Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism

By Nana Okura Gagné

Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes.

Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ILR Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501753046

Book preview

REWORKING JAPAN

Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism

Nana Okura Gagné

ILR PRESS

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To Japanese workers, for their passion, challenges, and humor

To Sumie Okura and Kinya Okura

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Names

Prelude

Introduction

Part 1LOCATING SALARYMEN, CAPITALISM, AND NEOLIBERALISM IN JAPAN

1. Historicizing Japanese Workers and Japanese Capitalism

2. Working in and Working on Neoliberalism

Part 2AFTER WORK, BEYOND LEISURE, AND INDIVIDUAL DESIRES

3. The Business of Leisure, the Leisure of Business

4. Working Hard at Having Fun through Hobbies and Community

Part 3MULTIPLICITIES OF MEN

5. Escaping the Corporate Shackles

6. Navigating the Waves of Work and Life

7. Weathering the Storms of Corporate Restructuring

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is about Japanese men who are working men, family men, aging men, and complex individual men in twenty-first century Japan. While salarymen and hostesses have taught me the importance of their dynamic give-and-take relationship (mochitsu motaretsu no kankei) for enabling and sustaining each other in contemporary Japanese society, not only my fieldwork but also my writing process itself has been supported—often unilaterally—by many people, sometimes making me feel that I have been on the receiving end of an entirely taking relationship (motaretsu no kankei).

This book would never have been possible without the help of many people who were involved in my research, whose support I can never fully reciprocate. First and foremost, I owe my deepest intellectual debt and sincerest gratitude to William Kelly, for his continuous support with critical and thoughtful feedback and invaluable insights at Yale and beyond, and who challenged me to think and analyze holistically, historically, and theoretically. The seeds of his wisdom continue to bear fruit in my work and have continuously helped me to grow my passion for anthropology.

My path to anthropology is something I can never take for granted. I am tremendously grateful for the positive influences through anthropology and history and the intellectual encouragement that made it possible for me to find my home in anthropology. I wish to thank Linda Angst, Tianshu Pan, Peter Perdue, Jordan Sand, David Sutton, and Yuka Suzuki. Without their positive encouragement, my journey to anthropology would never have begun.

At Yale, I have been intellectually guided by Kamari Clark, William Kelly, Karen Nakamura, Linda-Anne Rebhun, Katherine Rupp, Harold Scheffler, and Helen Siu. During my years at Yale, I have benefited not only from faculty members but also from my colleagues who shared their thoughts, ideas, and support with me. These include Allison Alexy, Anne Aronsson, Dominik Bartmanski, Yao Cheng, Seth Curley, Isaac Gagné, Joseph Hill, Hansun Hsiung, Brenda Kombo, Minhua Ling, Molly Margaretten, Richard Payne, Christian Ratcliff, Ryan Sayre, Colin Smith, Nathaniel Smith, Angélica Torres, Gavin Whitelaw, Jun Zhang, and Tiantian Zheng.

Second, this book would not have been possible without the many Japanese workers who spent time with me and shared their lives, emotions, and thoughts. Their experiences and reflections reveal how our understanding of events and narrations of ourselves is always dynamic and changing, being susceptible to such macro events as the Lehman shock and the March 11, 2011, disaster as well as such micro events as family issues, illness, layoffs, and retirement, which disrupted and redirected the lives of my informants. I am truly grateful that so many of them allowed me to continually follow—and be a part of—how they rewrote their own biographies. My greatest debt is owed to Chaoka Kaoru, Fujii Yukiko, Fukuda Ken, Gunji Takeshi, Kaneko Tōru, Katō Tomomi, Kawaguchi Kenjirō, Komori Akiko and Komori Yōichi, Mabe Toshio, Matsushita Akiko, Matsushita Sueo, Murakami Tomoyuki, Nishio Motohide, Ōmori Mikiichiro, Ōnuma Mitsuko, Sasaki Akihito, Sasaki Shinobu, Sasajima Iwao, Shida Kazutaka, Tanahashi Seiichi, and Tanaka Kenji. I am also greatly indebted to Asahina Yoshifumi and to the many members of the marathon club, volunteer cleaning group, and hostess clubs.

