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

By Ryan Moran

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773310

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

SELLING THE FUTURE

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

Ryan Moran

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Maile and Lilinoe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note to Readers

Introduction

1. Making Mutuality Profitable

2. Creating a Desire for Life

3. Delivering Security

4. Perfecting the Social Body

5. Empire of Responsibility

6. Life at War

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I thank Tak Fujitani and Stefan Tanaka at the University of California, San Diego, who have been phenomenal mentors. They have always pushed me to reflect on things in a more complicated fashion, and I am extremely grateful for all that I have learned from them. I also thank Cathy Gere, Joe Hankins, and Roddey Reid at UC San Diego.

Suzuki Akihito was a generous and welcoming host and mentor during my postdoctoral fellowship at Keio University, in Minato, Tokyo. I thank him for his guidance, for introducing me to people working on the history of medicine in Tokyo, and also for welcoming me into his seminar. Iwamoto Chiemi also helped to make my stay at Keio as pleasant as possible. I would like to thank Yazawa Masashi for hosting me as a visiting researcher at Waseda University and Umemori Naoyuki for helping to arrange this.

Over the years, I have been very fortunate to have received helpful comments, suggestions, and encouragement from many people. Thanks are due to far too many people to list here, though I would like to mention Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Megan Asaka, Noriko Aso, George Aumoithe, Crystal Baik, Max Balhorn, Jody Benjamin, David Biggs, Karey Caracas, Meghna Chaudhuri, Alan Christy, Michael Cronin, Mark Driscoll, Kjell Ericson, Steve Ericson, David Fedman, Yulia Frumer, Gotō Motoyuki, Hashimoto Takehiko, Todd Henry, Katsuya Hirano, Reto Hoffman, Caley Horan, Miyako Inoue, Tadashi Ishikawa, Ji Hee Jung, Sohaib Khan, Dong-won Kim, Su Yun Kim, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Mariam Lam, Tong Lam, Sujin Lee, Antoine Lentacker, Angela Leung, Michael Shiyung Liu, Shi Lin Loh, Matsuzaki Yuko, Kate McDonald, Sarah Mellors, Mihara Sayaka, Barbara Molony, the late Aaron Moore, Murata Keiko, Nakamura Eri, Ti Ngo, Lisa Onaga, Ōshima Noriko, Jin-kyung Park, Dylan Rodriguez, Tomoyuki Sasaki, Dagmar Schaefer, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Victor Seow, Grace Shen, Setsu Shigematsu, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Dana Simmons, George Solt, Robert Stolz, Chikako Takeshita, Robert Thomas Tierney, Max Ward, Samuel Yamashita, Tim Yang, Lisa Yoneyama, Evan Young, Fariba Zarinebaf, and Ran Zwigenberg. Sookyeong Hong introduced me to the digital archive of the National Library of Korea, for which I am hugely grateful. Special thanks to Kim Keonhyung for pointing out the reference to life insurance in the Yi Tae Jun’s stories. And I apologize sincerely to anyone whom I’ve forgotten but whose help has been enormously helpful in my work.

I have benefited greatly from the assistance of numerous librarians as I’ve worked on this book. I thank the librarians at Keiō University, The Economics Library at the University of Tokyo, the Meiji shinbun zasshi bunkō at the University of Tokyo, the Yūsei hakubutsukan, the Waseda Library, the National Diet Library, the National Archives of Japan, and the Life Insurance Association of Japan for their help in accessing materials that have been crucial to this project. Kikuchi Makiko supplied me with the stunning images from the Yūsei hakubutsukan and aided me in obtaining permission for their use. The online collection of the National Library of Korea enabled me to locate crucial journals from the colonial period. Hiroko Hashitani and the ILL staff at the University of Utah library helped me to track down sources as I finished the manuscript. I particularly thank Max Ward for kindly scanning an article for me and sending it from Japan as I was in the final stages of revisions. I also acknowledge Matsuzaki Yuko at the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation for trying to help me gain access to the corporate archives of Japanese life insurance companies.

