Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore the correlation between strategy, time and social relations amongst a group of well off Japanese people in Tokyo. My aim is to show how personal life crisis can create unexpected social relations and networks that allow for alternative forms of strategies.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore the correlation between strategy, time and social relations amongst a group of Japanese people in Tokyo. My aim is to show how personal life crisis can create unexpected social relations and networks that allow for alternative forms of strategies.

The people concerning are defined as a group by being around 30 years old, having academic or otherwise extensive educations, well paid jobs, and coming from financially and socially good families and in that way well off. However they all suffered from a specific form of personal life crisis: they did not want the kind of lives that they felt their family, education, social level and general socio-political expectations of society had put them in.

In this paper I show how they acted to simultaneously satisfy the expectations of their families, keeping good relations, and break with these expectations pursuing their own ideas of a glorious future. These ways of acting I call non-linear strategies.

I analyse episodes of my informants' everyday lives to show how they transformed them from part of a stable, upwards path in society into being unpredictable. In this paper I especially focus on how they shattered directionality by creating their social networks as terrains of misunderstandings.

My point is that through creating these specific kinds of social relations could they perform the non-linear strategy needed to pursue their own ideas of life and keeping good relations with their families and society at large.