AnneAllisonOnPainofLifefromPrecariousJapan.pdf

P R E C A R I O U S J A P A N

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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Allison, Anne, 1950– Precarious Japan / Anne Allison. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5548-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5562-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Japan—Economic conditions—1989– 2. Japan—Social conditions—1989– I. Title. HC462.95.A45 2013 952.05′1—dc23!2013018903

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The story grabbed the nation’s attention. The body of a fifty- two- year- old man, “mummifying” already, was discovered one month after starving to death. Not yet old and a former public official, the man was ordinary. But he died from lack of food in the apartment building he’d called home for twenty years. A welfare recipient ever since disease kept him from work, he was suddenly told funds would be cut off. With no one to turn to, the man was dead in three months. All alone, he kept a diary, pondering—page after page—what the country was doing for citizens like him who, strug- gling to live, have no recourse but to die. By the end, though, his thoughts were only on food. This last entry was what shocked people the most— “[All] I want is to eat a rice ball” (onigiri tabetai) (Yuasa 2008a).

A man dies alone craving the crudest of Japanese meals—a plain rice ball, a symbol of life and the cultural soul of Japan or, when lacking, of

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death, desertion, the utter soullessness of the times. The story was chilling. But, occurring in July 2007, it came at a moment surging with news simi- larly pinned to the collapse of mundane everydayness—of lives at once obsessed with and then left unfulfilled by food, human connection, home. Only one year earlier, for example, another case of a mummified body had been reported in the same city—Kita Kyūshū City. The circumstances were similar: a middle- aged man starved to death all alone at home. This man had also been denied welfare but, in his case, had never been granted it on the grounds that he had family—two adult sons—who could feed him. But familial relations were strained and only one son, who worked at a convenience store, gave his father food. And this, as the media re- ported it, never amounted to more than an occasional bread roll. Unable to work and (twice) denied welfare, the man lived in an apartment he couldn’t maintain; all utilities had been cut off and rent hadn’t been paid for months when he died (Yuasa 2008a, 43).

Life, tenuous and raw, disconnected from others and surviving or dying alone; such stories cycle through the news these days and through the circuitry of information, communication, and affect that so limn every- dayness for people in a postindustrial society like Japan. A memoir about a homeless junior high school student (Hōmuresu chūgakusei) became a national bestseller when released in December 2007. Written by a famous comedian (Tamura Hiroshi),1 it told of how, at age twelve and after having already lost his mother to cancer, a boy comes home one day to a boarded- up apartment and a father who tells his children simply to “scat” (kaisan). Deciding to fend for himself rather than burden his siblings, Tamura heads to his neighborhood park (nicknamed “shit park”) and lives, as he says, like an animal: sleeping inside playground equipment, scavenging for coins near vending machines, eating cardboard and pigeon food (Tamura 2007). What readers (in chat rooms and on talk shows and websites) re- marked upon most were the corporeal details of a “normal kid” reduced to scraping by in a park. That, along with the tragic story of family dissolution and fatherly abandonment: what made this, as Tamura’s editor called it, an entertaining story of poverty (Shimizu 2008:29). Comic book, television, and movie versions followed in 2008 and Tamura’s so- called “shit park” is now a tourist site. As one commentator put it, “we couldn’t imagine a story like this ten years ago, but now, in every Japanese family, there is some un- happiness (Shimizu 2008:112).

The anguish of everyday life for those who have “socially withdrawn”—

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a condition said to affect at least one million Japanese today—has been taken up by pop culture. These individuals, called hikikomori, often with- draw and remain in a single room they rarely, if ever, leave. Hikikomori are socially disconnected and detached from human contact: “homeless at home,” as one hikikomori described it (Tsukino 2004). More often male than female and most commonly young adults, this is the depiction given to hikikimori in NHK ni yōkoso—the story of a university dropout who is entering his fourth year of isolation. Written by a self- avowed hikikomori as a way to make money by never leaving home, NHK ni yōkoso2 is vividly brutal. Zooming in, as does Tamura, on the graphic details of a tortured existence, the story is said to be realistic in capturing the everyday ritu- als, nagging obsessions, and paralyzing delusions of a hikikomori. At the same time, this too—first as a novel (2002) and even more in the manga (2004–7) and anime (2006) versions3—has been heralded as edgy enter- tainment. With a storyline that jags between netgames, erotic websites, suicide pacts, and pyramid schemes, NHK ni yōkoso was promoted, rather oxymoronically, as “non- stop hikikomori action.”

The contraction of life into a tenuous existence spurred action of a dif- ferent kind in the summer of 2008. A string of violent attacks, all random and conspicuously public, plagued Tokyo starting in June. The first took place in Akihabara (Tokyo’s electronics and otaku [fandom] district) on a Sunday at noon when the streets had been closed for pedestrians. Driving his truck into the crossing and then jumping out to stab more victims, a twenty- five- year- old man killed seven people within minutes. A tempo- rary worker who feared he had lost his job, Katō Tomohiro lived a solitary, unstable life estranged from his parents and lacking—as he complained in the long trail of postings he left on a website—everything of human worth, including a girlfriend. Without anything to live for and no place to call home (ibasho), Katō went to Akihabara to randomly kill. His act triggered a series of copycat attacks in public settings like malls. The per- petrators shared certain life circumstances with Katō: solitude, job inse- curity, familial estrangement, precarious existence. And while most were young, the last attack of the summer was committed by a seventy- nine- year- old homeless woman who, stabbing two women in Shibuya train sta- tion, said her motive was to be carted to prison where she would find shel- ter and food.

