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Precarious Sociality: Social Life—and Death—for Youth inPost-Corporate Japan

Anne Allison

.Rebuilding itself after the defeat of the Second World War, postwar Japan becamean economic superpower by the late 1970s. Its national lens radically changed: from themilitarism of empire building to the industrialism of domestic security. Citizens werenow told to work hard—not to win a war but to increase prosperity at home. By toilingdiligently at school, at home, and at jobs, Japanese subjects worked at once for the nationand for themselves. The country prospered and with its “economic miracle,” Japan gainedthe 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 thelate 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 sh

”—(my homeism), labor was gearedtowards 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—washingmachines, 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 andreproduced through the gendered labors of a heteronormative family—what has beencalled the “family corporate system” (Kimoto, 2008). Japanese were identified, anddisciplined, 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 togive a lifelong commitment to their jobs for which they were given a family wage inorder 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 familieswhose sense of belonging always returned, at some point, to the home. Such a politicaland 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 lifethat, staking progress on the next generation, attaches—and delimits—sociality to theheteronormative family and home. Speaking from a queer perspective, Edelman is criticalof a polity that, so invested in this calculus of worth and futurity, assigns to thoseunwilling 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, becomingitself increasingly unable to reproduce, fears the demise of its own sociality and futurity.This is Japan today where—with a falling birth rate (

shika

)

, a delay and decrease in

. 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. Anddespite a brief rise in 2006 (the first in six years), the rate soon decreased again—to 8.6 in 2007j

young adults getting married,

and an increase in divorce

—the postwar family isunraveling. 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 entiregeneration 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 prospectthat 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 incircumstances that show no signs of improving, more and more youth are succumbing towhat 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 koy

) which means no job security,no benefits, and wages that are static and low. 77% of those irregularly employed earnless 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 inthe world.As reported in

The New York Times

earlier this month, Japan’s economy isexpected 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 singleJapanese company made it on the top ten—slots all held by companies based in Chinaand the United States; Toyota Motor ranked no. 22 and only five other Japanesecompanies made the top 100. By contrast, when Nomura Industries first started thesurvey in 1988, Japanese companies held eight of the top ten positions. So, from theheights 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 increasinglyfalling off the global map” (October 2, 2009: Business Section: 2The question I pose in my talk today is: What has become of sociality in an erawhen 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 whomso much—in the way of national futures, social hopes, and personal my-homeism—wasonce invested and staked? What does it mean that the country is confronting not onlywhat is a much lamented crisis of an aging low birthrate population (

shik

reika

) butalso a rise in poverty whose “new face”—as a recent and much publicized televisiondocumentary put it—is that not of the elderly or so-called lower class but of Japaneseyouth? As shown by the documentary on what it coined net café refugees (youth, usuallyworking poor, who, lacking any other home, sleep at night in net cafes), young peoplefrom their teens to forties, are struggling both physically and existentially today in acondition 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 inall this. But is this—the shifts in Japan’s economic landscape—entirely to blame for

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.

One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce.

what is a deep-seated sense of stasis, hopelessness, and unease amongst young peoplefrom teen-age years to forties? In a recent survey, 82% of Japanese youth reported thatthey felt “dark” about the future, for example, and, in what has been an upsurgenationwide 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, assomehow 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 thedownturned 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, oncecommitted 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 becomeincreasingly deterritorialized. As the anthropologist Appadurai (1996) has argued, this isdue, in part, to the increased movement of people, things, and information in ever freneticcircuits 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 morevirtualized as well as schizophrenic in that people are continually jumping across timeand space, bound but unbound to any one place, moment, or register. One might assumethat this has an effect (and affect) on the social: what theorists from Karl Marx to EmileDurkheim 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 criticallyimportant and fastidiously tracked in postwar Japan. As goes the cliché, a

sarar

man

didn’t merely work at Toyota, he belonged to Toyota. The same was true for the schoolsone attended, the clubs one joined at university, the family one came from and marriedinto 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 aboundedin 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 moreimmaterial, flexible labor. And, aggravated by the bursting of the Bubble economy in1991, companies started to downsize, restructure, or shut down altogether. As lay-offsand unemployment rose, there was less hiring of so-called regular or core employees andmore in the ranks of irregular laborers which include part time, temporary, contract, andday-laborers. Interestingly, this radical shift in labor practice and the delinking of whathad been the nestling of family and corporation under the postwar nation state was3