Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács (review)

Invisibility by Design is about the “exploitation” of women by “the masculinist world of entrepreneurship” (73) in various pursuits in “Japan’s digital economy” (79) which rendered their labor “invisible” (73). It does so by describing the works and experiences of some women who have achieved varying degrees of celebrity status in several online activities— as photographers, net idols, bloggers, and amateur traders, and also as cell phone novelists—with the aim of “exposing the centrality of feminized affective labor” by online companies controlled by men for profits (12).

The book begins with the introduction which explains its aims, discusses the works of various authors in relation to the emergence of do-it-yourself or DIY careers and affective labor, describes the fieldwork, and ends with overviews of subsequent chapters. Conducted from 2010, the fieldwork comprises structured interviews with 43 women whose engagement with digital technologies was followed by the author, and reviews of the women’s online diaries, blogs, novels, self-help books, and trading tutorials (24). The author explains that the book “anchors each chapter to the stories of two to four women who had emerged as icons of the trends that the chapters focus on” (24), and that “versions of several chapters of the book have been separately published” (xi).

The works of several female photographers are described in Chapter 1 against comments made by male critic Iizawa Kotaro in his book The Era of ‘Girly Photography’ published in 2020. Following descriptions of the growing popularity of digital cameras, the author discusses the works of Nagashima Yurie, Ume Kayo, Hiromix (Toshikawa Hiromi), and Ninagawa Mika to illustrate the women’s struggles with managing problematic self-identities against family relations and gender norms in Japan. Their endeavors are interpreted as “projects of disidentification” or “strategies” to critically engage mainstream representations of women and women’s place in society (32). These are said to refute Iizawa’s views, which are “emblematic” of the “male critical establishment in Japan” (35) which ignored “the feminist critique of gender inequity” encoded in women’s works (54), when women photographers in Japan had played an important role in “introducing second-wave feminism into the mainstream,” and that many “went beyond second-wave feminism and asked questions about third-wave feminism” (55).

The focus shifts in Chapter 2 to examining the works of several female net idols against accounts on the operations of “successful internet entrepreneurs,” such as Horie Takafumi of Livedoor and Kikitani Hiroshi of Rakuten who are male (64). The works of Hirata Erika, Nanjo Aya, Ebihara Yuri, Tanaka Eris, and Nakamura Toyomi are discussed to illustrate how the varying efforts made by the women constituted the “labor of cute,” which reinforced existing gender norms and hence “did not help women claim their own space within the masculinist world of entrepreneurship” (73). The chapter concludes that while female net idols were “instrumental” to the development of Japan’s the digital economy, their endeavors were made “invisible” (73), and their pursuits were “overwhelmingly a dead end” (79).

The activities of two female celebrity bloggers are discussed in Chapter 3 to demonstrate the “exploitation” of unwaged bloggers by male-controlled blogging portals such as Ameba and Jugem for profit. Some interesting descriptions are given to show how online portals and blog tutorials promoted blogging as a viable career that could offer “the good life” (104) in order to take advantage of the burgeoning number of female bloggers in Japan. The chapter then discusses the works of two famous female bloggers, Suzuki Junko and Tominaga Ayako, to demonstrate that blogging was not as effortless as it was portrayed and promoted by portals and online platforms. Their blogging activities are interpreted as unwaged labor with negative effects such as “precarity, vulnerability, and exclusion” (93). However, this is not forcefully conveyed with explanations or relevant data to elucidate what significant shifts in work patterns—especially among women—had occurred in Japan to...