An Emerging Non-regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers by Huiyan Fu (review)

This compact ethnography is a useful addition to the growing body of literature that is reassessing the 20 years in Japan that followed the bursting of its economic bubble in the early 1990s, a period often portrayed as “lost” or at best stagnant. Fu’s volume provides a sketch of the life of dispatched workers in Japan—a segment of the labor force that has grown significantly in recent years. Because labor markets and work organization are areas where quantitative measures and government statistics are gathered fairly systematically, their study often leads to the early detection of larger social changes. Ethnographies such as Fu’s provide good insight into how such quantifiable facts translate into social and cultural change. Fu’s volume might fruitfully be read in conjunction with Mary Brinton’s Lost in Transition (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Although not an ethnography in the strict sense, Brinton’s work also provides a nuanced account of how ordinary Japanese are experiencing historically significant shifts in the labor market and the implications flowing from those trends for those now coming through the education system.

By the end of the 1990s, some of these social and cultural changes were being reported in a piecemeal fashion. Over the last decade, however, a clearer picture began emerging as to how many of the pieces interconnect. Several related volumes with less ethnographic content than the two mentioned above include Imai Jun’s The Transformation of Japanese Employment Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Kosugi Reiko’s Escape from Work (Trans Pacific Press, 2008), and Genda Yuji’s A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity (LTCB International Library, 2005). Those works sit in the broader context of social change and widening social and cultural disparities highlighted in many of the volumes in the series on stratification and inequality in Japan published by Trans Pacific Press.

Fu’s account of haken (dispatched workers) is also highly recommended as a guide for those wishing to work in Japan. For increasing numbers of non-Japanese graduating from Japanese universities who want to stay in Japan after graduation, employment as a haken is one option. Fu’s monograph details many of the more subtle ins and outs of such employment, with a helpful glossary of terms. It is also good reading for undergraduate classes discussing life in contemporary Japan. Chapters 4 and 5 step back from the ethnographic data presented in chapters 2 and 3 and raise some historical questions and make statements requiring considerable knowledge of Japan to tease out the points for debate.

Following a brief methodological explanation, Fu sharpens the focus in chapter 2 by defining who the haken are and then uses government statistics to position them in the overall labor force. The haken are defined in two ways: first, as an employment status lumbered with various social perceptions that are mostly positive (when compared with depictions of day laborers, though in some ways wanting when compared with full-time regular employees); and then as a lifestyle removed from that of the furiitā—an existence characterized more by dignity than by failure. At the same time, Fu is careful to note that the haken come in many types with a complex mixture of motivations that confound simple stereotypes not only of the haken but also of the furiitā and indeed even the quintessential sarariman. In this regard, Fu argues that the popular media create images which then define work realities for many, pointing to a self-fulfilling prophecy that requires further investigation. Chapter 2 provides a valuable guide to what can be a confusing array of labels that overlay ideas concerning skill-linked functions on notions of employment status.

Chapter 3 is a walk through the gates into the corporate compounds where haken are employed. Important information on the nature of the tripartite employment relationship between the dispatched employees, their dispatching agency, and the client company where the work is actually...