read and formulate 150-300 words responses to one or more of the readings

ties had been living for ten years. They had no contact (koryu) with their neighbors, not even their landlord knew anything about them except that they were on welfare. On 3/11 two meters ofwater flooded their house from the tsunami. A few days later their bodies were carted away in blue vinyl sheets. Unable to find the names of any relatives (miuchi) in their belong­ ings, the police couldn't contact next of kin or even confirm the couple's identities. In April police contacted the landlord seeking his help in veri­ fying their names,1l but he couldn't help them. Four months later, with the

publication of this newspaper article, the names had finally been tracked down and the deaths of these victims of 3/11 were getting announced and grieved for the first time. At last the names of these victims are getting

recognized. Following these two stories, the article mentions a recent survey, con­

ducted online with ten thousand respondents living in Japan in June. Re­ sults from the survey were telling: 80 percent responded that they felt in­

secure (Juan) about the future of this country, and 70 percent responded that they felt that the one-to-one connections (tsunagari) between people are very important. Summing up, the article concludes that it's up to us. The earthquake has keenly revealed problems in Japanese society. Will a new course be taken? Can we choose to do so? This is the crossroads for a country of solitude.

A crossroads. The earthquake as an opportunity. Of quite different kinds. For the precariat it is the "opportunity" to work in the nuclear clean­ up business, where they court danger, possibly death, but more money

than other precarious employment. And for "us" it is an opportunity to open up the networks of social connection to make the lives of those who have nobody else to give them recognition (no family, no company, no

town) grievable upon death. These are the issues- senSing precarity - I take up in Precarious Japan.

CHAI'TIlIIONE 20

TWO. FROM LIFELONG TO LIQUID JAPAN

Postwar Japan was an era and nation-state of incredible successes: high­

paced economic growth, sustained industrial output, creative genius in new-age consumer electronics, global acclaim as a rising postindustrial power, and, at the heart, was a system of lifelong attachments for the Japa­ nese. Starting at school, this system carried over into work and marriage

and was clearly mapped by a gendered division of labor: women were to be managers of the family and home, and men were to give ,their all to

the workplace. Postwar Japan is sometimes nicknamed "Japan, Inc." for the corporatization of its social economy and the "marriage" between the social factory at home and the postindustrial factory at work that fueled its off-the-charts productivity.

This marriage is now falling apart, and the lifelong temporality of be­ longing has fallen into rhythms of a very different sort. In this chapter I

J

briefly layout this shift: from Japan, Inc. to liquefied Japan in terms of the social ecology of home and work.

After its failures at militarism in the Second World War, Japan replaced

empire building overseas with a social economy of high growth and ma­ terial prosperity at home. Rebuilding itself as an industrial producer of

high-tech manufacturing, Japan succeeded by becoming a world eco­

nomic power by the 1970S. The state organized its "enterprise society" around the three pillars of family, corporation, and school (which echoed

the three sacred imperial regalia of mirror, sword, and jewel), a structure

that was rewarded and enforced by the mass-consumer culture emerging

at the same time. This edifice not only fed Japan's economy as an indus­ trial producer and global power but also supplied Japan's middle class with

secure jobs, steady incomes, and high-priced consumer lifestyles. Indeed,

by the end of the 1970S, a vast majority of citizens self-identified as middle

class, sharing a vision of a good life that seemed reachable to a great many people. A designation closely linked to heteronormative family and an in­ creasingly nuclearized one, a good life (and success at it) was calibrated

in large part by familial roles. For a man, this meant providing for family;

for a woman, it meant raising children and running the home; and for a

child, it meant studying hard, excelling academically, and acquiring a job and family of one's own as an adult.

But family, in the postwar buildup of corporate capitalism, became not

only the seat of hard work and high performance, but it also fed consump­ tion as the site of a new kind of home: a privatized, domestic space filled

with consumer electronics - washing machines, electric fans, and a family

car parked outside.1 Called "my-horne-ism" (mai-homushugi), this oper­

ated as at once a consumer dream and social contract - what people came to desire and what they received in return for working hard, for sticking

to a normative life course, and for staying focused on the small picture (versus political protest, for example, which had all but evaporated by the

mid-1970s). It also operated according to strict gender roles; the financial

running of the household depended on the male wage, while the domes­

tic management of its everydayness-from making food to balancing the budget - fell to the woman. The enterprise society ran similarly on gender

CIlAI'TER TWO 22

,.····tt...

performance; core workers were hired for life or long term (shushi koyo),

and their tenure was rewarded with calibrated salary increases (nenko jore­ tsu) intended to support the families they were (supposed to be) having. This meant that core workers, given a "family wage," were primarily men.

