Precarious Sociality: Social Life—and Death—for Youth in

Post-Corporate Japan
Anne Allison
.
Rebuilding itself after the defeat of the Second World War, postwar Japan became
an economic superpower by the late 1970s. Its national lens radically changed: from the
militarism of empire building to the industrialism of domestic security. Citizens were
now told to work hard—not to win a war but to increase prosperity at home. By toiling
diligently at school, at home, and at jobs, Japanese subjects worked at once for the nation
and for themselves. The country prospered and with its “economic miracle,” Japan gained
the global prestige that had eluded it as would-be imperial power. Meanwhile, the
population enjoyed stable employment and the rise of consumer culture. Indeed, by the
late 1980s, 90% of Japanese identified as middle class meaning that the vast majority of
people felt they had, or could reach, a standard of material comfort that would
progressively accumulate—or improve—for their children in the future.
Life—for the nation-state, for the individual subject—was organized around the
personal home. Referred to as “mai homu shūgi”—(my homeism), labor was geared
towards the private ownership of a home. This is what people worked for and expected—
at some point—to attain: a home stocked with the newest domestic electronics—washing
machines, color T.V.s, air conditioners. A site of consumption, the home—and its nuclear
family—was a social and productive unit as well. This was the grounding of the postwar
nation-state: corporate capitalism that, nestling the family within, produced and
reproduced through the gendered labors of a heteronormative family—what has been
called the “family corporate system” (Kimoto, 2008). Japanese were identified, and
disciplined, according to their place within family: children of both genders were to work
hard in school, women were to devote themselves to raising children, and men were to
give a lifelong commitment to their jobs for which they were given a family wage in
order to support a family at home.
Home-based, family-entwined, and productive of and for corporate capitalism—
postwar Japan was a nation-state fed by the domestic and gendered labors of families
whose sense of belonging always returned, at some point, to the home. Such a political
and economic order embraces a principle of what Mark Edelman (2004) has called
“reproductive futurism” as in seeing one’s future in the image of the child. At the heart of
modernist politics, reproductive futurism is a belief in the progressive betterment of life
that, staking progress on the next generation, attaches—and delimits—sociality to the
heteronormative family and home. Speaking from a queer perspective, Edelman is critical
of a polity that, so invested in this calculus of worth and futurity, assigns to those
unwilling to reproduce a status of social exclusion (and “no future”).
Here, I take a different tack: looking at the case of a nation-state that, becoming
itself increasingly unable to reproduce, fears the demise of its own sociality and futurity.
This is Japan today where—with a falling birth rate (shōshika)1, a delay and decrease in

1
. Ever since 1973 when it experienced its last baby boom, Japan has been struggling with a decrease in
birthrate. From a birthrate of 19 per 1000 population in 1973, the rate had plummeted to 9.6 in 1993. And
despite a brief rise in 2006 (the first in six years), the rate soon decreased again—to 8.6 in 2007j