My fieldwork has been supported through generous grants from the Japan Foundation, Yale University, the Yale MacMillan Center, and the Yale Council on East Asian Studies (CEAS), as well as Waseda University. In Japan, my fieldwork was aided by David Slater, who always pushed me to think critically through the materials and gave me invaluable advice while I was in the field. A Waseda University Asakawa Fellowship made it possible for me to have access to many Japanese archives, and Glenda Roberts provided me with intellectual guidance and unflagging encouragement during my writing. I am also very grateful to Emma Cook and Kate Goldfarb, who read my manuscript and shared their responses.

At the Institute of Social Science (ISS) at The University of Tokyo, I received much intellectual stimulation and guidance from Hiroshi Ishida and Kaoru Satō, who professionalized me in the Japanese academy. I very much enjoyed the ISS young researchers seminar, exchanging ideas and discussing with colleagues, especially Itō Asei, Sugawara Ikuko, and Taki Hirobumi. My research and writing were further supported by grants from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Faculty of Arts and the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. At CUHK, Ben Ng and Lynne Nakano have supported me and my research greatly. I am also grateful to Jeremy Yellen for providing historical materials. I have been fortunate to be connected with fellow anthropologists at CUHK, Ju-chen Chen, Sealing Cheng, Teresa Kuan, Gordon Mathews, and Huang Yu, who invited me for talks and shared their anthropological insights as well as humor. Moreover, Ann Lui, Negishi Hanako, and Nagaoka Misaki provided essential technical help and meticulous research assistance, which made it possible to put the finishing touches on the book. I am also indebted to Angélica Torres for continuous support as well as practical advice for my writing. Finally, I have greatly benefited from Frances Benson, Jennifer Eastman, and Ellen Murphy from Cornell University Press for their advice and support, Mike Roy for his indexing, and from the excellent copyediting by Matthew Perez and Mary Gendron. I also offer thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading, critical and constructive comments, and suggestions, which helped make my manuscript considerably stronger.

Lastly, I wish to dedicate this book to all the Japanese workers involved in this book as well as to my family, Sumie and Kinya Okura, who have always had faith in me and encouraged me to pursue my passion. I could not have completed this book without the support, love, and cheer at home from Mona Okura Gagné and Paola Samaniego, as well as Elaine and Thomas Gagné, who always encouraged me from overseas. Last but not least, I am profoundly grateful to Isaac Gagné, my academic and life partner, who helped me on a daily basis and kept me encouraged and enthusiastic to study anthropology, Japan, and everyday life by his constant challenging of any sort of stereotypes and assumptions.

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Parts of the introduction, chapter 2, and the conclusion of this book were published in earlier versions and different forms in Neoliberalism at Work: Corporate Reforms, Subjectivity, and Post-Toyotist Affect in Japan, Anthropological Theory, February 6, 2019, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499618807294; and ‘Correcting Capitalism’: Changing Metrics and Meanings of Work among Japanese Employees, Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, no. 1 (2018): 67–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2017.1381984. Parts of chapter 3 were published in an earlier version in a different form in Feeling like a ‘Man’: Managing Gender, Sexuality, and Corporate Life in After-Hours Tokyo, in Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, ed. Tiantian Zheng, 74–91 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016); and The Business of Leisure, the Leisure of Business: Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity through Gendered Service in Tokyo Hostess Clubs, Asian Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2010): 29–55. Parts of chapter 7 were published in an earlier version in a different form in Neoliberal Ideology and Shifting Salarymen Identities under Corporate Restructuring in Japan, in Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities, ed. Jonathon Louth, 181–206 (Chester, UK: University of Chester Press, 2017).

Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Names

This book uses the modified Hepburn system to translate Japanese-language words, with the exception of commonly recognized place-names. All translations are mine except where otherwise noted. When writing Japanese names, I follow the Japanese order of surname followed by personal name.

