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Session 207: Youth, Media, and Neoliberal Capitalism in Heisei Japan
Organizers: Gabriella Lukacs, Duke University; Colin Scott Smith, Yale University
Chair: Colin Scott Smith, Yale University
Discussant: Anne Allison, Duke University
Keywords: youth culture, mass media, neoliberal capitalism, contemporary Japan.
Japan’s prolonged economic recession and the concomitant restructuring in the corporate world have produced much anxiety and uncertainty about the nation’s future social and economic vitality. At the same time, the past decade has witnessed an intensification of mass media and the consumer culture industry particularly concentrated in youth markets. This panel addresses the concurrence and connections between these two developments. One of the ways in which Japan’s crisis has been articulated is in terms of a moral panic centered on youth. High school girl prostitution, "parasite singles," and the dramatic increase in the number of young part-time workers, or freeters, among many other youth-related phenomena, have all been the focus of concern in public discourse. The culture industries have been quick to capitalize on these trends, commodifying and incorporating them into the mobilization of labor and consumers. This has led not only to the further embedding of youth subjectivities in mass-mediated consumer culture, but also to the production of new social identities and differences, as well as to the reproduction of old social inequities.
This panel takes an anthropological approach to the dramatic social and economic events that have characterized the last decade in Japan. While each paper looks at a different aspect of the crisis, they all ask how youth-related phenomena arise out of the workings of neoliberal capitalism and how formations of power are both challenged and reproduced through the mass media and culture industries.
What’s Love Got to Do with It? "Parasite Singles," Trendy Dramas, and Post-Fordism in Contemporary Japan
Gabriella Lukacs, Duke University
"Parasite singles," a term coined by Japanese sociologist Yamada Masahiro, refers to young unmarried women who keep postponing marriage and continue to live with their parents in order to maximize their disposable income and enjoy a single lifestyle. As these young women have grown (up) to be the wealthiest and savviest consumers in the last two decades, they have also become the target of an impassioned neo-nationalist discourse that blames them for the dwindling birthrate, the crisis in the construction business and—ultimately—for the economic recession. At the same time, the service sector, including the television industry, is making enormous profits targeting these young single women.
This paper explores how the Fuji Network tapped into and reinforced the "parasite single" subjectivity and culture by launching a new primetime genre, the trendy drama. These serials are oriented to love and, most commonly, they conclude with the self-development of heroines in marriage. I argue that in these programs marriage becomes a master trope for consumption in that it signifies commodity acquisition par excellence. Correspondingly, interviews with trendy drama producers reveal that they conceptualize this genre as a new "integrated, multi-purpose marketing and entertainment machine" that, while entertaining viewers, saturates them with information on consumer trends. I conclude that these programs reproduce the contradictions within which single women are enmeshed in contemporary Japan; while these dramas encourage their viewers to become elite consumers, in reality, young women remain marginalized from the normative world of work and wage labor.
Girls’ Culture, Girls’ Sexuality: A View From the Shōjo Manga Industry
Jennifer Prough, Duke University
The last decade has witnessed a preoccupation with the status of girls’ sexuality in Japan. The media, academics, politicians, and pundits of all sorts have weighed in on the crisis of girls’ sexuality, most notably the enjo-kōsai and the kogyaru phenomena. Enjo-kōsai, literally "assisted dating," is a phenomenon which began in the early nineties wherein high school girls receive money for dating older men, sometimes including sexual exchanges; kogyaru is a girls’ consumer fashion trend often linked to the enjo-kōsai phenomenon. Based on two years of fieldwork in the shōjo manga industry in Tokyo this paper examines how the manga industry has engaged with recent discourses about girls’ sexuality. Over the course of the postwar period, manga has come to be the backbone of popular culture in Japan and shōjo manga has become a subtext to discussions of girls’ culture. As the mainstream manga industry participates in the commodification of youth culture, current trends, such as kogyaru, are reflected and refracted in the pages of
shōjo manga. In fact, according to several of the editors I interviewed the biggest trend in shōjo manga at the turn of the century has been sex. Thus, tacking between notions of "what girls want to read" and what is appropriate for young readers, the shōjo manga industry navigates tricky terrain. This paper will begin to unravel the complex negotiations between the shōjo manga industry, discourses about girls’ sexuality, and youth culture itself.Excessive Freedom: Fear and Fascination with Freeters in Contemporary Japan
Colin Smith, Yale University
The dramatic increase of "freeters," or young, part-time workers, is one of the major developments of Heisei Japan. They are both a source of fascination and a cause for alarm about the future of Japanese society. Images in the mass media of dream-seeking youth looking for alternatives to mainstream career paths, symbolized by the salaryman and office lady, exist side by side with those of youth who have fallen into a social malaise with no future prospects or goals in sight. The mass-mediated discourse on freeters is itself very much a part of the phenomenon and has shaped their image in the public imagination. Based on eighteen months of anthropological fieldwork, this paper examines the social history of the term freeter. By looking at the various ways in which freeters have been promoted and criticized, it asks what all the attention given to them is about, and explores what their contradictory images reveal about the anxieties and cultural politics of Heisei Japanese society. Additionally, it discusses the bearing this public discourse has on the lives and identities of individual freeters. How has the term changed the way people imagine and talk about youth, and how do freeters use the term when talking about themselves?