Bodies in Motion: Contemplating Work, Leisure, and Late Capitalism in Japanese Fitness Clubs

Laura Spielvogel. 2003. Working Out in Japan: Shaping the Female Body in Tokyo Fitness Clubs. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

In the opening pages of her book, Laura Spielvogel presents readers with a social scientific puzzle, a seemingly inexplicable phenomenon that she will decipher and elucidate in the rest of her book. Fitness clubs, and more specifically the popularity of aerobics in Japan beginning in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, are the twinned subjects of her ethnographic study. Despite a socio-cultural, political and economic environment seemingly conducive to supporting a robust fitness boom, fitness clubs and other venues providing health and fitness opportunities have not taken off in Japan at anywhere close to the rates seen in the U.S. In the mid-1990s, approximately 97 percent of Japanese adults did not exercise on a regular basis of three times a week (p.2). Fitness membership rates in 2001 in Japan were only one-third of the levels in the U.S. (p.3). These statistics, Spielvogel argues, are particularly surprising when one considers dominant notions of beauty in Japan today. "The message of the beauty industry in Japan is unavoidable: Thin is beautiful and beautiful is thin. It stands to reason, doesn't it," she asks, "that fitness clubs, aimed at building and sculpting a stronger and leaner body, would be a booming business in Japan?" The mediocre response to aerobics and fitness clubs, she continues, is even more puzzling when one factors in the increased leisure time afforded by economic prosperity, government policy initiatives implemented since the1980s aimed at encouraging and facilitating increased leisure and healthier lifestyles, the popularity of beauty and diet aids, and what Spielvogel refers to as Japan's "cultural system of achievement that awards hard work, industriousness, and discipline."

The inability of fitness club owners to capitalize on what ostensibly appears to have been the convergence of various factors propitious to the clubs' success is one question driving Spielvogel's research. Inside the fitness clubs, the activity—and notable inactivity—of (the overwhelmingly female) members is another phenomenon, fundamentally connected to the first, that fuels Spielvogel's curiosity, and justifies, as she argues in her Introduction, fitness clubs as a worthy site of ethnographic investigation. In the end, it is the pieces that do not fit—club members who barely work out and female aerobics instructors who live "unhealthy" lifestyles off of the job—that inspire the most interesting inquiries in Spielvogel's work, with the former pointing to the cultural and historical specificities of notions of health and fitness, and the latter exemplifying individual acts of resistance and rebellion.

Spielvogel's project benefits from her thorough understanding of her subject matter, and her proximity to her fieldsites and informants. An accomplished aerobics instructor before she went to Japan, Spielvogel worked as an aerobics instructor and a staff member at two clubs, one located in the heart of Tokyo and the other in a more suburban area outside the city. Her status as a staff member and expert aerobics instructor inhibited comfortable communication with some members, she admits, but it also made her privy to backroom conversations and after hours employee events that very likely would have been unavailable had she been in a different position. With information collected from the front of mirrored aerobics studios to the cramped "break room" used by exhausted and frustrated employees, Spielvogel's investigation provides insights into the structural division between work and leisure in contemporary Japan, and the positioning of exercise within that structure. Because leisure is understood in Japan, she argues, as relaxing and requiring little exertion, the task of fitness clubs in Japan, which in the U.S. are typically associated with sweat and physical exhaustion, is to "mask the necessary hard work and discipline of exercise under a veneer of relaxation and luxury" (p.20). A country stereotypically imagined as...