Inside A Japanese Sharehouse

This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction – the home – by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse. Sharehouses, which emerged in the 2007 'sharehouse boom', are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities. Through a description of the micro-level, mundane, material interactions among residents within a mid-sized, mixed-sex sharehouse, the book considers what these interactions indicate about existing – and often conflicting – ideas about intimacy, privacy, gender, the individual, family, community, and the home. In so doing it highlights how sharehouse residents, though a dramatic rejection of the twentieth-century domestic model, with its ideal of the family home as a partnership between a male wage-earner and a dedicated housewife, and its implied separation of 'family' and 'outsiders', are nevertheless uneasy about overturning existing gender roles and giving precedence to the individual over community, and are regarded as a foreign import.

This book enables readers to understand contemporary Japanese society and culture. Since it is written by experts, it allows readers to start with any chapters they are interested in. It also provides a unique way to introduce Japanese society and culture to those who have never visited or studied Japanese society by reading articles from various authors on topics such as gender, family, economy, natural disasters and politics and laws. It provides scholars, academics, graduate students and the general educated audience all the information required to understand contemporary Japanese society and culture fully and see the diverse perspectives available.

This book is an exploration of media scandals in contemporary Japanese society. In shedding new light on the study of scandal in Japan, the book offers a novel view of scandal as a specific mediatized ritual which follows moral disturbances throughout Japanese history. Media and society are analyzed largely in terms of social performances, while the focus is on how Japanese transgressors talk and act when explaining their scandals to the public. A detailed analysis of three case studies is provided: the drug scandal of the popular Japanese celebrity Sakai Noriko; the donation scandal centering the heavyweight politician Ozawa Ichirō; and the Olympus accounting fraud revealed by the British CEO Michael Woodford. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, anthropology, communication and media studies.

This book explores the decline of rural and peripheral areas in Japan, which results from an aging population, outmigration of the younger generations, and the economic decline of the primary sector. Based on extensive original research, the book examines in detail the case of the Noto peninsula. Allowing the locals to tell their stories, describe their problems, and come up with possible solutions, the book demonstrates the serious impact of rural decline on their daily life and work and highlights the struggle to sustain rural living in the globalized age. It argues that some recent innovations in global media, economy, technology, and ideology offer scope for reversing the decline, as some central government initiatives do, but that these are not always noticed, appreciated, and made use of by local people. The book also discusses the nature of the links between the peripheries and the centres – regional, national, and global – and how these often take the form of "internal colonialism."

This book examines the phenomenon of social withdrawal in Japan, which ranges from school non-attendance to extreme forms of isolation and confinement, known as hikikomori. Based on extensive original research including interview research with a range of practitioners involved in dealing with the phenomenon, the book outlines how hikikomori expresses itself, how it is treated and dealt with and how it has been perceived and regarded in Japan over time. The author, a clinical psychologist with extensive experience of practice, argues that the phenomenon although socially unacceptable is not homogenous, and can be viewed not as a mental disorder, but as an idiom of distress, a passive and effective way of resisting the many great pressures of Japanese schooling and of Japanese society more widely. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351260800, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CCBY-NC-ND) licence.

By addressing what it means to belong beyond the collective safety net and an emotionally buttressed sense of embeddedness, The Price of Belonging exposes the adverse sides of belonging characterised by obligations, commitments, sacrifices, hidden threats and pressures.

In contrast to most studies of migration, which assume that migrants arrive from less developed countries to the industrialised world, where they suffer from discrimination, poor living conditions and downward social mobility, this book examines a different sort of diaspora – descendants of Japanese migrants or "Nikkei" – in Bolivia, who, after a history of organised migration, have achieved middle-class status in a developing country, while enjoying much symbolic capital among the majority population. Based on extensive original research, the book considers the everyday lives of Nikkei and their identity, discusses how despite their relative success they remain not fully integrated into Bolivia's imperfect pluricultural society and explores how they think about, and relate to, Japan.