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- Convenors:
-
Yutaka Yoshida
(Cardiff University)
Yoko Demelius (University of Turku)
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- Chair:
-
Yutaka Yoshida
(Cardiff University)
- Discussant:
-
Yutaka Yoshida
(Cardiff University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Location:
- Iuridicum Novum, Room Epsilon G./1.
- Sessions:
- Sunday 30 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
This panel explores marginality as a catalyst for identifying strategies to cope with, question, and challenge social norms towards an alternative future by deconstructing the perceived inherent deficiency of marginality and contemplating potential freedom in contemporary Japan.
Long Abstract
This panel explores marginality and potential freedom in contemporary Japan and interrogates widely accepted societal norms. As the myth of Japan’s homogeneity became the subject of vigorous academic debate during the 1980s and 1990s, the notion of diversity in Japan was framed in terms of the embodied dichotomy between the Japanese majority and ethnic minorities. Both practical issues faced by municipalities and international pressure on the national government to accommodate diversity prompted the state to devise its master narrative on tayousei (diversity). However, diversity is continuously positioned vis-à-vis monolithic normative values and as ‘something to cope with’ while maintaining the existing structure. As Japanese society witnesses increasing diversity and fragmentation, the imposition of idealised norms causes many individuals to experience ikizurasa – a sense of alienation from the ‘ordinary’ without an apparent cause or ibasho ga nai – ‘a sense of being out of place, out of sorts, disconnected’ (Allison 2013, 14). Accordingly, research on the voices of situational marginalities among those who feel marginalised, including those conventionally categorised as the majority, remains scant. Thus, this panel approaches marginality as a catalytic driving force for identifying strategies to cope with, question, and challenge normative practices in Japan toward an alternative future by deconstructing the perceived inherent deficiency of marginality. To this end, the panel accommodates papers that address issues of marginality and access to actual cases that prompt an interrogation of existing normative practices.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 30 August, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper explores the homosocial world of male vigilante YouTubers whose offline lives and activities unfold in the Shinjuku realm, elucidating how the combination of online vigilante culture and offline Shinjuku culture equips them with aesthetic and practical tools to assert their way of life.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the homosocial world of male vigilante YouTubers whose offline lives and activities unfold in the Tokyo Shinjuku realm to elucidate how the combination of online vigilante culture and offline Shinjuku culture equips them with aesthetic and practical tools to assert their way of life. Vigilante YouTubers typically film confrontations with those who are engaging with criminal and illicit acts, ranging from sexual assaults in public spaces and prostitution to fraudulent acts and infidelity. They earn revenues by uploading their footage via the content-sharing platform, which often becomes a popular channel for its exciting and tense contents. In the backdrop of crumbling prototypical ‘salaryman’ masculinity due to the changing economic landscapes and gender norms in neoliberal Japan, vigilante YouTubers who challenge hegemonic masculinity by often exposing salarymen’s wrongdoings behind their legitimate façade, weaponising surveillance gaze and exercising moral superiority negotiate an embedded concept of socially ‘proper’ role (Demelius & Yoshida, 2025). Often portrayed as an underworld filled with scandals, Red Light and criminal activities, Shinjuku has accommodated various neighbourhoods and phases over many years. Particularly in recent years, male vigilante-content creators capitalise on the underground and blasé image of Shinjuku while legitimising alternative forms of masculinities. These vigilantes cultivate social media culture to take advantage of the attention economy while engaging in and filming edgework in their Shinjuku turf. By doing so, they try to thrive and justify free lifestyles away from the so-called ‘respectable mainstream’. Based on the combined theoretical frameworks of Stuart Hall’s (1996) ‘floating signifier’ and Tursic’s (2019) ‘aesthetic space’, this study analyses ethnographic data, interview materials, and published materials offered by the vigilantes who strategically position themselves in the proximity of the underworld. In due course, the present study draws out phenomenological snapshots of proprietors’ Shinjuku aesthetics, thereby highlighting the significant role that physical space plays in shaping the aesthetics of the vigilante YouTubers.
