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- Convenors:
-
Marta Fanasca
Deborah Giustini (KU Leuven)
Marcello Francioni (Oxford Brookes University)
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- Chair:
-
Marcello Francioni
(Oxford Brookes University)
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 25 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Along macro and structural changes in society, post-growth Japan is both adapting and questioning these processes on a micro level. Through ethnography, we explore alternative practices —of love, of sex, of work— as forms of status quo resistance and as future landscapes for societal change.
Long Abstract:
Officially entered in its "post-growth" stage, Japan struggles to overcome complex issues such as demographic decline, a relationless society, and a stagnant economy. Using a macro dimension, scholarship has emphasized related negative trends, including the formation of new affective units outside the family institution and ineffective solutions against gender and sexual discrimination in society and the economy. However, this approach does not account for smaller niches of resistance that express Japan's resilience against social, economic, and affective turmoils.
This panel analyses these forms of resistance by taking three different case studies to explore alternative professional, gender, and affective trajectories in contemporary Japan. We argue that, along main macro and structural scenarios of change and destitution, Japan is both adapting and questioning these processes, with individuals increasingly resorting to alternative practices —of love, of sex, of work. To this extent, the first presenter focuses on the interdependent relationship between gay bars and competing technology, showing that notwithstanding many aspects of relational gay life are now Internet and app-mediated, Japanese-style gay bars continue to survive. The second presenter instead addresses the provision of commodified intimacy such as dansō escort services as a way to create new affective bonds, in contrast with the notion of Japan as relationless. The third presenter observes women who, attempting to escaping gender-stratified corporate structures, fall for the promises of 'foreign option' professions as gender-equal work environments, showing how these attempts often clash with the pervasive reality of labour discrimination.
Together, we also methodologically question the investigation of Japan's post-growth trajectories as a macro process, and argue for more in-depth ethnographic studies of human actors engaged in socio-economic, affective practices as a proximal research method. We advance that ethnographic praxis leads us to the situated and interpretative nature of such practices, which helps appreciating that people's trajectories in contemporary Japan are shaped both through individual agency responses and structural conditions. Thus, the panel finds that where the Japanese institutions fail to provide concrete solutions to structural problems, actors increasingly take on practices that can elicit individuals' perceptions and preferences among possible and probable alternative futures for their society and lifestyle.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 25 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The emancipatory turn promised by the 'foreign option' entices women to escape Japan's gender-stratified corporate structures for the language services industry. However, their trajectories clash with failures of work-life balance, discriminatory socio-economic relations and gender ideologies.
Paper long abstract:
In the post-growth scenario of Japan's economic and society, women face new challenges overlaid on long-established ones. Despite renewed labour participation and policies, factors such as over-representation in non-regular employment, pay gap, employment discontinuity, and the burden of domestic work call into question the future of gender equality in Japan.
This paper explores the narratives of a group of Japanese women who, to escape gender discrimination in regular employment, deploy their linguistic expertise in temporary employment as interpreters. Building on the sociology of work and language economics, it highlights the professional/personal trajectories of Japanese women engaged in the economy of linguistics acts. Thus, adopting a critical approach to neoliberal linguistic instrumentalism, it examines a segment of the Japanese female labour force, who - by mobilising rare communication skills - constructs an emancipatory turn from gender-stratified corporate structures. Besides, it questions women's investment dynamics into languages as an organising construct for their presence in the labour market, in a feminised industry where they feel gender equity is secured.
Drawing upon a wider comparative mixed-method research on the Japanese labour market for linguistic services, this paper focuses on a micro-level ethnographic understanding of a temporary form of skilled work and women's aspirations. It also contends that ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative data help giving voice to working women's experiences, values, and transitions to complement the quantitative mapping of gender inequality in Japan. The paper contributes to scholarship by scanning female interpreters' contextual situation in the contemporary Japanese labour market, but also resonating with broader observations of gender discrimination and precarious female work, including a better understanding of women's trajectories from regular employment and their gender implications in Japan beyond the part-time model, as the 'means by which women enter […] alternative systems of thought and value' (Kelsky 2001, 101). It finds that interpreting, and the ethos of linguistic instrumentalism it carries, promises to informants a work-life balance and career growth. However, findings also show that informants' work trajectories in interpreting are not immune from gender stereotypes and occupational segregation, and thus remain a 'professional chimera' for their future.
