The entire floor is blanketed in low-intensity clutter. Drifts of papers, classwork, some books, are they textbooks? In the corner, underneath a grey hoodie and a maroon roller-bag aground like a wrecked freighter. The futon in the room’s center is covered in everyday detritus: empty instant noodle cups, a half-eaten bag of chips, a few magazines, hair clips, maybe that’s a t-shirt? Or a skirt? Stained with coffee. A few lipsticks. Dirty underwear. Sheets twisted into sharp knots and folds. Running through the surf of ordinary accumulation are cords and wires. One is tethered to a cell phone, keeping it both powered and afloat. Another runs into the depths, became unmoored, and is lost.

At the foot of the bed is a low plastic table with fake blond woodgrain. An open laptop is playing Guns-n-Roses through small speakers. The guitars and Axl Rose’s voice are tinny and small but more sugary with the bass nearly absent. One speaker is tipped over dangerously against a partially emptied bottle of tea. A simple mug, chopsticks, a bottle of aspirin, and an orange peel complete the tableau of anomie. The laptop case is encrusted in stickered bling. Flashy adhesive rhinestone patterns and sticky sparkle sold to young women across Japan as protest solution to drab consumer electronics, anonymously slick as if to prevent any trace of differential identity from holding. A Roxy brand sticker—Pacific girls’ surf dreams in tropical colors and patterns. The revenge of 100-yen store Baroque and a casual disfigurement of vaunted Japanese design to defy lost autonomy and the very temporariness of the surfaces themselves, because soon they will be obsolete. The walls of the small room are covered in a plasticky wallpaper skin, a simple 90s stripe design in grey and white. The room feels flimsy and pre-fab, sterile enough to make the history of any tenant disappear painlessly. The closet is open and feels like it has been carelessly disemboweled, guts made of forgotten clothes, fancy dresses and straps, belts, jean legs spilling out to join a pool of high heels, bejeweled flats, black Converse hi-tops, the pathetic yawn of a large, ornate handbag leaking tissues, more lipsticks, sunglasses, snarled earbuds. A small picture frame containing a collage of photographs of smiling friends hangs on the wall next to the closet. The photographs welcome my gaze, speaking of memories, history, ordinary but intimate connections. Even though the frame reflects the horror vacui of the room with its dense assemblage of carefully cut and arranged photos, it's a generous riot of human warmth and the handmade. It is an inviting space of calm made of earlier moments against the present chaos of the room.

With a small tabletop mirror carefully arranged on the tiny desk in the corner, Akemi is quickly but delicately sorting through the cosmetics she’s dumped from a well-worn travel bag. A few bottles roll off the edge but are absorbed into the clutter below. She deftly spins open a lipstick and traces the line of her upper lip before brusquely wiping it away with a sharp sound of displeasure, barely throwing the tissue down before she’s already located the next color to try. Her eyes are already done with thick mascara, so heavy her eyes seem permanently shadowed and macabre, all the more stark beneath her severely plucked eyebrows. I watch her face struggle with its own reflection in the mirror, a severity of concentration so physical it marks itself across her body. Her back hunches under her simple t-shirt. The muscles in her calves twitch and she arches her feet unconsciously, straining with athletic precision to inhabit the persona she soon will perform.

Things have only gotten harder. Struggling with depression, with her college classes, with her family relationships, with a seeping sense of social disconnection, now Akemi is feeling a gnawing stress over money. Her parents have been divorced for years and her mother has struggled to raise she and her brother.

Lately it has become a serious strain on her mother to woo tuition support from her father who lives in a distant city. Her mother has been putting lots of pressure on Akemi to develop a warmer relationship with her dad, despite the bitter resentment spawned over the years since he abandoned them. The strategic duplicity her mother advocates has gone beyond Akemi’s emotional and ethical capacity and they’ve been fighting often, mostly over the phone. Seriously fighting. With her money disappearing fast, she’s asked friends to help cover her rent and she took the initiative to find work on top of her already grueling school schedule. A few attempts to get sales jobs failed. Through friends she met with a girl who was working at a hostess club in one of Tokyo’s main entertainment districts. After interviewing at the club and working a few nights as a waitress/observer, she was given a few trial shifts.

