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PRECARIOUS JA PA N
Duke University Press Durham and London 2013
© 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker. Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
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
O NE. PAIN OF LIFE
Te story grabbed the nation’s attention. Te body of a ffy-two-year-old
man, “mummifying” already, was discovered one month afer starving to
death. Not yet old and a former public ofcial, 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 of. With no one to turn to, the man
was dead in three months. All alone, he kept a diary, pondering—page
afer page—what the country was doing for citizens like him who, struggling to live, have no recourse but to die. By the end, though, his thoughts
were only on food. Tis 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
CHAPTER ONE 2
death, desertion, the utter soullessness of the times. Te story was chilling.
But, occurring in July 2007, it came at a moment surging with news similarly pinned to the collapse of mundane everydayness—of lives at once
obsessed with and then lef unfulflled by food, human connection, home.
Only one year earlier, for example, another case of a mummifed body
had been reported in the same city—Kita Kyūshū City. Te circumstances
were similar: a middle-aged man starved to death all alone at home. Tis
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 reported 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 of 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 afect that so limn everydayness 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 afer having
already lost his mother to cancer, a boy comes home one day to a boardedup 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) remarked upon most were the corporeal details of a “normal kid” reduced to
scraping by in a park. Tat, 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 unhappiness (Shimizu 2008:112).
Te anguish of everyday life for those who have “socially withdrawn”—
PAIN OF LIFE 3
a condition said to afect at least one million Japanese today—has been
taken up by pop culture. Tese individuals, called hikikomori, ofen withdraw 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 ofen 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 rituals, nagging obsessions, and paralyzing delusions of a hikikomori. At the
same time, this too—frst as a novel (2002) and even more in the manga
(2004–7) and anime (2006) versions3—has been heralded as edgy entertainment. 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.”
Te contraction of life into a tenuous existence spurred action of a different kind in the summer of 2008. A string of violent attacks, all random
and conspicuously public, plagued Tokyo starting in June. Te frst 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-fve-year-old man killed seven people within minutes. A temporary 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 lef 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. Te perpetrators shared certain life circumstances with Katō: solitude, job insecurity, familial estrangement, precarious existence. And while most were
young, the last attack of the summer was committed by a seventy-nineyear-old homeless woman who, stabbing two women in Shibuya train station, said her motive was to be carted to prison where she would fnd shelter and food.
Tis violence was notable for how impersonal it was. Random attacks
on strangers by people desperately disconnected themselves. But stories
CHAPTER ONE 4
of more intimate violence are common as well. Tose most spectacularly 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 seventyseven-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, daughterin-law, and grandchild: his entire orbit for not only care but human contact. As it was reported, this “dangerous old man” (abunai ojīchan) thought
he’d be happy once his family was dead. It was immediately afer she had
come to visit, cooked him a meal, and cleaned his apartment that a teenage boy killed his mother a year earlier in May. In what has been the more
persistent trend in familial attacks—children against parents and particularly mothers—this one was especially gruesome. Decapitating her,
the seventeen-year-old then carried his mother’s head with him to a karaoke 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 killing 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 briefy 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. Tese 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. Tis condition has become ever more familiar and widespread in the
world of the twenty-frst century. I write in the afermath 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 already a rising demographic of global citizens at risk—from poverty, dis-
PAIN OF LIFE 5
ease, unemployment, war. Everywhere people are sufering, caught by the
instabilities and inequities of neoliberal globalism run amok. In the acceleration, 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
profts, the struggle—and ofen 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 afer the bursting of its highly engorged bubble economy, Japan boasts the third strongest economy in the
world (having lost the second position recently to China). And any visitor 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. (Tis compares with an average of 10.7 percent in OECD member 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 security, benefts, or decent wages. A surprising 77 percent earn less than the
poverty level, qualifying them—by the government’s own calibration—as
“working poor.” Te situation is even worse for women and youths; onehalf of all young workers (between the ages of ffeen 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 “miraculous” recovery afer 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 awareness 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 diference. As activist
Yuasa Makoto (2008c) puts it, the reserves (tame)4 that people were once
CHAPTER ONE 6
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 defnition, Japan is becoming an impoverished
country. A society where hope has turned scarce and the future has become bleak or inconceivable altogether.
Oddly, or not perhaps, the mood was strikingly diferent in the years of
deprivation following the war. Ten, 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 (Te Exodus
of a Country of Hope, 2002). People had become so consumed by materialism by the 1980s that drive and hope for anything beyond private acquisition 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 frst by European social
and labor movements in the 1970s,5 precarité indexes shifed in late stage
capitalism toward more fexible, 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 defnition, most
work for most workers around the world has been historically precarious, which makes precarity less the exception than the rule (Neilson and
Rossiter 2008). Half of all workers in the world today work in the informal economy that is, by defnition, 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 government 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
PAIN OF LIFE 7
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 irregular 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 afective 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 frst place.