I feel immense gratitude to those who assisted me in my work at the University of Utah. I thank Dianne Harris, who was dean when I was hired. I would also like to express my thanks to my chairs Eric Hinderaker, Ben Cohen, and Paul Reeve. Ben and Dean Stuart Culver generously arranged for me to have leave when my daughter was born. Thanks also to all of my wonderful and supportive colleagues in the Department of History, especially Julie Ault, Matt Basso, Hugh Cagle, Beth Clement, Ed Davies, Nadja Durbach, Becky Horn, Danielle Olden, Susie Porter, Greg Smoak, Wes Sasaki-Uemura, and Janet Theiss. I have also greatly appreciated the support of colleagues in other departments, especially Lezlie Frye, Mujeeb Khan, Kim Korinek, Ashton Lazarus, David Roh, Bunny Torrey, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Cindi Textor, and Myra Washington. I would also like to thank students in my graduate and undergraduate seminars who helped me think through some of the ideas in this book.

Thanks to the Catteni Positivo cycling club for welcoming me into their ranks and introducing me to cycling in the greater Tokyo area. Thanks especially to Nagai-san, M-Taichō, Pari-san, Sansone-san, Arabesque-san, Daidai-san, Chō6-san, and Jonny-san.

Tak Fujitani, Stefan Tanaka, Lisa Onaga, Kate McDonald, Wes Sasaki-Uemura, and Maile Arvin all read parts of the manuscript and gave very helpful suggestions. Thanks also to the participants of the Works in Progress workshop at the University of Utah for helping me to refine the first chapter. Two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press provided helpful feedback that greatly improved the manuscript. All remaining errors, of course, are my responsibility.

I am grateful to everyone at Cornell University Press for helping to make this book exist. Thank you to Emily Andrew for first expressing interest in this book. Sarah Grossman, Jackie Teoh, and the rest of the production staff of Cornell University Press and Westchester Publishing have been a joy to work with and helped to shepherd it through the production process. Justin Sorenson at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah kindly created the map for me.

I have benefited immensely from the hard work of many teachers over the years. I’d like to thank my professors at Reed College, especially Douglas Fix, for first introducing me to the pleasures of critical inquiry. Additionally, I was very fortunate to spend a year at the Inter-University Center at Yokohama and want to express gratitude to all of my teachers there. Satō-sensei, Ōhashi-sensei, and Konnō-sensei deserve special thanks for helping to improve my Japanese.

I first lived in Japan in a small town that at the time was called Shio-machi (now merged with another town to form Hōdatsushimizu-chō) while working as an English teacher on the JET Program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program). I would like to thank the many teachers, colleagues, and friends who welcomed me to life in that town, especially Araki-san, Morita-san, Tsubame-san, Tanaka-san, Maeda-san, Konishi-sensei, Kamatani-sensei, and Fuji-san.

I’ve been immensely fortunate to have received generous support for this book. Various stages of research and writing have been sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright IIE, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Social Science Research Council, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, the UC San Diego Department of History, UC Riverside’s Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Department of History at the University of Utah.

I received incredibly helpful comments and suggestions at conferences, workshops, and talks at a number of conferences and symposia, including the Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, the Symposium on the History of East Asian Science and Technology, the World History Association Annual Conference, the Modern Japan History Workshop (formerly held at Waseda University), the Asian Society for the Social History of Medicine, Keio University, Kyoto University, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Oxford Brookes University, the V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, UCLA, and the University of Utah

An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as Delivering Security in Modern Japan: Postal Life Insurance and Social Unrest in positions: asia cultures critique 26, no. 4 (2019), used by permission by Duke University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as Securing the Health of the Nation: Life Insurance, Labor, and Health Improvement in Interwar Japan in Japan Forum 31, no. 2 (2019), 211–234, copyright by British Association for Japanese Studies, https:doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2018.1461677. I thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved those articles.

