2 THE DAY LABORER

On the Black Labor Market

Once and if the exchanges left the sphere of friendship and gifting to make it onto the black market, where objects took on the character of commodities proper, the trick was to turn a profit from objects that had far passed their date of obsolescence. In form, this was no different from the labor market of San’ya, whose labor was composed of men in their fifties or sixties or older, almost all on welfare and mostly bearing some kind of physical ailment, suggesting that they should not be working at a construction site in the first place. It was therefore no coincidence that the content of work circulated to San’ya workers was, as Akira put it, of the sort that no one else wanted to do. Nor was it a coincidence that, shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, posters had been put up on electric poles in San’ya advertising work cleaning rubble (gareki) in Fukushima Prefecture.² Like the objects for sale at the morning market, the workers of San’ya had been disposed of once and could readily be disposed of altogether. Indeed, oftentimes the circulation of secondhand objects occurred side by side with work and liquor. When workers of the Okinawa-gang came back from work between six and seven o’clock in the evening to report to Suzuki—dirty, tired, and with a can of beer, one-cup sake, or plastic cup of shochu in their hand—Suzuki would be well into his third or fourth mizuwari (shochu with water and ice) in front of Mutō’s, gambling on boats with one eye, writing down names of workers with another as he assigned them to construction sites, and self-medicating his perennial stomach ache by dropping painkillers filched off Akira. Thus, the working days would repeat.

If they did not say so, the daily lifestyle of the guys attested to the fact that they privileged money, liquor, and excess over health and that they sacrificed the latter for the former. Moreover, the guys were well aware of the low regard in which they were held: pinpointing the “problem” of San’ya to “disposability” (tsukaisute) and noting straight out, albeit in private, that they were considered akin to “human garbage.” Nonetheless, the dominant code of conduct was such that a real day laborer put cash, and therefore the excesses of liquor or gambling, before health.

It was not just their bodies, however, but their lives that were staked in the determination to persist in their expenditures: an exchange in which the day laborer would emerge as the losing party. Marx thus begins his famous chapter on the “working day” by pointing out both the limits and the insatiable drive of capital to accumulate surplus value, reaped from the bodies of workers. Capital does this by maximizing the length of the working day, while paying workers only enough to ensure their reproduction. And while the commodity of labor contains an irreducible negativity in the laborer, who can raise their voice in objection, the equivalent form of surplus extraction goes unquestioned.³ Thus, the effects of commodity exchange carry the day.

As a matter of course, everyone in the group had complaints relating to work, but it was only when they had come into another source of income, like winning at the races, that the guys ceased to work. The construction site might be too far away, like Kami-Fukuoka in Saitama, which was two hours by train, or the subcontracting company might be unreasonable, like Futomaki, which did not let its workers take breaks on time. The content of work could also be physically grueling and pointless, as at one construction site where the top coordinator demanded that every single rock be cleared off the ground before cement could be filled in. Navvies consequently spent all day lifting rocks in the blistering summer heat, but no one complained, except under their breath and among themselves. Even Kentarō, who could recall laborers walking out en masse during the bubble economy of the 1980s, acceded to ridiculous demands knowing that too much backtalk might cost everyone their income. Work was undergone by necessity, and it was self-evident that this was what an otoko did, for “work” did not refer to any kind of work but to work in which one “moved the body.”⁴ As I was to learn when I asked Kentarō and Akira whether they would ever bring a woman (josei) to work, the response was an immediate no. Realizing that I might be asking if I could bring someone along, Kentarō notably pulled back, only to reply that, yes, there were some carpenters who worked as families and that I could bring someone along as long as I took care of her. Otherwise, the response was unequivocal. They would let me carry her burden, but I could not recommend a woman for work in my absence. The laborers of the Okinawa-gang were exclusively men, and it was from manual labor that an otoko derived his worth. Referring back to his own experience one evening, Akira addressed Kentarō:

AKIRA: What would you do if you couldn’t work?

KENTARŌ: I’d kill myself.

An otoko shorn of labor power was worthless, and though he did not mention it on this occasion, Akira had, in fact, tried to take his own life years earlier when he had been deemed unfit to work by his doctors.⁵ He would recount how it used to be that recipients of welfare were frowned upon and excluded from social activities. Now, all this had changed, and San’ya had become a “welfare town.” Yet, by a certain irony, it was welfare that enabled men in San’ya to persist in their excess-driven lifestyles, whereas the worker with neither welfare nor insurance had to eke out a living and borrow.

For the guys on welfare, the sale of their labor was therefore akin to making a surplus off an object on the black market. In the Okinawa-gang, the income of ¥12,500 ($125) per day constituted cash in excess of their monthly allowance from the state: something extra. In fact, as a man at Sanyukai noted when Akira had started working with the Okinawa-gang, it was illegal not to report earnings in excess of one’s welfare. Ostensibly, the reason for this was that monthly allowances had to be recalibrated in accordance with one’s income. But reporting income in excess of welfare could result in a diminution of one’s total monthly finances—welfare was reduced by a larger amount than one earned!—which functioned as a veritable disincentive to report one’s earnings and encouraged men to put themselves to use on the black market.⁶ On the other hand, there was a real risk involved in not reporting earnings, because welfare was instantly cut if the failure to do so was confirmed. The ward office could find out about this by two routes. The first involved an “informant” (chinkoro) in one’s immediate environment who told the office that so-and-so was working. The second involved the ward office sending an employee out on a home visit or an undercover operation to investigate or confirm whether someone was in fact earning extra income. Ward employees were said to spy on a variety of infractions, including alcohol consumption as well as pachinko and other gambling. Welfare recipients who worked thus led a stealthy existence, wary of the watchful eye of the state and of neighbors who might notice their early-morning departures, heavy bags, and late returns. Indeed, everyone knew of others losing their welfare because someone had reported them. One day, Akira was accosted in front of his bunkhouse by four ward employees who questioned him regarding work. In fact, Kentarō had been receiving welfare until the ward discovered that he was working on the side. Now he had become “envious” of others on welfare, Akira would say, and spent their money as if it was public property. As a tacit rule, it was known that Akira or Shōkawa were both on welfare and could be turned to for funds that were never returned. But by the end of the month, they, too, had run dry in frustration. Whether on or off welfare, the guys never had enough cash to go around. Yet the most disadvantaged was the worker with neither welfare nor the assistance of out-of-work aid.

The periodical nature of work for the Okinawa-gang made it almost impossible to sustain a reliable income without welfare, save for a few core workers. For one, no one knew how many workers would be needed the following day. This decision came by phone every day around four or five o’clock in the afternoon, from Barasawa, who paid Suzuki a monthly fee to round up workers and thereby acted as the middleman between the tehaishi, Suzuki, and the subcontractor, the Tenjima Company, which was hired, in turn, by the Seichō Corporation to build apartment blocks. Secondly, there were periods, sometimes of months, when there was very little work, be it because the group had fallen into ill repute, because Seichō had chosen to go with competitors, or because there was no construction in progress. And even if there had been enough work to go around for everyone, work as a navvy was so taxing that only the youngest and fittest could manage five days per week. Kentarō himself seemed to manage this only by directing work and abstaining from hard physical tasks as much as possible. At the age of twenty-eight, even the youngest of the group, Wakami, said he could work a maximum of only four times per week.

In the absence of a contractual relationship with employers, flexibility was required of the Okinawa-gang, which had to provide workers in accordance with fluctuating demand. Too many consecutive days of work was as much a problem as too little work, and it was in tacit recognition both of this shifting nature of work availability and the necessity to capital of an idle pool of labor—Marx’s “reserve army of labor”—that Taitō Ward had instituted a system to compensate laborers for days on which work, as the guys would say, was not “coming around.”⁷ Out-of-work aid required day laborers to work at least thirteen days per month, for which their employers signed off in a stamp book (at times, even if they were not working), and in return for these working days, they were guaranteed thirteen days on which the ward gave them ¥7,500 ($75). This was far from sufficient, however, to carry workers through thirty days when there was no work at all. By midmonth, the money would be gone. Thus, the group would wait for a dose of work that no one else wanted to do or once the foundations of the buildings had been dug by navvies (dokata), and the scaffolders (tobi), ironworkers (tekkinya), and carpenters (daiku) had taken over the upper stories, for the two or three days per week when the navvies were called to do the cement. Alternatively, they would wait for April, when the new fiscal year arrived, and construction companies invested in new sites. In prolonged dry spells, the guys were starved for work, any work at that.

These provisional conditions of work forced the laborer to shift from tehaishi to tehaishi. If work grew scarce in the Okinawa-gang, the individual had no recourse but to find other means of income or borrow, and it was for this reason that the maintenance of an individual reputation and personal connections assumed paramount importance for the laborer in San’ya. The reputable worker was not only reliable, meaning that he showed up for work as promised, like the borrower was good for his word to return money, but possessed vast experience and commanded a versatile repertoire of skills. For such a reputation could secure work for both oneself and one’s acquaintances. Hence, Kentarō not only knew all about work as a navvy but had worked in other fields of construction (originally carpentry) and was able to perform and direct a range of tasks beyond the immediate demand of the workplace. On one occasion, he even maneuvered the excavator, grinning from behind the wheel because he did not have a license. In short, if Kentarō was on-site, the director could expect tasks to be completed expediently and without any fuss. For this reason, Kentarō said, it was necessary for him to be physically present at the construction site and to leave the work of tehai for Suzuki.⁸

For those who had acquired an established reputation, like Kentarō, the necessity of self-reliance presented itself in the guise of “freedom” (jiyū). For all the headache that the inveterate drinker, womanizer, and braggart that Suzuki was, Kentarō would scornfully say that he had been “free” before Suzuki came since it had just been about “himself” (jibun). On top of this, Suzuki had invited along their salaryman-gone-insolvent cousin, Saruma, unversed in the ways of San’ya. With Suzuki and Saruma in San’ya, Kentarō was held accountable for them in spite of himself and, though he was loath to admit it, felt obliged to look out for them. Yet what Kentarō expressed as “freedom” of “self” disclosed an objective necessity of the economic order in San’ya that might render Kentarō as redundant as it already had other workers marginal to the Okinawa-gang. When work was scarce under Suzuki, some laborers obviously had to seek work elsewhere.⁹

But Suzuki would take it personally when workers, for whatever reason, perhaps even on a whim, switched to another tehaishi. Kentarō would say of Suzuki, who had only been in San’ya three years (one as a navvy, two as a tehaishi), that he “does not understand” that it is normal for individual workers to switch tehaishi as they wish. It had always been this way in San’ya, but this was not only social convention: the logic of the market dictated such practice. Yet Suzuki, tehaishi of the Okinawa-gang, and Matsuda, tehaishi of the Matsuda-group, had set up a working relationship such that each would borrow workers from the other. If Matsuda was short of workers, he would ask Suzuki, and vice versa; and the payment for each worker adhered to the standards of the group from which they came. Such an arrangement between the tehaishi made it impossible to switch between groups and, to the eventual demise of both Suzuki and Matsuda, produced the appearance and belief that specific individuals belonged to one and not the other, because it was always an option to get away from the duo by seeking work elsewhere. Finally, Suzuki assumed such an attitude of self-importance that he demanded a finder’s fee from anyone who went to work for another tehaishi, because Suzuki had presumably facilitated the connection in the first place. When Suzuki exposed his senior by ten years and veteran ironworker, Shōkawa, to such proprietary behavior, Kentarō at long last exploded.