This violence was notable for how impersonal it was. Random attacks on strangers by people desperately disconnected themselves. But stories

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of more intimate violence are common as well. Those most spectacu- larly newsworthy have taken place within families—that unit assigned, by society and the state, the responsibility of routine caregiving and even sociality itself. In the same month of the Akihabara killings a seventy- seven- year- old man in Tokyo entered his kitchen and killed his wife with a hammer. Apparently enraged that she had called him a nuisance, the man then proceeded to kill the rest of his household—a son, daughter- in- law, and grandchild: his entire orbit for not only care but human con- tact. As it was reported, this “dangerous old man” (abunai ojīchan) thought he’d be happy once his family was dead. It was immediately after she had come to visit, cooked him a meal, and cleaned his apartment that a teen- age boy killed his mother a year earlier in May. In what has been the more persistent trend in familial attacks—children against parents and par- ticularly mothers—this one was especially gruesome. Decapitating her, the seventeen- year- old then carried his mother’s head with him to a ka- raoke club and later an internet café. Hours later—and still carrying the head—the boy confessed to the police but could give no motive for kill- ing a mother he claimed to bear no grudge against. As the media reported it, the youth had stopped going to school about a month before and was taking medication for anxiety for which he had been briefly hospitalized. Before that, however, he had been a good student. In fact, it was in order to attend a highly ranked high school that both the boy and his younger brother were living together in an apartment away from home.

STORIES FROM THE everyday where death stalks daily life. Unease crimps the familiar and routine. A disquiet brushing the surface where the all too normal can turn deadly. Mothers beheaded, strangers killed, children abandoned, adults starved. These cautionary tales get told, and retold, at a moment of mounting insecurity—material, social, existential. But what precisely do they caution against? And, more to the point, (how) does one gain protection?

THE JAPANESE ARE certainly not alone in experiencing precarity these days. This condition has become ever more familiar and widespread in the world of the twenty- first century. I write in the aftermath of Arab Spring, in the face of Greece leaning ever closer to leaving the EU, and in the midst of a never- ending economic crisis that has only exacerbated what was al- ready a rising demographic of global citizens at risk—from poverty, dis-

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ease, unemployment, war. Everywhere people are suffering, caught by the instabilities and inequities of neoliberal globalism run amok. In the accel- eration, and spread, of a market logic that has privatized more and more of life and deregulated more and more of capitalism’s engine for extracting profits, the struggle—and often failure—of everyday life has become an all too common story for all too many people around the world.

Given the extremity of deprivation experienced by so many of the world’s inhabitants today, Japan would seem more notable for its vast wealth and what some say is the most advanced consumer culture in the world. Even today, almost two decades after the bursting of its highly en- gorged bubble economy, Japan boasts the third strongest economy in the world (having lost the second position recently to China). And any visi- tor who has recently been to Japan will know that department stores still do a brisk business even for pricey brand- name goods. Yet Japan also has the second highest level of poverty among the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) member countries. Calculated as the number of people who fall below half of the mean income, Japan— with a rate of 15.3 percent—is second only to the United States, which has a rate of 17.1 percent. In 2007 this constituted twenty million Japanese: one out of six. (This compares with an average of 10.7 percent in OECD mem- ber countries and 4.5 percent for welfare countries like Norway.) Further, for a country that once prided itself on lifelong employment, one- third of all workers today are only irregularly employed. Holding jobs that are part time, temporary, or contract labor, irregular workers lack job secu- rity, benefits, or decent wages. A surprising 77 percent earn less than the poverty level, qualifying them—by the government’s own calibration—as “working poor.” The situation is even worse for women and youths; one- half of all young workers (between the ages of fifteen and twenty- four) and 70 percent of all female workers are irregularly employed (Yuasa 2008a).

Poverty, a word seldom spoken in Japan since the country’s “miracu- lous” recovery after its devastating defeat in the Second World War, has returned. Not across the board, of course. But the ranks of the poor are growing (14.6 percent of children; 20.1 percent of elderly), as is an aware- ness that they actually exist. Few deny that a seismic change in the body politic has taken place in recent years: from a society with a vast (and materially secure) middle class to one that is now, as it’s variously called, downstreaming, bipolarized, and riddled by class difference. As activist Yuasa Makoto (2008c) puts it, the reserves (tame)4 that people were once

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able to count on—whether savings in the bank, families one could turn to in time of need, or educational credentials—are drying up. Japan is a society no longer of winners and losers, just of losers. But, as Yuasa points out, poverty (hinkon) is more than material deprivation alone. It also is a state of desperation, of panic over debt collectors and rent, a life lived on the edge. And, by this definition, Japan is becoming an impoverished country. A society where hope has turned scarce and the future has be- come bleak or inconceivable altogether.

Oddly, or not perhaps, the mood was strikingly different in the years of deprivation following the war. Then, as novelist Murakami Ryū has noted, no one had anything but hope. Today, by contrast, hope is the only thing people don’t have, as Murakami wrote of the boom years of the bubble economy in his bestselling book Kibō no kuni no ekosodasu (The Exodus of a Country of Hope, 2002). People had become so consumed by materi- alism by the 1980s that drive and hope for anything beyond private acqui- sition was ebbing away. But things only worsened. When the bubble burst in 1991, triggering a recession that lingered on (and on), people began to lose not only their ability to consume but their jobs, homes, and future plans. For better or worse, the materialist dreams of postwar Japan are coming undone.

