Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of reading the air to try to avoid creating trouble (meiwaku). Meiwaku emerges as a strong affective force that shapes the air and results in feelings of difference and detachment. However, the sharing of such feelings can also be constitutive of new relations.

Paper long abstract:

Food and sociality are inextricably linked. A cursory glance into any izakaya window provides a glimpse of its importance to relationality and connection as people chat over a variety of dishes. Such food sociality can be, however, complicated when an individual has to check the ingredients of every dish before eating. As such, people with food allergies talk often about how they feel they have to ‘read the air’ (kūki wo yomu) and not create trouble (meiwaku) when disclosing their allergies.

Reading the air is a highly valued communicative skill in Japan (Maemura 2014; Roquet 2016). It shapes expectations, motivations, and actions within social settings and facilitates smooth relations (Kimura 2010). Not being able to read the air is correspondingly understood as disruptive and damaging to social settings and the smooth management of social relations. It is a skill that is learned, embodied, intersubjective, and situationally dependent, and it entails not just looking or listening but using the whole of the body – and others’ bodies – to perceive, understand and respond to specific social settings.

In this paper I explore how people in Japan try to avoid creating trouble for others and themselves by reading the air when disclosing their food allergies. I trace how the concept of meiwaku - and the feelings of concern that emerge from attempting to avoid creating meiwaku – emerges as a strong affective force that shapes the air. For some, it produces and reinforces feelings of difference, and a process of detachment emerges in social encounters that involve food as well as a sense of separation and non-understanding from classmates and colleagues, shaping their relationships at university and work in diverse ways. However, in events for people with food allergies, feelings of detachment and difference can be constitutive of a sense of community though the sharing of experiences and strategies that they use to (dis)engage from/with food-related sociality. This paper consequently analyses how feelings and affects that emerge from reading the air and attempting to avoid trouble contributes to the lived experience of difference and (dis)connection in food-related sociality in Japan.