INTRODUCTION

Although the lives of the men depicted in this book take place in the receding squalor of Tokyo’s old skid row and day-laborer district, San’ya, nearly all these men were born and raised in the countryside and aftermath of World War II, on the devastated peripheries of postwar Japan. Their lives began in abject poverty, with sweeping blue skies and endless crystal-clear shorelines, for many, but not all the characters who appear in this ethnography grew up in the Okinawan islands during the 1950s, under US administration.¹ Their earliest memories include taunting US soldiers, hoping to catch a dime, spearing fish on the way home from school, snatching sugarcane from moving trucks, gliding down the giant slides of empty shipyards, domestic violence, divorce, suicides, thatch-roof homes, torrential storms, a mom doing construction work with a baby strapped to her back, and the final farewell that would take them to the naichi (mainland) of Japan as manual laborers with naught but the most lowly of social standing. Of one Okinawan island, Miyakojima, it was said that departing travelers would cast a string from the balcony of their ship to someone waving from the wharf, and they would let this string slip through their fingers. Thus, whether the lives that follow began in Okinawa or elsewhere on the margins of postwar Japan, the poignant violence and permanence of these originary displacements would haunt them forever after.

Nearly a half century later, these men would be eking out a living from construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. While the following account does not narrate the trajectories that landed them in the squalid bunkhouses of San’ya, nor the discrimination they encountered along the way, nor the decades of isolation that would sever their relations with parents, spouses, and children, it seeks to facilitate an imagination of the manner in which they maintained sociality and dignity against the insurmountable odds of these histories. For this reason, the portrayals hereafter are not concerned simply with the figure of the “day laborer” or the geographic locale of “San’ya” but with the espousal of a vanishing set of mobster virtues and the recurrent references made to this dignifying, virtuous topos, just when the world of San’ya was coming to an end, because the deck had been stacked against the San’ya man from start to finish. Having given his life to construction work and other debased forms of labor, the resident of San’ya knew that his time was nearly up, as his decrepit cityscape was indeed being demolished and replaced by tourist hotels and fancy apartment buildings. Precipitated by impending death, this ethnography consists in the description of a final burst of effervescence.²

It takes place primarily across two years, between 2011 and 2013, both at construction sites scattered across the northern margins of Tokyo and in the old yoseba (gathering place for laborers) of San’ya, said to have housed as many as fifteen thousand male day laborers in the two decades following World War II.³ Since then, the population of San’ya has only diminished, especially so with the recessionary decades after the economic bubble burst in 1991.⁴ In 2011–2013, active laborers in San’ya observed that there were probably fewer than fifty others working in the area; official statistics on the black labor market are difficult to come by, and if anyone had a lay of the land, it was the workers and subcontractors themselves. Additionally, almost all these workers were in their fifties: “There are no young people in this town,” it was said. Indeed, the remainder of San’ya’s populace was considered either too old or physically unfit to labor. Living in the old two-story wooden bunkhouses that still lined San’ya’s back lanes, these men composed an anonymous mass of rapidly declining individuals whose weekly routine consisted in doing their rounds from the hospital, to the welfare office, to the gambling halls in Asakusa, and to the convenience store. Even the many eateries, bars, or rather, dive bars that used to pepper San’ya were becoming a thing of the past. If the day-laborer district was said to have once contained as many as five hundred eateries and dives, in 2011–2013, there were no more than ten, and in 2018, there were five. Once ubiquitous in day-laborer districts, only two of these were hole-in-the-wall establishments that hosted illegal gambling and in which the clientele either stood by the counter or sat about on chairs spread out on the pavement.⁵ Since the 1990s, moreover, not only had San’ya’s bunkhouses been transformed into one-room occupancy, but the area had shrunk to one-fourth its previous size.⁶ The inhabitants of San’ya and their way of life were facing extinction.⁷

