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Discuss two or more films we have watched in this course, building upon key concepts regarding Japanese cinema and culture. Your approach can be comparative (different approaches to a similar topic), contrastive (different interpretations or perspectives), analytical (close reading of stylistic differences toward a concrete interpretation), or class, this paper combines your skill of close reading from the descriptive paper to provide evidence for your interpretation of film. Your interpretation should build upon what visual elements of form, style, themes, and/or performance techniques you feel support your interpretation. The ‘cultural’ part of analysis asks that you contextualize the film within the general historical moment and cultural context of the film as part of your discussion. This information will be learned as part of Seminar and through the readings.

0.5mm  

After the Storm  

Akira  

Anpo Art X War  

Castle in the Sky  

The Cheat  

Edo Avant Garde  

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On  

Face of Another 

The Funeral 

Giants and Toys 

Gojira

Hospitalite  

Kakera  

Lady Snowblood      Lady Snowblood – Love Song of Vengeance  

Like Father, Like Son

Lupin the Third, Castle of Cagliostro  

The Mourning Forest 

Mr. Thank You  

Nobody Knows  

One Day We Arrived in Japan  

Ran  Play 

Seven Samurai  

Shin Godzilla  

Sonatine

The Tale of Zatoichi  

Three Resurrected Drunkards  

Villian  

Zatoichi the Outlaw

These are the names of Japanese films, and the teacher has asked for two of them to be written, so choose two at random.

If you want to cite them, there are film techniques on this website

Part 1: Basic Terms

55

M
I Y A Z A K I L O V E S T O D E S I G N V E H I C L E S , and all sorts of cars, boats,
and planes figure prominently in his films. He is obviously not a mere
technophobe. Castle in the Sky marks a turning point in his animation,

however. After Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki would make two films geared largely
to younger children (in contrast to Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, whose worlds,
in his thinking, appealed more to older children and adolescents): My Neighbor
Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyūbin,
1989). These two films move away from the large epic and adventure worlds that
had brought him into the limelight. Although these two films also center on bod-
ies that fly and the joys of flight, they move resolutely away from an overt engage-
ment with the modern technological condition that characterizes Nausicaä and
Castle in the Sky, almost as if Miyazaki had gained his free relation to technology
in Castle and began to inhabit it. Later, in his third film after Castle in the Sky,
Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta, 1992), Miyazaki self-consciously plays for laughs
his prior engagement with adventures centered on technologies of flight—in fact,
when you finally glimpse the face of the pig pilot, he looks like Alexander Key,
the novelist whose book inspired Conan as well as Nausicaä and Castle in the
Sky. It proved difficult for audiences to share the joke in its entirety, however.

Miyazaki’s three subsequent films—Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime,
1997), Spirited Away (Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001), and Howl’s Moving
Castle (Hauru no ugoku shiro, 2004)—brought him unparalleled box office suc-
cess in Japan and won a long-overdue broad-based theater release of his films in
North America as well as greater acclaim internationally. Yet, as many commen-
tators have pointed out, Miyazaki’s vision of technologies and the technological

F L Y I N G M A C H I N E S

C H A P T E R 5

F LY I N G M A C H I N E S56

condition in these films seems more deterministic and less nuanced than in his
earlier films.1 In terms of Miyazaki’s thinking technology in animation, Castle
in the Sky is truly a turning point. It was also Miyazaki’s first film with Studio
Ghibli, which he established in 1985 with his longtime friend and collabora-
tor Takahata Isao, also a director of animated films. Takahata first served as
Miyazaki’s producer on Castle in the Sky and ever since has produced Miyazaki’s
films. The history of Miyazaki’s collaborations with Takahata prior to Castle in
the Sky and the foundation of Ghibli is crucial to understanding Miyazaki’s
changing relation to bodies that fly.

Takahata Isao was born in 1935, and Miyazaki Hayao in 1941, which meant
that, in 1959 when Takahata was graduating from Tokyo University, Miyazaki
was graduating from high school.2 Takahata began working at Tōei Studios in
1961, working as an assistant director on their fourth feature-length animated
film, Anzu to Zushiomaru (Anzu and Zushiomaru). Tōei Studios referred to its
animated films as dōga, literally “moving pictures” or “animated drawings,” and
the animation studio is known as Tōei Dōga.3 Tōei’s first three dōga enjoyed
international success, gaining prizes at film festivals and appearing in English
dubs (usually re-edited). Hakujaden (Legend of the white serpent, 1958) became
in English Panda and the Magic Serpent. Shōnen Sarutobi Sasuke (The youth
Sarutobi Sasuke, 1959) was dubbed in English as Magic Boy. Saiyūki (Journey to
the West, 1960) was distributed as Alakazaam the Great. Yabushita Taiji directed
these films (and subsequently a number of others), and it was under Yabushita’s
direction on Anzu and Zushiomaru that Takahata learned the trade.

Miyazaki began as a temp at Tōei Dōga in 1963, at a time when the studio’s
success with feature films was allowing them to expand into television anima-
tion. Takahata (direction) and Miyazaki (in-between animation) both contrib-
uted to a television series called Ookami shōnen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken, 1963), but
the dōga that has become legendary in the Studio Ghibli annals for bringing
together the dream team is Taiyō no ōji Horusu no daibōken (Prince of the Sun:
Hols’s great adventure, 1968; released in English as Little Norse Prince). This
film combined the talents of Takahata as director, Miyazaki as key animator and
scene designer, and Ōtsuka Yasuo as animation director. Understanding Ōtsuka
Yasuo’s style of animation is especially important to understanding Miyazaki’s.
In fact, in 2004, in conjunction with its traveling exhibition on the manga
film, Studio Ghibli produced a documentary on Ōtsuka Yasuo entitled Ōtsuka
Yasuo no ugokasu yorokobi (Ōtsuka Yasuo and the joy of making movement). In
this documentary Takahata and Miyazaki highlight the impact of Ōtsuka on
Japanese animation in general and on their own animation in particular. Later I
will write more about Studio Ghibli’s insistence on referring to their animations

57F LY I N G M A C H I N E S

as manga films, a term that does not mean that these animations are adapted
from or even inspired by manga. The term manga film indicates something like
feature-length animated films for children or general audiences, often (as in this
instance) stands in contrast to anime or animated television series.

Miyazaki worked closely with Ōtsuka in 1964 on the film Garibaa no ūchū
ryokō (Gulliver’s space travels, 1965), and impressed with his work, Ōtsuka used
Miyazaki’s ideas for the last part of the film. When asked to make Prince of the
Sun in 1965, Ōtsuka made his only condition the appointment of Takahata as di-
rector. Miyazaki began voluntarily to participate in the project at that time, only
to be pulled away on another project. But then, with the key animator suddenly
hospitalized, Miyazaki returned to Prince of the Sun.

Loosely borrowing elements from Norse myths and tales, Prince of the
Sun tells of a young boy, Hols (often called Horus because of the Japanese pro-
nunciation of Hols), who must defeat the ice demon Grunwald who is intent on
destroying the human settlements. In the opening sequence, Grunwald’s pack of
wolves attacks Hols, and he defends himself with only an axe. When the wolves
appear about to win, Hols unknowingly awakens a stone giant. Hols pulls a blade
from the shoulder of the giant and learns that, once forged anew, the sword will
transform him into the Prince of the Sun. Soon thereafter, upon the death of
his father and after an encounter with Grunwald, Hols takes up residence in
a fishing village. Hols discovers and kills the giant fish responsible for the dis-
appearance of their fish, earning the gratitude of the villagers. The gray wolf, a
minion of Grunwald, continually appears outside the village, seen only by Hols,
who frequently leaves in pursuit of the wolf. On one chase, Hols encounters the
young girl Hilda in an unpopulated village. Hilda’s beautiful voice endears her
to Hols and the villagers, but gradually we learn that Grunwald controls her ac-
tions via the jeweled pendant around her neck. Hilda spurs the villagers to grow
suspicious of and to expel Hols, which clears the way for Grunwald’s full attack.
Subsequently, however, inspired by Hols’s kindness and the love of an orphaned
child, Hilda chooses to sacrifice herself to save the child. Hols returns to the vil-
lage, forges the sword with the villagers, and defeats Grunwald in a final battle.
Hilda, too, returns to the village, with the return of sun and spring.

Miyazaki apparently contributed to Prince of the Sun some of its most mov-
ing scenes (the villagers listening to Hilda’s song) and innovative devices (the
ice boats and ice mammoth). What is more, in the documentary on Ōtsuka,
Miyazaki cites Hilda’s magical pendant in Prince of the Sun as the inspiration
for the flying stone pendent in Castle in the Sky. There is indeed an affinity be-
tween Sheeta and Hilda, as girls who suffer under the burden of a pendant that
controls their relation to the world, from which they must free themselves.4

F LY I N G M A C H I N E S58

The 1960s were a tremendously productive time for Tōei Dōga and also a
time of labor strife. Miyazaki, Takahata, and Ōtsuka also sealed their friend-
ship through their participation in the animators’ union (Miyazaki as chair and
Takahata as cochair), and the three stuck closely together through a series of
projects and studios. In 1971, Takahata and Miyazaki left Tōei to join Ōtsuka at
A Pro, in order to make an animated series based on Pippi Longstocking. Among
numerous other projects, the three adapted Monkey Punch’s manga into an ani-
mated television series also called Rupun sansei (Lupin III, 1971–72). Received
poorly when it first aired, Lupin went on to become one of the most touted and
inf luential television series in Japan. Soon after (in 1973), Ōtsuka, Miyazaki,
and Takahata moved on to Nippon Animation, where Miyazaki worked espe-
cially on the World Masterpiece Theater television animation series, contributing
as key animator and director for animated adaptations of such children’s classics
as Anne of Green Gables and Heidi. At Nippon Animation, Miyazaki also created
an animated adaptation of Alexander Key’s novel, The Incredible Tide, under the
title Mirai shōnen Konan (Future boy Conan, 1978). Takahata directed some ep-
isodes, Ōtsuka served as animation director, and Miyazaki directed and worked
as key animator. Even though Takahata’s and Ōtsuka’s contributions are evident,
you also see in Conan the emergence of something decidedly Miyazaki.

Conan takes place in a postapocalyptic world and deals with the aftermath
of weapons of mass destruction, for, even though technologically advanced
industrial society has come to an end, the weapons linger on. The adventure
begins when a preternaturally strong youth, Konan (or Conan) meets a young
girl Rana (or Lana). The girl, who possesses psychic powers, becomes caught up
in a struggle to regain the secrets of solar energy that powered the “old” WMDs.
Lepka, the villainous head of Industria, knows that Lana’s grandfather possesses
the secret and pursues her in an attempt to wrest the secret from him. Conan
and Lana together f lee and do battle with the bad guys. As even such a brief
summary suggests, there is more than a passing resemblance between Conan
and Castle in the Sky.5

In 1982 in Animage, a magazine devoted to anime published by Tokuma
shoten, Miyazaki began to serialize a manga, Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind, 1982–94), which also draws some of its inspiration
from The Incredible Tide and Conan, spinning a tale of the young girl Nausicaä,
who struggles to save the world from its technological condition, and who, like
Key’s heroine, has the power to communicate with animals. Nausicaä, too, lives
in a postapocalyptic world in which industrial civilization as such has vanished
after devastating the earth with WMDs. Yet the WMDs linger, inviting men and
women hungry for power to recover and reactivate them. The film adaptation,

59F LY I N G M A C H I N E S

which Miyazaki reluctantly agreed to make when the publisher Tokuma shoten
insisted that it would only fund a film based on his manga, consists of mate-
rial largely reworked from first quarter of the manga. (It would take Miyazaki
thirteen years to complete the manga, working on it in starts and stops between
films.) 6 Significantly, although the Nausicaä manga has a mysterious stone that
is the key to activating the giant robots who once destroyed the world, the film
version of Nausicaä eliminates the mysterious stone, but Miyazaki would use
this segment of the Nausicaä story in Castle in the Sky. In sum, there is a great
deal of overlap thematically from Conan and Nausicaä to Castle in the Sky, as
if Miyazaki were consistently, even obsessively working through his concerns
about modern technology in animation. Even his Lupin III film, Lupin the Third:
The Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro, 1979) works with
similar themes and devices, albeit in a more playful manner.

In light of Miyazaki’s prior projects, then, Castle in the Sky appears as a
summation. The nineteenth-century look of the film recalls the period feel of
Miyazaki’s television animation adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Heidi,
which Miyazaki renders in Castle in the Sky with generic ease. The story, es-
pecially its magical flourishes, recalls both Tōei feature-length dōga (especially
Prince of the Sun) and Miyazaki’s previous postapocalyptic epics (Conan and
Nausicaä). I don’t wish to imply that Miyazaki’s prior work merely served as prepa-
ration or apprenticeship for Castle in the Sky or for his subsequent films with
Ghibli. It is not a question of straightforward continuity or direct influence. From
his Tōei Dōga animations to his television animation to Castle in the Sky, we see
a dazzling array of animated worlds. Nonetheless, in Castle in the Sky, Miyazaki
gathers those worlds into one epic world with a distinctively Miyazaki look and
story arc. Castle in the Sky marks the emergence of a distinctive Miyazaki-Ghibli
world and worldview, and in a stable and marketable form.

Significantly, however, that world and its worldview are in crisis even as
they emerge. In effect, the crisis comes of the conf licting stances toward tech-
nology that appear in Miyazaki’s animation.7 By the time of Castle in the Sky,
the delight in speeding vehicles and action sequences—so carefree and playful
in Lupin and Conan—is proving awkward for Miyazaki to sustain alongside his
critical take on techno-scientific modernity. It is difficult to play with speeding
vehicles and launch a critique of the modern technological condition. In my
opinion, Castle in the Sky succeeds precisely because Miyazaki launches his
critique of technology even while playing with speed and machinery. Castle in
the Sky succeeds precisely because it manages to gather and focus our manner of
interacting with technology, not by rejecting technologies but by bringing them
into focus differently. In his interviews about the film, however, he expresses

F LY I N G M A C H I N E S60

discomfort about Castle in the Sky, speaking of his general discontent with boys’-
adventure films, as we have seen. Maybe Miyazaki sensed that he had, in fact,
summated or finished the genre—“finished” in both senses of the word, at once
polishing it (giving it a beautiful finish) and closing or completing it. In any
event, he turns away from it after Castle in the Sky.

Miyazaki’s take on the boy’s-adventure genre was always unusual in its
sensibility, showing a tendency to question and even undermine goal-oriented
actions. Working with Takahata, who seems equally intent on hollowing out
adventurism, albeit in different ways, encouraged Miyazaki’s tendency toward a
sort of antiadventure adventure film that asks viewers to question their delight
in treasures, magical powers, or thrills and to transfer that interest onto other
broader technological concerns. We have seen how Castle in the Sky presents a
stance toward technology that is close to that of Heidegger. If the goal is not to
accept or reject technology but to change your relation to it, the central issue
becomes that of how you get caught up in the film, how the film gathers and
focuses your practices of perception in relation to technology. This is where
Miyazaki draws on his experience making Tōei dōga. This is where Miyazaki’s
insistence that his animations are manga films not anime comes into play. At
stake is developing in animation a different perception of technology.

Miyazaki’s films strive to shift our perception of technology at three differ-
ent but interrelated levels. First is his use of open compositing of the multiplanar
image, that is, his manner of rendering movement, speed, and depth by empha-
sizing the sliding of layers within the image. He avoids and deemphasizes the
ballistic optics of cinematism because, for him, these constitute a “bad”—that is,
merely correct or accurate—relation to the modern technological condition, one
that tends toward optimization for its own sake. This is not to say that he never
uses ballistic modes of perception. In Castle in the Sky, for instance, the chase
sequence on the train tracks over the gorge is full of images of things rushing
out of the screen at you, and while Miyazaki mostly generates thrills with lateral
views of motion, there are nonetheless many views down the rails that exploit
perceptual ballistics. Yet Miyazaki undercuts such effects with humor: Sheeta
decks two burly pirates with a shovel in the face, they grimace and slowly col-
lapse. The timing and the interactions are almost slapstick, slightly loony, and
always harmless, and jolts and slams are rendered theatrically, in the scale of
human bodies (a fist in the face) and at the level of bodily knowledge.8 In addi-
tion, as in the fistfight between village men and pirates, Miyazaki not only brings
ballistic optics back to the level of the human body but also associates them with
a preening yet harmless machismo. Just as this film is still able to play with tech-
nologies even as it critiques them, it is also able to play with masculinity even as

61F LY I N G M A C H I N E S

it questions it. Nonetheless this film largely marks the end of Miyazaki’s willing-
ness to render overtly masculine behavior with humor or affection.

Second, Miyazaki’s films abound in whimsical, implausible-looking con-
traptions that nonetheless fly through the skies or move over the earth. Usually
such vehicles appear too voluminous and weighty to move at all. In Castle in the
Sky, especially in the title sequence, there are the aircraft that seem to combine
dirigibles, bicycles, and propellers, and one has to wonder how they could get off
the ground; like the castles in the sky, they appear to hover or float rather than fly
in the sense of speeding through the skies. While the gunships of Nausicaä seem
not entirely unlike our airplanes, the flying jars and large airships defy our sense
of aviation. Miyazaki seems to like bulbous entities with lots of spindly legs or
propellers; vehicles as different as the catbus in Totoro and the mobile castle in
Howl’s Moving Castle are such entities. Miyazaki’s giant insects in Nausicaä and
insect-inspired planes in other films (like the flaptors in Castle in the Sky) also
seem at once preposterous yet oddly coherent; they are large and many-limbed,
yet swift. Sometimes familiar vehicles occur in anachronistic combinations: in
Kiki’s Delivery Service, the dirigible appears in conjunction with televisions, to-
gether with the boy Tombo’s transformation of a bike into a plane. All in all, such
funny and eccentric vehicles, often with lots of flapping legs or spinning arms
that make them whimsically accessible to the human body, seem calculated to
avoid streamlined ballistic-designed craft. Miyazaki studiously avoids jets and
rockets, and when he cites such designs, they are closely associated with the evils
of war (in Howl’s Moving Castle in particular).9 Miyazaki uses humorous and ec-
centric designs to open the technological ordering of our modern world to other
possibilities, by generating vehicles that look implausible yet somehow accurate,
thus refocusing our perception of technologies of flight and movement.

At the same time, the paragons of flight are those that stay aloft with the mini-
mum of technology: Nausicaä’s seagull-like glider Meeve (or Mehve or Möwe),
Pazu’s glider, Kiki’s broomstick, or Totoro as a gust of wind. Such vehicles are
closely linked with animetism, because it is in sequences of gliding, floating, or
soaring that the sliding layers of the image can be emphasized to their best ef-
fect. These minimal flying technologies are thus associated with a third register of
animation—the animation of human bodies, that is, the animation of the charac-
ters who inhabit these worlds.

Miyazaki’s animations highlight youthful bodies and children’s energies, too.
Generally the characters on whom Miyazaki lavishes his attention tend to be chil-
dren, old men or women, with an occasional adult woman, often in a role character-
ized as masculine. With the exception of Lupin, his animation generally does not
devote much attention to adult men, and even his version of the character Lupin

F LY I N G M A C H I N E S62

the Third is more youthful and sweet-hearted than usual. Interestingly enough, in
Studio Ghibli’s documentary on Ōtsuka’s animation, Ōtsuka and Miyazaki stress
the importance of the youthful energies that young animators can impart to move-
ment as in-between animators. They see the energies of young animators translated
directly into vigorous and vital animation. Harnessing youthful energies plays an
important role in Miyazaki’s attempt to produce a free relation to technology in
animation.