My family has always supported me, and I would particularly like to thank my parents Marshall and Charlene and brother Paul, in addition to the extended Moran family. Thanks also to the Awo-ohana for kindly welcoming me over the years. My greatest thanks go to my partner, Maile Arvin, whose love and companionship have helped sustain me enormously. Thank you, Maile, for building a life with me. Finally, I’m grateful to our daughter, Lilinoe, for making every day of my life more fun. Only after your birth did I finally get why life insurance, with its vision of a fantastical future, could be so appealing.

Note to Readers

Japanese and Korean names are written with the surname first. When a cited author has published in English, I use the name order under which she or he published. Macrons (as in Sōseki) are used to indicate long vowels, except for words commonly written in English, such as Tokyo. The translations are mine, except where indicated.

INTRODUCTION

In one of the many humorous passages from Natsume Sōseki’s classic, I Am a Cat, the wife of Professor Sneeze (Kushami Sensei) expresses annoyance with her husband to her niece.¹ As an example of her husband’s obstinacy, the professor’s wife recounts his discussion with a traveling life insurance salesman. While Mrs. Sneeze wanted the professor to purchase an insurance contract, Professor Sneeze stubbornly responded that nobody needs to get insured unless he’s going to die.² When the salesman points out the preposterousness of this statement, Professor Sneeze digs in his heels and replies even more resolutely, I’ve decided not to die, so have no worry on my account.³ Mrs. Sneeze and her niece both declare that this is absurd. As Mrs. Sneeze continues, But your uncle cannot see it. He swears he’ll never die. ‘I’ve made a vow,’ he told the salesman with all the pride of a nincompoop, ‘never, never to die.’ Their niece mockingly responds by succinctly stating, How very odd.⁴

Professor Sneeze’s decision not to purchase insurance is incredibly vexing to his wife, who wants the security of a life insurance contract. In an inversion of tales told by insurance salesmen, wherein the logical male salesman needs to overcome the objections of overly sentimental, superstitious, and backward women, Professor Sneeze’s wife and niece later trick him into declaring that he will purchase insurance. After Professor Sneeze has expounded on his dislike of female college students, his niece cleverly asks which he dislikes more, insurance or college girls. As a result of the niece’s artful manipulation, Professor Sneeze now advocates for the necessity of insurance. When his niece replies that insurance premiums are a waste of money, the professor retorts without any hint of self-awareness: You only say such irresponsible things because you imagine you’re going to go on living until you’re a hundred years old. Even two hundred. But when you’ve grown a little more mature, you’ll come to realize the necessity of insurance.⁵

Sōseki wrote this story in 1905, as Japan emerged victorious in the Russo-Japanese War. During this period, the life insurance industry expanded from a product largely geared toward the elite to one that would attract the members of the emerging white-collar professional class who read Sōseki’s work. A few years prior, in 1898, the Meiji state had established the Civil Code, which enshrined the patriarchal family of the samurai as the ideal for the nation. In this process, the male household head, who controlled the family and its property, became the locus of imperial citizenship. His wife, treated essentially as a minor, needed his permission to receive property, to sign a contract, or to buy and sell goods.⁶ Sōseki’s anecdote humorously upends this relationship, as Professor Sneeze’s wife is the responsible party who worries about familial continuity. Often represented as flighty, spendthrift, and vain, Professor Sneeze is irrational and makes decisions based on his immediate mood rather than from a long-term plan.

Sōseki famously cast a critical eye on the rapid social changes that accompanied the Meiji Restoration. Michael Bourdaghs argues that in I Am a Cat and other works, Sōseki explored a vision of literature "not bound by the rational, a priori laws of the social totality."⁷ In contrast, Sōseki attempted to use literature to imagine forms of communal life outside those idealized by the emerging science of sociology and its celebration of individual property rights.⁸ In I Am a Cat, for example, making the cat the narrator challenges the conventional notion of human dominion over the natural world that was essential to the forms of private property that emerge within capitalism.⁹ According to Bourdaghs, In the cat’s eyes, it is the humans who are barbaric and cats who truly understand the morality embodied in a civilized property system … Human property is theft, the cat implies, an irrational abomination maintained only through brute violence.¹⁰ For Sōseki, literature itself offered the possibility of a dialogic relationship that transcended individual property rights. In Sōseki’s ideal, stories were reworked and gained meaning by the community of readers rather than solely as a result of the actions of a singular author.¹¹

