I encountered these pages when I was flipping through a thick, unsorted bunch of materials regarding the industrial campaigns that the youth associations conducted in the immediate postwar period. Apparently this is a song promoted by the headquarters for the currency stabilization (通貨安定対策本部）.  You can tell how desperate they were to persuade people to make savings in banks during the flaring inflation. The lyrics go (sorry for the rough translation):

What does that girl wait for at the counter of the bank? What are the bundles of bills that flow out every day doing? With whom are they now? Why are they coming home so late?

Bank Girl is alone, worried.

What does that girl look at during the lunch break? The bundles of cash that flooded into the city raise the price of what she wants. A shadow is cast over the shop window.

Bank Girl is alone and sad.

What does that girl do at the counter? The more cash flows out, the deeper the value goes down. Why do you not deposit that cash? The calculation does not make sense.

Bank Girl is alone, concerned.

Who does she wait for at the counter? The gentleman who always comes to deposit money. He is truly reliable — I wonder if he is single. I would love to see his bank statement.

Bank Girl is alone, longing for him.

Paul Krugman wrote a column in which he argued that the last decade in the US has been a waste of time, economically speaking:

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. …
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. …
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early …
… it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. …
So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
…
So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

My mother sent me the column, and I wrote back the following comparison:

It’s almost like we had the same Lost Decade that the Japanese had in the 90s, but in a much more dramatic fashion. They had the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks; we had 9/11. They had the Hanshin Earthquake, we had Katrina; both triggered a discussion about emergency preparedness and civil society. They had a bubble burst and zero growth; we had several bubbles burst and, ultimately, zero growth.

Unfortunately, it’s very clear that Japanese leaders and citizens didn’t learn very much from the experience: it took almost another decade before a major change in leadership, and their economy remains extremely weak. Not a happy comparison.

My China-side colleague, Alan Baumler, noted that China seems to have supplanted Japan as the go-to model for economic development. This has, he says, required him to alter his own attitude towards Chinese history, which never really had much of a triumphal arc before. He says, though

Well, the Japan people seem to have adjusted to going from an Asian Anomaly to a model for humanity and back, so I guess we can.

My response was

Actually, Japan’s gone 180 degrees and has become a negative example for demographic, financial and rights development. Between the “aging Japan”, “Lost Decade” and rising tide of neo-nationalism….. we need a new narrative, too.

The last few times I’ve taught my Japan course that comes up to the present, I’ve used Bumiller’s book, but that one comes just at the beginning of the economic stagnation, and is now approaching 20 years old. I haven’t seen much that I’d like to use to replace it, either literature or ethnography. There’s Japan After Japan, but it seems like the kind of stuff I’d have to spend more time explaining and excusing than making good use of. I’m tempted to shift in the direction of global diaspora or something on the globalization of Japanese culture, but both of those seem a bit like avoiding the question.

What’s the new narrative? Have the economic slowdown, normalization, and globalization affected the way you present the post-war arc, or are the last two decades a distinct period?

One of my students is doing a summer research project on the Japanese financial crisis of the 1990s and we just looked at Jon Woronoff’s book The Japanese Economic Crisis (1992) which was originally published as Japan, the Coming Economic Crisis (1979). Woronoff, who was at one point a correspondent for the journal “Asian Business” and still writes about East Asian economies, was apparently widely panned at the time for being a Japanophobe or maybe just a hater in general, but I was very struck by how many of the issues he raises–banking problems, too much reliance on exports and protectionism, widening social inequalities, insecurity for the elderly, the massive generation gap of the late 20th century, collapse of the company loyalty ethic–became widely acknowledged and commented-upon social and economic problems after the collapse of the bubble. Didn’t he turn out to be right about a lot of things? Has he gotten any credit? This is not my field. My understanding of postwar economic issues is thin (Is MITI a college at M.I.T?). But the many ways in which Japan’s response to its crisis of two decades ago resonate with both the global and Japanese situation today make this feel worth revisiting.

I’m using Ivan Morris’ translation of Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Woman and other Writings this semester¹, but one thing which is bugging me right off the bat is his habit of translating money into Pounds Sterling by converting the Tokugawa money to rice and then converting the rice to yen and the Yen to Pounds at the 1963 rate.² Needless to say, neither I nor my students have any intutitive sense how much £16.70 in 1963 is worth today, but that’s what he says one gold Ryo is. According to the first historical currency calculator I could find, that’s about US$335.24 now. But that’s assuming that the original gold-rice/rice-yen calculation is worth anything….

I’d much rather have had a discussion about relative purchasing power, but here’s my best (quick) guess:

A little more digging and I found How Much Is That? which covers a good swath of modern financial history with converters that are a bit more open about their indices. The What Were Japanese GDP, CPI, Wage, or Population Then? page is set up to produce “Annual Observations in Table and Graphical Format for years 1879 to Present” based on your inputs. Unfortunately, the data actually only goes back to 1952, except for the CPI.³ Still, plugging in the 1963 Yen values Morris uses and you get⁴

Tokugawa	1963 ¥	Current ¥	Current dollars5
1 gold ryo	16,350	67000	742
1 Ichibu-koban	4,087.5	17000	181
1 silver chogin	11717.5	47300	525
1 silver kamme	272,500	1,100,000	12,180
1 copper kanmon	4,087.5	17000	181
1 copper monsen6	4.1	17	.18

This is still not terribly satisfying, since it’s based on continuity in rice prices — and if I wanted to be really thorough, I’d convert the 1963 yen value back to rice, then convert rice to yen for current prices.

Then there’s specie value by weight, just for kicks. Using Morris’ weights:

Tokugawa Coin	weight in momme7	weight in grams	Current market value in dollars
1 gold ryo	4.8	18	512.45
1 Ichibu-koban	1.2	4.5	128.11
1 silver chogin	43	161.6	61.72
1 silver kamme	1000	3758	1435.37
1 copper kanmon	1000	3758	12.34
1 copper monsen	1	3.758	0.012345

As I said before, I much prefer a discussion of relative incomes and purchasing power. Fortunately, I just got the announcement of the new EMJ, including Constantine Vaporis, Samurai and the World of Goods: the Diaries of the Toyama Family of Hachinohe. So I have some fresh scholarship I can share along with the old.

1. Thanks, Alan!
2. Appendix II, “Money in Saikaku’s Time”
3. I’m very surprised: population and GDP data for those years isn’t exactly hard to find…. The Historical Statistics of Japan has some data going back to the late 19c and early 20c. Not the most interesting stuff, but at least some of the basics. The Bank of Japan statistics covers some of the early 20c in detail. HistoricalStatistics.org is a Swedish site with some interesting stuff on it, like the excel spreadsheet with population and GDP estimates for the whole world going back to year 1!
4. I’m going to use an approximation for current yen values, based on CPI and Real GDP per capita. Nominal GDP numbers seem very high….
5. Using the current 90/dollar
6. There’s an error in Morris’s table, I think: he indicates the yen value of the kanmon as being 100,000 times greater than the monsen instead of 1000 times. Since, according to Morris, the kanmon should be equivalent to the ichibu-koban, I have to assume that the monsen needs to be scaled up.
7. Morris pegs the momme at 58 troy grains, or 3.758 grams