Postwar Japan's National Salvation

The following is a chapter from my new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Beyond Our Means tells the global story of how many states and societies have actively encouraged household saving from roughly 1800 to the present. To do so, they established an array of institutions aimed at attracting “small savers.” These included savings banks, postal savings systems, school savings programs, and wartime and postwar savings campaigns. Although four of the chapters present the history of Japanese savings-promotion, the book also describes the development of similar efforts to encourage saving in Europe, the United States, and other Asian nations. This is not simply a comparative history, but emphatically a transnational history. Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Germans love to talk about thrift as a part of their distinctive “culture,” yet nations do not save simply because of indigenous traditions. The similarities in savings institutions and campaigns across the globe are far from coincidental. They resulted in large part from transnational or international exchanges of knowledge. The postal savings bank, for example, was not a peculiarly Japanese institution, but originated in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. In turn, the emerging Japanese model of savings-led development profoundly influenced rising economies in East and Southeast Asia, including China. Rather than offering disparate case studies, the book interweaves the history of savings promotion on three continents.