Japan was one of those places. What it had before, and what has become of this in the precaritization of labor and life in the last two decades, 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. Tis crisis oozed mud that literalized a muddiness existing already. But not only mud. Te tsunami triggered 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 Nagasaki in August 1945—a reminder of Japan’s unique history as the frst, and
only, country to be the victim of nuclear warfare. Atomic bombs lef an
unbearable wound but also ended Japan’s militarist ambitions to render
East Asia its imperial domain. And in “embracing defeat” under the occupation 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 histories as well as metaphors. For if the disaster at the Daiichi nuclear reactor
in Fukushima provoked memories of Japan’s victimization and vulnerability at the end of the Pacifc 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 socioeconomic relations that started in the mid-1990s (but actually before) with
the turn to fexible employment and its transformation of work and the
workplace. Tis is called ryūdōka in Japanese—the liquidization or fexi-
CHAPTER ONE 8
bilization of work and life. In liquefed 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: relationships that instantaneously connect, disconnect, or never start up in
the frst place. One-third of all Japanese live alone these days and the phenomena 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 feldwork in summers since 2008, many Japanese feel lonely, that they don’t belong (anywhere), and are struggling to
get by. A recent special on public television encapsulated current conditions of social life with the label “muen shakai”—the relationless society.
Social precarity. Liquifed Japan.
Japan had been rumbling long before the recent disaster of earthquake,
tsunami, and nuclear reactor accident. Tremors underfoot, a sense of imbalance, the premonition of water turning everything into mud. Te events
of 3/11 spawned a crisis of unimaginable intensity. Over eighteen thousand
are missing or dead; three hundred ffy thousand displaced; almost unimaginable and ongoing damage to businesses, property, livestock, and
everyday life; and trillions of yen in clean up, reconstruction, and compensation. Beyond those killed, it has made life even less safe than it was before
for so many: precarity intensifed. 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 afer 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 reports on precarious employment (dispatch, contract, day labor) are much
more common these days, and the precariat have assumed greater recognition 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 ffeen thousand in June 2011, but another protest staged in
PAIN OF LIFE 9
Tokyo three months later drew sixty thousand), as have disgust and suspicion 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 radiation exposure.
In pre- and now post-3/11 Japan, multiple precarities—of work, of sociality, of life (and death), as the recent crisis has both exacerbated and exposed—overlap and run together like mud. But that doesn’t mean that
everyone is situated similarly or afected 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 percent of temp workers being female) (Gottfried 2009). Tat precarity is
diferentially distributed is seen in the afermath of 3/11 as well. Tose up
north, already living in a region economically depressed and overly populated 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 assurance of ever being able to return. Tose 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 particular 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.
Tough it may start in one place, precarity soon slips into other dimensions 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), fnding 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 precarious 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
CHAPTER ONE 10
home. Workers in countries with good social protections are less vulnerable to labor market insecurity than they would be otherwise. In Denmark,
for example, workers’ security in life is not tied to a specifc job; if a worker
loses a job he can either fnd another one or expect support (in maintaining 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 “fexicurity” when fexible hiring
and fring for workers is combined with a robust social security system for
workers (Kalleberg 2011, 15). How to balance fexibility (for business, industry, employers) against security (for citizens, residents, employees) is
a perennial problem for modern, industrial states. Diferent states, at different historical times, resolve it diferently—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 centuries 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 between 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 social 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. Diferent from the post-market security of fexicurity, when workers are protected less by a specifc 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 corporation and the family that fgured 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 children, and any attached elderly so that the breadwinner could give all to his
PAIN OF LIFE 11
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 cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, causing a meltdown at three units, it was announced that the threat had been contained.
Te 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 pressure vessels of reactor numbers 1, 2, and 3 had been stabilized at 100 degrees, 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 government 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 Prefecture immediately challenged it. “Te accident has not been brought
under control” he told reporters, pointing out the myriad of dangers still
threatening his contingency, including contaminated water (Asahi Shimbun 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 efectively cooling the reactors down, others dismissed 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 Institute at Kyoto University, lamented, noting how even according to government 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-
CHAPTER ONE 12
ture, of safety can no longer be trusted. But he also spoke of a “battle,” of
fghting to survive in eforts that may require new tactics, alliances, and
maps. A politics of survival; a dance with death that demands a diferent
orientation toward life. What this means for residents of the afected areas
now that the nuclear crisis is declared to be ofcially over and evacuation
orders will start to lif 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 forsaking one’s community, home, and (former) livelihood but also entering
into what can be an alien and inhospitable terrain. Stories of discrimination against Fukushima evacuees foated almost immediately in the afermath 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 lef
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 afer 3/11. But at eight months pregnant, 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
defned 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” announced on December 15, the nuclear crisis was now over. Tough his
school had reopened in October when declared safe following a fast-paced
cleanup, the principal was not convinced: “Tis 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 happening. 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-fowing tsu-
PAIN OF LIFE 13
nami: a defciency 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. Tese 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. Te 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 sufered so much. Ten, not mincing words, he told
us to be prepared because another earthquake would come one day soon.