Paper short abstract:
Using ethnographic material, this paper investigates the trajectory of Japanese queer nightlife by highlighting the interdependent relationship between Japanese-style gay bars in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ni-chome and competing technologies of service, such as convenience stores and mobile applications.
Paper long abstract:
Amidst the 25-year-long economic recession that has hit Japanese economy at large after the explosion of the bubble and the extensive cut to companies' entertainment budgets (settai), the sector of Japanese queer nightlife (along with its straight counterpart) has witnessed an extensive shrinkage where venues such as hostess clubs and gay bars have progressively reduced their clientele and often closed down. The strenuous competition from the multi-fold growth of the sex industry (sei fuuzoku), the rise of the "healing boom" (iyashi buumu), the development and pervasiveness of convenience stores (konbini) and the use of internet-based dating sites and applications have forced Japanese-style gay bars in Tokyo's "gay town," Shinjuku Ni-chome, the focus of this paper, to reconsider their relationship with other segments of the service industry in order to survive. Using the researcher's ethnographic data, gathered while working as a miseko (bar help) at a Japanese-style gay bar, this paper will focus on the interdependent and often unresolved relationships entertained between gay bars and other technologies of service. In particular, by looking at the bars' ambivalent attitudes towards the frequentation of convenience stores in Ni-chome and towards the use of dating apps, the paper will discuss the trajectory of queer nightlife in Ni-chome and its survival. Furthermore, it will argue against the simplistic view that the decline of traditional models of queer entertainment has been brought about by the aforementioned competing technologies of service, but by a missed opportunity to learn from them and to adapt to the changing economic landscape of the country.
Paper short abstract:
The provision of commodified intimacy such as the one provided by the dansō escort services is a way to create new affective bonds, in contrast with the shared idea of Japan as relationless and oriented toward substituting human with technology-mediated interactions.
Paper long abstract:
Among the many buzzwords defining contemporary Japan, "muen shakai" refers to the country as a relationless society. The decreasing number of marriages, the lack of sex, the growth of lonely deaths are just the more mediatic examples of what seems to be a general lack of connections among individuals. This trend is not exclusive to Japan, as the dissolution of the family characterises neoliberal societies at large (Hardt and Negri 2000). Scholarship has been focusing on presenting Japan and its future as an AI-dominated society, where individuals will increasingly rely on futuristic technologies and augmented reality as providers of emotions and support (Galbraith 2011).
In spite of such predicted trajectory, there is another phenomenon running on a parallel track to be taken into account when imagining the future of relations in Japan, namely how the service sector is investing and innovating its enterprises to provide sentimental and emotional services.
The aim of this intervention is to analyse those services oriented to satisfy the sentimental and emotional needs of individuals, as a way to contrast the shared view of Japan as relationless. Adopting a feminist perspective, I will take as a case study the FtM crossdresser (dansō) escorts service, and then I will focus on other similar businesses aiming at a female clientele.
The first case study, analysed through an ethnographic approach, will demonstrate the intense emotional investment of dansō escorts and their clients, shedding light on how the entire business is based on the performance, provision, and purchase of human emotions. The other examples, investigated through digital ethnography and online data analysis, functionally consider how the market of emotion is on the rise, providing clients with intimacy at large and affect, to be intended as the "ability to affect and a susceptibility to be affected" (Massumi 2002).
The final goal is to question how, far from being a relationless society, Japan is instead turning toward the development of new forms of emotional experience, which are commodified but not less real or significative compared to non-commodified, traditional relations, and based on human exchanges.