Hi Mat:
>Yoshie- I would say Miyabe's book gives a very different view of
>consumer credit
>in Japan than what you put forward. It does argue that there are a group of
>people who do not go for credit cards, but this is not due to their
>unavailability, etc. I will try to type a few paragraphs in later.
Please do. I'm very interested. Though it's too late for the next
quarter, I might assign _All She Was Worth_ in one of my courses in
the future (if it's well translated).
>Some history
>is provided, via the lawyer character explaining some stuff to the
>detective. It
>talks of big crises in the early 80s and early 90s, but also talks about the
>beginnings in the early 60s.
My impression was based upon old information & blue-collar
working-class experience, so I must correct myself. I just heard
that Japanese consumer credit as a percentage of disposable income
passed the American level in 1989!!! Can it be true?
Here's detailed info on Japanese consumer credit that I've found on the net:
***** Japan Economic Institute--JEI
July 16, 1993
-ti- THRIFTY JAPAN DISCOVERS CONSUMER CREDIT
by Arthur J. Alexander
SUMMARY
The combination of financial market deregulation and a smaller
corporate appetite for household savings to fund business investment
has unloosed the bonds on Japan's use of consumer credit. Between
1976 and 1991 consumer credit rocketed from 6.7 percent to 23 percent
of disposable income, while the absolute value increased 15 percent
annually. In contrast, consumer credit in the United States began
and ended this 15-year period at about 18.5 percent of disposable
income.
At the beginning of the credit takeoff in Japan moneylenders
(sarakin) were well-placed among the variety of lenders to take
advantage of the latent demand for loans, but their growth fizzled in
the early 1980s as sales finance companies rode the wave of credit
expansion. For the last seven years, however, banks have dominated
the field. Banks' strengths lie in their low-cost access to large
amounts of funds and their ability to manage millions of transactions
efficiently.
All types of lending organizations have used credit cards to expand
their operations. In the 10-year period ending in 1992 the number of
credit cards increased by almost four times to 203 million, or 1.6
cards for every Japanese. By the end of 1991 outstanding credit card
debt averaged almost $220 per person. Estimating the equilibrium
levels of Japanese consumer credit, the country is probably now at or
slightly above the long-run sustainable level. Therefore, the heady
expansion of consumer credit seen in the past 15 years most likely is
over.
The boom in consumer credit appears to have had only a small effect
on household savings, reducing the ratio of savings to disposable
income by about 1 percentage point from 1976 to 1991. If that
expansion is now at an end, savings will increase by a similar amount.
[The full article is at
<http://www.gwjapan.com/ftp/pub/policy/jei/1993/a-series/7-16-93a.txt>.]
*****
What do you think?
>The book also goes into the whole issue of family
>registers and legal identity, also focusing on bureaucracy.
Intriguing.
>Supposedly Miyabe's
>written lots of books that have been made into movies. Do you know if any of
>these ones we would have seen (e.g. Tampopo, Accountant's Wife, etc.)?
I'm not into mystery books & jidai shosetsu ("historical" novels), so
until you mentioned Miyabe, I had never thought of reading her works.
By _Tampopo_ you mean the film directed by Juzo Itami? I don't
recall seeing her name in the writing credits section, though. FYI,
I think the Japanese title of the novel _All She Was Worth_ is
_Kasha_ (1993), which received the prestigious Yamamoto Shugoro award.
Yoshie