That workers were at liberty to switch tehaishi if they could find other means of income sometimes made it difficult for tehaishi to maintain an available pool of labor, and this problem of reliability was compounded by the low work ethic in San’ya. Kentarō would repeatedly lament that if only he could get together a steady and reliable group of laborers, it would be possible to really get business going, but the paucity of work availability was mirrored in the inconstancy of workers. Matsuda especially seemed to suffer from temper tantrums because workers simply did not show up for work as promised. This was called to “open a hole” (ana o akeru), news of which reached the tehaishi when the others arrived at the construction site and could not find or reach so-and-so. Then, Matsuda or Suzuki, hungover from the night before, would have to get on the phone either to reach the individual in question or to find a replacement. But it was usually to no avail. The repetition of such instances made it nearly impossible to build a reputation at the workplace such that demand for the group remained continuous, and it was the tehaishi who felt the brunt of this drop in reputation. But the group suffered as a whole, as well, because work might not be circulated to them in the future or because the directors realized that certain tasks could be performed with one less person and, as a result, decided to lessen the number of workers. Of course, Suzuki and Matsuda bore no small responsibility for opening holes, particularly when this resulted from overextending their obligations to various subcontractors. The reputation and income of the tehaishi stemmed directly from the number of subcontractors he provided laborers for, and Suzuki bragged of receiving payment from three out of the five subcontractors operating in San’ya. In addition, as a favor, he secured workers for the other two subcontractors—a relation that could easily evolve into an obligation if Suzuki, as he was wont to do, decided to pocket an extra paycheck every month. On the one hand, this increased work availability, but it did so for a group of workers whose dependability was erratic at best. Suzuki had to cultivate a list of connections that exceeded the maximum number of workers on any given day, which ranged from zero to twenty, and there were a number of reasons why someone might not be able to or agree to go to work when Suzuki asked them. Some of the guys were not picking up their phone or did not have one. Others might have switched to another tehaishi, since work had been scarce with Suzuki. But most frequently, they simply did not want to go, which led to a comical exchange between Suzuki, pressured to fill his quota, and another man who had just gotten back from work, started drinking, and begun feeling good about the next day off. Someone might not want to work because they had worked all week and were tired. Others might have won at the races, and still others declined since, by the time Suzuki, who was also drunk, got around to phoning them, they could not fathom the prospect of waking the next day.

It was common lore in San’ya that everyone sometimes missed a day of work. To a certain extent, this was anticipated and forestalled by the tehaishi, who could force so-and-so to take one day off, so as to prevent them from making promises they would not keep. Suzuki knew, for instance, that the lean and seemingly tireless fifty-seven-year-old Riku, who ran the show with Kentarō, would eventually hit his limit and go on a drinking spree for days on end, sleeping outside in the Iroha arcade, and Suzuki would have a replacement ready for this eventuality. But even Kentarō, who liked his drink as much as the others, would sometimes show up for work late or not at all. Indeed, everyone, even Takeda-san, had days when they neglected to work as promised. At the construction site, workers from San’ya consequently had a reputation for unreliability. When it was said in the changing rooms one day that the navvies were a man down (Kentarō), the identity of the culprit was confirmed by a rhetorical question—“Yama?” as if to suggest that the guy from San’ya was most likely to flake—and a nod. On one occasion, Kentarō had spent the entire previous evening persuading Shōkawa to work because they were a man short, but upon arriving at the station in the morning, Shōkawa, who had been suffering from a backache, changed his mind and made a U-turn to his bunkhouse. This was called “flaking on work” (tonko suru), and supposedly, the work of tehai in the heyday of San’ya had taken place in the mornings since that way, tehaishi could ensure that workers were awake, sober, and prepared to work.

The real problem was not that the guys would drink every evening: that occurred without exception, although many kept it moderate if they had work the next day. In fact, everyone worked hungover, and Kentarō would note that by the time work finished at five o’clock, the hangover would be wearing off just in time for another drink. The real problem was that everyone knew that they were, in any case, “disposable” labor from San’ya and that they were employed as a means to conclude the most disagreeable part of construction work, sacrificing their health in the process. Akira would say over and over again of work, and of liquor, that “it only destroys the body.” Nevertheless, as if to contradict himself, “work” was what an otoko did: a discourse that emerged out of labor as an act of creative destruction and that negated the negativity of death in which a man’s worth was measured exclusively in terms of the daily wage, for which one paid with one’s life. At the margins of the nation, the day laborers of San’ya were exposed to the most brute effects of capitalist surplus extraction, in which, as Marx says, the commodity of labor power is reduced to a minimal value, expending their labor power unto death. But grounded in their work expertise, the discourse of the otoko sustained and added to this objective order of the economy. For an otoko went “his own way” (jibun no michi) and replaced its monetary relation with a principle of sociality, hierarchy, and honor of the marginal outlaw, embodied in the figure of Takeda-san.¹⁰ At the end, everyone would die, but the narrative detour of being an otoko held the contingency of death, materialized daily in the exchange relation, at bay. Likewise, the veteran worker was called an “artisan” or quite simply “skilled” (ude ga tokui), and with a statement that pardoned the occasional act of flaking on work—“This is, after all, Yama”—San’ya’s day laborers disclosed the truth of productivity and discipline to consist in expendability.¹¹ What was the point, after all, of going to work?

There was a difference, however, between feeling guilty and shamefaced for failing to go to work one time and blazing a trail of failures. Some men developed a reputation of not showing up, leaving a string of irreparable relations behind as they hopped from tehaishi to tehaishi. Like debts that could not be returned, such burned bridges eventually prompted individuals to disappear from San’ya, but so too did scarcity of work and low wages.

Makoto, for instance, vanished from San’ya overnight. Although he had been speaking of joining the yakuza, everyone had witnessed his deteriorating physical condition from liquor and overwork. Stumbling about town drunk, with a black eye from fighting and leaving his wallet lying about, Matsuda, his tehaishi, had to implore him to put his valuables in his room when he was drinking. Yet it was common knowledge that, like for everyone else in the Matsuda-group, ¥2,000 ($20) was docked from Makoto’s pay as pinhane (finder’s fee) for Matsuda each time Makoto went to work.¹² With only ¥8,000–¥9,000 left for daily expenses, Makoto was just eking out enough to pay for transportation, meals, drinks, and his bunkhouse (which he paid by the day). Kentarō noted that Matsuda had “been like that from way back,” and it went without saying that taking pinhane was what the work of a tehaishi was all about: that surplus or excess pocketed from each laborer. Suzuki and Matsuda were pimps of the construction trade. Unlike the objects on sale at the morning market, however, it was generally (albeit tacitly) recognized in the Okinawa-gang that Matsuda’s “system” of extracting surplus from everyone was excessive. There were certain limits to be observed. Even if Makoto had assented to the conditions, the deduction was far from fair, and Makoto consequently emerged as a symptom of the order of equivalent exchange between a tehaishi and his workers, which was made to appear fair; most certainly, no one told Matsuda to his face that he was ripping off workers.¹³ Indeed, if Makoto, who was situated relatively high in Matsuda’s hierarchy of workers, was docked ¥2,000 per day, it was not unheard of that Matsuda would take half the pay of some homeless person given a day of work. Hence, the subject of Makoto had become “taboo” (tabū) in the days following his disappearance, because it suggested that Matsuda, who was enraged, had brought the matter upon himself. It was bound to happen that workers quit. And it happened on a number of occasions that members of the Matsuda-group vanished. One man who had been entrusted with the wages of six or seven others pocketed the cash and left without a word, and it was similarly a regular occurrence that guys in the Matsuda-group would not show up for work. If this occurred repeatedly, as it did in the case of Kon-chan, everyone would begin to wonder when Matsuda’s fuse would blow. Damage control involved beating the culprit with a metal baseball bat that Matsuda and Suzuki had stowed away in a storage space by Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, along with worker’s gear (safety belts, helmets, chainsaws, tools, etc.). Physical violence constituted a recognized means of meting out punishment and reestablishing authority. Hence, when Makoto phoned Matsuda a year later and reappeared in San’ya, Akira had to ask Matsuda not to batter Makoto. But Makoto showed up walking with a cane. During his absence, he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had lost mobility in half his lower body. People said it had been the “liquor.” Having gotten on welfare and relocated to another ward, Makoto rarely came to Yama afterward.¹⁴

The demise of the Matsuda-group came when Matsuda himself suddenly disappeared from San’ya. Over the years, Matsuda had built quite a reputation as a tehaishi in San’ya, with the guys and workers, the Kanamachi-ikka, and the police. He himself stayed in a cheap, ¥2,000 bunkhouse by the Iroha arcade, cutting a stocky figure as he could be seen after two in the afternoon, cycling about Yama on a mama-chari (mom bike), dressed in jeans, beach sandals, and a plain collared shirt or T-shirt. He had silver jewelry hanging around his neck, showing through the opening at the top of his shirt, and never went anywhere without his cell phone. Over the years, he had gotten fat about the waist, which lent him a comical air, paired with a quick-witted, almost nasal voice and laughter. He was always on the phone and always rushing off to attend to matters that required his immediate attention. Unlike Suzuki, whose workers were paid at the construction site, Matsuda paid his guys upon their return from work; sporting this cash in a bundle of ¥10,000 ($100) bills strung together with a rubber band, which was entrusted (albeit in an envelope) to someone close if Matsuda was not around to pay workers himself. In effect, Matsuda acted the part of the boss-caretaker, and it therefore came as little surprise when he announced the opening of his own construction company in the spring of 2013: Sanja Kensetsu, it was called, with an office right off the Iroha arcade, next to a run-down dive with mice (figure 2.1). The opening was accompanied by an invitation list and formal invitation letters. Everyone attended the opening event at a karaoke bar on Namidabashi, but in the following months, Matsuda increasingly stopped picking up the phone when Suzuki or Kentarō called for workers, relegating this task to one of his innumerable minions at the office (on the office number). He started traveling, mixing business with pleasure, and A-4–size cheap colored ink-jet photos of Matsuda appeared here and there in San’ya, on the inside walls of the dive bar, Sakura, in front of a takeaway lunchbox counter, or posing in baggy working pants and baseball cap before a primordial tree on Yakushima Island. Yet another poster showed Matsuda standing and smiling in front of his office, with the tacky slogan “to work = life” (hataraku = inochi) printed alongside his cell phone number. Having discovered, he said, a rock formation that accelerated the process of decontamination in soil, Matsuda also began going to Fukushima to engage with nuclear decontamination work, repeatedly appearing in a business suit in the Iroha arcade, tired out after a day on the bullet train. He started hanging out with professors from Tōdai (Tokyo University), conversing with them about nuclear decontamination, and alongside this, he seemed to be working on a project to export water-cleansing equipment to Burma and was enlisting Akira—who just shook his head in private and politely deferred on the matter in public—to act as head of a new NPO in San’ya. Yet everyone in the Okinawa-gang knew from the beginning that Matsuda spread himself thin as tehaishi and that, regardless of his extensive connections, he tended to use an especially unreliable labor base. The setup with Suzuki did not improve matters either, because Suzuki would only take ¥500 as pinhane, contrary to Matsuda’s minimum ¥2,000. Hence, when a Matsuda crew member worked side by side with Suzuki’s guys at the same construction site, the former was made painfully aware that he was doing the exact same work as the latter but was receiving one-fifth less in wages. In the absence of a contractual relationship, Matsuda treated his workers as if they were his own. Less than a year after the inauguration of his new company, Sanja Kensetsu, however, Matsuda’s crew members consolidated, objected to his conditions of labor, and refused to work. Shortly thereafter, Matsuda disappeared from San’ya. Everyone knew he had fled, because the Kanamachi-ikka sent its people out looking for him, asking everyone if they had seen Matsuda or knew where he was: Matsuda had disappeared with a debt of ¥30,000,000 (approximately $300,000) to the Kanamachi-ikka, a sum that would cost him his life if they located him.

