Because of these reforms, and the high economic growth which followed, the standardized norms of the global order penetrated the daily life of most Japanese people far more deeply than they had done in the first half of the twentieth century. As the percentage of the work force employed in farming fell from around 45 percent in 1950 to about 17 percent in I970, a growing section of the population was exposed to the daily routines of factory labor or office work. Democratization and shifis in the employment structure encouraged an enormous growth in secondary and tertiary education: By 1970 about 80 percent of students were completing high school and almost 1.5 million were attending college or university.
Meanwhile, in Japan as in other industrialized countries, the age of mass consumption was both transforming and standardizing many aspects of daily life. More than 95 percent of Japanese households had a television by the end of the 1960s, and viewers were being expo mixture a mixture of U.S. serials and Japanese dramas and game shows, loosely based upon U.S. models. The rapid diffiision of household consumer goods did not wholly “Westernized” Japanese family life, but resulted in a new pattern which blended global and local elements. The apartment blocks which sprouted up all over Japan’s expanding cities embodied an internationally standardized frame, containing and structuring an inner content made up of a mix of old and new: refrigerators and rice cookers, televisions and tatami matting.