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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Gordon, Andrew. Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Main Argument: "Put to manifold uses with varied meanings, both a tool of home-based production and a high-status object of consumer desire, the sewing machine and its sojourn track the emergence and then the ascendance of the middle class as cultural ideal and social formation, along with the emergence of the female consumer and professional home manager as defining figures in Japanese modern times" (9).
Historiographical Engagement: Young, Silverberg
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon looks at the sewing machine in Japan as a vehicle to understand its social transformations in the C20. He sees globalization as a "localizing process," with Arjun Appadurai, "while recognizing its flattening power in many respects" (5), and he is admittedly "less pessimistic than Marx on the matter of exploitation and less optimistic than Gandhi on the sewing machine's potential to usher in a more humane system of production and consumption" (ibid). In any case, the sewing machine "allows us to study the modern transformation of daily life with its continuing harshness, its new opportunities, and its new imposition of discipline," because "the seeing machine played a role in shaping the modern world" (Ibid). Furthermore, the rise of the sewing machine in Japan coincides with the era of the modern consumer, who had several important characteristics: "she participated in practices of getting and spending that were transnational or global in qualitatively different ways than in the past;" another characteristic was "her connection to a widespread concern over social division and inclusion;" and a third key element is "the emergence of women into central and widely recognized social and economic roles, often based in the home but with consequences reaching beyond it" (8).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews the history of the sewing machine (and other associated ideas and technology) in Japan, which formed part of a "two-way but asymmetrical exchange" and which "was therefore among those objects that carried into Japan new and at times contentious ideas concerning women's roles, the idea of progress, and the role to be played by technology, by individuals, and by nations on the march toward an improving future" (17). Until the end of the C19, sewing machine use was limited to tailors and dressmakers in the treaty ports; garment factories producing for the military and a few modern industries; and Tokyo elites. Women's fashion lagged about 15 years behind men's; the Meiji empress continued to wear exclusively "Japanese dress" until 1886, and she issued a court circular directing the same for her attendants the next year, sparking fashions beyond the aristocracy. The empress's promotion of frugality and buying local in adopting Western dress, however, were part of the ideology of the "good wife and wise mother," who fulfilled a public duty by playing her domestic role. The Singer company began direct sales in Japan when the era of "mixed residence" opened in July 1899, and "the history of the seeing machine as an item of relatively widespread purchase and use by women in thousands of homes throughout Japan–the story of the mishin as an item of 'mass' consumption–begins with the advent of Singer" (25). Singer, the world's first global corporation, was one author of the "global story" of "the transformation of sewing and dress practices around the world" (26). But the answers to who sewed for whom and where varied locally. In Euro-America in the C18 and 19, the fabrication of clothing first for men and then for women move out of the home "into the hands of specialized producers: tailors and dressmakers as well as pieceworkers" (27). By the 1920s, however, fast fashion--the factory--had killed the garment shop. In Japan and most other parts of the world, clothing was fabricated in the home until the advent of modernity. Thus as Western dress spread in Japan, "the organization of garment production changed significantly" (28). The location of sewing was gendered; by the end of the C19, tailors produced Western-style dress outside the home for male customers, while inside the home, women cared for, made, and repaired Japanese and sometimes Western style dress for themselves and their children. But for both tailors and women at home, "the seeing machine and new modes of sewing and garment production would bring modern life directly into the home in the form of professionalized training, a new science of home economics, and market-oriented, mechanized fabrication of clothes" (29).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Singer's selling its sewing machines in Japan, which were understood in Japan as "fundamentally American" despite being crafted through trans-Atlantic trial and error. Gordon argues that "the Singer system helped produce new social roles and forms of discipline–on the supply side for men as sellers and women as teachers, and on the demand side for wives and husbands as installment plan borrowers" (31). It also fostered, and was part of, a lifestyle that was identified as American and modern, even as daily life became "double-layered," i.e. both Western and Japanese. This American way of selling consisted of buyers on installment credit, which was understood "less as a moral hazard but as a positive disciplinary force on both sides of the capitalist bargain," canvassers, women teachers who helped clients cultivate self-reliance as well as to become modern home managers, and the salesmen who "led this educational project" (50). Singer was remarkably successful in Japan, and reasonably successful at meeting its own standards for transnational business practice, but only up to a point--the company confronted a bottleneck in its inability to convince adult women that its lock-stitch machines were suitable for kimono.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the ways in which the sewing machine and the associations it mobilized, as well as the arguments these engendered--arguments over women's roles, over female virtue, about anxiety about class division, and about how to make sense of what modernity meant in Japan. However, even when mobilizing binary oppositions about Western versus Japanese sewing, etc, "almost all parties were making claims for the practices best suited to a life understood to be both Japanese and modern, one that embraced values of speed and efficiency, freedom of movement, and sometimes even freedom of choice" (83). Despite the fact that the image of the sewing machine and the discourses around it had expanded the possibilities open to women, this expansion did not fundamentally challenge established gender roles or male patriarchal power.