INTRODUCTION

1. 1. Japan officially handed Okinawa over to US control under the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco, only to be returned in 1972. The islands of Okinawa, however, continue to be overrun by US military bases (a concession that the Japanese government granted the United States as a condition of Okinawa’s reversion, thereby betraying the people of Okinawa). For a critical take on this history and its implications for the present, see Nelson, Dancing with the Dead. While it was no coincidence that I encountered men from Okinawa in San’ya, it should be emphasized that theirs was by no means the predominant demographic in San’ya. I return briefly to the history of Okinawa as a site of capitalist, imperialist, and military expropriation in the epilogue.

2. 2. It should be stated off the bat that the aim of this introduction and book is not to provide a historical or sociological account of San’ya but, rather, to give life to a contingent moment as it was lived by a number of individual men in the area. For English readers seeking a standard introduction to San’ya as a geographical location with specific landmarks, statistics, and a history that dates back before World War II, see Fowler, San’ya Blues; de Bary, “Sanya”; Tessei, “Street Labour Markets”; or Gill, “Sanya Street Life.” For up-to-date Japanese sources on the area, see the annual “Jigyō Annai” (Summary of Activities) published by San’ya’s Jōhoku Welfare Center or the annual report of the Japan Association for the Study of Yoseba (Nihon Yoseba Gakkai), though the latter ceased its publications in 2013. Publications on San’ya have notably diminished because the district has been in decline since Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1991 and Fowler’s “Suggested Readings” in San’ya Blues remains the most comprehensive list of writings on San’ya.

3. 3. According to San’ya’s Jōhoku Welfare Center’s annual “Summary of Activities” (Jigyō Annai), San’ya’s population of day laborers experienced its peak in 1963, when 15,000 men resided in its bunkhouses. By 1995, four years after Japan’s economic bubble burst, there were only 6,123 men living in San’ya’s bunkhouses, and in 2012, there were 4,765. While most men in San’ya’s bunkhouses were actively working as day laborers in 1963, that is, during Japan’s two decades of high economic growth (mid-1950s–mid-1970s), and thereafter, during Japan’s bubble economy (which burst in 1991), by 2012, 87.1 percent of the men living in San’ya’s bunkhouses were considered to be on welfare, and their average age was estimated at 64.7. I should add that a considerable number of the men living in San’ya’s bunkhouses in 2012 were not and had not been day laborers and that the 4,765 men living in San’ya’s bunkhouses in 2012 only composed a fraction of the 37,000 residents living in the area, which would include shop owners, white-collar workers, and any number of individuals and families who were not associated with day laborers. Jōhoku Welfare Center, “Jigyō Annai: Heisei 28.”

4. 4. Until 1991, when Japan’s economic bubble burst, San’ya’s population was regularly replenished through dislocations caused by the pursuit of economic growth. After 1945, the drive to industrialize caused farmers to lose their livelihoods and their breadwinners to go to San’ya. In the 1950s, the switch from domestic coal to foreign oil forced miners to go to San’ya. By the 1960s, when Japan’s “miraculous” recovery from World War II was touted as a model for the world, men in San’ya had already paid the price of economic restructuring, and they would go on to build the infrastructure of Japan’s crowning postwar achievement—the 1964 Olympics—not to mention highways, subways, and Tokyo itself. So too, men moved to San’ya after the 1973 Oil Shock, which tanked Japan’s shipbuilding industry, and again, in the 1980s, after metal industries moved production abroad. Acting as both an absorbing buffer against economic hardships and dispensable labor force, the yoseba was therefore instrumental to Japan’s postwar period of high growth (1950s–1970s). During the 1980s, it underpinned the stability of middle-class “Japanese society,” legendary today for its social securities and life-time employment system. I draw here on Fowler, San’ya Blues.

5. 5. It is difficult to translate the sheer range of eating and drinking establishments that the men in San’ya frequented, and I therefore take some liberty in calling the more sordid establishments dive bars, or quite simply, dives, because these were truly seedy establishments where cheap drinks could be had, in addition to an array of (often insalubrious) dishes. Sometimes, there was a mouse inhabiting these dives (he or she had acquired a nickname), and regulars virtually lived in them during the day, where it was common to find them passed out or singing karaoke for hours on end. A sign on the outside of such dives might simply have categorized them as a “drinking and eating places” (nomikuidokoro), for they did not rise to the standards of what I translate as an “eatery” (izakaya), where food was served at a higher quality and the drinks were more expensive. While it was generally the case that the men I came to know would spend at least an hour or two at establishments they frequented, true dives were venues where they could literally spend the entirety of their day, drinking, eating, and singing karaoke.

6. 6. San’ya is located north of the old entertainment district of Asakusa and is split between Tokyo’s Taitō and Arakawa Wards, where it occupies parts of Kiyokawa, Nihonzutsumi, Hashiba, Higashi Asakusa, and Minami-Senjū. At least, that is how San’ya’s Jōhoku Welfare Center continues to depict San’ya on its map of the district. But this is more of a historical representation of how large San’ya used to be, and while one may still get a whiff of the old San’ya while walking down a backstreet of Hashiba in Taitō Ward or Minami-Senjū in Arakawa Ward, it would be more accurate to say that the only place where the old townscape of San’ya can still be encountered is south of Meiji Street, in Kiyokawa and Nihonzutsumi, which is to say that my estimate of a one-kilometer-square area is generous.

7. 7. The masculinity I describe hails from an older, vanishing generation that remains stigmatized in contemporary Japan, and its demographic must be distinguished from the demise of Japan’s middle-class society and its masculinity. Patrick Galbraith and David H. Slater make passing reference to such stigmatized “margins,” thrust beneath the threshold of public visibility: “Our analysis follows Tom Gill’s work on day laborers and Roberson’s analysis of blue-collar factory workers, both of which point out the important link between labor and masculinity, and how men’s claims to legitimate alternatives are compromised when practiced outside of the corporate context. But our argument that links social class to masculinity … is less about compromise at the margins (those who almost never emerge into the popular media) than it is about the collapse of middle-class masculinity.” Galbraith and Slater, “Re-Narrating Social Class.” On the collapse of Japan’s once-lauded middle class, see Allison, Precarious Japan.

8. 8. Redolent with the sounds of traditional Japanese instrumentation, enka songs or ballads most frequently adopt a sentimental, nostalgic, or wistful theme and tone. Their place in Japanese society has often been compared to that of American country music. Notably, the careers of many famous enka singers (including those, for instance, of Tsuruta Kōji and Misora Hibari) were helped along by the yakuza. For an account of the performative aspect of enka in terms of gender and nationalism, see Yano, “Burning of Men.”

9. 9. Bataille, “Notion of Expenditure,” 119.

10. 10. See Miyazaki, Toppamono, 207, 216–18. When I invoke the word sacrifice, I do so insofar as sacrifice would create sociality, social recognition, and longevity for a group of individuals consigned to San’ya. Of sacrifice, Hubert and Mauss write: “This procedure consists in establishing a means of communication between the sacred and the profane worlds through the mediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed. Now contrary to what Smith believed, the victim does not necessarily come to the sacrifice with a religious nature already perfected and clearly defined: it is the sacrifice that confers this upon it. Sacrifice can therefore impart to the victim most varied powers, either by different rites or during the same rite.” Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 97.

11. 11. For the reader’s convenience, I have included a glossary of key characters.

12. 12. It is no coincidence that the classic, preeminent boxing character of Japanese anime hails from San’ya. As Valerie Walkerdine writes of the Rocky movies: “The fantasy of the fighter is the fantasy of a working-class male omnipotence over the forces of humiliating oppression which mutilate and break the body in manual labor.” Walkerdine, “Video Replay,” 173.

13. 13. Marx, Capital, 643–54.

14. 14. As Gill observes, “death is a subject of consuming significance to Japanese writers who study the yoseba. The short life expectancy mentioned above, and the fact that dead bodies are sometimes found in the street in the yoseba, are unavoidable facts of life: hence such books as Aoki Hideo’s Yoseba Rōdōsha no Sei to Shi (The Life and Death of the Yoseba Worker), an academic work that sees the early death of day laborers as the ultimate form of capitalist exploitation, and Funamoto Shuji’s collection of militant tracts, Damatte Notarejinu-na (Do Not Be Silent and Die in the Gutter), a call for day laborers to abandon quietism and take action against capitalist exploiters.” Gill, “Wage Hunting,” 127.

15. 15. As if poverty and nuclear contamination were new to Japan, however, the discourse of insecurity in millennial and post-Fukushima Japan sidelines the fact that their object of nostalgia—the famous, secure life of the 1980s—was itself grounded in social unevenness, the victims of which are dead or dying untimely deaths. Likewise, nuclear labor has been around in Japan since the 1970s, when the state started its harebrained project of constructing fifty-four nuclear power plants on top of an earthquake fault line. Notwithstanding the overdue attention that the topic of nuclear labor received after Fukushima, this also means that nuclear labor has been around in Japan for a half century, and nuclear workers have long constituted part of the population of old day-laborer districts, where their profession crosses over into other dangerous forms of labor, as neglected as their own had been before Fukushima. In chapter 2, I return momentarily to the question of nuclear labor in San’ya and to its association with the underworld of the yakuza.

16. 16. For an account of Japan’s economic transformation into a land of neoliberal insecurity and of the effects that Japan’s three decades of recession have had on the general population and, more specifically, on the youth, see, for instance, Amamiya, Ikisasero!, Arai, “Killing Kids,” Allison, Precarious Japan, Genda, Nagging Sense, Iwata, Gendai no Hinkon, and Yuasa, Hanhinkon.

17. 17. Nuclear laborers have been called “nuclear gypsies” (genpatsu jipusī) on account of their gypsy-like migration from nuclear plant to plant, in response to the demand for laborers to clean different plants as they shut down under rotating schedules every year. See Horie Kunio’s 1979 classic, Genpatsu Jipusī (Nuclear Gypsy), as well as Horie and Mizuki Shigeru’s 1979 Fukushima Genpatsu no Yami (The Darkness of Fukushima Nuclear Plant). For more on nuclear power and labor in Japan, see Hirose Takashi’s books, especially Genshiro Jigen Bakudan (Nuclear Reactor Time Bomb), in which he predicts the nuclear catastrophe specifically at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Not surprisingly, Takashi is no longer dismissed as a writer with science fictional aspirations.

18. 18. See Mutō, From Fukushima to You.

19. 19. On the 1964 Olympics, see Edward Fowler’s history of San’ya in San’ya Blues, 9–52. At the end of the day, there was never any outbreak of COVID-19 in San’ya, although hospitals that service its residents emerged as hot spots in 2020, and individuals were diagnosed positive. As I describe in chapter 1, it is impossible to practice social distancing in the bunkhouses (doya) of San’ya, and during COVID, many of the characters in this book went about their lives, singing karaoke and gambling, as if nothing had changed. Finally, it should be said that unlike the years leading up to the 1964 Olympics, San’ya did not receive an influx of work prior to the 2020 Olympics. Its residents have long been considered too old and unfit for quality work.

20. 20. Tsukuda, Dakara San’ya ga Yamerarenē.

21. 21. Fowler, San’ya Blues, 14.

22. 22. For an account of this transformation of day-laborer districts into “welfare towns,” see Stevens, Margins of Japanese Society.

23. 23. Gill concludes his 2001 book on day laborers in the Kotobukichō district of Yokohama as follows: “What we are seeing in Japan is a transformation in the pattern of casual labor: from heavy industry to the service sector, from the middle aged and elderly to the young, from men to women. A new vocabulary accompanies this transition: in place of the hiyatoi rōdōsha, or the more derogatory ankō or pūta-rō, we have the eminently respectable rinji saiyōsha (temporary employee), the pleasantly exotic pāto (a contraction of “part-timer”), or even the appealingly libertarian-sounding furiitaa (a contraction of “free arbeiter”; see p. 193). Recruitment is handled by large, legal companies which nevertheless take just as large a cut of the casual labor wage as the tehaishi standing on the street corner (cf p. 60). The people who do these jobs do not gather anywhere: they get their employment through the rapidly proliferating employment magazines, from the pages of sports newspapers, and even in some cases through the Internet.” Gill, Men of Uncertainty, 198.

24. 24. Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs.”

25. 25. Although Alcoholics Anonymous entered Japan in 1976 and has since produced local offshoots, like DARC (Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Center) or Danshukai (Alcohol Abstinence Society), the discourse of alcohol addiction was largely absent within San’ya itself. I myself only encountered it from physicians, psychologists, and Western college students who had come to volunteer in the district. For more on the discourse of alcoholism in Japan and its gendered configurations, see Borovoy, Too-Good Wife.

26. 26. In this respect, Derrida writes: “It is the making proper of the proper itself (propriation du propre même), in as much as the proper is opposed to the heterogeneity of the im-proper, and to every mode of foreignness or alienation that might be recognized in someone’s resorting to drugs.” Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs,” 241. For a similar elaboration of purity in relation to the contaminating effects of that which is considered dangerous, see Douglas, Purity and Danger.

27. 27. See Derrida, “Restricted to General Economy,” and chap. 3.

28. 28. I draw here on poststructuralist texts that explore how a constitutive excess attends signification as its condition of possibility and, therefore, of impossibility, triggering repetition. See Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” and Siegel, Naming the Witch. Siegel in particular focuses on historical conditions that trigger violence and repetition.

29. 29. In San’ya, the discourse of the skilled construction worker echoed a discourse that Dorinne Kondo’s has described as that of traditional artisans in the shitamachi (low-city) district of Tokyo. As in its association with a discourse of “shame” (haji), here the masculinity of day laborers in San’ya occupies the place of a postwar legacy rapidly heading for extinction. Kondo unpacks the mythology of the Japanese “artisan” (shokunin) in Crafting Selves. Offering some history, Kondo writes: “The industrialization of the Meiji period saw segments of the artisanal population becoming shokkō, factory operatives, rather than artisans. The status of these operatives slipped well below that of the merchant, and factory workers generally were considered part of lower-class society (cf. e.g., Gordon 1985; T. C. Smith 1988). These parameters have changed in the postwar period; for the people I knew, the more salient divisions … are between shokunin, artisan, and shain, company employee.… In the ward of Tokyo where my informants lived, the term shokunin was used for virtually anyone who worked with his hands, even for people who seemed to be doing assembly-line work. Lathe operators, people who operated metal presses, painters of metal parts, makers of industrial-strength soap, as well as the makers of more obviously ‘traditional’ handicrafts, all considered themselves shokunin. And although middle-class executives are accorded a certain dominant social prestige, shokunin had their own special place as the bearers of a unique Japanese ‘tradition.’ ” Kondo, Crafting Selves, 234–35.

