have if only you could afford it?’ His respondents were divided. Almost half answered more clothing or better furniture. A slightly larger group wanted a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, a stereo or toaster. The responses reflected the partial breakdown of an older status system. In the past, the most treasured objects had been a way to assert status. Peasants would put on their finest clothes and lay out their best china for special festivities to impress their peer group. Then, when the party was over, it was back to rags and cracked cups. The first group of Dore’s Tokyo housewives still reflected that mentality. They desired more of the same and had their eyes on higher-quality clothes. It was normal to sacrifice family comfort to impress others. Parents stinted on food so that their sons had pocket money to keep up with the Joneses. It was among the second group that a new orientation was shining through. Here aspirations centred on novelties that first and foremost promised satisfaction to the family, through entertainment, greater comfort and saving time and effort. In the growing cities, community ties were looser, and this, Dore explained, made ‘status and hence the prestige attach[ed] to material possessions of lesser importance’.77 Conspicuous consumption did not die, but it was now harnessed to the welfare of the family through the purchase of an electric fan, a TV and other new appliances that could be shown with pride to guests and friends.
In Japan from the 1950s onwards, greater consumption was legitimized by two rather different ideals: national strength and social equality. Consuming was fine as long as shoppers did not forget the local peasants, small retailers and manufacturers who belonged to the same nation. Paying a bit more for Japanese rice was the price of national solidarity. At the same time, affluence generated new worries. In the 1970s, Japan looked itself in the mirror and wondered about its ‘lifestyle’. In annual surveys, the Prime Minister’s office asked people ‘Do you feel your lifestyle has improved?’ In 1974, the answer turned negative, and has stayed negative since.78
The 1980s are now remembered as a golden decade of rising incomes, fashionable teenage tribes and Gucci on the Ginza, a 1989 English-language bestseller on Japan’s new generation of consumers. Attitudinal surveys in the mid-1980s found that most people put their own satisfaction first. Consumer culture seemed to be breeding a nation of individualists. In reality, this was a blip. Already before the bubble burst in 1989–90, the trend of ‘breaking away from things’ and enjoying ‘things other than things’ (mono igai no mono) was under way.79 The post-material search for authentic experiences and happy relationships entered the retail landscape. Tired of technological novelties, customers discovered nostalgia. Seibu department stores opened ‘Reborn Pavilions’ and herbal-medicine shops. The deep recession and ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s that followed reinforced this trend, as shoppers tightened their belts and big corporations cut back on ski-trips and expense accounts. The family reg
ained importance. Salarymen no longer spent their evenings in bars with colleagues but at home with their wives, though they still rarely sat down for a shared meal. In 1992, Prime Minister Miyazawa promised to make Japan a ‘lifestyle superpower’, less stressed and more relaxed.80 By then, Gucci on the Ginza looked like a relic of a bygone age. Instead of individualization, retail analysts worried that the Japanese were all becoming alike.81 Since 1989, attitudes have been back where they were before the 1980s boom: society and nation come first.82
In South Korea, as in Japan, conspicuous consumption was once again treated as a social disease in the late 1980s and ’90s. In 1993, 93 per cent of South Koreans felt that ‘excessive consumption’ (kwasobi) was a ‘serious social problem’, although few were inclined to point the finger at themselves.83 Spending on schools, leisure, customary gifts of congratulations and condolences attracted the greatest blame. Most of it was directed at women. The Korean media ran scare stories of ‘too rich too soon’ that painted young, educated women as slaves to shopping; students at Ewha, Seoul’s elite private women’s university, were rumoured to spend half a million won on a pair of underpants, roughly US $700 at the time. Two groups were in the vanguard of the anti-luxury campaign: Presbyterians and the state. Greater affluence had been demonized by the Seoul YMCA throughout the 1980s. A ‘wholesome’ lifestyle, they warned, was giving way to a pleasure economy of discos, alcohol and sex. Private extravagance was taking the place of shared sacrifice.
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