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two labor disputes organized by Singer employees in 1932 to early 1933, which were articulated in terms of "widely held beliefs about the terms of employment that were legitimate in a capitalist system that ws increasingly understood and desired to be specifically Japanese" (91). These disputes failed, but in the long term Singer and its global selling system failed in Japan, because it paved the way for companies that "more effectively adapted and legitimized its sales system for sellers and buyers alike" (ibid). Singer's sales never recovered after the dispute, after which many of its most talented salesmen and other employees left; instead, several emerging Japanese companies grew by leaps and bounds and by 1940 had cornered and enlarged the domestic market, Singer having been driven out of business in the empire after 1937. At least one company, Pine-Janome, made two significant revisions to the Singer system: switching to fixed pay plist commissions for employees, and a new credit plan aimed at less affluent customers. In Gordon's telling, "these producers were self-consciously localizing market capitalism as they reinforced concepts of employment and improvised selling practices understood to accord with 'national customs'" (115).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that "as both object of desire and tool for reform, the seeing machine tracks the story of an expanding consumer society in an era of wartime modernity" (119). The idea of "wartime modernity" was formerly regarded as oxymoronical, and not without good reason, as the fascist rhetoric of the empire's final phase was typically fascist in that it was resolutely anti-modern. The trick with fascism and with the empire, though, is that it was irreducibly modern even as it was anti-modern, and so it is with wartime modernity in Japan. Gordon hits the nail on the head when he characterizes the 1930s as "a time of both mobilizing for war and deepening of modernity" in the form of the increasing possession of radios, increasing passion for baseball, and the increasing spread of Western clothes and Western-style beauty parlors catering to women (120). This modernity spread in spite of and also due to the mobilization for war, and the sewing machine was positioned well since it was both an object of desire and an instrument of production, meaning that it could be marketed through wartime rhetoric, although it was also marketed "as a good bringing convenience and pleasure" (128). Gordon notes that
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter "explores the process by which Japanese producers came to dominate home and world markets, and Singer's frustrated attempt to regain its dominant position" (152). The two continuing themes are "the nationalized, if not radicalized, understanding of business competition" which surfaced in the Singer dispute in the 1930s, and the "construction of modernity as globally connected but locally inflected" (ibid). By 1957, the sewing machine was a mechanical phoenix, and Japan had become the world's leading producer of sewing machines. But although Singer never regained its dominance and lost ground to Japan worldwide, its selling system served as a model for a variety of consumer goods in Japan. [Redacted: the trade wars of the 1950s, which read a lot like those of the 1980s, except with actual consumer goods rather than real estate and spectral capital.] However, it is interesting to note that Singer seems to have lost because it refused to compete on price, a marked contrast from corpocratic policy during the Economic Miracle. Conversely, Japanese sewing machine companies in the United States "won the day by placing low-cost machines in the chain and discount stores that were reshaping the landscape of American retail selling" even as they stuck to the Singer system in Japan and articulated it in a vocabulary of Japanese concepts (168). At the same time, the discourse had shifted to the sewing machine as "the indispensable tool of the happy bride and an instrument allowing a female consumer to fabricate a fashionable, good life" (176). They ddi this through the reintroduction of purchasing machines "on time," which had the handy effect of disciplining their consumers into the responsible shopping that was a key part of the later success of the Miracle, which was itself fueled by domestic demand for consumer goods.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the breaking of the demand-side bottleneck in the sewing machine market (i.e. the demise of wafuku as the choice of Japanese women) and argues that "both for family consumption and for the market, both as 'housework' and for pleasure, Japanese women in the 1950s and 1960s constituted a nation of dressmakers," which Gordon argues was part of the daily routine of the "professional housewife" (189). Thus the 1950s, and even more the early years of the Occupation which saw a rush to Western dress even in the countryside, marked the end of the "two-layered life"--indeed, Japanese women wore trousers en masse earlier than women in the West! For this to happen, however, millions of women had to learn to sew, and they did so, which is part of why why the production of custom-made clothing dominated into the 1960s: women could produce better clothing on quality at only a modest premium in cost. Gordon argues that the era of high economic growth coincided with a sharp rise in the numbers of homeworkers for several reasons: the Miracle was fueled by low paid women's labor, but these women were also acting to fulfill customers' dreams of the consumer life and to secure it for themselves and their children.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews his earlier arguments; it is important to note again that "with the birth of the salesman came the birth of the consumer, in Japan as around the world," and that "in the cultural life of the consuming subject or citizen, one sees in Japan as elsewhere a two-sided modernity projected at and anchored in the imagination of a new middle class" (216, 217). In Japan as elsewhere, the sewing machine had many similar effects, including its role affirming the social order and bridging class differences. Gordon finds that local differences in Japan include "the figure of the woman managing home finance with professional attention, struggling to rein in her spendthrift husband's binging on credit tickets, to be a singular one, linked to the singularly enduring influence in high-growth, postwar Japan of the ideal of the professional housewife," and that the preponderance of home sewing in Japan is also a salient difference linked to the survival of that same housewife ideal (223).
