Youth Culture and Contacts (Saturday 10:30)
Undergraduate Panel
Shigeaki Kurimoto (Keio): “Shibuya Street Culture”
I will focus on the street culture of Shibuya’s Hachiko area. Through two years of fieldwork in the Hachiko area, I have established 3 roles of the ‘street’ as the media of culture. One role is that the street is a media of “self-expression”. Another role of the street is as “the media connecting to the next larger media”. The third role of the street is that the street is a media that reflects local culture. I will present these 3 roles of the street as the media of culture, based on fieldwork interview data. Through the research the roles and the value of the street for Japanese culture will be defined
Shigeaki Kurimoto is a undergraduate student of faculty of environmental information at Keio University. His research interests include ethnographic approaches to popular youth culture.
Ryuta Komaki (Jochi): “An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Messaging in Japan”
Mobile phone messaging has become a popular means of communication among Japanese youth today. Nevertheless, serious social scientific studies on this subject have been scarce. Based on a series of ethnographic interviews with Japanese university students, this study investigates how Japanese young people use and perceive mobile phone messaging technology. The study reveals that each user has an understanding of the capacities and limitations of the technology, which I call the perceived characteristics of the technology, developed through interacting with producers, mass media representations and other users. Their actual use of mobile phone messaging, then, emerges as strategies to deal with those characteristics. In particular, perceived characteristics of asynchronicity and narrowness of the channel (inability to transmit rich non-verbal cues compared to face-to-face communication,) have strong influences on how the medium is actually used. Users choose between different media tactically to take advantage of asynchronicity and to lessen the disadvantages derive from it. They also modify their language use in order to avoid troubles caused by narrowness of the channel. Different users perceive characteristics of the technology differently, and they have different strategies. That leads to variations in actual uses. With such varied actual uses, the technology becomes meaningful in different ways to each user. Therefore, there is not a single meaning for mobile phone messaging. Rather, the study suggests that not only are multiple meanings possible, but also the process through which meanings are constructed makes these different meanings acceptable to users.
Ryuta Komaki just finished his undergraduate study of anthropology and sociology at Sophia University researching popular culture and youth.
Mako Fujino (Keio): “Club Culture and the Internet”
The internet has very strong power in every aspect of society today. Club culture, which has developed with the improvement of technology, is not an exception, and it somehow reflects youth today. Focusing mainly on internet websites, this paper discusses how the internet changed club culture and what club culture changed by the internet is like. Data from interviews, surveys, participant observation, and website analysis are used to clarify the present condition of club culture and the internet and, to show the features of the internet employed by youth today.
Mako Fujino is a undergraduate student of faculty of environmental information at Keio University. Her research theme is the relations between youth culture and the new technology.
Rie Narui (Keio): “The Internet, Culture, Life, and Values of Youth in Japan”
The Internet is a necessity of life for Japanese people today. Young people in particular are familiar with the Internet and computers. They gather information, communicate with a wide range of people, work on assignments, enjoy entertainment, have hobbies, and meet or keep in touch with friends on the Internet. In this presentation, I will analyze and introduce features of Internet usage and the attitudes of Japanese university students in the Yokohama area. Through examining the interaction between youth and cybermedia or cyber communication tools, some aspects of Japanese society and culture can be seen.
Rie Narui is a senior in the Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. She is studying the interaction between youth culture and cybermedia.
Chair: Todd Holden… (…is a cool guy and if he does not have a job offer from some other place by November, has agreed to be the chair.)
Youth and Urban Sex (Saturday 1:00)
Shana Fruehan (Chicago): “Sex in the City: Tokyo women’s narratives about dating and sexual relationships”
Urban centers are sites of changing discourses and behaviors concerning dating and sexuality in contemporary Japan. In an age of numerous media stories about teenage prostitution and rising rates of abortions and AIDS among young people, what kinds of relationships are todays young, urban women seeking? How do they deal with the potential threat of STDs and pregnancy within these relationships? This paper will examine the narratives of several young women living in Tokyo, in order to shed light upon their experiences of relationships and sexuality.