PRECARITY IS A WORD of the times. Picked up first by European social and labor movements in the 1970s,5 precarité indexes shifted in late stage capitalism toward more flexible, contingent, and irregular work. At its base, precarity refers to conditions of work that are precarious; precarious work is “employment that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg 2009, 2). By this definition, most work for most workers around the world has been historically precari- ous, which makes precarity less the exception than the rule (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). Half of all workers in the world today work in the infor- mal economy that is, by definition, precarious (Standing 2011). And in the United States most jobs were precarious and most wages unstable until the end of the Great Depression. But, in the case of the United States, the gov- ernment stepped in, bolstering social protections and creating jobs with the New Deal. And as Fordism took hold and unions (and workers’ rights to collectively bargain) strengthened, regular full- time jobs—and access to the middle class—became the norm by the 1950s (Kalleberg 2011).6 In those developed countries that, like the United States, enjoyed a period of

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postwar Fordism that accorded its worker citizens (in the core workforce at least) secure employment, it is the deviation from this norm that the term precarity (and the “precariat” as the precarious proletariat of irregu- lar workers) in large part refers. Precarity references a particular notion of, and social contract around, work. Work that is secure; work that secures not only income and job but identity and lifestyle,7 linking capitalism and intimacy in an affective desire for security itself (Berlant 2011). Precarity marks the loss of this—the loss of something that only certain countries, at certain historical periods, and certain workers ever had in the first place.

Japan was one of those places. What it had before, and what has be- come of this in the precaritization of labor and life in the last two de- cades, is the subject of this book. Precarious Japan, a country struck by a radical change—in socioeconomic relations in post- postwar times—that conveys, and gets commonly interpreted as, a national disaster. And this even before the Great East Japan Earthquake and accompanying tsunami pounded the northeast coast of the country on March 11, 2011, rendering it a gooey wasteland of death and debris. This crisis oozed mud that liter- alized a muddiness existing already. But not only mud. The tsunami trig- gered a meltdown in the Daiichi Nuclear Plant in Fukushima that spewed radiation. It was a nuclear disaster reminiscent of the dropping of the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War and killed upwards of one hundred forty thousand at Hiroshima and eighty thousand at Naga- saki in August 1945—a reminder of Japan’s unique history as the first, and only, country to be the victim of nuclear warfare. Atomic bombs left an unbearable wound but also ended Japan’s militarist ambitions to render East Asia its imperial domain. And in “embracing defeat” under the oc- cupation of Allied (mainly American) forces,8 Japan entered its postwar period of astounding reconstruction, achieving high economic growth and astronomical productivity in record time.

Nuclear radiation and mud. A strange combination that mixes histo- ries as well as metaphors. For if the disaster at the Daiichi nuclear reactor in Fukushima provoked memories of Japan’s victimization and vulnera- bility at the end of the Pacific War—and the eerie risk of an unknowable, invisible contamination—the sea of mud that pummeled what had been solid on the coastline signaled something else: a liquidization in socioeco- nomic relations that started in the mid- 1990s (but actually before) with the turn to flexible employment and its transformation of work and the workplace. This is called ryūdōka in Japanese—the liquidization or flexi-

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bilization of work and life. In liquefied Japan a change in the logic of work seeps into everyday relationality: relations once valued for their sturdiness in space (staying in the same company or neighborhood for decades) and durability over time (lifelong marriages, group memberships, and jobs). Sociality today has become more punctuated and unhinged. Along with replaceable work and workers is the rhythm of social impermanence: re- lationships that instantaneously connect, disconnect, or never start up in the first place. One- third of all Japanese live alone these days and the phe- nomena of both NEET (not in education, employment, or training) and hikikomori (social withdrawal) are well known among youths. As I’ve learned in the process of fieldwork in summers since 2008, many Japa- nese feel lonely, that they don’t belong (anywhere), and are struggling to get by. A recent special on public television encapsulated current condi- tions of social life with the label “muen shakai ”—the relationless society. Social precarity. Liquified Japan.

Japan had been rumbling long before the recent disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor accident. Tremors underfoot, a sense of im- balance, the premonition of water turning everything into mud. The events of 3/11 spawned a crisis of unimaginable intensity. Over eighteen thousand are missing or dead; three hundred fifty thousand displaced; almost un- imaginable and ongoing damage to businesses, property, livestock, and everyday life; and trillions of yen in clean up, reconstruction, and compen- sation. Beyond those killed, it has made life even less safe than it was before for so many: precarity intensified. It has also thrown into relief aspects of life that were precarious already; the fact, for example, that so many of the workers in the Fukushima nuclear plants were, both before and after 3/11, part of the precariat (close to 88 percent)—disposable workers for whom the safety of other Japanese (as in cleaning up and containing the spread and exposure of radiation) are now so intimately intertwined. News re- ports on precarious employment (dispatch, contract, day labor) are much more common these days, and the precariat have assumed greater recog- nition and sympathy in the public eye. Sensibilities of the Japanese across the country have also been raised to the politics of the “nuclear village”: to the location of so many nuclear reactors in the region of Tōhoku where— because of its depressed economy and aging population—residents had accepted the dangers in order to secure revenues and jobs. Sentiments against nuclear energy and the nuclear industry have soared (I protested alongside of fifteen thousand in June 2011, but another protest staged in

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Tokyo three months later drew sixty thousand), as have disgust and suspi- cion against the owners of the nuclear plants and the government for their collusion of interest, and for their mismanagement of safety regulations, clean up, and withholding, even lying about, information regarding radi- ation exposure.