Prelude

In Ginza, Tokyo, around ten thirty on an ordinary Tuesday night in July, ten members of MTC,¹ a major Japanese telecommunications company, just arrived for after-work drinking at the hostess club Class A.² They were a mixture of young and senior male employees—often referred to as salarymen—and tonight the head of the department, Takizawa-buchō (division manager), arranged the trip to a restaurant and a club to bring his subordinates together to commemorate their midterm business performance. Inside Class A, where I was conducting fieldwork as a hostess, I was waiting with six other hostesses, ready to entertain them and facilitate this night out in the after-hours space of Japan’s night business (mizu shōbai). Mizu shōbai, literally meaning water business for its unpredictable flow of income, facilitates the leisure of business, where Japanese businessmen go after work to create and deepen connections for corporate, semicorporate, or personal entertainment while being served by hostesses. Takizawa-buchō and his coworkers were just such regular customers, and tonight like many nights they had come to celebrate and relax together with drinks and conversation. After the formal greeting to thank them for coming, all the hostesses flew into action, busily preparing whisky for the MTC members and fixing snacks to go with the drinks.

While some men looked quite tipsy already, they quickly sobered when it came to the delicate activity of negotiating seating. No one seemed willing to sit by their boss, Takizawa-buchō, who was absent at the moment for an important phone call. In the end, as one of the main functions of a hostess is being a social lubricant, Mama-san, the head of the club, assigned five hostesses to take their seats among the men and chose another hostess and me to sit directly next to Takizawa-buchō.

After ten minutes or so, Takizawa-buchō hastily rushed in. Unlike what I had expected, he was a very young-looking man in his midforties who did not look like he could be the boss for many of the older employees. Earlier, one senior-looking man told me how MTC is a progressive company based on the new personnel evaluation system—the performance-based merit system, or seika-shugi. It was implemented as a grade, pay, and promotion system based solely on short-term performance, and the company no longer maintained long-term employment and seniority systems. Holding a master’s degree from an elite university, Takizawa-buchō seemed to be one of those employees who had risen through the ranks based on his performance, an example of the changing face of Japanese corporate culture under Japan’s economic restructuring.

Immediately after the official toast, the group began a typical drinking chant as Takizawa-buchō sat down over a glass of whisky. While singing and listening to karaoke songs, some members chatted and joked with other colleagues, some played at seducing the hostesses or impressing Mama-san, and others looked seriously for the next song to sing or simply moved to the music. As I served drinks to the men around me, one of the young members in his late twenties, Katō-san, caught my attention as he was the target of many conversations. Later, while Katō-san and another young man were dancing, they jokingly started taking off their business suits to the beat of the music, beginning with shoes, blazers, and ties. At first they were simply pretending to strip in order to provoke the audience. Yet soon they had caught everybody’s attention—to the extent that they could not stop what they had jokingly started. As Katō-san and the other man stripped down to their underwear, I knew that this was not a normal scene but one that was unfolding nonetheless.

The rest of the members increased their chanting with one goal in mind: they expected Katō-san to strip completely naked for his fellow MTC members. One member asked the hostesses to play an appropriate song, and Berlin’s Take My Breath Away was chosen to create the mood for Katō-san’s following actions. Once Katō-san was under the spotlight, he struck a pose like a body builder in order to warm up the audience. The rest of the male customers and hostesses chanted louder and louder, shouting Show time! to encourage him to strip off his underwear. Not knowing what to do, I sensed the abnormality of this scene from the subtle tense looks on the faces of the other hostesses, and I viscerally reacted to what Katō-san would do in the next moment. When he placed his hands on his underwear, without thinking I quickly jumped out of my seat and ran into the back room, feigning that I had something to do in the kitchen. I heard the increasing laughter and chanting continue, so I quietly waited in the kitchen until the commotion calmed down.

When I returned to my seat, Katō-san was in the bathroom putting his suit back on. Katō-san had in fact taken his underwear off completely in front of the hostesses, Mama-san, and his fellow members of MTC. However, he had managed to do so without exposing his private parts. One hostess, Rica-chan, had offered a whisky glass so that Katō-san could use it as cover, despite its transparency. Similarly, one man had taken out a flat dish for snacks from the table and had it ready for Katō-san’s show. Thus, Katō-san had stripped successfully without completely exposing his body.

