Life at War: Life Insurance and National Solidarity in Total War Japan

This paper analyzes the relationship between the life insurance industry and Japanese wartime expansion. With the outbreak of Total War in 1937, scholars revived earlier debates to nationalize the life insurance industry. Although full-scale nationalization of the Life Insurance Association never occurred, governmental oversight from above increased as the war dragged on and life insurance became incorporated into the Control Economy (tōsei keizai). Through this process, life insurance firms became important consumers of the government bonds that allowed Japan to continue the war. Life insurance was not only valuable for the financial resources it could provide. Ideologues also asserted that life insurance would maintain popular support for the war by managing the fears of the populace and helping to assuage the sufferings of the families of the dead.

Through life insurance, in other words, the Japanese Ministry of Industry and Commerce sought to focus the energies of the populace towards an immanent future to create the fascist vision of a productive and prosperous social order. In order to shore up popular support for the war and to also protect the future profitability of life insurance companies, the wartime state enacted various measures to ensure that companies would continue to pay benefits to the families of the war dead. The transformation of the populace into a manageable and stable aggregate social body also facilitated the extraction of resources from their already exhausted bodies. In this process, the very legitimate fear of death people might have experienced transformed - through the purchase of life insurance policies - the lives of the people into material and spiritual resources that supported the very same war effort that threatened their livelihoods.