"In Yedo, nothing is so common as to hear the citizens lament the times that have only just come to an end." So ran one editorial of "The Far East," an English-language periodical published in Japan in the 1870s.
A contemporary echo of this sentiment reverberates in the exhibition "Tokyo Olympics and the Bullet Train", now on at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of a key moment in Japan's postwar history. The exhibition is like opening two dusty shoeboxes at the house of your elderly but incorrigible aunt and uncle to find memorabilia from when they first met. Items such as crockery marked "Made in Occupied Japan," copies of the racy magazine Avec and posters disseminated by GHQ to promote democracy help give us an impression of the years when the country went from rubble to riches.
There are two shoeboxes, because it is difficult not to notice how the new time-saving technology affected women and men quite differently back then. A display of electrically powered rice cookers, irons and washing machines next to their non-electrical predecessors show how postwar modernity aimed to make life easier for housewives.