This book is an important addition to the small body of English-language historical works on the critical transition period in Japan between the end of the war in 1945 and the early 1960s, the beginning period of high economic growth. At the same time Scott O'Bryan provides a stimulating historicization of the whole idea of economic growth in Japan: its rise to prominence as a concept, the development of ways of measuring it, its use in evaluating the past and in forecasting the future, its incorporation into government policy and its popularization. O'Bryan's overall concern is thus the rise of “growthism” in early postwar Japan, or an examination of “the formative years of growth as an idea that redefined national conceptions of purpose and prosperity” (p. 16). He concludes that by 1960, growth “represented an encompassing vision of national purpose and peacetime redemption” (p. 173).
O'Bryan seeks to explain why “growthism” became so prominent and so strong in Japan in the late 1940s and the 1950s. He proposes that Japanese people eventually turned to the concept of growth as a means of securing national power partly because an obvious alternative route was suddenly blocked in 1945 with the abrupt loss of empire; that the ideal of growth appeared to supply a remedy for “uniquely Japanese” socio-economic problems, especially structural “dualities” in the economy; and that policy-makers and others were attracted to the technocratic concept of growth because it seemed scientific, rational and universal, in contrast to the “bankrupt national languages of imperial power, racial mission, and cultural purity of the colonial and wartime pasts” (p. 10).
The book introduces three major themes. First, O'Bryan examines changes in social science as they related to the postwar ideal of growth in Japan: the rise of macroeconomics in the 1950s and specifically national income accounting and the idea of GNP. Second, he discusses the political use of the growth ideal “to articulate … a domestic vision of national postwar purpose” (p. 5) that included the goal of full employment and the fostering of a vigorous middle class to create “a domestic society of prosperity and equity” (p. 6). Third, he explores the efforts of those who publicized the concept of growth to articulate visions of future prosperity for all, visions that included a new emphasis on the legitimacy, desirability and possibility of large-scale private consumption.
Chapter 1 focuses on “the redemption of the planning ideal” after the war, as key individuals, notably the economic bureaucrats Ōkita Saburō and Inaba Hidezō, sought to reinstate centralized planning by the state as an acceptable practice, despite its discredited role in the 1930s and up to 1945. One method of doing this was to forge new rhetorical linkages between planning and science and democracy, those catchphrases of the postwar period, in an attempt to dissociate the managerial state from “the blunders of the wartime controlled economy” (p. 21) and connect it instead to technocracy and humanism.
Chapter 2 documents the increased recognition of the importance of statistics in the moves towards new forms of economic planning, and the institutionalization of this recognition in government agencies devoted to statistical calculation. In particular, bureaucrats, academics and others placed increasing emphasis on national income accounting systems. As O'Bryan points out, “The statistical and macroeconomic revolutions in Japan, as elsewhere, provided the technical means by which to measure national growth in powerful new ways” (p. 49). Though the production of statistics had been increasing already for some decades in Japan as in other countries, it was in the postwar period that it became “a formalized and regularized function of the state as never before” (p. 49). Under influence from the United States and from new international bodies, especially the United Nations, with its emphasis on international standards, and through the efforts of individuals like Tsuru Shigeto, national accounting systems and practices were institutionalized in Japan by the mid-1950s, especially in the Economic Planning Agency. In the process, by the late 1950s “the statistic of GNP would begin to assume an outsized place in official analysis, wider public discourse on the economy, and shared conceptions of national purpose and power” (p. 87).
Chapter 3 deals essentially with the Occupation period, and in particular, the rise of Keynsianism in the late 1940s; the increasing prominence of the rhetoric of full employment, and to some extent of policies reflecting such rhetoric; and a growing acceptance that government would play an important role in regulating the economy. O'Bryan's discussion of the rise of Keynsian thought is especially useful, along with his careful acknowledgement that it coexisted and competed with other modes of analysis, particularly Marxian and neoclassical economics. Chapter 4 discusses the decade or so from the end of the Occupation, with an emphasis on the importance by the mid-1950s of theories of growth; the increasing attention paid to assessments of past “growth” and to forecasts of future growth; and the continued rise of planning, with a focus on macroeconomics and in pursuit of “growth”, despite some official uncertainty about the wisdom of ambitious planning in the first half of the 1950s.
Chapter 5 situates longstanding concerns amongst bureaucrats, academics and others about certain socio-economic problems that supposedly characterized Japanese capitalism within the context of the new thinking about macroeconomics. Thus, “overpopulation”, unemployment and the “dual structure” of the economy were reconceptualized in the postwar period, and domestic growth was posited as the cure for these manifestations of “backwardness”. As part of the cure, consumerism was cautiously promoted as a way of stimulating growth and thereby enhancing national economic welfare, in marked contrast to older emphases on frugality and restraint.
O'Bryan's achievement is to show that the ideal of growth is not to be taken for granted as “always already there”, and that it did not spring fully formed to prominence. Rather, it is itself an idea with a history and an identifiable trajectory, championed by particular people and reflected in policies at particular times and places in specific contexts, enabled by other developments in the social sciences, and expressed with different inflections in different circumstances. He is also careful to situate developments in postwar Japan within the longer history of economic thought and practice there, and to acknowledge the extent to which the rise of “growthism” in Japan reflected and relied upon international trends. The result is a well rounded and very informative study of Japanese economic thinking and practice from 1945 to the early 1960s. The book discusses economics without recourse to jargon. In its systematic linkage of the history of economic thought and practice with political and social themes, moreover, it succeeds to an unusual degree in bringing economics to the forefront of mainstream history.
At times, the strengths of this study paradoxically almost threaten to undermine it. O'Bryan pays so much attention to the prewar bases of postwar trends in economic thought, for example, that it can be difficult to see exactly what was new after 1945, and thus why the book sets out specifically to discuss the postwar period. Postwar trends might appear simply as a continuation and intensification of prewar trends, with the difference principally one of scale. Growth as an ideal seems sometimes to have no more than “new valence” in the 1950s compared to the past (p. 173); macroeconomics to have only “more complex, specifically postwar forms” (p. 176). The book would have benefited, too, from stronger and more frequent linkages between the detail of the narrative and the overarching arguments of the work as a whole. At times the narrative swamps the argument. These are small quibbles, however, compared to the contribution O'Bryan makes to understandings of Japan in the late 1940s and the 1950s in a book that will be essential reading for a wide range of people, well beyond those specifically interested in the history of economic thought.