In pre- and now post- 3/11 Japan, multiple precarities—of work, of soci- ality, of life (and death), as the recent crisis has both exacerbated and ex- posed—overlap and run together like mud. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is situated similarly or affected the same way. Certain workers are more prone to belong to the precariat, for example: those without post- secondary education and who come from households that are single parent and working class (or working poor). And, even during the boom period of the bubble economy, women were overly representative in the peripheral workforce as part- time workers (which they remain today with 70 percent of female workers employed in irregular jobs and with 80 per- cent of temp workers being female) (Gottfried 2009). That precarity is differentially distributed is seen in the aftermath of 3/11 as well. Those up north, already living in a region economically depressed and overly popu- lated by elderly, have been hardest hit by both the damage of the Great East Japan Earthquake (and tsunami) and the deadly threat of radiation—a threat that has forced thousands to evacuate their homes with no assur- ance of ever being able to return. Those who have lost everything—family members, the boats or tractors used to make a living, the very village one has lived in since birth—straddle the precarity of life in a particu- lar dance with death. An early story emerging from Fukushima reported how a farmer who had lost his wife and home was happy to see that his cabbages, at least, had survived. When these were then banned from sale because the radiation level was found to be dangerously high, the man committed suicide.

Though it may start in one place, precarity soon slips into other dimen- sions of life. Insecurity at work, for example, spreads to insecurity when paying bills, trying to keep food on the table, maintaining honor and pride (in one’s community or head of household), finding the energy to keep going. It is not only a condition of precarious labor but a more general existential state—a state where one’s human condition has become precari- ous as well (Lazzarato 2004). But the relationship between labor and life, job security and everyday security, depends on where one lives and where one is situated in the socioeconomic landscape of nation, workplace, and

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home. Workers in countries with good social protections are less vulner- able to labor market insecurity than they would be otherwise. In Denmark, for example, workers’ security in life is not tied to a specific job; if a worker loses a job he can either find another one or expect support (in maintain- ing a basically decent life) from the state. Even with increased precarity in the labor market, local politics—or workers’ relative power—can produce “post- market security”: what is called “flexicurity” when flexible hiring and firing for workers is combined with a robust social security system for workers (Kalleberg 2011, 15). How to balance flexibility (for business, in- dustry, employers) against security (for citizens, residents, employees) is a perennial problem for modern, industrial states. Different states, at dif- ferent historical times, resolve it differently—through socialism, corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, state welfare, neoliberalist socialism (China’s “neoliberalism as exception” [Ong 2006]). And, according to Polanyi, countries have swung historically in the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies from one end of the spectrum to the other in a “double movement” between privileging market and economic growth to—when destitution and unemployment spike, spurring worker protests and populist rage— attending more to the needs (for security) of its citizens (Polanyi 2001).

During the 1970s and 1980s, Japan achieved a remarkable balance be- tween high economic growth and a high level of job security for (male) workers. Under “Japan, Inc.,” the country was considered a “super stable society” (chō antei shakai): one with a low crime rate, no war or military engagement, and an environment of long- lasting jobs, marriages, and so- cial connections. Security—of a kind—was at once expected and desired: what one traded for diligence and compliance in a social contract that registered as the norm. Different from the post- market security of flexi- curity, when workers are protected less by a specific workplace or job than by the state- sponsored social security system, Japan, Inc. operated through the market. Or, more precisely, it ran by collapsing the market into the workplace, which collapsed into the social factory of the family and home. Japan wasn’t a welfare state and the government allocated little in the way of social provisions (which is still true today). Rather, it was the corpora- tion and the family that figured as the de facto welfare institutions. Given a family wage to have and support a family, workers were taken care of but also wedded to the workplace—a dynamic that extracted labor from male workers and also their unpaid wives in managing the household, the chil- dren, and any attached elderly so that the breadwinner could give all to his

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job. Japan’s “super stable society” depended on this knot of dependencies, labors, and attachments. And, as it unraveled in post- postwar Japan, a very particular kind of precarity and precariat has emerged in its place.

NINE MONTHS AFTER the earthquake and tsunami that crashed the cool- ing systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, causing a melt- down at three units, it was announced that the threat had been contained. The reactors had been put into “cold shutdown,” Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko declared on December 15, using a technical term that indicates normalcy: intact reactors with fuel cores in safe condition. In this case “cold shutdown” meant that the temperatures at the bottom of the pres- sure vessels of reactor numbers 1, 2, and 3 had been stabilized at 100 de- grees, stemming the release of radioactive materials. Pledging to restore the plant’s cooling system by year’s end, the government had lived up to its promise—or so it said. It now declared control over the damaged reactors; national safety was restored (Fackler 2011, A6).

