It is easy to portray the house as a striking example of new horizontal cultural practices taking over the abandoned nuclear dreams of fast-dissolving middle class families. The house undone is a hackneyed trope. To depict this house as illustrative of the dissolution of Japan’s teleologically undifferentiated class and biological reproduction would only recast Lesque as the protagonists surviving crisis through creative adaptation. To some extent, this version of youth, masculinity, work, and family refracts a dim truth about a global city within a struggling nation. But the binary is never so cleanly etched. It is always becoming more than just split truth, a queer remainder. This is exactly why Koji recounted his neighbors’ suspicion of their house as a cultish headquarters as a funny, small story. His neighbors’ nervous misrecognition of him, his beard, and the many young men drifting in and out of the house was a half-truth: they seemingly shared with Aum Shinrikyō a detachment from everyday concerns and ordinary social convention. Invisible to those curious neighbors, Lesque was connected to a global network replete with a powerful media apparatus, even if often contingent and underground. Young guys from Europe, North America, and Japan’s periphery passed through and the crew left for lengthy skate trips across Japan and into Asia.

Something hazy was shared between Lesque and Aum Shinrikyō marked in the way the house coalesced the drift between the local and the outer world. The neighbors could be forgiven for mistaking the young men as part of a deviant religious sect. Women never came to the house—Itoshin had a girlfriend in distant Ibaraki prefecture who never visited. None of the other guys in the house, while interested in women as romantic and sexual partners, had any steady relationships. The relationships visible from the neighbors’ vantage must have seemed curiously, perhaps dangerously, insular and without any meaningful connection to the immediate space of Tokyo.

The misrecognition is funny, because of course; Lesque was kind of a cult, or at least a metamorphosing assemblage within the larger site of Japan’s risky youth and a vibrant node comprising the global skate scene. They were erupting at the very eroded margins of normal society and making space for themselves and their desires as they could. But the guys in the house also comprised a new aspect in the story of Japan’s working class, a new capillary of labor growing along the seams of a fractured, global capitalism.

The old day laborers used to congregate together in wards around the yoseba. Together they claimed space out of the city and produced a rowdy, often-disorderly zone for themselves even as they were subjected to the worst features of capitalism’s expansionist projects. A day laborer veteran described Osaka’s yoseba, Kamagasaki, as “a kind of ‘liberated zone,’ where permissiveness, vulgarity, and violence reigned. Visitors to Kamagasaki…were thoroughly taken aback by its peculiar inhabitants, so different were they in their dress, their appearance—their very language—from ordinary citizens…Laborers and the police frequently engaged in large-scale clashes” (Shirō 2005 2). Before the area’s decline in the wake of Japan’s changing labor needs in the 1980s, “this rowdy, otherworldly ‘liberated zone’ positively intimidated the surrounding community” (Ibid.). This is not the kind of “otherworldliness” that drew the attention of the neighbors to the Lesque house. But the mark of class difference combined with their homosociality surely drew their attention, much as the police attempted to curb the degree of “liberation” achieved by the male residents of the Osaka yoseba.

While the Lesque skaters were hardly interested in rioting, they were still an object of concern to both society and the police. As their unusual domestic arrangement infiltrated the bedroom community once reserved for middle class reproduction, they represented a counter-factual youth threat. They were not the type of withdrawn, isolated, unpredictable young people (almost always boys) depicted as responsible for the “crisis” of youth violence most famously precipitated by the Shōnen A multiple murder case by a Kobe junior high school student in 1997. And they didn’t set off alarms with unsettling similarities to much older forms of working-class gangs (yotamono) of the 1920s or more recently, the famed biker gangs (bōsōzoku) of the 1970s and 80s. It is in the relation of the skaters’ social connections (a motley connection of young men, only tentatively employed) to a specific space (stagnant suburban community) that they made the most sense when aligned with the culture and kinship of the cult (and by extension, terrorism).
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The Lesque house existed as a schizophrenic sign of young male communality: not regulated by a patriarchal system of either family or company or segregated into a discrete class zone set apart from “ordinary citizens” (nor in military barracks or prisons) the skaters were mimicking the sociality of normal families. In their unusual sociality, were they and their friends perceived as interlopers and impersonators? In appearing as a perverse form of family, doomed to biological non-reproduction, much like the day laborers in their impoverished, unmarried state, the Lesque skaters signified not contingent labor just trying to make it, but a more sinister threat, that of the cult—family separated from its social meaning. Is this the kind of lack of “social responsibility” among unfocused and entitled youth Kosugi bemoans in her analysis of Japan’s growing population of irregular workers?



