Anti-Crisis of Kids In Global Japan
Within the chronotopic space of Japan, the very present appears in most scholarship as beset by exceptional time signatures. The nation seems to be always “post-“ some major trauma—World War II, the Bubble economy of the 80s, the combined tsunami/nuclear disaster of 3/11. Though Japan shares in global economic and political uncertainties, Allison collapses a heterogeneous Japan down to a narrow band of signifiers. In her telling, Japan’s recent cultural memory of becoming (my expansion of Allison’s term “ambition”) is condensed to “an intimate level of the daily lunchboxes, outings to the hostess club, everyday regimes of hard work and competitive output” (Allison 2013, 84). This historical claim bluntly cleaves Japan into two oppositional periods: one is productive and visualized with the classic graph slope rising into the heady reaches of high growth, “competitive output” and bio-reproduction. In contrast is a “flattened” present (a spatial undifferentiation signing “no increase”—a specter of lack legible because of our thorough training in economic visual languages).
Inevitably, zones of crisis, like autopoietic machines giving shape to unstable socio-economic territories, reproduce themselves around the non-reproductive figure of the child in this view of a hegemonic Japan rent by the epoch-shaping Bubble Collapse in the early 90s. What became termed the “Lost Decade” continues as an uninterrupted expanse, a zone of extended crisis where society, once idyllically robust with celebrated reproductive “output,” is exposed to new “failures of youth.” A tautology of crisis is embedded in this version of Japan’s post-war rise and subsequent decline into a period of prolonged malaise and concomitant weakening of the social fabric as it appears in conventional narratives. As Janet Roitman points out, structuring analysis along fault-lines of crisis as “the very condition of contemporary situations” requires “a certain philosophy of history” and makes certain questions “possible while others are foreclosed” (2014, 10). Crisis cuts transversally across the normatively conceived territories of Japan studies: economics, family relations, politics, education, popular media, etc. In the autopsy rooms of academia, “crisis” operates like a Guattarian “abstract machine,” appearing to excise/exorcise the past into a form of being distinctly different from the present and through this difference, imbuing the present with new signifiers and relations, giving serialized targets to familiar modes of critique. “‘Crisis’ is a term that is bound up in the predicament of signifying human history, often serving as a transcendental placeholder in ostensible solutions to that problem” or at least in defining its parameters (Roitman 2014, 13). Rather than helping to make visible the negative spaces in the background of rupture and shift in Japan, “the term ‘crisis’ serves as a primary enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge” (Ibid.). Japan and its youth are perpetually beset by crisis in popular depictions and academic analysis. The future sci-fi apocalypse of fiction Susan Napier describes as “panic sites” can be permanently postponed after first the abstract crash of capital, then micro-ruptures on individuals and social connections under neoliberal contractions, and then the tsunami chased by nuclear instability glazed with governmental deceit and ineptitude. Crisis accumulates upon crisis. An island nation so profuse in its lacks and excesses it threatens to become unmoored from its history and adrift in a hazy present without direction, with waves of global capital and the Pacific Ocean crashing across its surfaces. In telling a story of “what went wrong” the crisis assumes a divine force of creation because it is then the causal agent organizing forces and casting protagonists into the maw of irretrievable destiny. The blind spot begins to bleed. A Rorschach blot takes shape, then mutates, a knowledge stain becoming the patternmaker. If my challenge to “crisis” is overheated, it is only to get the circuits hot for examining “youth” as victim and adjective/appendage to crisis, especially in the delicately profuse categories of “folk devils” in which youth are conjured.