But not everyone believed this assertion. Suspicious that the govern- ment was falsely declaring success to appease peoples’ fears and anger over its incompetency, many voiced doubt about the accuracy and timing of this claim. Upon hearing the news, the governor of Fukushima Pre- fecture immediately challenged it. “The accident has not been brought under control” he told reporters, pointing out the myriad of dangers still threatening his contingency, including contaminated water (Asahi Shim- bun 12/17/2011). And while some experts praised the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the owners of the Fukushima nuclear reactors, for effectively cooling the reactors down, others dis- missed the illusion of safety implied by the term “cold shutdown.” Given that at least three reactors went into meltdown and have leaked radiation, the next (very delicate) stage of removing fuel from the reactors will be riskier, harder, and more time consuming than usual. Cold shutdown “is a term that has been trotted out to give the impression we are reaching some kind of closure,” Koide Hiroaki, a professor at the Research Reactor Insti- tute at Kyoto University, lamented, noting how even according to govern- ment predictions it would take at least four decades to fully dismantle the plants: “We still face a long battle of epic proportions and by the time it is really over most of us will be long dead” (Tabuchi 2011, A8).

Deathliness, as Koide suggested, should be faced rather than contained under false illusions by a government whose promises, and infrastruc-

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ture, of safety can no longer be trusted. But he also spoke of a “battle,” of fighting to survive in efforts that may require new tactics, alliances, and maps. A politics of survival; a dance with death that demands a different orientation toward life. What this means for residents of the affected areas now that the nuclear crisis is declared to be officially over and evacuation orders will start to lift is that some refuse to return. Unconvinced that they can be safe here, many are leaving (or breaking up the family, leaving the husband behind) to take their chances as “nuclear refugees” ( genpatsu nanmin) elsewhere in the country—an elsewhere that means not only for- saking one’s community, home, and (former) livelihood but also entering into what can be an alien and inhospitable terrain. Stories of discrimina- tion against Fukushima evacuees floated almost immediately in the after- math of 3/11. Reminiscent of the stigma that was attached to the atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who were living in Fukushima at the time of the disaster harbor a contamination that can render them socially polluting (Douglas 2002).

One news story I heard in July 2011 reported on a woman who left Fukushima Prefecture immediately following 3/11 but never found a home anywhere else to live and was now returning to Minami Sōma, which is thirteen kilometers from the Daiichi Nuclear Plant and close to, but not inside, the evacuation zone imposed after 3/11. But at eight months preg- nant, the woman was high risk, a relief worker in town tried to tell her. Yet she was returning precisely because life was too risky elsewhere, the woman replied. Here, at least, she had both a home and a job. Riskiness defined by what and by whom?

But also in Minami Sōma a deputy principal of a high school dismissed the claims made by the government that, with the “cold shutdown” an- nounced on December 15, the nuclear crisis was now over. Though his school had reopened in October when declared safe following a fast- paced cleanup, the principal was not convinced: “This does not ring true for us at all.” By December, only 350 of 705 students had returned. Speaking of the Daiichi Nuclear Plant, but also his town and the country too perhaps, he said “the plant is like a black box, and we don’t know what is really hap- pening. I feel no relief ” (Tabuchi 2011, A8).

And then, rumbling potentially underfoot, is the threat of another large- scale earthquake with the possibility of another tsunami. With its jury- rigged cooling system, the recent repairs on the Daiichi Nuclear Plant have not been made to withstand a major earthquake or high- flowing tsu-

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nami: a deficiency in the original plant as well, of course.9 But geologists have announced that another major quake (somewhere in the region of Japan, sometime soon) is not only a possibility but a certainty. These are facts I was told myself when standing in the ruins of Ishinomaki, the town worst hit by 3/11, suited up in rubber and ready to embark upon shoveling mud in early July. The leader of the volunteer operation I had joined, Peace Boat, stood in front of us, also in boots. It came at the end of his speech about how to work hard, greet any residents, and be respectful of the area and people who had suffered so much. Then, not mincing words, he told us to be prepared because another earthquake would come one day soon. Pointing his finger to the hill behind him, he gestured to where we should run if a tsunami hit: “Run up the hill. And run fast.”

This condition of uncertainty, of rumbling instability, a terrain mud- died—by debris, contamination, death—is what Japanese face as their country moves forward in this second decade of the twenty- first century. As the recent crisis has shown, the country is on a fault line. No longer a “super stable society” and not (yet) one that has contained the damage and threat of its nuclear accident. Rather, it is one facing the challenge of pre- carity of multiple kinds. “Can we really call this precarious situation a cold shutdown?,” asked Kudo Kazuhiko, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University, upon hearing the government claim that its nuclear crisis was now under control (Fackler 2011, A11).

Almost certainly not. But just asking the question, as so many (more) Japanese are doing these days, is a sign of something new. It speaks of an emerging and spreading skepticism—toward the government, its procla- mations of safety and control, and social institutions that have been run- ning on certain expectations and logics (hierarchy and dependency) that may no longer make sense. And, in some cases at least, trying out new tactics (and resistances) to survive precarious times. Uncertainty is unset- tling. But contending with it, going into the mud, is a different response than gripping onto familiar securities or the authorities that pronounce them. This is one of the themes of the book. Asking in what sense, along what lines, and with what effects and affects precarity is engendering a politics of survival: a “representation of politics oriented toward the ques- tion of survival” (Abélès 2010, 10).

PRECARITY, JUDITH BUTLER has argued, demands something more than recognition alone: “we ought not to think that the recognition of precari-

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ousness masters or captures or even fully cognizes what it recognizes” (2009, 13). She advocates instead what I take to be a politics of social life (and social survival) premised upon the shared condition of precarious- ness and the grievability of all life and lives.

Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. . . . It implies ex- posure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a de- pendency on people we know, and to those we do not know . . . these are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but con- stitute obligations towards others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who “we” are. . . . There can be no celebra- tion [of a person’s life] without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life. . . . Without grievability, there is no life or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. (2009, 14–15)

Speaking about war and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Butler writes that Americans are “recruited” into seeing only a particular reality framed as it is by war reports through the news media (“frames of war”— the title of her book). A central feature in this reportage is the govern- ment’s figures for casualties based on a selective counting system; certain deaths count, others do not. This official version leaves particular lives and elements out; it also tames people’s affective response to the violence by distancing and diluting it in various ways. In order to be “responsible citi- zens,” according to Butler, we must resist “that daily effort at conscription” (2009, xiv). But such a resistance cannot be at the level of image making alone. While the shock of horrific images, as with Abu Ghraib, might cause outrage, that doesn’t suffice for political resistance or “utopian excitement” in itself (Butler 2009, xiv). Rather, as Butler enjoins us, we must seek new ways to “act upon the senses, or to act from them” (ix), that evokes an af- fective reaction with a greater potential for radical change.

It is the way that insecurity or precariousness registers on the senses in the first place—as a sense of being out of place, out of sorts, disconnected ( fuan, fuantei, ibasho ga nai)—that I take to be the sign, and symptom, of a widespread precarity in twenty- first- century Japan. What people then do with this—with both the sense of precarity they are living themselves

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and how, or how not, they are able to sense and act upon the precarity of others—is what I track in Precarious Japan. Sensing precarity.10 The sense of an insecure life and the sense that it could, and sometimes does, turn quickly to death. Precarity that registers deeply in the social senses: of an affective turn to desociality that, for many, feels painfully bad. A place (muen shakai, a relationless society) where it is difficult to survive and dif- ficult to muster up the kind of civic responsibility to sense beyond one’s own pain to that shared by others (whose deaths are grievable), as advo- cated by Butler. And this then is part of the pain of being precarious and part of the precariat: having a life that no one grieves upon death and living a precariousness that no one cares to share with you in the here and now.

Ikizurasa—the pains or difficulties of life—is the word activist Ama- miya Karin uses to capture the sensory nature of precarious living in con- temporary Japan. She activates particularly for the precariat, workers who are un- and underemployed in irregular jobs (hiseikikoyō), for whom—as she knows from the time spent as one herself—it is not only the material insecurities of uncertain work but the existential nature of social living that is every bit as, if not more, painful. In Amamiya’s case, it was the un- certainty of labor and life rhythms (never sure whether she could find work or keep a job even if she found one) and the estrangement from on- going human relations and recognition (shōnin) (not called by name at work and treated as disposable labor) that crippled her sense of self. What Amamiya describes fits what the Italian autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi calls the alienation of the soul—what he sees as the very particular kind of alienation affecting the precariat today. Defining alienation as “the re- lationship between human time and capitalist value, that is to say . . . the reification of both body and soul” (2009, 22), he argues that it offers an opportunity that, while numbingly painful (panic and depression are the two soul pains he views as most symptomatic of the times), positions the worker to resist—and reconnect to other humans—in a radically new way. The precariat is seen as a radically new political subject, and “alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship” (2009, 23).

Particularly interested in what he calls the cognitive work of late- stage capitalism and the cognitariat (the cognitive proletariat, many of whom are part of the precariat), who are the new flexible laborers of this capi-

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talist regime, Berardi points to how it is less (likely or merely) the body or set hours from which value is extracted on the job. Rather, labor is now continual and merges with life—that is to say the soul (the meanings, desires, affects of social living)—which is mined for doing the work of capital. Thus, for Berardi, “the entire lived day becomes subject to a semi- otic activation which becomes directly productive only when necessary” (2009, 90).

While Berardi is focused on cognitive labor and the cognitariat in late- stage capitalism, I apply what he argues about soul, alienation, and resis- tance (“the soul on strike,” as I call it) to the condition of precarity and the precariat in twenty- first- century Japan. A condition I see in not only the post- postwar but the postwar as well: of a relationship between labor and soul that, if differently assembled (or disassembled) today, stems (at least in part) from the family- corporate system that started in the late 1950s. If Berardi’s cognitariat have jobs that eat into their everydayness (of whom they text, what they share online, how they spend all their time wired for work and life), this was certainly true of the sararīman who rarely got home for all the late nights, weekends, and trips spent in the company of his company. And of the “education mama” whose motherly routines had to splice discipline into the academic performances she prodded from her kids. When so much (of the self and soul) gets absorbed into work, the loss of not having that work (and longing for it) can be all- absorbing as well. In ikizurasa (the pain of life), Amamiya produces a word to signify a condition that has spread in recessionary Japan over the past two decades that overtly stems from un- and underemployment and the social malaise it incurs. But ikizurasa also indexes a particular relationship, and alien- ation, between “human time and capitalist value” (Berardi 2009, 22)—one that predates the current (post- bubble) moment and spreads beyond those precaritized by irregular work. In the terrain of social living, this indicates a strain: straining to fit human time, energy, and relationships into a calcu- lus of capitalist value. What doesn’t fit gets strained or dumped out.

This social and human garbage pit is precarity. And, as the sensory na- ture of precarious living, it is pain and unease. Life that doesn’t measure up: a future, and everydayness, as secure as a black box.