Soon after the heated excitement, although the atmosphere was still light and fun, I noticed a slight change in the mood. It turned out that a few members had taken pictures of Katō-san’s nude body with their cell phones from an angle with an unimpeded view and had proposed to send the picture through the company e-mail to everyone in the company for fun. Soon, however, I heard many men saying, That is not good or We should consider Katō’s position. Many objected to the e-mail proposal, though many had been complicit with his stripping. In the end, one senior salaryman said, "Katō did it in order to liven up the atmosphere for us, so it is unfair for us to circulate his picture.… Those who took pictures of Katō with their cell phones should immediately delete them!" As the comment implied, Katō-san had not given the strip show for himself or his own aggrandizement.

Katō-san returned from the bathroom fully dressed, and I returned to my seat. Takizawa-buchō suddenly noticed that I had been away. He had not lost his calm and quiet demeanor and seemed deep in thought, watching Katō-san from a distance. Nodding approvingly, he commented, seemingly to himself, Katō … pretty impressive. I did not know he was a person who would actually do it, you know. Noticing my bewildered face—I was trying hard to interpret what had just occurred—he continued:

It may be hard to understand. But this kind of behavior can be characterized as self-sacrifice [jiko gisei]. This may seem unbelievable to you, but unfortunately we still do this kind of thing … [,] building a sense of togetherness through one’s self-sacrificing actions [jiko gisei ni yori ittaikan wo fukameru]. But honestly … I did not expect to see Katō act like that today. He is a young man, still … he is truly full-fledged [hito toshite dekiteru].

According to Takizawa-buchō, if such self-sacrificing behavior, no matter how embarrassing, degrading, or even offensive, helps to arouse the audience and raise the atmosphere, it is commendable. While Takizawa-buchō used the word self-sacrifice (jiko gisei), he did not simply refer to doing something that was self-demeaning; he meant that it was Katō-san’s willingness and intention of daring to go this far for the others that was to be acknowledged. As a female observer who was inexperienced in both the worlds of business and leisure, I was doubly shocked, not only by what happened with Katō-san (his actions) but also what happened with the others (their reception). Sensing my continued puzzlement, Takizawa-buchō explained, "It is difficult for one individual to raise the atmosphere, you know. Here [at the hostess club] we are all equal [kokodewa minna issho]. But in the company, I am a boss, and they are my subordinates. We hardly associate with each other this way."

Later that evening I had a chance to serve Katō-san. I noticed that he was occasionally but surreptitiously checking the time for his last train. As much as he was clearly having fun, he also secretly told me that he would rather go home as he needed to get ready for work early the next morning. As part of the business of hosting, hostesses cover for those guests who need to leave early without disrupting the atmosphere. In response to my comment that we could cover for him so that he could leave, Katō-san appreciated our offer but told me to wait. A bit later a senior man in his late fifties, Ōta-san, who had seen us talking across the large table, openly said, Katō, you must live a bit far right? Why don’t you leave now? Katō-san was officially released, and within an hour or so, all of the MTC members, including Takizawa-buchō, left Class A.

The night out with the MTC coworkers at Class A reflects what happens in any major business district in Tokyo, where coworkers gather to drink and carouse in the after-work hours. During the heyday of the Japanese economy, when corporate consumption was conspicuous and companies were characterized by long-term employment, seniority, and corporate welfare, after-hour corporate entertainment was prevalent and even essential to facilitate the sense of sociality among the office groups. This leisure of business has long built a sense of trust and corroborated business and human relationships in Japan (Allison 1994; Gagné 2010b).