As much as the day laborer or the district of San’ya, which now encompasses no more than a one-kilometer-square area, this book is concerned with the fantasy of a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with the honorable mobster (yakuza) values of old and, specifically, with how an otoko (man) conducts himself when backed against the wall. It is as much about “day laborers” (hiyatoi rōdōsha), labor, labor power, and the disposability of labor power at construction sites as it is about the embodied references made by one group of active workers in San’ya to the vanishing yakuza virtues represented by underdog characters like those of Ken Takakura (perhaps the most well-known Japanese actor of yakuza characters in the West), Andō Noboru, or Sugawara Bunta, and it is about the fact that, if one happens to be invited up one of the steep, narrow, dark staircases that lead through unlocked partitions into the musty interior of a third-floor San’ya apartment, one suddenly feels oneself transported onto the set of a 1970s Japanese yakuza movie. The windows are shaded, but streaks of light nevertheless penetrate the room, giving it a twilight hue by lighting dirty, frayed tatami mats, as well as a row of laundry, shirts, and pants hanging from a pole stretched across the ceiling. Across from a sink and gas stove, the bed is aligned against the windows, beside which stands a small table with a dysfunctional alarm clock, a TV that works when you hit it, and a 2.7-liter bottle of cheap shochu. During the summer, it gets as hot as 40º C in this apartment, but there is no air conditioner, and so the fan is running and the windows are always open, outside of which a mouse can be seen scuttering across the electric wires into the bunkhouse on the opposite side of the street. The occupant of this flat works occasionally at construction sites. But his primary source of income is welfare, and on account of his age (sixty-two), the city ward has approved his move from a bunkhouse into an apartment of his own. After decades in San’ya, he still goes by an assumed name, ostensibly because he was running from the law when he first arrived in the area, and he is known not only for his underworld connections but for his hot temper and tendency to pull a knife in confrontations. While he speaks with another man of Okinawan descent, I look out the window, pretending not to hear, because the conversation concerns a longtime mutual acquaintance who is suspected of having started injecting meth (shabu). In joking imitation of the three wise monkeys—“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”—the tenant looks at me and covers his mouth, ears, and eyes, and eventually the conversation moves on to lighter topics like baseball or movies, of which a stack of some twenty DVDs lie next to the TV. As I sift through them, I am told that I can have any one, including the porno, but not Takakura Ken, and sure enough, the stack is composed almost entirely of yakuza movies, be it Battles without Honor and Humanity, New Battles without Honor and Humanity, or less canonical fare featuring Tanba Tetsurō, Kitaōji Kin’ya, or Matsukata Hiroki. While the names of such actors and their films may be unfamiliar outside Japan, in San’ya they constituted the Japanese counterpart to the American Godfather series, the narrative of which everyone I knew had internalized and made their own. Notably absent from their repertoire were references to contemporary actors like Takeshi Kitano, whose characters embody the shamelessness of the mobster underworld. For if anything, theirs was a world grounded in nostalgia for the early decades of the postwar and for the vanishing values of shame, honor, and the upstanding otoko.

What one most often hears upon entering one of San’ya’s eateries or dives, therefore, is the blaring voice of a man singing karaoke against the backdrop of stools spread about three or four tables, a menu pasted onto the walls in the form of greasy handwritten pieces of paper, a cramped kitchen, counter, concrete floors, and retrograde TVs screening either the lyrics or the boat and horse races. Often tipsy if not drunk, the man will not be singing pop songs, however, but enka from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s in which the hardships and virtues of an otoko (man) are given poignant expression, and not surprisingly, the sentimental themes of these songs resonate with the lives of the men who sing them: of leaving the countryside to find work in the city, of long-lost loves and family, of loneliness, of longing for the good times, and of perseverance.⁸ But just as the objective market conditions that necessitated the violence of these displacements stay tacit in the lyrics, so too, the men I came to know in San’ya rarely spoke of the wounds that they themselves had incurred over time. In fact, the masculinity that they espoused was one that frowned upon excessive self-indulgence and that displaced the failures induced by the economy into the excesses of camaraderie, gambling, and the occasional brawl. Much as the solitary gangster flings himself against his adversaries in the final scene of a Japanese mobster movie rather than back down, the San’ya man was more likely to hurl himself against denigrating circumstances in what Georges Bataille has described as a “real charge of the passions,” only to perish.⁹

In this way, an otoko enacted his bravado precisely when he was in the direst of straits, out of luck, cash, or friends to rely on without compromising himself. Before physical deterioration set in, the moment of his appearance, or the moment of seeking to be recognized on his own terms, not as a disposable “day laborer” (hiyatoi rōdōsha) but as an “otoko” (man) in his own right, coincided with the moment of his disappearance, and in 2011–2013, this was also the predicament in which the district of San’ya found itself. For while men in San’ya had lived under conditions of economic and social insecurity decades before the bubble burst in 1991, earning their livelihood from day to day, it would not be until well into the twenty-first century that the district was dying as surely as the demand for its laborers had disappeared. Perched upon the precipice, its remaining workers had time for one more blast.

