The intensity of the work, the scarcity of permanent jobs, and the shared uncertainty of the men echoed a long history of day laborers (hiyatoi rōdōsha) on the perilous, expendable margins of the Japanese economy. The traditional day laborers were men who worked for the interlocking chain of construction firms or keiretsu for low pay on hazardous building projects across Japan, living in boarding houses and private dormitories adjacent to yoseba or employment centers where daily jobs are dispensed. These workers rebuilt the country after WWII, constructed the massive highway system, domesticated urban waterways with concrete, erected the nation’s thriving metropolises, and cleaned up after earthquakes and nuclear accidents. The day laborer is a fading figure following the stagnation of the economy in the 1990s. Now these men, who were once a robust component of the Japanese labor force albeit outside the confines of company and family, move into old age and increasing homelessness and illness. New and proliferating forms of “casual labor” or rinji are an increasingly common feature of young people’s lives in post-Bubble Japan.

The young men living in the Lesque house and their many friends crashing on the tatami floor comprise a portion of this reserve army of labor, inheriting a changed socioeconomic landscape: they work, but are not embraced within a company structure with relations resembling a “great big family” rather than “an impersonal employment situation” (Rohlen 1974, 19). Deprived of this societal legibility, they appear stunted and risky, unable to grow into accepted positions from which masculine adulthood could be conferred and thus trapped in a twilight of perpetual youth and at risk for spreading generational anomie.

Another stack of skateboard decks is neatly bundled and placed inside a box to be sent to Osaka. Masataka checks the order off against a list posted on the wall. Kazu brings us all cold bottles of tea from the fridge. Their cooperation and care exhibits a maturity and attention to relations in which resources—skate decks, floorspace, tea—and affective energy in friendships, as well as raw labor, are all exchanged as needed. Without overstating it, their behaviors resemble those idealized among elementary school students working together democratically to solve problems and maintain a harmonious and productive social life. In so many ways they resemble a family. This stands in contrast to the painful crucible of constricted present in which “Layoffs and downsizing expose the extent to which corporate familialism is not prepared to go, as defamilialization writ large accompanies the much-mourned fragmentation of the Japanese family writ small” (Ivy 2000, 820). This change is a result of neoliberalization and a statistical category captured by fashionable analyses of “precarity.” Youth tagged as furiitaa (temporary or contingent labor) or NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) are quickly assessed to be vulnerable to aimless anomie or hopelessness. This is reflected back even by some young people themselves. Anne Allison recounts one twenty year-old woman who felt “her generation are nihilistic:”
   

“Nothing really matters and we don’t take anything, including ourselves, too seriously.” “Hope?” she repeated back when I asked her about this. “No, I wouldn’t say I’m hopeful about either my own future or that of Japan. All I can say is that I’m genki (healthy) at the moment.” (Allison 2013, 89)

Self-revelations such as this give credence to the socioeconomic precariousness located and defined by scholars of a prolonged Japanese cultural “crisis.” However, this academic work echoes back panic discourses, often uncritically (Toivonen and Imoto 2013). I argue it occludes or obfuscates the persistence of “precariousness” as a necessary condition of capitalism. The concern and interest for the “precariat” is specific to the unprecedented threat to Japan’s middle class youth. This is identified as middle-class bias as the debate over kakusa shakai or “divided society” as class inequality becomes visibly sharper and painfully experienced (Toivonen and Imoto 2013, Chiavacci 2008).

In the context of a broad demographic of young people, including many with the possibility of attending university and those from middle class families, Japan’s smooth social and class reproduction will be disrupted. Indeed, it already appears under threat: “If this next generation is not properly trained and given a sense of its destiny in taking society to its next stage, the society will lose its dynamism” (Kosugi 2008, 243). 

Precarious has a History of Being Risky: Day Laborers and Contingent Male Work

It is critical to think about young people within a genealogy of capitalist insecurity. Masataka and his friends, working should-to-shoulder for Lesque’s own risky future, share in a lineage of marginalized men giving shape to Japan from below.  Tom Gill, a leading scholar on day laborers, points out, however, that irregular labor is a persistent feature in the Japanese landscape with nearly a quarter of the workforce in 2001—some 15.5 million people—living without job security. The “precarious” class is the focus of considerable attention as of late as more and more young people enter the labor market with little chance of finding a stable or permanent job, but again, this is a feature easily tracked, as shown by Kosugi Reiko:

[I]t used to be the case that nearly all graduates had a permanent job waiting for them upon graduation [from high school]. However, the situation began to change in the 1990s, and today some ten percent of graduates do not have such employment waiting for them. This is a big change in just over a decade. The result is that there is now a pool of surplus labor which flows into the market for casual employment.” (2008, 18)

Long stretches of working part-time jobs or arubaitō frequently means once workers were caught in the pool of irregular labor they were without “tangible skills or experience” and “these traits were likely to be negatively evaluated by prospective employers” (Ibid., 133). Kosugi concludes her study with a prescriptive attention towards rehabilitating these workers and attempting to integrate them into a restructured economy with new pathways from school to work. Beyond the transition process to stable employment she focuses on “dreams” intended to guide workers into finding meaningful work. She gestures vaguely to young entrepreneurs bringing “fashion, music, video games and manga to the world…Japan’s future would indeed be bleak were it not for the energy generated by these young Japanese in pursuit of a dream” (Ibid., 222).

There is no saccharine talk of dreams as the three young men work together. But they are not confined to the prison of the perpetual present. As they work, they discuss places across the city they want to skate at and who had done what trick in those places recently. Masataka pondered whether he had a better chance getting visibility if he moved to the West Coast like Ishiko had done a decade prior, maybe to L.A. or San Francisco. “I just wish I spoke better English,” he moaned. “Dwayne, start an eikawa (English conversation school) here!” “Seriously?” I teased. “Shouldn’t you have mastered the language with all the Snoop Dogg you listen to?”

The last package was taped closed and the three teens congratulated one another on their hard work. We moved into the living room through the tidy kitchen, past a nearly waist-high stack of old, battered skateboard decks piled against the wall by the doorway. A full ashtray on the table sat on the table and various skateboard parts were stacked beside it. Living together this way saved money, it was efficient and convenient. It meant the men could create a sociality on their own terms an devote their energies to skating and by extension to one another and their shared vision of an independent company. All those shoes piled in the genkan served as monument to their provisional form of domesticity and action. The subjectivities the Lesque skaters were shaping from the new cultural gaps and along old class and gender fissures in traditional Japanese society were hard at work within a global imaginary.

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