The ‘hedonistic revolution of everyday life’: Men’s magazines, consumerism and the Japanese salaryman in the 1960s

Abstract

This article examines the ambiguous relationship between masculinity and consumerism in Japan since the Taisho period. It charts the creation of Heibon Punch, the first post-war lifestyle magazine aimed explicitly at men. In contrast to the corporate ideological reaffirmation of, or passive submission to, political and economic ideology hegemonic salaryman masculinity would come to epitomize, in the magazine consumerism was presented as a means of establishing individuality, creativity, agency and self-expression. Rather than seeing the rise of men’s lifestyle magazines in the 1960s as reconstituting Japanese masculinity through struggles against the deleterious, feminizing effects of mass consumption, I argue instead that there was an attempt to defeminize the act of consumption itself and establish a masculinity at ease with the new imperative to go shopping. Underpinning this was the ongoing quest for a revolution in Japanese masculinity that challenged the association, since at least the 1920s, of individual consumption with feminine traits of hedonism, spontaneity and irrationality. In the 1960s, this quest countered the increasingly hegemonic connection of masculinity and male consumption to middle-class domesticity by offering the chance for young Japanese salarymen to envision a masculinity at ease with consumer society.