Reviews

remarkable importance and attention to image in the ordinary lifeworld of the Japanese. This fascination with image and surface, and with the ephemeral, is an enduringly central element in Western interpretations of contemporary Japan. Indeed, in a growing body of literature it is argued that Japan can be read—precisely because of its ease with a world of surface, image, and depthlessness—as the first postmodern society (see Arnason and Sugimoto, 1996). Such readings offer an interesting inversion of more conventional Western interpretations of Japan—and other Asian industrial(ising) nations—as rampant borrowers and imitators of original Western tech-nologies and innovations. But if such accounts in some way radicalise our understanding of the process of modernity, they also maintain Japan as essentially a mirror for North American and European obsessions about themselves. Like Barthes, the advocates of a postmodern Japan look at the complex and sometimes spectacular otherness of Japan with a sense of puzzlement and wonder, and yet come away with their original interpretative framework not just intact, but affirmed. In Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption, the sociologist John Clammer argues that such a straightforward translation of Western social theory onto the Japanese context will not do. Certainly, writes Clammer in the introduction, Japan is a society remarkable for the concentration and intensity of its consumer culture. It is a society in which consumption has come to take on an absolutely central significance in the everyday lifeworlds of all Japa-nese. In this, of course, Japan is marked less by uniqueness than by its apparent similarit