Kakeibo Monogatari: Women's Consumerism and the Postwar Japanese Kitchen, 1945-1964

• Main Author: Maxson, Hillary
• Other Authors: Hanes, Jeffrey
• Language: en_US
• Published: University of Oregon 2018
• Subjects: Consumer; Japan; Kakeibo; Kitchen; Washoku; Women
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23917

This dissertation explores the history of Japanese home cooking during the formative postwar period—focusing on the women who were responsible for its development. My research demonstrates that as the primary consumers who typically controlled the finances in their homes, and as the primary cooks, women shaped and directed many of the dietary and technological changes that took place in the postwar Japanese kitchen. Chapter II argues that self-proclaimed housewife Nakamura Kimiko’s pragmatic approach to household economy, demonstrated through her devotion to kakeibo (personal household account book) keeping, equipped her with the tools she needed to become a political leader in her community, as she became a central figure in Seikyō Co-Op’s kakeibo movement and their campaigns for food safety throughout the 1970s. Kimiko’s political participation was part of a broader pattern of women’s civic engagement in postwar Japan: her politics were tied specifically to her role as a consumer. Chapter III examines the transformation in common nutrition knowledge that played out in the pages of women’s kakeibo—both in the published and nationally circulated copies of kakeibo, and in the ways that women like Kimiko used kakeibo. Chapter IV takes up the “bright life” years (1955-1962) from the perspective of consumers. It attributes value to household appliances, specifically kitchen appliances, based on how they affected women’s domestic labor. Chapter V argues that women were integral to postwar changes in Japanese cuisine. Women bore the burden of bringing new ingredients and dishes to everyday life in the postwar home, and their consumption, labor, and cooking were integral to culinary change. Current scholarship on postwar Japanese cuisine focuses on empire, politics, and macroeconomics as the impetuses of change, effectively placing the efforts of women at the periphery of historical narratives. My research contributes to current scholarship by demonstrating that the mental and physical labor many women carried out on a daily basis played an equally important role in transforming food in everyday life in postwar Japan.