Critical assessment: Another excellent book from Gordon, and a welcome focus on women as agents in their own historical stories and in the story of Japan's economic history. He really is an excellent writer, although the press copy editor was asleep at the switch on this one.
Further reading: Skud: Why Is It So Difficult to Make Your Own Clothes?; Mimura, Planning for Empire; Atkins, Blue Nippon
Main Argument: "Put to manifold uses with varied meanings, both a tool of home-based production and a high-status object of consumer desire, the sewing machine and its sojourn track the emergence and then the ascendance of the middle class as cultural ideal and social formation, along with the emergence of the female consumer and professional home manager as defining figures in Japanese modern times" (9).
Historiographical Engagement: Young, Silverberg
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon looks at the sewing machine in Japan as a vehicle to understand its social transformations in the C20. He sees globalization as a "localizing process," with Arjun Appadurai, "while recognizing its flattening power in many respects" (5), and he is admittedly "less pessimistic than Marx on the matter of exploitation and less optimistic than Gandhi on the sewing machine's potential to usher in a more humane system of production and consumption" (ibid). In any case, the sewing machine "allows us to study the modern transformation of daily life with its continuing harshness, its new opportunities, and its new imposition of discipline," because "the seeing machine played a role in shaping the modern world" (Ibid). Furthermore, the rise of the sewing machine in Japan coincides with the era of the modern consumer, who had several important characteristics: "she participated in practices of getting and spending that were transnational or global in qualitatively different ways than in the past;" another characteristic was "her connection to a widespread concern over social division and inclusion;" and a third key element is "the emergence of women into central and widely recognized social and economic roles, often based in the home but with consequences reaching beyond it" (8).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews the history of the sewing machine (and other associated ideas and technology) in Japan, which formed part of a "two-way but asymmetrical exchange" and which "was therefore among those objects that carried into Japan new and at times contentious ideas concerning women's roles, the idea of progress, and the role to be played by technology, by individuals, and by nations on the march toward an improving future" (17). Until the end of the C19, sewing machine use was limited to tailors and dressmakers in the treaty ports; garment factories producing for the military and a few modern industries; and Tokyo elites. Women's fashion lagged about 15 years behind men's; the Meiji empress continued to wear exclusively "Japanese dress" until 1886, and she issued a court circular directing the same for her attendants the next year, sparking fashions beyond the aristocracy. The empress's promotion of frugality and buying local in adopting Western dress, however, were part of the ideology of the "good wife and wise mother," who fulfilled a public duty by playing her domestic role. The Singer company began direct sales in Japan when the era of "mixed residence" opened in July 1899, and "the history of the seeing machine as an item of relatively widespread purchase and use by women in thousands of homes throughout Japan–the story of the mishin as an item of 'mass' consumption–begins with the advent of Singer" (25). Singer, the world's first global corporation, was one author of the "global story" of "the transformation of sewing and dress practices around the world" (26). But the answers to who sewed for whom and where varied locally. In Euro-America in the C18 and 19, the fabrication of clothing first for men and then for women move out of the home "into the hands of specialized producers: tailors and dressmakers as well as pieceworkers" (27). By the 1920s, however, fast fashion--the factory--had killed the garment shop. In Japan and most other parts of the world, clothing was fabricated in the home until the advent of modernity. Thus as Western dress spread in Japan, "the organization of garment production changed significantly" (28). The location of sewing was gendered; by the end of the C19, tailors produced Western-style dress outside the home for male customers, while inside the home, women cared for, made, and repaired Japanese and sometimes Western style dress for themselves and their children. But for both tailors and women at home, "the seeing machine and new modes of sewing and garment production would bring modern life directly into the home in the form of professionalized training, a new science of home economics, and market-oriented, mechanized fabrication of clothes" (29).