I Am a Cat is fairly agnostic about the value of insurance and seems mainly to use insurance to poke fun at Professor Sneeze’s assertion that he will never die. Given Bourdaghs’ reading, however, it makes sense that insurance would have been a topic on Sōseki’s mind. In contrast to the more radical social formation Sōseki envisioned sprouting from literature, private life insurance companies represented their product as an aggregate social body of male customers who gained entry to this community through their policy premiums. Life insurance thus symbolized the triumph of the market in the management of human relationships as well as the commercialization of the concept of community. While insurance companies often invoked the language of mutuality, they did so in the pursuit of private profit rather than to generate a liberatory vision of society. Selling the Future explores how private insurance companies and the state insurance system deployed insurance’s association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern both life and labor in modern Japan.

The first successful Japanese life insurance company began in 1881, a surprisingly momentous year that witnessed the introduction of deflationary economic policies that stabilized the economy at the expense of the peasantry and eventually caused large-scale riots in central Japan. In the same year, the Meiji government announced the eventual opening of Parliament and the creation of a Constitution to quell support for liberal reformers in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement. Prior to this, Saigō Takamori famously led a rebellion against the Meiji polity in 1877 to protest the loss of samurai privilege and to oppose the centralized authority of the new Meiji state.¹² The late 1870s and early 1880s also marked a new phase of the Freedom and Popular Rights movement. This movement transformed from one largely comprised of elite intellectual support for the creation of Parliament and the expansion of popular participation in government to one in which lower class activists directly challenged the status quo in often violent incidents.¹³ As Irokawa Daikichi illustrated, the circulation of new political and social theories emboldened local activists to form study societies and to draft constitutions, demonstrating that Japanese villagers were also starting to demand a say in their own governance.¹⁴ The 1870s would also witness the movement for bunmeikaika, often translated as Civilization and Enlightenment, which trumpeted the value of Western science and knowledge for building up Japan as a strong nation-state with an industrialized economy.¹⁵

Insurance thus emerged as the state and Japanese elites demonstrated a commitment to science and technology amid new challenges to the dominant political and social order. Life insurance proved enticing, I argue, because it seemed to offer consumers a means of controlling their life-course amid an era filled with rapid change and instability. Insurance salesmen suggested that a customer who purchased an insurance contract could almost ensure a hopeful and prosperous future for his family. According to companies, insurance differed from other financial products of the early Meiji period due to its basis in statistics and probability. This allowed them to chart a stable future for the aggregate. By contrast, private firms and the state life insurance system argued that the individual lived a life filled with contingency and precarity. In company materials, death often literally seems to lurk around every corner. According to firms, the individual consumer was powerless to alter his life-course through his own actions, but could protect his family’s future by joining the aggregate community of the insured.¹⁶ In order to enjoy this security, however, the individual consumer needed to internalize norms of appropriate conduct, which included savings, responsibility, and even hygiene. While life insurance promised customers prosperity and security, it required them to delay gratification until an indeterminate point in the future. As it brought bodies into a disciplinary regime, life insurance also extracted economic resources from customers. It thus became an important source of finance for colonial expansion, wartime finance, and social welfare projects. Life insurance thereby functioned as an important modernist technology that helped to instantiate expectations for responsibility and reconfigured meanings of mutuality as tools for governing and commodifying life in both Japan and its colonies.