Paper short abstract
Based on fieldwork in Tokyo, this paper analyzes migrant-run restaurants as intercultural urban infrastructure. It shows how such restaurants play varied social roles—interethnic hubs, low-intensity contact zones, or intra-ethnic spaces—shaping everyday coexistence across diverse neighborhoods.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines migrant-run restaurants in Tokyo as forms of intercultural urban infrastructure, focusing on how they operate within neighborhoods that are commonly characterized as socially stable and ethnically homogeneous, yet increasingly shaped by everyday encounters with migration. Drawing on qualitative data from 30 in-depth case studies of migrant-owned eateries across Tokyo conducted in 2025, the paper shifts attention away from exceptionalized ethnic enclaves toward a broader range of Tokyo neighborhoods, where migration remains limited in scale but increasingly visible in commercial life.
Building on research on social infrastructure, conviviality, and intercultural third places, the paper analyzes how migrant restaurants mediate social relations under differing neighborhood conditions. The cases reveal considerable variation in the roles these establishments play, even within similar neighborhood contexts. In low-density residential areas, migrant restaurants more often operate as interethnic hubs that sustain repeated interactions, local familiarity, and informal ties between migrant owners and Japanese regulars. By contrast, in diverse commercial neighborhoods, more restaurants function as cautious or low-intensity contact zones, where interaction between migrant proprietors and a diverse population of customers is routine but socially bounded. Other establishments, however, serve as intra-ethnic clienteles, providing linguistic comfort, mutual support, and informational resources for migrant communities.
Rather than treating intercultural interaction as a universal outcome, the paper argues that migrant restaurants function as flexible forms of urban infrastructure whose social roles are contingent and relational. These roles are shaped by multiple factors, including neighborhood migrant density, cuisines and drinking cultures, perceived ethnic distance, length of operation, and restaurateurs’ own orientations toward sociability and community engagement. Positioned within the panel theme of “Japan on the Margins,” the paper reframes migrant restaurants as sites where the margins of migration are negotiated within otherwise mainstream urban neighborhoods. By foregrounding everyday, small-scale practices rather than dramatic conflict or policy intervention, the paper contributes an empirically grounded account of how intercultural coexistence is quietly negotiated in contemporary Tokyo.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the complex relationship between gay and bisexual men and a heterosexual marriage system in Japan, with a particular focus on those who marry women while desiring other men. it opens new conceptualisation of marriage that cannot be reduced to a union of two persons.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the complex relationship between gay and bisexual men and a heterosexual marriage system in Japan, with a particular focus on those who marry women while harboring romantic or sexual desires for other men. Historically, heterosexism has coerced many gay and bisexual men into conforming to societal expectations of heterosexual marriage. However, recent advancements in LGBTQ+ rights, particularly the legalization of same-sex marriage in many regions, have offered alternative pathways. Despite these progressive changes, this chapter argues that the gay rights movement, while empowering in many ways, inadvertently marginalizes married gay and bisexual men by prioritizing same-sex partnership as the normative ideal.
To illuminate this tension, this paper draws upon articles from Japanese gay magazines Barazoku and Badi, which document evolving attitudes toward heterosexual marriage and sexuality among gay and bisexual men in Japan. Additionally, it incorporates transcripts from interviews with former participants, including married gay men navigating dual identities and single gay men grappling with societal pressures. By analyzing these narratives, the study examines how discourses around same-sex partnership and heteronormativity impact individuals’ choices and the perceptions of their relationships. Finally, it focuses on the Japanese marriage advocacy specifically those promoting marriages between sexual minorities (in Japanese, called Yūjō Kekkon [friendship marriage]). Friendship marriages are also influenced by the tension between same-sex marriage/partnership and heterosexual marriage. By examining narrative found on the Web site of a pioneering friendship marriage agency in Japan, Karāzu[colours], the study maps out how men attracted to men, gay identity, and hetero- same-sex marriage intersect and relate to each other.
This study’s significance lies in connecting two areas rarely examined together: gay studies and mixed-orientation marriage. By foregrounding the experiences of gay and bisexual men, it opens new ways of thinking about hetero- and same-sex marriage that go beyond seeing it only as a choice between two spouses. This perspective also reveals how gay and bisexual men’s own discourses shape, contest, and reframe norms around marriage and desire, challenge (or be subject to) both heteronormative assumptions and dominant models of queer “liberation”.