As Akira had predicted from the very beginning, Matsuda was “finished.” Kentarō, too, had foreseen this eventuality, as he reiterated the principle of the worker in San’ya, stating that the collapse had been bound to happen because the enterprise had been based on making a claim to an informal network of workers as one’s own. But the San’ya man moved about according to his own whims, and in the absence of a formal contractual relationship that dissimulated the exploitative relationship of the tehaishi to the laborer, the availability of other means of income would crumble any attempt at forming a hierarchical institution in the name of self-interest. The individualizing order of the economy was to prevail.

But the informal and personal relations between the tehaishi and his workers also made for an economy of favors and obligations that far exceeded cash compensation for services. This was especially the case under Suzuki when work was abundant. The provision of work would itself assume the form of a gift, in that Suzuki was thinking of the well-being of the worker by giving him work. When ten or more guys were being sent out on a regular basis, Suzuki was able to expand this thoughtfulness beyond the core workers in the Okinawa-gang to anyone who required work (those not receiving welfare) and was recognized as “usable” (tsukaeru) at the workplace. Thus, when I started working, the first thing Suzuki told me was that if I desperately needed work, I could call him, and he would make it happen. He said he kept track of who worked how many days per week and how much they needed to get by. Takeda-san constituted an exception to the rule that the core members were off welfare, and he had grown frail over the years so that hard manual labor had become an increasing challenge for him; perhaps it was for this reason that he seemed to put all the more heart into the tasks he was assigned. A principle of seniority in the network of social relations necessitated his regular inclusion in the work group, though Takeda-san was subordinate to Kentarō at the workplace itself and was inescapably included in the every-man-for-himself market logic that would ultimately work to unravel sociality and group cohesion. By the same token, Suzuki emerged as a kind caretaker of the group when work was abundant, although economic necessity would one day lead the group to disband. Akira always did say: “Just watch, it won’t last.” Yet, likewise, he would note of Suzuki that he had a “genuinely kind” side; akin to Takeda-san and Ne-san’s hospitality, this aspect of Suzuki’s personality appeared unmotivated by immediate self-interest. Ideally, Suzuki thus rotated workers by taking into consideration the fatigue and financial needs of “everyone” (minna) and thereby ensured income for core workers without overwork. On the other hand, the guys tried to make sure to go, since “opening a hole” put the income of everyone at stake and served as a direct rebuff of Suzuki’s consideration. Work was inscribed in a network of obligations on which the financial viability of the group as a whole and of Suzuki depended. Suzuki’s reputation as tehaishi was heightened along with that of his workers, which, in turn, enabled him to provide more work. But this generosity was inscribed side by side with an egotism, the propensity toward which resided in both Suzuki’s personality and the economic logic of being a tehaishi. Of course, Takeda-san never permitted egotism to rear its head, and it was from this self-effacement that he derived his undeniable respectability, authority, and power. But Suzuki would declare that the way things worked was that his own reputation would “rise” in accordance with the quality of work performed at the site. Via the vine of subcontractors above Suzuki, news reached him regarding the performance of his workers, leading Suzuki to have favorites. Wakami’s tireless proficiency at all tasks reflected well on Suzuki—subcontractors put in requests for Wakami—and led Suzuki to send Wakami to construction sites that were of most significant income for the group.¹⁵ When Wakami’s only next of kin passed away, it was also Suzuki who did the rounds, collecting cash from everyone to pay Wakami for the bullet train and the working days he had missed. In another similar incident, Suzuki had moved in with his girlfriend and, because his room was now empty, decided to give it (all expenses paid) to an eighteen-year-old youngster who was having domestic problems. Assuming the role of a father figure, Suzuki urged the young man to take advantage of the place and to go to work, but the setup ended in a disaster when, having neglected to take care of the room, the eighteen-year-old was kicked out by Suzuki—clothing, luggage, and everything hauled into a garbage can on the street.

The scale of Matsuda’s operations enabled him to act in a far more official capacity on behalf of his own crew and the Okinawa-gang. In fact, whenever someone wound up in the local, giant three-story police box in San’ya—nicknamed the “Mammoth” in the old days, on account of its size—it was Matsuda who stepped in and would use his reputation to fix a release, whenever he could. Sometimes a release could be achieved when two parties had been fighting. As he did later when Akira and Shōkawa were in custody for two weeks because the other party to a dispute refused to drop suit, Matsuda met with police officers outside of visiting hours and convinced the other party (whom he knew) not to press charges. This relieved everyone, including the local police, of the headache of prolonged detention and possible jail time. In fact, it was common practice for the police in Yama to let matters like fighting slip: brawls happened all the time, and so long as these were confined to San’ya, the police preferred to “turn a blind eye” (mite minu furi) and avoid the hassle of detaining someone or making an arrest.¹⁶ In this way, Matsuda generated indebtedness not only with the Okinawa-gang, who would have been hard put to find someone to mediate, but with the police. Yet, contrary to Suzuki’s moments of generosity, which had the air of disinterest to them, Matsuda’s every act appeared in retrospect to have been motivated by some calculation of self-interest. When Matsuda received word that my partner was in town, he promptly put in a reservation for us to drink and dine on the house at the members-only bar on the twenty-eighth floor of the Asakusa View Hotel. By far the tallest and most opulent building in the Asakusa area, this was an invitation that was eagerly and genuinely presented and could not be turned down without causing insult. There was nothing to do but accept—even Akira said “there is no problem”—and so my partner and I stepped into a dimly lit bar on the twenty-eighth floor with a panoramic view of Asakusa and Tokyo’s newest tourist attraction, the 640-meter-tall Skytree. A waiter approached us in a tuxedo, presented us with menus, and proceeded to set up a table before us, on which he lined up six 1.5-liter bottles of shochu ordered from Kyushu. Taken aback by the ghastly juxtaposition of five-star luxury to San’ya, we were left to wonder at the connection between the disparate worlds.

As I discovered when I became unwillingly embroiled in Matsuda’s world, the connection was the yakuza. After our visit to the Asakusa View Hotel, Matsuda increasingly started to relate his business schemes to me, calling me over the phone to schedule informal meetings at Sakura during which he expatiated in frenzied fashion about his plans to export water-cleansing equipment to Burma, his relations with a professor at Tokyo University who specialized in nuclear radiation, and the mystical rock formation (he had a sample in his office) that, unbeknownst to the scientific world, had magical properties that would accelerate nuclear decontamination. When he asked for my help, I said that I would aid as best I could. But I declined when he repeatedly and insistently requested that I accompany him to Fukushima Prefecture to oversee his decontamination projects. Disappointed, Matsuda finally relented and noted that he understood I was “afraid” of radiation, while I was left to ponder why on earth he would have wanted to bring me along in the first place. As a cultural anthropologist, I had no expertise in any of his ventures, and it was only after some time that I realized that Matsuda was angling to buttress his projects with the appearance of authority in just about any shape or form. For him, it sufficed that I was affiliated with a prestigious university in the United States and that he could speak of me and introduce me to others as his associate. This happened one evening when I had been asked to attend a meeting of all the participants in Matsuda’s project, some of whom had flown in from Kyushu (the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands) to meet on the twenty-eighth floor of the Asakusa View Hotel. Replete with a shady yakuza man in his midfifties who reminded me that I had previously dined on his tab there (I had not known), construction work subcontractors, company owners and businessmen from Fukushima, Matsuda’s hoodlum (chinpira) sidekicks dressed in cheap suits, and a PhD student from the United States, this meeting was a burlesque masquerade of legitimate business concerns, in which everything was discussed from making contact with the military in Burma to decontamination in Fukushima and providing Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant with workers:

I had changed into a collared shirt and sweater to go. I waited before entering the lounge on the 28th floor of Asakusa View Hotel … but I arrived a little too early and entered the lounge only to find a bunch of senior intimidating figures in suits—including the dark figure of Mr. X—exchanging calling cards. I felt decidedly out of place and waited for Matsuda outside, until he arrived shortly after with two younger men dressed in cheap business suits. One looked decidedly punkish with hair sticking straight up. Both were overweight, with heavy black circles under their eyes. Otherwise, everyone seemed like real businessmen, that is, with the exception of Mr. X and Matsuda, the latter of whom came in his regular clothes, cellphone strapped to his belt. There were some 13 of us, some of whom had come from Kumamoto and some of whom were affiliated with this company, Hisugawa. The topic of the day was water-cleansing technology—to be exported on the back of Naniwa company to Burma—and related to this, the decontamination of radiation using this rock called “minakami green.” A bogus possibility, no matter how you looked at it, but these men were really trying to sell the idea.… Photos were circulated of Mr. X in Myanmar, standing in a line beside a military man and his subordinates, all in military uniform. There were comments made amongst everyone regarding how they really were in military uniform. Throughout the four-hour meeting, a 75-year-old technician and owner of the rights to the technology spoke most of the time, getting on Matsuda’s nerves, saying that he had not heard about this or that. He especially freaked when he heard Naniwa company’s name mentioned, because he had had his rights stolen from them before.… It took a lot of persuading from Matsuda to slowly get him onboard. You could tell, though, that what this man really wanted—over and above Burma—was to get inside TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company] to clean the water. It was a spectacle of someone wanting a piece of the pie—hard figures were quoted—since Naniwa has monopolized the decontamination work in Fukushima. Thus, he was really excited to get to know the TEPCO-affiliated professor whom Matsuda and Mr. X knew. But Matsuda warned him to stay clear of suggesting any business plan to the professor—this relation had to stay purely “research”—because otherwise it would alienate the professor from them. There was also talk of how most of the decontamination work is being done by workers from the outside of Fukushima, and how they knew of locals from Fukushima who would be eager to do that work themselves. This conversation struck a particularly bad note with me, causing me to remember news articles stating that decontamination workers simply do not have the necessary expertise to do their jobs. As the night progressed, the three main figures at the end of the table—Matsuda, Mr. X, and the owner—proceeded to get increasingly intoxicated, vivacious, and talkative, while the remainder of us stayed silent.¹⁷