Calling them toppamono, or “devil-may-care types,” the former construction worker, mob member, and investigative journalist Miyazaki Manabu has described this destructive character of individuals in San’ya in his best-selling autobiography. At once contemptible and respectable, this character is possessed by a nearly reckless disregard for general propriety and for the consequences of transgressing its norms. But while he is a man who resorts to “bulldozing” his way onward—“a man who charges forward without actually knowing where he is going”—it must be underscored that the actions of this individual earn its bearer recognition especially when they are paired with consideration for those with less social prowess, and this entails that he will sacrifice himself for others.¹⁰ Hence, the character that Miyazaki calls the devil-may-care type may not know precisely where he is going, but he is certainly aware of the potential costs necessitated by his actions. It is the risks he exposes himself to that confers respectability on this person, and for this reason, he knows where he is most likely to wind up: in debt, jail, or dead. The construction worker and gambler of whom I write acts on account of the risks he incurs. Rather than bend his convictions, he prefers to die early.

It has been seven years since I lived in San’ya, and Akira, my confidant and primary interlocutor, has been true to his word.¹¹ Back then he was still stout, witty, and convivial over drinks, stood straight on his feet, occasionally going to work at construction sites, taunting the police whenever he got the chance, and ready to engage in physical altercations, even if it resulted in a jail stint. Now, at the age of sixty-two, he totters with a cane. If I had not witnessed his gradual physical and mental deterioration, Akira would be virtually unrecognizable. His cheeks have gone sallow and cavernous, reminiscent of the full-blown puffs he gives to cigarettes, like the gulps of shochu he takes with his medication. His chest has become hollow, his back bent, and his body unhealthily lean. Akira now wears the same urine-stained clothes every day, and before the ward assigned helpers to clean his apartment twice every week, his room was in an unimaginable state. Because he has called the ambulance one too many times, the nurses at Asakusa Hospital have sanctimoniously informed him that he has been placed on their “blacklist,” meaning that the hospital will not accept him in case of an emergency. Scared of collapsing after a bout of drinking, Akira now shuffles his feet while waiting for a taxi, as if a child holding in a wee, and when he arrives home, he has to climb a steep concrete staircase from which he has fallen unconscious. Most devastating of all, his eyes have taken on that vacant aspect which can be encountered in so many of the men who wander aimlessly about San’ya, dosed on a mixture of medication, sedatives, and liquor.

Indeed, Akira is one among many. Tamura, for instance, passed away during my stay in San’ya, at the age of fifty. Unlike others, he was fortunate enough to have been volunteering at the local NPO (nonprofit organization), meaning that staff members sought him out and discovered his body shortly after he stopped showing up. So too, Hayashi died in his room, reputedly from a brain hemorrhage. When I left San’ya, he appeared to be in much better shape than Akira, but then he started drinking day in, day out, until it became a common sight to find him sleeping naked on the streets. Had it not been for the rumor that a neighbor had called the police regarding the odor emanating from his room and that his body had been disposed of by the ward, nobody would have known of his death, at the age of fifty-eight; it could only be presumed that Hayashi’s ashes had been handed to his estranged wife and daughter. Then there is Kentarō, who refused to see the doctor even when his stomach swelled abnormally and his robust arms withered. In fact, Kentarō continued to drink even after he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, resulting in multiple emergency trips to the hospital, until he coughed up so much blood that the ambulance staff told his cousin he might not make it. On the following day, he became so enraged by the condescension from nurses and doctors that he proceeded to pull out his IV needles and walked out while telling his cousin to take him to another hospital. Having had this brush with death, Kentarō no longer drinks but is a skeleton of his former self.

And this is much the same way that San’ya itself appears today. Once a bustling city of day laborers, the district has become a ghost town of shuttered stores and high-rise hotels that cater to tourists oblivious to its historical and social significance. Last year, in 2017, the mama-san (an older female proprietor or manager) of the eatery Iseya died of cancer. This year, the decades-old pachinko parlor Atariya was razed to the ground (figure I.1), and a few months ago, the overhang to San’ya’s shopping arcade, Iroha, was removed along with its anachronistic, colorful entryway placard and its faded banner depicting Tomorrow’s Joe (Ashita no Joe) anime characters—a series from the ’60s and ’70s that relates the rise to boxing fame of the delinquent youth of San’ya, Joe, under the tutorship of his alcohol-prone coach.¹² Remarking that Iroha had been rendered “butt naked”—for many homeless people sleep in the arcade, where illegal gambling and drinking also take place—the removal of San’ya’s signature, shielding overhang caused people I knew to lower their heads and ponder where they would drink once the proprietors of the last two hole-in-the-wall dive bars passed away. Soon, only Tamahime park would be left.