After over two and a half decades of economic recession that began in 1990, however, companies have started cutting down on long-term employment and seniority, as well as on corporate welfare and corporate entertainment, under corporate restructurings. As in many societies, work, family, and leisure are taking on new meanings as employment systems are restructured, family conditions change, and individual desires for careers and self-fulfillment diversify. This raises an important set of questions: First, for companies like MTC that have undergone restructuring and changed to competitive merit systems based on individual performance, what meaning does after-work sociality now have? More broadly, how have the ongoing pressures from globalization and neoliberalism affected corporations like MTC and their employees?

In many ways, MTC’s night out might seem incongruous with the current trend of neoliberalizing agendas that promote performance and results over human relations and humanistic qualities. Likewise, both Katō-san’s self-effacing performance and Takizawa-buchō’s humanistic reflections might strike some readers as incompatible with the usual stereotype of the Japanese Salaryman as a homogenous and emotionless dominant group. Indeed, the image of Japanese salarymen has long been viewed through the notions of power and corporate ideology (Allison 1994) or various perspectives of salaryman masculinity and hegemonic masculinity (Cook 2016; Dasgupta 2013; Hidaka 2010; Roberson and Suzuki 2003). Salarymen are often seen as metonymic for a corporate institution or for the entire Japanese economy, and they have been regarded as the dominant proponents of dominant ideology—a suited force that has been pulling the strings of the Japanese economy and society.

This dominant image of the Japanese worker and their role in Japanese society notwithstanding, both the representations and the realities of worker’s lives have been undergoing significant changes. Recurring economic crises since the bursting of the bubble economy in 1990, ongoing corporate restructuring, changing demographics, increasing numbers of working women, and social, political, and economic transformations under the global regime of neoliberalism are challenging the existing corporate system, corporate culture, and the livelihoods of many employees who labored under Japan’s postwar modernization and middle-class aspirations.

Recalling how members of MTC proclaimed to me, We at MTC are very much performance based [seika-shugi], and we are so dry [businesslike], it was clear that the kind of interactions I saw at Class A were rare and thus meaningful for the members of MTC in the late 2000s. That night at Class A, the senior employee Ōta-san lamented that under the pressures for raising individual productivity and cutting back on unprofitable interactions, it became increasingly difficult to get to know his colleagues in their ever-competitive and busy work settings. Before Takizawa-buchō came in to the club that evening, Ōta-san had confessed to me, "It is actually quite strange to have a boss who is much younger than I am. At work I call him Takizawa-buchō [boss], but here I call him Takizawa-san [Mr. Takizawa]. And here he treats me with some respect, as if I am senior [sempai toshite]." For Ōta-san, who had experienced the shift to the new performance-based merit system, relating with others through age and seniority is no longer defensible at a progressive company like MTC. At the same time, he also felt that it is equally important to re-create a context that operates differently from the new ideological system of performance that MTC introduced as part of the company’s neoliberal economic reforms.

It is true that some of the members would rather have gone home or left early, and it is also true that the frequency of such events has declined for many companies since the 1990s. At the same time, it is also hasty to conclude that such events are futile for the successful functioning of both the workplace and individuals’ morale in the contemporary economy. As I got to know many Japanese employees and participated with them in the many spheres of their lives, I learned that especially in this moment of workplace restructuring, the very fact that one’s company would still put effort into such gatherings was important for making the employees feel that they were treated with dignity. Within these leisure spaces, where dominant ideological categories could be suspended or at least recontextualized, it was possible to connect with one’s colleagues through more humanistic ways that reflected one’s efforts and spirit. Indeed, Katō-san’s actions and others’ reactions typify how even in the midst of neoliberal reforms that emphasize productivity and efficiency, these seemingly superfluous nights out can become important and meaningful sites for recuperating a sense of humanistic relations.

On a broader level, examining Japanese employees’ life stories as they are interwoven with work, family, and leisure spaces sheds light on the complexity of employees’ lives and on the shifting meanings of these various interconnected contexts that are obscured by the economic logic of twenty-first-century Japan. As I will show throughout this book, it is in contexts like these that seemingly oppositional ideological systems and different individuals clash and operate and where these individuals create new meanings; it is also contexts like these that reveal both the restructuring and resilience that marks the ways Japanese employees wrestle with, navigate through, and further manipulate dominant ideologies operating in the local and global economies.

