I read an interesting article in the Naked Capitalism Blog (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/02/object-lesson-consumer-frugality-in.html) on how the people of Japan have been handling the current economic crisis. As we all know, since WWII, Japan has been looked at as the case study on how capitalism can be brought to a foreign land and thrive because of it. However, today Japan’s economy has fallen almost 30 percent and consumer spending has decreased an enormous amount because of it. You may think with such a decrease might lead to an emptiness in the urban areas of Japan , however “infrastructure is well maintained, people are neatly dressed, restaurants, bars, and tea houses look busy”. Where one can really see the changes is in the homes and day-to-day lives of the working class people.
“Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.”
“The Takigasaki family in the Tokyo suburb of Nakano goes further to save a yen or two. Although the family has a comfortable nest egg, Hiroko Takigasaki carefully rations her vegetables. When she goes through too many in a given week, she reverts to her cost-saving standby: cabbage stew.”
This kind of penny-pinching even hits families where both parents have stable jobs as in the Takigasaki family the mother works part time at a home for the disabled and the father “has a well-paying job with the electronics giant Fujitsu”, but just like here in the US, neither knows how long their jobs will last.
It’s funny to think about what we in the US would think if we had to wash our clothes in the bathtub or ration out vegetables and eat cabbage stew regularly, especially if both breadwinners had stable jobs. These kind of cost-cutting measures are almost the anti-thesis to what the middle-class culture in the US preaches. We always want to look as if we don’t need the assistance or don’t need to be frugle, when in actuality, we probably would be better off if we were. In the Blog post it said that in Japan it is easier to achieve these frugle ways because “Japan has very little income disparity, the fact that the belt-tightening is widespread no doubt makes it somewhat easier to bear”.
If everyone you knew also had to wash their clothes in a tub instead of laundromat, the stigma of being a penny-pincher would essentially be washed away.