She’s about to leave soon but is struggling to choose an outfit, pack her accessories in her battered roller bag, and get out the door in time to make the train. Her unrelenting depression makes decision-making difficult and punctuality almost impossible. The hostess club follows the classic model of chatty, lively women facilitating the homosocial male relations between salaried corporate employees and sometimes their clients and guests. The men, Akemi tells me, are so boring. The décor is cliché and atmosphere so scripted as to be laughable. All the girls mock the job, the club, and the patrons for the transparent stage of exchange that it is: the particular value of embodied girl-time for money. And lots of it. Akemi has been able to pay back her friends and is starting to save a little. She really needs counseling and probably some medication, neither of which she can afford but doesn’t want her mom’s money.

So the club increasingly becomes the center of her life to the detriment of her studies, her plans for therapy, and even her shrinking circle of friends.

From the outside, she seems to exemplify the public anxieties over Japan’s young womanhood, legible as risk and danger once they are identified and assigned to the familiar panic site of (bad girl) youth. “Critics complain that girls put their make-up on in public, speak loudly on their cell phones on trains and in restaurants, and no longer take care of themselves or their rooms and clothing” (Miller and Bardsley 2005, 8). Looking around Akemi’s room, I only wonder how smugly vindicated “the curators of Japan’s national femininity” would feel, those faceless guardians Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley reference in their introduction to Bad Girls of Japan. I imagine them sharpening their hallowed pens against the coarseness of their judgment, perched vigilantly across Japan’s discursive media forest. They would pick apart Akemi’s life, making her exceptional, both as example and as deviant, as synecdoche sign of future collapse arrived a bit early as harbinger and warning. The ordinary failure-to-come heralded in the form of an early-to-arrive anomaly. Akemi was a friend and not implicitly part of my research. But her specific moment of distress, perseverance, and exchange of her performance of girlishness for possible means of survival and autonomy unfolded so unexpectedly close to me that I absorbed the painful concussions of everyday life through our relationship.

Akemi’s struggle and the understanding of it confuses the discrete boundaries of research and existence, tearing apart the already shoddy, hastily-erected borders between myself at work and myself not-working. I admit, those borders were barely sketched out and had more worth in theory than they ever had in active intent. While I had been busy looking out in Tokyo’s dense youth worlds for risk and responses—improvised, provisional, or planned—to instability, uncertainty, and change, it was right here, in Akemi’s messy room. She was yet another articulation of precariousness and the liminal threat of young women, but also a fracturing of any single, safe narrative composed to hold her fast and contain her particular pain and attempts to modulate and alter her life.

The “precarious” and the attendant “youth in crisis” are not quarantine units for analyses. Akemi is a fractal of becomings, intensities fluctuating so powerfully they sting and sing to you through nerves and sympathy networks and the helpless confusion of time compressing but being undone into a runaway spool all at once. Her face composed, she races down the metal stairs of the apartment building with her roller bag banging loudly down the steps and she waves a hasty good-bye, trying to make it to the next train.

Human Relations Pay the Bills

An assemblage of labor and youth reconstitutes itself around Akemi’s hours spent entertaining middle-aged men at the hostess club. Because of her part-time vocation she might be assigned a place in the fashionably crowded halls of the precarious, but she shares a dimly lit table with a history of women in a continuity of labor. She is yet another woman going to work to serve men within a circuit of affective labor, a space already visible to us through a first ethnographic encounter so many decades ago now, in the research of Anne Allison. Allison worked as a hostess, and while the term “affective” hadn’t yet come into vogue or taken on its shiny resonances, she was participating in gendered, affective labor. For corporate salarymen, family is the blueprint for work relations resulting in strong ningenkankei—human relations—necessary to secure the warm, loyal bonds among employees and between them and their bosses. The hostess is a crucial figure in revitalizing the “humanness” (ningenmi) between workers. “And the payoff, by this logic, is to worker as well as company: the worker is made to feel more human and these feelings of humanness build the ties needed between those who work or do business together” (Allison 1994, 14). Women, albeit outside the family home, thus perform a crucial task in reconstituting the capitalist-corporate workplace as instrumentalized mimetic site of family. In a sharp-edged irony, the hostesses themselves in their performance rehabilitate, enhance, and massage the homosocial connections between those men entrusted with the energies of Japan’s elite commerce so as to create a feeling of family, that sign of traditional values and connection the workplace pays homage to. Meanwhile, the hostesses themselves, like Akemi, go to work providing the familiarizing, biopolitical grease between men within this still-powerful patri-capitalist edifice. Their work is in the structuring of fantasy, sublimation of male hierarchy, and lavish care for the micro-details of male comfort—lighting a cigarette, pouring a drink, administering the salve of preciously contrived feminine attention to the softening, vulnerable male identities entrusted to them.

