Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan by Emma E. Cook (review)

Against the background of Japan's prolonged recession and deregulation of the employment system since the late 1990s, the increased number of young irregular employees attracted public attention and caused a moral panic over youth independence, while also giving rise to the prevalence of the newly named furiitā (freeter). Although the term generally describes young male and female part-time workers aged 15–34, who are neither students nor housewives, "freeter" has accrued various meanings beyond a mere employment category. The word has highly gendered connotations, and criticism of freeters has been directed primarily at male workers because the meaning of adult manhood has been linked so closely in postwar Japan to full-time labor and male breadwinning, as represented by sarariiman (salaryman).

While prevailing discourses on freeters are extremely simplified—whether as immature boys lacking a work ethic or victims of a changing employment system—details of their living conditions are less than well known, especially to international readers. Now, however, thorough the anthropological approach of Reconstructing Adult Masculinities: Part-time Work in Contemporary Japan, Emma E. Cook provides a detailed picture of how young male part-timers negotiate the meaning of masculinity and adulthood in their daily lives.

Cook's study is based on ethnographic research conducted intermittently in Hamamatsu from 2006 to 2013. Qualitative uniqueness and abundance of locally collected narratives are just part of this study's attractions. As a participant observer, Cook worked as a part-timer with freeters at a nine-screen cinema. Becoming a member of and developing rapport with the target group, she interviewed more than 100 men and women, including nonfreeters. The fieldwork location is particularly significant for Cook's topic. Existing major surveys on freeters have been conducted in and around Tokyo. However, Tokyo is not a typical area but a very special place in Japan as a whole. Indeed, the majority of young part-timers are born and live in local areas with stronger community ties and more limited occupational choices than in metropolitan areas. Selecting the provincial city Hamamatsu as a research site "where social pressures can be amplified as men continue to live in the neighborhoods of their childhoods" (p. 17), Cook depicts lively interactions between young male part-time workers and their parents, for example, how sons tried to persuade their parents to accept them as freeters and the influence parents' expectations had on their sons' life courses (chapter 3).

In addition to these ethnographic features, the study is also characterized by how masculinities are understood. While acknowledging the importance of the salaryman as a symbolic figure and of hegemonic discourses of masculinity in male part-timers' narratives, Cook refuses to look at masculinity as a static type, seen for example in the mutually exclusive categories of "salaryman masculinity" and "freeter masculinity." Instead, she adopts an alternative approach that "explore[s] how individuals draw on different aspects and dimensions of masculinities in different spheres of their lives—at the level of both discourse and practice—that shape their adult masculine identities in particular ways at particular points in time as they age" (p. 6).

Based on such an understanding of masculinities, Cook proposes an ingenious and suggestive analytical frame: a pair of concepts she terms "aspirational masculinity" and "restrictive masculinity." On the one hand, aspirational masculinity illuminates the ways in which men try to construct and practice their masculine selves through future-oriented aspirations, especially within the sphere of labor. On the other hand, "restrictive masculinity" refers to how men "make concessions with regards to their pursuit of labor aspirations… according to their expectations of future marriage" (pp. 7–8). In this context, young male part-time workers face difficulties, which Cook has dubbed the male "freeter failure dilemma": "[I]f they gave up on their aspirations they felt they would be failing to achieve something that they felt in part defined them, that was constitutive...