First, let me explain my desire for anti-crisis further. Deleuze and Guattari set up a diorama of theory—a spatial visualization for us where linear time and negative refusal become a unified plane on a flattened structure. Deleuze and Guattari have perhaps endured the height of their posthumous fashion bestowed by Negri & Co. and after this time in the fiery furnace of high theory I find their ideas useful to us once more, the sheen of faddish cool burned off like dross. Trusting this is so, here’s a passage from Difference & Repetition following a discussion of Leibniz and the function of opposition and limitation in relation to difference:
If we release prior evaluative assumptions about surface vs. depth and let the poetics of this visualization saturate our imagination, we can picture crisis skittering like a filament across the surface of events large and small. What does it ensnare? What gets caught there, snagged with this technique of making history? More significantly, what remains submerged, beneath the line of crisis, down in the dark of difference? Could we recognize these things in the gloaming, their tendrils like “radiations in all directions”? Things are down there, changing, shape-shifting. Up above, crisis seems to be the only thing in action, causing a tidal wave of reactions. Ethnography dives into the wreck. It plumbs the depths and descends in all directions hand-over-hand with the soft sense for difference taken at different soundings. How could we know things and time and space any other way? The banality of the negative is of no interest here, playing down below the tempest of conflict. Crisis gives us only temporary coordinates from a transponder cast backwards in the wake while we grab for the gunwales amidst distressing times. There it is, bobbing forlornly, maybe winking a feeble light. “Behind me was the good! Before you is shipwreck!”
Crisis must be left where it buoys up a false temporal dichotomy and floats as an island populated by risk-analysts, crisis-managers, and careful archeologists of inevitable social erosion already assembling their truths from the detritus gyre. Anthropology is anti-crisis insofar as it does not depend on the coordinates of reified historical forms to define what can be called the field site and guarantee its validity and value. Instead, our stories and analyses trace open futures or “a flow that maintains these differences and keeps them from canceling themselves, that is, a flow that does not allow the intensive process to become hidden underneath the extensive results” (De Landa 1991, 32). In short, anti-crisis is an attempt to flow, to stay in motion, to revel in movement and to ride momentum, currents, and energies and where “a view of truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of beings” is jettisoned (Ibid., 31). It is a refusal to fetishize the “extensive results” we might so fittingly imagine as Benjamin’s pile of debris growing skyward like a monument to crisis. I do not for a moment think myself so capable as to do without tensions, frictions, and oppositions in order to make sense of the world around me and especially within the zones of my ethnographic engagement. But I do endeavor to dump the old ballast of binaristic reduction, the law of grammar, the fashions of theory, and the discipline of form and formulation. In that cargo there truly is only the dullest of futures. I choose to flow, or maybe drift.
This anti-crisis is about becoming. Let me explain: this is about rethinking the thoughts we have already been having about the expansive capacity of categories, like “youth” and “the child” to hold and fold in symbolic meaning and actual bodies. This is about making the liminal a shapeless, differentiating non-state but still producing itself in communication with all the firmer forms of cultural identities around it. Rather than thinking of youth as a state between A and B or a spectral shift from pre-adult to adult as pre-social to social, think of youth as human derivation to human dérive. Like the drifting journey through the city undertaken by the Situationists intent on shifting habits and eager for the differences of unthought desire and landscape to interact, “a line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points…A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (D&G 1987, 293). Becoming keeps youth in motion but suspends the panic of crisis when the kids fail to show up on time or in the right places. Within becoming there is multiplicity, where desire proliferate and energies intersect with forces of control while they splinter and ricochet within deep space of social flow. Becoming puts Haberstam’s “anarchic beings” into motion and failure. Failure is derivation—it is losing and not arriving but not just because things stopped. Quite the opposite. It is a non-arrival because things moved too fast and in too many directions and always never-quite there. “When we are ‘in-between’, on the threshold, what keeps us distinct from this or that can become indiscernible or indistinct or imperceptible” (Sotirin 2005, 100). The fetish of blissful, differential contact may be too much to bear, I grant you. At some point this whole thing can be handled so much it gets worn down and slippery, like stone steps or a balustrade. An apolitical fog sets in the longer we linger here and the poignant shape of actual young people gets muffled in theory and diminished in discourse. These are ideas to help us hold a floating outpost and the gauges by which to take our soundings. The anti-crisis provides our engine. Failure charts our territory. Becoming is our dispersal vector.
I call becomings a dispersal vector because it carries us into the complex spaces of this project and conceptually makes contact with different bodies, locations, haptic and social experiences, media, institutions, and understandings of youth and time. This ethnographic project draws together into an assemblage three “sites” of young people in Tokyo. Of course, “young” is already a suspect word, mired in liminal, precarious mud. In a moment we’ll begin to examine more closely what causes “youth” to hold together as a social category despite profound, and sometimes cataclysmic social change.
First, though, the three sites: Kikokushijo Academy, an after-school and weekend English-language juku or cram school where students who have lived and studied abroad (usually in English) come once or twice a week to maintain and improve their English, primarily with the goal of passing English language entrance exams to elite schools. For two years I taught at the school and I focused my research on a group of 8 sixth and seventh graders. The school, its students, and staff offer a site of intersectional play between circulating capitalism, national identities, performances of social achievement, and techniques for shaping the globalized child.
The Lesque house: a crew of skateboarders, all male, had rented a family-style suburban home in the western suburbs of Tokyo and transformed the house into a base for their nascent skateboard company as well as an underground crash pad for skaters visiting Tokyo from across Japan and beyond. The skaters are overtly part of a working class, part-time male cohort emblematic of the Lost Decade’s under-employed generation but they invert Japanese male identities while remodulating them through body practices organized around failure and homosocial care.
Scattered across Tokyo: cultural workers—contingent, contract or freelance photographers, translators, web designers, and graphic designers who comprise a floating pool of reserve labor are highly atomized and disconnected from secure, stable forms of labor. They reflect an intensifying global economy in signs and affect generated around the signified of youth as it is fragmented into mobile forms and mediated desires. Unlike the first two groups, these young people shared a more jagged social existence. But they coalesce around highly visible global projects that trace the circulatory patterns of the kikokushijo and the risks so omnipresent in the skateboarders’ lives.
The form for this ethnography attempts to inscribe the flow and polytonality through interrelating stories and analyses. There is no center, only sites of explanation and nodes of affinity. “When two divergent stories unfold simultaneously, it is impossible to privilege one over the other: it is a case in which everything is equal, but ‘everything is equal’ is said of the difference, and is said only of the difference between the two” (D&G 1994, 125).
Inevitably, zones of crisis, like autopoietic machines giving shape to unstable socio-economic territories, reproduce themselves around the non-reproductive figure of the child in this view of a hegemonic Japan rent by the epoch-shaping Bubble Collapse in the early 90s. What became termed the “Lost Decade” continues as an uninterrupted expanse, a zone of extended crisis where society, once idyllically robust with celebrated reproductive “output,” is exposed to new “failures of youth.” A tautology of crisis is embedded in this version of Japan’s post-war rise and subsequent decline into a period of prolonged malaise and concomitant weakening of the social fabric as it appears in conventional narratives. As Janet Roitman points out, structuring analysis along fault-lines of crisis as “the very condition of contemporary situations” requires “a certain philosophy of history” and makes certain questions “possible while others are foreclosed” (2014, 10). Crisis cuts transversally across the normatively conceived territories of Japan studies: economics, family relations, politics, education, popular media, etc. In the autopsy rooms of academia, “crisis” operates like a Guattarian “abstract machine,” appearing to excise/exorcise the past into a form of being distinctly different from the present and through this difference, imbuing the present with new signifiers and relations, giving serialized targets to familiar modes of critique. “‘Crisis’ is a term that is bound up in the predicament of signifying human history, often serving as a transcendental placeholder in ostensible solutions to that problem” or at least in defining its parameters (Roitman 2014, 13). Rather than helping to make visible the negative spaces in the background of rupture and shift in Japan, “the term ‘crisis’ serves as a primary enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge” (Ibid.). Japan and its youth are perpetually beset by crisis in popular depictions and academic analysis. The future sci-fi apocalypse of fiction Susan Napier describes as “panic sites” can be permanently postponed after first the abstract crash of capital, then micro-ruptures on individuals and social connections under neoliberal contractions, and then the tsunami chased by nuclear instability glazed with governmental deceit and ineptitude. Crisis accumulates upon crisis. An island nation so profuse in its lacks and excesses it threatens to become unmoored from its history and adrift in a hazy present without direction, with waves of global capital and the Pacific Ocean crashing across its surfaces. In telling a story of “what went wrong” the crisis assumes a divine force of creation because it is then the causal agent organizing forces and casting protagonists into the maw of irretrievable destiny. The blind spot begins to bleed. A Rorschach blot takes shape, then mutates, a knowledge stain becoming the patternmaker. If my challenge to “crisis” is overheated, it is only to get the circuits hot for examining “youth” as victim and adjective/appendage to crisis, especially in the delicately profuse categories of “folk devils” in which youth are conjured.
First, let me explain my desire for anti-crisis further. Deleuze and Guattari set up a diorama of theory—a spatial visualization for us where linear time and negative refusal become a unified plane on a flattened structure. Deleuze and Guattari have perhaps endured the height of their posthumous fashion bestowed by Negri & Co. and after this time in the fiery furnace of high theory I find their ideas useful to us once more, the sheen of faddish cool burned off like dross. Trusting this is so, here’s a passage from Difference & Repetition following a discussion of Leibniz and the function of opposition and limitation in relation to difference:
Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organized oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. Stereoscopic images form no more than an even and flat opposition, but they depend upon something quite different: an arrangement of coexistent, tiered, mobile planes, a ‘disparateness’ within an original depth. Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary. It is no use rediscovering depth as a third dimension unless it has already been installed at the beginning, enveloping the other two and enveloping itself as third. Space and time display oppositions (and limitations) only on the surface, but they presuppose in their real depth far more voluminous, affirmed and distributed difference which cannot be reduced to the banality of the negative. It is as though we were in Lewis Carroll’s mirror where everything is contrary and inverted on the surface, but ‘different’ in depth…There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox—the eye of the dialectician dreaming of futile combat? (D&G 1994, 51)
If we release prior evaluative assumptions about surface vs. depth and let the poetics of this visualization saturate our imagination, we can picture crisis skittering like a filament across the surface of events large and small. What does it ensnare? What gets caught there, snagged with this technique of making history? More significantly, what remains submerged, beneath the line of crisis, down in the dark of difference? Could we recognize these things in the gloaming, their tendrils like “radiations in all directions”? Things are down there, changing, shape-shifting. Up above, crisis seems to be the only thing in action, causing a tidal wave of reactions. Ethnography dives into the wreck. It plumbs the depths and descends in all directions hand-over-hand with the soft sense for difference taken at different soundings. How could we know things and time and space any other way? The banality of the negative is of no interest here, playing down below the tempest of conflict. Crisis gives us only temporary coordinates from a transponder cast backwards in the wake while we grab for the gunwales amidst distressing times. There it is, bobbing forlornly, maybe winking a feeble light. “Behind me was the good! Before you is shipwreck!”
Crisis must be left where it buoys up a false temporal dichotomy and floats as an island populated by risk-analysts, crisis-managers, and careful archeologists of inevitable social erosion already assembling their truths from the detritus gyre. Anthropology is anti-crisis insofar as it does not depend on the coordinates of reified historical forms to define what can be called the field site and guarantee its validity and value. Instead, our stories and analyses trace open futures or “a flow that maintains these differences and keeps them from canceling themselves, that is, a flow that does not allow the intensive process to become hidden underneath the extensive results” (De Landa 1991, 32). In short, anti-crisis is an attempt to flow, to stay in motion, to revel in movement and to ride momentum, currents, and energies and where “a view of truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of beings” is jettisoned (Ibid., 31). It is a refusal to fetishize the “extensive results” we might so fittingly imagine as Benjamin’s pile of debris growing skyward like a monument to crisis. I do not for a moment think myself so capable as to do without tensions, frictions, and oppositions in order to make sense of the world around me and especially within the zones of my ethnographic engagement. But I do endeavor to dump the old ballast of binaristic reduction, the law of grammar, the fashions of theory, and the discipline of form and formulation. In that cargo there truly is only the dullest of futures. I choose to flow, or maybe drift.
