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.