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Singer's selling its sewing machines in Japan, which were understood in Japan as "fundamentally American" despite being crafted through trans-Atlantic trial and error. Gordon argues that "the Singer system helped produce new social roles and forms of discipline–on the supply side for men as sellers and women as teachers, and on the demand side for wives and husbands as installment plan borrowers" (31). It also fostered, and was part of, a lifestyle that was identified as American and modern, even as daily life became "double-layered," i.e. both Western and Japanese. This American way of selling consisted of buyers on installment credit, which was understood "less as a moral hazard but as a positive disciplinary force on both sides of the capitalist bargain," canvassers, women teachers who helped clients cultivate self-reliance as well as to become modern home managers, and the salesmen who "led this educational project" (50). Singer was remarkably successful in Japan, and reasonably successful at meeting its own standards for transnational business practice, but only up to a point--the company confronted a bottleneck in its inability to convince adult women that its lock-stitch machines were suitable for kimono.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the ways in which the sewing machine and the associations it mobilized, as well as the arguments these engendered--arguments over women's roles, over female virtue, about anxiety about class division, and about how to make sense of what modernity meant in Japan. However, even when mobilizing binary oppositions about Western versus Japanese sewing, etc, "almost all parties were making claims for the practices best suited to a life understood to be both Japanese and modern, one that embraced values of speed and efficiency, freedom of movement, and sometimes even freedom of choice" (83). Despite the fact that the image of the sewing machine and the discourses around it had expanded the possibilities open to women, this expansion did not fundamentally challenge established gender roles or male patriarchal power.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the two labor disputes organized by Singer employees in 1932 to early 1933, which were articulated in terms of "widely held beliefs about the terms of employment that were legitimate in a capitalist system that ws increasingly understood and desired to be specifically Japanese" (91). These disputes failed, but in the long term Singer and its global selling system failed in Japan, because it paved the way for companies that "more effectively adapted and legitimized its sales system for sellers and buyers alike" (ibid). Singer's sales never recovered after the dispute, after which many of its most talented salesmen and other employees left; instead, several emerging Japanese companies grew by leaps and bounds and by 1940 had cornered and enlarged the domestic market, Singer having been driven out of business in the empire after 1937. At least one company, Pine-Janome, made two significant revisions to the Singer system: switching to fixed pay plist commissions for employees, and a new credit plan aimed at less affluent customers. In Gordon's telling, "these producers were self-consciously localizing market capitalism as they reinforced concepts of employment and improvised selling practices understood to accord with 'national customs'" (115).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter argues that "as both object of desire and tool for reform, the seeing machine tracks the story of an expanding consumer society in an era of wartime modernity" (119). The idea of "wartime modernity" was formerly regarded as oxymoronical, and not without good reason, as the fascist rhetoric of the empire's final phase was typically fascist in that it was resolutely anti-modern. The trick with fascism and with the empire, though, is that it was irreducibly modern even as it was anti-modern, and so it is with wartime modernity in Japan. Gordon hits the nail on the head when he characterizes the 1930s as "a time of both mobilizing for war and deepening of modernity" in the form of the increasing possession of radios, increasing passion for baseball, and the increasing spread of Western clothes and Western-style beauty parlors catering to women (120). This modernity spread in spite of and also due to the mobilization for war, and the sewing machine was positioned well since it was both an object of desire and an instrument of production, meaning that it could be marketed through wartime rhetoric, although it was also marketed "as a good bringing convenience and pleasure" (128). Gordon notes that
In many realms, including that of sewing and dress, it was not until 1944 and 1945 that a nightmare of deprivation and then physical destruction squashed virtually all leisure and discretionary consumption.Indeed, the search for "wartime modernity"--the often tortured attempts to find an "authentically Japanese" modern form--is mirrored in the saga of monpe, the afterwards much-hated wartime work pants for women. Ironically, these "traditional" slacks were just one of three categories of "Standard Dress" proposed for women by the state, and everyone involved understood the growth in the wearing of monpe "as separate from Standard Dress, even as a sign of resistance to it" (146)--monpe were both functional, and fashionable. The fact that they were so quickly discarded after the war, however, "discredited decisively the effort to design a functionally modern hybrid based on the kimono. This in turn cleared the way for a wholesale turn to Western modes after the war" (149). The practice of home seeing for long hours, however, survived the surrender intact.
