Looking around I wondered what the diagnosis for these young men would be. Kosugi Reiko thinks young people suffer risk, not from declining academic performance, but from a failure “to develop a sense of social responsibility.” An easy ride of affluence, she continues, has made young people careless in developing the kind of life skills previous generations took for granted. “Students now need to acquire and to be taught the life skills being promoted by the Ministry of Education and Science” (ibid., 240). This shilling for government curriculum in producing a dutiful subject with a sufficiently mature sense of “social obligation” exemplifies the turn towards a neo-liberal focus on “socially delinquent” individuals rather than a larger, more critical view of sociality made “precarious” by the dismantling of lifetime employment into a scarce reminder of an earlier, arguable exceptional, economic period. As I’ve argued here, crisis around youth is a constructed means for shifting blame and deploying social orthopedics to discipline and acclimate marginalized youth as a contingent class upon whom demands and diagnoses can be heaped but by who claims and challenges must not be made.

Andrea Arai succinctly outlines a trifecta of panic around young people, focused specifically around failures of institutions and mutations of subjectivities:

During the first years of the twenty-first century, the focus shifted dramatically in the Japanese media onto what became known as the collapsing classrooms (gakkyu hōkai), failing homes (katei hōkai) and strange kids (hen da kodomo) of the new millennium. These descriptions of decline were filled with the details of the frightening deficiencies of academic ability, physical strength and social skills among the young, on the one hand, and their excesses of desire for commodities and death on the other. As examples in the media of the moral and physical decline of the youth preoccupied national interest, a new credence was lent to government proposals for the need to strengthen and revitalize the population. (2003, 370)

Youth problems (wakamo no mondai) take a sinister shape in these media depictions and the discursive effects are far-reaching. Approaches like Kosugi’s do much to transect the panic zones and provide us with an understanding of the Japanese economy’s structural shifts in relation to school-to-work transition and hiring practices. But even such a careful sociological method as Kosugi’s is still insistently coupled to a neo-liberal, bio-political ideal: the young person is confronted with choice and so dreams must be realistically imagined, skills acquired, and initiative taken. But this progress towards self-realization through labor incorporation is derailed by “the view held by many youth that they can get by in life without assuming the responsibilities of adulthood” (2008, 242). Shifting from the micro-view of the individual young person with their malformed sense of social responsibility, Kosugi finds this figure representative of “a larger social change…in which the entire framework or set of assumptions that were crucial to the transformation of young people into adulthood has been altered” (Ibid.). The future is at risk. The institution of adulthood, always synonymous with a slate of unspecified responsibilities to be shouldered (biological reproduction, greater financial debt, or societal “dynamism” perhaps?), is being rejected and abandoned by entitled, consumerist youth who lack any concrete vision of their “dream.”

The statistical story continues to tell of a growing “precarious” population. During the course of my research, from 2006-2008, the part-time employment rate had jumped from 18% to 19.6% and has continued to rise to 20.5% in 2013. If combined with the “self-employed” category, the total non-permanent workforce is 32.6%, substantially higher than the quarter at the time of Gill’s study in 2001. Yet narrative-by-percentage tells us little to nothing about what “adulthood” or family might mean to young people who are part of “a larger social change” in which assumptions about how youth is to transform into adulthood have been seriously “altered.”

The Lesque house is an exceptional location to ask questions about new forms of familial relations, about men at work drifting within the ever-expanding reserve pool of labor, about the social freedom and possibility intersecting at the local street and global imaginary.

Comment on this page