ON JULY 24 , 2011, I was heading home after six weeks in Japan. This time, I hadn’t gone to do fieldwork per se. The manuscript was done and I’d handed it over to my editor the day before leaving in June. But, just shy of

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finishing this book, the Great East Japan Earthquake took place, catapult- ing the country and its people into whole other dimensions of precarity I knew little about. What I did know something about, and had been get- ting a sense of over three summers of fieldwork since 2008, was of a widely shared uneasiness over an instability and insecurity in life; not having a place that feels steady, not being in a temporality that makes sense. One word given to this was pain: pain in life (ikizurasa) and the pain of social loneliness and disbelonging (muen shakai).

A pain in life symptomatic not only of economic decline but of a capi- talism that had attached so much to, and was now festering around, a com- plex of belonging to work, family, and state, what is called mai- hōmushugi (“my- home- ism” or a family- oriented way of life). A pain bred from an understanding of human living that, now strained for many, felt strangled for the nation at large. I heard Japan referred to as lacking a future and fail- ing to generate hope in its citizens (let alone noncitizens), particularly its youth. And Japanese, I was told, were losing—for better or worse—that sticky relationality of human ties that had been the earmark of not only traditional culture but the country’s own brand of Toyota- ist capitalism once deemed so successful to be called a “miracle economy.”

The (mainly pre- 3/11) story I tell here—of precarity, those suffer- ing it, and a particular variant of its manifestation in, and around, social living that I call social precarity—I picked up primarily through stories of peoples’ lives. These stories, often in fragments or pieces or lines of flight that run into (or away from) others, are the center of this book. And because they involve persons more fractured than grounded by pre- cariousness and because of the nature of precarity itself—of uneasiness, uncertainty, risks, or retreat in sociality with others—I try to maintain, rather than weed out, these senses of my precarious subjects. The book is short and not intended to be either exhaustive or linear. Rather, I am more interested in entering the pain—messy, murky, and meandering as it may be—and touching the circumstances, the conditions, and the everyday effects and affects of how precarity gets lived. This is the ethnography I do, gathering stories from not only encounters, conversations, interviews, or events that I was party to but also news accounts, books, movies, television specials, manga and anime, and stories passed on from others.

Much of what I track about precarity involves pain, but this is not all I have learned or come to understand about precarious Japan. For, if hope is the vision of the future in a state of becoming, I see signs of not only

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hopelessness but also of people struggling to make Japan a place where fewer will fall prey to precarious lives (and ungrievable deaths). Few of these people care for the word hope, I discovered. But in trying to survive a condition of precarity that is increasingly shared, one can see a glim- mer in these attempts of something new: different alliances and attach- ments, new forms of togetherness, DIY ways of (social) living and revalu- ing life. One can sense, if one senses optimistically, an emergent potential in attempts to humanly and collectively survive precarity: a new form of commonwealth (commonly remaking the wealth of sociality), a biopoli- tics from below. This social and political possibility I call the soul on strike in precarious Japan.

THIS LAST SENTENCE is where I had left things (in the manuscript I handed my editor) before heading to Japan three months after its triple crisis of the worst earthquake in its recorded history, a tsunami with waves over forty meters tall, and the nuclear reactor accident in Fukushima. And after six weeks of being there (about which I write in the last chapter and have used to reshape the entire book, if mainly at both ends), I was headed home late July. The then prime minister Kan Naoto would be out of office the following month (after assuming office only in June); news about con- tamination (of beef that had sold all over the country, rice that was now banned from Miyagi, soil on the school playgrounds in Fukushima, water pouring into the Pacific Ocean) was spreading as fast as the radiation itself; the politics and cost of reconstruction as well as the future of the nuclear industry were getting heavily debated and contested by just about every- one; and the human stories of what people had faced, were still facing, or had already succumbed to as a result of 3/11 (death, evacuation, sui- cide, loss) were almost too much to bear for even an outsider going home after a mere six weeks of getting exposed to the mud. On the plane that day—July 24—I felt shaken, a bit shattered, confused about all the differ- ent strands and edges to this newest wave of precariousness hitting Japan. The vast majority of Japanese now reported to be against nuclear energy, even joining protests (some for the first time) to demonstrate support for cutbacks in energy production (on which the neon- generated lifestyle of postwar Japan has been so heavily dependent) in favor of a more envi- ronmentally safe well- being for the population. But, if this could be read as progressive, far more reactionary responses were in evidence as well. There were charges of “un- Japaneseness,” for example, against those in

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Fukushima who (not otherwise evacuated) chose to flee homes or make lunches for their children so they wouldn’t have to be exposed to the food made at school.

Pulling out the newspaper I had brought with me on the plane, I read an article on the front page: “Lonely Country: No One to Grieve Deaths From the Crisis” (“Shinsai shiitamu miuchi nashi kozoku no kuni ”). In an ongoing series on what it called Japan’s country of solitude, Asahi Shim- bun was reporting on “the change in people’s connections to one another and the rise of those isolated from society altogether” (July 24, 2011: 1). As with the Hanshin earthquake in Kobe in 1995 (when police reported more than nine hundred suicides from those living in temporary shelters), one of the biggest dangers of 3/11 will be heightened solitude, the article sur- mised: “pushing over the edge,” those who are there or close already. But, as it continued, this is hardly a phenomenon unique to the current crisis; in Tokyo alone ten people die from “lonely death” (kodokushi) every day. In a society where 31 percent of the population lives alone, 23.1 percent are over sixty- five years old, and one- third of all workers are irregularly em- ployed, the crisis of 3/11 exposes “weaknesses” in the rapidly aging, single living, precariously employed disparities in the social order. A fault line opened up that was deepened, but not created, by the disaster.

