Imagining a Post-High-Economic-Growth Society: The Crisis of the Liberal Political Economy and the “Japanese Model of Mature Society”

In Japan the growth paradigm, which frames the enlargement of economic production as the national priority, has dominated the social imagination. This paradigm remains influential despite criticism of its harmful effects and the harsh reality of long-term recession since the 1990s. In this article, I will explore one of the contributing factors that discourses advocating against the growth paradigm often rely upon some of the paradigm’s underlying premises. Specifically examined here is Murakami Yasusuke’s discussion of post-high-economic-growth society in the 1970s. I will particularly consider Murakami’s primary concerns relative to the historical context of the time. Murakami is credited with constructing the discourse of a “Japanese model of mature society.” Today “Mature society” is used as a cliché in Japan to refer to a post-high economic growth society, without a clear awareness of the term’s historicity and political implications, a circumstance which my study intends to problematize. Within this analysis I investigate the relevant characteristics and major assumptions of Dennis Gabor’s Mature Society in addition to Murakami’s ideas in the historical context in the 1970s, a moment when the post-WWII liberal political and economic system was widely thought to be in crisis given the rising awareness of the “limits of growth.” By considering the concurrent emergence of Gabor’s and Murakami’s discussions at this moment, I argue that they reaffirmed the basic premises of the post-WWII liberal political economy against the growing voices at home and abroad calling for a correction to the harmful effects of the growth paradigm including the prevalent disparities it engendered, and that they sought to provide neo-conservative solutions, thereby reinstating the appositeness of growthism. In addition, I also examine the epistemological premises of Murakami’s discussion of the Japanese-model of mature society, which combined a critique of Western-style modernization and a reappraisal of Japanese history and “traditional” culture. By contextually clarifying the historicity and limitations of Murakami’s notion of mature society, I aim to raise some questions about the uncritical use of this concept as a defining term for contemporary Japan―a tendency which I argue prevents us from critically rethinking the growth paradigm.