This also meant that corporate capitalism, nestled with the family, consti­ tuted a "familycotporate system" (kazoku kigyo kan kankei; Kimoto 2008,

35) that benefited from the pool of cheap labor provided by women­ confined, when they did work, to low-paid, mainly part-time jobs.

• The feeling of moving forward and progressively improving (as a na­ tion, a family, an individual) infused the national ethos and hopes of the

times. Certainly, not everyone had a job with lifetime employment or was

married to someone who did; no more than about 30 percent of working

men had these mainly white-collar positions in middle- to large-sized cor­ porations. Yet by 1970, 75 percent of household heads identified as sarari­

man (Roberson and Suzuki 2003), a term for salaried worker that carries, and underscores, the ideological centrality of the middle-dass, hetero­

sexual citizen worker in postwar Japan (Gottfried 2000). These jobs in or

dose to corporate Japan signaled a sense of accomplishment and identifi­ cation even with the state. I recall a sarariman telling me in the early 1980s about the stretch of long hours of overtime he was then putting in at the

office. Sometimes he stayed up all night or slept at his desk. But no, he wasn't getting extra pay, he told me. And no, this didn't make him resent

his company. As he explained to me, the American, naive about Japanese work culture, "I am doing this for my company. And for Japan." The sac­

rifice signaled both duty and honor and also was just part of the job. Be­ cause, as the cliche goes about the sarariman, he didn't work for Toyota,

he belonged to Toyota. And belonging gave the male worker his location in social place; having a job became his identity-the affiliation stamped on meishi (business cards) acqUired so voraciously when meeting some­

one new. The affiliation also consumed ever more of his actual life. Aspira­ tionally, middle-class workers bought "my-homes" in the suburbs, which

meant long commutes to the workplace and less time for family,neigh­ bors, or anything not related to work itself.

The family-corporate system linked a particular structure of work to one of family and home, operating on a principle ofwhat Lee Edelman has called "reproductive futurism." At the heart of the modern polity, this is the notion that hard work today yields a better tomorrow: the modernist

belief in progress staked on "the child as the obligatory token of futurity"

FI(OM I.II'EI.ONC; TO LIQUID 'AI'AN 2.1

(Edelman 2004, 12). In postwar Japan this was corporate tamilism operat­

Ing as blueprint for the nation-state-economic productivity driving and driven by (re)productivity at home, futures made for children, and the child as familial and national investment. As Edelman notes, such an ide­ ology undergirds those in the normative center but consigns those who

fail to measure up- those insufficiently productive or unwilling or unable to have children - to the social dustbin. When the child embodies the telos of the social order, the very logic "within which the political itself must be thought" (Edelman 2004,2), then the refusal or failure to reproduce gets

read as "no future" (the title of Edelman's book). The prospect of no futurity for a shrinking nation-state will have reso­

nance later when we consider how the complicity of family and corpora­ tion has imploded in recent times in such precarious forms as hikikomori: youths who, failing to be (re)productive outside the home, withdraw into solitary existences that would seem the ultimate perversion of "Japan, Inc." With the hikikomori the home has failed to produce a productive child who _ by becoming a sarariman or "education mama" - takes part in the

national contract of economic growth. Whoever or whatever is to blame (the corporation, the family, the nation-state, Japanese youths), the specter of "no future" Japan provokes anxiety, some of which is intt>ntionallv and

ideologically provoked. When it "worked:' though, the family-corporate system drove the social

economy. It accompanied Japan's rapid urbanization and postindustrial­

ization in the second half of the twentieth century. This is when, following the war that devastated and emptied the cities, the Japanese soon returned

in ever higher numbers, leaving the land for jobs and life in urban cen­ ters. By 1970,72 percent had become wage laborers, 7

0 percent lived in big cities, and only 9 percent remained farmers (a reduction by half since the

1950S). Incomes rapidly increased; in urban households they rose more than sixteen times between 1955 and 1989. With the demand for a highly educated workforce, raising children revolved around having fewer chil­

dren and schooling them well. By 1955 family size had decreased to five and went to 3-19 by 1987 (foreshadowing the low birthrate that has become

exacerbated today), and the extended family had becotne a nuclear one (60.5 percent of households in 1987). Division oflabor was gendered. Men worked and brought home the paycheck - their primary responsibility as

Illil breadwinners. This meant that a wife, much as a boss, expected men to make work their primary commitment-of time, energy, and affective in-

CIIAI'Tli" TWO 14

.....~_...... ",en 7S1: 1

vestment. Women, in turn, stayed home and managed the household, the children, and caregiving-their "reproductive bargain" (Gottfried 2009).