On a warm early summer evening hanging out in the house, I film Masataka cleaning the living room floor. After carefully finishing, he moves to the kitchen floor and then bags the recycling and garbage, taking them out to the nearby trash collection point for the next day’s pick-up. Hardly unusual or exceptional, the very quotidian actions were significant for the very fact of their ordinariness within this small household. Working less frequently than the others, Masataka had the time to clean up, though efforts stopped short of clearing the low tables in the living room cluttered with nearly empty bags of dried squid, old skateboard wheels, and a few beer cans. Upstairs, Itoshin was getting ready to go to work at his part-time job as a clerk at Family Mart, a ubiquitous chain of convenience stores or conbini. It didn’t pay much, but it wasn’t too demanding and gave him enough time to skate while being entirely disposable if he wanted to travel. The job, Itoshin explained, was necessary to stay alive, as he opened the fridge to reveal stacks of packaged prepared meals: pork cutlet, spaghetti, cold soba noodles. “They have to be eaten soon though,” his voice rising into comic sharpness, “or we’ll dieeee!” He pulled one out to show me, pointing to the expiration date—two days earlier. “They usually last a few days after the date. Who cares? They’re free!” he said gleefully, tossing it back into the fridge, skittering over the other meals in their uniform plastic containers. Itoshin brought them back from Family Mart after every shift. What would’ve gone to waste was secretly fueling scruffy squads of skaters crashing at the house. The meals, consumed most often by solitary salarymen at the end of a long day or students in need of a cheap, quick lunch, were already emblematic of the lonely, hard pressed, and alienated laborers scattered across Tokyo’s alleys, corporate offices, concrete apartment blocks, pleasure districts, and industrial districts. Who would choose to eat this food if given a choice? Like Itoshin’s job, the food itself was intended just to get you by, to allow you to get to another disposable job as a solitary, disposable worker across the vast matrix of surplus labor constantly in motion. Yet Itoshin was smuggling bags of these meals home to feed his friends in a reversal of the sociality they presumed. Gathered around the small table, Masataka and Itoshin devoured two boxes, sipping bottled green tea. “Delicious!” Itoshin barked. “But ooooh, my stomach hurts. I think I ate too much.”

Itoshin used to be one of those lonely workers, scattered across the city, dispatched from one temp job to another. He moved from Ibaraki prefecture, north of Tokyo, after he dropped out of high school. In middle school he had been on the baseball team, the most socially prestigious and exclusive sport a male student could play, but he’d hated the coach. On top of that, he was a bad student. Not just bad academically, but bad all around. “I, um, had a lot of troubles,” Itoshin grinned at me, his eyes twinkling mischievously, during my one structured interview with him. “I got busted with some weed—it wasn’t a big deal, but you know, it became a major incident.” The demands to reform and accommodate himself to the social constraints of the baseball team along with the intensifying regimine of competitive schooling disagreed with him. He described a sort of unarticulated, mute resistance against the forces tightening around him and his life. Middle school is where “[y]oung adolescents learn more than submission to the group” (Fukuzawa and LeTendre 2001, 23). They also learn kejime, “the individual cognitive ability to dissociate one set of common behaviors from another” resulting in a compartmentalized life (Ibid.). What Itoshin was discontentedly recounting was the restraint and socially determined behavior-switching understood as a fundamental aspect of Japanese schooling and a trait expected of adults as well. He eventually gave up struggling to survive within the education system. “My dad was really angry.” Itoshin shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette when I asked him about his parents’ feelings when he dropped out. He had been skating ever since junior high and had found he was the happiest when he was just rolling around. After dropping out the most obvious trajectory was into the huge metropolis to the south, where he could skate the city and flow into a thriving skate culture with its opportunities to work with videographers and photographers and potentially attract sponsorships.

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