Because one doesn’t hope alone

Allison ties these stories and observations together with the Post-Fordist concept of ‘precarity’, the social condition in which once durable and secure relations and have become dismantled, unhinged, marked by risk, strain, and isolation. Beginning with the premise, Allison takes us to the ragged edges of precarity, to the heart-breaking signs that mark the end of the road whose construction began in the post-bubble economic reorganization over twenty years ago. She does this not to suggest that all of Japan is or will be peering over this precipice, yet by touring these political, economic, and existential borderlands, she makes palpable the everyday conditions, the intuitive sensing of the world, and the narrowing temporal dimensions that set the stage for what might otherwise be seen as senseless and unfathomable. While the majority of the book is dedicated to this aim, Allison also finds people who have stepped back from the edge to find alternate paths, aspirations, and hopes for the ‘good life’.

Precarious Japan concentrates on the ways precarity shapes the lives at both ends of the life course, where vulnerability and bonds of dependence present the most immediate risk. Chapter One situates the reader first by juxtaposing vignettes snatched from these ends: an old man who dies alone and abandoned, and a jobless youth who embarks on an anonymous killing spree. In Chapter Two, Allison develops the framework of precarity that leads to events like these by laying out a clear timeline of political, social and economic change in Japan over the last century, connecting this history with widespread discourses of social disconnection (muen shakai). This disconnection, which she links to the structural and corporeal liquidization of labour, oozes into the family through channels carved out by decaying structures of domestic life, age, and care. In most cases, Allison does not venture as far as to make direct causal claims, but rather, she sets a scene that evokes a heavy mood of grief and despair (zetsubō), which creates the potential for tragedy to become the norm.

Chapters Three and Four focus on the precarity of youth, covering many of the signposts that are likely familiar to most observers of Japanese social trends over the last few decades: bullying (ijime); shut-ins (hikikomori); flexible and part-time workforce (furītā), ‘Not in Education Employment or Training’ (NEET); growing youth poverty (hinkon); and child abandonment. Chapter Four examines these topics through the heuristic of ‘home’, conceived of here as an imagined site of potential, aspiration, and hope. What youth seem to hope for, Allison points out, cannot be the lost world of their parents’ generation, nor a hope that can be located ‘outside’ in the realm of work and social participation. Yet there is a need to hope for something—and this is, I think, the point—just to survive long enough to find a trace of recognition, the briefest touch of humanity.

Chapters Five and Six look at the effects of precarity on the body and soul, and the possibilities this produces for new forms of collective life to emerge from the broken pieces. From suicide survivors to abandoned corpses, the disconnected society seems to feed off of itself and off of the bodies of ‘human waste’- the leftovers of capitalist progress. Allison also introduces activists passionate about envisioning new forms of social solidarity, trust, and recovery. These are means—affective, social, moral—of what Allison calls “reterritorialization” (165) or the “soul on strike” (176), made possible, she argues, by loss and precarity.

Chapter Seven is the most ethnographically satisfying of the book. Whereas much of the book is dominated by summaries of news reports, movies, and books, with only brief, disjointed snippets of conversations, this last chapter is heartfelt and visceral. In the wake of the 3.11 triple disaster (Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown), Allison volunteers to help, dipping herself in the mud with other volunteers to do the slow, heavy, work of recovering personal objects before the site is demolished. Although this immense event and its aftermath are complex and remain a powerful flashpoint for political protest, working shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, Allison feels her ways into the hope: a sense of “precariousness as establishing human relations and as a means of calibrating what is precious in life” (193).

Precarious Japan does not limit itself to a particular group or sub-culture in Japan. Allison’s research spans the last decade and draws on a huge number of cases, and while she has published or presented on most of this material before, it is difficult to detect. The ideas are consistent and the chapters weave together in a seamless and compelling narrative. Some readers will no doubt feel that the stories in Precarious Japan are overly violent, strange, or romanticized like so much post-industrial ‘ruin porn’. How could these stories truly reflect the world of mainstream Japan? And yet, as an anthropologist who has focused on older people and caregivers in Japan over the last decade, I have seen and heard many of the same stories and sentiments. In fact, I commend Allison’s sensitivity to what are very real struggles vibrating just under the surface of an often carefully composed veneer. Allison’s writing helps us be with her subjects, not out of pity, but because one doesn’t hope alone. This is perhaps why Allison’s book is so important—it exposes what is just below the surface of the headlines and casual remarks alike, what hides behind drawn curtains, but is nonetheless ubiquitous in Japan today.

Jason Danely, Department of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University (jdanely@brookes.ac.uk)