The article moves into a juxtaposition of two human stories. The first is of a forty- four- year- old man found sitting alone on a bench in a municipal city park in Sendai (Miyagi Prefecture) close to midnight, staring at the sky. A small day pack by his side, he’s a laborer from Nagoya seeking work. As if drawn by the earthquake, many visit the site where it hit. For this one, the earthquake represents an opportunity. He’d been working temp (haken) jobs but had been on unemployment (welfare) since last year. In Sendai he hoped to do rubble removal ( gareki sōri) but found work dis- mantling houses instead. Pay was 7,000 yen per day (US$74) but he’d quit halfway through the contract; this was the fifth day he’d slept in net cafés or the park. Next he aimed to head to Fukushima to join reconstruction work ( fukkyū sagyō) in the area of the nuclear reactors. Pay there would be much higher, 40,000 yen a day (US$425) for a twenty day contract. But they had all the workers they needed right now, he’d been told. So he’d try for the next slot. The reporter said he’d call the next day. But when he did, there was no answer.

The next story takes place in the center of town, Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture in a wooden one- story house where a couple in their seven-

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ties had been living for ten years. They had no contact (kōryū) with their neighbors, not even their landlord knew anything about them except that they were on welfare. On 3/11 two meters of water 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,11 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 ( fuan) 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.

N O T E S

C H A P T E R 1 . P A I N O F L I F E 1. Japanese names are written last name first. 2. N.H.K. ni yōkoso translates as “Welcome to the N.H.K.” NHK is the national

broadcasting system in Japan. But in the story the main protagonist, who is suffer- ing from delusions, thinks this stands for Nippon hikikomori kyōkai or the Japanese Hikikomori Association.

3. Manga are comic books, while anime are animated videos or cartoons. Taki- moto Tatsuhiko, the author, published the novel in 2002 with Kadokawa shoten. The manga version, also published by Kadokawa, was serialized in its manga maga- zine Shōnen Ace between June 2004 and June 2007. The television anime, broadcast in twenty- four episodes, was televised by Gonzo between July and December 2006. There are English versions of the novel, comic book, and animated cartoon.

4. This is somewhat of a new usage by Yuasa, which he takes from words like ta- mekomu (to hoard or save up) and tameiki (to sigh).

5. Pierre Bourdieu (1998) is one of the first scholars said to have used the word.

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6. Named after Henry Ford, who started the Ford automobile plants in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1915, Fordism refers to a social and economic system of industrial mass production. Unique to the United States until the end of the Second World War, Fordism spread and was exported to other countries in Europe, Latin America, Japan, and East Asia in postwar times. Based on Taylorization, production was bro- ken down into discrete steps to make it more rational and efficient. Also, under the model introduced by Ford, workers were paid a sufficiently decent wage so they could purchase the objects they were producing for their own consumption (such as a Model- T Ford). Due to a number of factors, including the oil shock in 1973 and in- creased international competition of consumption goods, Fordist production started shifting to post- Fordism in the 1970s characterized by more just- in- time production (or “lean production”), flexible labor, and outsourcing (see Harvey 2007).

7. According to Guy Standing (2011, 9–10), the precariat (workers in precari- ous employment) lack seven forms of labor- related security: 1) labor market secu- rity (adequate income- earning opportunities), 2) employment security (protection against arbitrary firing), 3) job security (the ability to advance), 4) work security (protection against accidents), 5) skill reproduction security (the opportunity to ac- quire and advance skills), 6) income security (adequate income), and 7) representa- tion security (access to a collective voice in the labor market).

8. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is the title of John Dower’s (1999) excellent history about Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and its sub- sequent reconstruction under Allied (mainly American) occupation.

9. By May 2012 the decision had been made never to reopen the four nuclear re- actors in Fukushima. The number of nuclear reactors in the country is thus tallied now to be fifty, not fifty- four, that is, fifty now pending reopening.

10. There is an emergent body of scholarship on the affect/sensing/embodiment /everydayness of precarity/survival/raw life/abandonment. My own work has been deeply informed and influenced by this scholarship, and particularly that by fellow anthropologists on: ordinary affects and precarity’s forms (Stewart 2007, 2012), life in zones of social abandonment (Biehl 2005), affective space and phantomic existence (Navaro- Yasmin 2012), raw life and the hope/ugliness of social forms (Ross 2010), existential reciprocity and living on the margins (Lucht 2012), the uneven distribu- tion of well- being (Jackson 2011), social suffering and pain (Das 1997), care and debt amidst unequal social arrangements (Han 2012), the chronicity of pain in a pastoral clinic (Garcia 2010), ethics and volunteerism (Muehlebach 2012), exhaustion, endur- ance, and a social otherwise (Povinelli 2011), and queerness, precarity, and fabulousity (Manalansan, talk given at Feminist Theory Workshop, Duke, March 23, 2013).

11. Japanese names are written in Chinese ideograms (kanji) that can be read in different ways.

C H A P T E R 2 . F R O M L I F E L O N G T O L I Q U I D J A P A N 1. Mass culture also picked up the theme of the three sacred imperial regalia in its

commercial slogans for desirable consumer goods: the three S ’s of the late 1950s and