This book, therefore, begins and ends with death. It ends with death because the sociality it depicts, when life had “been good” among one group of workers, had fractured over the course of two years and because many of its characters are dead today. But the book begins with death because it was the imminence of death that instigated the conduct that I describe, conferring necessity upon it by preceding it as its cause. Predominantly the outcome of unrestricted working conditions and excessive alcohol consumption, the San’ya man had seen his predecessors die, and he knew that what awaited him was third-rate treatment by the state, the medical establishment, and a lonesome death. Long before words like neoliberalism, precarity, or abandonment came into vogue, the state had consigned men in San’ya to an economic insecurity in which the extraction of what Marx called “absolute surplus value” could be maximized.¹³ Save during the bubble economy, when wages and spendings were said to have been truly extravagant, conditions had been put into place such that their bodies were worked to their physical limit, while they were compensated just enough to live from day to day, or even less; most certainly, the forms of labor through which they were made to earn their living, of which cleaning radioactive materials is perhaps most scandalous, were not designed to protect the longevity of workers.¹⁴ For men in San’ya composed a reserve army of labor that could be discarded without consideration for their reproduction. As alienated from general society as from their opposite gender, the San’ya man had virtually no prospects of marriage and children, and biopolitics had been dispensed with in the area. During its heyday, the district’s labor force had been successively replenished by victims of the economy, and now that San’ya was disappearing, the insecurity that had conditioned its way of life for over half a century had become generalized to the population at large. As if overnight, Japan Inc. of the bubble era had degenerated into a land of economic insecurity and, for a brief moment after the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, of nuclear gypsies.¹⁵ But this is also precisely why the death of places like San’ya demand attention, because lest the wreckage that history has always already left behind is forgotten, these places disclose the truth of surplus extraction and capitalism and signal the future for a nation in which the inexhaustible violence of capital accumulation has been unleashed on the general populace.¹⁶

In fact, not unlike Japan’s multibillion-dollar sex industry, San’ya was forgotten before the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima and remains evermore forgotten today. While the old day-laborer districts of Japan availed the nuclear industry of laborers decades before the “human-made accident” (jinsai), the lives of these men have not changed in its aftermath. Notwithstanding momentary discussions of “nuclear laborers” and “nuclear gypsies” after the meltdowns, the paltry financial sources that previously provided aid to San’ya have since diverted their funds to Japan’s northeastern coast.¹⁷ Yet when the Fukushima-born antinuclear activist Mutō Ruiko addressed a crowd of sixty thousand half a year after the tsunami, she also raised the plaintive cry, “Please don’t forget Fukushima,” warning against and presaging a future in which Fukushima, too, has become forgotten.¹⁸ Of course, while the mass media may have forgotten about Fukushima, the academic bandwagon continues to attend to its golden goose—“Fukushima”—but neglects to address the general formation of state recognition that has been marshalled to contain or eliminate backtalk in Japan today, the effects of which have long been evident in the old day-laborer districts, where the association of labor with uncleanliness and death triggers shame before general society, compelling individuals to silence. So too, during the course of COVID-19 and the 2020 Olympics, San’ya’s population of ageing men was one of the most vulnerable in Tokyo, and it should be recalled that San’ya was where homeless people were shuttled and confined prior to the celebrated Summer Olympics of 1964.¹⁹ Much as it has been observed that the stigma of radiation exposure is not new to Japan, it must be acknowledged both that such stigmatization drives victims beneath the threshold of public visibility and that the structure of this containment is not limited to second or third generations from Hiroshima or Nagasaki or residents of Fukushima. Be it radiation work, construction work, sex work, or so-called 3K work—kitsui (severe), kitanai (dirty), and kiken (dangerous)—the relationship between state ideology and a whole gamut of marginalized labor forms calls for interrogation.

Given the fear of contagion that surrounds such labor forms and places like San’ya in their affiliation with death, their containment can be identified as the effect of a certain rhetoric akin to that which surrounds and constitutes the negativity of “drugs.” It was in a state of fearful attraction and repulsion at the possibility of breach that outsiders once entered San’ya, and one must, indeed, still be careful of sharing drinks on the street or at dive bars because tuberculosis can be contracted through contact. On the other hand, veterans of San’ya themselves employed a rhetoric of drugs to explain the addictive lifestyle that it offers, remarking that “once you taste” San’ya, you “cannot give it up.” This was also the reason that, when younger men entered the district, some senior members of my group urged them to return to their families or to find employment appropriate for a CV, lest they burn their bridges. For while the initial appeal of San’ya consisted in anonymity, escape, and, for able-bodied young men, an income without strings attached, the passage of time and habitual alcohol consumption made it increasingly unlikely that these individuals would return to a life in general society. An autobiographical account by Tsukada Tsutomu, an outsider to San’ya, is even titled This Is Why I Cannot Quit San’ya.²⁰ Writing in 1997, Edward Fowler observes that San’ya

suggests a kind of moral degeneracy to mainstream Japanese which is anathema to their way of life. An acquaintance became visibly disturbed when I told him that I was frequenting this section of Tokyo. “I wouldn’t waste my time there if I were you,” he told me. “You don’t want to get dragged down in the mire.” In the eyes of my Japanese acquaintance, San’ya was not simply an eyesore, a blot on Tokyo’s image, but a festering wound capable of infecting any passerby foolish enough to come in contact with it.

