6. Conclusions

Japanese society has moved from a devastated society to an economically successful one, surprising observers and Japanese alike. Success has made the Japanese proud of their customs and practices, as a form of national and cultural identification, although no cultural identity is as clear-cut and homogeneous as most representations of the Japanese seem to suggest. Gift exchange is important in the understanding of contemporary Japan as it summarises the complexity and paradoxes of this process. Japanese think of gifts as fundamental pieces of their relations with the social and supernatural, the past and present. However, the patterns that gift exchange creates among Japanese illustrate that their types of exchange are like those of most gift exchange systems in capitalist societies. Wrapping impinges on the construction of certain kinds of social relationships, such as ritual and obligatory, although the classification of reciprocal exchanges also suggests that individuals relate in a voluntary way to others, sharing and giving generously. It is important to stress that gift exchange is constructed as something entirely different from commercial market exchange. The difference between gift giving and commercial exchange is reflected in the way wrapping expresses information about the donor, and the reasons for making the gift. I develop these themes in Chapter Seven. Gift exchange is presented as a ‘traditional economy’. Therefore changes in the perception of obligation and reciprocity, which I present here and examine in Chapter Two, are presented as lineal changes in a folk model. However, the actual practices suggest that multiple arrangements overlap in time within the capitalist gift economy of the society. This chapter has been largely concerned with introducing the many characteristics of gift exchange, the types of wrapping and giving and their historical context, which the reader will need to keep in mind when reading the following chapters. In the next chapter I develop the theoretical and ethnographic perspectives that ground this work, focussing on the different debates and ideas that sustain most perceptions about gift exchange, which are then balanced with the detailed ethnographic cases in the next five chapters.
Figures. Top left 3: Wrapped papers tied in a knot on a tree. Top right 4: Wrapped bottle of sake with green furoshiki with bamboo motifs. Middle left 5: wrapped toy for gift’s day in red bag, non-wrapped white dolls. Bottom left 6: Two pink and white wrapped towels with pink paper, re-wrapped with a box with noshigami papers. Noshigami papers have mizuhiki ribbons and noshi pre-printed. Bottom right 7: Wrapped gifts (envelopes) for wedding with elaborate mizuhiki ribbons. Notice the character of auspiciousness of most prestations despite their different origins.