Imagining Insurance in Japanese High Schools during the Era of Rapid Modernisation: From ‘Distrust’ to the Japanese ‘Spirit’

Individual private insurance is a risk-management practice that plays an important role in many people’s lives. Despite its prominence in industrialised countries, it remains an understudied area in Japan studies, where most work has focused on social insurance. Using insights from the governmentality literature, and in particular François Ewald’s concept of an ‘insurantial imaginary’, we examine the changing perceptions towards private non-life insurance during Japan’s period of high growth and rapid modernisation (1964–1992). While individual private insurance developed in Western Europe and the US over hundreds of years, it did not take off in Japan until the early postwar era. We argue that, like in Western Europe and the US, individual private insurance in Japan had to overcome normative resistance. The norms in Japan, however, were different. To illustrate this, we look at winning essays from an annual high school writing competition run by the Japanese insurance industry as part of a wide-ranging publicity campaign. We conclude that private insurance in Japan passed through four stages of moral understanding to successfully incorporate existing counter norms centred on ‘sincerity’ and ‘mutual aid’. What was initially viewed with ‘distrust’ ended up as a supposed manifestation of the Japanese ‘spirit’.