In this embattled context, modernity was confronted not so much by premodern tradition itself–defined as long-standing customary practices in daily life–as by a modern spirit of "traditionalism." Agents of the state as well as some of their foes on the civilian right loudly propagated the belief that time-honored, quintessentially Japanese practices, which were in large measure invented or cobbled together in the modern era, should be touchstones for morality and action. … The assassins [of Inukai, and of a planned attack on Charlie Chaplin] condemned modern Western culture as decadent and sought to restore imperial rule, but they stood on modern ground as they advocated universal suffrage and the nationalization of big business. (134)
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter "explores the process by which Japanese producers came to dominate home and world markets, and Singer's frustrated attempt to regain its dominant position" (152). The two continuing themes are "the nationalized, if not radicalized, understanding of business competition" which surfaced in the Singer dispute in the 1930s, and the "construction of modernity as globally connected but locally inflected" (ibid). By 1957, the sewing machine was a mechanical phoenix, and Japan had become the world's leading producer of sewing machines. But although Singer never regained its dominance and lost ground to Japan worldwide, its selling system served as a model for a variety of consumer goods in Japan. [Redacted: the trade wars of the 1950s, which read a lot like those of the 1980s, except with actual consumer goods rather than real estate and spectral capital.] However, it is interesting to note that Singer seems to have lost because it refused to compete on price, a marked contrast from corpocratic policy during the Economic Miracle. Conversely, Japanese sewing machine companies in the United States "won the day by placing low-cost machines in the chain and discount stores that were reshaping the landscape of American retail selling" even as they stuck to the Singer system in Japan and articulated it in a vocabulary of Japanese concepts (168). At the same time, the discourse had shifted to the sewing machine as "the indispensable tool of the happy bride and an instrument allowing a female consumer to fabricate a fashionable, good life" (176). They ddi this through the reintroduction of purchasing machines "on time," which had the handy effect of disciplining their consumers into the responsible shopping that was a key part of the later success of the Miracle, which was itself fueled by domestic demand for consumer goods.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the breaking of the demand-side bottleneck in the sewing machine market (i.e. the demise of wafuku as the choice of Japanese women) and argues that "both for family consumption and for the market, both as 'housework' and for pleasure, Japanese women in the 1950s and 1960s constituted a nation of dressmakers," which Gordon argues was part of the daily routine of the "professional housewife" (189). Thus the 1950s, and even more the early years of the Occupation which saw a rush to Western dress even in the countryside, marked the end of the "two-layered life"--indeed, Japanese women wore trousers en masse earlier than women in the West! For this to happen, however, millions of women had to learn to sew, and they did so, which is part of why why the production of custom-made clothing dominated into the 1960s: women could produce better clothing on quality at only a modest premium in cost. Gordon argues that the era of high economic growth coincided with a sharp rise in the numbers of homeworkers for several reasons: the Miracle was fueled by low paid women's labor, but these women were also acting to fulfill customers' dreams of the consumer life and to secure it for themselves and their children.
As it was used for homework, the sewing machine was not a tool that primarily immigrated its users, as Marx had it; nor was it a means to live a simple life, as Gandhi claimed. As it connected women and families to the consuming world, it was a tool of class integration more than division; it helped build the cultural hegemony of Japan's middle-class life from prewar through postwar years. And as women moved in and out of the roles of homeworker-housewife and full-time housewife, needlework helped link their identities as income earners and professional home managers. (206-07)By 1970, the transwar era had ended, and with it the supremacy of the housewife as women's identity and the predominance of home sewing.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Gordon reviews his earlier arguments; it is important to note again that "with the birth of the salesman came the birth of the consumer, in Japan as around the world," and that "in the cultural life of the consuming subject or citizen, one sees in Japan as elsewhere a two-sided modernity projected at and anchored in the imagination of a new middle class" (216, 217). In Japan as elsewhere, the sewing machine had many similar effects, including its role affirming the social order and bridging class differences. Gordon finds that local differences in Japan include "the figure of the woman managing home finance with professional attention, struggling to rein in her spendthrift husband's binging on credit tickets, to be a singular one, linked to the singularly enduring influence in high-growth, postwar Japan of the ideal of the professional housewife," and that the preponderance of home sewing in Japan is also a salient difference linked to the survival of that same housewife ideal (223).
Critical assessment: Another excellent book from Gordon, and a welcome focus on women as agents in their own historical stories and in the story of Japan's economic history. He really is an excellent writer, although the press copy editor was asleep at the switch on this one.
Further reading: Skud: Why Is It So Difficult to Make Your Own Clothes?; Mimura, Planning for Empire; Atkins, Blue Nippon
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-15 18:31 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-16 18:14 (UTC)Hmm, while checking whether this Clover is the Japanese Clover that makes needlecraft tools (it isn't), I found that it's a ten-year-old Seattle company (founders mentioned here).