San’ya, then, might just as well be considered a state of mind as a slum. Or, more properly, “states of mind,” for the meaning of this neighborhood is clearly not the same for the resident (or even the different categories of resident) and nonresident. For the latter, who rarely if ever sets foot in the area and is left simply to imagine it, San’ya is a filthy repository for men whose personal world has gone awry, the result of individual excess or error; for the former (at least for the day-laborer resident), it is a refuge—a symbol of defeat, perhaps, but at the same time a cradle of opportunity which holds the possibility, however slim, of a second chance in a society that is most stingy with second chances.²¹

In 2011–2013, after the collapse of the bubble economy and the recessionary decades that followed, construction work had all but disappeared from the area, and outsiders contemptibly called San’ya a “welfare town.”²² In a transition that Tom Gill has documented in San’ya’s counterpart in Yokohama, Kotobukichō, second chances had become nonexistent, and the “degeneracy” that previously attached to San’ya had become compounded by the notion of taxpayer’s money wasted on the excessive habits of unemployed lowlifes.²³ Never mind that inhabitants of San’ya literally built Tokyo or that their welfare dependence owed largely to the conditions of labor they had been placed in by the municipality and state. But men in San’ya were themselves likely to concur with the diagnosis that they had brought their situation upon themselves and to admit that, to add to the conglomeration of vices already concentrated in the district, illegal “drugs” and especially injected methamphetamines were consumed by its residents behind closed doors (as elsewhere in Japan, I might add). The needle, as Derrida has said, epitomizes the diseased and infectious quality, indeed, the danger and impropriety of drugs.²⁴ In the interest of eliminating these improprieties, it might be observed, as one American nurse of many decades of experience in San’ya did, that what these men need is a twelve-step program to cure their alcoholism, that is, a program to replace an unruly and unacceptable addiction with an ever more sinister addiction rooted in dominance by and obsequiousness to the Western torchbearers of Alcoholics Anonymous.²⁵ Either way, the resident of San’ya is stiffed. More often than not, he therefore mimics compliance before welfare officers and doctors, seeking to secure what he requires to survive, and reverts to excess upon his return to San’ya. However suicidal this excess may be, it garners him recognition within the confines of San’ya. Shielded there from the judgment he incurs in general society, the veteran of San’ya transforms the infectious symptoms of his defeat into a repulsive sign of empowerment.

Condensed as much in the excesses of gambling, drinking, fighting, or the piles of garbage that could be seen in San’ya, the conventional form of such signifiers had long been associated with traditional tattoos (irezumi), the missing pinkie, and the knife scar across the cheek, each of which indicates mobster affiliation. Much as traditional Japanese tattoos have captured the fascination of the West and have admittedly taken on a new meaning for Japan’s younger generations, who may sport such tattoos just because they like them, in San’ya, these signs nevertheless signified avowal of current or past outlaw status and a code of conduct that opposed upstanding society, prompting wariness among outsiders. Of course, more often than not, tattoos or missing pinkies conceal yet another man who castigates himself for having let his loved ones down and with whom one can converse as easily as with a salaryman. But the fact of the matter was that even the men I came to work with (many of whom had spent years in the yakuza) were circumspect in the public bathhouses (sentō) of the nearby red-light district, Yoshiwara, where the yakuza also came to bathe and that a hush descended on eateries when the local mob entered. And it was in its association with this outlaw world that San’ya itself occupied the place of a constitutive negative in the social imaginary, threatening general propriety while holding it in its thrall. In the excesses of working hungover at construction sites, only to carouse, gamble, and, given the chance, womanize, San’ya was located at the margins of the social bond of statist propriety. It was only by virtue of expelling the useless and heterogeneous elements of San’ya that the propriety of “general society” (ippan shakai) could establish itself, constituting San’ya, in turn, as a menacing entity of its own.²⁶ As if they were caught in a symbiotic relationship, the necessity of the mobster underworld was, in fact, explained to me with reference to ineluctable logics of negation and containment, like yin and yang, or “shadow” (kage) in the presence of “light” (akari). But to harness the power of this negativity, the veteran of San’ya could not charge headlong into death: if he was to enable signification, he had to limit his expenditures, and herein resided the difficulty of his predicament.²⁷ Because his conduct was grounded in excess, he always ran the risk of undoing his reputation by drinking or gambling too much, by selling meth too flagrantly, or by inflicting disproportionate injuries on his adversary in a brawl, and for this reason, his enactment of masculinity was prone to collapse into bombast, failure, and compulsive repetition.²⁸ In short, the very impropriety of San’ya necessitated its own code of conduct, its own propriety, and its own improprieties. A genuine otoko adhered to a chosen “path” or “way” (michi), thus “seeing things through” (suji o tōsu), and if he was not only steadfast but considerate and perhaps even selfless in this transgressive enactment of justice, it secured him the place of a dependable personage.