Though the number ofworking women increased over time (and, by 1989, more wives of white-collar workers were working than not), it was typi­

cally in part-time jobs, particularly after women had resumed work upon leaving it at childbirth or marriage-mandatory practice (except in some

professions like schoolteachers) until the law made it illegal in 1986, and one that 80 percent of Japanese women still follow today upon having a

In the form it developed follOWing the Second World War, the family not only embedded socioeconomic relations, it served as the "hidden capi­

tal of the Japanese economy" (Takeda 2008, 162). Family (along with the corporation) became the basis of Japan's welfare society, assuming this

responsibility so the state could cut back on welfare spending, as it did following the oil shock in 1973 (Takeda 2008). Family modeled and fed Japan's emerging enterprise society - work relations that were family-like and allowed men to work long hours, making them virtually nonexistent

at home (Yoda 2006). Family also yielded a source of cheap labor in the way of married women who, when returning to the workforce while also raising children, did so in low-paid, peripheral jobs-a locally bred labor force performing the kind of work largely assumed by foreign migrants in

other industrialized countries. In all three ways-in terms ofJapanesewel­ fare, Japanese management style (nihonteki keiei), and a peripheral labor

force '-the family constituted an important asset to the postwar capitalis­ tic state.

But the family is not what is usually credited for the country's high eco­ nomic growth and "miracle economy" of the 1970S and 1980s. Rather, it is the "Japanese management style": those industrial practices now iconic

of post-Fordist Japan -just-in-time production, lean production (Toyota­ ism), quality circles. But "Japanese management style" also indexes those business strategies intended to foster sticky socio-affective ties between worker and workplace. As mentioned already, these included lifetime em­

ployment, wages based on seniority rather than merit, and all-company unions: practices that targeted only certain workers (core, male), shoring up a system less of "lean production" than of "lean and dual," Beverly Sil­

ver's (2003) term for Japan, Inc.'s reliance on both the hard work and loy­ alty of its core workers and the flexibility and disposability of its peripheral workers in contract and part-time jobs. Though historically recent-

I'IIOM I.II'III.ONO TO U(JIIIIl 'APAN 25

"&i .~_~.. _...___.._.__

initiated in the 1950S and 1960s to contain worker unrest, union activ­ ism, and itinerant work patterns-such work strategies became identified

as culturally Japanese-the mark of Japan's own brand of capitalism. As Prime Minister Ohira famously announced' at a policy meeting in 1980, Japan's economic system is different because it is founded on its unique culture that, unlike Western modernity, privileges the communal values of aidagara (human relations and respect). A survival from traditional cul­ ture, this, as Ohira asserted, is what gives Japan its competitive edge, rep­ resenting an alternative-more "humane" and advanced-form of capi­

talism (Harootunian 1989). Dependency, performance, and affect melded in a particular ar­

chitecture in these "Japanese" relationships of nestled (family and corpo­ rate) belonging. Men worked at companies ideally for life, creating a bond that extended beyond "work" to the personal and everyday. A company man (kaisha ningen) would devote not only long hours to work but also evenings, weekends, and vacations to "leisure" (golf, karaoke, drinking)

spent in the company of fellow workers. At once a duty and a perk, such work-sponsored entertainment affectively blurred the boundaries be­

tween labor and life (Allison 1994). Such outings also kept a man from home where complementary webs of duty and dependence spun around mother and child(ren). Women gained recognition for producing children who achieved high academic performances by demonstrating extraordi­

nary output and diScipline even as toddlers. But for the "education mama," this was a full-time job that seeped into everything from the lunchboxes sent to school to the games played before bed (Allison 2000). Routine caregiving became embedded with this second nature: using and embel­ lishing everyday rituals as a means to extract and reward output. Because a woman's identity, and social capital, merged with that of a husband but also that child, mothers worked hard at love. If she succeeded (mea­ sured by how well a child did at every stage along the life course), a woman gained recognition. If the child failed, a mother was held accountable.