Too close for comfort, this meeting nevertheless provided the clearest picture I would get of the intersection of San’ya with the sordid corporate interests of construction companies, the yakuza (which hosted the meeting and financed Matsuda), and government funds. Matsuda was the brains behind both the project and the stitched-up assemblage of parties present, most of whom had not met each other before, and Mr. X was his benefactor. Obviously, there were no day laborers present. In fact, during the meeting, Matsuda was receiving phone calls from his minions back in the office regarding Suzuki, who had called to ask whether Matsuda could spare workers for the following day (this was about when tehai was taking place back in San’ya). Exasperated, Matsuda told them to deal with it by themselves and hung up. He clearly had more important matters to deal with. For the conglomeration of vested interests at this meeting constituted precisely the group of interests that labor unions in San’ya had fought against in the 1980s: a tehaishi in cahoots with the yakuza, construction companies, and, by extension, the state.¹⁸ When Matsuda and the others above spoke of providing workers to Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this was a conversation that was purely concerned with pocketing money that would accrue to them in return for supplying labor, that is, with taking easy money that would not go to workers.¹⁹ And whether or not there was any merit to exporting water-cleansing equipment to Burma, the notion of a mystic rock formation that could accelerate nuclear decontamination was a lie. At the end of the day, when the pretense to philanthropy had been set aside, every one of the schemes discussed at the meeting above focused on taking funds that had been made available by the state, be it for decontamination in Fukushima or inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the contracting of nuclear laborers, or the large-scale business alliance between Japan and Burma.

Thankfully, this meeting at the Asakusa View Hotel was the one and only occasion in which I was asked to meet Matsuda’s business associates. Soon after, I left Japan for the United States, and when I returned, Matsuda had already fled from San’ya and from his debt to the mob, which he had been repaying by cutting the wages of his workers. But before this happened, I was privy (yet again) to the difficulties of navigating the political relationships of Matsuda’s world, into whose orbit I had been forcibly pulled, or so I felt, by a display of generosity. One day I had entered Sakura:

The place was packed. Sitting across from Akira, next to Suzuki, was a face that I had seen before. Big burly body. Equally big, comical face with a slight beard. Akira introduced me to Ikari, a member of the Kanamachi-ikka. “Ikari, Kanamachi-ikka,” he said. Jokingly, Akira asked Ikari if he wouldn’t “go nuts” at Sanyukai, where Akira had recently gotten into a quarrel. Or if he wouldn’t put on his black mobster suit and pay Sanyukai a visit to ask whether Akira was there. Ikari jokingly flexed his shoulders and muscles in response, as if preparing for action. It was a little afterwards that I felt like I had to be careful about what I said. Akira mentioned that I had gone to this meeting with Matsuda, and that I was going to meet this professor from Tokyo University. Ikari then asked me—indirectly, jokingly, but not really—to fill him in on this this professor, whom one of his friends had introduced to Matsuda. He said that he had already heard a little about this professor, but—blinking at me—would I not fill him in? I had to say that I was just there to help and not in a position to judge or know. I thought to myself: what if Matsuda hears about this conversation.²⁰

Suzuki, too, had his way of showing off his largesse, albeit in a more down-to-earth, if unrefined, vulgar, and innocent way. He bragged of how he had “become famous in this town” after rumors spread of his fighting exploits, crowing about how, one day, the crowd by Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall had parted like the ocean before him. Indeed, Suzuki dominated the scene by Mutō’s, transforming the alley into a reception ground for the group as they got home, bought drinks, reported on how it had gone, and waited to be assigned sites for the following day. Notably, Matsuda, too, was known for never having lost a fight, but his manners were crafty, functional, and sober, as opposed to Suzuki, who perorated drunkenly on having become the most well-known tehaishi in San’ya. Extending his fingers to demonstrate how many subcontractors he had pocketed, Suzuki would continue, oblivious of Kentarō’s frown, all the while drinking shochu with an air of self-entitlement and acting as if he was the only tehaishi who could provide the group with work. To make matters worse, Suzuki was also an incorrigible and successful womanizer, to the comical bewilderment of the Okinawa-gang, all of whom wished for romance but could not fathom how Suzuki always managed to have an affair going, and once even with a graduate of Tokyo University! And Suzuki was a terrible spendthrift, carelessly spending money as a sign of his influence and frequenting the neighboring red-light district, Yoshiwara, where he would easily blow ¥50,000 or ¥60,000 ($500 or $600) in one evening.

If not deriving from real egotism, projecting the image of an intimidating personage was an intrinsic part of the tehaishi role. Suzuki’s most important task was to make sure that the correct number of workers went to work, and to ensure this, it had to be known that the failure to show up would carry consequences. This was particularly the case with new and unknown workers, with whom Suzuki would initially meet to lay down the terms of work, which included a warning of how angry he would become if they failed him but also an explanation of the many benefits they would receive (more work) if they did well. At times, especially with younger workers in their early twenties, Suzuki made it sound like he was offering them the opportunity of a lifetime, explaining how they could slowly work their way up, and he was forgiving at first, as were the others, when eighteen-year-olds had trouble getting up in the mornings and opened a hole. In the final analysis, however, the failure to comply had negative consequences for the Okinawa-gang as a whole, and on occasion, Suzuki, too, meted out physical retribution—the “chokehold,” he called it—before giving someone a last chance. One did not go back on promises made to Suzuki.

Regrettably, Suzuki finally accepted money from so many subcontractors that he had trouble meeting the daily demand for workers. This happened much to Kentarō’s distress, since it overworked the group and because, by foregoing the money, Suzuki could have maintained the relation at the level of favors that would have increased work without obligations. Combined with Suzuki’s liquor habit, which started when he woke in the afternoon and approached two liters of shochu per day, egotism led Suzuki to make himself accountable for services that he could not provide. On the one hand, he was earning the money that had always been the sure sign of his standing in San’ya. Every worker paid him ¥500 ($5) as pinhane from their wages, in addition to which he received a minimum of ¥50,000 ($500) per subcontractor as a flat monthly fee, and he was in the habit of bragging that his income exceeded ¥400,000 (approximately $4,000) every month. On the other hand, Suzuki’s liquor habit would force him to renege on his promises to subcontractors and the Okinawa-gang, spelling his downfall as a tehaishi.

Unlike the old days when tehaishi lined up at Namidabashi in the morning to pick their workers, Suzuki and Matsuda concluded their work between the hours of four and seven the previous evening. Except on Saturdays, Suzuki received a call from subcontractors when construction sites concluded the day, between four and five o’clock, after which Suzuki began his work of tehai. In addition to the number of workers required, the subcontractors informed Suzuki what type of worker (navvies, scaffolders, ironworkers) to assign and what kind of work they would do. Because the Okinawa-gang was composed mainly of navvies, the labor of which almost anyone could do, requests primarily came for navvies, but if other laborers were needed, Suzuki had acquaintances at hand.

It was important that Suzuki assign to sites workers who could be “used” (tsukaeru) at the given tasks. To ensure this, Suzuki generally paired inexperienced men with experienced workers so that the latter could instruct the former. For example, if konkuri (cement work) was scheduled, it was necessary that at least two workers knew how to use the vibrator that enabled the concrete to flow on the top floor and that at least one worker knew how to take care of things on the floor below, as cement seeped through the walls and often spilled out the cracks. Three extra workers were then required: one to join the worker on the floor below, one to hold the heavy wires of the vibrator, and one to clean the steel rods protruding from the top floor. To do his job well as tehaishi, Suzuki consequently had to possess proficient knowledge of the skills required of specific tasks and had to know which of the guys could do what. But Suzuki had only worked for one year as a navvy alongside his brother Kentarō, who had four decades of experience. As a result, Suzuki was criticized for lacking the expertise necessary for his work, and as he expanded his obligations to subcontractors, he came into the habit of pairing any number of inexperienced workers with experienced workers like Kentarō, such that the latter was overburdened. Because Kentarō cut such an intimidating figure that anyone would “listen to” (iu koto o kiku) him, as Suzuki noted, grouping newbies with Kentarō became a quick-fix solution to fixing the numbers for the following day, especially as Suzuki got progressively drunk and desperate to settle the tehai. It was not unusual, however, that tehai continued late into the evening and that, as a last resort, Suzuki had to wake up early in the morning to scout a stranger lingering by the train station. Otherwise, Suzuki did not show his face in the mornings, save on the rare occasion when he had to introduce new workers. Yet even this became more and more infrequent as Suzuki preferred to sleep in until the midafternoon.

As a rule, Suzuki could be found at a designated spot in San’ya, from which he did his tehai. By making it known where he would be between four and seven o’clock, by which time the tehai had generally concluded, Suzuki made himself available to anyone who wished to seek him out in person and to workers who did not have a cell phone. It also allowed him to welcome back workers, to check in with them as he assigned them to new sites or gave them the day off, and to collect his ¥500 pinhane, or for that matter, any money he had lent them, so they could pay for their transportation and lunch. Sitting in a designated spot also enabled the Tenjima company’s middleman to find Suzuki easily in order to hand him the transportation money for the following day, which was a flat ¥500 per person: the same as Suzuki’s pinhane or his daily liquor allowance.

Emblematized in the figure of the tehaishi, the meeting place for Suzuki and his crew was far more than functional because it condensed the excesses of work, alcohol, and gambling. During the spring, summer, and early fall, and with the exception of that brief period when the seventy-year-old Mutō was jailed for running an illegal gambling operation, this meeting place where all the returning workers of the Okinawa-gang congregated after work was the narrow street in front of Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall. A one-minute walk from Suzuki’s bunkhouse, Suzuki would arrive around four, pull up a wooden stool, and wait for the phone to ring. Dressed in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt, he would sit with a glass of Mutō’s cheap Daigoro shochu with water and ice, placed on the ramshackle table beside him, alongside two sheets of paper: one of that day’s statistics on boat racing—and after he had received calls from the subcontractors—another of a list of construction sites with numbers written in parentheses next to them. Suzuki would move his eyes, distracted, between the box TV in the upper left-hand corner of Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall and the race stats. Eyeing the races and shouting at the regular drunks—of which there were always five or six, lounging about chatting, talking to themselves in their own worlds, or passed out on the cement—to get the hell out of the way when they blocked his field of vision, Suzuki would shift back to the statistics after the races concluded, talk to Akira, or pick up the phone. Every time he shifted to pick up the statistics or to fill in another name on his list of workers, Suzuki would put on his sharp-looking red reading glasses, which made his face look distinctly like that of an out-of-place accountant on the grimy street. Every once in a while, he would receive a phone call or put one in, almost just like he placed ¥500 bets with Mutō, who sat behind the counter and wrote numbers in his ledger. Sometimes tehai ended with one phone call, as when the number of workers and locations matched up with the day that was just concluding. Then, Suzuki could put in a single call to the guys, who were still at the construction site, and tell them to repeat the routine the next day. More often, however, the tehai continued into the evening, as dusk fell and members started coming back, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or groups, dirty, tired, and carrying backpacks laden with clothes, tools, and safety belts.