Emerging from within differences that had been expelled from society, the sheer abjection of San’ya precipitated the formation of a sociality that constrained excess through the demand that an otoko demonstrate consideration for his “buddies” (nakama) and, in so doing, conferred dignity in place of failure. Emblematized in the figure of the upstanding otoko, this not only entailed that a respectable person refrained from embroiling others in brawls too many times, from repeatedly borrowing or failing to return money, or from humiliating himself over drinks but that, when the occasion arose, he sacrificed himself for others. In this way, it was precisely where the signifier of equivalent value—the commodity form—had created the most abject circumstances that the desire to be recognized in one’s singular and irreplaceable value materialized, and it is the enactment of this aspiration that I try to intercept and decipher, without committing the violence of replacing it with the artifice of the ethnographer. Across the death-inducing activities of labor, gambling, and staking oneself for one’s buddies, this ethnography seeks to restore the qualitative heterogeneity of the skilled “artisan” (shokunin) by depicting a cast of individuals embracing a masculinity that sought to counteract the violence of the market and their containment in negativity.²⁹ As much as the theory that undergirds the writing that follows, my concern is to give imaginative space to the social world of San’ya as I encountered it and to the specific individuals who composed this world.

As of old in San’ya, this cast was constituted by a troupe of incorrigible and rambunctious characters. For not only did men in San’ya hail from the entirety of Japan, if not occasionally from Korea, China, or the Philippines, but many of the differences that were otherwise self-consciously set aside in adherence to a standard Japanese identity could be met in the open, whether that be a regional accent, a queer identity, or an ethnic affiliation. Disabilities were an all-too-common sight, be it a speech impediment; harelip; missing finger, limb, or eye; a gammy limb; a limp; scars from workplace accidents or physical altercations; or a host of less identifiable mental disabilities. On any regular night, the small crowd that gathers at an outdoor dive may include a former yakuza member; someone just released from jail, be it for drugs or murder; or an Okinawan worker for whom such stories are old hat and who prefers to banter with the regular clientele of middle-aged women, one of whom sleeps on the streets and another of whom has a reputation for shoplifting. And in the course of the evening, a stream of others passes by the dive, greeting customers in passing, sitting down to gossip, talk about work, or exchange goods, and the nameless group of regulars, whose speech is often slurred or unintelligible on account of alcohol and medication, begin to take on individual features. At some point, the homeless man who lives in a tent by the Sumida River may also stop by on his way back from the supermarket, or a member of the local mob may bicycle by to receive an envelope from the owner. Unlike the crowd that hangs out drinking by the old labor union, the individuals who frequent this hole-in-the-wall have no overt political affiliations. Most likely, everyone here spurns leftist ideology in favor of an antediluvian right-wing ideology that involves emperor worship and self-sacrifice. In fact, it was at this hole-in-the-wall dive bar that I met the group of men from Okinawa (and mainland Japan) with whom I came to work at construction sites. In their first account, the sacrifice of Okinawa during World War II and its subsequent handover to the American forces was transformed into a narrative in which the Okinawan islander claimed Japanese identity by having renounced more than anyone else. Yet, on occasion, these men did converse among themselves in their native tongue—which varied from island to island—and they recognized brethren islanders from their accents.³⁰ In what follows, I refer to this conglomeration of men from Okinawa and beyond alternately as a social entity in the abstract, as “the group,” or as “the guys,” to signify the intimacy and loose affiliation among a slew of individuals in whose orbit I slowly came to be included. Finally, as this cast of characters approach their curtain call, I refer to them once more as “the troupe.”