Just as in the work sphere, the home knitted an affect of care with that of duty and performance. The two spheres played off one another, nes­ tling social relations - ~f leisure, loyalty, love - with those of capital, labor, and school. As the sociologist Nakane Chie famously claimed in Tate sha­ kai no ningen kankei (Human Relations in a Vertical Society), published in the throes of Japan's miraculous recovery economy (1967), the post­ war workplace operated just like a family. Cemented by kin Iikl' hondl'l.

CIIAI'TIII{ TWO It'l

(male) workers were married to their companies (and coworkers) for de­ cades. This meant that, like family, the human and "humane" attachments of aidagara oozed stickiness but were anchored by a structure of differen­ tiation as well-what Nakane called tate (hierarchy or verticality). This is the difference that defines every relationship (older and younger brother,

boss and employee, teacher and student), dictating the appropriate be­ havior of each party (the inferior obeys and respects the superior, who takes charge but also care of the inferior). According to Francis

yama (1995), who admires it as culturally "Japanese," this dynamic ensures "trust" in the workplace. Modeled on the family, the affect of dependence

(amae) is transferred to the workplace-a transference that, in the thesis proposed by the psychiatrist Doi Takeo (2001), assumes special saliency and longeVity in Japan.

Staging a helplessness and desire to be taken care of modeled on the in­ fant's relationship with the mother, even adults will "amaeru" on authority

figures. Whereas Doi posited amae as a cultural principle-and was criti­ cized for endorSing cultural essentialism (nihonjinron, or "unique Japa­ neseness") - he also felt it had spread too deeply in postwar times, making

the Japanese overly attached to the caregiving of their intimate authority figures. Worried that the Japanese were growing too insular, too fixated on their own needs, and too compliant in deferring to those in charge, Doi (along with other cultural critics) criticized the excessive "maternal prin­ ciple" nestled in the familial relations of both workplace and home (Yoda 2006). But goading subjects into hard work by enveloping them in a cru­

cible of dependency, whether through consumer treats for studious kids or company perks for the sarariman in a hostess club, was part and parcel of the policies undertaken by Japan, Inc. And until it was dismantled by the neoliberal restructuring platform of Koizumi in 2001 as an obstacle

to economic reform, its embrace has been seen as critical to the country's postwar success and its "Japanese-style" capitalism.

Writing in 1989, critic Asada Akira argued that dependency produces an "infantilization" at the very heart of Japan's capitalist form. In what he called "infantile capitalism," the Japanese are driven to be competitive by

remaining docile and perpetually cared for, a type of subjectivity quite at odds with the self-reliance fostered by "mature" capitalisms elsewhere: "in Japan, there are neither tradition-oriented old people adhering to tran­ scendental values nor inner-oriented adults who have internalized their

values; instead, the nearly purely relative (or relatiVistic) competition ex-

I'ICOM UI'I\LONlj '1'0 Ll<JIIIIl IAI'AN 27

hibited by other-oriented children provides the powerful driving fi.m:e for capitalism" (1989, 275). Rather than viewing dependency as a cultural sur­ vival from the past, however, Asada viewed it as the cutting edge ofexplOit­ ative capitalism - a cutting edge that catapulted Japan to the heights of global prestige as an industrial power. That is, until it didn't cut it anymore.

After the Bubble, a New Era of Japanese Management Style

By the late 1990S Japan's "dependency culture" had lost its expediency. See­ ing it as an obstacle to economic growth, neoliberal reformers urged the dismantling of the Japanese management style. But the indictment went

'deeper, charging that dependency culture created unhealthy "interdepen­ dent relationships that hinder individuals from exercising initiative and developing entrepreneurship" (Takeda 2008, 156). Under its new banner of "risk and individual responsibility" (risuku to jiko sekinin), the govern­ ment asked its citizens to remake their subjectiVity to become strong and

independent individuals "capable of bearing the heavy weight of freedom" (qtd. in Miyazaki 2010, 243). Such a makeover to a leaner cultural style ap­ plauds risks. But as the interdependencies that once grounded work and well-being are undone, many people are left in the lurch. Meanwhile, the

state has yet to pick up the slack left by the withering of the old family­ corporate system - where it shoved responsibility for welfare at the onset of its high-growth economic surge.