Shana Fruehan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago, researching discourses and practices surrounding dating and contraception in contemporary Tokyo.
Philip Sawkins, (Oxford Brookes): “Playful Attraction: examining the nature of Japanese cruising.”
In view of the perceived lack of anthropological research into the diversity of young Japanese lives, this paper will examine a youth leisure-time activity known as nanpa (cruising), to determine whether or not we can understand this activity as ‘play’. To achieve this aim, data from fieldwork and post fieldwork conversations, observations from the field, Internet websites, magazines and library resources will be analysed using anthropological theories of play developed over the past fifty years. In general, it will be argued that, by understanding the ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who’, and ‘what’, of nanpa, it is indeed possible to view this activity as ‘play’. In particular, it will be seen that nanpa, as an activity that takes place spatially and temporally opposed to ‘labour’ in Japan, is a form of play of ‘liminoid’ description, and allows its willing participants to cut across and go beyond the every day limitations of social structure.
Philip Sawkins is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology under Joy Hendry at Oxford Brookes University. He is currently in Osaka on a Monkasho grant for the next year, investigating mobile phones in Japanese society and Japanese society in mobile phones.
Youth Alternative in the City (Saturday 3:30)
Chair: David Slater (Jochi)
Sachiko Horiguchi (Oxford): The emergence of the ‘hikikomori’ problem—youth social withdrawal in Japan
Hikikomori generally refers to (i) those who are withdrawn at home for a long period of time without participating in any social activities and (ii) the condition of withdrawal. It has increasingly been recognized as a social issue afflicting many youths in Japan from the 1990s, which has lead to an establishment of the ‘hikikomori industry’. Although similar mental problems may be found cross-culturally, hikikomori is usually considered unique to contemporary Japanese society, and the perception of hikikomori is generally associated with “negative” aspects of postwar urban life (e.g. loss of community, pathology of the nuclear family, insufficiency of face-to-face communication). This paper provides an anthropological analysis of how and why hikikomori came to be seen as a social problem. First, an overview of the hikikomori issue and the state of the hikikomori industry (mostly developed in urban areas) are provided with reference to competing discourses on hikikomori. Then, how the term was coined and has been discussed in the mass media is mentioned. Next, why discourses on hikikomori as a social problem emerged is explored. Attention is given to the impact of media coverage of crimes; attention to school refusal; and changes of values regarding labour, communication and well-being, youth/children, and class during the past decade. Through such analyses of the hikikomori industry, this research reveals how values are transformed through socio-economic changes and the relationship between language and social change. It also addresses anthropological issues of personhood, youth, medicalization, class-consciousness, and urbanization in contemporary Japanese society.
Sachiko Horiguchi is a D.Phil candidate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford with interest in Japanese youth.
Wakako Kusumoto (Illinois): “The City as a Niche for Freelancers”
Despite evidence that only a small portion of the Japanese workforce have benefited from lifetime employment, the salaryman seems to still occupy a special place in the discourse on postwar Japan. It may no longer be regarded so unanimously as an ideal career trajectory as Ezra Vogel argued in Japan’s New Middle Class (1963) but, nonetheless, the salaryman is still a powerful symbol that embodies the various attributes of “Japaneseness.” The media of both the US and Japan continue to fashion their narrative on Japanese society as if the salaryman lifeway is the norm; any other life choices are portrayed as “unconventional” in the popular discourse.
The media platitudes aside, what is it really like to be an independently working person in Japan? In this presentation, I introduce freelancers who work in the white-collar professional world in Tokyo. Unlike entrepreneurs who head a company, most freelancers work alone, often in creative and artistic fields. Their trade is to sell their talent, skills, and expertise to various clients.
Tokyo holds a concentration of freelancers in a wide array of professions. Freelancers live and work in the city, because it provides them with clients and contracts as well as professional and personal networks. In the city, some freelancers thrive while others barely survive. Through several ethnographic cases, I will situate individual lives in the complex system of the city and investigate how the city and the freelancer interact with each other and coexist.
Robert Stuart Yoder (Chuo): “Youth Deviance, Class Culture and the Reproduction of Class in Japan”
Similar to Willis (1977) in Learning to Labor, lower working class Japanese youngsters, like English working class lads, are part of a class culture antithetical to making it in middle class Japanese society. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted by myself shows that: 1) class culture and class conditions ties in with differences of youth deviance between lower working class and higher class Japanese youngsters and that; 2) class reproduction is the norm.
Robert Stuart Yoder is a lecturer at Chuo University and active in research on youth crime, deviance and inequality in Japan.
Chair: David Slater teaches anthropology at the Faculty of Comparative Culture of Sophia University and is a member of the Graduate Faculty in Asian Studies. His research interest are on education, youth, social class, and the transformation of urban space.
Tokyo Social and Public Space (Sunday 10:30)
Julian Worrall (Univ. of Tokyo): “Plan, Design, or Edit? Considerations on urban practice between architecture and anthropology”
The city has long been a potent source of inspiration, speculation, and theoretical elaboration among architects. For urban planners, the city is a professional raison d’etre. But the conceptual framing of these practitioner discourses on the city has been largely independent of the insights and approaches that anthropology has brought to the study of the city.
This paper aims to explore how urban practitioners, such as architects and planners, could engage the concepts and insights of anthropology and urban ethnography. What areas of architectural or planning concerns are addressed by work in urban anthropology? How could the methods and roles of urban practitioners be enriched through this engagement? What are the potential pitfalls or losses that may accompany such engagement?
The potential stakes of such engagement in the Japanese context are illustrated by considering a concrete site in Tokyo – the Shimbashi-Shiodome district. This site combines a significant historical legacy (the first train station and station square in Japan), a distinctive sociological context (“oyaji-world” – a hub for unemployed middle-aged men and for salarymen drinking after work), and a massive urban development project, completed in late 2002 (Shiodome). By considering the competing dimensions of this urban redevelopment project from alternative disciplinary frameworks, it is hoped that an appreciation of the possibilities of disciplinary dialogue may be gained.
Julian Worrall is a doctoral Candidate in the Department of Architecture, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo doing historical and ethnographic research on the representations and social uses of “public” spaces in urban Japan.
Joanne Jakovich (Tokyo Univ.): Tokyo Code: Investigating Complexity in Tokyo via Diagraphics
Tokyo is a megalopolis of over 32 million whose amorphous structure is incomprehensibly complex. It is impossible to describe Tokyo as a whole. Again, accurate knowledge of Tokyo is inaccessible to foreigners. Firstly there is the problem of the language barrier. Secondly, most local research on Tokyo is of a highly quantitative nature meaning knowledge is concealed inside a data format. Similarly, in foreign media specialist knowledge of Tokyo is blurred by stereotyped projections.
The Tokyo Code project proposes defining Tokyo by a series of ‘codes’. These codes represent systems, rules, patterns, languages, mathematical expressions or interactive algorithms that define Tokyo. Collectively these are called ‘Tokyo Code’. Each code is translated into a visual format we call a ‘diagraphic’ – a visual representation that combines graphic concepts with diagrammatic methods, and transcends language barriers.
A case study of the code ‘Tokyo Mobility’ will be presented to illustrate the concepts of abstraction, signification and visual coding that are fundamental to the diagraphic method of urban analysis.
Chair: Kit Weddle is the principal of a niche commercial property development consultancy, Land Development International, specializing in property development services in mainly industrial and retail property here in Japan and certain other locations. He is a land economist with a PhD in Japanese real estate and its functioning. His research interests include the structure and agency approach towards development markets and their enablement. Of late his interests have been increasingly focused upon commercially approaches to meeting third world housing needs as well as the functioning of property markets in war and other forms of civil disturbance.
Space, Designed, Controlled and Lived (Sunday1:00)
Roman Cybriwsky (Temple): “Deconstructing Roppongi Hills”
Roppongi Hills is well known as one of the newest, largest and most glamorous of Tokyo’s many in-city redevelopment projects. Developed by the giant Mori Company and opened with great fanfare on 25 April 2003, it is a mixed-use project combining a high-rise office tower, international hotel, and four apartment-condominium buildings with upscale shopping centers, restaurants and cafes, movie theaters, and attractive public spaces, all in spectacular architectural design. This paper discusses this project from a social-cultural perspective, looking at how and why Roppongi Hills was built, its symbolic role for Tokyo, its role in terms of planning objectives for Tokyo, and its emerging rhythms or lifestyles. In short, Roppongi Hills serves as “text” for insights to upscale Tokyo society. The discussion is based on a review of published literature and Internet information about Roppongi Hills, as well as informal observation and interpretation of the social landscape. Comparisons are made with other Tokyo redevelopment projects and projects in other cities, setting Roppongi Hills in a context of global urban change and architectural trends.
Roman Cybriwsky is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and currently the Associate Dean at Temple Japan. His research interests include urban-social geography, urban planning and development, social aspects of the built urban environment, and neighborhood social change.
TSU Yun Hui (Nat.Univ. of Singapore): “Nature in the Self-narratives of Kôbe”
Throughout its 130-year history, the city of Kôbe has been repeatedly hit by floods, some of which rather devastating, and a major earthquake in 1995. While there was mourning and grieving every time, both the municipal government and citizens continue to cling onto images of their natural environment as “beautiful” (utsukushii) and “abundant” (yutaka). This paper examines how Kôbe positions natural disasters in the narratives it has constructed for itself over the past century. Specifically, it will compare the various meanings given to them in the three editions (1898, 1921-65, 2000) of municipal history. It will be shown that the city began with a crude but straightforward concept of natural disasters as enemies of civilization that are to be subdued with the help of technology and ends, in 2000, with a complex and ambivalent concept of the same phenomena as an aspect of nature which human beings must learn to live with. Meanwhile, the city’s perception of its natural environment also changed. A hundred years ago, natural beauty was attributed to particular and historically famous spots such as the Nunobiki waterfall and the Suma-Maiko coast, for which old poems have been written. Nowadays, natural beauty is found in almost every part of the landscape: the entire Rokkô range has become the city’s natural treasure (shizen no hôko), every ravine a pristine stream (seiryû), and every inch of Suma-Maiko’s artificial beach reminds one of the phrase “green pines and white sand” (seishô hakusa), a conventionalized description of coastal scenery. An analysis of the Kôbe case will provide insights into a dimension of the changing meaning of natural disasters—and nature by extension—in modern Japanese consciousness, something that is not easily discernible in high-brow philosophical, religious, and political writings.
Tom Gill (Meiji):”The Birth of ‘Shelter Culture’ in 21st Century Japan”
One part of the image of Japan in the days before the Bubble Economy and subsequent Heisei Recession was that Japanese-style capitalism was fairer than other varieties, with fewer cases of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. Low unemployment and virtually no homelessness were symbols of this ‘more human’ kind of capitalism. Today, even official government figures admit to over 25,000 street homeless in Japan and the true figure is undoubtedly higher. The government has reluctantly commenced formal measures to tackle homelessness and a new ‘Homeless Independence Support Law’ was passed last year. This paper will take an ethnographic look at the first public homeless shelters being built under this new legislation and compare the approaches in several major cities to this challenge. Homeless shelters in other countries, notably the US, have been accused at times of fostering a ‘culture of dependence.’ What kind of culture will the new Japanese shelters foster? I will take a look at this new social institution now undergoing its birth agonies.
Tom Gill holds a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and is an associate professor at the Department of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University. His book on Japanese day labourers, Men of Uncertainty, was published by SUNY Press in 2001. His research has followed his subjects: many former day labourers are now homeless.
Chair: John Clammer teaches sociology at the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Sophia University and is a member of the Graduate Faculty in Asian Studies. His research interests include the sociology of culture, sociology of development, social inequality, religion and ethnicity, Southeast Asia, Japan. His recent books include Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption and Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference and the Critique of Modernity.