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young adults getting married,2 and an increase in divorce3—the postwar family is
unraveling. And, of more interest to me here is the fact that, due to an economic recession
brought on by the bursting of the Bubble economy along with shifts in labor, an entire
generation of youth has come of age with few or no prospects of viable employment.
This so-called “lost generation” has been crippled in their hopes for the future, including
—for a large number of them—the ability to get married and have children: a prospect
that over 90% claim they desire. Often stranded at home or even becoming homeless,
Japan’s youth of today—a life stage that can be endless —feel stuck. Mired in
circumstances that show no signs of improving, more and more youth are succumbing to
what activist Amamiya Karin (2007) calls “precariat”—precarious proletariat or working
poor. One-third of all workers but one-half of those between the ages of 15 and 24,
excluding students, are irregularly employed (hiseiki koyō) which means no job security,
no benefits, and wages that are static and low. 77% of those irregularly employed earn
less than 2,000,000 yen a year putting them in the ranks of the working poor. Calculating
poverty as less than half of the mean average income, Japan now has the second highest
poverty rate, after the United States, of OECD countries (Tachibanaki, 2008)—and this,
despite the fact, that its economy is still (if not for much longer) the second strongest in
the world.
As reported in The New York Times earlier this month, Japan’s economy is
expected to shrink 3% this year, and production and exports will slump as much as 40%.
In a survey of top ranked global companies based on market capitalization, not a single
Japanese company made it on the top ten—slots all held by companies based in China
and the United States; Toyota Motor ranked no. 22 and only five other Japanese
companies made the top 100. By contrast, when Nomura Industries first started the
survey in 1988, Japanese companies held eight of the top ten positions. So, from the
heights of economic miracle in the 1970s and 80s, Japan makes news for the starkness of
its economic decline today. As the newspaper put it, “Even Japan Inc. is increasingly
falling off the global map” (October 2, 2009: Business Section: 2
The question I pose in my talk today is: What has become of sociality in an era
when it is no longer organized so tightly, or assuredly, by the family corporate system of
postwar Japan Inc.? In these times of precarity, that is, what happens to the ontology of
the social, particularly to and for youth: that demographic of the population around whom
so much—in the way of national futures, social hopes, and personal my-homeism—was
once invested and staked? What does it mean that the country is confronting not only
what is a much lamented crisis of an aging low birthrate population (shōshikōreika) but
also a rise in poverty whose “new face”—as a recent and much publicized television
documentary put it—is that not of the elderly or so-called lower class but of Japanese
youth? As shown by the documentary on what it coined net café refugees (youth, usually
working poor, who, lacking any other home, sleep at night in net cafes), young people
from their teens to forties, are struggling both physically and existentially today in a
condition that Amamiya (2008), and others, refer to as “hardship of life” (ikizurasa).
Jobs—and the much more unpredictable, insecure, and flexible condition of
employment in what I have called post-corporate Japan—are certainly a major factor in
all this. But is this—the shifts in Japan’s economic landscape—entirely to blame for
2
The average age of marriage is now is 30.1 for men and 28.3 for women and 28.3) % of females in their
30s and 47% of males are unmarried.
3
One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce.

2
what is a deep-seated sense of stasis, hopelessness, and unease amongst young people
from teen-age years to forties? In a recent survey, 82% of Japanese youth reported that
they felt “dark” about the future, for example, and, in what has been an upsurge
nationwide since 1998, suicide is now the leading cause of death for young people
between the ages of 18 and 24. The contemporary generation of Japanese youth is “de-
social”, sociologist Miyamoto Michiko told me in interview. This means not that they
protest against society but, rather, that they view themselves, and their place in society, as
somehow outside, distant, apart, and unstitched. If under the family corporate system of
Japan, Inc., youth were the center and future of socio-politics, is their role in the
downturned and flexible economy of today indeed as many youth tend to see it—
marginalized and mired in a present that is not moving forward? And, if so or even if not,
what kind of sociality is emerging in these precarious times when the nation-state, once
committed to a principle of reproductive futurism, has fallen more prone to a condition of
barren presentism?

deterritorialization

Certainly, life in Japan, as everywhere around the globe today, has become
increasingly deterritorialized. As the anthropologist Appadurai (1996) has argued, this is
due, in part, to the increased movement of people, things, and information in ever frenetic
circuits of traffic and trade, and also to the mediatization of a world ever more processed,
prismed, and performed through media and digital technology. Life becomes more
virtualized as well as schizophrenic in that people are continually jumping across time
and space, bound but unbound to any one place, moment, or register. One might assume
that this has an effect (and affect) on the social: what theorists from Karl Marx to Emile
Durkheim have long claimed to be basic to humanity—the need to belong to some unit,
endeavor, or community beyond the singular self that gives meaning to life and a sense of
recognition and worth to the individual. Without a doubt, belonging was critically
important and fastidiously tracked in postwar Japan. As goes the cliché, a sararīman
didn’t merely work at Toyota, he belonged to Toyota. The same was true for the schools
one attended, the clubs one joined at university, the family one came from and married
into and—for a married woman—all of the above as she acquired through her husband.
All of this was territorialized in the sense that, enduring over time and localizable in
place, the attachments made to and by such social units rooted individual identity. Also,
by becoming middle class—images, information, and advertisements for which abounded
in the rising pop and consumer culture—Japanese joined what Benedict Anderson (1991)
calls the “imagined community” of the postwar nation-state.
Such business practices as lifetime employment, wages based on seniority rather
than merit, and the family corporate system were categorized under the rubric of
“Japanese style management.” But starting in the 1980s, the economy shifted to more
immaterial, flexible labor. And, aggravated by the bursting of the Bubble economy in
1991, companies started to downsize, restructure, or shut down altogether. As lay-offs
and unemployment rose, there was less hiring of so-called regular or core employees and
more in the ranks of irregular laborers which include part time, temporary, contract, and
day-laborers. Interestingly, this radical shift in labor practice and the delinking of what
had been the nestling of family and corporation under the postwar nation state was

