Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. This book reinterprets this through an exploration of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese “growth performance” as “economic miracle” came to be articulated. The book traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity. The book presents acc ... More

Our narratives of postwar Japan have long been cast in terms almost synonymous with the story of rapid economic growth. This book reinterprets this through an exploration of the history of growth as a set of discourses by which Japanese “growth performance” as “economic miracle” came to be articulated. The book traces the history of growth as an object of social scientific knowledge and as a new analytical paradigm that came to govern the terms by which Japanese understood their national purposes and imagined a newly materialist vision of social and individual prosperity. The book presents accounts of the key role played by the ideal of full employment in national conceptions of recovery and of a new valorization of consumption in the postwar world that was taking shape. Both of these, the book argues, formed critical components in a constellation of ideas that even in the context of relative poverty and uncertainty coalesced into a powerful vision of a materially prosperous future. Even as Japan became the premier icon of the growthist ideal, neither the faith in rapid growth as a prescription for national reform nor the ascendancy of social scientific epistemologies that provided its technical support was unique to Japanese experience. The book thus helps to historicize a concept of never-ending growth that continues to undergird our most basic beliefs about the success of nations and the operations of the global economy.