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- Convenors:
-
Laura Dales
(The University of Western Australia)
Nora Kottmann (German Institute for Japanese Studies)
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- Chair:
-
Lynne Nakano
(The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.20
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the changing forms and socio-spatial implications of being alone in post-COVID-19 urban Japan. The panelists apply diverse perspectives and methods, addressing new ways of engaging socially and new meanings attached to solo behaviour, ranging between connection and disconnection.
Long Abstract:
In this panel we explore the changing forms and implications of being alone in post-COVID-19, urban Japan. While the notion of a solo social actor (ohitorisama) has a discursive history reaching back to the late 19th century, recent developments including the COVID-19 epidemic have produced new ways of engaging socially and new meanings attached to solo behaviour, including intimate practices (Jamieson 2009).
In this panel we explore the changing forms and implications of being alone in post-COVID-19, urban Japan. While the notion of a solo social actor (ohitorisama) has a discursive history reaching back to the late 19th century, recent developments including the COVID-19 epidemic have produced new ways of engaging socially and new meanings attached to solo behaviour, including intimate practices (Jamieson 2009).
Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, we discuss the ways in which intimacy can be fostered within crowds, in busy spaces and beyond households, and while avoiding "the 3Cs". We also address the meaning and limitations of sorokatsu (doing things alone), reflecting on how the ways - and places - to be alone is differently experienced and differently valued depending on a range of individual, sociocultural, economic and temporal factors. We critically examine the rhetoric of individualism and its empowering, as well as exploitative potentials, and the mobilisation of this rhetoric in relation to sharehouses and personal spaces (hitori kūkan). We situate the evolution of sorokatsu in the Japanese context of familialism and demographic shifts, and suggest possiblilities for future development.
The panel brings together four papers that apply diverse perspectives and methods. By focusing on various facets and underlying ambiguities/ambivalences of solo behaviour and intimate spaces, this panel illustrates novel forms of relating and engaging socially, of (dis)connection and aloneness/loneliness. We connect these explorations to wider societal changes, such as demographic change, a de-standardisation of life courses and an increasing fluidity of familial relationships in post-COVID societies, in Japan and beyond.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Laura Dales (The University of Western Australia) Nora Kottmann (German Institute for Japanese Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods, this paper examines the ways that COVID has modified, amplified and challenged pre-existing ideas about being single and doing things alone in a familialist “hyper-solo-society”.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we draw on qualitative and quantitative date to examine changes in the notion of “doing things alone” (sorokatsu), as well as perceptions of being single, since the turn of the century and, in particular, in the context of the ongoing pandemic in Japan. Based on findings from our large-scale survey on COVID and practices of intimacy among unmarried Japanese aged 25 to 49 years (n=4000), we explore the gendered ways that the pandemic has affected Japanese individuals’ social practices as well as their socio-spatial implications. We contextualize these findings using data from long-term ethnographic fieldwork and media and popular literature before and during COVID-time, to demonstrate the ways that COVID has modified, amplified and challenged pre-existing ideas about being single and doing things alone in a familialist “hyper-solo-society” (Arakawa 2017). Preliminary findings point to a parallel but diachronic development: on the one hand an increase in loneliness, social isolation and the longing to be with others and a (partial) normalization of acting alone in public and a shared sense of community – of being alone together – on the other hand.
Caitlin Meagher (University of North Carolina - Asheville)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses market responses to increasing singlehood in Japan. The paper focuses critically on the marketing rhetoric of sharehouses and sorokatsu, which in both cases emphasizes themes of personal emancipation and self-realization.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses market responses to increasing singlehood in Japan. The specific focusis on sorokatsu and sharehouses, two experiential commodities to emerge within the last two decades, both aimed primarily at single women. The paper focuses critically on the marketing rhetoric of sharehouses and sorokatsu, which in both cases emphasizes themes of personal emancipation and self-realization (though in slightly different ways). It asks: why this focus on individualism at this socio-cultural moment? To what extent are these rhetorics empowering, and to what extent are they exploitative? If these experiential commodities are, in fact, empowering, how accessible are they?