3
officially announced by Nikeiren in 1995 as “the new era in Japanese style management”
(“shinjidai no nihonteki keiei”).4 Applauding the flexibilization of the country’s labor
force, the government adopted other signature tendencies of neoliberalism: deregulation
of labor policies, heightened reliance on the privatization of social services, and an
ideological endorsement of the responsibility of the individual (jiko sekinin). Under this
new regime of labor (code-named labor’s “big bang, rōdō biggu ban), what is productive
of and for capitalism is no longer the family or the lifetime employment of corporate
workers. Rather, it is the detached, flexibly adaptable, and privatized individual—a
deterritorialized, decentered, postmodern subject. And, in its “new era of Japanese
management style,” this would appear to be the new face of Japan’s post postwar national
subject.
Writing about coming of age in what is sometimes called Japan’s “new economy”
of flexibilization (ryūdōka), Amamiya Karin, now 36, describes her own generation.
Children of baby-boomers who grew up under the Japan, Inc. model of hard work at
school geared towards the adult roles of stable middle class life, Amamiya’s cohort
entered the job market when times were bleak (called the “lost decade” or the “glacial
age of hiring”). Finding that companies gave job priority to their older, veteran workers
rather than young workers just starting out, many in her generation had also befallen the
trend of freeta—working freely, with no set duration or contract, in arubeito or part time
jobs. But what started off as a lifestyle option by a Recruit Company campaign in 1989—
urging youth to avoid a job-for-life in favor of come-and-go employment—freeta became
more an economic fiat for young workers in post-Bubble times. When Amamiya entered
the labor force in 1993, it was as a freeta, a job and status she says was numbing for
multiple reasons: she could be fired anytime, the pay was minimal, the future promised
no promotion or pay increase, rarely was she recognized or addressed by name, and the
work could be done by anyone. Treated as a commodity, she was a replaceable,
disposable laborer. Materially, of course, the job status of a freeta—known more today by
the blanket term hisekikoyō (irregular worker) which encapsulates contract, temporary,
part time and, much in the news, haken or dispatch workers—is precarious. Pay tends to
be low and benefits, non-existent. But Amamimya, who has emerged as something of the
spokesperson for the irregularly employed, working poor, and lost generation of Japanese
youth today, is careful to define the risk of precarity faced by young people in terms that
are not just material. In her words,

ikizurasa (hardship of life) is connected to poverty and labor issues. But, first, it’s
a problem of ningenkankei (human relationships). And that’s where I start—with
an emotional sense of hardship
(Amamiya & Kayano 2008: x).

Honing in on human relationships—the stuff of sociality—Amamiya describes

the psychic turmoil of being a Japanese worker who lacks affiliation (shozoku). This is
what companies once provided and still do for their seishain (regular workers): a steady
salary, protection if there is a crisis and—every bit as important—an identity. Irregular
workers, by contrast, are on their own, struggling to make a living, and, in what has
4
With this new policy, workers were now divided into three categories: 1) those with long-term
accumulation ability 2) those highly skilled, and 3) flexible workers (koyō junan) (Amamiya & Kayano
2008).