Rather than the anti-state sentiment that might have been expected among individuals who had been systematically exploited by the state, what the men I write of shared was the precondition for secondary elaborations of sociality to take place, namely, the fact of their failure in the eyes of their families and general society. Nearly every one of the guys had severed their family relations when they first arrived in San’ya, which, if anything, marked the end point of a trajectory of failed masculinity. They were the long-lost sons, husbands, and fathers who had trouble supporting even themselves and who were no longer expected to provide for others. If it happened once every few years that a daughter or son called asking for money, they might have been able to spare ¥10,000 ($100), but that was it, and with the passage of time, they had become increasingly isolated within the stigma of San’ya. After years of making acquaintances and manipulating the system to their advantage (getting welfare while working secretly), it had become well-nigh impossible for these men to leave behind the familiarity of San’ya for the alienation and hazards of striking out in society at large, and this entailed accepting what San’ya had to offer: giving up on the prospects of finding a spouse or reestablishing family relations. Circumscribed by the shame of retrograde working conditions, welfare status, and the fact of residing in a bunkhouse, it was thus from within the conditions of their defeat that the group sought to maintain “dignity” (iji).

As much as theory, the chapters of this book consist in an exposition of these conditions and of the people who endured them.³¹ Readers should be aware that, in the interest of legibility, I have embedded my theoretical framework in the narrative and that explicit elaborations of theory and their import for cultural anthropology, critical theory, and East Asian studies can be found in the endnotes. Alas, industry standards have disallowed footnotes. Readers interested in theory will therefore find the rest of this introduction helpful, as it provides a road map to the chapters that follow. But readers who desire a straightforward narrative are encouraged to move on to chapter 1. While the theory that underpins this book deals with questions of labor, exchange, and value; honor and shame; temporality and desire; gender and personhood; or state recognition and violence, the book is equally dedicated to enabling an ethnographic imagination of social life as it was lived by a specific handful of men in San’ya—however impossible it may be to put oneself in the subject position of someone else.

Here, my understanding of subjectivity and the “subject” draws largely on psychoanalytic theory and its postulate that sociality derives its normative force from the organization of lack or insufficiency. If a constitutive split did not separate us from our identification within a social and symbolic order, there would be neither desire nor an aspiration to overcome our insufficiencies by meeting the expectations of the sociality that constitutes our world. For men in San’ya, this would originally have entailed becoming self-sufficient caretakers of their families and children, but not only had they fallen short of this expectation. They had failed miserably, beyond the point of return, and herein lies the crux of my argument, because once your place within sociality has assumed the irrevocable and enduring character of utter abjection, you cannot but reference other social forms. It is either that or becoming stuck endlessly in shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. Having been denied even the organization of insufficiency that constituted you as a social being, you are, in fact, predisposed to being hailed into another sociality, as Akira had been when he was released from years in jail on a manslaughter conviction and was approached by the yakuza. This was also partly why San’ya had been so popular among NPOs, leftist labor unions, and religious organizations and also partly how I forged my relationship with the guys.

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that the countersociality of San’ya had well and truly been contained and that this containment was the effect of a normative, statist gaze that forced undesirable elements beneath the threshold of public visibility. There was no escaping the shame of failed masculinity, save in San’ya, where the abandonment of families could be iterated as a successful assertion of masculinity. For this reason, the analytical categories I privilege are not those of a sovereign suspension of the law, abandonment to the vagaries of the market, or bare life but, rather, state recognition, commodification and absolute surplus extraction, and language. For language and desire persist in places that appear to have been reduced to bare life.³² And there can be different subject positions or secondary organizations of lack within language, particularly so in places that have been expelled from general society.³³ Moreover, the violence that circulated in San’ya owed its source to the state, because much as San’ya was described as a “lawless zone” (muhō chitai), its circumscription was grounded in a dialectic of recognition in which residents and especially welfare recipients had no choice but to be recognized in accordance with municipal demands—a recognition that entailed a negation of every other aspect of his person.³⁴ As I hope to unpack, this recognition was a complicated thing, for while many men were undoubtedly ashamed and compliant on first seeking welfare or medical services, what they had to master over time was the mimicry of shameful need and, in so doing, to replace shame with shamelessness. In this way, they became witness to a doubling of their social personas so that their reputations within San’ya were refracted, in turn, as “acts” or “performances” (engi) that could nevertheless be imposed on their interlocutors for a moment of mutual recognition to arise.

