Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (43 page)

In the men-oriented workplace dramas such as
Sarariman Kintarō
(Salaried Man Kintarō, TBS, 1999, 1999 Special, 2000, 2002, 2002 Special, 2004) or
Kachō Shima Kōsaku
(Section Chief, Shima Kōsaku, Fuji 1993, 1994, 1994,
1998),
the main themes are how men are climbing the corporate ladder [
shussesuru
] or how they confront evil. Conflicts between junior and senior employees serve as the main sources of struggle. Ordinary office ladies in
Shomuni
have a lot of other problems than climbing the corporate ladder (which is way out of their league). . . . Of course, they are not in the position to fight evil. All they want is to make their jobs more fun for themselves. (Takahashi, cited in Satake, 2000: 142)

Given that affect management has always been a key job requirement for office ladies, this is a curious fantasy.
22
While the politics of drama production offer some insights to understand why this particular message was encoded in the script, this is just a partial explanation. I mentioned earlier that the serial was scripted by two writers, the other being Hashimoto Yūji. Although Takahashi played a more important role in writing the scripts for the first season, in parallel with the growing popularity of
Shomuni
among male viewers, the other (male) writer, Hashimoto, took over as lead author. As Takahashi was no longer allowed to pursue her agenda of crafting story lines that she believed office ladies (and female viewers in general) would find empowering, she withdrew in the middle of the second series of the
Shomuni
enterprise. She resented that the male staff members of the production team kept insisting on shortening the skirt length of the office ladies while increasing the number of catfights between Misono and Chinatsu (personal communication; see also Satake 2000: 146).

The message that “office ladies should get some fun out of their work” is by no means radical given that non–career-track female employees have long been involved in what anthropologist Ogasawara Yuko calls “offstage resistance” (1998). However, she argues that these acts of sabotaging work by arbitrarily deciding job priorities or by not taking initiatives end up promoting stereotypes that women get carried away with emotions and thus are irresponsible employees. Connecting the idea of pleasure and work, however, opens a space of redemption to male
freeters
.
23
Unlike office ladies, male
freeters
cannot aspire to secure a stable future for themselves by marrying men in career-track positions. In
Shomuni
, Misono represents this possibility for office ladies. Thus, by introducing pleasure into work,
Shomuni
offers a possibility for positive self-identification for
freeters
who reinterpret their unemployed status as the realization of the very freedom they are entitled to and as a step toward finding meaningful and enjoyable work.

In
other words, Chinatsu’s character explains the flexibilization of labor as a potential for
freeters
to enjoy their freedom, which is portrayed here as a matter of choice. There is a curious gender politics at work here. While different institutional discourses interpret the
freeter
phenomenon differently, they converge in viewing
freeters
—who are either female or male—as collectively effeminate. Although it is becoming more and more socially acceptable for Japanese men to be consumers, devoted involvement in consumerism is still coded as effeminate. Correspondingly, when discussing Japanese men’s increasing participation in consumer culture, scholarly and popular discourses dominantly talk about the feminization of men—thus reinscribing the postwar divide between male producers and female consumers (see L. Miller 2003). In the 1980s, a consumption-led definition of self-hood defined by personal style became more characteristic. Yet this was discussed as a feminine trait in that it challenged the principle of unity and uniformity—the founding values of the masculine corporate structure of the postwar period. In this gendered binary, therefore, the resistance to an earlier ideal of masculinity epitomized by the salaryman, “especially of images of short, stocky, dark-suited
oyaji
[geezer] with pomade-plastered hair” (L. Miller 2003: 52), is inextricably tied up with femininity. And this is exactly why Chinatsu becomes popular with male viewers; in addition to refashioning the indecisiveness of youth as an insistence on one’s right to freedom, she offers an alternative, more attractive ideal of masculinity.
24

Conclusion: Workplace Dramas and Labor Fantasies

The prolonged recession has marked the end of Japan’s rapid economic growth and all that it meant: steadily rising standard of living, low unemployment rates, mass middle-class stratum society, and the system of lifetime employment (or for women and the self-employed sector the possibility to aspire to it for their children). On the one hand, Japanese government officials and industry leaders agreed that introducing more flexible labor market laws was unavoidable; however, they remained ambivalent about abandoning the postwar labor contract (Vogel 2006) or, at least, its ideological support for formidable work discipline and workplace hierarchy.
25
On the other hand, the service industries pushed less hesitantly for neoliberal restructuring, flexibility, and new worker subjectivities. In these conditions, commercial
television networks played an important role in reconfiguring the field of possibilities and mediating the tensions between young people’s narrowing opportunities for meaningful employment and growing desires to use their labor power to realize themselves in conditions in which employers expect intense commitment from them.

The televisual discourse on social responsibility was both a marketing strategy to sell workplace dramas to new market segments (most notably young men) and a means for television producers to negotiate their agency under the massive commodification of the medium in the 1990s. However, this discourse was pertinent not only to producers but also to the viewers. Workplace dramas reminded them that their workplaces were no longer capable of securing predictable futures to them. Instead, they had become institutions of uncertain futures that constantly had to be saved from bankruptcy. By portraying this reality as the order of things under a stagnating economy, workplace dramas such as
Shomuni
tended to naturalize the withdrawal of corporations from guaranteeing lifetime employment. At the same time, the serial tended to encourage individuals to redefine themselves as enterprising and autonomous subjects, who were on their own to secure their own psychological or economic well-being.