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become a pervasive complaint—bereft of an ibasho –a whereabouts where one feels
comfortable and at home. More than anything, according to Amamiya, it is the loss of a
sense of belonging—recognition (shōnin) by others that one is accepted, needed, special
—that troubles young precariat. Calling this the biggest issue facing young Japanese
today, Amamiya portrays “hardship of life” as an insecurity that is not only material but
also ontological—a sense of existential emptiness and social negation. And, in an idiom
that has gained much currency these days, she sees this as adhering particularly, if not
exclusively, to those in the underclass of what is becoming a two-class, bipolarized,
society (kakusa shakai). According to Yamada Masahiro in his much cited Kibō Kakusa
Shakai (A Society of Differential Hope, 2003), Japan has moved from a society of an
expansive middle class to one of class difference. What once was achieved or achievable
by the majority of citizens—material prosperity—now divides the nation into “winners”
and “losers.” And this division exists not only in reality but also the imagination—those
with and those without hope.
It is this notion of hope—and its relationship to sociality—I want to examine here.
For it would seem that hope is what precarity—or those most affected by the shifts and
destabilization of the economy—has endangered, along with everything else. But this
would not seem to be the case everywhere around the world. In the West African country
of Togo, for example, where in the post Cold War environment of restructuring and
neoliberalization, subsistence is much more precarious for the average citizen than in
Japan, there remains a vigorous sense of optimism, even hopefulness about the future.
This, according to anthropologist Charlie Piot (2010), is because everyone is trying to
migrate out, to primarily the US, and also because of a boom in Pentacostalism with its
prosperity gospel and end-times worldview. Abandoning their ties to past traditions,
Togolese route their hopes to an otherness at once spatial and temporal—what Piot calls a
“nostalgia for the future.” How different is the situation for many Japanese, unable to
imagine a better future or an outside to the precarity of current circumstances. If hope is
tied to how one sees and scripts sociality, then the hopelessness haunting Japan(ese)
today would seem a symptom of nostalgia for the past—for the totems of an econo-
sociality (lifetime job, nuclear family and home, bubble consumerism) that, defining the
era of Japan, Inc., now seems so definitively and traumatically over.

war, killing, housewives

In a controversial article (“Kibōwa Sensō, ”Hope is War) published in the January

2007 issue of the journal Ronza, a 31-year-old, self-identified freeta argued that the hope
of his generation was war. Still working a nightshift and living with his parents ten years
after entering the labor force, Akagi Tomohiro described his conditions of life as
“unbearably humiliating.” With a monthly income of 100,000 yen (well below the
poverty line), Akagi was finding it impossible to assume the qualifications of adulthood:
having a place of his own, a car to drive, a wife and kids. Living as if he were “under
house arrest,” Akagi despaired of being forever stuck in the same dead-end job and in the
lifestage of a perpetual child. Describing this existence as not “that of a human who can
live having hope,” Akagi felt betrayed. Having done everything he was supposed to—
study hard at school, enter and graduate from a good university, find and stick with a job
—he had been denied what was promised him as an adult: a decent life and social

5
citizenship. The corrective, he provocatively proposed, was for Japan to go to war to
shake things up and spur social mobility as occurred after the Second World War. For
today, despite the new flexibilization of the economy, the social order isn’t nearly flexible
enough and those in the lower rungs— young precariat like himself—are crystallized in
what is likely to be an underclass existence that turns permanent. If war occurred, it
would certainly be tragic, Akagi admitted. But everyone would suffer and, in this, there
would be an equity grossly lacking today.
Strikingly, Akagi both identifies with, and feels disidentified by, the Japanese
nation-state. For not only does he feel excluded from a national project that, in some
sense at least, no longer exists—a middleclassness tied to the lifelong ties of the family
corporate system—he wants to rekindle the latter and insert himself (but presumably not
others such as foreign laborers) as a full-bodied citizen within it. The story with which
Akagi starts out “Hope is War” is revealing. On a Sunday morning after getting off his
nightshift, Akagi heads to his local shopping mall. While meandering the aisles of a store
crowded with families, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker: “For the security
of your children, surveillance cameras are watching for suspicious persons.”
Immediately, Akagi feels targeted. A single man without children or spouse stalking the
aisles on a Sunday morning in dirty work clothes; isn’t this how he appears—a suspicious
person—in the eyes of others? The thought infuriates him for having a wife, kids, and
“my-home” to shop for is precisely the life(style) he hankers for, instead of being a single
freeta who lives “parasitically” off mom and dad. And, cut off from this social script,
Akagi feels negated and socially dead.
As Ghassan Hage (2003) has written, the nation-state has three mechanisms it can
(and should, in his mind) use for distributing hope to its citizens. These are: fostering a
sense of belonging to the nation (national identification); cultivating investment in and
expectations about a progressively better future (social mobility); and recognizing the
importance of personal and collective dreams (social hope). When citizens feel plugged
in—to a sense of a collective beyond themselves and a future beyond the here and now—
they are more likely to feel hopeful. When not, there is a tendency towards what Hage
calls paranoid nationalism: clinging to a sense of nation or community which, feeling
excluded from, one attempts—sometimes violently—to exclude others from as well. This
concept is akin to what Arjun Appadurai (2006), in his analysis of the rise of ethnic
cleansing campaigns across the globe since the 1990s, has called an “anxiety of
incompleteness.” Brought on in part by the free flow of finance capital and new
inequities of global distribution, nation states—still grounded in some notion of national
ethos—are finding their (already murky) borders disturbed in ever more ways today.
Provoking a social uncertainty that is spreading globally, people lose clarity and
confidence over who they are and where they fit in. As Appadurai notes, such an anxiety
of identity is often accompanied by a surplus of rage that is not only an effect of
uncertainty but also a means to produce certainty—as if killing a Tutsi will confirm, and
complete, a Hutu’s place in the nation-state.
Violence fueled by an anxiety of incompleteness could be said to characterize the
rampage of Katō Tomohiro, a young precariat who on, June 8th 2007, drove a four-ton
truck into a crowded intersection then jumped out to stab seven to death. Occurring in the
electronics and otaku (fan) district of Akihabara in Tokyo, the act spurred what was a
summerlong wave of indiscriminate attacks in public spaces—train stations, kiosks,

