Remembering the Rickshaw Everyman: Transport, Labor, and Consumer Society in Postwar Japan
History Department
518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305
224

At the turn of the twentieth century, the rickshaw puller represented the bottom rung of urban life in modern Japan. By the turn of the twenty-first, the rickshaw puller symbolized the essential heritage of the postwar nation. This talk examines the history of the Rickshaw Everyman. Using examples from museums, emerging logistics technology, labor organizing, and urban riots, I show how the rickshaw and the rickshaw puller became powerful targets of memory work as government officials, cultural producers, and transport workers debated whether Japan was a society of consumers or of producers. (Image: Cover of Rôdô nômin undô, no. 103 (1974))
This talk is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.
About the speaker:
Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017) and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History digital spatial history project. She currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies and Co-Editor of the monograph series Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.