Insurance has been a significant, if not fully appreciated, mode of defining and transforming social relations in modern societies. While historians have recently brought greater attention to the importance of insurance, most have focused on the United States or Europe.¹⁷ According to Caley Horan, life insurance in the post–World War II United States constituted the quintessential form of neoliberal governmentality.¹⁸ As she argues, insurance companies sold the fantasy that responsible individuals could fully take control of their families’ futures. As she writes, industry leaders encouraged Americans to view participation in public insurance programs as a form of dependency. The US insurance industry instead persuaded consumers to take charge of their own security by purchasing a private life insurance contract and discouraged them from conceiving of security as something that could be attained through collective action.¹⁹ Jennifer Klein has also masterfully demonstrated how private insurance companies helped to forestall larger claims to social welfare in the prewar and postwar United States. As she shows, insurers regained market share and consumer trust after the calamitous findings of the 1905 Armstrong Commission by selling group policies to employers. This led to a situation wherein most Americans came to receive security as a benefit from their places of employment rather than as a result of the social obligation of the state to its citizens.²⁰ Private insurers managed to prosper, even with the environment provided by the New Deal, by offering supplementary policies and fighting against the expansion of benefits provided by public social welfare programs.²¹ Klein analyzes this situation as an example of welfare capitalism, in which companies came to supply benefits to workers in order to maintain productivity and to sustain the industrial order.²² As Klein and Horan demonstrate, private US insurance companies proved essential to creating the expectation that individual Americans needed to obtain security through their own efforts and not from social programs run by the government.

In Japan, life insurance would also help to establish expectations around security as well as to define normative social behavior. While private insurance companies came to dominate the US insurance market, however, Japan would see the development of a state-run industrial life insurance system under the authority of the post office in addition to a private insurance system. Through its investment fund, the postal life insurance system distributed funds at low interest rates to groups that promoted social welfare. While private insurance companies in the United States worked to prevent the spread of government welfare benefits, postal life insurance would be one vehicle through which the Japanese government distributed resources to groups engaged in promoting the public good.

Nevertheless, the expansion of the postal life insurance system would also work to forestall more expansive claims to social welfare in Japan. Rather than redistribute wealth to the poor, postal life insurance relied on profits generated from its largely poor customers to function. As supporters of the system stressed repeatedly, the Japanese postal life insurance system differed from social welfare. For example, postal life insurance disbursed money to social welfare organizations as loans; while the interest rate was low, it expected to generate profit. In contrast to compulsory European social insurance systems, moreover, postal life insurance was voluntary. This meant that the individual customer needed to freely choose to join the community of the insured. The security and social protections obtained through life insurance were not rights of imperial citizens, but rather goods that they would need to purchase.

Further, while Japanese private and public insurance companies employed the language of the responsible individual in ways that sometimes mirrored the US industry, they always paired this with a vision of a new social collective mediated through life insurance. At the industry’s inception in Japan, private firms sold insurance as a type of collective social body through which the elite male customers who dominated the industry’s early years would engage in mutual support. When the industry expanded to include laborers and the poor with the post office’s state-run system, scholars and government officials claimed that the social nature of insurance would reintegrate alienated workers back into the community of the nation. Post office officials in colonial Korea similarly argued that postal life insurance would bring disaffected Koreans back into the community of empire. The state and private companies thus sold security in the aggregate as a means for citizens to take shelter from the precarity that seemed to haunt modern life. By merging individual consumption with group security, insurance executives and government officials alike transformed life in its form as an aggregate social body into both a subject of governance and an object of desire. As it became an established product necessary for participation in responsible society, life insurance would also introduce important public health campaigns that impacted the relationship between subjects and the state. Community, in its form as a fetishized commodity, supplemented the capitalist ideology of the isolated consumer or worker responsible for supporting himself and his family.

The community formulated by insurance companies is thus a central concept of this book. The community of insurance customers, of course, was not the organic gemeinschaft community based on personal affective ties to which interwar thinkers such as Orikuchi Shinobu or Yanagita Kunio sought a return in their valorization of folk customs.²³ In contrast, life insurance companies established their communities through consumption. While Miriam Silverberg has presented consumption as a form of individual agency for subjects in imperial Japan, this book looks at how insurance companies aggregated lives through the commodity, which had the effect of reifying capitalist social relations.²⁴ Although insurance companies uniformly stressed the mutuality of insurance, the community idealized in insurance discourse did not always mean the same thing. It could signify both nation and the laboring classes in discussions of the state-run system in interwar as well as wartime Japan. It might also refer to the imperial community idealized by empire when applied to colonial Korea. Community also signified elite men engaged in mutual aid in the industry’s early years. While the specific meaning of the community of insured could thus differ, companies and the state always presented insurance as a means of re-creating social bodies engaged in the intimate work of supporting each other.

