Waste

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s study of waste in postwar Japan is history writing at its very best: expansive in scope, richly textured, compellingly narrated, and convincingly argued. As Siniawer explains, the ‘history of waste is at its heart a history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday in postwar Japan’ (3). While the book provides a marvellously rich narrative of how the Japanese have attempted to deal with various forms of physical waste, the author’s primary interest is in the idea of waste and what the changes and continuities in this idea tell us about Japan since 1945. The meanings of waste, Siniawer notes, were ‘reconfigured’ and ‘rearticulated’ throughout the period as people searched for meaning and value in their lives and, moreover, as Japan assumed a position among the ‘wealthy and consumptive countries of the world’ (296)....

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Expansive · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Period (music) · Scope (computer science) · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy