Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (5 page)

In
Chapter Seven
, Arai explores another affective economy in the form of a gift of
Notes to the Heart
, a set of booklets prepared as a supplementary curriculum for public school children in Japan in 2002. She reads this act of giving from the school to its students (but also implicit here is a gift from the state to its citizens) as an exemplification of how the Japanese people are asked to accept a profound reworking of Japanese identity formation to meet the challenges of a postmiracle Japan. Problems that had been denied, disavowed, or overlooked in postwar representations of Japan as a homogeneous society and model modernizer have suddenly become visible and are laid bare by the ending of the miracle and the grim new reality of a deepening recessionary economy. One of the key effects of this shift is the discourse of “strange kids,” most horrifically exemplified by the beheading of a Kobe schoolboy in 1997 by a fellow student, and in the discourse of “abnormal nation,” referring to the constitutional stripping of Japan’s war powers. Both of these discourses reveal concerns about national and cultural reproduction that take their form in anxieties about youth and educational reform.

More particularly, Arai explores education as a site where issues of modernity that have a long history in Japan continue to be debated. “Love of nation” and “freedom” take on different meanings and uses in this specific context. This is not a love that can reproduce the national community as it once was, nor is it simply a reprise of the past. It is a newly individualized love, and it is a different nation than one might think of loving or devoting oneself to. The shift of focus to the individual’s love and heart rather
than
the nation works as a form of governance by other means. The frontier within offers the promise to transcend the rigors of a harsh new economic reality by developing the strength to live in a system that can no longer offer any guarantees. Arai’s analysis of this discourse raises important questions about the reworking of national cultural identity formations in the face of epochal economic shifts remapping capital flows across national boundaries. The success of Japan Inc. no longer rests on a reciprocal exchange of obligations between state and citizen but continues to demand sacrifices on the part of the latter in exchange for increasingly precarious conditions of living.

Governing “Free” Subjects

What is understood by the word
freedom
is often cast as a repudiation of a national past that continues, nonetheless, to condition its possibilities in the present and for the future.
14
In each instance,
freedom
has meant a liberation from structures of the past that are now perceived to constrain individual freedom. Often this entails a massive overturning of values under the pressure of the heightened competition of globalization. However, this shift in what constitutes value has come at the cost of making the future increasingly precarious. The erosion of job security and social insurance is also accomplished in the name of freedom through new models of citizenship (in which individuals take responsibility for themselves). The chapters in this section therefore explore the specificities of what
freedom
might mean and how libratory projects of social change can become folded into neoliberal projects of economic restructuring.

In
Chapter Eight
, Miyako Inoue explores the effects of corporate practices to address gender inequality in a workplace in Japan in which the underlying structural causes of inequality are left undisturbed. The confessional practices of training workshops focus on a failure of women workers to realize their full potential as professionals. Either they fully accept the requirements of full integration into the workplace or they are “free” to relinquish their professional lives for homemaking. In Inoue’s analysis of how these technologies of subject production operate, we see a striking parallel to the training objectives of the Fuping School described by Yan Hairong. Both contexts teach women to objectify their labor as entrepreneurs of themselves and to optimize their opportunities by becoming self-governing subjects
fully
responsible for their own success or failure. Gender reform thereby becomes a process of working on the self and the production of laboring subjects of a particular determinate form. Rather than being a form of false consciousness, it is a question of how discursively difficult it becomes to think outside the construction of a rational self who pursues her own interests. In liberal governments, as Inoue is careful to remind us by citing Foucault, “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (1983: 221). In this respect, we can begin to see this activity of gender reform as yet another form of affective labor in which the “happiness, sense of fulfillment, and aspirations” of women workers become the central focus of management. Inoue carefully maps out how this process of subject formation is enacted by noting the limits of what can be spoken in addressing the question of gender inequality—hence, neoliberal speech acts—in new managerial tools such as the workplace climate survey. In her detailed analysis of such instruments, Inoue is able to elucidate the apparent paradox of how constructing what it is that women want can result in a new mode of subjection for women that is in tune with the new demands of competitiveness in a globalized economy. Gender issues become a problem of interpersonal EQ between supervisors and workers and therefore subject to new modes of human engineering rather than structural reform in gender relations.

Inoue’s discussion of what freedom means in this new neoliberalized labor regime foreshadows Gabrielle Lukacs’s discussion, in
Chapter Nine
, of televisual celebrations of the possibility of not taking work seriously, in which female protagonists figure prominently. Lukacs explores technologies of subject production in 1990s Japan through an ethnographic study of television dramas that focus on the workplace. In her analysis of one such drama,
Shomuni
, which proved to be an unexpected success, especially with young male viewers, we see dramatized many of the new management practices that Inoue encountered in her field research—indeed, one of the characters is assigned the task of addressing complaints about gender discrimination in the workplace. Lukacs suggests that this series, which was pitched as social realism, was really a fantasy about the emergence of a new labor subject who takes responsibility for his or her own success in the workplace and in making his or her work life meaningful—if only to have fun with it. The irreverent attitude of the principle female character epitomizes an approach to work that is meant to be a refreshing antidote to the labor contract of the
high-growth
era, which had been based on lifelong job security and benefits for male wage earners in exchange for rigid hierarchy, loyalty to the firm, an ethic of workaholism, and the subordination of women’s labor. Instead, Chinatsu, the principle female character, projects the image of a woman who is contemptuous of her male bosses, takes on each new assignment as a challenge to her ingenuity and sense of fun, and emphasizes her individuality and strong sense of self.