The street in front of Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall was then transformed into a veritable thoroughfare for workers, especially when Matsuda was also doing tehai from the same place, trading workers with Suzuki. At Mutō’s, the guys would have another drink (their second, at least, after work), standing about, sitting on a chair if they could find one or on the ground in small groups. They would buy drinks for one another, which called for reciprocity, and they would gamble before splitting up and leaving for the next dive bar. After he started working, Akira would always observe of this daily celebration, as he would of every occasion with the guys, that he was left without a penny after all the rounds of drinks and gambling. “No matter how much, there is never enough money” (ikura kane ga attemo tarinai). Kentarō, too, would make an unknowing gesture as to where exactly all the money went, raising his palms upward to the sides and tilting his head. The only way not to spend the entirety of the daily wage from that day was to go home.

Alongside the drinking and gambling, it was normal for confrontations to take place, for fights to break out, and for the cops to pay the crowd a visit, if only to warn them that complaints had been issued and to be careful not to block the passage of cars. The cops were well aware that the entire conflagration of activities was illegal, beginning with Mutō’s boat racing, for which he had no license and was backed by the yakuza (which also made the gambler criminally responsible). This was likewise the case for the dive bar, Sakura, where Suzuki would do his tehai during the winter months and where boat racing bets were also accepted, backed by the mob. Thus, it befell Suzuki and Matsuda to pay the Kanamachi-ikka monthly for the right to work in their “territory” (nawabari). As a matter of pride, Suzuki was thus a “sworn brother” (kyōdaibun) with a man in the Kanamachi-ikka. Once every month, their shiny, black van could be found parked outside Sakura, in which a driver in a black suit waited for Suzuki. But the Okinawa-gang declined to take on work directly from the Kanamachi-ikka, as it entailed too many complications. Indeed, when rumors started to circulate regarding well-paid work at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this work was to be acquired through the Kanamachi-ikka.

At the Construction Site

Work started at eight o’clock in the morning at the construction site, but workers would arrive as early as seven to sit, smoke, read the sports newspaper (which contained the gambling statistics), and while away the time that remained after changing into work clothes. If it was their first time at a construction site, they tried to arrive especially early to stay on the safe side. Only a few of the guys, like the twenty-eight-year-old Wakami, who commuted in his work clothes, or Kentarō, when he had had a late night, would arrive last minute or late to work. There was thus almost always time for a cigarette, a nap, light breakfast, and maybe even a quick game of cards.

At eight o’clock, the general assembly began in a clearing with radio calisthenics. Introduced in 1928 to commemorate the emperor, the same cheery music with instructions aired all across construction sites in Tokyo and, no doubt, all of Japan, at eight every morning. The crowd of workers did their stretches in construction gear in sync with the music, facing a central platform before which the foremen, identifiable by their green denim clothes, also did stretches.²¹ At most sites, the workers and overseers alike did their calisthenics half-assed, but not doing them was not an option. Kentarō just pointed his fingers downward, wriggling them with his back upright, when he was actually supposed to be reaching for his toes. The exertion was in any case impossible, since he was as stocky and round as a penguin. Yet, at certain sites, the calisthenics took on an explicitly disciplinary function. To put me in place before work began, one work leader slipped up behind me during the calisthenics and told me to do them “firmly.” At another site, it was daily practice to line workers up for calisthenics according to their specialization—navvies, scaffolders, carpenters, electricians, machinists—all seated in separate rows on dinky little plastic chairs before and after calisthenics, and during the stretches themselves, one of the foremen walked around, watching the workers while occasionally telling them to bend their knees properly. Hardly any surprise, at this site it was also the foremen who decided when workers took breaks, and it was explained to me that the top foreman was so strict that he would single out workers who were not doing the stretches seriously and make them repeat the exercises alone after the morning assembly. Once the assembly concluded, a solitary figure might thus be doing the calisthenics alone to nonexistent music.

The meeting itself began after calisthenics. Workers then picked up their helmets, safety belts and equipment and lined up in the queue of their profession. They self-identified in accordance with their specialization, referring to each other as navvies, scaffolders, carpenters, operators, or electricians.²² At some sites, new workers were even made to introduce themselves on a microphone in front of the crowd, stating their name and subcontractor. Then the foremen took turns outlining the tasks for the day and the safety precautions that needed to be taken. They explained where the heavy machinery—excavators, dump trucks carrying away soil, cranes, cement trucks—would be moving. On rainy days, the slipperiness of the soil and the danger of falling into the trenches was emphasized. In the summer, when it got as hot as forty degrees Celsius, workers were told to take precautions against heatstroke, to keep well hydrated, and were reminded how many workers had already been carried off from heatstroke. If an accident or death had recently occurred at a company site, workers were especially urged to ensure “safety” (anzensei).²³ Once the foremen had spoken, workers gathered in groups of four or five to go over the tasks of the day again, to reiterate the safety precautions, and to verify that everyone’s safety gear was in order. The foremen walked around while this took place, listening in, and as if this were not enough, a single worker was finally called in front of everyone to summarize the tasks and safety precautions, a prospect many of the guys dreaded: public speaking. At last, everyone retired to the changing rooms for a quick rest and smoke before actual work started at eight thirty. Workers were only spared this morning assembly (chōrei) when cement work was scheduled, since navvies then had to be ready once the concrete trucks arrived, and thus they prepared for this during the morning assembly.

The haphazard means of approving the medical condition of workers were revealed at an additional introductory meeting for new workers, after the assembly. It was at this meeting that workers were required to submit their blood pressure readings to receive approval for work. Since the foremen did not observe the laborers when they took their blood pressure (the monitor was in another room), it was common practice for everyone in the group who had high blood pressure—that is, almost everyone—to submit a false reading. For if the upper reading was above 160, workers were denied permission to work. Consequently, when the guys arrived at a new construction site en masse, the first matter of business was for the twenty-eight-year-old Wakami or myself to take four or five readings and hand them out to the group. It would have posed a problem for both workers and foremen if most workers were disqualified on account of high blood pressure, and so the foremen turned a blind eye to fake blood pressure readings. By so doing, they also retrojected responsibility for health consequences on the individual himself: everyone worked at his own risk. Indeed, no one even raised an eyebrow when five men in their midfifties presented identical blood pressure readings of 120/80.²⁴

Thus, three to four times per week, the guys in the Okinawa-gang were consumed by the work of a navvy, which involved a number of tasks that, at least in theory, could be done by anyone. For work as a navvy required no license and paid less than many of the other lines of construction work. Many in the group did, in fact, have licenses to work as scaffolders, which paid more on account of the danger for which the scaffolder assumed full responsibility, but they would reluctantly admit that anyone could work as a navvy, regardless of age and physical condition.²⁵ At least in appearance, this was a form of labor that Marx referred to as “unskilled labor” and that disclosed a strict hierarchical division not only between manual and mental labor, which was all too evident in the difference between the foremen who never raised a finger and everyone else, but between the “skilled” worker and the “unskilled” navvy, whose work could be undertaken by anyone.²⁶ Of course, for the guys, their labor was certainly “skilled” and thereby masculine labor, for this was labor, they said, that women could not do, and it was undeniable that the expertise of veteran workers increased productivity at the site and enhanced demand for the group. To a certain degree, even the work of a navvy retained the character of a unified craftsmanship that demanded experience, knowledge, and expertise, and perhaps this differentiated it from work that might have been undertaken at an assembly line.²⁷ But it went without saying that navvies occupied the bottom rung among the manual laborers at the construction site and, therefore, stood at the farthest reach from the intellectual labor of the foremen, whose separation from manual laborers was not simply discursive or a matter of degree.²⁸ As Alfred Sohn-Rethel explicates it, the separation of manual from mental labor is constitutive of the capitalist mode of production because by relegating the organizational and technical aspects of the workplace to a specific cadre of individuals (the foremen), capital deprives manual laborers of the cohesive knowledge required to take production back into their own hands, thereby rendering them dependent on capital.²⁹ Moreover, the wage is integral to sustaining this division. For by conferring value on their labor, the individualizing wage reincorporates manual laborers back into sociality, only to sever them from one another, making it appear as if the power to produce belongs not to them as a social unit but to capital, whose property they have become and in whose interest they are made to produce surplus value by the foremen.³⁰ In this way, the division of mental from manual labor is constitutive of the wage laborer, whose reproduction Marx regarded as constitutive of capitalist production.³¹ Lest head and hand unify against the shareholders and upper management of the Seichō Corporation, it was for this reason that the separation between overseers and manual laborers at the construction site was enforced so stringently. But it was perhaps also to maintain his indispensable place in the group that Kentarō never taught others how to use the vibrator or the electronic depth gauge. It went without saying that there was indeed a certain amount of know-how (as opposed to theoretical knowledge) that belonged almost exclusively to the manual laborers at the construction site.

Nevertheless, it was precisely its menial character that qualified navvy work as the end of the line. With the exception of the twenty-eight-year-old Wakami, almost everyone who worked as a navvy appeared older and less fit than workers in the other professions. While the scaffolder required the agility, balance, and fearlessness to work high along scaffolding, the ironworker needed the sheer upper-body strength to bend and carry metal reinforcements. But the navvy had to be able to use the shovel, carry things, clean, and sometimes operate equipment like a chainsaw, concrete vibrator, or electronic depth gauge. Very little specialization was required of bottom-rung navvies, and unlike older scaffolders, the navvy never commented on becoming unable to keep up with younger workers. In a typical reversal of hierarchies, Akira accounted for the ranking system between various workers at the construction site: the most important part in a building, or anything for that matter, was the “foundation,” and in this sense, navvies did the most important work. As if he were speaking of San’ya itself, he added that, as a navvy, Kentarō did not take crap from anyone on the construction site.

Work as a navvy did, however, involve a range of tasks that varied in physical intensity, danger, and technical expertise. Maybe the simplest task was “digging holes” (ana hori), for which no instruction whatsoever seemed necessary, except for knowing how to pace oneself and pause. But this task was also considered one of the most demanding and entailed digging in places that the excavator could not reach. In this case, human labor power filled in for the machine, meaning that even at this most menial level of labor, the manual laborer was expected to match his actions to the pace of machinery such that, as Marx once observed, the conditions of work determined the speed and content of the laborer’s motions, rather than the other way around.³² By determining the pace and substance of labor, machinery superseded the disciplinary role of foremen, whose role it was to maximize productivity. Given the physical strain of digging holes, this task was usually given to younger members of the group, like Wakami or myself. It was work, like all the other tasks, in which the earth was destroyed, and human labor was expended to lay the foundations of a new building. At the age of fifty-six, Saruma thus explained that, to get through the day, especially when doing demanding physical labor, he needed to pace himself in accordance with the break periods held from ten to ten thirty, twelve to one (lunch), and three to three thirty. It was only the thought and certainty of an upcoming break that enabled him to continue, a little more, until the next break. Thus, time passed and constituted the abstract measure of bodily expenditure. Yet, unconcerned with the material contingencies of the workplace, this was a specific form of time, one oriented toward the future in a future-anterior mode in which the workday, like the portions of the day, will have ended.³³ At least one person had to bring either a wristwatch or phone out to the construction site, so the guys could ask each other, sometimes every five minutes, if the time for a break had arrived yet. The alternative was to wait endlessly for the other workers to head lazily back to the changing rooms. If a watch was on hand, it was possible to get a head start. In the summer, when workers were regularly hospitalized for heatstroke, the stretch between one and three o’clock felt especially long. At those times, it was better not to look at the watch, to stick it out, and be relieved that time had passed when one finally dared a glance.

