He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Selling the Future explains why two supporters of the Japanese post office’s life insurance system valued life insurance. Both writers (one a former general who had fought in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars and the other a professor at Kyoto University) argued that postal life insurance would bring unity and discipline into the lives of Japanese people. According to these supporters, the post office’s life insurance system, which mainly targeted poor laborers, would solve the problem of labor alienation by giving workers security and uniting them, through the commodity of insurance, into the community of the nation.Learn more about Selling the Future at the Cornell University Press website.
This page highlights the relationship between insurance and community, a key concept explored in this book. In that sense, the page does do a good job of highlighting how figures in the insurance industry conceptualized insurance as a form of mutual aid. Of course, this was a commodified form of mutuality that further reified capitalist social relations. While this page does highlight a key concept of the text, the chapter it comes from is focused squarely on the post office’s life insurance system. The rest of the book is more expansive, however, and examines how private companies as well as the state-run system worked to transform life into an object of governance and socially constituted commodity. The first chapter focuses on private companies and how they commodified the concept of mutuality. The second chapter also looks at private companies, focusing on their marketing strategies centered on a vision of responsible masculinity for white collar consumers in interwar Japan. The fourth chapter also deals with the post office and its insurance system, but focuses on how the system tried to inculcate health promotion as a moral obligation of members of the national community. This chapter also includes a discussion of radio calisthenics (rajiō taisō) and its transnational origin. Chapter 5 continues with a discussion of the post office’s life insurance system, but shifts the discussion to how this worked in colonial Korea. The book ends with a discussion of how the wartime Japanese state used insurance to mobilize the populace amid Allied bombing runs. Insurance, with its promise of a secure future, functioned to instill what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism” into the everyday lives of Japanese people. These different aspects of the book all explore the industry’s co-optation of the concept of mutuality in different ways. Page 99 thus does give readers a decent sense of a central theme of the book, but would leave out some of the important issues addressed in the rest of the manuscript.
--Marshal Zeringue
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