INTRODUCTION

The Double Bind of the Dominant Group—Salarymen and Neoliberalism

I suppose there are many arguments you could get into politically and socio-economically about [who is more powerful: women or men?]. There are still a lot of disagreements on that level. But in terms of, I suppose, liberation—emotional and cultural liberation—my feeling is that the notion of what we considered woman has expanded dramatically in the last twenty-five years. And I think in many ways I experienced it as a much larger concept. In other words, I can incorporate things I learned from Ned [male Vincent] into Norah [female Vincent]. They easily flow that way. But they did not flow well in other directions. The notion of manhood, what’s acceptable in it, especially heterosexual manhood is much more narrow. (excerpt from the NPR interview, The Woman behind ‘Self-Made Man’ [Vincent 2006b; emphasis added])

Based on eighteen months in her professional disguise as a man (Ned), in her book Self-Made Man Nora Vincent unravels the complexities of American heterosexual manhood. Vincent speaks for the notion of unspokenness as she realized so much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often overspoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there (Vincent 2006a, 46). What Vincent alludes to in her reflections is something out of the grasp of everyday consciousness but which is constantly droning in the background—the silencing effects of dominant ideology.

Vincent’s insights resonate with what I found with many of my informants—Japanese salarymen—the supposed dominant group in Japan. For many observers of Japan, the image of Japanese men is often a group of anonymous business-suited figures riding a crowded train, flowing in streams into the massive concrete corporate buildings that symbolize Japan’s economic power. This is the figure of the Salaryman, the iconic crystallization of Japanese men, and of Japanese corporate life or Japan, Inc. more broadly. While the salaryman as an icon is often spoken about in the media and academic works, salarymen themselves are seldom heard from directly. The absence of their voices from discussions about work, masculinity, and Japanese society more broadly reflects the silencing effects of dominant ideology, which tend to structure debates about power and dominant groups in contemporary society.

My analytical interest in present-day Japanese working men derives from this double silence: the absence of individual men’s voices and the unspoken ideological effects on the assumed dominant group of the Salaryman. Just as anthropological works on gender can undo gender (see Abu-Lughod 1993; Gutmann 1996), studying such slippages between the dominant ideology and supposed dominant group provides nuances in our understanding of how the dominant ideology actually operates and penetrates into a particular social group more than others in a given society.

While anthropologists have long investigated the pervasiveness and invasiveness of ideology in societies, influenced by Marx and Engel’s (1998) concept of dominant ideology, anthropological approaches often focus on the effects of power on nondominant groups. As a result, the dominant group is often left unexamined, taken for granted, and sometimes reified as the dominant ideology, as has been the case with Japanese salarymen. If Japan, Inc. was the global image of the economic powerhouse of Japan from the 1960s through the 1980s, the salarymen were the anonymous army of suited office workers who fired the engine. In this way, in contemporary analyses modern salarymen have been treated as the iconic Salaryman, a historically frozen embodiment of hegemonic masculinity and as the default hegemonic representation of Japanese society (see Cook 2016; Dasgupta 2013; Hidaka 2010; Roberson and Suzuki 2003).

In fact, it was only from the late 1950s that the economic and cultural prosperity of Japan was manifested in workers’ lives in concrete forms and Japanese salarymen and their families came to represent the symbol of Japan’s rising new middle class (E. Vogel 1963). Specifically, the large generational cohort of baby boomers (dankai no sedai) born in the late 1940s and early 1950s became emblematic of postwar democratization and modernization—the capitalist ideology of Japanese-style economic nationalism. By the late 1960s, the men of this cohort were growing into passionate workers (mōretsu shain) who were thought to devote themselves entirely to their companies. Together with remarkable economic growth into the 1980s, these salarymen were characterized as corporate warriors (kigyō senshi), the postwar reincarnation of the samurai ethos. More critically, the significance of this new middle class orientation is that it became conceived of as a symbol of the desirable life and created the ‘mechanical’ tempo of modern routine for salarymen, farmers, and merchants (Plath 1964, 192) even to the extent that it affected people who were not part of a large corporate organization (Kelly 1986; E. Vogel 1963).

