Conscripting (Bad Boy) Labor

In the 1920s juvenile delinquents, roaming youth, and itinerant laborers in one experiment were rounded up sent to the Bonin Islands to execute the colonial domestication of the islands envisaged by Tokyo authorities. Reform projects and attempts to harness (male) youth to the nation frequently framed their efforts through the imperial imagination. Reformers compared “juvenile delinquents with ‘broken, defeated’ Koreans and slum dwellers with the Ainu” (Ambaras 2006, 63). Colonialism provided the global context and possible futures of unruly youth and uncannily prefigured the discourse around Japan’s contemporary youth. “The construction of social problems in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century thus signals the country’s integration in a global network of power and knowledge organized around multiple imperial and industrial centers” (Ibid.). Ambaras succinctly highlights the sociopolitical necessity of discursive techniques to ideologically and physically articulate youthful becomings with the changing shape of the nation. In the present we witness a sharp tension between national (post)modernity and the global production of youth. This tension jeopardizes the future as a teleological prize of uncontaminated cultural continuity. It is crucial to not read the Lesque skaters and their peers as inhabiting the figure of crisis—much like their predecessors might be cast as the unwitting surplus in imperial crisis—but instead to see them navigating economic and cultural topographies scored with multiple, conflicting lines of flight, where the nation folds into and out of the global space:  

The duality of Japan versus the world, or the nation-state versus the global market, that underlies much of the rhetoric of ‘‘Japan in crisis’’ occludes the mutually parasitic relations between economic and political forces at play. The expanse of the borderless market is, of course, not ‘‘out there’’ somewhere outside Japan but is spreading within it, through the very forces that are transforming the corporate governance and employment practices in Japanese companies or in neoliberal measures that are eroding the public sector and services in the name of reform. (Yoda 2001, 642)

Itoshin, so similar to the young delinquents in Ambaras’ history of pre-war era “bad youth,” finds himself sleeping alongside others produced out of the new intensities of “borderless markets.” Waking in the crowded, stuffy globalized world localized in his dorm, uncannily and doubly alien, Itoshin shares in the experience of many of his young contemporaries while also embodying a genealogy of Japanese male labor laid over a new globalizing fold.

Tokyo Skateboard Local


On his way to his shift at Family Mart he steps into the street and drops his skateboard before him. One graceful, long push and he’s gliding through traffic and coming to a stop at a railroad crossing. The train rushes past, carrying commuters westward from the commercial centers of the city. The gates rise and his jumps back on his board, turning  a corner, then cutting and dodging through a crowd of salarymen pouring out of the nearby train station. The contrast between them is sharp as I follow behind, videoing Itoshin’s line through the crowd. Tired office workers pull up sharply or sidestep as Itoshin’s wheels clear a sonic path that opens up space before him and then closes swiftly behind. I swerve and have trouble keeping up as he pushes hard, gaining speed in an empty stretch of the narrow street. While he might be interpellated as another sign of social disorder within the panic site of youth, he is already flashing past, in flight, shifting, pushing to a shitty job that will keep him alive on expired food, the excess left behind by the rest of society. His movement through the Tokyo streets reflects a comfort with  “moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a multiplicity of flows,” navigating the harsh politics of the local at the level of the street and social expectation but surviving on expired conbini food and contributing to the social and physical life of the Lesque house (Grosz 1995, 184).

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