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In this paper, I demonstrate how long-term multigenerational minorities and Japanese residents engage in the current socio-political discourse of "multicultural coexistence" society (tabunkakyōsei shakai), which had not previously been integral to the vocabulary of national rhetoric in Japan until the 2000s. I argue that the lack of clear definition and goals of multicultural coexistence by the current Japanese government generates obstacles in the attempt to build a multicultural society. While local municipalities' programs, such as multilingual services and lifestyle support, are certainly needed, long-term foreign residents with linguistic and cultural competence are suspicious of the concept of multicultural coexistence due to their own embodied marginalized positions. Taking a local municipality's intercultural event as a point of reference, this paper explores how long-term minority residents perceive their positions at the crossroads of seemingly paradoxical forces of multicultural trends and an ongoing national identity founded upon ethnic homogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper – at the intersection of island studies, youth research, and the anthropology of the future – examines the future perspectives of young Oki Islanders. When we investigate future images, we also explore present-day action. What do young people expect, what do they aspire to, what do they dream? In metropolitan post-growth Japan, the "crisis of youth" and the "lost generation" of the "lost decade" have become common expressions signaling challenges facing contemporary Japan. What will happen in the future? This paper is based on semi-structured interviews and surveys conducted among senior high school students in Ama-chō (Oki Islands) in 2015. The paper argues that the islands' insularity contributes to a better understanding of the dialectical local/global interplay influencing young people's everyday life practices and education and career preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic entrepreneurship can be an alternative economic strategy among immigrants whose labor market opportunities in the host society are hindered by language deficiency, institutional constraints or racial discrimination. However, it can also constrain migrants' social economic mobility. This is especially likely when, with particular visa policies, ethnic business is appropriated as a channel for labor migration, trapping migrants in a narrow economic niche. Excessive concentration in one type of business leads to low road competition within the community and co-ethnic exploitation. This study uses the case of Nepalese immigrants' restaurant businesses in Japan to illustrate this pitfall of ethnic entrepreneurship. It highlights the roles of the immigration regime and the migration industry in creating such a condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Japan and notions of Japaneseness are becoming “postfamilial” in breaking from earlier models and roles, and that one aspect of Japan's post-familial shift can be observed in the sharp rise in the number of “fuzzy” household members, specifically dogs, cats, and rabbits over the past three decades. In Japan, pets now outnumber children under the age of 15. The number one consumer of companion animals is also the fastest growing demographic in Japan: adults whose adult children have left home. Dogs are the focus of this paper. Dogs are more publicly prominent than cats or rabbits and they are an increasing presence in homes, parks, and cafés in urban Japan. Moreover, the representation of human–canine relations has become prominent in popular media; for example “the Softbank dog,”Kaikun, has become a television advertising celebrity. Furry familiar others are projected to be an ever-increasing presence in urban Japan. Thus, “fuzzy” also denotes the boundary blurring familial roles that some dogs encroach upon. This paper discusses how touch, affect, and embodiment entangle in dealing with urban Japan's exploding population of companion canines; a space where dogs are coming to be viewed as stand-in or surrogate fathers, friends, and even lovers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Urespa, meaning "to grow together" in the Ainu language, is a social venture founded at Sapporo University in 2010. The Urespa club brings Indigenous Ainu and Wajin (i.e. non-Ainu) students together in a curriculum-based environment to co-learn the Ainu language and Ainu cultural practices. The initiative's aim is to restory the conventional narrative of Otherness in Japan by creating a transformative space or "micropublic" in which students can work collaboratively across ethnic difference. In this paper, we argue that Urespa succeeds in effecting an inclusive social setting for both Ainu and Wajin students through the design and implementation of a process which promotes and, recursively, is shaped by, a transcultural form of social encounter. The challenge this makes to the promotion of multicultural programming within Japan in recent decades is important although not without controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the early 1990s, pushed by domestic economic recession and uncertainty of their life paths, young Japanese have been flying to Canada and Australia not only for holiday experiences, English learning, and temporary work, but also in the quest to find oneself. Searching for “international” work they really want to do, they often prolong their sojourning. Host countries often keep them in temporary resident status, postponing their career development. Suspended in foreigner status, the migrants themselves extend their “subjective youth” – what they see as an ongoing preparatory period in their lives. Based on fieldwork in Vancouver and Sydney, this paper elucidates how the emerging population of self-searching migrants blurs the conventional boundaries between youth and adulthood, and work and holiday, as well as sojourning and immigrating, thus extending “youth experience” indefinitely. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tenshoku means changing jobs: quitting one's company and starting work in a new company. Under the lifetime employment system, regular workers have enjoyed the security and stability provided by corporations, and tenshoku used to be rare among regular workers. In the decades after the Japanese economic bubble burst in 1991, tenshoku has become a more common practice in Japan. However, even now, young people's job-changing behavior is often regarded negatively. What young workers inside the prestigious lifetime employment system think of tenshoku remains underexamined. This qualitative study uses young regular workers' experiences of tenshoku as a lens to investigate their values. Overall, instead of relying steadfastly on their employers, I find in this study that young workers are actively utilizing tenshoku for better working lives: it is an option that supports their subjective well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between truth, sense of self and being a professional in Japanese queer nightlife? For service industry professionals' spontaneity is not a fruitful quality to cultivate to establish oneself. Instead, commitment to customers' satisfaction and adaptability to their wants, needs and grudges are considered by customers and providers to be paramount qualities of a service professional. Drawing on my ethnography at Japanese-style gay bars in Shinjuku Ni-chōme (Tokyo) and other Japanese urban centers, and from studies on the Japanese self, religious practice and authenticity, I propose in-sincerity as an analytical tool to describe how service professionals orient their practice. At Japanese-style gay bars, in-sincerity represents a strict approach to work involving withdrawing parts of one's self and concocting subjunctive selves (customized versions of one's self that occupied an illusive 'as if' dimension) for customers' entertainment. The co-creation and reproduction of bar legends at Zenith bar exemplifies the surfacing of these subjunctive selves by inextricably entangling factual information and the imaginary worlds of both service professionals and customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to increase productivity in national agricultural land and help depopulated villages with aging farmers, current agricultural policy in Japan rewards small farmers who contribute their land to agriculture corporations in which they own shares, have a vote, and labor in the fields for a low wage. Membership is individual, and the sacred link between household and land is virtually cut. Akata, a small village in northeast Japan, has formed agriculture corporations that result in tensions, new alignments, and marginalizations that are well captured by Foucault's concept of heterotopia: a displacement and regrowth that juxtapose villagers' pasts, presents, and futures in disruptive yet creative ways. An anthropological analysis unearths social nuances bridging new roles and older connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the different ways Africans present themselves in Japan and considers what these differences explain about the function of ethno-racial categories and discourses in the Japanese context. Specifically, it highlights the importance of cultural factors in shaping the ways Japanese discourses conceptualize and engage categorical difference, as well as the limitations of examining difference in solely racial or ethnic terms. This article considers data from Africans who present themselves as being from places other than continental Africa and demonstrates how these presentations elucidate the dynamic cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, and contextual variables that inform how Japanese discourses construct cultural Otherness. In constructing such Otherness, Japanese discourses project domestic identity ideologies differently onto foreign populations, which simultaneously highlight the functionality of these ideologies. This article suggests that by constructing Otherness in such ways, Japanese discourses are able to reconceptualize notions of domestic Japanese identity in a renewed sense within a global framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, Shibuya ward became the first district in Japan to start issuing same-sex partnership certificates, signifying the first step towards public recognition of same-sex couples in Japan. Same-sex marriage in Japan has been a contentious issue, with opponents arguing that it will end up supporting the patriarchal and discriminatory family registry system. Marriage nevertheless serves as an important means of recognition in society, and there are many queer individuals who aspire towards it. Using the concept of