In Japan, where over 95 percent of television content is domestically produced, television—and television dramas, in particular—plays a vital role in reinforcing particular social orders by reproducing the socioeconomic structures and dominant subjectivities that underwrite them. From the mid-1960s, family-oriented home dramas, for example, valorized selflessness, a key behavior to organize the national community into an entity united under the desire to ascend to the ranks of Western economic superpowers. Producers of workplace dramas claimed that they aimed to revitalize the tradition of home dramas by reintroducing a concern for the “social” into commercial broadcasting; however, work dramas were in fact not much different from love dramas. Both subgenres of trendy drama promoted self-centeredness as opposed to selflessness. Although work dramas were more concerned with society than love dramas, a preoccupation with the individual and his or her happiness remained in the center of both genres. Love dramas encouraged their viewers to be self-indulgent in the realm of consumption, while
Shomuni
extended this sensibility into a new frontier: the corporate world, which was the last bastion of the postwar socioeconomic order. While love dramas portray work as an unavoidable nuisance of life, in work dramas work
becomes
the very force field within which individuals can enact their freedom. In the late 1990s, workplace dramas mediated an ongoing recalibration of the social contract between individuals and postwar social institutions and produced new labor subjects in response to the demands of the new economy. The labor fantasies offered by these dramas served to make neoliberal initiatives for individual responsibilization more palatable.

I have argued that Chinatsu, the heroine of Shomuni, was a female stand-in for the male
freeter
. In the 1980s, young women’s burgeoning power as consumers was part of a broader sea change in the popular imaginary. By the end of the 1990s they had come to embody new values such as a more robust enjoyment of life and a more relaxed relationship to work. While the service (mainly entertainment and leisure) industries have made enormous profits targeting these young women, other industries have also exploited them as a source of cheap and disposable labor. Mary Brinton has argued that, in postwar Japan, gender served as a readily available criterion by which a reservoir of unskilled labor could be maintained or shut down as business cycles fluctuated (1993). Although women have been steadily supplying flexible labor, in the wake of the recession the demand for disposable workers has dramatically increased, and masses of young men have been incorporated into a flexible labor force. In
Shomuni
these socioeconomic trends serve as the background to the story lines, but they are glazed over with a hypocritical message suggesting that there is no unrewarding work that cannot be transformed into fun. This breakdown of the boundary between pleasure and wage labor marked a milestone in mobilizing workers into a new labor regime and in socializing them to accept their employers’ increasing demands for more commitment but for less pay.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Gabriella Lukacs, “Labor Fantasies in Recessionary Japan: Employment as Lifestyle in Workplace Dramas of the 1990s” in
Scripted Affects, Branded Selves,
Gabriella Lukacs, pp. 147–176. Copyright, 2010, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
www.dukeupress.edu

1
.
General Affairs II
(also translated as
Power Office Ladies
), Fuji, 1998, 1998 Special, 2000, 2000 Special, 2002 Final, and 2003
Shomuni
Forever Special.

2
.
OL
(for office ladies) is borrowed from the English language, and it refers to single women in their twenties who pursue non–career-track clerical and secretarial work that does not require expert knowledge or management responsibility.

3
. In the second half of the 1990s, a rating of 15 percent (approximately 15 million viewers) was considered a hit program; a rating of over 20 percent equaled megahit status.

4
. The Japanese television industry is self-sustaining, meaning that the local media market is controlled by the public channel NHK and five domestic commercial networks whose key stations in Tokyo are Fuji Television (Fuji TV), Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Nippon Television (NTV), Asahi Network (TV Asahi), and TV Tokyo. Television dramas are a major form of prime-time entertainment in addition to such game shows as
Iron Chef
. There are four seasons in a broadcasting year, and Japanese prime-time dramas have ten to twelve episodes (aired weekly in the same program slot) in a season.

5
. Indeed, the original idea for trendy dramas was to provide them with subtitles giving information to the viewers on the clothes, accessories, and other consumer items featured in the drama.

6
. Free market principles into Japan’s government-guided economy were introduced soon after the recession’s onset. See Inoue,
Chapter Eight
in this volume.

7
. All translations from the Japanese language are mine.

8
. Interview with Nakazono Miho, July 1 and 9, 2003, Tokyo, Japan.

9
. These dramas are not action dramas like the American
E.R
. or
Law and Order
. We have to remember that Japanese producers work with incomparably smaller budgets than their American colleagues, and they emphasize character development, rather than action scenes and special effects.

10
.
Shomuni
had aired on Fuji Television before I began my fieldwork research on the Japanese television industry in the 2001. Although I was unable to interview viewers during the period when the series was shown, I was able to talk to my informants about the show later. Between 2001 and 2003, during my stay in Tokyo, Fuji aired reruns of the drama in afternoon program slots. I also include in my study discussions on the show that appeared on fan sites and comments that were posted on Internet chat boards. Lastly, I have reviewed articles accounting for the popularity of
Shomuni
published in print media.

11
. Fuji, 1998;
Kirakira Hikaru Special
1999, 2000. Producer: Yamaguchi Masatoshi. Scriptwriter: Inoue Yumiko.

12
. This was the dominant life course in the postwar period. In this period, similar to Western societies, female participation in the labor force fell; and, by the 1980s, a particular pattern of gendered employment had evolved. Namely, women temporarily stopped working after giving birth and returned to the workforce,
mainly
as part-timers or blue-collar workers in their late thirties or early forties (Brinton 1993; Roberts 1994).

13
. In 1998 protective labor laws were further relaxed. Recruitment practices (including the employment agency business) were deregulated. Overtime work became exploitable without regulation, and the time limit of one year on part-time employment was abolished (Itoh 2005).

14
. See “Japan Report Worried about Young Part-time Workers.”
Jiji Press English News Service
. May 30, 2003.

15
.
Kōseirōdōshō: Heisei 21-nen Jakunensha Koyo Jittai Chōsa Kekka no Gaikyo
(Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare: Summary of the Survey Results of the Employment Condition for Young People in 2009); retrieved on March 21, 2011, from
www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/itiran/roudou/koyou/young/h21/jigyo.html
.