30. 30. Lest the colonial legacies of Okinawa be forgotten, I cite from Steve Rabson: “Interviewed in July 1999, a man who had migrated to Osaka in the mid-1960s said he had trouble at first because he was ashamed of his Okinawan accent. He explained that many newcomers from Okinawa were reluctant to express themselves because they remembered how, at school in Okinawa, they were made to wear wooden ‘dialect tags’ as a punishment if they happened to utter a word in an Okinawan dialect.” Rabson, Okinawan Diaspora, 190.

31. 31. On this note, I make little reference to Precarious Japan or Gill’s writings on gambling in Kotobukichō. My reason is simple: neither Allison’s nor Gill’s work is grounded in a thorough engagement with the people they write about. As Gill himself professes, he never accompanied day laborers to their workplace. As for Anne Allison, Precarious Japan accords all due respect to contemporary theorizations of precarity and representatives of nonprofits in Japan, but there is no engagement with the so-called precariat beyond interviews (conducted at nonprofits—red flag) and interludes in which friends comment on the state of Japanese society. Suzuki Takayuki deserves honorable mention as someone who lived the life he represents, as a documentary producer. My point here is not about theory. Get to know the people you write about, and get to know them beyond formalized contexts between social scientist and subject. Both Allison and Gill have deep pockets, as tenured professors. So why no real effort? The answer, perhaps, resides in the violence that social scientists commit in order to abstract, theorize, and establish their reputation. Jacques Rancière has offered a scathing critique of such violence as a strategy of writing, with specific reference to Marx’s representation of the so-called “lumpenproletariat.” Lump it all together—Precarious Japan—imbue your writing with pathos, enclose your subjects in negativity, and repeat what “can be counted among the master logics of modernity: exclusion by homage.” Rancière, Philosopher and His Poor, xxvi.

32. 32. João Biehl puts it nicely: “A human form of life that is no longer worth living is not just bare life—language and desire continue.” Biehl, Vita, 318.

33. 33. Of the form of language and its relation to secondary elaborations of subjectivity, Lacan observes: “In the sense that it will also be the rootstock of secondary identifications … this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.” Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 76. For a psychoanalytic elaboration of the abjection I refer to, see Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Please note that all italicized quotations in this book are italics in the original.

34. 34. Insofar as the state exercised the power of death over its subjects, I draw here on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

35. 35. See Pine, Art of Making Do; Bourgois, In Search of Respect; and Liebow, Tally’s Corner.

36. 36. Starting with Ron P. Dore’s classic, City Life in Japan, see Bestor, Neighborhood Tokyo; and Seidensticker, Low City, High City. On gender and labor, see Kondo, Crafting Selves; Allison, Nightwork; or Roberson and Suzuki, Men and Masculinities. As these texts elucidate, one should be aware of the internal differences that compose masculinities in Japan today. Yet one should also note that, while San’ya has been thrust beneath the threshold of public visibility, the face-to-face sociality found in San’ya is one that has grown increasingly scarce in society at large. Galbraith and Slater write: “Nakane Chie and Ezra Vogel both show ways in which Japan, Inc. was productive of a very particular masculinity structured around economic and social connections that required personal sacrifice to corporate goals and co-workers, and willingness to share collective responsibility. In today’s media … we encounter these narratives once again, but mostly in their absence: they represent a closeness and connection that especially younger men cannot achieve, and an absence of anything to sacrifice to or for.” Galbraith and Slater, “Re-Narrating Social Class.”

37. 37. See, for instance, Siegel, Naming the Witch; or Morris, Returns of Fetishism.

38. 38. I am thinking here of Kathleen M. Millar, who writes of “how life becomes livable through forms of labor commonly defined in terms of redundancy, abandonment, or exhaust” in Reclaiming the Discarded; Clara Han, who considers questions of everyday care and sociality under neoliberalism in Life in Debt; or Andrea Muehlebach, who addresses neoliberal markets, affect, and ethics in The Moral Neoliberal.

39. 39. Spanning from 1945 to 1991, Japan’s recovery from World War II and its period of economic high growth have been referred to as the “Japanese economic miracle.”

40. 40. By addressing the creative aspects of gambling, I move beyond Malaby’s observation that gambling can crystallize “chanceful life into a seemingly more apprehensible form.” Malaby, Gambling Life, 147. What this book attempts to shows is how gambling—as metaphor and trope—can be mobilized to transform a merely “chanceful life,” grounding personhood in experience, time, and mutual recognition. Notably, Clifford Geertz’s famous essay on gambling focuses precisely on the Balinese cockfight in terms of social status. Geertz, “Deep Play.”

41. 41. See Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” and chap. 3.

42. 42. Grounded in my exposition of manual labor at the construction site, I present an alternative here to theorizations of gambling that have considered its deadening effects, particularly in relation to labor in the service industry, time, and experience. See chap. 3 and Schüll, Addiction by Design.

43. 43. See chap. 4 and Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

44. 44. See the epilogue and Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.”

45. 45. Here, I follow the postulate of performance theory that, rather than constituting a preestablished essence or identity, the intelligibility of gender is discursively and performatively created, determining the place of sex, in turn. See Butler, Gender Trouble; and, for the discursive constitution of sex as an identifiable difference, Foucault, Herculine Barbin. On the influence of performance theory within anthropology, see Morris, “All Made Up.”

46. 46. Miyazaki, Toppamono, 21.

47. 47. The mythology that was referenced by the conduct of men in San’ya was a specific one, and insofar as it intersected with representations of the yakuza, this mythology was set in opposition to the conduct of actual contemporary yakuza. That is, real yakuza had become driven by self-interest and had lost touch with the virtues embodied by itinerant, honorable outlaw mobsters. For English sources on this mythology, see Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, “The Honorable Outlaws”; and Buruma, Behind the Mask. For an account of the theatricalization of these and similar virtues in theater for the masses (taishū engeki), see Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, “Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams.”

48. 48. As a response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, this “untitled” work by Wojnarowicz is a photograph of a diorama in Washington, DC, depicting the result of a Native American hunting technique. John Sevigny writes as follows of this image: “The buffalo is an animal so sacred to Americana that it once graced the tails side of the nickel, and it was going off a Southwestern, Spaghetti Western cliff like a lemming, presumably driven on by hunters who nearly pushed the animal to extinction. The photograph goes far beyond representing the death of the American dream. In a simple image, it captures the forced, borderline-psycho disillusionment felt by anyone left of center during an age in which Right was right and homosexual men died because God himself had descended from the heavens to exact His revenge. This is not Death of a Salesman. This is the photographic equivalent of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an indictment of a sick nation reeling in riches and hubris even as it feasted on the weakest, cast the mentally ill out into the streets, and blamed death on the dying.” Sevigny, “Twenty Years Later.” I thank the David Wojnarowicz Estate and PPOW, New York, for permission to reproduce this image.

49. 49. Jean-François Lyotard explicates the future anterior in The Postmodern Condition, 81.

50. 50. On this seminal distinction between labor and play, see Caillois, Man, Play and Games. On gambling and time as a “narcotic,” see Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital.”

51. 51. See Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”; and Stone, “Empire Strikes Back.”

52. 52. For more on homeless people in Japan, particularly regarding the implementation of Japanese state policies in turn-of-the-century Japan, see Gill, “Whose Problem?,” 192–210. See also Tokyo City Bureau, “Hōmuresu Taisaku.”

53. 53. Benjamin, “Destructive Character,” 541.

1. SETTING OUT “YAMA”

1. 1. The name Yama derives from an alternative reading of the ideograms that compose San’ya. The ideogram for San (mountain) can be read as “Ya,” while the ideogram for ya (valley) can be read as “ma,” to create “Yama.” As “Yama,” San’ya takes on a local connotation: a city of mountains and valleys, or of highs and lows.

2. 2. Oyama Shiro writes: “Looking back, I can say that the first six-year period, during the bubble era, was a golden age for us day laborers.… In those days, it simply wasn’t possible to step out of my doya in the morning with the intention of finding work and not come away with a job. Indeed, I’d be hailed by several agents who recruited workers off the street on my way to the main drag around Namidabashi intersection, where most of the recruiting takes place.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 17.

3. 3. Writing in 1996, Fowler says: “Because it is not being replenished, the pool of men making a living today as day laborers in San’ya has dwindled considerably and the population is growing old. Whereas half or more were still in their thirties or younger in the 1960s, better than half were over fifty in 1990. More than two-fifths of the day-laborer population have lived in San’ya for at least ten years, and a substantial number have made it their home for decades. Those who migrated from the farms to San’ya in the mid-century are sticking it out in the yoseba rather than returning to the provinces. The increase in average age has brought with it an increase in job-related injuries, illness, and the death rate. Yet signs that San’ya has passed its prime notwithstanding, no one is predicting that the yoseba will disappear completely.” Fowler, San’ya Blues, 42.

4. 4. Except for institutions like the Palace Hotel, which could house hundreds of laborers, the doya is usually two stories tall, with a single corridor running along each floor. No larger than 1.5 by 2.5 meters, single rooms flank each side of the corridor, separated by thin wooden walls. Each is equipped with a mini-TV and air-conditioner. Toilets and a common bathing area are shared among residents, who must observe designated bathing hours. Depending on the doya, there may also be a gas stove available, but residents must pay for every minute of usage. Electrical sockets are most often blocked, as residents are not allowed to use electrical appliances. So too, many old doya have a curfew. The daily price for a room ranges from ¥1,800 to ¥3,000 ($18–$30), the monthly total of which often exceeds rent for a reasonable apartment. However, the residents on welfare must have permission from their ward to relocate to an apartment, and those who work must have guarantors and be ready to deposit approximately four times the monthly rent (as Japanese real estate agents ask) to move into an apartment.

5. 5. The doya used to be and ostensibly still are run by the local yakuza. To increase profits in the heyday of San’ya, the use of space was maximized to fit four, if not eight or sixteen, men into the bunk beds of a single room; however, with the disappearance of construction work, most doya have since been converted into single-room occupancy. It should also be noted that as men on welfare got older (or if they were seriously ill), the ward would approve their move from a doya into a proper, albeit small apartment. Yet this came with its own set of inconveniences, because the apartment might be far from San’ya, which entailed isolation and transportation costs, and the apartment might not have a bath or shower. All doya, on the other hand, had set bathing times but frequently also a curfew. Most of the guys were still living in doya during the two years that this ethnography takes place. Notably, Tom Gill has written of a variation on the doya in northern Kyushu (the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands), namely, the ninpudashi: “The word ninpu is a fairly coarse Japanese term for a navvy or manual laborer. Dashi derives from the verb dasu, to produce, give, or supply something. Hence ninpudashi are navvy-suppliers.… The ninpudashi combine the roles of the yoseba (casual labor introductions) and the doya (cheap, low-grade accommodation). The owner of the ninpudashi supplies the worker with a room, either a small doya-like individual room, or a larger room shared with several other workers. Meals will generally be provided, though probably at extra cost. He also supplies the worker with employment, activating a network of contacts to find casual work.” Gill, “Yoseba and Ninpudashi,” 130–31.

6. 6. Consider the mass-mediated case of the TV personality Yoshimoto Jun’ichi, whose family was accused of “deceitful receipt” (fusei jukyū) of welfare in 2012, on account of his high income. In another mass-mediated instance, the mayor of Osaka, Hashimoto Tōru, argued that city bus drivers should have their pay reduced by 38 percent on account idling. Bus drivers, he argued, spent most of their time taking breaks as they waited for their next scheduled trip and should not be paid for this time. See “Nihonkeizai o Boroboro ni Suru Hitobito.” Like the conservative US discourse critical of welfare recipients, such rhetoric forms part of a discourse that bashes the so-called abuse of state funds, although resentment is rarely if ever expressed toward state bureaucrats and politicians who ran the economy into the ground to begin with.

7. 7. Like San’ya, the day-laborer district of Osaka, Nishinariku, is located next to the old red-light district and to a Buraku neighborhood. For a comparison of Nishinariku and San’ya during the 1980s and 1990s, see Oyama, Man with No Talents, 2–3.

8. 8. Japan’s controversial family registry (koseki) system allows the state and lawyers to determine whether an individual is of Buraku ancestry, and lawyers have been known to acquire such information illegally. The term Buraku, which translates as “community” or “neighborhood,” may also be referred to as hinin—translated literally as “nonhuman”—or eta. For a consideration of the Buraku minority in contemporary Japan, see Hankins, Working Skin. As a carryover from premodern times, discrimination against Buraku originally derives from their association with supposedly unsanitary forms of labor involving animals, leather tanning, or death. Thus, there was a profusion of small-scale shoe factories in Imado, the Buraku neighborhood just south of San’ya. According to Hankins: “Present-day Buraku discrimination is primarily based on whether a person lives in a Buraku neighborhood, or whether her or his parents are from such a neighborhood.” Hankins, Working Skin, 35. See also Shimazaki, Broken Commandment; and Nakagami, Cape.

9. 9. This crime rate is notably low in comparison to other countries, but this is also because San’ya has become a welfare town with an average age of sixty-four. Jōhoku Welfare Center, “Jigyō Annai: Heisei 28.” In a nation that still lauds itself on its “public safety” (chian) and in which murder anywhere makes national headline news, both the proximity of murder (of or by an acquaintance) and the fact that these murders go unreported by the media disclose a structure in which San’ya marks a departure from the norm.

10. 10. In observing that “it has rarely been made clear what their status, what the meaning was of this proximity which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane,” Michel Foucault identifies an “imperative of labor.” Confinement, he writes, “constituted one of the answers the seventeenth century gave to an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages, unemployment, scarcity of coin.” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 39–49. For a list of the economic downturns that led a heterogeneous mass of men to concentrate in San’ya, see Fowler, San’ya Blues, 15.

11. 11. I invoke Freud’s notion of the uncanny here insofar as the death-inducing expendability of men in San’ya—“human garbage” (ningen no gomi), as Akira said—discloses the repressed truth of capitalist Japan and, indeed, of capitalism at large. For Freud’s elaboration of the movement from the heimlich, or homely, to the unheimlich, or uncanny, see Freud, “ ‘Uncanny.’ ” I specifically consider this repression an effect of the commodity form and what Derrida has called its “visor effect,” of whose disruptive ghostliness Derrida writes: “This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there … to feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law.” Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6–7.

12. 12. Oyama writes of the smell of bodies in San’ya’s bunkhouses back in the day: “The aforementioned piercing, organic stench, which materializes in a week to ten days, not only has a limited range but also tends to dissipate once it has attacked the olfactory sense. The ‘wafting odor’ that kicks in after a month’s time, on the other hand, is both pervasive and persistent. It never seems to let up.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 8.

13. 13. See “Yama” Seisaku Jōei Iinkai, Yararetara Yarikaese, 18.

14. 14. I refrain from referring to homeless people as the “homeless.” For as Robert Desjarlais has pointed out, the negative and spectral invocation of the “homeless” expresses all sorts of normative and murderous intent: “To describe someone as ‘homeless’ announces a lasting identity. When used, the adjective is lasting and all-encompassing: journalists and others often speak of a ‘homeless’ woman or man with the same certitude that they identify someone as a doctor, a politician, or a white man. Homelessness denotes a temporary lack of housing, but connotes a lasting moral career. Because this ‘identity’ is deemed sufficient and interchangeable, the ‘homeless’ usually go unnamed. The identification is typically achieved through spectral means: one knows the homeless not by talking to them but by seeing them.… Homeless figures are presented negatively, as models to be avoided, and thus as illustrations of the value of other ways of being … Lest anyone take these ways of making meaning to be inconsequential, without real force in the world, we need only recall the predictable fate of Mr. Corniel, who was portrayed as a leprous lunatic in the wake of his death at the hands of the police in front of the White House, or read about the man set afire in New York City in the summer of 1995, or consider the ‘social cleansings’ (limpieza social) enacted by vigilantes in Colombia, who have killed hundreds of vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, street children, and drug addicts, also known as ‘disposables.’ These are metaphors to kill by.” Desjarlais, Shelter Blues, 2–5.

15. 15. Hanafuda, or traditional Japanese playing cards, are designed with flowers or leaves denoting each season. Popular games include Koi-Koi or Oicho-Kabu. See the glossary and chap. 3.

16. 16. Like the severed tip of the pinkie, the scar of a knife wound on the cheek may connote yakuza affiliation. Slashing the cheek or severing the pinkie may be undertaken to compensate for infractions against organizational rules.

17. 17. Unlike “group” (gurūpu), the gumi of Okinawagumi carries the connotation of gang or mob affiliation. I therefore translate this socially recognized moniker for a loose affiliation of individual men as “Okinawa-gang.” In fact, many “members” (membā) of the Okinawa-gang objected to being referred to as members, although they clearly constituted a gang of sorts—working, drinking, gambling, and fighting together—in their everyday conduct. When I refer to actual yakuza syndicates, however, such as Yamaguchi-gumi or Sakaume-gumi, I retain their proper names in their entirety. The same goes for the proper name of the local yakuza organization, the Kanamachi-ikka, in which ikka might be translated as “clan” or “family,” or the Sumiyoshi-kai, in which kai might be translated as “association.”

18. 18. Although nakama may be translated variously as “companions,” “colleagues,” “comrades,” or “fellows,” I have chosen to go with “buddies” because it conveys the casual, loose character of social intimacy among the guys, without invoking the distant formality of a “friend” (tomodachi). Buddies (nakama) were first and foremost drinking buddies, but the term was also used to signal inclusion and exclusion, such that someone might note of an absent other that “he is a buddy” (nakama da), or if they had had a falling out, that “he is not a buddy” (nakama jya nai), even if they were still drinking together as part of the larger group of guys. As I detail later, there were also times when individuals were shunned by the entire group, or rather, by “everyone” (minna), and at such times, it would be apt to translate nakama as “group,” such that these individuals were “excluded from the group” (nakama hazure). In short, there was “the buddy,” and there were “buddies,” each of which referenced the social entity of the group but could be used variously to signal personal intimacy and trust or inclusion within the group at large. It was the social character of the group that was at stake in the use of this word: if someone was a buddy, he was invariably one of us. But there was an exception to this terminology of exclusivity, and that was in death. Whether someone had been a buddy or not in life, when they died, they were reincorporated into the fold of the social, as a buddy (nakama).

19. 19. Suffixes to Japanese names function widely to indicate hierarchy or intimacy. Strictly speaking, I should have added -san to many of the names in this book, to indicate my subordinate status to the person in question, but in the interest of legibility, I have omitted these suffixes. Among the day laborers in San’ya, such hierarchy was primarily a reflection of age. Men of the same age might refer to one another as dōkyūsei (classmates). In such cases, they often eliminated the addition of a suffix to the name, referring to the other simply as Saruma or Kentarō. Even the difference of one year in age could prompt someone to add the suffix -san to the name—indicating that so-and-so was of senior status—or -kun to show that so-and-so was younger. Yet the addition of suffixes—or, for that matter, the choice of using surnames or first names—was equally a matter of the preference of the individual addressed. Suzuki, who was fifty, preferred to be called Suzu-chan by me, who was twenty years younger than him. By adding the suffix -chan—usually reserved for children—a certain familiarity was created between Suzu-chan and myself. Akira, who was Suzuki’s senior by five years, simply referred to Suzuki by his first name, without any suffixes. Others, like Wakami—who worked under Suzuki—referred to Suzuki as Suzuki-san (surname plus suffix). Such matters were complicated yet further by the fact that many of the workers I knew employed the suffix -bō—like -chan—to signal intimacy with younger individuals. Hence, Kentarō, who was Akira’s senior by one year, referred to Akira by adding the suffix -bō to his first name. Akira, in turn, referred to Kentarō by adding -san to his surname, but because there was one week of the year when Akira and Kentarō were of the same age—a week during which Akira referred to Kentarō simply as “Kentarō!”—Akira performed their equality to comic effect for everyone by calling “Kentarō!” into line. No one referred to Takeda-san except as Takeda-san. If only because everyone I knew addressed these three individuals with the suffix -san, I have retained this suffix for Takeda-san; his partner, Nē-san; and the head of Sanyukai, Guy-san.

20. 20. Lévi-Strauss identifies a problem of segregation in the ternary social structure of the Guana in Paraguay, the Bororo of the Mato Grosso, and the Mbaya Caduveo of Brazil. But while the Guana and Bororo had employed a sociological system of binary moieties (and the social synthesis it would create) to resolve or conceal the contradiction of a ternary system of hierarchical castes, each undoing the social whole by turning in upon itself, the Caduveo had no such system in place. Of the Mbaya Caduveo, Lévi-Strauss writes: “This solution never existed among the Mbaya: either they did not know of it (which is unlikely), or, more probably, it was incompatible with their fanaticism. They therefore never had the opportunity of resolving their contradictions or of at least concealing them by means of artful institutions. But the remedy they failed to use on the social level, or which they refused to consider, could not elude them completely; it continued to haunt them in an insidious way. And since they could not become conscious of it and live it out in reality, they began to dream about it. Not in a direct form, which would have clashed with their prejudices, but in a transposed, and seemingly innocuous, form: in their art. If my analysis is correct, in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted, and its mysterious appeal and seemingly gratuitous complexity explained, as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way.” Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 196–97.

21. 21. Usually the companion of a senior male individual, the term for the caretaking figure of Takeda-san’s partner Nē-san (older sister) draws explicitly on the world of the yakuza. As it was explained to me, matriarchs in the mobster world were not unheard of, and it was rumored that, albeit temporarily, a sister had taken over the Yamaguchi-gumi after its head had passed away. Akira himself related the story of having encountered one of the last yakuza matriarchs in his younger days, when he had been caught and beaten for destroying an outdoor stall (tekiya) protected by the local mob. It had been his first and only time to inject meth, and the young Akira had found himself taking the stall apart in a mindless rage. When the moment of reckoning arrived, Akira was presented to the matriarch, who entered the room with thumping footsteps and addressed him with a husky bellow. As it turned out, the big boss deemed that the young Akira had taken the beating well, and he was commended for his grit.

22. 22. In this respect, the guys were no different from salarymen who frequent hostess clubs or snack bars to be waited on by female staff. The guys may have been on a tighter budget and certainly did not have a family or home to return to, but from a structural point of view, their relationship to mama-sans (older female proprietors or managers), waitresses, hostesses, and prostitutes was identical to that of the salaryman. Masculinity could only be asserted on the ground of sexual difference. For an ethnographic consideration of this logic in the context of corporate Japan, see Allison, Nightwork.

23. 23. As a street-level labor broker (tehaishi) working within the “territory” (nawabari) of the local yakuza organization, the Kanamachi-ikka, Suzuki was official “blood brothers,” or more formally, a “sworn brother” (kyōdaibun), with one of its members. The relationship between these two men had supposedly been made official through the ritual act of cutting their forearms, joining their bleeding wounds by crossing their arms, and drinking a glass of sake thus.

24. 24. Individuals who had failed to succeed as radical leftists also came to San’ya. Oyama describes one such man: “I believe he was deeply hurt by the fact that the radical leftists he associated with never took him seriously or offered him the kind of position in their infrastructure he felt he deserved. He found himself unable to play the role of the foot soldier with men young enough to be his children in order to reactivate his political career in San’ya; yet at the same time he couldn’t face old age as a common day laborer. Both prospects were equally unbearable to him. Was this not how his despondency manifested itself: in the form of these early-morning bellows in front of the Center?” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 50.

25. 25. Welfare recipients were required to declare income so that their welfare could be calibrated accordingly. For more details, see Tokyo City Bureau, “Seikatsu no Fukushi” and chap. 2.

26. 26. For those approved and registered by the ward, the “out-of-work aid” or “unemployment pay” (abure teate) system was designed specifically for old day-laborer districts, both to sustain the livelihood of laborers and to maintain them as an available pool of laborers. Thus, laborers had to work to receive out-of-work aid, and workers approved by the ward were given a “pocket notebook” (techō) in which to receive stamps from their employers as proof of having worked. See chap. 2 and Oyama, Man with No Talents, 25. Ken C. Kawashima writes of the individualizing effects of a similar system for Korean day laborers in interwar Japan. With reference to the so-called Unemployment Emergency Relief Program (UERP), Kawashima says: “In sum, therefore, the implementation of the work book registration system not only functioned to separate unemployed Korean workers from unemployed Japanese workers, but also produced individuals as effects of registration. Registering with the UERP was a mechanical function of marking, coding, stamping, registering, and, most of all, producing labor power in the form of individuals for the purpose of inaugurating them into exploitative regimes of wage labor that the UERP coordinated, specifically (as we will see shortly) in the public works industry.” Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, 180.

27. 27. If tehaishi refers to the street-level labor broker himself, the noun tehai refers to the actual work of brokering, such that one might ask of a tehaishi: “Have you finished tehai?” (tehai owatta?). Not surprisingly, the ideograms used to write tehai combine “hand” (te) with the verb “distribute” (kubaru), suggesting the distribution of hands or labor.

28. 28. While the precise etymology of takobeya (octopus room) is unclear, the term derives historically from the inhuman conditions under which laborers were caught, like octopi perhaps, and sent to work on the northern borders of Japan, in Hokkaido, as forced laborers. Dating back to the 1880s, the term is associated with colonialism and the forced labor of Koreans, but in San’ya, it referred to conditions of virtual confinement in which individuals were made to work off their debt to the mob, while they were crammed like octopi into a single room, for which they also paid. Notably, there were numerous illegal schemes at work in the underground world of San’ya’s homeless people, who were oftentimes approached by shady characters and enticed to get off the streets by moving into a dormitory. The dormitory would be located in the hinterlands of Japan, and the scheme had been designed to divest them of their welfare funds.

29. 29. It was said that there used to be many characters like Yasuko in San’ya: brash, loud, in and out of jail on account of petty misdemeanors. Two or three nonprofit organizations in the environs of San’ya welcomed women.

30. 30. Sanyukai, Hibi no Dekigoto.

31. 31. I take some liberty with Lacan, insofar as his understanding of desire is grounded in a theorization of language and of subjectivity as split within language. In Lacanian lingo, the subject desires to occupy the place of desire precipitated by alienation in language and lack. In desiring to be desired, the subject thus desires to occupy the place of “the Other’s desire.” Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 690. For Lacan, the movement of desire is therefore located in the unconscious, which assumes the form of language. However, it should not be forgotten that Lacan’s formulation of desire owes to Kojève and Hegel, in whom the master or the state are dependent on the slave’s recognition to maintain their own identity: a dialectic in which the slave is not recognized but is made to satisfy the master’s desire by recognizing him. See Weber, Return to Freud.

32. 32. Sanyukai, Hibi no Dekigoto.

33. 33. See Tokyo City Bureau, “Hōmuresu Taisaku.” Supposedly, the number of homeless people within Tokyo was reduced from 5,500 to 2,600 between 2004 and 2008. In the absence of a follow-up study, however, it is likely that the eyesore of blue tents along the Sumida River was simply dispersed.

34. 34. As Lacan writes: “There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel). Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 5.

35. 35. Oyama expresses a similar sentiment of Christian volunteers in San’ya. He writes:

36. “What I sense from such people’s ‘good deeds’ (what Christians call putting their love into practice) is utter shamelessness, and I can’t help feeling repulsed.

37. “These Christian volunteers depend in a far more profound way on San’ya—as objects for their ‘good deeds’ (that is, relief work)—than San’ya men do on the volunteers, yet the famous grandma and her ilk seem all too oblivious to this fact. If, for example, the government were to conduct relief work on a wider scale, San’ya men would no longer need these people; the volunteers, on the other hand, will always require San’ya men as their very own ‘needy’ and as living proof of their own spiritual redemption. “The fact that these volunteers seem to feel no shame at the hypocrisy of their ‘good deeds’ is, I believe, a huge failing on their part. Isn’t their obliviousness to this fact the reason they are regarded as complete outsiders here in San’ya?” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 97.

38. 36. Of an analogous logic of containment and threatening reversal, Foucault writes: “Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned against that unity and once again put it in question. Madness, made possible by passion, threatened by a movement proper to itself what had made passion itself possible.” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 89. Here, I am concerned with the threatening place that San’ya occupied insofar as it harbored a constitutive negativity in relation to general society. In chapter 4, I return briefly to Foucault’s elaboration of “madness” and, specifically, to logics of silence and the internalization of guilt as it applies to the San’ya man.

39. 37. Unfamiliar as it may sound, I have recuperated a nineteenth-century British term for the “unskilled laborer”—navvy—both because contemporary job descriptions do not encompass the range of menial tasks imposed upon the guys and because navvy invokes an unruly temperament that cannot be disassociated from San’ya. Like the labor of the guys at construction sites, the work of navvies once focused on excavation or digging into the earth to build canals, as “navigators,” according to Daniel William Barrett. But their “unskilled” character would also allow them to cross boundaries between work that might be described variously today as that of a general laborer, helper, or, quite simply, a laborer. So too, the ideograms for dokata (navvy) contain the ideogram for “earth” or “soil” (tsuchi) and a dictionary search for dokata kotoba (dokata language) turns up “bad language” or “low language”—the very word dokata (navvy) carries pejorative connotations. Indeed, navvies of the Victorian age constituted a disorderly and recalcitrant breed of vagrants that threatened the powers that be. In his 1880 Life and Work among the Navvies, Barrett cites descriptions of navvies as “the roughest of the rough,” “the most uncouth of the human species,” “a roving pest to society,” and “coarse brutes.” Barrett, 31–33. Gregory Dart likewise observes that the mid-nineteenth-century navvy was considered “insubordinate, unruly, and ungovernable” and that they carried the “notorious reputation” of being “the most dangerous type of modern worker.” Dart, “Reworking of ‘Work,’ ” 82–83. Thus, the figure of the navvy not only invokes the (literally) lowest, most basic, menial, and brute form of labor, but a type of character. On this note, I make one final reference to a nineteenth-century text, namely, that of the ex-foreman Denis Poulot’s typology of workers, as elaborated in Le Sublime. For if we follow Poulot, the guys were not just unruly navvies. As if their employers and general society could not quite wrap their minds around what these men, they were sublime—that is what Poulot observes workers referring to themselves as when they transgressed against the disciplinary regimes of the workplace and family. See Cottereau, “Denis Poulot’s ‘Le Sublime,’ ” 104–11. I thank Aslı Menevse for this reference.

40. 38. Reminiscent both of the corner at which Akira stood at Sanyukai and the entryway to the Iroha arcade, where men congregated over drinks, Liebow writes: “The streetcorner is, among other things, a sanctuary for those who can no longer endure the experience or prospect of failure. There, on the streetcorner, public fictions support a system of values which, together with the value system of society at large, make for a world of ambivalence, contradiction and paradox, where failures are rationalized into phantom successes and weaknesses magically transformed into strengths.” Liebow, Tally’s Corner, 139.

41. 39. Journal entry from 2012.

2. THE DAY LABORER

Parts of this chapter were originally published as “Gambling, Dignity, and the Narcotic of Time in Tokyo’s Day-Laborer District, San’ya,” Cultural Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2022): 150–75, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0578-2828.

1. 1. Unlike an onsen, the sentō or local downtown bathhouse is an inexpensive and informal affair. They usually cost no more than five hundred yen, and the ward office distributes discount coupons to those on welfare, which can also be purchased at the morning market (see below). The bathhouses themselves usually include baths of various kinds, be it at different temperatures, a jacuzzi-like area, or an electric bath (denkiburo). If their patrons are lucky, there may also be a sauna, a cold bath, and an outdoor bathing area. The locals who frequent these bathhouses know each other, converse, and gossip, and many of them really have no choice but to frequent these institutions because they have no shower or bath at home.

2. 2. In May 2011, the story of an individual from San’ya’s counterpart in Osaka, Nishinariku, made the news. The person had applied for a job as a dump truck operator in Miyagi Prefecture, but upon arrival, he discovered that he had been hired to drive inside the compound of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. See “Osaka Nishinariku no Rōdōsha.” In San’ya, it was said that news of this incident put a stop to flagrantly disingenuous efforts to contract labor from day-laborer districts.

3. 3. Marx, Capital, 340–416. The “exchange of equivalents” masks the process through which the capitalist takes a “portion of the labour of others,” arrogating the right “to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product.” It is the act of exchange—“post festum,” Marx says—that creates capital as an “alien power that dominates and exploits,” actualizing a machinery of domination. Marx, Capital, 729–30, 168, 716. In fact, in Intellectual and Manual Labor, Alfred Sohn-Rethel proposes that commodity exchange is formative of science, mental labor, and the very discipline capital imposes on manual labor. Arguing mainly against Kant, Sohn-Rethel contends that the categories of time and space are not a priori and that the transcendental subject apprehends the world through abstractions that originate in commodity exchange. Sohn-Rethel writes: “What defines the character of intellectual labour in its full-fledged division from all manual labour is the use of non-empirical form-abstractions which may be represented by nothing other than non-empirical, ‘pure’ concepts. The explanation of intellectual labour and of this division thus depends on proving the origin of the underlying, non-empirical form-abstractions. This is the task we have undertaken. And we can see that this origin can be none other than the real abstraction of the commodity exchange, for it is of a non-empirical form-character and does not spring from thought.” Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 66.

4. 4. This work ethic is by no means specific to San’ya or Japanese manual laborers. The book of Genesis extolls, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” Genesis 3:19, NIV.

5. 5. Writing of the 1950s, Miyazaki says: “Compared with nowadays, it was a much more macho era. The idea that a man should live like a man was an omnipresent value—an obsession, if you will—upon which most men modeled their conduct. Evading one’s responsibilities or acting in a cowardly fashion was abhorred and disdained. At the same time, there was a deep-rooted belief that a man should live by the sweat of his toil. I think this was something that was more strongly felt in the Kansai region of western Japan. Physical labor, such as construction work, was far more respected than it is today.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 39–40.

6. 6. See Tokyo City Bureau, “Seikatsu no Fukushi.” Although it was not immediately apparent from the welfare system, everyone in San’ya was aware that declaring income could result in an overall diminution of funds. Like the conservative discourse that vilifies welfare recipients who spend money on alcohol or drugs, this disincentive to report earnings is familiar in the United States, if not in other nations. More importantly, the disincentive to report one’s earnings produced a labor force willing to perform undesirable tasks at their own risk, on the black market.

7. 7. Marx, Capital, 781. Operated by the ward, out-of-work aid was described by some day laborers as approaching obsolescence. While it had once provided the city as a whole with a steady, readily available supply of workers when construction workers had been in high demand, it no longer fulfilled this function, or at least not as efficiently. Hence, it was said that, in the eyes of the “city” (shi)—as opposed to the ward—out-of-work aid constituted an anachronism that had outlived its original function. Workers, of course, made ready use of the system. If they were on good terms with their superiors at the work site, they could receive stamps for individuals who were not working that day. Kentarō carried the stamp books of others to work and had them stamped. To collect their ¥7,500, workers then presented their stamp book at the Tamahime Rōdō Shucchōsho (Tamahime Labor Branch Office) at seven thirty in the morning. Gill provides extensive descriptions of how labor was organized through the Tamahime Rōdō Shucchōsho and the San’ya Labor Center in the early 1990s and by their counterparts in Yokohama’s Kotobukichō, namely, the Kotobuki Labor Center Free Employment Introduction Office and the Yokohama Public Employment Stability Office. See Gill, “Sanya Street Life,” 276; and Men of Uncertainty, 50–54.

8. 8. Miyazaki writes of the construction world in the late 1970s. Though not exactly the world of the hiyatoi (day laborer) who moves from tehaishi to tehaishi, he says: “But despite its importance, the industry is for the most part built on the physical labor supplied by marginalized members of society—the poorly educated and the discriminated against. It’s a fascinating world to be a part of—boisterous, vibrant, frenetic—but at the same time, one in which old habits are deeply ingrained. The best illustration of the way it works is to think of a pyramid with a handful of giant general contractors at the apex who subcontract the work to those below them. Every industry has its own subcontracting system, but what makes the construction industry unique is the extent of its stratification, with subcontractors feeding off subcontractors, and so on down the line. Tiny sub-sub-subcontractors, who eke out a living by clinging to some part of the pyramid, account for 99 percent of the industry.

9. “This highly stratified structure is directly reflected in the industry’s close-knit system of hierarchical ties. The contractor-subcontractor relationship very much resembles the oyabun-kobun (boss-follower) bond in the yakuza world, in that it requires absolute loyalty to the boss. The same is repeated further down the pyramid between subcontractor and sub-subcontractor, and so on. Those in the subordinate position regard the job as something they have been allowed to do.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 208.

10. 9. As Engels writes: “It offers him the means of living, but only for an ‘equivalent’ for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority.” Engels, Condition, 88.

11. 10. Marx, Capital, 163–65.

12. 11. Kondo explicates some of the terminology that surrounds the figure of the skilled artisan. She writes: “Prevailing notions of skill among artisans—in the present day as in earlier times—stress physical idioms of technical ability. The aim is to go beyond a purely cognitive level of learning, and to karada de oboeru, to learn with the body. A multiplicity of idioms indicate that this is a kind of physical knowledge. An artisans’s skill and technique is known as his ude, his arm, and to hone a skill is to polish one’s arm, ude o migaku.” Kondo, Crafting Selves, 238.

13. 12. I translate pinhane here as “finder’s fee” because that is how this extraction of absolute surplus value was justified. But it would perhaps be more correct to describe this extraction as the surplus value or excess obtained by skimming off someone else’s labor and wages, usually at an unfair percentage. Though the significance of the term applies just as well to the state (consider taxes) and capitalism at large, pinhane is associated with sordid labor practices of corrupt companies or the mobster underworld. In gambling terminology, pin might refer to “one,” and thus, a fraction or slice, and hane derives from the verb, haneru, which, in this instance, means “to skim off.”

14. 13. In this respect, San’ya itself was a symptom of capitalist Japan, hidden from view. Like Makoto, San’ya occupied the place of what Slavoj Žižek describes as an “internal negation” within the order of equivalent exchange: “We have here again a certain ideological Universal, that of equivalent and equitable exchange, and a particular paradoxical exchange—that of the labour force for its wages—which, precisely as an equivalent, functioned as the very form of exploitation. The ‘quantitative’ development itself, the universalization of the production of commodities, brings about a new ‘quality’, the emergence of a new commodity representing the internal negation of the universal principle of equivalent exchange.… For Marx, this ‘irrational’ element of the existing society was, of course, the proletariat, ‘the unreason of reason itself’ (Marx), the point at which the Reason embodied in the existing social order encounters its own unreason.” Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 17–18.

15. 14. Oyama writes of individuals in San’ya vanishing: “Here a man who had showed up two or three times a week for years on end might suddenly disappear and never again be heard from again. No one in San’ya is going to tell you, ‘This is my last day here. I won’t be coming to the Center any more. Thanks for everything.’ You might ask around about someone (‘I haven’t seen Mr. So-and-so lately. Do you know what’s happened to him?’), but nobody will know a thing, and after a while all talk about him stops. This is the way people around here disappear from the scene.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 33.

16. 15. Day laborers clearly occupied the very bottom rung of this vine of subcontractors, which Gill has described in terms of a keiretsu system, with origins in prerecessionary Japan: “One of the reasons why big Japanese corporations were able to maintain excellent standards of job security for their employees was because they maintained relatively small workforces. Compared with other capitalist countries, a much larger portion of production was out-sourced: entrusted to smaller companies that stood in a variety of relationships to the main company.… Construction keiretsu were generally vertical; the smaller companies acted as a kind of safety valve for the main company.” Gill, “Yoseba and Ninpudashi,” 124.

17. 16. Gill cites a policeman of Yokohama’s day-laborer district, Kotobuki: “As far as I know, neither my superiors in the force, nor the local authorities, have any intention to ‘clean up’ Kotobuki or ‘close it down’ or whatever. Kotobuki won’t change. In my personal view, it would be a bad thing if Kotobuki disappeared. There is a need for such a place. There are good and bad people in every city; there must be a place for bad people to go to. Given that human nature, and therefore cities, are not perfect, it’s not a bad idea to concentrate the problems in one place.” Gill, “Unconventional Moralities,” 249.

18. 17. Journal entry from 2013.

19. 18. Riots by San’ya day laborers against the yakuza, police, and construction subcontractors reached a peak in 1984 and were famously captured in Saitō Mitsuo’s documentary, Yama: Attack to Attack. During its filming, the director himself was killed by the yakuza. For an account of the production of the documentary and the historical circumstances surrounding the riots, see “Yama,” Yararetara Yarikaese. For an even earlier account of militant left-wing labor movements in San’ya and Kamagasaki (the day-laborer district of Osaka), see Kama Kyōtō San’ya, Yararetara Yarikaese.

20. 19. The yakuza has a longstanding association with nuclear labor, and it is hardly a secret that nuclear labor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has been provided by the mob. TEPCO is notorious for its pyramid-like hierarchy, which alleviates its elites of responsibility for subcontracting practices at the bottom rung, where the yakuza provide workers who may (or may not) be in debt. For an account of cutting wages or the pinhane (finder’s fee) system at nuclear plants and specifically at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the 1970s, see Horie Kunio’s 1979 classic, Genpatsu Jipusī, 85–88. For a contemporary account of relations between the yakuza and nuclear power, see Suzuki, Yakuza to Genpatsu.

21. 20. Journal entry from 2013.

22. 21. Of this massification of laborers and the constitutive place of the foreman, Marx writes: “Their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence.… An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function.” Marx, Capital, 449–50. Frederick Winslow Taylor likewise says: “In almost all of the mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity.” Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 18.

23. 22. Of the manufacturing division of labor, Marx writes: “The division of labour within society is mediated through the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry, while the connection between the various partial operations in a workshop is mediated through the sale of the labour-power of several workers to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power.” Marx, Capital, 475–76.

24. 23. In 2012, 1,500 people died in accidents at construction sites in Japan. See Japan Construction, “Kensetsugyō ni Okeru.”

25. 24. These practices of turning a blind eye to the health conditions of workers are reminiscent of the “cover-up system” (inpei taisei) employed by the nuclear industry in Japan to conceal the radiation exposure of workers. See, for instance, Horie, Genpatsu Jipusī, 108–10, 169–72; and Suzuki, Yakuza to Genpatsu, 143–45, 244–59.

26. 25. Tobi (scaffolders) were said to assume complete financial responsibility in the event of accidents at work. For this reason, they were paid around ¥17,500 ($175) per day, approximately ¥5,000 more than other professions in the construction business. Oyama Shiro has described the figure of the tobi in the heyday of San’ya. While his description accords with the status of Rikiishi and Norihisa as respected scaffolders in San’ya, it contrasts with the respect given to Kentarō, a former carpenter, and Shōkawa, a former ironworker. Oyama writes: “Tobi are the aristocrats of San’ya.… The training required to nurture their skills to a level worthy of their calling and the confidence gained through having those skills recognized by their peers give them a commanding presence and bestow on their countenance a certain poise. All in all, they cut a very dashing figure. There is a certain crispness about their movements and indeed about their entire demeanor. I would imagine that their individual abilities vary considerably, but the best have a truly unmistakable aura about them.… Carpenters and ironworkers are not employed as day laborers or as contract laborers, so there are none in San’ya. Here, the word shokunin—skilled worker—means only one thing, and that is tobi.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 61.

27. 26. As Marx unfolds, the emergence of an “unskilled” class of workers is a consequence of the manufacturing division of labor: “Manufacture therefore develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages.… Every process of production, however, requires certain simple manipulations, which every man is capable of doing. These actions too are now separated from their constant interplay with those aspects of activity which are richer in content.… Hence in every craft it seizes, manufacture creates a class of so-called unskilled labourers, a class strictly excluded by the nature of handicraft industry.” Marx, Capital, 469–70.

28. 27. Traditionally, so-called unskilled labor has been relegated to women at the workplace. As Kondo writes regarding the female composition of part-time workers and the male composition of full-time artisans at a downtown sweets factory in late 1970s Tokyo: “The development of an aesthetic approach to craft work and the teaching of skills to the male workers guarded the boundaries of this select group.… The artisans, then, excluded women by identifying as a collectivity of full-time, skilled workers. As a collectivity, they could protect their identities by downplaying the many contributions of the women to the work process. Yet these women are also necessary members of the company, who in some ways constituted a threat to artisanal articulations of a skill-based hierarchy.” Kondo, Crafting Selves, 251–53.

29. 28. Marx viewed the reunification of mental and manual labor as a precondition for a communist or socialist society. He writes: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the subjection of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has disappeared … only then can the limited horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society can inscribe on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” Marx, “Critique,” 214–15. See also Llorente, “Analytical Marxism.”

30. 29. Sohn-Rethel writes as follows of the division of mental from manual labor under monopoly capitalism: “The division directly involved in the managerial authority over the monopolistic labour process is the one between the technical and organisational intelligentsia and the manual work-force. As this division springs from the foundations from which monopoly capitalism itself arises, the stability of monopoly capitalism virtually depends on the relations between these two forces, the mental and manual, remaining safely divided. Should the division be changed into an alliance, the authority of the management would be in jeopardy.” As a science, moreover, mental labor seeks to maximize production: “Modern science is not aimed at helping society in her relations with nature. It studies nature only from the viewpoint of capitalist production.… It can be said that objects over which capital can exercise control must be cast in the form of a commodity. It is the exact truth of exact science that it is knowledge of nature in commodity form.” Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 157, 132.

31. 30. Under capitalism, Sohn-Rethel writes, “physical production has lost its direct social cohesion and can form a viable totality only by the intermediary of a network of exchange under the rule of private property. As capital it controls production … Individual labour is in full control only in the small-scale individual production of peasants and artisans. Only then is production based on the individual unity of head and hand. This artisan mode of production is ousted by capitalist production.” Sohn-Rethel, 78. As an attribution of value, the exchange of wages for labor achieves a social synthesis insofar as it reincorporates manual labor within a totality. But the form of this exchange is inherently alienating because it dispossesses the laborer of the products of their labor, feeding the power of capital to repeat this process, and because, in exchange, “the action is social, the minds are private,” such that the wage negates and isolates the interiority of the worker within a solipsistic world of their own. Sohn-Rethel, 29.

32. 31. I cite from Marx: “But what was at first merely a starting-point becomes, by means of nothing but the continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result which is constantly renewed and perpetuated. On the one hand, the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization. On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it—a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself.… The worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces objective wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.” Marx, Capital, 716.

33. 32. In “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” Marx says: “It is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’.” Marx, Capital, 548–49.

34. 33. For a discussion of this future-anterior mode of temporality, see Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.

35. 34. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 30. Freud wrote of this “protective shield against stimuli” in specific relation to modern warfare, mechanization, and machinery. Writing after World War I, he theorized trauma or the compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences as the effect of a penetration of this “shield.” Freud wrote: “Living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimuli that have been allowed through it.” Freud, 30. And Marx himself comes close to describing such a shield insofar as the shutting out, deadening, or etiolation of undesirable elements demands increased “attention” on the task at hand from the worker. Marx says: “Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of work. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be.” Marx, Capital, 284. In Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch illuminates how the repression of the specter of accidents constitutes a hallmark of modernity.

36. 35. As I detail, the etiolation of material stimuli is demanded of the laborer by the exchange relation, in which they sell their labor for wages. Sohn-Rethel writes: “Exchange empties time and space of their material contents and gives them contents of purely human significance connected with the social status of people and things.” Sohn-Rethel, Mental and Manual Labour, 48.

37. 36. Journal entry from 2012.

38. 37. Of slacking or “soldiering,” Taylor writes: “Underworking, that is, deliberately working slowly so as to avoid doing a full day’s work, ‘soldiering,’ as it is called in this country, ‘hanging it out,’ as it is called in England, ‘ca canae,’ as it is called in Scotland, is almost universal in industrial establishments, and prevails also to a large extent in building trades; and the writer asserts without fear of contradiction that this constitutes the greatest evil with which the working people of both England and America are now afflicted.” Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 3.

39. 38. Geta are traditional Japanese footwear, wooden and heavy like clogs but held by a thong like flip-flops.

40. 39. I follow Lukács here, who writes that, as “it stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man,” the commodity form finally penetrates consciousness with intellectual labor. Thus reified, the journalist, lawyer, or intellectual laborer sells their minds and souls as commodities, while mistakenly believing their products proceed from a singular self. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness,” 100, 172.

41. 40. Lukács proposes that the “self-consciousness of the commodity” hinges on a contingent moment when the dialectical antinomy between subject and object reaches its limit in the proletariat—a moment that marks the arrival of contingency into history, when the fetishism of the commodity gives way to “relation between men” and mutual recognition. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness,” 168–69.

42. 41. Of dying in the name of a “master signifier,” Jacques Alain-Miller writes of a “death that is risked or a death that is wished for or a death that is assumed, and which is related to the transcendence of the signifier.” Miller, “On Shame,” 19. And to explicate the constitutive character of shame to this master signifier, Miller cites Lacan: “He explains it, indirectly, ‘Henceforth, as subjects, you will be pinned down by signifiers that are only countable signifiers and which will efface the singularity of S1.’ They have begun to transform the singularity of S1 into units of value. The master signifier is the singular unit of value, which cannot be quantified, which will not fit into a calculus in which everything is weighted. This is the context in which he proposes to ‘make ashamed,’ which has nothing to do with guilt. Making ashamed is an effort to reinstate the agency of the master signifier.” Miller, 23.

43. 42. In the name of “scientific management,” Taylor asserts the “self-evident fact that maximum prosperity can exist only as a result of the determined effort of each workman to turn out each day his largest possible day’s work.” Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 4.

44. 43. Rikiishi was a tobi (scaffolder) by profession. On this note, Miyazaki writes of scaffolders in the late 1970s: “The world of the tobi (scaffolder) is certainly a rowdy one, and scrapping was a daily occurrence. Among such men was a special breed known as the heavy-duty scaffolder. Incredibly strong, they balanced steel girders on their shoulders as they flew along scaffolding high above the ground. They were reckless, devil-may-care types that you would think had been born to fight.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 207.

45. 44. Of “labor power,” Anson Rabinbach writes that it “represents the quantitative aspect of labor under capitalism.” He cites Engels, pointing out a Marxist truism, namely, that labor power “is, in our present-day capitalist society, a commodity like every other commodity, but a very peculiar commodity. It has, namely, the peculiarity of being a value-creating force (my italics), the source of value, and moreover, when properly treated, the source of more value than it possesses itself.” Rabinbach, Human Motor, 74. See also Marx, Capital.

46. 45. Sohn-Rethel writes: “Time and space rendered abstract under commodity exchange are marked by homogeneity, continuity and emptiness of all natural and material content, visible or invisible (e.g. air) … The exchange abstraction excludes everything that makes up history, human and even natural history. The entire empirical reality of facts, events and description by which one moment and locality of time and space is distinguished from another is wiped out. Time and space assume thereby that character of absolute historical timelessness and universality which must mark the exchange abstraction as a whole and each of its features.” Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour, 48–49.

47. 46. I draw here on Marx’s chapters in Capital “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power” and “The Working Day.”

48. 47. Rabinbach writes of chronophotographic images in Human Motor, 104–19.

49. 48. Consisting of a repetitive isolation of movements, this compartmentalization recalls the analogous relationship that Benjamin describes between factory work and gambling: “the ivory ball that rolls into the next compartment, the next card …”. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 179. See also Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design, 203–207.

50. 49. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 97. The capitalist mode of production produces the obsolescence of older forms of labor, prompting Bloch to note that: “a merely awkward man who for this very reason falls short of the demands of his position or little position is simply backward in himself. But what if in addition, through the continuing effect of ancient peasant origin for instance, as a type from earlier times he does not fit into a very modern one? Various years in general beat in the one which is just being counted and prevails. Nor do they flourish in obscurity as in the past, but contradict the Now; very strangely, crookedly, from behind.” Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 97. As a critique of the times, Bloch identified the nostalgia for such non-contemporaneous elements as fascism. But it was also precisely in their subjugation and incompletion that he recognized their revolutionary potential: “It is only thus that the non-past, because never wholly become, and hence lastingly subversive and utopian contents in the relations of human beings to human beings and to nature are of use: these contents are as it were the gold bearing rubble in the course of the previous work processes and their work-based superstructures.” Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, 116.

51. 50. Okabayashi Nobuyasu, “San’ya Blues,” track A1 on San’ya Blues, Victor SV-1028, 1968, LP Record.

3. GAMBLING

Parts of this chapter were originally published as “Gambling, Dignity, and the Narcotic of Time in Tokyo’s Day-Laborer District, San’ya,” Cultural Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2022): 150–75, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0578-2828.

1. 1. As the JRA (Japan Racing Association) writes on their website, the acronym WINS was introduced in 1987 to make the term “off-track betting hall” (jōgai kachiuma tōhyōken hatsubaisho) more familiar to fans. Easier to remember and easier to say, WINS (pronounced “uinzu” in Japanese) clearly references the English word win but is also said to stand for “WINning Spot” and “Weekend IN Spot.” As an off-track betting hall, WINS is not specific to Asakusa. A WINS hall can be found in virtually every city of median size or larger in Japan, and there were several WINS halls in Tokyo. These halls, therefore, were not places where actual horse races could be seen but ones in which horse races from across the country were screened on TVs. Japan Racing Association, “Beginner’s Guide (JRA).”

2. 2. For the uninitiated, the “betting card” refers to the blank piece of paper riddled with numbers and circles that you fill out to place your bet. To place your bet, you insert this betting card into one of the machines that line the walls of WINS and pay the amount you indicated on the betting card; in return, the machine issues your “gambling ticket.” If you lose, you shred the ticket. If you win, you insert your ticket back into a machine, and—voila—out comes your winnings. In Japanese, the “betting card” is called a māku kādo (literally, a “mark card”), and in the case of horse racing, the “gambling ticket” or “horse racing ticket” is called a baken (literally, “horse ticket”).

3. 3. The experience of boat, bicycle, and horse racing was mediated by the TV screen. On very rare occasions, someone might venture to the actual racetrack, but this was rather something everyone had done at some point in the past and could tell of but did not do anymore. Instead, they fixated on the TV screen or moved between TV screens at WINS, standing to see the main races. I do not dwell on the technological aspect of gambling here, but the up-close experience of gambling on screens immersed gamblers in the medium of transmission, foreclosing critical distance. Precipitated by moving from screen to screen, from race to race, the affect generated by gambling recalls the euphoria that Fredric Jameson has identified with postmodern aesthetics of surface, pastiche, and écriture as “radical difference.” Jameson, Postmodernism, 29–31. Rotating between TV screens facilitated a shameless enjoyment that Jacques Lacan has associated with both the commensurable value form of the commodity and the absence of a reciprocating gaze on TV. See Lacan, Television; and Miller, “On Shame.”

4. 4. Located next to an amusement park and the Tokyo Dome (formerly the Korakuen Stadium for baseball, constructed in 1937 and demolished in 1987), Korakuen refers to the WINS gambling hall in Suidōbashi, Tokyo. Unlike WINS in Asakusa and other parts of the city, this location allowed gamblers to bet on horses throughout the week.

5. 5. See Japan Racing Association, “Beginner’s Guide (JRA).”

6. 6. It is as if the winning numbers have already been decided and all the gambler has to do is get them right. The excess of abstract numbers in the newspapers recalls the “signifier surfeit” that Claude Lévi-Strauss writes of regarding a fundamental “contradiction” in language by which “there is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the total system of signifiers and any given signified.” A “supplementary ration” is needed to achieve complementarity, and the ability to achieve this resides in the magical effectivity of the copula: to be. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work, 62–64. In this way, the gambler hopes that his gambling ticket is the floating signifier of the winning ticket.

7. 7. Dating back to premodern Japan, the lottery (takara kuji) translates literally as a combination of “treasure” (takara) and “raffle” or “draw” (kuji), and flower cards (hanafuda) translates as a combination of “flower” (hana) and “cards” (fuda). Unlike the Western card deck, the flower card deck is composed of twelve suits of four, making a total of forty-eight cards. Each suit is represented by a traditional drawing of a flower or leaf known to sprout in a specific month of the year (at least before climate change), which gives that card its value. Hence, cherry blossoms (sakura) signify March and the value of “3,” while pine (matsu) signifies January and the value of “1.” There are no actual number indications on the cards, save for the images, and the complexity of the deck allows for an array of games because some cards in specific suits are further marked with a red ribbon, a poetry ribbon, a purple ribbon, or animals—a crane, a bush warbler, a cuckoo, butterflies, a boar, geese, a deer, a swallow, or a Chinese phoenix—which can be combined in different ways. Then there is the so-called “Rainman” (Ono no Michikaze) card, the chrysanthemum poetry cup (Kiku no Sakazuki) card, and so on. Depending on the game, there are also nicknames for various values that emerge, including “pig” (buta) for zero—consider Akira’s use of this word in chapter 4—or pin for “one,” which recalls pinhane, in which a pin, percentage, or slice is skimmed by the tehaishi. Notably, the individual who ran the one-man gambling operation by the entryway to the Iroha arcade, Gīn, was also nicknamed Pin.

8. 8. Insofar as the initial “hook” of a “near miss” is concerned, the appeal of gambling in San’ya may even be likened to that of slot machines. But this is also where the affinities end, because the manual laborer’s desire for self-constitution through a narrative form of experience contrasts with the asocial “self-liquidation” realized in the “machine zone” by gamblers at slot machines, as Natasha Dow Schüll illuminates in relation to people seeking an escape from the relentless vagaries of human relations in the service industry. Whereas Schüll explicates the asocial dimensions of the gambler’s desire to reach a “zero state” at slot machines, the San’ya gambler discloses the initial thrill and social aspect of gambling. See Schüll, Addiction by Design, 96–97, 221–27.

9. 9. See Matome, “Kyōtei de 30 Oku.”

10. 10. Immanuel Kant writes of the mathematical sublime as “that which is great beyond all comparison.” Kant, Critique of the Power, 132.

11. 11. Although I move on to theorize the restorative aspect of gambling as an experience of contingency, my reference to the “real” opens to a consideration of gambling as repetition compulsion in the psychoanalytic sense. In this respect, the “real” does not refer to reality in the colloquial sense but to a constitutive exclusion that organizes the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of our everyday worlds and, in so doing, operates as an object cause of desire. In gambling, the repetition, coincidence, and contiguity of signifiers precipitate and release a certain excess or residue of the “real,” which Samuel Weber explicates as “residing at the innermost core of the imaginary insofar as the latter is constituted by an ambivalence and a conflict that, precisely, resists imaginary representation, and in so doing goads it on.” Weber, Return to Freud, 106.

12. 12. Roger Caillois makes this seminal distinction between labor and “play,” as “an occasion of pure waste.” Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 5.

13. 13. Readers of Benjamin will note that I push back against his rather hopeless presentation of gambling as an analog to factory work, particularly in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Insofar as Benjamin pointed out an identity between factory work and gambling, rather than an analog (as I argue), Gerda Reith is right to say that he mistakenly equates the drudgery of work with the thrill of gambling, for even in the self-liquidation that Schüll identifies at slot machines, it begins with the seduction of a “near miss.” Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance, 137–38. But when Benjamin writes that the “contact between his motor stimuli and ‘fate’ ” must stay intact for the gambler, he undercuts the oft-cited, seeming identity he makes between the “drudgery” of factory work and gambling. See Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory of Gambling,” 298. Schüll argues convincingly for an asocial merging of machine, body, and consciousness—the “machine zone”—at slots in Las Vegas, in which “near misses” truly appear to induce a deadened state of Freudian repetition compulsion. Yet, in the words of Schüll’s interlocutor, Mollie, a winning streak at slots is deceptively similar to Benjamin’s description of motor-connectivity to fate: “this vibration between what I want and what happens” must remain intact. Schüll, Addiction by Design, 171.

14. 14. Of such experience, Erving Goffman observed that the gambler must “expose himself to time, to seconds and minutes ticking off outside his control.” Goffman, “Where the Action Is,” 261.

15. 15. Benjamin writes: “When a winning number is clearly predicted but not bet on, the man who is not in the know will conclude that he is in excellent form and that next time he just needs to act more promptly, more boldly. Whereas anyone familiar with the game will know that a single incident of this kind is sufficient to tell him that he must break off instantly. For it is a sign that the contact between his motor stimuli and ‘fate’ has been interrupted.” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 298.

16. 16. Journal entry from 2012.

17. 17. I hold off here on a detailed description of each of these games. Suffice it to say that their rules are almost endlessly complicated, not least because, like mahjong, each of these games has regional variations that differ, for instance, in the Kansai region of Osaka from the Kantō region of Tokyo.

18. 18. Himself an incorrigible gambler, Dostoyevsky writes of such repetition in roulette: “It seemed as though fate were urging me on. This time, as luck would have it, a circumstance occurred which, however, is fairly frequent in the game. Chance favours red, for instance, ten or even fifteen times in succession. I had heard two days before that in the previous week red had turned up twenty-two times in succession; it was something which had never been remembered in roulette, and it was talked about with amazement. Every one, of course, abandoned red at once, and after the tenth time, for instance, scarcely any one dared to stake on it. But none of the experienced players staked black either. The experienced gambler knows what is meant by this ‘freak of chance.’ It would mean that after red had won sixteen times, at the seventeenth time the luck would infallibly fall on black. Novices at play rush to this conclusion in crowds, double and treble their stakes, and lose terribly.” Dostoyevsky, “Gambler,” 489.

19. 19. Here the repetition and coincidence of numbers approaches what Richard Klein and William B. Warner, drawing on Jung, have described as “significant coincidence,” which “may be defined as a conjuncture of events so unlikely or implausible that to call it accident seems less reasonable than to assume some intentional, motivated connection.” Klein and Warner, “Nuclear Coincidence,” 6. On the repetition of numbers, see also Freud’s essay, “ ‘Uncanny,’ ” 213–14.

20. 20. In an analog to off-track betting floors, Caitlin Zaloom expands on the importance to financial traders of “learning not to calculate.” Zaloom, Out of the Pits, 151.

21. 21. Of this motor connectivity, Benjamin says: “No one has so many chances of betting on a winning number as someone who has just made a significant win. This means that the correct sequence is based not on any previous knowledge of the future but on a correct physical disposition, which is increased in immediacy, certainty, and uninhibitedness by every confirmation, such as is provided by a win.” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 298.

22. 22. The gesture of the sketch follows Benjamin’s observation that the gambler must use “their hands sparingly, in order to respond to the slightest innervations.” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 297. On gambling, Benjamin, and “innervation,” Miriam Bratu Hansen writes: “Entwined with the multiple meanings of Spiel, is the already mentioned concept of innervation. This term broadly refers to a nondestructive, mimetic incorporation of the world—which Benjamin explored, over the course of a decade, through exemplary practices such as writing and reading, yoga, eroticism, children’s play, experiments with hashish, Surrealism, and cinema. In an unpublished fragment written around 1929–30, ‘Notes on a Theory of Gambling’ (… des Spiels), Benjamin states that the decisive factor in gambling is ‘the level of motor innervation.’ … In other words, rather than relying on the master sense of vision, say, by ‘reading’ the table, let alone an ‘interpretation of chance’ (AP, p. 513), gambling turns on a ‘bodily presence of mind,’ a faculty that Benjamin elsewhere attributes to ‘the ancients.’ In marginal cases of gambling, this presence of mind becomes ‘divination—that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments in life.’ ” Hansen, “Room-for-Play,” 9–10.

23. 23. Benjamin writes: “The gambler’s basic approach must, so to speak, adumbrate the subtlest network of inhibitions, which lets only the most minute and unassuming innervations pass through its meshes.” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 297.

24. 24. Of the winning streak in roulette, Dostoyevsky writes: “Black won. I don’t remember my winnings after, nor what I staked on. I only remember as though in a dream that I won, I believe, sixteen thousand florins; suddenly three unlucky turns took twelve thousand from it; then I staked the last four thousand on passe (but I scarcely felt anything as I did so: I simply waited in a mechanical senseless way)—and again I won; then I won four times running. I only remember that I gathered up money in thousands; I remember, too, that the middle twelve won most often and I kept to it. It turned up with a sort of regularity, certainly three or four times in succession, then it did not turn up twice running and then it followed three or four times in succession. Such astonishing regularity is sometimes met with in streaks, and that is what throws inveterate gamblers who calculate with a pencil in their hands out of their reckoning. And what horrible ironies of fate happen sometimes in such cases!” Dostoyevsky, “Gambler,” 488.

25. 25. It is “at the critical moment of danger (of missing his chance),” Benjamin writes, “that a gambler discovers the trick of finding his way around the table, of reading the table.” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 297.

26. 26. It is at games like craps, roulette, and at off-track betting parlors for horses that the social and vertiginous dimensions of gambling in San’ya can be encountered in other contexts. On the vertigo (ilinx) of gambling, see Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 24. For a description of off-track betting parlors in the United States, see Holly Kruse, Off-Track and Online. For a consideration of the “negative valuation” of horse gambling in Fiji, see Presterudstuen, “Horse Race Gambling.” Schüll also observes the exhilaration of craps in Addiction by Design, 18.

27. 27. Benjamin writes: “Furthermore, one should note the factor of danger, which is the most important factor in gambling, alongside pleasure (the pleasure of betting on the right number).” Benjamin, “Notes on a Theory,” 298. At slot machines, this seduction quickly gives way to the drudgery of the “zone.” Schüll, Addiction by Design, 96–97.

28. 28. Quoted in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 498.

29. 29. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 30. See also chap. 2.

30. 30. The newspapers enabled gamblers to “isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience.” Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 158.

31. 31. For a similar explication of the heads-up display in online poker, which “releases players” from keeping notes, see Schüll, “Online Poker,” 570–74.

32. 32. In exchange value, Marx writes, the commodity does not contain “an atom” of use value or quality, which is to say that, in itself, the money form cannot provide the ground for the qualitative, singular reputation of an individual. Marx, Capital, 128.

33. 33. Scanlan, Horse God Built, 160–64. Even today, uncashed winning tickets from Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont race can be purchased online.

34. 34. The necessity of secrecy, of conferring a guise of singularity on bets, recalls Derrida’s observation that the signature is haunted by a constitutive iterability—an iterability that must be repressed for the signature to appear singular. In their abstract form, numbers are considered not only repeatable but identical. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 20.

35. 35. Riku’s comment recalls Malaby’s observation that gambling can crystallize a “chanceful life into a seemingly more apprehensible form.” Malaby, Gambling Life, 147.

36. 36. As a compartmentalization of time, Benjamin writes that because “each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.” Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 177.

37. 37. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 163. Robert Desjarlais offers a pointed critique of this notion of “experience” (erfahrung), of which he also notes that its “temporal integration” is achieved through narrative, much as the guys told stories of their big wins. Tied to normative notions of personhood, the question of “experience” for Desjarlais concerns who the category excludes by default. Desjarlais writes: “Experience builds toward something more than a transient, episodic succession of events. The intransience of experience ties into the fact that it has a lasting and memorable effect on the person who undergoes it. ‘To undergo an experience with something,’ Heidegger writes, ‘—be it a thing, a person, or a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us.’ … Experience transforms: it ‘does not leave him who has it unchanged,’ or so says Gadamer in his specification of a ‘genuine experience’ (erfahrung). To have an experience or to learn by experience suggests an education that can accrue in certain skills or knowledge, though this education hinges on a flux of subjective reflections that other kinds of learning (such as operant conditioning) do not. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that, since the sixteenth century, experience has involved ‘knowledge resulting from actual observation or from what one has undergone.’ Experience is thus fodder for the kind of psychological developments or becomings that have characterized ideas of personhood in Europe since the Old Testament at least.” Desjarlais, Shelter Blues, 16–17.

38. 38. Benjamin writes: “Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This would be the peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis).” Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 163.

39. 39. Such punctuated bursts of intensity recall the repetitive temporality of Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, a “process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one.” Geertz, “Deep Play,” 447–48.

40. 40. Time, for Benjamin, remains to be actualized as a “durée”—which Bergson described as “past and present melting into one another.” Cited in Reith, Age of Chance, 136.

41. 41. See chap. 2 for my discussion of the deadening effects of manual labor on time and the body.

42. 42. Connecting gambler to flaneur, and time to space, Benjamin observes that gambling “converts time into a narcotic,” creating a “phantasmagoria of time.” Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital,” 12.

43. 43. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 193–94. Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out the transformative possibilities of such “impotent rage”: “Action is the sister of the dream.” Buck-Morss, Dialectics, 270.

44. 44. Although I cite here from the above passage in Benjamin’s essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin’s full exposition of the disintegration of aura under modern conditions of reproducibility can be found in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.” Over against technologies of reproduction (consider photography) and the commensurability of all things under the commodity form—everything has a price—I write of “aura” in terms of its incommensurable character within a modern world of abstraction.

45. 45. The “jackpot,” Rizzo writes, is “not possible because no empirically giveable prize is adequate to it.” Rizzo, “Compulsive Gambling,” 266.

46. 46. Welfare recipients were given “ranks” (kyū) corresponding to their health status. Those in the “A rank” (A kyū), of which Akira was one, received more than others. Akira typically transformed this rank into the positive sign—albeit to be kept hush-hush—of his secure place within the welfare system. See Tokyo City Bureau, “Seikatsu no Fukushi.”

47. 47. It was in this manner that, by incurring excessive debts through gambling, the stakes and significance of gambling had been amplified to involve “esteem, honor, dignity, respect,” as Clifford Geertz once wrote of the pain and pleasure of “deep play.” Geertz, “Deep Play,” 455. Moreover, in these eminently social dimensions, gambling in San’ya recalls the “character” that Erving Goffman once depicted as a compensation for the routinized predictability of office work among male casino gamblers in his “Where the Action Is” (1967).

48. 48. That credit constitutes the social reputation of a man should recall any number of ruminations on debt and the social form of Marcel Mauss’s gift, in which “the productivity of debt can also be understood in terms of a primary relation that puts debtor-creditor relations at the very base of social relations more generally.… This approach implies that debt is productive of something and that the productivity of debt is not necessarily revealed in those moments where disorder confronts order. Debt breaks with the logic of exchange not because it subverts it, but rather because it induces deferred exchange.” Roitman, “Unsanctioned Wealth,” 212–13.

49. 49. Of this conjunction between shameless enjoyment, the commodity as a commensurable form of value, and TV, see Lacan, Television; and Miller, “On Shame.”

50. 50. Malaby notably writes of “concealment and revelation” in gambling insofar as these logics establish and protect “an intimate sphere.” Malaby, Gambling Life, 33.

51. 51. Asides from the myth that the term yakuza derives from a premodern outlaw imitating the flashy character of an onstage yakusha (actor), it is generally recognized that the term comes from the three unlucky gambling numbers: ya (eight), ku (nine), and za (three). As in gambling, “yakuza” refers to a no-good character, down on his luck. For English sources on the yakuza and gambling, see Miyazaki, Toppamono; Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza; and Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza. There also exists an abundance of untranslated Japanese texts on the yakuza. Two examples are the classical autobiographical texts by the third “foreman” (kumichō) of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Taoka Kazuo, Yamaguchigumi Sandaime (The third foreman of the Yamaguchi-gumi), and the mobster who became an actor, Andō Noboru, Yakuza to Kōsō (Yakuza and battle). Taoka Kazuo writes specifically of gambling in Yamaguchigumi Sandaime, 49–56. Moreover, Taoka had assumed a mythical place in the imaginary of former mobsters like Akira, much like Takeda-san. Akira recounted how there had been a queue of men lining up to give blood for Taoka Kazuo when he was lying on his deathbed. When I asked Akira whether he had read Taoka’s autobiography, his response was a dismissive no. Why should he have to, when he knew what the man stood for in real life?

52. 52. See “Seikatsu Hogo de Kyōtei?”

53. 53. See “Kyōtei de Nomi.”

54. 54. Operating as a “point de capiton,” the term kuni (state/nation) stitches together and gives sense to the reportage. See Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 681.

55. 55. As it was explained to me, this ritual of passing around an itchō (single) block of tofu, or more literally, to “take the edges off” or “the corners off” (tōfu no kado o otosu) a block of tofu upon someone’s “release from prison” (shussho), is common practice in the yakuza world. The tofu itself is served without soy sauce or dressing, in its pure state, as if to cleanse the “stomach” (hara) or make it white. In this instance, Shōkawa was asked to finish the block of tofu. But this is not always required, because the main point of the ritual is to take the rough edges off someone who has been incarcerated, making them amenable to life on the outside.

56. 56. This is my inadequate translation of the title. Jōji, Hei no Naka. The novel was turned into a film bearing the same title in 1987.

57. 57. To explicate the practices that underpin the claim to masculinity, I draw here on the psychoanalytic concept of the “Thing.” In San’ya, being an otoko or performing its values was constitutively threatened. For as Žižek points out, as an obsessive object of identification, the “Thing” does not just constitute a point of symbolic identification but consists in a specific organization of jouissance (enjoyment) in relation to the “real” and can never be fully claimed as one’s own. As such, Žižek says, “It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet the only way we can determine it is by resorting to different versions of an empty tautology; all we can say about it is, ultimately, that the Thing is ‘itself’, ‘the real Thing’, ‘what it really is about’, and so on.” Indeed, much as the abuse of yakuza iconography triggered rage among a group of men who identified the “real yakuza” as someone who looked out for the weak (like Robin Hood?), Žižek writes that “what we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us.” Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics,” 52–54.

58. 58. BEGIN, “Shimanchu nu Takara,” track 1 on Begin no Shimauta, Imperial Records (13) TECN-20798, 2002, compact disc.

59. 59. Obon refers to the Buddhist festival of ancestors, held across Japan during three days in mid-August and celebrated with traditional dances, outdoor food stalls (tekiya), and such.

60. 60. For more on this traditionalist notion of “shame” (haji), see chap. 5.

61. 61. Derrida identifies the nostalgic discourse of emancipation through drugs (or, for that matter, gambling) as a “phantasm of reappropriation,” as a dream of the impossible “restoration of an ‘ego,’ of a self, or of the self’s own body.” Yet he is quick to point out that the discourse of prohibition also seeks to achieve this plenitude, justifying itself by referring to such a restoration: “Depending on the circumstances (tirelessly analyzed, whether macroscopically or microscopically) the discourse of ‘interdiction’ can be justified just as well or just as badly as the liberal discourse.” And this entails that the discourses of prohibition and emancipation are mutually constitutive, and that each threatens the other as “the trace of the third”: “the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond.” Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs,” 239, 241–42, 251. For more on upstanding society and its constitutive relation to “drugs,” see Ronell, Crack Wars.

62. 62. Lest he lose the “very stakes [he] hoped to win,” Akira maintained what Derrida described as a “respect for death” in the Hegelian dialectic, necessary to signification, because if he was to succeed in imposing himself on others and being recognized on his own terms, limits had to be placed on a “negativity without reserve.” Charging “headlong into death pure and simple” entailed surrendering signification itself. At the limit of loss, gambling threatened to undo the Hegelian dialectic by “uncovering the limit of discourse and the beyond of absolute knowledge.” Derrida, “From Restricted to General,” 255–61. Notably, limiting and harnessing this negativity recalls the point at which the slave represses what Kojève described as the “liquefaction of every stable-support,” thereby overcoming the condition of slavery. Kojève, Introduction, 20–21.

63. 63. Georges Bataille has written of expenditure with reference to “unproductive forms” of activity in which “the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning.” Of gambling, he says that it “can be considered to be a real charge of the passions unleashed by competition and that, among a large number of bettors, it leads to losses disproportionate to their means; these even attain such a level of madness that often the only way out for gamblers is prison or death.” Bataille, “Notion of Expenditure,” 118–20. Indeed, it was said of Matsuda that, to escape his underworld creditors, he had probably gotten himself into jail.

64. 64. On “addiction,” see my discussion of Derrida’s essay “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” in the introduction and the endnotes above.

65. 65. This denigrating gaze is one that dovetails with the discourse on ikizurasa (pain of life)—see Allison, Precarious Japan.

66. 66. Of a constitutive divide between “us” and “them,” Kathleen Stewart writes of a social worker in Appalachia: “Although she had worked daily with clients from the camps, she had never herself ventured out to this place that began five miles from her doorstep in a protected middle-class enclave. For her it was an imagined landscape beyond the pale—a place given over to dirt and violence, lack and excess.” Stewart, Space on the Side, 67.

4. FORBEARANCE

1. 1. Rabson provides historical context to the migration of Okinawan youth to the Japanese mainland: “Even before the official transfer to Japanese administration on May 15, 1972, an increasing number of Okinawans began traveling to the mainland, especially youth seeking opportunities for work and study. Job prospects remained bleak in an Okinawan economy still heavily dependent on expenditures of the U.S. military, and more than 6,000 left for work on the mainland in 1971. Factories and other employers had begun fourteen years earlier, in 1957, to recruit Okinawans, mostly in their teens and early twenties, through agents who organized transportation and job placements in what were called ‘group hirings’ (shūdan shūsoku) for work in mainland cities.” Rabson, Okinawan Diaspora, 189.

2. 2. As it is also called in English, the itai-itai disease was so named in early twentieth-century Toyama Prefecture when cadmium poisoning caused individuals to experience constant pain. As it turned out, Mitsui Mining and Smelting Co. had been releasing the chemical into a river that proceeded to poison local water and food.

3. 3. For a depiction of the incendiary conflicts that arose between subcontractors (for work) in the late 1970s, see Miyazaki, Toppamono, 210–12.

4. 4. Joining the mob did not secure Akira employment free from discrimination. As Miyazaki writes of one mob member in the 1980s: “Most hit men involved in yakuza battles in Kansai were from Okinawa, making their way by offering their bodies as shooting targets. Kuniba was one of them. It was the only way for outsiders like him to get ahead, given the way the Kansai yakuza world is dominated by locals.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 365. In fact, Akira’s moment of glory in the mob came when he was released from his stint in jail as a “substitute” (migawari), and eight hundred members from various syndicates gathered to pay their respects. It was an achievement of which he would say, “It’s not like everyone can do it” (dare demo dekiru wake jya nai). However, these words were undercut by the regret Akira expressed over the incident in which he was found guilty of killing a man and that led to his life in the mob: “Why’d he have to die from being hit” (nande nagutte shinun dayo).

5. 5. It is no coincidence that the word forbearance appears in one of Akira’s favorite songs, “Otoko,” by Tsuruta Kōji. Also famous as an actor in yakuza movies and as Miyamoto Musashi’s adversary, Sasaki Kojirō, Tsuruta’s song gives poignant expression to the struggles of masculinity and failing to live up to a mother’s expectations. With the phrase—“Write the letter of forbearance/and hold back the tears”—the song emphasizes the need for self-reliance under conditions of severe hardship. Tsuruta Kōji, “Otoko,” track 1 on Otoko/Kizudareke no Jinsei, Victor SV-2173, 1971, LP Record. I thank Harumi Osaki for her help with this song.

6. 6. The ideogram for “forbearance” (nin) is most often used with another kanji to spell nintai, which translates either as “endurance,” “perseverance,” “forbearance,” or “patience.” Nintai is almost synonymous with the word gaman, which likewise translates as “patience,” “endurance,” “perseverance,” “tolerance,” “self-control,” or “self-denial.” I translate the nin- of nintai as “forbearance” because forbearance foregrounds the virtuous character of the conduct I describe. As the kanji is drawn from Tsuruta Kōji’s song “Otoko,” a citation is apposite from Ian Buruma’s orientalist tract, Behind the Mask (a book in which he himself translates gaman as “forbearance”): “Tsuruta Koji has the melancholy, haunted look of a man who has seen it all but still, somehow, manages to keep going, like an ageing courtesan or a seasoned gambler who sticks to the old rules in a bad new world where everyone plays dirty.… His heyday as a yakuza star is now over, but he still appears on television as a singer of noble gangster stories or sentimental wartime ballads, sometimes dressed in full naval uniform. Fan magazines and record-jacket notes never cease to inform us that Tsuruta was on the list to be a kamikaze pilot.… Suffering is very much part of his image. Mishima wrote about him that ‘he makes the beauty of gaman shine brightly.’ Indeed, Tsuruta is all gaman. The main thing he suffers from is being an anachronism. A typical beginning of a Tsuruta film shows him coming out of jail after several years, dressed in a kimono. He finds the world a changed place: his old friends wear suits now and work for construction companies taking kick-backs and bribing politicians. He is of course appalled and appeals to his friends’ sense of yakuza honour and humanity.” Buruma, Behind the Mask, 177.

7. 7. Junichi Saga writes: “So you see, if you aren’t powerful, somebody’s going to come barging into your turf. And if you can’t shove him out again, you’ve had it. So you mustn’t ever show weakness. Suppose you get into a fight with a guy from some other gang: whatever happens, you must squash him. If you let yourself get hurt without hurting him back, then it doesn’t matter what happens to you, we’re the ones who’re going to suffer.” Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza, 81.

8. 8. Mauss writes: “Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves, their subgroups, and lastly, the individuals in them, have succeeded in stabilizing relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return. To trade, the first condition was to be able to lay aside the spear. From then onwards they succeeded in exchanging goods and persons, no longer only between clans, but between tribes and nations, and, above all, between individuals. Only then did people learn to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without resort to arms.” Mauss, Gift, 105–6. For a similar logic in which exchange supplants warfare, see Lévi-Strauss’s chapter, “A Writing Lesson,” in Tristes Tropiques.

9. 9. As Derrida writes: “The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent that it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time.” Derrida, Given Time, 41.

10. 10. “Between equal rights, force decides.” Marx, Capital, 344.

11. 11. As the third foreman of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, Taoka Kazuo observes: “This thing called gambling is a battle to read the opponent’s hand.” Taoka, Yamaguchigumi Sandaime, 52.

12. 12. Describing an underground character, Miyazaki refers to similar values: “As he spoke, Mr. Uchida kept nodding to himself. To him, even a bad reputation was good publicity. It never occurred to him that press coverage like this would dirty my name. To him, the opposite was true: ‘You stood up for yourself all the way in your fight with the police, and you won through in the end. That earns you respect.’

13. “Mr. Uchida only cares about the principles at stake. He rejects anything that doesn’t add up to him, whether he hears it from a general contractor or a yakuza.

14. “Many times I’ve heard him tell a yakuza, ‘You’re full of shit. Get lost!’ ”

15. “This didn’t have the kind of consequences you might expect, however. Yakuza knew he wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone if he felt it was justified, and I think they respected him for that. Indeed, he had been sent to prison thirteen times for standing his ground. No one could deny the formidable spirit of a man who matched words with deeds.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 277.

16. 13. As Mauss explicates, a gift cannot be returned right away, because such a return would amount to an annulment and therefore a rejection of the gift. And a gift cannot simply be returned in the same form but must bear a mark of difference across time. Mauss writes: “In every possible form of society, it is in the nature of a gift to impose an obligatory time limit or term. By definition, even a meal shared in common, a distribution of kava, or a talisman that one takes away, cannot be reciprocated immediately.” Mauss, Gift, 45. So too, Derrida comments on the necessity of a gift to bear a mark of difference: “So we were saying that, quite obviously, if the donee gives back the same thing, for example an invitation to lunch (and the example of food or of what are called consumer goods will never be just one example among others), the gift is annulled. It is annulled each time there is restitution or counter-gift.” Derrida, Given Time, 12.