In sum, Miyazaki’s thinking of a free relation to technology in anima-
tion relies on a gathering and focusing of attention on bodies that fly—at once
vehicles and human bodies. He does this at three different levels: (1) emphasiz-
ing animetism and avoiding (or comically deflating) cinematism by stressing
the movement between multiple layers of the image; (2) designing whimsical
vehicles and/or minimizing flight technologies while avoiding streamlined bal-
listic structures; and (3) harnessing or channeling the energies of young bodies.
These three impulses already come together beautifully in the scenes of the
young Nausicaä on her glider in Nausicaä and appear again with Kiki soaring
on her broomstick. But it is in Castle in the Sky, which from the outset until the
end is a film that dreams a world of clouds and winds, that Miyazaki’s animetism
reaches its fullest expression in sensations of flying, soaring, gliding, or wheeling
through the clouds or along the earth. In contrast to the scenes that humor-
ously def late ballistics or ridicule the streamlined biases in f light design, the
scenes that open the sliding of layers of the image evoke sensations of awe and
wonder, sensations of a world whose vastness and depth is somehow ungrasp-
able. Miyazaki’s animetism is, to some extent, an experience of the sublime, an
aesthetic experience of the world in which the world exceeds our ability to grasp
it rationally or to order it hierarchically. Yet, insofar as flying and animating do
not deny recourse to technology, however minimal, Miyazaki does not embrace
the Romantic sublime that tends to repudiate the technological. Nor does he
produce a technological sublime.

The sensation of sliding layers is entirely different from speeding into depth.
Rather it is a sensation of induced movement or relative movement, such as that
you feel when you are on a train stopped in a station, and the train next to yours
begins to move forward or backward. You feel that you are moving, your train
is moving. Or when your car creeps forward at a stoplight but you are not aware
of lifting your foot from the pedal, you feel that the car ahead is backing up
or even that the world is moving. This is how Miyazaki begins to imagine a
free relation to technology: when movement is rendered with sliding planes, the
world is not static, inert, lying in wait passively for us to use it, in the form of
a standing reserve, to evoke Heidegger’s term. The world is not “enframed” or

63F LY I N G M A C H I N E S

made into a picture.10 On the contrary, Miyazaki assures that when we move,
the world moves, and vice versa. Opening a relation through animation technol-
ogy to the dynamism of the world promises a way for us to gain a free relation to
our modern technological condition, to save ourselves from it. Yet for all that it
seems rather simple to formulate, such an experience is difficult to render. After
all, Miyazaki doesn’t want to embrace the art of the engine. He thus takes the
“big” or “high tech” vehicles of flight and transportation (planes, cars, trains)
and deflates or deforms them, and at the same time he gravitates toward “small”
or “low tech” vehicles (gliders, bikes, broomsticks). The result is vehicles that fit
perfectly into a world of sliding layers. Vehicles associated with ballistic percep-
tion are defanged, while other wind-powered vehicles feel ideally suited to move
in a multiplanar, movement-full world. Yet the question remains of what kind
of human bodies are suited to these flying machines, to these gliding, wheel-
ing, soaring, and sliding machines. I have indicated that Miyazaki, following
Ōtsuka, stresses youthful energies in his animators and in his animated charac-
ters. This is where another art of animation comes into play, the art of animating
characters, which has a profound impact on the imagination of a free relation
to technology.

P R E C A R I O U S J A P A 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 N E . P A I N O F L I F E

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

C HA P T E R O N E!2

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”—

PA I N O F L I F E!3

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

C HA P T E R O N E!4

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-

PA I N O F L I F E!5

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

C HA P T E R O N E!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 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

PA I N O F L I F E!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 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-

C HA P T E R O N E!8

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

PA I N O F L I F E!9

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

C HA P T E R O N E!10

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

PA I N O F L I F E!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 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-

C HA P T E R O N E!12

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-

PA I N O F L I F E!13

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-

C HA P T E R O N E!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 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

PA I N O F L I F E!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 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-

C HA P T E R O N E!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, 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

PA I N O F L I F E!17

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

C HA P T E R O N E!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 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

PA I N O F L I F E!19

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-

C HA P T E R O N E!20

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.

N OT E S T O C HA P T E R T WO!208

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

Kenneth Masaki Shima

Kenneth Masaki Shima

Kenneth Masaki Shima

Kenneth Masaki Shima

Kenneth Masaki Shima

Kenneth Masaki Shima