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Japanâs literature of precarity
Roman Rosenbaum
Introduction and nomenclature
Worldwide dissatisfaction with the inequality and the occupation of the worldâs resources by a mere one per cent of the population, the worldâs super rich, whose recklessness may at least partially be responsible for the global financial crisis (GFC), which is believed to have begun in 2007, has led to increasing dissatisfaction of the working poor.1 This trend has led to the introduction of a new nomenclature whose global impact is explained by the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman:
The French theorists speak of prĂŠcaritĂŠ, the Germans of Unsicherheit and Risikogesellschaft, the Italians of incertezza and the English of insecurity âbut all of them have in mind the same aspect of the human predicament, experienced in various forms and under different names all over the globe, but felt to be especially unnerving and depressing in the highly developed and affluent part of the planet â for the reason of being new and in many ways unprecedented.2
In relation to this apparent rise of precarity, the year 2011 saw an unprecedented level of public protests and the emergence of international high-profile campaigns such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, whose repercussions are being felt all over the world. Ominously in Japan, this global sense of precarity combined with the twin catastrophes of the March TĂ´hoku earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to create an unprecedented example of cultural crisis, referred to as muen shakai, or the relationless liquefied society.3 With the world deliberating the implications of social versus natural precarity, there were global ripples such as Occupy London, Sydney and New York and the catch cry of the day was âWe are the 99%â. Ching Kwan Lee and Yelizavetta Kofman observe, for instance, that âit is obvious that precarious workersâ discontent was behind the general strike in Egypt on February 11, 2011.â4 This event, part of what has been called the Arab Spring, is closely related to the rise of pre-carity in adolescent youth. Lee and Kofman also observe that:
the number reaches 60% in Egypt, for instance. Finding themselves in âwait-hood,â that is waiting for (good) jobs, for marriage and intimacy, and for full participation in their societies, this segment of the Arab society is readily available for political mobilization.5
As if this was not enough, the world experienced some major catastrophes, from Hurricane Irene in the United States to cyclone Yasi and major flooding in Australia but culminating in the unprecedented scale of the triple calamity of 3/11 in Japan, the earthquake, nuclear meltdown and tsunami of 11 March. The synergetic effect of this natural and social disenfranchisement has triggered grassroots movements and public outbursts of political dissent the world over, but also marks the escalation of what may be referred to as a precariat6 consciousness in literature and the arts. The following chapters of scholarly research are dedicated to the emergence of a new discourse that revolves around the representation of the working poor whose rise into the canonical sphere is yet another symptom of the increasing divide between rich and poor the world over. This book focuses on what Lisette Gebhardt has referred to as Nippon prekär or the Japanese precariat, in relation to the increasing social isolation as well as an inability to bond in contemporary Japan. Whereas the global similarities in the status quo of the working poor lend themselves to the conceptualisation of an imagined community of disenfranchisement in the global market place, often the realities are very specific. This global trend to polarise post-millennium societies into the rich and the working poor as a distinct stratum of society marks a paradigm shift from the old concept of a national Marxist proletariat to the conceptualisation of a global precariat. Thus, in light of the longevity of Japanâs recessionary economy, Gebhardt also suggests that whereas the 1990s following the collapse of the bubble economy signified Japanâs âlost decadeâ, the first ten years of the new millennium from 2000 to 2010 marks the âdecade of the precariatâ.7 Gebhardtâs study focuses predominantly on the disenfranchised communities in Japan, where several large and distinct social groups such as hikikomori (social withdrawal), freeters, NEET and the more traditional unemployed workers of the salarymen social stratum exist,8 all of them finding themselves lumped with the âhave notsâ of the Japanese working class. Similar studies focusing on the European situation, such as Guy Standingâs recent analysis of the precariat as the ânew dangerous classâ, suggest that the term describes a truly global phenomenon wherein the old Marxist rhetoric no longer appears sufficient.9
Timeline of the precariat