Pointing his fnger to the hill behind him, he gestured to where we should
run if a tsunami hit: “Run up the hill. And run fast.”
Tis condition of uncertainty, of rumbling instability, a terrain muddied—by debris, contamination, death—is what Japanese face as their
country moves forward in this second decade of the twenty-frst 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 precarity 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 proclamations of safety and control, and social institutions that have been running 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 unsettling. But contending with it, going into the mud, is a diferent response
than gripping onto familiar securities or the authorities that pronounce
them. Tis is one of the themes of the book. Asking in what sense, along
what lines, and with what efects and afects precarity is engendering a
politics of survival: a “representation of politics oriented toward the question 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-
CHAPTER ONE 14
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 precariousness 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 exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, and to those we do not know . . .
these are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute 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. . . . Tere can be no celebration [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 government’s fgures for casualties based on a selective counting system; certain
deaths count, others do not. Tis ofcial version leaves particular lives and
elements out; it also tames people’s afective response to the violence by
distancing and diluting it in various ways. In order to be “responsible citizens,” according to Butler, we must resist “that daily efort at conscription”
(2009, xiv). But such a resistance cannot be at the level of image making
alone. While the shock of horrifc images, as with Abu Ghraib, might cause
outrage, that doesn’t sufce 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 affective reaction with a greater potential for radical change.
It is the way that insecurity or precariousness registers on the senses in
the frst 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-frst-century Japan. What people then
do with this—with both the sense of precarity they are living themselves
PAIN OF LIFE 15
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 Te 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
afective turn to desociality that, for many, feels painfully bad. A place
(muen shakai, a relationless society) where it is difcult to survive and diffcult 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 advocated 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 difculties of life—is the word activist Amamiya Karin uses to capture the sensory nature of precarious living in contemporary 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 uncertainty of labor and life rhythms (never sure whether she could fnd
work or keep a job even if she found one) and the estrangement from ongoing 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 fts what the Italian autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi
calls the alienation of the soul—what he sees as the very particular kind
of alienation afecting the precariat today. Defning alienation as “the relationship between human time and capitalist value, that is to say . . . the
reifcation of both body and soul” (2009, 22), he argues that it ofers 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.
Te 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 fexible laborers of this capi-
CHAPTER ONE 16
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, afects of social living)—which is mined for doing the work of
capital. Tus, for Berardi, “the entire lived day becomes subject to a semiotic activation which becomes directly productive only when necessary”
(2009, 90).
While Berardi is focused on cognitive labor and the cognitariat in latestage capitalism, I apply what he argues about soul, alienation, and resistance (“the soul on strike,” as I call it) to the condition of precarity and the
precariat in twenty-frst-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 diferently 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 alienation, 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 ft human time, energy, and relationships into a calculus of capitalist value. What doesn’t ft gets strained or dumped out.
Tis social and human garbage pit is precarity. And, as the sensory nature 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 afer six weeks in Japan. Tis time,
I hadn’t gone to do feldwork per se. Te manuscript was done and I’d
handed it over to my editor the day before leaving in June. But, just shy of
PAIN OF LIFE 17
fnishing this book, the Great East Japan Earthquake took place, catapulting the country and its people into whole other dimensions of precarity I
knew little about. What I did know something about, and had been getting a sense of over three summers of feldwork 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 capitalism that had attached so much to, and was now festering around, a complex 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 failing 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.”
Te (mainly pre-3/11) story I tell here—of precarity, those sufering 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. Tese stories, ofen in fragments or pieces or lines of
fight that run into (or away from) others, are the center of this book.
And because they involve persons more fractured than grounded by precariousness 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. Te 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
efects and afects of how precarity gets lived. Tis 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
CHAPTER ONE 18
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 glimmer in these attempts of something new: diferent alliances and attachments, new forms of togetherness, DIY ways of (social) living and revaluing 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 biopolitics from below. Tis social and political possibility I call the soul on strike
in precarious Japan.
THIS LAST SENTENCE is where I had lef things (in the manuscript I
handed my editor) before heading to Japan three months afer 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
afer 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. Te then prime minister Kan Naoto would be out of ofce
the following month (afer assuming ofce only in June); news about contamination (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 Pacifc 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 everyone; 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, suicide, loss) were almost too much to bear for even an outsider going home
afer 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 diferent strands and edges to this newest wave of precariousness hitting Japan.
