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.