Lukacs argues that Chinatsu, in fact, represents much more than women workers but becomes a stand-in for the
freeter
, the new labor subject, both male and female, that is demanded by the conditions of Japan’s postrecessionary economy. The Japanese term
freeter
is a neologism that combines the English word
free
with the German word
arbeiter
(worker) to designate a new generation of Japanese workers who no longer desire the guarantees of life-long labor but wish to remain free to develop their life career as a project that entails no loyalty to any employer. If the neoliberal ethos rests on ideas of freedom, then freedom is differently articulated in each localized project of reform. This new laboring subject is one who desires his or her freedom from a labor regime that is, in fact, no longer a possibility for this generation of Japanese youth. The
freeter
is represented as a lifestyle choice rather than a condition that is imposed by the economic changes in the wake of Japan’s economic recession. However, representations of this figure are fraught with contradiction, being both celebrated as figures of freedom and creative energy unleashed from the stultifying labor regime of the high-growth era and also reviled by elders as a generational failure to understand the importance of hard work. The
freeter
therefore exemplifies the “new spirit of capitalism” in which the subject seeks emancipation from what was oppressive in prior labor regimes as a project of self-fulfillment, but one that is entirely resonant with the post-Fordist reorganization of capitalism itself (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006). Neither of these two
freeters
(Driscoll 2007) adequately captures the desperation of many Japanese youth who have not been able to secure regular employment but are bused from one location to the other as a reserve army of labor with no way to map out a future.

In
Chapter Ten
, Jesook Song explores the meaning of freedom in post-democratization South Korea in the context of the Asian Debt Crisis of 1997–2001, which had upset the occupational stability South Korea had enjoyed in the preceding couple of decades. Under pressure from the IMF,
South
Korea had to agree to a program of economic restructuring in which the downsizing of the large state-subsidized conglomerates (
chaebol
) to liberalize the market economy led to massive unemployment. However, as Song carefully lays out for us, these economic policies must also be placed within the context of Kim Dae Jung’s specific problem of government as an anticorruption reformer. Hence we see here the articulation of external forces of global governance and internal forces of political liberalization.

As an “unemployed highly educated worker,” Song describes how she herself became caught up in the paradoxes of this articulation. Hired on as a part-time researcher investigating the problems of homeless people, she became both an agent and a beneficiary of Kim’s workfare policies. She describes with devastating detail her discomfort with her growing awareness of the forms of discrimination embedded in these policies in which homeless women are made invisible as subjects deserving social support. Song’s chapter resonates strongly with Inoue’s reflections on how discourses of welfare reform work through the medium of neoliberal speech acts to make gender inequality invisible. In the case of South Korea, these speech acts took on the guise of “family breakdown,” “the deserving poor,” and “empowerment,” and their illocutionary effects turned liberal projects of social redistribution into neoliberal projects of self-responsibilization by making invisible the structural causes of women’s homelessness.

Conclusion

The authors of these chapters bring ethnography to bear on what it does best by exploring the complex relationships between macrolevel processes working globally with the everyday practices of building a life in an economic landscape that has been dramatically altered. They demonstrate the value of grounded ethnographic work in exploring the processes of subject formation within locally specific conditions of possibility. Neoliberal subjecthood is not entirely the result of a process of top-down human engineering but is also the result of transnational cultural flows in which ideals of the enterprising self take shape in locally specific forms that define what it means to be competitive and forward moving.

But this volume was also conceived with a hope that these projects of life-making can be connected across national boundaries to become part of a
New
International already in formation. Capitalism’s strategy of segregating high- and low-value subjects by means of a global division of labor has recreated the struggle at a global level: “Intensifying the integration of the world market has made channels for unprecedented connections between different value subjects; it has formed a new, and militant industrial proletariat in new planetary zones” (Dyer-Witheford 2002: 30). The self-enterprising subjects produced by capitalism’s efforts to externalize its costs may instead engage in life-making projects that lie outside the circuit of capital accumulation altogether. In a global regime that constantly undercuts the value of the enterprise of the self, the imperative of building new economies from the ground up outside the speculative logics of global capitalism may indeed open a path to a future.
15

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This introduction emerged out of countless conversations with Andrea G. Arai whose intellectual collaboration has taken the form of teaching together as well as co-editing this volume. Our other volume coeditor Hai Ren and Stanford University Press editor Stacy Wagner also contributed invaluable input, which has helped shape it into its final form.

1
. NHK.
Friita—Genryuu—Monozukuri no Genba de
(From the Worksite: A Story of the
Freeter
). Documentary, aired February 2005.

2
. For a historical overview of neoliberalism, see Harvey 2005. For discussion of neoliberalism as a problem of government, see Foucault 2008 and Lemke 2001.

3
. “Spatiotemporal fix” is a phrase taken from Harvey 2003. It is a spatial movement in that capitalism seeks geographical regions where there are large pools of cheap labor. It is a temporal move because it seeks these new conditions of doing business in areas that are “behind” in terms of capitalist development.

4
. See Mike Davis’s discussion (2011) of the collision course of the debt crisis in the United States, the European Union, and China. China’s real estate bubble threatens an iteration of the Japanese disease in China.

5
. See Morris-Suzuki 1988 for an account of how government agencies plotted Japan’s future course as the information society. The knowledge economy has now diversified to include materials science and biogenetics as key areas for economic growth. China and India are engaged in a race to develop research parks and
“innovation
incubators,” while the labor costs for building the physical infrastructure of such facilities are still low. Likewise, we see transnational competition for becoming the new “education hubs” that are very much in service to this model of technological innovation as the driver of the new economy.