Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance

Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance

In Selling the Future , Ryan Moran explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, Moran describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system. Absorbing. Using the insurance industry as a narrative frame, Selling the Future is a well-written and well-researched intellectual and cultural history about the commodification of life in modern Japan. -- Timothy Yang, University of Georgia, author of A Medicated Empire Selling the Future puts life insurance at the center of the story of Japan's modern social and economic history and successfully shows its importance. -- Laura Hein, Northwestern University, author of Post-Fascist Japan Selling the Future puts life insurance at the center of the story of Japan's modern social and economic history and successfully shows its importance. -- Laura Hein, Northwestern University, author of Post-Fascist Japan Ryan Moran is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah.