Building up Steam as Consumers: Women, Rice Cookers and the Consumption of Everyday Household Goods in Japan

Consumption in Japan, as elsewhere, is strongly gendered. While patterns of consumption have evolved a great deal since the mid-nineteenth century, the role of women and gender in consumption has remained a central issue, particularly in the context of the rise of the housewife and breadwinner-homemaker model. Scholars have analysed women’s association with consumption, and why women across the globe have become the main shoppers and consumers (de Grazia, 1996; de Vries, 2008). Research on gender and consumption in regions such as the United States and Europe has highlighted the relationship between production and consumption. With the separation of home and work over the course of industrial development came a gendered division of labour, within which men’s roles and responsibilities became defined by the public domain and by productive work, while women’s roles and responsibilities became defined by the private domain and by ‘non-work’ activities, mainly comprising housework, childrearing, maintaining family life, leisure and consumption (Costa, 1994). Francks (2009b, pp. 140–41) notes that in Japan ‘… growth in consumption in the forms that it took could not be divorced from the shifting patterns of work and family organization and, in particular, from changes in the role of women within the household and the labor force.’ This development has earlier origins, but occurred in Japan most markedly from the 1950s.