By the 1990S the "super stable society" started morphing into some­ thing else: its "era of unsafe nationalism" (juantei nashyonarizumu no ji­ dai), as the political scientist Takahara Motoaki (2006) describes post­ postwar Japan. Labor sits at the heart of this, shifting from one work model (lifelong, family-linked, associated with Japanese Fordism and miraculous economic growth) to another (short-term, individual, associated with flex­

ible labor, decline, and precarity). However, flexible labor wasn't entirely new in the 1990S. At the end of the 1980s - and when the bubble was still strong-taking on short-term, free-floating jobs became something of a lifestyle option even for middle-class youths. Called "furitd,"2 the concept was spurred in part by a clever ad campaign by the temp company Recruit, which promoted it as new-age alternative to the work-for-life trajectory of sarariman. What started off as an individual choice, however, became more economic fiat (particularly for young workers) with the stagnation in

CHAPTHR TWO 28

the 1990S that worsened the financial situation of companies nationwide. Even before that, however-and before the furita phenomenon-Japan,

Inc. had its own variant of flexible laborer (Slater 2009). These were the ranks of peripheral (versus core) workers who could be activated upon

demand, lending the lean production of Toyota-ism a much-valued flexi­ bility for its trademark just-in-time production. Mainly part-time workers

(largely women) and contract workers (largely men ofa certain class or in­ clination, such as dropouts of the "academic credentializing society"),

peripheral labor force was strategically important to Japan's miracle econ­ omy. But, as David Slater points out, these workers were never called "fu­

rita" nor given the public attention targeted at furlta,3 by either critics who

have blamed them and their laziness for Japan's unproductivity today or activists like Amamiya Karin, who advocate for furUa under the rubric of

the preca:riat (Driscoll 2007). This will be addressed in greater detail later.

The bubble burst in 1991. As stagnation and recession set in, companies began to downsize, restructure, or merge with other companies. Layoffs

and unemployment rose, and as the hiring of regular (core) employees fell, that of irregular workers sharply increased. Temporary work (haken), sparking in the 1980s-from 87,000 to 317,000 between 1986 and 1989­

continued to grow in the 1990S, doubling between 1994 and 2000 (Gott­ fried 2000). In this "glacial age of hiring," youths were particularly hard hit, becoming the "lost generation" in Japan's "lost decade." When able to

do so, companies tended to hold onto their more senior workers rather

than hire young ones under the assumption that older men had families to support-and that keeping the primary breadwinner's salary "safe" meant "safety" for the nation.

4 But even this mindset, a holdover of the enterprise

SOciety, was derided for burdening business with a rigidity it could no longer afford. Replacing the job-for-life, family-based model ofwork came

one of more flexible, results-based employment. Trying to lay claim for

what was a radical transformation, Nikkeiren officially announced in 1995 that these labor shifts constituted a new cultural moment-the "new era

in Japanese-style management" (shinjidai no nihonteki keiei).5 Applaud­ Ing the fleXibility of the country's labor force, the government adopted other signature tendencies of neoliberalism: deregulation oflabor policies, heightened reliance on the privatization of social services, and an ideo­

logical endorsement of individual responsibility (jiko sekinin). Under this new regime of labor (nicknamed labor's "big bang," or rodo biggu ban), what is productive ofand for capitalism is no longer the family or the long-

I'IIOM I.II'HI.ONII TO I.IQlIlII JAPAN 21)

c NTS

Acknowledgments vii

o PAIN OF LIFE

2013 Duke University Press

All rights reserved TWO. FROM LIFELONG TO LIQUID JAPAN Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper @J

Information Systems, Inc. 21Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker. Tvoeset in Minion

THREE ORDINARY REFUGEEISM: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

POVERTY, PRECARITY, YOUTHAllison, Anne, 1950­ Precarious Japan I Anne Allison. 43 pages em Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8:1.23-5548-9 (cloth: alk.

ISBN 978-0-8223-5562-5 {obk. : alk.

1- JOrrmomir conditionS~1989- 2. Ja1Jan~Social conditionS-1989- 1. Title.

HC462.95.A 45 2013 952.05'1~dc23 2013018903

~.