Waste knot: Materials, waste and productivity in postwar Japan

Dr Sarah Teasley (Royal College of Art)

Plywood fibre directionality (Hashimoto Kiyota, Mokko gijutsu koza I: Mokkoku to kihon kosakuho, Tokyo: Gijutsu Shiryo Kankokai, 1960)

Abstract

In 1950s Japan, researchers and makers explored the application of composite wood materials in furniture manufacturing, cabinetry and construction. This emerged as part of a much longer, and very international, attention to new and optimised materials for increased product quality, variety and output. Waste - specifically employing waste effectively - was a key conceptual, economic and material driver in modern Japan’s attention to manufacturing materials. But the rationale behind their use in postwar Japan differs notably from prewar notions and practices around rational, economical resource utilisation. In this talk, I work from internal records, visual sources, artefacts, interviews and industry publications to argue that manufacturing policy and guidance shifted from transforming waste materials into useful ones in prewar Japan, to a broader effort to reduce waste across the industry overall. In this sense, I suggest, the story of wood composites’ reception confirms the broad-brush history of industrial policy and industrial change in Japan between 1930 and 1970. At the same time, however, attention to the (literally) granular level of human interactions with these materials, conceptually and physically, allows us to articulate how policy was received and experienced on the ground, and to identify more complex and multiple understandings of efficiency and waste in materials’ actual use.

Speaker Biography

Dr Sarah Teasley is Reader in Design History and Theory and Head of History of Design at the Royal College of Art. Her research takes an artefact-led approach to the social history of modern and contemporary Japan, with particular focus on design, manufacturing and communities. Her publications include Global Design History (Routledge, 2011) and 'Design and Society in Modern Japan', a special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (2017). Her book Designing Modern Japan will be published by Reaktion Books in 2020.

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Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre

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