Hui-Ying Kerr

In the late 1980s, Japan experienced an economic bubble of such proportions, it was later called the ‘Bubble Economy’. Accompanying the stock and property boom was a correspondent consumer frenzy, in which Japan frenetically participated in the collective dream of its own global destiny. While only lasting a few years, the crash accompanying the boom had repercussions for the following two decades, showing the scale of the Bubble through the length of its fall. Nevertheless, although inarguably influential, the Bubble has largely been studied in economic terms, while the cultural nature of the Japanese Bubble has been much less so.

This research explores the Japanese Bubble Economy as a cultural phenomenon through consumer lifestyle magazines of the late 1980s and accompanying oral histories. Bringing together narratives of Japanese cultural, economic and design histories, it focuses on the young working Japanese men and women at the forefront of the economic and consumer bubble, also called the salaryman and office lady (OL) respectively.

Through the themes of work, leisure, and the international, it posits that the Japanese Bubble was more than a hollow peak of Japanese economy, but had essential implications for its consumer-citizens in terms of nationalism, internationalisation, gendered cultures of work and leisure, masculinity, femininity, travel and tourism, sport, sub-cultural forms of retro and kawaii, resistance, dissention, and ultimately relationships with time itself.

Wider implications of this study include the repositioning of Japan’s 1980s as a time of change and momentum-gathering; not only as a period significant for signalling the end of extended economic growth, and the beginning of a new era of consolidation and self-exploration, but also as a necessary catalyst for cultural metamorphosis and development of later soft power. Using approaches that are deliberately interdisciplinary, intertextual, material, and discursive (Adamson, Riello, Teasley, 2011; Lees-Maffei, Howze, 2010), it engages with that of the non-West and the transnational, contributing to a narrative of a uniquely East-Asian reclamation of modernity. Furthermore, positioned against the context of other cultures of economic bubbles, it contributes to other global design histories of consumer cultures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.