institutional performativity, this article discusses the social significance of marriage, and how same-sex marriage may serve as a means of "queering" hierarchical social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When asked to reflect on their own creative practice, contemporary artists in Osaka would frequently invoke images of movement. In lieu of a preformed mental image or plan, they would emphasise the processual and emergent nature of creating a work of art and the importance of moving one's body, likening the gradual and meandering nature of their understanding to a "path." At the same time, they would often compare their own lives to a path, albeit one with a far less visible endpoint than that which lay ahead of practitioners of the traditional Japanese arts. Along this particular life path, one must move without a clear idea of where one is headed; the path is laid down as one moves along it. "Feeling with the world" and sensing in collaboration with others, emerges as a mode of knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides a literature review on the anthropology of the senses and affect, highlighting the theoretical and methodological issues, and pointing at the ideas of "affective practices" or "practices of feeling with the world" as possible solutions. Subsequently, it reviews the literature related to these topics focusing on Japan, showing existing gaps in research. Lastly, it provides an overview of the contributions, in order to set the topic and clarify the reasons why we advocate for a novel approach revolving around "feeling (with) Japan." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnography is a methodology that requires both intellectual and physical efforts and is carried out through the body. The body is also the site where affect is experienced, which in Massumi's view is "an ability to affect and a susceptibility to be affected" of a body in constant transition. This article explores my ethnographic fieldwork on FtM crossdresser (dansō) escorts in Japan, taking into account the role played by the body, affects, and emotions, also analyzing their relationship with materiality and the surrounding environment. My body became the means of interaction with crossdressers and customers, and its masculinization affected and was affected by objects and the surrounding spaces. It was also the site where I experienced affective intensities descriptive of the experience of crossdressers and date clients. I first focus on the body and its physical and emotional reactions to investigate the practice of crossdressing, identifying the role played by objects in enhancing masculinity. I highlight crossdressers' and customers' management of spaces and human interactions as or towards displaced bodies. To conclude, I investigate the body as a way to interact with spaces and individuals from the standpoint of "affective correspondence". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological studies of tsunami-related folk spirituality are rare. Yet historically, ghosts have often helped residents in Iwate, Japan to mitigate some unimaginable human losses resulting from each of three calamitous tsunami which have struck its coastline during the last 122 years. Among the many tsunami death-mitigating ghost tales recorded is Yanagita Kunio's Kyūjū-Kyū-Wa: Ōtsunami (Story 99: The Giant Tsunami), first published in 1910. Once considered meaningful to survivors who lost loved ones and friends, in recent decades, contemporary analysts have questioned the utility of its message. Using traditional ethnographic methods, contemporary Japanese media sources, and new physical evidence discovered since 2001, this study demonstrates that Story 99, which is slowly fading from public memory in the current generation, is still worthy of fulfilling its original mandate to help tsunami survivors left behind to accept and overcome their heart breaking losses from a local point of view that has never been fully articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the obstacles preventing women from entering national-level politics in Japan and reviews research by political scientists and sociologists who use methods associated with anthropology such as participant observation and interviews to investigate the rise of women's political activism at local levels. The article discusses "housewife" activism that has propelled significant numbers of women into political office but relies on associations of women with domestic roles. It argues that in spite of the advantages obtained by the model of housewife activism such as inclusive, caring, and egalitarian politics, we need to move beyond this model and its reliance on the gendered division of labor if we are to obtain greater political participation for women at national levels and for politics to better represent the interests of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the attempted introduction of a lifting robot called “Hug” into an elderly care home in Japan. As demand for institutional elderly care in Japan escalates due to population aging and a move away from familial care, the shortage of professional care staff is also intensifying. Attributing this shortage partly to carers’ endemic back pain, the Japanese government and corporations have poured resources into developing high-tech robotic lifting devices. Yet contrary to their expectation, many Japanese caregivers