Direct exposure to the sun and heat and seemingly endless swathes of time were most intense when cement work was scheduled. This was a task, moreover, that involved the highest degree of technical expertise and, hence, the clearest hierarchy in the division of labor among the navvies. Six navvies were required to lay the concrete floors of the high-rise apartment blocks built by Seichō. Two of these took turns operating the vibrator that released the cement, a heavy, plug-like object that had to be lugged about and dipped into the cement along the crevices of the walls and the slabs of the floors, to even it all out. There were only three or four in the group who knew how to do this work, which involved reading the texture and height of the cement, matching the movements of the man holding the cement pump, and anticipating how everything would even out when they came back from the other side. When dumping the vibrators inside the walls, this navvy had to gauge from the sound and feel of the vibrator how long it had to be held in place, releasing just enough. Meanwhile, another navvy brushed the protruding steel reinforcements of the walls with water so that excess concrete would not stick to them. And yet another navvy did two tasks, holding the wires of the vibrator so the navvy operating it did not have to haul them about (or the generator attached to them) and, as the concrete approached the margins of the floor, shoveling cement to even out the edges. The remaining two navvies stayed on the floor below, in the belly of the building. As cement poured into the walls—bolts and screws shaking from the vibrators and making a racket, as if a drill had been plugged inside, joined by the spout of the cement tube reaching up alongside the outside of the building like the neck of a beast—these two navvies hammered away on the bottom of the walls to make sure the concrete made it all the way down and, while the floor slabs were completed, cleaned up any excess cement that had spilled through the fissures in the walls and ceiling above. This latter job could be dangerous, because it could happen that the carpenters had not sufficiently secured the wooden frames of the walls. The sheer weight of the raw cement filling the walls could then cause the wooden mold to break and collapse on the navvy. This was not a big issue when there was space behind the navvy, but if work was in the cellar, the navvy had to crawl into a crevice between the wall and the soil, and if the navvy was in the crevice when the wall collapsed, he would be buried in a deluge of raw cement, wood, steel reinforcements, wires, and bolts. The navvy thus had to know from the sound of the hammer on the walls when the concrete had risen above the waist and climb out immediately. The navvies on the bottom floor were covered with cement by the end of the day, a prospect that the navvies holding the vibrators could prevent, depending on their ability to establish a rhythm with the man holding the pump. On days when cement was scheduled, every single movement of the worker was, in effect, matched to the rate at which the machine on the ground floor spouted out cement. If the concrete mixers did not arrive on time, work was stalled. This allowed everyone to take a break and “escape” to the shade in the summer, but it was also vexing as workers wanted to be finished. On the other hand, when the mixers were lined up downstairs, work continued nonstop, save for lunch, because breaks were not given on days when cement was slated. Forced upon them by the machinery, workers marched to the rhythm of capital. By this same token, the navvy had to keep up with the man lugging about the concrete spout, who, in accordance with the bulky weight of the spout, did not shy from showering an inexperienced or slow navvy with an unsparing string of invectives. In turn, the man who operated the spout connected to the concrete truck below had to match his movements to the pulse of the machine that pummeled concrete with beastly force, reining in the end of the spout and directing it with ropes. But the machine and tube had a life of their own.

The force of the concrete pump and the superhuman tube extending from it harbored the specter of accidents that overhung the working day. To begin with, the concrete itself contained chemicals that could burn straight through bare skin, leaving gaping sores. Sure enough, prolonged exposure to concrete wore down any working gloves and clothes, and although workers protected themselves against direct exposure with proper work gear, accidents could not be predicted. One day, the elevated tube connecting the concrete in the truck to the workers split in half right above our heads, writhing and spewing cement like a broken exhaust pipe. Everyone fled from the sight to clean themselves up, but it did not require much of an imagination to know that the tube, filled with cement, would have broken somebody’s neck if it had fallen on their head. Contact with the force of the machinery would have been deadly. Indeed, during work, senior laborers would give brief but deadly serious instructions regarding dangers of the tasks at hand, the neglect of which could have real consequences. The cement pebbles in the air, for instance, petrified in the lungs: it was best not to breathe in too much. And if you started to feel dizzy during the summer—symptoms of heatstroke—you should go inside regardless of work and sit under the air conditioner. When accidents occurred, it became the subject of awed gossip, prompting workers in the changing rooms or San’ya to recount a series of other, similar experiences. The former scaffolder, Iwasawa, who was as frail as a stick in his early fifties and could hardly walk, had once fallen from a height of several stories, puncturing his ribs and breaking all sorts of other bones. Other younger scaffolders, too, had been paralyzed from the neck down. The long and short of it was that if you got into an accident, “no one is going to look after you,” and this dictum of the workplace, where men were made to assume almost complete “self-responsibility” (jikosekinin), was carried over into the everyday life of San’ya, where physical confrontations and illnesses were regarded as self-incurred. San’ya constituted proof that no one would look after you, except, finally, the state, into whose hands the deteriorating health of laborers was handed over, forfeiting their masculinity. It was said that “you protect your own body by yourself” (jibun no mi wa jibun de mamoru). But the days only alternated between the self-destruction of drink and that of work, and in the changing rooms, workers would puff away in breaks, inundating the room with smoke.

Following on cement work, negiri (excavating the foundation) required most coordination between the navvies and machinery. In fact, excavation was what a navvy specialized in, and for this reason, they were in highest demand when the foundations of buildings were being laid. During such times, there was work for navvies every day, as the construction site had to be excavated before any other work could proceed. The guys were thus busiest at the beginning of the financial year—April 1 in Japan—when construction companies invested capital in new buildings. Navvies would then come to the construction site in the absence of scaffolders, steelworkers, carpenters, or electricians and transform the soil beside an excavator. Working side by side with the excavator entailed that the navvy had to be constantly aware of the location of the excavator up above, moving ceaselessly back and forth, humming and circling without rest as it dug farther and farther along the floor plan of the building. It was said that machinists could operate the excavator for hours without rest, and navvies had to match its speed, just as digging holes involved digging where its square beak could not reach. Down below in the holes, navvies kept up by leveling out the height of the ground with a shovel, cleaning the margins, and securing the walls of the hole with wooden boards that were said to have come from Fukushima Prefecture (thus, to be irradiated) and pipes, plunged into the ground so that the walls would not crumble. Using an electronic depth indicator, one navvy—usually Riku or Kentarō—read the floor plan and, with a spray can, indicated the places that required more digging and those that were all right, while two other navvies followed up with other work. Sometimes, the depth of the hole dug by the excavator required one of the navvies to take a spade to correct the depth. Otherwise, the remaining two navvies cleaned the insides of the excavation dug by the excavator, evening out the surfaces, and carried wooden boards and steel pipes to secure the sides of the excavation, which required several trips to the storage area, due to the weight of the pipes and boards. Once the depth had been established and the pipes and boards collected, the navvies signaled to the machinist that they could go ahead and secure the walls. This last work required speed and nimble fingers on the part of the navvy, who had to work with, keep up with, and stay out of the way of the excavator. First, the navvy placed the wooden boards up against the sides of the hole, nailing the edges together so they reached across both vertically and horizontally. Second, the navvy signaled the machinist and began putting the pipes in place. This required that the navvy place the pipe so that it leaned against the wooden boards, placing pressure against them to hold the soil behind in place. Depending on the size of the hole, there were usually eight pipes per side. Because the machinist above could not gauge the distance to these pipes, the navvy held the pipe in place with one hand and, with the other, instructed the operator to move the beak of the excavator forward and down so that it clasped the tip. At this point, the navvy had to “run out of the way,” because once the beak pushed down, the pipe was plunged into the earth. It went without saying that, if a finger was caught between the beak and the pipe, or if a foot was stuck under the pipe, the force of the excavator would take it off. And sometimes, just when the excavator released its hold, the pipe bounced back toward the face of the navvy, shredded across its tip.

The prevention of accidents required attending to dangerous contingencies, yet, at the same time, it also demanded a deadening to the possibility of these contingencies ever coming to deadly fruition. Thinking too much about the ever-present possibility of accidents would have made work impossible, so energy had to be invested in maintaining a certain “shield,” as Freud once wrote, to block out this possibility.³⁴ Confronted with the specter and penetrating shock of an accident bound to happen at some point, manual workers at the construction site had to block out direct exposure to material contingencies. It was as if they labored in an abstract temporality imposed on them by capital, in which the time of production had been emptied out of the interruptive (yet inevitable) force of accidents and other hindrances.³⁵ At the end of the workday, the worker was drained to the point of fatigue since the tasks imposed on him required that he expend his energy as efficiently as possible but also because these tasks demanded that he deaden himself to the physical environment of the construction site—a deadening that resulted in an etiolation of material stimuli, for it deprived the manual laborer and man of a sensorial experience of the world that he could call his own. When dust particles flew in the air, he either turned his face or wrapped a towel around his mouth. If he stepped on a nail, he ignored the injury until lunch break, when he could run by a pharmacy. Even downright exhaustion left no choice but to carry on. Likewise, scaffolders knew what would happen if they fell from a height of thirty stories, since it had happened to others. One man related what passed through his mind when looking down from such a height: “If I fall from here, I will die.” Nevertheless, he continued to work without the encumbrance of his safety gear. In this way, the possibility of accidents had to be bracketed and repressed as if it did not exist. During my first week at the construction site, before I myself had become desensitized, I wrote as follows of the excavation work:

What the machines cannot do, we fill in. I remember being scared of the crane on the first day. Of working so close to it, having to align pipes to the boarded walls of craters, down in the bottom … holding the pipes in place while the crane put its snout to the top of the bar, and pushed it down. Incredible power. Super-human. Pushing that bar into the ground, two or three meters with no effort at all. Kentarō always saying immediately after the snout was placed and ready to push down: “run away.” Yesterday, I realized why. The crane pushed down and because the pipe got stuck momentarily … the snout ripped straight through the metal. Put a huge gash in the top of the pipe. The day before, the crane was carrying one of those metal boards placed on the ground, across which vehicles drive. Kentarō said they weigh 1.5 tons. He added that if the driver is good, he can stack up to two boards at once, and carry them thus. Yesterday, Kentarō said, “look”: the big crane was carrying the small crane up to a different level. When we put metal bars in place, for “stopping the mountain” (yamadome), we move to match the progress of the crane. We don’t move at our own pace. We move so that the crane can move quickly on to other work.³⁶