Te vast majority of Japanese now reported to be against nuclear energy,
even joining protests (some for the frst 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 environmentally safe well-being for the population. But, if this could be read
as progressive, far more reactionary responses were in evidence as well.
Tere were charges of “un-Japaneseness,” for example, against those in
PAIN OF LIFE 19
Fukushima who (not otherwise evacuated) chose to fee 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 Shimbun 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 surmised: “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-fve years old, and one-third of all workers are irregularly employed, 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.
Te article moves into a juxtaposition of two human stories. Te frst 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 dismantling houses instead. Pay was 7,000 yen per day (US$74) but he’d quit
halfway through the contract; this was the ffh 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. Te reporter said he’d call the next day. But when he did,
there was no answer.
Te next story takes place in the center of town, Ishinomaki, Miyagi
Prefecture in a wooden one-story house where a couple in their seven-
CHAPTER ONE 20
ties had been living for ten years. Tey 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 fooded their house from
the tsunami. A few days later their bodies were carted away in blue vinyl
sheets. Unable to fnd the names of any relatives (miuchi) in their belongings, the police couldn’t contact next of kin or even confrm the couple’s
identities. In April police contacted the landlord seeking his help in verifying their names,11 but he couldn’t help them. Four months later, with the
publication of this newspaper article, the names had fnally been tracked
down and the deaths of these victims of 3/11 were getting announced and
grieved for the frst time. At last the names of these victims are getting
recognized.
Following these two stories, the article mentions a recent survey, conducted online with ten thousand respondents living in Japan in June. Results from the survey were telling: 80 percent responded that they felt insecure (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.
Te earthquake has keenly revealed problems in Japanese society. Will a
new course be taken? Can we choose to do so? Tis is the crossroads for a
country of solitude.
A crossroads. Te earthquake as an opportunity. Of quite diferent
kinds. For the precariat it is the “opportunity” to work in the nuclear cleanup 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.
Tese are the issues—sensing precarity—I take up in Precarious Japan.
N OTES
CHA P TER 1. PAIN OF LIFE
1. Japanese names are written last name frst.
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 sufering 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. Takimoto Tatsuhiko, the author, published the novel in 2002 with Kadokawa shoten.
Te manga version, also published by Kadokawa, was serialized in its manga magazine Shōnen Ace between June 2004 and June 2007. Te television anime, broadcast
in twenty-four episodes, was televised by Gonzo between July and December 2006.
Tere are English versions of the novel, comic book, and animated cartoon.
4. Tis is somewhat of a new usage by Yuasa, which he takes from words like tamekomu (to hoard or save up) and tameiki (to sigh).
5. Pierre Bourdieu (1998) is one of the frst scholars said to have used the word.
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 208
6. Named afer 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 broken down into discrete steps to make it more rational and efcient. Also, under the
model introduced by Ford, workers were paid a sufciently 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 increased international competition of consumption goods, Fordist production started
shifing to post-Fordism in the 1970s characterized by more just-in-time production
(or “lean production”), fexible labor, and outsourcing (see Harvey 2007).
7. According to Guy Standing (2011, 9–10), the precariat (workers in precarious employment) lack seven forms of labor-related security: 1) labor market security (adequate income-earning opportunities), 2) employment security (protection
against arbitrary fring), 3) job security (the ability to advance), 4) work security
(protection against accidents), 5) skill reproduction security (the opportunity to acquire and advance skills), 6) income security (adequate income), and 7) representation 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 subsequent reconstruction under Allied (mainly American) occupation.
9. By May 2012 the decision had been made never to reopen the four nuclear reactors in Fukushima. Te number of nuclear reactors in the country is thus tallied
now to be ffy, not ffy-four, that is, ffy now pending reopening.
10. Tere is an emergent body of scholarship on the afect/sensing/embodiment
/everydayness of precarity/survival/raw life/abandonment. My own work has been
deeply informed and infuenced by this scholarship, and particularly that by fellow
anthropologists on: ordinary afects and precarity’s forms (Stewart 2007, 2012), life in
zones of social abandonment (Biehl 2005), afective 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 distribution of well-being (Jackson 2011), social sufering 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, endurance, and a social otherwise (Povinelli 2011), and queerness, precarity, and fabulousity
(Manalansan, talk given at Feminist Teory Workshop, Duke, March 23, 2013).
11. Japanese names are written in Chinese ideograms (kanji) that can be read in
diferent ways.
CHA P TER 2. F ROM LIFE L ONG TO LIQUID JA PA 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

 

–Basic Terms for Film Analysis