seem reluctant or even hostile to the idea of using such devices. I use fieldwork data to explore why this is the case, and find that lifting is situated within a practice of tactile, joking care aimed at ensuringanshin(安心; “peace of mind”) for both care staff and residents. Mechanical replacement of this tactile connection was strongly resisted as “disrespectful” by care staff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The way Japanese culture forms families (ie) has historically provided women with great autonomy. The formation of theieas a perpetuating, corporate, stem family with impartible inheritance raises the successor’s wife’s status in theieabove that of the successor’s brothers, who leave theie. Theie’s succession of generations functions most smoothly with one son, or a daughter and then a son, the pattern typical of modern industrial societies as well. But Japan’s stable gender paradigm Male : Female :: Public : Private :: Breadwinner : Housewife that arises from this way of forming families has now become a hindrance to those women ambitious for opportunity in the wider world once they have fulfilled their duties to their husband’sie. Neither the modernization of Japan nor its economic advance and more recent stagnation have significantly altered this pattern of family gender formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This report provides a general overview of Goth subculture as it is performed in clubs, bars, and elsewhere in Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities of Japan. Originally formed around the gothic rock genre that appeared in the UK during the late 1970s, Goth has taken root in Japan as a spectacular subculture that is underground yet highly visible due to its characteristically dark and elaborate sartorial styling. Similar to their counterparts in the US and Europe, self-professed Goths in Japan often express identities that are contingent on a sense of alienation from mainstream social circles that is expressed ironically through a self-reflexive use of dark and morbid imagery and themes. Stories of informants demonstrate how Goth subculture factors into their personal narratives as a way of coping with alienation from social circles in Japan, an ironic expression of negativity, and a lifelong identity. Socioeconomic consequences and gender-related issues are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on my ethnographic observation of the risk discussion of the possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease in Nagasaki's Fukue Island in the summer of 2010, I examine how members of a local community in Japan attempted to discursively link their local-level political-economic decision with what they believed to be a global discourse. By comparing it with the counter discourse from those in Japan's tourism industry and an athletic community, I argue that two different risk discourses at the local level are influenced by the complex processes of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes how Japanese handle problematic situations involving the care of the dead. Drawing upon narratives of hauntings, dream visitations, and split-grave internments, and other ethnographic data collected in northern Japan, we show the central importance of ongoing ritual attention and attentiveness to the needs of the dead as a means of maintaining proper emplacement of ancestral spirits. We argue that ongoing concerns about maintaining connections between the dead and their proper loci is a manifestation of concerns about constructing and maintaining social relationships among the living and between the living and the dead, providing a way to physically represent and work through social problems displaying interdependencies. In their emphasis on emplacement as an ongoing process, our informants' narratives reveal a different way of thinking about the divide between the living and the dead, and the possibility of its transcendence through the actions of the living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maid cafés are establishments where waitresses wear costumes and talk to customers. Inspired by dating simulation games, maid cafés first appeared in the late 1990s in Akihabara, Japan, an area where dating simulation games were sold and players gathered. Maid cafés extended relations with fictional characters from media to physical reality, allowing players to interact with fictional characters in human form, while at the same time interacting with humans who perform characters. Having proliferated in the 2000s, maid cafés depend on dedicated customers, or “regulars.” Because physical and personal contact is strictly prohibited, maids only interact with customers “in character,” but regulars nevertheless form long-term, affectionate relationships with them. Maids are paid to perform affective labor in the café, and regulars pay to be there, but affective relations cannot be reduced to money relations. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how relationships are both enabled by the maid café and in excess of it. Interactions with the maid are not oriented toward the goal of “getting the girl,” and relations are not private or exclusive. Instead, the maid character – both fictional and real, always more than the individual – allows for affective relations that go beyond the common sense of human relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]