The work of excavation also involved the task of inserting wooden walls between giant H-shaped bars that had been driven into the ground beforehand to align with the future floor plan, separating the walls and supporting the building from its corners. The excavator began by digging along the edges of the building, uncovering the H-shaped bars that were separated by 100–150 centimeters. When two meters had been dug up, the navvies would step into the pit, armed with spades and crowbars, take away a layer of earth from behind the H-shaped bars, and insert wooden boards behind the H shape. The H shape of the bars prevented the boards from falling out, as the navvies worked from the bottom up, filling in soil behind the boards. Once 2 meters had been completed, the excavator would come back and dig another two meters, and thus the task was repeated until the wall was as deep as 10–20 meters. This was demanding work, especially when the earth was rock-hard clay or if it had been raining and work was done in knee-deep water. Sometimes, a water pump had to be dumped into the water to facilitate work, but regardless, soil and dust particles flew everywhere as the navvies cleared the walls of soil, and at least one span had to be kept open between the navvies, because sometimes the crowbars would slip when they struck out to the sides. Two navvies would thus remain down in the pit. There they would also measure the distance between bars and call up to a third navvy—usually Kentarō, who shirked work in the pit—who cut the wooden boards to the right length with a chainsaw and threw them down as they were concluded. These boards were heavy, especially when wet, and the navvies had to communicate so that they were thrown safely. Once the boards were all down in the pit, the navvies wedged them behind the H shape and moved along the side of the wall to start another span as the excavator came in to dig farther from where they had left off. But the earth behind the navvy was not held in place by anything. Once, after it had rained, this part of the excavation caved in on Takeda-san, leaving him knee-deep in soil. Alarmed and immediately to the rescue, Kentarō and the others laughed about the incident afterward, noting that one cannot move once the soil gets to knee level.

Finally, the most demanding of all tasks was to work as tobi no temoto (at the scaffolder’s side), or as a helper to the scaffolder. After merely one day working at the scaffolder’s side, Saruma swore to Kentarō that he would never do it again. Akira also complained endlessly of the one day he had worked with Saruma as a helper to the scaffolder. Keeping up had forced him to flee from work and to throw up from the exertion. After this incident, it was decided in the group that work with scaffolders would only be given to the younger crew, like Wakami or myself. Much like digging holes, this task was straightforward: the navvy had to assist scaffolders when the scaffolding came down, forming the last link in the human chain of scaffolders that extended up alongside the scaffolding, receiving and handing pieces on as they were dismantled. Standing at ground level, the navvies had to work faster than scaffolders since they had to carry off the pieces, which were heavy, and be ready to receive the next one. It was pure stamina work for navvies, who had to match the youth and speed of scaffolders with their electronic screwdrivers, and it was nonstop, as the pipes, bolts, and metal walking boards kept coming.

On a typical day, the group prepared to leave the construction site at around four thirty. If Kentarō was on-site, this last stretch of time was preceded by his looking at the clock every few minutes or his asking repeatedly what time it was of the person who had the watch. Hence, as everyone knew, getting ready to leave with Kentarō started around four fifteen, with a pretense to working while waiting for four thirty, when it was actually considered legitimate to start packing up.³⁷

As if it were part of work itself, Kentarō did almost anything possible to end the working day early. He was always in a hurry to return: the first out of the changing room, rushing to make the earliest train and practically jogging to transfer trains. For a few months, he even got into the habit of buying confectionary at a cake store on the way home for the mama-san (proprietor) of his favorite eatery (izakaya). Laughing at the novelty of this practice, Kentarō said he had never done anything like it before and that it was “fun.” Kentarō even had his laundry done by the proprietor of this eatery, who folded his clothes and presumably also charged him for the services. Of course, the dynamic of this relationship shifted whenever Kentarō fell into debt at the eatery, as it was his privilege and habit to drink on credit, and his mama-san would begin charging interest on this debt, calling his phone every day to come and drink or to pay up. Then, Kentarō would no longer come by with cakes after work but, begrudgingly, with increments of cash. But a month later, the debt was forgotten about, and Kentarō would be back drinking and trying to fondle the mama-san. Until Kentarō fired Suzuki and took over tehai, there existed a clear break for him between work at the construction site and the world of San’ya.

It was a distinctive feature of the day laborer’s working day that the minute it was over at five o’clock, it was well and truly over. Work could not be taken home; nor were the hierarchical relations of the workplace reproduced in social relations among the guys in San’ya, albeit an elevated status did attach to the tehaishi or Kentarō. For in Yama, it was the unfailingly graceful and humble Takeda-san, paragon of a vanishing world of mobster values, who emerged as the mythic source of authority: a figure who looked out for everyone and treated everyone as equals.

The return to this world of San’ya was thus marked with a drink after work. After leaving the site and changing at four forty-five, all the guys invariably stopped by a convenience store before getting on the train. No matter the time of year, Riku would buy a One Cup Ozeki sake and sometimes something sweet, sharing at first. A lean figure in his late fifties with unshaven chin or a rough beard, Riku cut the figure of a lone wolf at the train station, sitting removed from the rest of the group, leaning against a pillar on his heels as he sipped from his sake and looked out in front of himself. On days when Riku did not work, the number of One Cups he drank grew to ten, he said, or sometimes fifteen. He laughed as he described his fondness for “liquor” and confessed he would start drinking at five in the morning, black out toward noon, and fall asleep either in his room or somewhere under the overhang of the Iroha arcade, where he could often be seen sleeping on the side of the street, a thin blanket spread over him, his traditional Japanese clogs (geta) sticking out from the bottom.³⁸ Days off were, unequivocally, days off, and this separation of work from the world of Yama began with the consumption of a drink on the train home. By the time everyone arrived in Minami-Senjū, they would each have a buzz. Hence, Takeda-san always bought a 500 ml Nodokoshi Kirin Happōshū beer and with it his trademark snack, kaki no tane (soy-flavored rice crisps and peanuts). Unless it was summer, when he would get a beer, as well, Kentarō always bought a cup of straight shochu that he tucked into the inside of his jacket or in his back pocket.

This consumption of alcohol on the train and cigarettes on the train platform separated the guys from regular commuters. While smoking on the platform was not permitted, drinking in the train was not prohibited, but it was certainly frowned on. It created an atmosphere of unease around the group when they openly flaunted the “rules” like this, especially on less crowded trains, where they were in plain sight. Of course, as Akira put it, some guys acted more like “gentlemen” on their way back than others. Takeda-san, for instance, never smoked in public, while Kentarō and the others would stand off to the side somewhere, behind a pillar, and smoke on the platform before the train arrived. To Akira’s horror, Saruma simply smoked in the open. One time, when another commuter reminded Saruma that smoking was not allowed, Saruma proceeded to cuss the person out: “What’s it got to do with you?” But all and sundry drank in the train, cutting a sharp contrast to other commuters. In addition, many of the guys were still in work clothes: Takeda-san sported a baseball cap backward with Nike sneakers after work, but he kept his baggy workpants, carrying a cell phone with One-Piece anime stickers, since he was an avid fan. The others similarly carried bulky bags and wore clothes stained with paint or cement, oftentimes ripped at the bottom. There was, indeed, a sense in which the guys consciously flaunted “manners” in the public space of the train compartment, although this was a far reach from the deliberate and threatening display of mobster affiliation that Yamamori took pleasure in enacting on every occasion he came face to face with general society. Nor did Yamamori ever go to work. It was only that, being tired after a day at work, having a drink took precedence over etiquette, and so the guys would help themselves—without exception—to a beer, sake, or shochu. Every once in a while, a prim, elder housewife would glare at us, and Takeda-san would react abashed, but such incidents were brushed off with a laugh as the guys settled into the loosening effects of alcohol. It was just as likely that the guys would give their seats away to a couple with a baby and play with the child for the remainder of the ride back. At Minami-Senjū Station, everyone each went his own way—some to meet Suzuki, Kentarō to deliver his confectionary, and Takeda-san to the local bathhouse—although there was a strong likelihood that many would end up drinking together later that evening, be it at Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, Sakura, Chūfukuro, Iseya, or Gen, on whose proprietor Kentarō had a crush.

The separation of the construction site from the world of San’ya fostered self-awareness of the social position the group occupied within general society and, in seeing the fruits of their labor externalized and dispossessed, of themselves as objects of labor. In fact, every time the train passed an apartment block or building the guys had worked on, they were reminded of the time they had spent constructing it. In this manner, there was a mutually constitutive dichotomy at play between the construction site and San’ya, reflected in the difference between the “disposable” laborer and the “skilled artisan” (ude ga yoi shokunin) or in the respect accorded to someone like the frail Iwasawa, who had “worked his butt off” when he was young and was experiencing the deadly effects of his labor for others, which had ultimately been for naught. It must be asked elsewhere whether this separation placed the manual worker in a different category from the salaryman—Georg Lukács once argued that intellectual labor must be differentiated from manual labor, since the latter does not consume the interiority of the mind and ends at five o’clock.³⁹ But it was nevertheless this antinomy between subject and object that gave rise to self-consciousness among San’ya’s laborers and that necessitated mutual recognition among members of the group. Otherwise, the men of San’ya would have been nothing but the dying and disposed of.⁴⁰

Regardless of what the laborer was aware of, however, economic necessity compelled the exchange of labor for wages. In this respect, the counterdiscourse of San’ya accommodated itself to and attenuated the cruelty of the workplace, for an artisan worked with dignity, and reversed the social arbitrariness and negativity of the wage—for which laborers exchanged their lives—with a narrative detour that installed an alternative modality of shame, honor, and sociality. To uphold the values of an upstanding otoko, who did good by his buddies and sacrificed himself for the group, it was necessary to maintain a poignant sensibility of failure and shame, because it was only in contradistinction to shame that honor and, therefore, dignity could be sustained, over against the shamelessness that the exclusive pursuit for money would engender. Taking precedence even over life itself, it was on the disavowed margins of Japan Inc., where the truth of labor was disclosed to consist in expendability and death, that the order of a singular master signifier was repeated over and over again. It was precisely there where nothing but equivalence seemed to reign and the commodity form of labor was materialized in its most spectral guise that a social signifier of honor was reiterated, for which many of the guys were willing to sacrifice themselves.⁴¹ Coming back from the construction site exhausted was what an otoko did, but in San’ya, it was Takeda-san who occupied the singular place of an otoko who gave credence to the irreplaceable value of buddies, and it was his word that expressed everyone’s desire. If something were to happen to Takeda-san, as Akira put it, everyone would “go running” to the rescue.

As the final effects of labor, however, bodily exhaustion and death were inescapable for capital rationalized the body to maximize productivity, and for capital, the name of the game was to minimize costs. In short, the fewer the workers needed to complete a job, the better, and while this strategy substituted for an endless working day, it also predicated premature exhaustion and death for workers.⁴² Together with excessive alcohol consumption, the repetition of this work was deadly, and the guys had all witnessed the signs of imminent death before, and they recognized them. Thus, when Suzuki collapsed, Akira said, “This is how Okinawans die,” and when Akira was carted out of his bunkhouse on a stretcher one night, Yamazawa from Sanyukai approached to watch in the crowd, remarking: “He’s gonna die, isn’t he.”

