UC San Diego

This dissertation is a study of the history of the life insurance industry in modern Japan. Through the topic of life insurance, I analyze the objectification and quantification of life under capitalism and industrialization in modern Japan. Through life insurance, this study analyzes the process by which life became an isolated object that was simultaneously connected to the aggregate of society. Life insurance companies and executives, in fact, were among the first groups or individuals to use the term seimei, the modern Japanese term for life. I argue that the collection and organization of statistical data by insurance actuaries and state bureaucrats led to new ways of categorizing, governing and commodifying Japanese lives. These actors used mortality and health data to transform lives into comparable and interchangeable individuated objects that they could simultaneously organize within newly defined social categories - including laborers, the old and women. This new mode of categorizing social relations helped organize and manage the various parts of the population and to transform life itself into a resource from which the state and private companies could expropriate value. The topic of life insurance, moreover, highlights the importance of activating consumer desire for the practice of interpellating the modern Japanese subject. The new biopolitical mode of governance, which had the mobilization of life at its center, could not simply operate through indoctrination and repression, but also needed to work through the individual as an autonomous, desiring subject trained in new modes of responsible conduct. In the individual chapters, I analyze a few of the most important possibilities unleashed by this shift - life as a scientifically constituted aggregate (chapter 1), life as object of social policy (chapter 2), life as part of the health of the nation (chapter 3), life as a deferred commodity in the 1920s and 1930s (chapter 4), and life as an economic and ideological wartime resource (chapter 5). The five chapters thus all bring attention to the myriad projects for which the state and insurance companies might utilize life in its form as a socially constituted commodity. The chapters, moreover, highlight the simultaneous role played by utopic hope and fear of uncertainty in inciting consumer desire for life as a commodity