In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of financial and environmental shocks provoked anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty. For the first time in the postwar period, hope for a brighter future was shaken. But even as there were fears of loss and retrogression, there was also doubt about what to defend and preserve. Postwar dreams of economic growth, mass consumerism and middle-classness seemed to be in crisis. This chapter explores ideas of value and waste, comfort and panic, strength and fragility, to argue that the early 1970s were an inflection point in the longer arc of the postwar period.

Introduction

In October 1974, the Economic Planning Agency issued a diagnosis of contemporary ills. The nation, it determined, was suffering the lingering discontents of an “era of anxiety,” or fuan no jidai. In its annual white paper on people's lifestyles, the agency identified a litany of problems that had been eroding feelings of stability. Prime among them were environmental pollution, impending resource shortages and price inflation. To convey a sense of the scale of these challenges, the agency noted that these were global phenomena, especially resonant among the economically advanced countries of the world. In the face of such difficulties, the stated purpose of the report was to help the nation overcome the pervasive unease that had come to characterize the early 1970s.

The Economic Planning Agency's white paper described and exemplified the uncertainties and insecurities of these years. Cracks in the foundation of economic growth seemed to be widening, sheared open by the humanitarian and environmental damage wrought by industrial pollution, worries about finite natural resources and rising prices. As people realized the severity of these strains and felt them in their day-to-day lives, some raised questions about the costs and consequences of the nation's rapid economic growth. At the same time, many grasped more tightly onto middle-class lifestyles. In the Economic Planning Agency's view, people were dissatisfied because of the gap between expanding desires, stoked by economic expansion, and their lagging and unequal realization. But perhaps the most immediate and acute sentiment of these years was fear of the deterioration, or even the loss, of middle-class lifestyles that attested to individual and national achievement.