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

Ryan Moran's book Selling the Future explores how the life insurance industry in Japan commodified and governed lives by exploiting its association with mutuality and community. He argues that insurance companies and government officials worked together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous, offering consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises.

Format: Hardback
Length: 276 pages
Publication date: 15 January 2024
Publisher: Cornell University Press

In his book "Selling the Future," Ryan Moran delves into the intricate workings of the life insurance industry in Japan, exploring how it capitalized on its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Spanning from the industry's inception in 1881 to the conclusion of World War II, Moran provides a comprehensive account of the collaboration between insurance companies and government officials to present a future characterized by peril and uncertainty. Recognizing the challenges faced by individual consumers in navigating an unpredictable world, insurance industry administrators argued that their utilization of statistical data allowed them to chart a predictable course for the collective. By offering insurance, companies and the state provided consumers with a means to attain a perfectible future amidst a backdrop of repeated crises.

Life insurance played a pivotal role as a significant modernist technology within Japan and its colonies, serving to instill expectations for responsibility, redefine notions of mutuality, and normalize emerging social formations, such as the nuclear family, as integral to life. Through the lens of life insurance, we gain valuable insights into the interplay between modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the disciplining of workers into a capitalist system. Moran's book "Selling the Future" offers a rich and insightful exploration of these complex dynamics, shedding light on the ways in which the life insurance industry shaped and influenced Japanese society during its formative years.

Weight: 907g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501773297