In contemporary Japan, popular culture is increasingly distributed to a generation who range from juveniles to adolescents who have grown up after the ending of Japanâs economic miracle and the bursting of its economic bubble of the early nineties. The initial extended period of economic downturn, beginning after the end of the baburu keiki (bubble economy), roughly about 1991 and lasting into the new millennium, had been termed ushinawareta jĂťnen (the lost decade), but has recently been relabelled in accordance with the unexpected longevity of Japanâs economic decline.10 As a result the decade from 2001 to 2010 is nowadays also included in the period of economic decline, resulting in an unprecedented twenty years of economic contraction, referred to as ushinawareta nijĂťnen or âtwo lost decadesâ. This was punctuated by the 2011 TĂ´hoku earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima nuclear disaster and, arguably even worse, the post-3/11 era. In Post-Postwar Society, Yoshimi Shunya, for instance, links the notion of Japanâs unending postwar period with the definition of Japanâs lost decades as the time after the period of high economic growth ended with the collapse of Japanâs asset price bubble.11 In fact, Japanâs economic turnaround was gradual rather than catastrophic and similar decade-long periods of economic downturn are quite common in developed nations in the twentieth century.12 There have been several detailed economic explanations of this catastrophic decline in national wealth, such as Hiroshi Yoshikawaâs Japanâs Lost Decade (2001), Tim Callen and Jonathan Ostryâs Japanâs Lost Decade: Policies for Economic Revival (2003), as well as Shimokawa KĂ´ichiâs Ushinawareta jĂťnen ha norikoeraretaka (Have we overcome the lost decade, 2006). Yet, there are very few scholarly studies on the cultural and literary repercussions of this unprecedented period of economic devastation. Two notable exceptions are Lisette Gebhardtâs analysis of the literature of the precariat in Nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit: Zeitgenoessische japanische Literatur im Zeichen der Prekaeren (After the setting of darkness: Contemporary Japanese literature in terms of the precariat, 2010) and the special edition of Contemporary Japan entitled Mind the Gap: Stratification and Social Inequality in Japan (2010). In fact, as a result of the combined effect of prolonged economic stress, rising unemployment, and an uncertain future, many young Japanese who reached working age at the beginning of these lost two decades in the nineties have begun to express their experience of prolonged economic stagflation via a variety of popular cultural media.13 In essence the chapters of this book focus on this ever-increasing proportion of literature, film, manga and anime that depict the side effects of prolonged economic stress on disenfranchised communities and the well-being of the individual in Japan.
The media has also reintroduced the related term âa new lost generationâ. In the Japanese context this refers to those of the shĂťshoku hyĂ´ga ki (employment ice age period) generation. This period in turn refers to people who were born between 1970 and 1986, and were forced to look for work after the Japanese bubble economy collapsed in the early nineties. The term lost generation also enjoys a long genealogy in the Western press and was originally popularised by Ernest Hemingway to refer to the generation, or more precisely the age cohort, that came of age during the First World War.14 Yet, it has also been used to refer to other transcultural phenomena, such as the lost generation in China, for those children who missed secondary or higher education because of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the generations of youth in South American countries in the 1990s who evaded the school system and turned to a life of crime. Quite similarly, in Japan the contemporary lost generation that has slowly emerged after two decades of economic demise and the resulting wave of debilitating social circumstances is now finding cathartic expression in a new literary paradigm that resonates with precariat vocabulary such as kakusa shakai,15 freeter, parasite singles,16 NEET, unemployment, as well as depression and hikikomori (acute social withdrawal syndrome).17 The modus operandi of this new literature has been defined by Amamiya Karin in an interview for a special edition of the literary magazine Kokubungaku entitled Saidoku: puroretaria bungaku (Rereading: Proletarian Literature), where she was asked:
What do you think about the contemporary, newly written proletarian literature (like the blogs and diaries of labourers)?
They are amazing, but I would rather refer to them as precariat literature.18
While her social involvement has earned her the moniker âMaria of the Precariatâ from the Asahi shinbun,19 Amamiya is credited with verbalising the move from proletarian to precariat literature, a trend that has been referred to elsewhere as freeter bungaku. Yoshimoto Takaaki, for instance, has identified a kind of literature of impoverishment, which may correlate the proletarian literary movement of the 1920s with the current generation of working poor in Japan through the neologism of the precariat in his treatise Hinkon to shisĂ´ [Ideology and poverty, 2008]. Takaaki in particular points out that the link between these two historically distant literary trends may be the impoverished social conditions that many young people experience in Japan today. Because of its evocative portrayal of the cruel labour conditions, Kobayashi Takijiâs KanikĂ´sen (Crab-Canning Boat) written in the early ShĂ´wa period (1926â1989) resonates with the working poor in contemporary Japan.20 However, despite the radically different social conditions between the two temporally distant epochs and the at best tenuous link in literary traditions, Amamiya suggests that the difference lies primarily in an increase in complexity and the fact that the individuals concerned believe that their impoverishment and disenfranchisement is often a personal matter.21
Yoshimoto states that the increase in social impoverishment is not just reflected in literary trends but the similarity between the current decrease in earning power, the inability of families to even pay school fees and the lack of full-time employment have been described as daini no haisen-ki or the second period of defeat.22 Following closely behind Japanâs never-ending âp...