Enacting outlaw codes of masculinity in face of economic and social depredation is by no means a Japanese phenomenon. Among others, Jason Pine, Elliot Liebow, and Philippe Bourgois have shown how the failure by stigmatized men to retain a dignified job may give rise to forms of sociality that confer “respect” where other means of recognition have been denied.³⁵ This book is also preceded by a tradition of urban ethnographies of Tokyo, especially of its shitamachi (low-city) district, of which San’ya forms a part, and it is preceded by academic work focusing on labor and gender beyond mainstream Japanese society.³⁶ But its theoretical scaffolding is poststructural and psychoanalytic, expanding on writings that have explored the nexus between fetishism, failure, repetition, and historical conditions that induce violence.³⁷ As such, the theory and subject matter of this book resonate with anthropological work on precarity and so-called neoliberal conditions of global labor.³⁸ The point of departure of this book, however, is not the insecurities of everyday life but the certainty of an early death. In the imminence of premature death, the book focuses on leftovers from Japan’s “miraculous” economic recovery from World War II—day laborers—and it asks how one group of postwar day laborers sought to secure sociality and dignity under statist conditions that had written them out of history and consigned them to oblivion.³⁹ If anything, the book shows how the most precarious of acts—gambling, in many iterations—can create a sociality that divests state recognition of its power.⁴⁰ In his insatiable desire to expose himself to shock, harness experience, and create social values that transcended individual life, the day laborer I write of therefore emerges as a poet of modernity.⁴¹ Insofar as the trope of gambling pervaded his everyday life, he created accountability in insecurity, dignity in abjection, and through the mutual recognition of his peers: the singular value of his person in a world that dictated his obsolescence.⁴²

Much as this book focuses on a group of marginalized men in Japan, however, their values take part of a global configuration of patriarchy in late modern capitalism. In fact, misogyny was an intrinsic part of the drinking scene in San’ya, where Chinese waitresses could occasionally be fondled and where sexism converged with racism. I deal with this scene explicitly in chapter 4, in terms of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique that imperialist, patriarchal discourse legitimates itself by claiming to save racially different women from their male counterparts.⁴³ Moreover, while there was a modicum of hospitality toward sexual differences among the men that I worked with, the book concludes with an outburst of transphobic violence that was triggered by the appearance of a transgender person. As Susan Stryker has pointed out, the ambiguity of gender points up the constructed character of sexual difference, not to mention of sex itself, and in so doing, it threatens to unleash the normative violence of the social order.⁴⁴ Sexual difference was, indeed, constitutive of the masculinity that I describe, be it in bars with Chinese waitresses or at construction sites, but it is the performative character of this masculinity that this ethnography seeks to bring forth, both in its honorable, self-sacrificial aspects and in the violence that would maintain the boundaries of its identity.⁴⁵ It should be noted, however, that one of the most influential characters in this book was a woman. For as Miyazaki Manabu writes: “Beneath its macho exterior there is a matriarchal aspect to the yakuza world and maternal principles exert a powerful influence.”⁴⁶ As the figure of authority in San’ya par excellence, her male partner, in turn, was impeccably faithful to her, and he himself might be witnessed bowing his head for and introducing a Chinese man to an employer, so as to secure them work. Indeed, “the guys” may have been close cousins to “the lads” of England, much as the gun-slinging cowboy might be identified as a counterpart to the knife-wielding otoko, but the possibilities raised by their ethos for hospitality should not be dismissed. Already expelled from upstanding society, this book attempts to give imaginative space to this ethos. Drawn from the universe of Japanese historical drama (jidaigeki), theater for the masses (taishū engeki), yakuza movies, karaoke (specifically, enka), and an abiding fantasy of the honorable outlaw mobster who sets aside capitalist self-interest, the specificity of San’ya resided in the trope of the otoko as a man who, by adhering to his sensibility of shame (haji), protected the weak and sacrificed himself for others.⁴⁷

Nonetheless, in a social world that did, in fact, draw upon a genealogy of stereotyped forms of outlaw honor, it is difficult to escape the exoticizing and ghettoizing closure of Japanology and Japan, and it is for this reason that I turn to an image (figure I.2) that may appear to have everything to do with the United States and nothing to do with Japan but that, in my reading, has everything to do with San’ya. This untitled photograph by David Wojnarowicz depicts buffalo, suspended in a moment before their death, careening as they tumble over a cliff. The photo captures as if in slow motion the nearly vertical progression of the buffalo, as the head of the first has entered the upper-left corner, the second lifts its legs above the precipice, the third charges down the cliff, head lowered and legs assembled beneath it for one last burst of energy, and the fourth floats pathetically in midair, upside down, freefalling toward death. If not also the plight of society at large and our contemporary universe, this black-and-white image metaphorizes the self-destructive conduct of individuals in the absence of proper medical care and social recognition, and in so doing, it acts as an indictment of the state and as a portrayal of the defiance that is the subject of this book.⁴⁸