6
shopping malls. In this case, Katō was a 33-year-old haken (temporary) worker who,
having gone from job to job, thought he had been fired from his current one. Deeply
troubled—as he admitted on the long trail of postings he left on a phone netsite—Katō
wrote of his despair at being a haken worker with no firm attachments (to work,
girlfriend, steady co-workers, or parents) that gave him a homebase (ibasho) anywhere.
Devoid of the tokens of social status and connectedness, he had come to hate being alive
and, as he posted the morning of the killing, “I came to Akihabara because I wanted to
kill people. I’ve come to hate society and am tired of life. Anyone is OK.” In the news
reportage that followed, Katō was described as working poor, part of Japan’s suberidai
shakai—society where people slide ever downward—who, feeling socially alienated, was
suffering from both loneliness (kodoku) and the failure to feel accepted (shōnin). And,
related to this, was his estrangement from parents: a mother, whom it was reported, had
pushed the high-performing Kato academically then withdrawn her love when his grades
declined in high school.5
Because of the nature of the violence—public, random, impersonal—the attack
was considered to be a terrorist act, and came to be known as the “Akibaken musabetsu
terojiken” (Akihabara terrorist act). But, equally disturbing, was the profile of the so-
called terrorist himself, someone not so dissimilar, in certain ways, from an increasing
number of youth: irregularly employed, lonely and disconnected, socially estranged and
existentially bereft. If sociality of the new precariat was getting (dis)assembled like this,
it was precarious not only for youth themselves but for the population—and public—at
large. This, in fact—the sociality and ‘de-sociality’ exposed by this indiscriminate killer
—were the terms around which much of what was a voluminous debate and commentary
over the incident took place. For example, in a roundtable published in the journal
Rosugena (Lost Generation) entitled “Who was the enemy in the Akiba terrorist
incident?,” participants discussed the role society played in creating a killer like Kato.
Given no respect and no place in the society today, youth of the lost generation feel
deprived of a future: a sentiment that makes them dissatisfied (fuman)—a word that was
changed to (the more passive) “uneasy” (fuan) (:30) when the social critic Azuma Hiroshi
first used it in a news interview immediately after the incident. As Kayano Toshihiko put
it, ‘if only we have hope and respect, we can live. But without a secure means of
existence, many today have no place or sense of home at all (ibasho)” (2008:34). Youth,
as he noted, are not only driven to join right-wing associations for the promise of national
belonging they offer, but also to the kind of despair, and social nihilism, that spirals in
violence—either towards themselves (as in wrist-cutting and suicide, both of which are
on the rise today) or towards others (which, in the case of Katō, was directed to a
faceless, generic crowd reflecting back, one could say, an anxiety of incompleteness
unanchored to any sense of identity at all).
Interestingly, it would seem the very desire to be safely anchored in a social rubric
at once familiar and materially secure that inspires teenage girls to answer, as 85% did in
a recent survey put out by the advertising company, Hakuhōdō (2005), that what they
want to become in the future is a fulltime housewife (sengyōshūfu). A life career that is
becoming increasingly anachronistic and thus unlikely for most of these respondents, the
girls added that, what was more important than the excitement of a successful career, was

5
For this account, and commentary, I relied primarily on the special issue of the journal Rosujiyene (Lost
Generation) on the “Akihabaramusabetsuterojiken” (2008).