In the spirit of surplus extraction, it was common practice for Seichō to assign a younger, workaholic member of its permanent navvies to sites doing excavation. Wakami clearly explained the reasoning for this when he said that Itō does the equivalent of three workers, simply by being on-site. At the age of forty-nine, Itō took the opposite approach from Kentarō, who was at work more than anyone else and explicitly avoided excessive physical exertion because he anticipated its long-term effects. Rather than merely instruct, Itō took it upon himself to do a vast part of the work, and he was, in fact, quicker at finishing tasks than anyone else; also, he preferred to work by himself as he moved ahead. As “head worker” (shokuchō) of the navvies, indicated by the red (rather than white) helmet he wore, Itō was directly employed by the subcontractor, Tenjima, and it was his responsibility that work progressed on schedule. Itō would thus pick up slack by investing his own extra labor. Often, he would work in the breaks, after hours, and even on Sundays. Because he was an employee of the subcontractor on a monthly salary, he was reputedly not paid overtime but had to work every day. It was also said that his salary was lower than that of the day laborers, if the monthly sum was divided by the number of days he worked. Riku said that, while Itō might not have been intending to guilt-trip the rest of the crew—which took its duly awarded breaks and went home at five—the effect was the same. There was something distinctly wrong with watching Itō’s slender body slave away, back bent over a shovel in a water-filled ditch, while everyone took their break. As well as they got along, Kentarō remarked flat out of Itō’s exertions that “the man is stupid.” At some point, Itō’s body was going to shut down beyond repair. He ought to have known how to conserve his energies.

But much as the guys had made an artform of preserving their energies, slacking whenever possible, there was an adulation among them of raw, physical “power” (pawā). These tendencies naturally formed two sides of one coin, insofar as they expressed desire for inexhaustibility at work. In San’ya, however, this praise of power took the form of banter, as many had longstanding reputations for their strength at the workplace, which translated into a prowess for fighting in San’ya. Perhaps Rikiishi was most well-known for his power, and unsurprisingly so when one came face-to-face with him. The guys had nicknamed him the “gorilla” on account of his tremendous upper body, swelling forearms, and hands with stubbly fingers the size of salt shakers. Kentarō, who also possessed a hefty upper body and hands worn, swollen, and heavy from decades of work, would hold up Rikiishi’s hands for display, saying to everyone: “Have you seen these hands? Are these the hands of a human being!” True to his nickname, Rikiishi could often be found passed out on the benches lining the wall of Sakura. Upon waking, he would growl like an animal on the prowl and most often attack Shōkawa (one of his favorite prey), who, giggling away with an ice drink swaying in his hands, would beg him to stop as Rikiishi hugged him close, grunting intimately while he rubbed the stubble of his unshaven cheeks against Shōkawa’s, and bit his scalp in loving imitation of a gorilla. And when he was especially drunk, Rikiishi would begin kissing and crying. The latter was, in fact, a penchant which many of the guys shared, including Kentarō—the white-haired “silver-back”—when they had drunk a drop too much.⁴³

At the construction site, the praise of strength occurred in concrete scenarios, such as when someone dug a hole indefatigably, lifted an especially heavy rock, or carried lots of steel pipes at once, as if it required no effort. Then somebody might comment, “Nice power,” and this machinic strength would become the subject of conversations over drinks, as one man lauded another (who might be absent) for his feats at work. Suzuki, in particular, liked to boast of his own physical prowess, telling the “youngsters” (wakashū) in the group that he would one day show them how to lift thirty-kilogram bags of rice; similarly, it was not uncommon upon meeting workers that someone remarked of them that they “have strength.” Specific body “types” were also lauded as being especially “able to work,” and contrary to expectation, these were not always hefty-bodied types but lean and agile. Kentarō, however, repeatedly warned against overexertion at the construction site, insisting that work take place at the worker’s “own pace.” Suzuki naturally hoped for the opposite because hard workers reflected well on himself, but it was an accepted dictum that “hurrying” or “pushing oneself” could lead to “accidents.” In morning assemblies, the foremen pointed out that accidents occurred most frequently in the first hour or two of work. It was most important that workers pace themselves: a practice that entailed ceaseless attention to the possibility of accidents, for the construction site was a “horrific place” (osoroshī tokoro), but which also entailed a blocking out of this ever-present threat. Posters hanging here and there at construction sites detailed endless iterations of accidents: from tripping to getting caught under a machine or passing out from heatstroke. In effect, pacing entailed the sacrifice of direct exposure to the material contingencies of the construction site in an emptying out of time. When the end of the workday finally arrived, the worker wondered where the day had gone.

A capitalist conception of value inhered to the adulation of “power” and its regimentation, since it is the commodity form, or rather, the wage, that precipitates the abstraction of “labor power” into units of time. Although in diametrically opposed ways, the laborer and employer recognized labor power as a source of value, for the employer sought to maximize productivity, while the laborer sought to minimize his efforts so that he could last a little longer, earn his living for a few more years, and live a longer life. From the tehaishi’s pinhane all the way up the pyramid of subcontractors, it was the quantification of labor power in units of time that facilitated the extraction of surplus on the basis of exchange.⁴⁴ Moreover, this extraction of surplus value through the payment of wages imposed a regime of labor on the construction worker, which required that material contingencies be emptied out of the workday, because the abstraction of the exchange relation demands that laborers work within a time and space conceived in the most abstract of terms, as if a machine in the absence of material impediments, dangers, or exhaustion.⁴⁵ But it should not be forgotten that the value of labor power is historically and socially determined, and it is for this reason that the appellation “unskilled labor” says more about the social circumstances that stipulate its value than it does about the content of the labor itself. In another place and time, Kentarō’s labor could have been recognized as labor that few people could perform, and it was precisely such a reversal of values that the counterdiscourse of the otoko put into effect, although only within San’ya.

Even in San’ya, the form of value of the commodity and the laws of the market remained unquestioned, since the act of exchange had always already produced the value of labor power, measured in units of time, and this meant that day laborers acceded to the death-inducing effects of the wage. The quantification of “labor power” is immanent to the exchange of the subsistence wage for manual labor, in which the quantification of labor entails the conversion of labor power into a socially useful object, and it is only in its complete expenditure that labor power emerges as “labor power” proper, that is, in its complete exhaustion: maximization of productivity is implicit to its definition.⁴⁶ When wages were exchanged for “labor power” at the construction site, overseers expected that laborers exhaust themselves in maximum productivity. Rather than expressing a social metabolism, labor power thereby entails an utter deprivation of energy in which laborers consisted of nothing but a means toward the extraction of value. It is the violence of this rationalization that constituted the hierarchical relationship between overseers and workers at construction sites, where the conditions of exchange dictated that manual laborers be worked to the point of exhaustion and, finally, death. The group had no choice but to endure death-inducing fatigue, and thus, it was partly the inescapability of the market that was expressed in the fact that day laborers preferred money over health. Yet it was precisely their reduction to a point of utter deprivation that compelled the emergence of a dignifying counterdiscourse to the death-inducing discipline of the worksite. The exigency of this counterdiscourse instigated the conversion of leftover wages into the daily excesses of liquor and gambling, the latter of which involved an altogether different experience of time and contingency.

At the construction site, the working day was subdivided into dockets of time (eight thirty to ten, ten thirty to noon, one to three, three thirty to five) that fused the expenditure of bodily energy with the duration of time. Reflecting a nineteenth-century imperative to understand motion in terms of space and time, the workday was divided into sections whose passage was experienced in anticipation of a safe ending, across which energy was spent.⁴⁷ Like chronophotographic images of the late nineteenth century, time was compartmentalized, with the body occupying the centerpiece of this compartmentalization, because the laborer had to know that, by the time it was three o’clock—or by the time he was fifty or sixty years old—he still had enough energy left to make it till the end of the day.⁴⁸ It was precisely through such self-management, which necessitated working at “my pace” and slacking, that the top-down management of overseers was subverted. The best kind of working day was the “easy” one, one less demanding or that ended early, but the only type of work that occasionally ended early was cement work, and this was determined by the pace of the machinery. If the mixers arrived on time, the day could end as early as three o’clock. If not, it could extend past five. And it was for this reason that, during cement work, the spaces of the floor came to represent the passage of time. Since Seichō constructed apartment blocks, every floor was divided into equal-sized apartment blocks called “slabs,” and each uncemented slab signified a compartment of time. Given that the mixers arrived on time, the guys counted the number of remaining slabs to calculate the remains of the day. If more than half the slabs were finished before noon, things were looking positive, but it was never certain that the mixers would continue to arrive on time.

No doubt, compartmentalizing the working day to manage its duration is not specific to the construction worker. But while the salaryman and convenience store person wait for breaks as much as anyone, biopolitics had been dispensed with in San’ya, and its laborers were discarded without consideration for their reproduction. The day laborer and construction worker thereby render explicit how the violence of absolute surplus extraction exhausts the body, bringing about death-inducing fatigue, and they disclose how the smooth performance of capital accumulation demands the blocking out of possible contingencies and accidents. Yet the risk of accidents is inescapable, and somebody must shoulder the possibility of their outbreak. Moreover, that someone is conveniently disposed of by construction companies at five o’clock every day.

The vanishing figure of the day laborer (hiyatoi rōdōsha) restores what Ernst Bloch once called a noncontemporaneity to a nation that was long misrepresented as all middle-class and that has now become about the “working poor,” as if precarity were new. San’ya’s remaining day laborers show that, in Japan today, not everyone lives in the same present.⁴⁹ The postwar is alive in San’ya, where its residents conjure the injustices that underpinned the stability and social securities of “Japanese society” in the 1980s. If anything, the face-to-face sociality that can still be found in San’ya testifies to the sheer difficulty with which mutual recognition and dignity are secured under labor conditions that predicate an anonymous, premature death, presaging the future for workers for whom the maintenance of sociality itself has become well-nigh impossible. Its day laborers are a vanishing breed, whose passing is joined with a fading hope for recognition from society at large and a wish for luck.

When the mood was right in the dive, Sakura, Takeda-san and Akira would occasionally sing the 1970s hit song by Okabayashi Nobuyasu, “San’ya Blues.” As a resident of San’ya, Okabayashi gives plaintive voice to the plight of day laborers, the strain of manual labor, the pointlessness of life in a bunkhouse, and the palliative effects of liquor. Noting the stigma of San’ya, his song calls to mind that Japan’s infrastructure would not exist without places like San’ya: “Will no one understand?”. Almost mournfully, Okabayashi observes that crying and resenting are to no purpose. For when the working day is over, San’ya’s day laborers become the discarded. That is, just when they had been restored to the generally recognized sociality of working men, that support is torn away. In its place, San’ya has become their “hometown,” and there they wait for the deferred recognition that will “certainly, certainly come in time.”⁵⁰