Even as the hostess critically maintains the assemblage and flow of corporate capitalism, they are, of course, jeopardizing their own position within gender hegemony. In working at the affective nexus of sex, gender, and money, they live along the perilous, risky fault line/panic site where they may become another (bad girl) sign of familial disorder and collapsing social futures. At the same time, the male patrons of the clubs are expressly looking for a place that is not home (Ibid. 36). “Further, when men whose jobs keep them away at night assume little in the way of responsibilities for children and home, and when women’s own career aspirations are obstructed, marriage has little opportunity to be anything but a relationship of expediency” (Ibid., 25).

The girls in the club are the bodily, gendered media whereby social energy is transferred between men and their (masculine) bonds are strengthened, hierarchies temporarily diminished, and an imaginary of a fraternal family carefully (re)assembled.

Even When They Are Present, Girls Have a Way of Being Disappeared

In Allison’s account we know nearly nothing of the women who work, so much attention being paid in research on the men. This absence is even more profound as the women in the account draw on their own store/stories of affective techniques in attending to male desires to be recognized, heard, restored. I wonder about the women who worked the tables along with Allison. What neighborhoods did they come from? Were they earning to survive or just get by? Where did they disappear to when the last customer had gone back to his wife and kids? Had their affective expenditure altered their own relations to work and to their other worlds, replete with other possibilities and futures, such that they found themselves returning to the club in a melancholy of persistence? Did they find the club, like one of Allison’s patron-informants, “more homelike than his real home” (Ibid., 199)? The social exchange of affective energy and power across gendered, monetized lines of provider and client is another instance of what Luxemburg calls “the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world” marked by “social convulsions” (Luxemburg 2003, 447). In my reading of Allison’s work, the women are disposable while the men persist and even thrive, after a fashion, in their transfers and reproduction of male power. The individuated affective capacity is perpetually diminished at the level of the isolated woman working her tables as best she can while contending with the worlds somehow still leveraging her values within the fantasy space of the club. The economic constrictions ripple in grotesque peristalsis and endlessly produce the reserve army of labor ready with their cultivated sense of affect, play, and commodified leisure.

The girls in the club are working hard facilitating conversation, giving (just a touch of) flesh to fantasy, making men feel meaningful. But their hard work is already contingent on the far-away revenue streams of the companies paying the monthly bills, a small feature in the assemblage of global capitalism particularly shaped here around a work-sociality traced in the affective image of the family.

In the lost decades between Allison’s research and my own early evening with Akemi as she prepared for her nightly hostess performance, the affective trace of women’s work in Japan has unfortunately but unsurprisingly gone missing in scholarship, most shamefully perhaps in anthropology.

This is unsurprising if we heed Kathi Week’s argument that the absence of women’s affective labor in a wide-range of scholarship was attributable “to the feminization of the work (and hence its status as ‘shadow labor’), to the preeminence of a rather orthodox brand of Marxism, and to the hegemony of the Fordist imaginary” (2007, 236). While Weeks is referring to the early 70s, the triumvirate exerts a powerful trace effect, evident even in Allison’s pioneering (and solitary) study where the speaking subjects are left speechless in the dark when the lights go off on the precariously cordoned site of ethnographic inquiry.

It is encouraging to witness the renewed exuberance with which contemporary research encounters the marginalized, impoverished, embattled, and distressed along with their politics, lived realities, and endangered environments. It would seem legitimating, terminal concepts such as precarity and Lazzarato and Negri’s versions of “immaterial labor” largely authorizes this turn. If these terms help us excavate the genealogies of power, labor, and the bodies engaging in complex relations across the fields of work and sociality, then good. We are long overdue, as we are observers to convulsing worlds with the solidity of careful ideological, conceptual, and disciplinary borders become so much pulped hope. The precarious and its crisis have long been with us in the forms of gendered labor whose divisions of masculine sites of production and feminine zones of reproduction have become conjoined under post-Fordist, neoliberal modes of incorporation. The hostess club epitomizes this incorporation. The family unit exists at home, where it belongs, but the affective energy of its sociality is actively manufactured in sites intentionally remote and disassociated from the home as originary site of value and wellspring of its meanings, subsumed through risky bodies into new affective outputs and purposes. “What could once perhaps have been imagined as an ‘outside’ is now more fully ‘inside’; social reproduction can no longer be usefully identified with a particular site, let alone imagined as a sphere insulated from capital’s logics” (Ibid., 238).” Exported from the ideological template of the middle-class family “many forms of caring and household labor are transformed into feminized, racialized, and globalized forms of waged labor in the service sector” (Ibid., 238). Familial sociality and female sexuality are retooled in the reproductive fantasy furnace of the hostess clubs and are played out by bad girls “fitting the man to other men and the man to himself in ways that ‘function’ to sustain the operation of work” (Allison 1994, 149). The hostess club is a pulsating zone within the assemblage of globalized affective labor, constantly remodeled, restocked, and repopulated. Against a green screen of theoretical language, a larger, fast-moving scene of “precarious” labor (as a popular analytic category) can too easily dehistoricize the hostess club and overwrite the feminist struggles to articulate women’s affective work to valorized capital.



Coming through decades of service work on the perimeter of U.S. bases, the affective laborer challenges Japan’s official histories and rattles her male interlocutors concerned with a grand narrative of the postwar. Harry Harootunian inadvertently fixes on the risky bad girl as counterhistorical narrator as he writes about Imamura Shōhei’s documentary, History of Postwar Japan As Told by a Barmaid (1971). The subject of the film, Onboro, exemplifies “a pariah class” who inhabits the border world of bars serving the US naval base at Yokosuka. While footage shows people praying at shrines “undoubtedly imploring the gods for good fortune in this dark moment in Japan’s history” Onboro is asked about her own feelings about the war and its aftermath. She “responds cheerfully, saying how glad she is that the war has ended and what a nuisance it had been and expressing the necessity of now getting on with her life” (2006, 117). Amid the social and intellectual anxiety of the long postwar in Japan, “Onboro is living off the page, as it were, outside the official narrative of postwar Japan and postwar as Japan, recounting her experiences to the director’s questions, so that her everyday life cumulatively writes a different history” (Ibid.). The documentary unsettles the hegemonic through the vocalizations from the margins, of a particular lived reality, much in the way the best anthropology hopes to unfurl. It may be that affective, risky labor is “on the page” in a way that Onboro’s experiences were not permitted. But it is critical to recognize and track precariousness as a permanent feature of capitalism. A second, more profound recognition then follows: how people become uncannily able “to be thrown by things,” to queerly fail at achieving a smooth social identity, and to contend with what Rosa Luxemburg has called capitalism’s “string of political and social disasters and convulsions.”



Akemi, and many others like her, have also been living “off the page” of Japan’s official narratives until they become legible within a discourse of youth/girl panics. I suggest that they have become legible through the companion-discourse of “precarity,” itself a fetishistic device conjuring new “classes” into being under the sign of neoliberal, transnational capital. Certainly, Akemi is visible insofar as she is waged-labor. She does not disappear into the deep interior of the social machine as capitalist production—that empirically undifferentiated zone so beloved by Hardt and Negri. As a hostess she is imperiled by her broader sense of self and her already risky existence on the outside as it is contingent upon money and medication. In her part-time performance she enters into Onboro’s legacy and forces the definition of a “pariah class” to undergo metamorphosis. Akemi is uncertain of her future on the outside, in the normal world of fellow college students, of family arguments, of trips to the conbini for more aspirin, tissues and beer, of long talks on the phone with an estranged boyfriend. On the inside of the club she is also uncertain, also a risk. She tells me she’s terrible at taking care of the men. “It’s so weird and uncomfortable. The guys who talk just bully all the other ones. The shy ones don’t have anything to say.” She dreads when small groups of customers come because fewer girls are assigned to their table and she can’t simply fade into a silent, heavily made-up decoration. “There’s one guy who loves that I can make jokes about classic Japanese literature. He totally gets it. But all the other guys are just bored. When I try to talk about interesting stuff, like current events or something, they get annoyed that I’m not being fun or whatever.” She has become even less of herself in her performance, concealing her interest in books and her English ability. She learned to emphasize her identity as a college student because it made her seem more pathetic but also somehow more similar to the men, almost all of whom hold college degrees. “I just try to remember all these old folktales and stuff I had to read in high school. I feel like I’m playing a modern geisha! I have to sound smart but I can’t talk about anything that matters or is too close to home, I guess. It ruins the effect!” She laughs thinly.

The girls all fall into types, like a cast of rambunctious female characters in shōjo anime such as “Sailor Moon.” Akemi has inadvertently become the serious, studious one. “It’s such a joke! I'm totally failing all my classes. I’m a total slob and I can’t even figure out how to pay bills on time!”

It’s hardly surprising she’s not slotted as the vivacious flirt given her depression. Every shift takes enormous effort and she has to carefully control how much alcohol she drinks, even though the desire is sometimes so overpowering, just to make the night go by.

Every week she’s sure she’ll be fired. She misses a few shifts, asking other girls to cover for her, favors she’s hardly in a position to ask for being extremely junior. This only increases the general tension and disapproval she senses from the entire staff. The emotional intensities proliferate and cross-cut as she talks to me over bowls of ramen in the apartment. Her whole identity, she says, is falling apart. “It’s fucking crazy. My whole life depends on me being a terrible fake. I mean, I’m terrible at faking and I’m just fucking up in general.” The stress in her voice vibrates. Her ramen bowl clatters on the floor as she sets it down hard and broth splashes out onto the floor cushion. A dark stain spreads across the cheap, pale red fabric. A few oily drops bead on the fake wooden floor.

She is conscious of herself as bad: a bad student, a bad daughter, a bad mime of “good femininity” on sale. All her worlds seem unstable and untenable. She lives along fraught borders inscribing her social-psychic landscape. She worries that the hostess work will overwhelm her nominal goal of graduating and securing some kind of work in the knowledge economy, hopefully using her English skills and in workplace far from those inhabited by men like those she entertains at the club. She can’t tell her mom about her job, leaving her struggle to demonstrate initiative and responsibility in a secret void along with the symbolic manifestation she hoped a job would communicate to her mom: a grateful acknowledgement for her mother’s own difficult sacrifices. Fortunately her friends are supportive. No one thinks her job is shameful and the measure of financial autonomy it gives her is enviable, even if it comes at a great emotional cost. “Nothing is permanent. I never really count on anything to last,” she says, recovering enough to slurp a few mouthfuls of noodles. The room is tidier. A big, clear plastic bag in the corner is full of recyclables. A wastebasket is full of wadded tissues. In another corner is a pile of sorted laundry. She coughs slightly, and laughs. “Yeah, my greatest skill is probably self-destruction! But seriously, everything just sucks.”



In every direction her connections are strained and frayed. There is no moment of perfect rupture, of exquisite crisis. The social and economic worlds she lives within torque, twisting her energies, desires, abilities, and dreams towards relational and affective ends she can barely examine before she’s bent again and improvising new ways of becoming to adapt. I visit with Akemi only in her small apartment. Sometimes we get dinner out nearby in the neighborhood. Once she went with me to the electronics district of Akihabara to buy a new audio recorder. Our interactions don’t bring us into all the varied territories—spatial and social—that comprise her life, and so these few intense conversations with her feel floating, a slender thread of friendship at the edge of everything that sucks.

At first it might feel like Akemi’s worlds are too distant, unobserved by the cold eye of research and the warm body sensorium upon which I depend for the unspoken, material, gestured, aesthetics, aura fragments of experiences. But this occurs to me: this very fragility and thinness in my description and memory is precisely the telling cue for another moment in “social disasters and convulsions” flickering across Japan, mostly unrecorded as brief, fierce installments in epic narratives being written across the young. Like Onboro, Akemi is telling me about trying to get on, a life being lived “off the page” of official narratives and elusive on the perimeter of panic sites. It is a peculiar new concatenated form of what is always possible. It is happening now, new, but familiar. Akemi’s stories and experiences are happening at very close range, within my own zone of intimate proximity, and they unsettle me with her sadness and furious frustration and desperate choices. An ambush in series.

I feel haunted listening to Akemi. She seems to be speaking the stories left off the page of Allison’s own research, speaking back from a historical absence while also detailing the small triumphs after working a successful night at the club, coming home with her bag stuffed with 1000 yen notes, and recounting days of dark ennui. She is telling us about what it means to be precarious, but it is not new. The history of Onboro’s everyday, Harootunian writes, “does not constitute a metonymic stand-in for a larger history being written by the new U.S.-Japanese partnership in the Cold War era. Nor is it possible to assume that such experiential histories add up to the larger, sanctioned version” (2006, 118).

Akemi too is not metonymic, neither for an official history inscribed in labor statistics and in the quantitative, sociological interventions of scholars like Kosugi. Nor for the radical histories being compiled to constitute new class boundaries at the expense of recognizing the changing ways social reproduction conditions women and girls to reinforce the always-precarious ranks of paid and unpaid shadow(ed) labor with their emotional, caring time and energy keeping aloft the smoothly legitimate spaces of family and work.

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