7
feeling safe and secure (antei)—an affect they obviously missed in their current lives,
worried about having in their futures, and associated with the kind of middle class,
family-based lifestyle of the past. In a study that also delved into the so-called human
relationships (ningenkankei) of contemporary youth, the girls reported on the high degree
of digital connectivity—through mainly cell-phones—they have with especially their
peers. Virtually all of these girls owned their own cell-phones and many of these were
continually plugged in. But while this meant they were never—literally, digitally—alone,
this also left them susceptible to a form of sociality dependent on what the two principal
investigators of the study labeled “instant communicative ability” (shunkan
komyunikēshon ryoku). Those who could curry and handle a high volume of phone
transactions were considered most popular and those who couldn’t or failed to receive
return messages would feel lonely and friendless. The energy was speeded up, and many
of the girls said they felt jumpy: their sense of connectedness as contingent and frail as
multiple and dispersed.
In what others have noted about the kind of relationality emerging in this era of
digitality and information capitalism, interpersonal connections are at once spread across
a broader network and devolve upon superficial, if constant, contact. As a young woman
in her twenties told me, her friends only share what is tanoshī (enjoyable) in their lives—
favorite foods, television shows, celebrity gossip. But their sorrows and hardships they
keep to themselves: to not burden one’s friends and to stay popular in an age when
knowing how to read, and stay in sync, with the mood of the moment—what is called
kūki o yomu (“reading the scene,” nicknamed “KY” by youth)—is everything. In the era
of the cellphone and internet, ijime (bullying) is said to be on the rise amongst school
students as “KY” gets played digitally, becoming a game of sociality at once fast-paced
and elusive (Amamiya & Kayano, 2008).
As Amamiya (Amamiya & Kayano, 2008) has related about her own years of
being bullied, “hardship of life” often starts here, when, designated a “loser” by one’s
peers, the experience of rejection and loneliness is not only unendurable but longlasting.
Pain is an all too common effect of the communication society for many youth, as
Amamiya puts it. And, writing about the school system and the high rates of bullying
today, the young cultural critic, Honda Toru, has entitled his most recent book,
Jisasatsunara, hikikomore (If You’re Going to Commit Suicide, Withdraw) (2007). Here,
“withdraw” refers to the practice of social withdrawal or shut-ins—retreating to the space
of a room, usually in one’s parent’s house, from which one doesn’t leave or engage in a
social life outside. Officially defined by the government in 2003 as “a person who, for a
variety of causes, doesn’t participate socially and doesn’t spend time working or going to
school outside of home” the number of hikikomori today is assessed to be as much as
1,000,000—more males than females, usually starting at the age of fourteen or fifteen,
and lasting as much as decades. Alongside of hikikomori, there is another category of
youth, NEET (not in education, employment, or training) who, numbering as much as 2
½ million, are symptomatic of an era when youth have come to be seen as embodying the
barren presentism of a Japan in decline. But the point I wish to make here is how painful
the current state of sociality/de-sociality can be for youth themselves. For as horrific is
the condition of withdrawal—from what I know of it to be—the hardship of life outside
can be even worse. Or at least this is the message of an advocate for youth like Honda

