Itoshin, Koji, Masataka, and Shota had rented an single-family home in Tokyo's western suburbs and moved in together in the summer of 2007, just before the company became official in November. The living arrangement itself was unusual and attracted suspicious attention from the neighbors. Koji recounted having to face a group of worried neighbors who rang the bell one morning. Koji, who at the time was 30 years old, stocky and wearing a full, thick beard, was confronted by his confused neighbors who wanted to know what all the young men were doing coming and going from this house. Their main concern, Koji said, was that they were afraid a cult had taken up residence. 

Koji's bearded and intimidating figure aside, the inter-generational drift of young men and teens around the house had become a source of concern for the surrounding residents of the quiet neighborhood. The very fact that the original purpose of the house had deviated from domicile for a thriving middle-class nuclear family signaled larger shifts in the country--even the meaning of buildings could longer be counted on to hold themselves in place amidst economic, cultural, and demographic changes. The intense homosociality of the house also seemed to be a cause for anxiety. Young people almost never live together in group houses of their own accord. Worker dormitories and cheap accommodations for day laborers are familiar spaces for same-gender co-habitation of working class men, but their living arrangements are structured by their laboring identities. That is, being lower class and single, they come under the care of their companies if fortunate enough to work for a robust corporation or they are consigned to the yoseba districts or “open-air, casual labor markets” in which men take on short-term contracts or day jobs doing the dirtiest and most dangerous work, usually at construction sites (Gill 2000).

A once ordinary family home transformed into a youthful, masculine homosocial zone full of young skaters exists uneasily between class insurgency and cult infection. The house had gone unrented for several years before Koji signed the lease on it, suggesting the capacity and interest of middle class families had drifted away from the large dwelling built atop former fields. The new social unit assuming the vacant contours of the nuclear family was out of place—working class youth who ordinarily would be expected to be safely ensconced within company dormitories deep in the industrial sections of Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama. Not legible under a corporate logo or conforming to normal housing conventions, the Lesque house instead represents a potentially dangerous mimicry of family—the perverse deformation of family through the deviancy of the cult. Koji’s beard alone was sufficient for neighbors to draw comparisons between their house and the infamous Aum Shinrikyō cult with its own bearded leader. The cult, responsible for deadly sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, required members to sever relations with outsiders, especially family and thus reconstituted kinship along through disaffection with conventional society and utopic desire initiated through this act of separation (Reader 2002).

Unlike the closed community constructed by Aum Shinrikyō, the Lesque house was a fluid space where travelling skaters from across Japan and abroad would crash for days or sometimes weeks, join up with other local skaters to go on late-night skate explorations of the city, or help Koji and other team members to package up decks, t-shirts, and sticker packs for shipment to local skateshops across the country. Ishiko’s respected contribution to Japan’s skate scene combined with Itoshin’s recent visibility in skate magazines and online videos ensured the company could develop a small but significant network in the underground among hardcore skaters and the shops they supported. The stream of skaters who crashed at the house only strengthened the reputation of Lesque and gave credence to their philosophy of exploration and commitment to individual skaters’ passion. The sharing of space and resources with friends and acquaintances further solidified Lesque’s risky commercial venture precisely because the brand was so much more about creating a strong connection to local skaters and shops in lieu of corporate distribution and steady income—a tactic designed to develop Lesque as an authentic skater-owned company which would then attract big sponsorships from clothing and shoe companies who depended on the transfer of authenticity from their riders to hold their place in a volatile and crowded marketplace.

Lesque coalesced aesthetic, economic, and social desires into a complex assemblage actively connected to globalized terrain—skate trips to Barcelona and later, Korea, Taiwan, and China—and media drifting around the Pacific Rim and beyond. Lesque was redolent with the scent of the global youth imaginary, saturated as it was with Ishiko’s enviable and rare breakthrough into the Los Angeles skate industry, Koji’s Costa Rican upbringing and visual training among American snowboarders, and Itoshin’s rising visibility within the worldwide skate scene. Even Masataka’s Okinawan origin contributed a form of internal difference—a cosmopolitan yet marginalized identity borrowing heavily from the music and styles of off-duty American soldiers, and indeed, his skateboarding skills developed on architecture built to serve American military interests.

The various differences expressed by the Lesque crew foreground the heterogeneity of Japanese youth, inscribed through global contacts, affiliations, experiences, and affinities and its creation of new meanings for Japanese spaces and subjectivity. How do the skaters sketch lines of possibility in which zones of crisis—youth (and the consumerist, sexed, dreaming bodies within this category), family, workplace—are reimagined, folded over into forms of difference such that markers of adulthood, working, and reproduction decay into expansive becomings within youth, play, and creative assemblage from cultural drift? As the suburban dream of middle class aspiration has diminished in the long passage of the Lost Decade+ and normalized forms of social maturation and economic incorporation have been perforated or eroded, the hollows and absences have reverberated with the shrill discourse of moral panics, an issue I address here and here. Yet dormant space is not debilitated space. The Lesque house, as dual site of work and communality, generates value, strengthens social networks and permits a closer analysis of the lives of working men and resilient forms of homosociality.

Arriving at the house after a short train ride from my apartment, I took off my shoes in the genkan or lowered entryway to the house. The space was a mess, piled with old pairs of worn skateshoes on the floor and stuffed into a refined shoe cabinet along the wall, a  middle class remainder, it top covered in skate wheels, hardware, and a motorbike helmet covered in skate brand stickers. From what had formerly been the Western-style dining room immediately to the right came the sounds of packing tape unspooling and the muffled thumping of cardboard boxes being assembled and filled. Masataka and two friends visiting from Okinawa were arrayed around a long folding table, methodically packing boxes with Lesque merchandise—skate decks and shirts, an occasional video. West Coast hip hop provided the soundtrack and Masataka nodded his head to the rhythm. “Yoooo!” he greeted me. The delicate white wallpaper and gauzy curtains were an ironic compliment to the functional office space the room had become. Where once a family had likely gathered around a dining room table, Masataka and his friends now shared in the drudge work of getting product out the door, a time-consuming, communal task that contributed to paying the rent. “We are the mailman’s worst nightmare! He knows now to just bring the truck up to the house. Coming on foot is pointless,” Masataka said, gesturing to the stack of packages piled along the wall.  “Looks like you are forcing guests to pay for their floorspace by working in this sweatshop,” I teased. One of the Okinawan kids grinned. The other fired back: “I’d rather be packing decks than packing recycling!”

The retort is telling; nearly all the skaters I met worked at some kind of temporary job, a reflection of “the restructuring of the work force, and the creation of an underclass of drifting young workers — a highly politically and economically productive reserve army of labor known as the fureeta” (Arai 2005). A year earlier Masataka himself had worked a six-month contract in Nagoya at an electronic parts factory. Now he was working occasionally on a demolition crew—hazardous, dirty work but flexible enough to give Masataka time to skate and refine tricks. The manual labor showed in his toughened, scarred hands, thick forearms curving up into powerful biceps. Kazu, one his visiting friends, was planning on taking a contract at the same place, sick of doing unpredictable part-time work collecting paper and cardboard recycling. “There aren’t many options for us guys back in Okinawa. The US military bases have some construction crews but there’s just no real work. We’re just poor kids so that factory job looks good, even though it’s super hard. After it ends you’re free and you’ve got all this money saved. It doesn’t last long enough though!”

On a skate trip with Lesque a few months later I met another 23 year-old, Okinawan skater at a spot we were riding in Nagoya. Nobu was in the middle of his contract and described the factory system in more detail. “Yeah, you work really long shifts and live in a cramped dorm. The only Japanese people who work there are Okinawan guys. Everyone else is foreign—mostly Brazilian. Those guys are wild! But they work hard and then just disappear, coming and going. A few get lucky and marry a Japanese girl and they stay. This whole area,” he waved his arm broadly from where we were squatting beneath the elevated highway, taking in the run-down apartment buildings and faded shop façade, “is basically Brazilian now, or just a mix of people without money.”

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