As was true in other parts of the world, unevenness and conflict pervaded Japan’s experience with modernity.²⁵ Scholars have analyzed various strategies that the state and intellectuals employed to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Historians, for example, have pointed to the reinvention of the past to forge a shared conceptual space that could bridge the social and political instabilities that emerged during the early Meiji years.²⁶ Selling the Future also points to the significance of moments of disruption, and looks at how the state and private companies rebuilt social relations through the establishment of communities of insurance customers. Life insurance fit this moment of drastic change well, as its adherents argued that its ability to scientifically chart out the future for the aggregate of the population allowed it to bring security to customers and their families in the present. Rather than emphasizing a return to an idealized past, moreover, insurance demonstrates how a vision of the future could also work to reestablish social relations in modern Japan.²⁷ Insurance companies argued that customer mortality data allowed them to determine the probable life-course of a population, which enabled them to establish a secure and prosperous future for their customers. Marking the contours of the social body, in other words, would allow for interventions to assuage social disruption. Private companies and the state contrasted their projection of a predictable future with the numerous difficulties customers faced in their everyday lives to make a life insurance contract seem attractive. The insurance industry offered customers access to a secure future, as long as they could learn to delay gratification and engage in disciplined payments of insurance premiums.

A focus on the management of data, however, made situations that were in fact social and historical seem natural. As Dana Simmons writes regarding nineteenth century France, scientists attempted to determine a vital minimum, or the minimum needed to maintain life. Scientific investigation thus allowed elite male scientists and scholars to reconstitute social hierarchies as a natural part of society. Various segments of society could then be properly balanced in a way analogous to a chemical equation, while the elite simultaneously received more because of their natural superiority.²⁸ These technocrats held the belief that science would provide the solutions to the problems of social dislocation that accompanied industrialization, thus occluding the conflict over the distribution of resources inherent in modern societies.²⁹

Of course, the anxiety that consumers felt never truly abated. Kathleen Woodward argues that the widespread dissemination of data into everyday life produces an affective state she calls statistical panic, whereby the statistically probable comes to seem like one’s own personal (and often grim) destiny. However, owing to the nature of uncertainty, where risk is associated with probability, subjects can never fully be certain that they will (or will not) succumb to this destiny. The uncertainty built into understandings of probability increases one’s feeling of anxiety.³⁰ Statistics, in Woodward’s words, are radiating risk.³¹ Japanese insurance companies preyed on their customers’ uncertainty, selling insurance as a panacea that would relieve consumers of anxiety. While everyone will die at some point, uncertainty comes from not knowing when or how one will die. Without knowing this data point, companies asserted that consumers could not feel confident that they had done enough to provide for their descendants in the event of an untimely death. In the sales discourse, only entry into the community of the insured could provide peace from anxiety. This respite was merely temporary, however, as customers took on new risks as they advanced in life. According to insurance companies, the sole solution was the repeated purchase of an insurance contract.

Along with aggregating lives in community, life insurance companies helped to promote an idealized vision of Japanese people as responsible consumer-subjects. The endowment contract, which combined a life insurance policy with an annuity, became the most popular type of policy in prewar Japan, and it strengthened the connection between insurance and savings. From the late 1870s onward, industry publications asserted that Japanese people did not understand the value of responsibility and savings, which they connected to modern citizenship. Employers criticized workers for being spendthrift with wages.³² Private company executives and state bureaucrats alike argued that life insurance would teach the consumer fiscal discipline, by making the regular payment of a premium a part of his everyday life. Executives of private companies, state bureaucrats, and insurance scholars all argued that life insurance would transform Japanese and colonized Koreans into responsible modern subjects with fiscal discipline and regular employment. Life insurance, in other words, promised to infuse habits needed to survive in modern societies into the everyday lives of both Japanese and colonized subjects.