Consequently, modern Japanese salarymen have been analyzed alternately as symbols of Japanese modernity (Plath 1964; E. Vogel 1963), as the primary proponents of corporate ideology (Allison 1994; Hidaka 2010), or as a locus of hegemonic masculinity (Cook 2016; Dasgupta 2013; Hidaka 2010; Roberson and Suzuki 2003). At the same time, the image of salarymen as the dominant group who occupy a hegemonic position of gender, sexuality, class and nation in society (Roberson and Suzuki 2003, 1) remained unquestioned and instead became pervasive for a number of reasons, it was both easy to believe and easy to explain in terms that accounted for Japan’s economic successes, supposed cultural uniqueness, as well as gendered relations. As such, the salarymen image as the dominant group, ideology, and hegemonic masculinity became hegemonic itself in the literature and has left the experiences of salarymen themselves largely unexamined.

The Salaryman in Crisis? The Vicissitudes of Salarymen’s Lives

The image of salarymen in contemporary Japan and throughout the world rests on the backs of real salaried men who have lived in postwar and now postbubble Japan, and who carry with them complex and varied histories, motivations, and desires. While there is a lingering characterization of salarymen as dominant and hegemonic in academic discourse, popular discourse increasingly portrays salarymen as an anachronistic figure of the past. The postbubble economic recession that began in 1991 tarnished the once positive image of salarymen. Corporate retrenchment and intensified global competition under neoliberal economic reforms have shaken conventional corporate practices—long-term employment, the seniority system, and collective responsibility (Abbeglen 1958; Clark 1979; Rohlen 1974)—that previously protected and rewarded the livelihood of Japanese salarymen.

Demography also lies behind the new conundrum of the salarymen. With an aging population and a falling birth rate, in 2017 over 40 percent of the workforce was aged forty-five or older, with those over the age of fifty-five making up 29.7 percent (MIAC 2018). The situation is even more pronounced for white-collar workers: 39 percent of all white-collar workers were over the age of fifty-five in 2017 (MIAC 2018). Moreover, because these demographic and generational shifts coincided with economic crises and neoliberal reforms since the 1990s (Conrad and Heindorf 2006), now both senior and young full-time workers have become vulnerable to economic restructuring.

There has also been a growing human toll as a result of these socioeconomic crises and related changes in corporate management and employment. Under the neoliberal economic reforms following the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, there was a significant increase in business failures, hiring freezes, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and workers pressured into early retirement. Converging with the aging workforce, the number of involuntarily jobless people quintupled from 1992 to 2002 (from 320,000 to 1,510,000) (MIAC 2019). Additionally, following the long-term aftershocks of business and bank failures in the 1990s together with the additional impact of the global financial crisis in the late 2000s (see chapter 2), layoffs also increased, with the number of companies reporting that they had laid off employees during the past five years doubling between 2007 and 2012 (JILPT 2016). And while the number of involuntarily jobless people showed signs of improvement in the early 2000s, falling to late-1990s levels (800,000) by 2007, it spiked again in 2009 at 1,460,000 after the global financial crisis and has recovered only slowly to mid-1990s levels since (MIAC 2019). Meanwhile, companies reporting layoffs have remained at more than double the pre-global-financial-crisis levels into the late 2010s (MHLW 2019).

Starting with the deregulation of irregular employment, more and more Japanese companies have suspended long-term employment and seniority systems to reduce the number of regular employees and implemented new merit systems to make them globally competitive, putting further pressures on workers. Pension eligibility has also been pushed back from age 55 in the 1980s to age 65 in the late 2000s, meaning that workers who leave their jobs or lose their employment before this age may face many years before they become eligible to receive social security (Martine and Jaussaud 2018). These changes in the labor market and employment practices since the 1990s have hit the generation of regular workers in their forties to sixties particularly hard due to their early socialization within a seemingly stable employment environment, leading to rising suicide rates (MHLW 2018), increasing unemployment, and precarious employment mechanisms (Gagné 2020; Itō 2017) as well as homelessness among middle-aged men (Gill 2001) and growing evidence of elderly working poor (Yamada 2009).

