Precarious Japan by Anne Allison (review)

Precarious Japan begins with a striking image: a 52-year-old man found starved to death in his apartment in Kita-Kyushu City in 2007. This story attracted widespread media attention in Japan at the time, and, as Anne Allison notes, a particularly shocking, and repeatedly emphasized, detail in the retelling of the man’s death was his last diary entry: “I want to eat a rice ball” (onigiri tabetai) (p. 1). Allison takes this story as her starting point for an examination of what she argues is the loss of connectedness in contemporary Japan and, relating to this, a sense of hopelessness, loss of confidence in the future, and crisis of the self.

Many elements of this crisis have become familiar both in the mass media and in academic writing since the 1990s. In place of the portrayal of Japan as a “middle mass” society characterized by homogeneity and consensus, the term kakusa shakai (gap society) has gained traction, as has a sense of a Japan divided between winners (kachigumi) and losers (makegumi).¹ In the realm of work, the growth of the nonregular workforce has led to certain categories of casualized labor—particularly the furiita (“freeters”) and more recently the haken (dispatch workers)—becoming recognizable archetypes in popular culture and the focus of a number of academic studies.² Others on the margins of (unable to access or opting out of) the once normative life course of graduation from school, employment, marriage, and parenthood include hikikomori, NEET (not in education, employment, or training), and parasite singles—all of whom have been the object of both mass media concern and academic interest.³ Turning to family life, the falling birth rate and aging population have been topics of public concern for some years now, together with the concomitant issues of elder care and the changing configurations of the Japanese family.⁴

Writing in 2009 of the growing perception of Japan as a kakusa shakai, Yoshio Sugimoto referred to “an unacknowledged paradigm shift” in the public discourse of Japanese culture,⁵ a move toward greater attention to inequality and social and cultural diversity within Japan. In Precarious Japan, Allison focuses on this shift and on the emergent precariat in Japan—those whose lives have become unstable and precarious in the domains of both work and home. Allison cites shocking numbers: although it is well known that Japan has the world’s third-largest economy, it is less well known that Japan has the second-highest level of poverty in the OECD, with 15.3 percent of the population receiving less than half the median national income (the highest level of poverty among OECD countries is in the United States) (p. 5). Allison also notes that a large number of Japanese living in poverty are employed: the English phrase “working poor” has become part of the Japanese language.

The casualization of labor and the growing inequality in terms of access to wealth and resources are clearly not phenomena confined to Japan. The emergence of a precariat whose working and living conditions are insecure, and who receive very low pay, coupled with an increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite, has become a global concern. Allison (p. 6) traces the use of the word precarité to 1970s Europe, with Pierre Bourdieu one of the first to use the term. More recently, the term “precariat” has been popularized by Guy Standing, who uses it to refer to an emergent class arising from the new economic formations of a globalized neoliberalism.⁶ Insofar as this can be seen as a distinctive new phenomenon, posing troubling questions throughout the industrial and postindustrial world, this is a paradigm shift stretching far beyond Japan.

While acknowledging this broader global frame, Allison is concerned with the particular localized Japanese experience of precarity and suggests that this needs to be understood in the context of hegemonic representations of Japanese culture and identity in the postwar period. She argues that...