The concept of responsibility has been essential for quelling the social disruptions produced by modern capitalism. As Miyako Inoue has written, discourses of responsibility place an obligation on the individual to regulate his or her conduct and ignore larger structural factors such as class that might cause the subject to fall short of an ideal. Any subsequent failure then becomes a result of the choices made by an individual.³³ Insurance both required and helped produce the responsible citizen in modern Japan, while it also offered him the shelter of security in the community of the insured. According to firms, a responsible patriarch protected his family and pooled his individual risk among a larger aggregate population. The claim to be able to calculate future probability and provide security also meant that any customer who refused a life insurance contract was neglecting his obligations to family as well as nation and was therefore acting irresponsibly. As a member of the community of insurance customers, the policy holder was also shielded from excessive risk, which might allow him the emotional space in which to develop his entrepreneurial talents and help build up the Japanese economy. Being responsible thus could also paradoxically promote certain kinds of risk taking. As idealized by company executives and state bureaucrats, insurance would thus produce a responsible citizenry that maintained social order, protected familial continuity, and contributed to the project of nation building.

The ideal of the responsible middle class and imperial subject reflected transformations in conceptions of the family that accelerated in the 1890s. Newspapers and popular magazines depicted the Meiji Emperor and Empress as models of proper gender relations for the rest of the nation. While the Meiji Emperor himself was not monogamous, media representations of the imperial family helped to promote the stable and monogamous marriage as an important part of imperial citizenship. Public morality exhorted women to fulfill their roles as good wives and wise mothers and for men to represent the family in public life.³⁴ The discourse of the middle class that emerged around the turn of the century also highlighted the importance of children and family. It responded to the anxieties faced by Japanese people as the language of meritocracy replaced the old language of social status. Within this discourse, social hierarchies became reconceptualized as the result of education and the fashioning of the self along respectable bourgeois lines.³⁵ Around the same time, scientific experts also sought to transform child development into an object of knowledge that required middle class mothers to purchase appropriate toys, magazines, and clothing.³⁶ Aspirants to the category of middle class thus had to carefully monitor their domestic lives. While Mark Jones has noted that this discourse especially emphasized the role of the wife within the middle class family, insurance allows us a glimpse into the idealized role of the male breadwinner within the newly articulated responsible family.³⁷ By purchasing life insurance, the male consumer could fulfill his prescribed social role while ensuring familial security and continuity.

Although women did also purchase insurance contracts, prewar Japanese private companies generally assumed that Japanese men would primarily comprise the workers and customers who made up these social bodies. The Meiji Civil Code, as noted above, consigned control over the household and its property to the male household head. For an ambitious man, life insurance would also protect the envisioned upward trajectory of his family, ensuring its prosperity in the event that he died prematurely. Companies toward the end of the nineteenth century thus articulated themselves as spaces where elite male consumers could pool their individual risks and establish a body of mutual support. More women purchased life insurance from the post office. This perhaps reflected the fact that families used these lesser valued industrial policies to help cover expenses related to burials as well as for medical costs incurred toward the end of life.³⁸ As it moved into the home itself, first with health guidance and later with rajio taisō (radio calisthenics), postal life insurance sought to remake the daily lives of the entire household. While continuing to center on the patriarchal family model, postal life insurance did not focus as explicitly on the household head himself, engaging instead with the entirety of the household.

Bringing Lives Together

While insurance had an interesting and lengthy prehistory in Britain, the modern industry utilized mortality calculations after 1760 and only expanded beyond London after 1800.³⁹ In spite of its somewhat later start at the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese industry quickly grew to become among the largest in the world. Its transformation especially accelerated around the period of the Russo-Japanese War, as the industry took advantage of wartime uncertainties experienced by an emerging middle class and subsequent postwar economic expansion. Between 1904 and 1908, the annual value of new contracts increased from 46 million yen to 134 million yen. For many Japanese people even today, purchasing a life insurance contract remains a symbol of responsible adulthood. Although the Japanese life insurance industry fell