Paper short abstract:

By drawing on the existing literature and interview data with 43 young adults in Tokyo, this paper offers a typology of various ways young workers in contemporary Japan manage precarity. The analysis identifies three different responses to precarity.

Paper long abstract:

While social theorists are wary of prevalent economic uncertainty and job insecurity that allegedly erode one’s sense of the self, empirical studies tend to single out hardship experienced by a particular group of people, such as men without a college education. By drawing on the existing literature and interview data with 43 young adults in Tokyo, this paper offers a typology of various ways young workers in contemporary Japan manage precarity. The analysis found three major ways young workers talked about precarity that roughly correspond to their positions in the labor market. “Insiders” hold relatively secure employment at large corporations. They suffer from overwork and lack of purposefulness in the workplace. Despite high levels of job security, workers in this group tend to hold the most pessimistic views about their future among this study’s informants. “Outsiders” have contract-based employment. They lack educational credentials and chose to adjust practically to insecurity rather than to protest injustices. Paradoxically, the fact that many of them work for nearly minimum wage provides them with some sense of security because they can believe that their situation cannot get any worse. “Meaning seekers” tend to come from middle-class backgrounds, and they deliberately chose unstable employment to pursue what they love or think is meaningful. As they tend to assume that their current situation is temporary, their perception of insecurity is often a conflicted mix of innocent optimism and sweeping pessimism. The gender of interviewees adds another layer of complexity to their responses to precarity. In particular, women in the “insider” category are torn between the two contrasting expectations about being a successful career woman and caregiver. Despite differences produced by individuals’ biographical trajectories, their prospects for the future, and various resources endowed with them, there exists a clear tendency to cope with precarity by individual means. The paper calls for a thick explanation of how young adults understand and come to terms with precarity, which is indispensable to forge a meaningful critique of skewed neoliberal narratives of individual efforts and talents.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to examine the pros and cons among Japanese youth of their positive attitudes towards their non-metropolitan hometowns. They wish to have a relaxing life with their families and friends in the hometowns. However, they end up with limited job opportunities by the very relationship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to examine Japanese youth and their increasing positive attitudes (地元志向) towards their non-metropolitan hometowns. Japan’s low birth rate and aging population is leading to a crisis which endangers local municipalities to disappear. In recent years, however, the Japanese youth in non-metropolitan areas are reluctant to out-migrate to and reside in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Instead, they prefer to live with parents until marriage, graduation, or other life events.

Japanese youth’s preference to remain in their hometowns has become more feasible with the innovations of infrastructure and growth of entertainment industry in non-metropolitan areas since the 2000s. This change satisfies local Japanese youth’s lifestyles. For example, they can possess their own vehicles for personal use; this modern lifestyle allows them the leisure to spend time with their friends unlike their counterparts, struggling in cities.

Contrarily, this “consummatory” lifestyle, aspired by the local youth, may only be sustainable by the support of their parents. Due to the fact that non-metropolitan areas both lack profit and job opportunities, the youth are faced with difficulties sustaining their life without their parental aid. Particularly, local youth with low academic attainment often obtain jobs only through local connections and then are limited to precarious employment. Their local networks assign them to certain types of work, such as construction and elderly care. Thus, the consummatory lifestyle of the local youth appears to be fragile.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how people at a newly-built Korean international school in Japan are imagining and practicing ideal education. Ethnographic research shows that the school’s stakeholders tend to retreat to ethnic identity when the school cannot present a clear alternative value to pursue.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores how students, teachers, and parents at a newly-built Korean international school in Japan are imagining and practicing ideal education. More specifically, I investigate how people narrate their ideals about skills, qualifications, and achievements in the context of secondary education. Unlike traditional Korean schools in Japan, which cultivate a monolithic expatriate North Korean citizen identity, the school explicitly seeks to produce border-crossing persons [ekkyôjin] who can thrive regardless of their ethnic backgrounds in and outside Japan. This school's emergence indicates a broader shift in educational visions among Korean schools in Japan toward shaping border-crossing people not bound by their ethnicity and nationality: this school does this by teaching English, Japanese, and Korean. However, my 4-month ethnographic study revealed that the lack of a cohesive school policy undermines pedagogical consistency. While leaving the concept of border-crossing relatively open allows for school stakeholders’ interpretive flexibility, the lack of singular goal sometimes negatively affects community solidarity, making the organization less cohesive and the teaching less consistent. Language learning poses another challenge to this goal. Most students are long-term Korean students in Japan or newcomers from South Korea: they are often more comfortable learning Korean and Japanese than English, due to linguistic proximity. Students’ difficulty in achieving English proficiency dissatisfies some parents who expected their children to become trilingual. Moreover, this unmet desire for trilingualism conflicts with the goals of parents from longer-established Korean families in Japan, who value the school as a close-knit community that helps students confirm their Korean ethnic identity. The intimate atmosphere of a small school supports such identity cultivation, as they desire, but at the cost of resources for those who aspire to explore specific fields, such as sciences. The school's current disorientation demonstrates the challenge of constructing an education model around something other than shared ethnicity. The lack of a consistent and clear alternative value produces more precarity and anxiety for students’ futures.