Beyond the media discourses and popular commentaries on the newly impotent image of Japanese salarymen, Japan’s long-term postbubble recession and the impacts of neoliberal reforms have also shaken the spheres of families and individuals through everyday practices. In the midst of this turmoil under economic restructurings, the crisis of salarymen has been increasingly represented by various midlife predicaments, ranging from increasing mental illness (e.g., Kitanaka 2011), homelessness (e.g., Gill 2001; Margolis 2002), joblessness and layoffs (e.g., Gagné 2017; Itō 2017), alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence (e.g., Borovoy 2005), the infamous death from overwork (karōshi) and overwork suicide (karō jisatsu) (e.g., North and Morioka 2016; Sawada, Ueda, and Matsubayashi 2017). Moreover, as the older, established images of salarymen lose their meaning, salarymen’s sense of their identity and their masculinity in particular have been increasingly contested. This leaves men caught in the ever-growing ambivalences between the shifting delineations of their personal identities—their personhood—and their long-term institutionalized role as corporate employees, what I term their salarymanhood.

Neoliberalism at Work: Riding the Waves of Postbubble Japan

After the bursting of Japan’s so-called bubble economy in the early 1990s, the Japanese economy has mostly been in the news as an economy that fell out of step with global capitalism and as an ominous warning of what other advanced capitalist countries might face. However, since 2013, many observers felt Japan was finally waking up, under the moniker of Abenomics, to the new global capitalist order. The combination of fiscal and labor reforms led by the Liberal Democratic Party’s prime minister Abe Shinzō has been characterized as both an intensification of neoliberalism (Suzuki 2015) and a postneoliberal turn in Japanese capitalism (Tiberghien 2014). Corporate executives have been given new license to save their bottom line by deregulating labor and capital, while at the same time producing an increasingly harsh work environment marked by instability, insecurity, and growing competition among workers.

The current swing toward neoliberal economic reforms since the 2000s is in many ways a new spin on older culturalist (especially neonationalist) arguments. As Yoda (2006) shows, since the 1990s Japan was simultaneously criticized for not being nationalistic enough for neonationalists and being too narrowly nationalistic (i.e., insular and parochial) for neoliberals. Both of these views have supporters in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and clashes between these groups have been partly responsible for inchoate policy moves during the 1990s (e.g., Lechevalier 2014; Tiberghien 2014). Differences aside, both these culturalist and neoliberal advocates see the post-1990s as Japan in crisis, where the problems that have emerged since the bursting of the economic bubble have come to represent the site of an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership (Yoda 2006, 22). For both neoliberal and culturalist advocates, the socioeconomic problems of the 1990s meant it was time for Japan to finally change (Gagné 2018; Tanaka 2002; St. Vogel 2006; Yoda 2006; see also MHLW 2011).

As in many other societies that faced economic crises in the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal policies in Japan since the 1990s were meant to correct economic inefficiencies—specifically to rectify what was seen as Japan’s anachronistic form of capitalism in order to escape its postbubble malaise and in the process to reform society (Gagné 2018). In practice, however, economic structures and social practices are not so easily manipulated. As a number of cultural geographers have argued (e.g., Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010a, 2010b; Collier 2005; Peck and Theodore 2012) neoliberalism as a critical reflexive process of reordering Fordist accumulation and regulatory regimes is best captured in the piecemeal and variegated ways that it is deployed by governments around the world. Likewise, despite the global similarities in the aims of reforms, the deployment of neoliberalism in Japan must be understood against its historical trajectory through which the modern configuration of welfare, work, and family emerged and the effects that the clash of postwar economic nationalist ideologies and postbubble neoliberal ideologies have had on workers’ subjectivities—and specifically, the subjectivities of the suited masses of Japan’s iconic salarymen. At its core, this is the overarching goal of this book.

Goals of the Book