Japanese flea market culture reflects shifting social attitudes

TOKYO -- Consumer habits in Japan have seen an extraordinary transformation in the last couple of decades. Secondhand goods, for example, once associated with a faintly shameful, unhygienic form of impecuniosity, are now sought-after items. This consumer shift is evident in the emergence of thrift shops, online used goods platforms like Mercari, and that most American of suburban institutions, the garage sale.

In some ways, this sea change signals a partial return to the values of preindustrial Japan, when an aversion to waste stemmed less from guilt or an ecological conscience than from dire necessity due to periods of food shortages caused by crop failures, natural disasters, and a dependence on the finite bounty of forests, oceans, fields and mountains.