8
Toru who tells kids that, rather than be brutalized at school, better to withdraw from
society itself.

Conclusion

But when and due to what precisely did life get so bad for those it has? Certainly,
there are plenty of Japanese, youth among them, who feel sanguine (enough) about their
lives today and not nearly as despondent or apocalyptic as my portrayal here may
suggest. But a sense of hardship in life is also widespread, making for a sociality that
more and more people feel excluded from or find to be even precarious itself. And, on
this, I end with three points.
The first is that there is a care deficit in Japan that stems, in part, from the fact that
the corporation and family were the de facto welfare institutions under postwar Japan.
People were taken care of not so much by the state—that provided little welfare as is still
true today—but by those groups they labored most intimately for: workplace and family.
But with the dissolution of both, there has been a care deficit spiraling across the country
that the government—prompted by its neoliberalization and reliance on individual
responsibility—defers to privatized care givers. For those unable to pay for such
commodified care or, for that matter, just basic health insurance, they are left stranded:
stuck all alone in homes—or on the streets—where one hears of more and more deaths as
well as suicides due to economic deprivation. Belonging to such units—a corporation,
family—provided not only social respect and an existential sense of place, but also very
real material support in time of need—the kind of resources (tame) that activist Yuasa
Makoto (2008) says are drying up for more and more Japanese in these times of
povertization. How imperiled and alone are those without such social bonds was made
clear in the much publicized case of a 52 year old man who starved to death in the
apartment he had lived in for years in Kita Kyushu City in spring 2007. Dying alone
without family, work colleagues, or apparently friendly neighbors to ask for help, the man
wrote in his diary about how all he wanted—and couldn’t even manage to get—was a
riceball.
The second point is that there is a contradiction—or disparity—in the way social
citizenship get calculated today. On the one hand—and as promoted by the government
itself—flexible labor is heralded as the “new era Japanese management style.” On the
other hand, the falling birthrate and drop in marital rate that accompanies this economic
shift is viewed as a social, even national, crisis. The government has taken a series of
measures since the mid 1990s to promote, and assist, childraising for married couples. It
has also officially announced that the old gender pattern of men working and women
staying home to raise children is outdated, and that a new “life work balance” must be
encouraged—by the state and by workplaces themselves—to help working moms. The
message sent here, and more generally as well, is that having a family/marriage/home of
one’s own still matters and still constitutes the measure of social adulthood. And yet the
low wages and precarious job security is a major obstacle in starting—or maintaining—a
family for young, even older, workers. The government is offering very little assistance in
this way to its newly heralded flexible labor force. As a result, those who can actually
start families and purchase their own homes tend to be those who land permanent jobs:
and these are increasingly limited to a privileged class of people. In what is emerging as a

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two-class society, only the “winners”—those with regular jobs, families, and homes—are
recognized as being fully social. If this is the measure of social citizenship, then no
wonder so many Japanese today feel excluded and exiled.
My third point concerns the template for sociality that, even now and for so many,
is nostalgically attached to the past—to the kind of affiliation, identity, and sense of
belonging that came from the family corporate system (and its Bubble prosperity) of
Japan, Inc. But not only is this past over, and its familial model of sociality no longer in
sync with current economic times, but the nestling of homey intimacy with the capital
relations of Japan Inc. bore its own problems: that of being expected to be hyper-
productive, for example, in the way of workaholic husbands, industrious students, and
sacrificial mothers. Needless to say, there can be a strain in sabotaging affective relations
to the end of high performance. According to Serizawa Shunsuke, a psychiatrist who
works with hikikomori, for example, many youth feel unloved by parents who treat them
like capital investments (from whom parents emotionally divest when children fail to
adequately perform). The problem, as he has argued, is less with the hikikomori than with
the social order they retreat from. And, it is here, in the breaking down and breaking
away from this (family/corporate) model of sociality, that I see signs of potential change
—and in Ernst Bloch’s definition of hope, a “not-yet” that gestures to the future rather
than the past (Bloch, 1986). Though still nascent, emerging is a new kind of
social movement, social gathering, and social network of people who, not connected by
either family or corporation, come together to help one another survive—what I call a
politics but also sociality of survival. The activists, Amamiya Karin and Yuasa Makoto,
also in his early thirties, are at the forefront here. Co-directors of the Hanhinkon (Reverse
Poverty) Network, they advocate tirelessly—in the way of gatherings, workshops,
protests, marches,—for better rights, welfare payments, and living situations for the
homeless, working poor, irregular workers—and also, for those experiencing more
emotional and psychic forms of hardship of life such as hikikomori. Amamiya, for
example, participates in so-called talking events at coffeehouses and bars devoted to such
issues as suicide, wrist-cutting, social withdrawal, and depression. Yuasa runs an NPO
where volunteers help drop- ins find jobs, apply for welfare, and locate housing. And the
two, active in the freeta and haken union movements, also ran what was called the haken
mura—a village housing hundreds of homeless precariat in Hibiya Park at New Year’s
2009.
As Yuasa has said about Moyai, his NPO, “everyone needs to be connected” in
order to survive. And, in an era when survival is becoming tougher for ever more
Japanese, it is time—and a sign of hope—that connectedness can be imagined beyond the
old familial, corporate forms.

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Amamimya, Karin. 2007. Ikisasero: nanminkasuru wakamonotachi (Allow us to live!

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Amamiya, Karin and Kayano Toshihito. 2008. “Ikizarasa”nitsuite hinkon, aidenteitei,

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Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
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Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

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Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope, Volume I. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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