This anti-crisis is about becoming. Let me explain: this is about rethinking the thoughts we have already been having about the expansive capacity of categories, like “youth” and “the child” to hold and fold in symbolic meaning and actual bodies. This is about making the liminal a shapeless, differentiating non-state but still producing itself in communication with all the firmer forms of cultural identities around it. Rather than thinking of youth as a state between A and B or a spectral shift from pre-adult to adult as pre-social to social, think of youth as human derivation to human dérive. Like the drifting journey through the city undertaken by the Situationists intent on shifting habits and eager for the differences of unthought desire and landscape to interact, “a line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points…A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (D&G 1987, 293). Becoming keeps youth in motion but suspends the panic of crisis when the kids fail to show up on time or in the right places. Within becoming there is multiplicity, where desire proliferate and energies intersect with forces of control while they splinter and ricochet within deep space of social flow. Becoming puts Haberstam’s “anarchic beings” into motion and failure. Failure is derivation—it is losing and not arriving but not just because things stopped. Quite the opposite. It is a non-arrival because things moved too fast and in too many directions and always never-quite there. “When we are ‘in-between’, on the threshold, what keeps us distinct from this or that can become indiscernible or indistinct or imperceptible” (Sotirin 2005, 100). The fetish of blissful, differential contact may be too much to bear, I grant you. At some point this whole thing can be handled so much it gets worn down and slippery, like stone steps or a balustrade. An apolitical fog sets in the longer we linger here and the poignant shape of actual young people gets muffled in theory and diminished in discourse. These are ideas to help us hold a floating outpost and the gauges by which to take our soundings. The anti-crisis provides our engine. Failure charts our territory. Becoming is our dispersal vector.
I call becomings a dispersal vector because it carries us into the complex spaces of this project and conceptually makes contact with different bodies, locations, haptic and social experiences, media, institutions, and understandings of youth and time. This ethnographic project draws together into an assemblage three “sites” of young people in Tokyo. Of course, “young” is already a suspect word, mired in liminal, precarious mud. In a moment we’ll begin to examine more closely what causes “youth” to hold together as a social category despite profound, and sometimes cataclysmic social change.
First, though, the three sites: Kikokushijo Academy, an after-school and weekend English-language juku or cram school where students who have lived and studied abroad (usually in English) come once or twice a week to maintain and improve their English, primarily with the goal of passing English language entrance exams to elite schools. For two years I taught at the school and I focused my research on a group of 8 sixth and seventh graders. The school, its students, and staff offer a site of intersectional play between circulating capitalism, national identities, performances of social achievement, and techniques for shaping the globalized child.
The Lesque house: a crew of skateboarders, all male, had rented a family-style suburban home in the western suburbs of Tokyo and transformed the house into a base for their nascent skateboard company as well as an underground crash pad for skaters visiting Tokyo from across Japan and beyond. The skaters are overtly part of a working class, part-time male cohort emblematic of the Lost Decade’s under-employed generation but they invert Japanese male identities while remodulating them through body practices organized around failure and homosocial care.
Scattered across Tokyo: cultural workers—contingent, contract or freelance photographers, translators, web designers, and graphic designers who comprise a floating pool of reserve labor are highly atomized and disconnected from secure, stable forms of labor. They reflect an intensifying global economy in signs and affect generated around the signified of youth as it is fragmented into mobile forms and mediated desires. Unlike the first two groups, these young people shared a more jagged social existence. But they coalesce around highly visible global projects that trace the circulatory patterns of the kikokushijo and the risks so omnipresent in the skateboarders’ lives.
The form for this ethnography attempts to inscribe the flow and polytonality through interrelating stories and analyses. There is no center, only sites of explanation and nodes of affinity. “When two divergent stories unfold simultaneously, it is impossible to privilege one over the other: it is a case in which everything is equal, but ‘everything is equal’ is said of the difference, and is said only of the difference between the two” (D&G 1994, 125).
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