17. 14. As opposed to the closed system Marcel Mauss observes in the economy of gifting, Derrida points to a constitutive excess that propels circulation. Derrida writes: “For finally, the overrunning of the circle by the gift, if there is any, does not lead to a simple, ineffable exteriority that would be transcendent and without relation. It is this exteriority that sets the circle going, it is this exteriority that puts the economy in motion. It is this exteriority that engages in the circle and makes it turn.” Derrida, Given Time, 30. He continues: “An essential exaggeration marks this process. Exaggeration cannot be here a feature among others, still less a secondary feature. The problem of the gift has to do with its nature that is excessive in advance, a priori exaggerated.” Derrida, Given Time, 38.

18. 15. Miyazaki writes of similar virtues in his autobiography: “Basically my father was utterly indifferent to my schooling and never said a word on anything educational. But there was one precept he used to drum into me like crazy: act like a man. His definition of manliness was to protect the weak, one’s juniors, and friends in trouble, even if it meant putting your body between them and danger. Also, stand up to the strong when they try and push you about, never back down, and never make excuses.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 38.

19. 16. Barthes, “World of Wrestling.”

20. 17. Pro wrestling recalls the extravagance and celebration of “character” that Susan Sontag identified with “camp,” of which she writes that it consists in “artifice as an ideal, theatricality.” Sontag, Notes on “Camp,” 288. But as Henry Jenkins III writes, pro wrestling also invokes a melodramatic script in which “stories hinge upon fantasies of upward mobility, yet ambition is just as often regarded in negative terms, as ultimately corrupting. Such a view of ambition reflects the experience of people who have worked hard all of their lives without much advancement and therefore remain profoundly suspicious of those on top. Wrestling speaks to those who recognize that upward mobility often has little to do with personal merit and a lot to do with a willingness to stomp on those who get in your way. Virtue, in the WWF moral universe, is often defined by a willingness to temper ambition through personal loyalties, through affiliation with others, while vice comes from putting self-interest ahead of everything else.” Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake,” 45. Pro wrestling intersects with other melodramatic forms of theater and theatricality in Japan, of which taishū engeki (theater for the masses) is most conspicuous for its invocations of itinerancy and yakuza characters fighting it out for justice. See Ivy, “Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams.”

21. 18. As Barthes says, wrestlers must “succeed in imposing an immediate reading of their inner nature,” in “emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs.” Barthes, “World of Wrestling,” 18–19.

22. 19. There exists an abundance of literature on “bullying” (ijime) in Japan, particularly as it unfolds among kids, although the phenomenon extends beyond the educational system into the adult workplace. See, for instance, Kamata, Ijime Shakai no Kodomotachi; or Naitō, Ijime no Kōzō. For English sources, see Yoneyama, Japanese High School; or Naito and Gielen, “Bullying and Ijime.”

23. 20. Here, I argue against René Girard’s elaboration of the relation between ritual sacrifice and sociality and, specifically, against his claim that violence is simply grounded in “the reality of human relationships.” Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 260. Moreover, the absence of the state and of the violence of state recognition in Girard’s exposition recall the structure of the “ban” that Agamben develops in Homo Sacer. Of this “ban,” Agamben writes: “The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment. The matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary ‘force of law,’ is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it.… A critique of the ban will therefore necessarily have to put the very form of relation into question, and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation and, thus, no longer in the form of a connection.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29. I argue that it is a specific relation or connection to the state that achieves the social expulsion and death of San’ya and that forces the circulation of violence to remain within San’ya. Through state recognition, in which the San’ya man is negated in just about every aspect of his person—since he gives himself to be recognized in accordance with state demands rather than imposing himself upon the state—the violence of this relation was materialized daily, be it at the workplace (in the wage), hospital, welfare office, or with the police. Ultimately, the state wields the threat of death over its subjects.

24. 21. Of such disposability in the 1990s, Oyama observes: “That San’ya’s true homeless are the older men who have been wholly excluded from the labor market is apparent from the resistance that they, as former laborers, put up when confronting this ultimate degradation. Those who can somehow remain in the labor pool will spare no effort to do so when facing such a crisis. It is only these older men, therefore—men whose final resistance has met with defeat—who are to be counted among the truly homeless.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 74. Fowler also describes San’ya in the 1990s, noting that “an increasing number of doya are affordable only to the young and able-bodied day laborers physically capable of working at least every other day. Their number is dwindling, however. As noted above, San’ya’s population is aging rapidly along with the nation’s as a whole, with one important difference. The day laborer’s life average age, in the early fifties as of 1990, is approaching his average life expectancy.… The final resting place for many of these men, who are too old to do hard labor but too young for welfare, is typically the street.” Fowler, San’ya Blues, 47.

25. 22. The temporary staffing agency (haken gaisha) has indeed superseded the role of day-laborer districts in providing a flexible pool of laborers. With the temp agency, workers do not meet face-to-face after work. Nor do they see their agent, who simply texts them with an address in the morning, and many are known to sleep in internet cafes or to pass their nights at a twenty-four-hour McDonalds. For a broad overview, see Allison, Precarious Japan.

26. 23. Bataille observes: “The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a military exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness it heralds, unless it is in the splendor of rags and the somber challenge of indifference.” Bataille, Accursed Share, 76–77.

27. 24. Bataille writes: “The man of high rank is originally an explosive individual (all men are explosive, but he is explosive in a privileged way).” Bataille, Accursed Share, 75.

28. 25. Journal entry from 2013. Like toshikoshi soba (year-crossing soba), osechi ryōri are traditional foods eaten during the New Year holiday. They consist of a variety of osechi, or dishes served in bento-like boxes, stacked on top of each other.

29. 26. Mary Douglas has described a type of social power comparable to that attributed to Takeda-san. Of a power derived from disorder, Douglas says: “Ritual recognises the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time … In these beliefs there is a double play on inarticulateness. First there is a venture into the disordered regions of the mind. Second there is the venture beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in control of themselves and of society.” Douglas, Purity and Danger, 95–96.

30. 27. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro describe the outlaw character in Japanese literature: “Like Goro Fujita’s novels of seventy years later, Hasegawa’s stories portrayed men of questionable backgrounds who fought as hard as they gambled, yet maintained a philosophy of supporting the underdog and never troubling the common folk. Above all, they remained loyal to those who helped them. A virtuous traveler would be willing to sacrifice his life for the oyabun who for one day had opened the gang’s home to him.

31. “The aggressive yet compassionate outlaw, useless to mainstream society but willing to stand up for the common man—these are the essential components of the yakuza legend. It is a tradition inherited not only from the machi-yakko but from the samurai as well, and it spread through the feudal underworld.” Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza, 16–17.

32. 28. Either someone in the group had filled in Takeda-san’s paperwork for him, and not knowing how to write his name in ideograms (names with the same pronunciation can be written a number of different ways using Japanese ideograms, kanji), this person had written his name with the syllabic alphabet. Or Takeda-san had been indifferent—it is not uncommon to write one’s name with syllables in Japanese, as a courtesy to someone who may not be able to read the ideograms with which one’s name is written (for instance, if one is putting one’s name down for a restaurant queue).

33. 29. Miyazaki, Toppamono, 424.

34. 30. In this instance, “gang” is a literal translation of the Japanese gyangu, which comes from the English word, and should be differentiated from the “gang” of “Okinawa-gang,” which derives from the yakuza-affiliated word gumi. See chap. 1. The scandalous character of the Okinawa-gang resided in the fact that they were neither here nor there. While they used yakuza terminology to describe their relations, at the end of the day, they were simply “buddies” (nakama)—somewhere in between a gyangu and a gumi.

35. 31. Oyama writes of such “gangs” (gyangu): “I refer to the frequent outbreaks of crime involving thieves (some working by stealth, some violently) called mogaki, who went after laborers returning to San’ya fresh from their jobs at a hanba. By the time these laborers, who had worked for a ten- or fifteen-day stretch, arrived back in San’ya, they were already well in their cups; once here they’d lose all inhibition and drink away until finally they sank, plastered, to the street, with their work bags as pillows. In their pockets were the earnings—ten or fifteen days’ worth—that they’d received from their hanba jobs.… Such men would become the targets of mogaki, who stole about at night in packs of twos and threes. Mogaki would lift valuables from the pockets of men who had passed out drunk; any victim who was awakened by the commotion would first be beaten to a pulp and then robbed. Members of a San’ya labor union formed by radicals used to band up and go on patrol late at night in order to lend a hand to potential victims.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 84–85.

36. 32. Miyazaki writes of the figure of the “elder sister” (nē-san) in the yakuza world of old: “While yakuza like to talk of otoko no hanamichi (‘man’s glorious path’), ‘manliness,’ ‘honor,’ and the like, the fact is that beneath its macho exterior there is a matriarchal aspect to the yakuza world and maternal principles exert a powerful influence. Men adhered to a code of ‘take my good name and you take my life,’ and were extremely conscious of face and obligation. Moreover, many would die young, either killed in gangland strife or burned out by debauchery and dissipation. To help them cope, they needed the emotional anchor provided by something maternal.

37. “The yakuza world wouldn’t be complete without its ‘mother’ figures. These women would heal the pain caused by the deaths of menfolk by recounting the exploits of the fallen and transforming their lives into the stuff of legend. Actually, the women often grew quite fed up with how stupid men could be, but would sing their praises anyway—and it was this kind of support that would encourage the men to take leaps into the unknown. So while on the surface it was a typically male-dominated world, the existence of women in the underworld counted for a great deal, in both spiritual and material ways. I am under the impression that there were many times when my father was dancing unknowingly to my mother’s tune.” Miyazaki, Toppamono, 21–22.

38. 33. See chap. 1 for more on contemporary discrimination against the Buraku minority, Japan’s outcaste class whose work has traditionally been associated with animals, leather tanning, and death.

39. 34. There was no overcoming the constitutive stain of the “outlaw” (autorō), which, rather than assert a code of honor of its own, gave credence to the shamefulness with which San’ya was regarded.

40. 35. For Matsuda, on the other hand, it was precisely “alcohol” (sake) that ruined the accountability of men. How many times had he castigated Akira for drinking to the point of self-destruction! Indeed, Matsuda might have disappeared for days on end, but he could never be found drunk.

41. 36. In San’ya, the phrase “an eye for an eye” (yararetara yarikaese) can be traced back to the early 1980s confrontation between San’ya laborers, led by the then powerful Sōgidan labor union, and the state, yakuza, and labor subcontractors. With the transformation of San’ya into a “welfare town” (fukushi no machi), the phrase seems to have come to signify reciprocity among laborers themselves. See “Yama,” Yararetara Yarikaese; Kama Kyōtō San’ya, Yararetara Yarikaese; and Yamaoka, Yama: Yararetara Yarikaese. Stuart Dowsey traces the emergence of the phrase to an even earlier moment in the Chūkaku-ha movement of the late 1960s: “The government has resorted to increasing the strength of the riot police in order to suppress the university struggle and the anti-Ampo struggle, so in order to cope with this the Chukaku have elected to follow the old Biblical adage ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for the tooth!’ ” Dowsey, Zengakuren, 233. For a description of “denunciation sessions” conducted by militant leftist unions in the 1980s, see Oyama, Man with No Talents, 98–99.

42. 37. I draw here on Theodor W. Adorno’s seminal essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in which Adorno warns of fascism from “within democracy.” Submission to the labor market, Adorno writes, requires the negation of “autonomous subjectivity,” predisposing individuals to “renounce their self” in an identification with the status quo of “power as such.” Adorno, “Meaning of Working Through,” 90, 98–99.

43. 38. The discourse of the otoko intersected with an imperialist and colonialist discourse that purports that the Imperial Japanese Army liberated the hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” (jūgun ianfu) that prostituted themselves for the Japanese army during World War II. According to this fascist discourse, these women were not systematically and forcibly conscripted as prostitutes for the Imperial Japanese Army but willingly offered themselves to their Japanese liberators, leaving behind their families. In the context of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a.k.a. Japanese imperialism during World War II) and contemporary disavowals by the Japanese state of atrocities committed during World War II, this discourse of saving women echoes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s sentence: “White men are saving brown women from brown men” Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, 48–49.

44. 39. For a factual account of the connection between the right wing and yakuza in postwar Japan, see Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza.

45. 40. See “Yama,” Yararetara Yarikaese, 25–26.

46. 41. “Yama,” 15–17. Saitō observed that the camera functioned as a “weapon” (buki) for day laborers by exposing the conditions of their exploitation by the state, subcontractors, and mob. He was shot with a live camera raised to his eye. Although the title of Saitō’s documentary could also be translated as “Yama: An Eye for an Eye,” it was screened outside Japan as Yama—Attack to Attack. Saitō’s film recalls Kazuo Hara’s 1987 documentary, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, in which the protagonist, Okuzaki Kenzō, confronts his former World War II officers with the guilt of ordering the execution of two other men in his unit so that they could be eaten. Hara, Camera Obtrusa.

47. 42. Regarding the murder of this policeman, see 6.9 Rally Executive Committee.

48. 43. In this case, -chan operates as a suffix expressing endearment. Recall my elaboration of suffixes in San’ya in chap. 1.

49. 44. Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence, Takeo Doi argued that Japanese culture predisposes individuals to seek indulgence from institutions and persons of authority within their select group. See Doi, Anatomy of Dependence.

50. 45. Having learned the “computer” (pasakon) and “internet” (intānetto), Akira was to read what his crush had to say of his conduct, not in person but on Sanyukai’s homepage, under “Hibi no Dekigoto” (Daily events):

A Relationship of Growing Together

A gentleman who is always smiling, a gentleman who cracks jokes and gives everyone a good time, a gentleman who is there together, and kindly helps out with this and that. There are times when such a gentleman suddenly stops showing up, and gets angry at some instant with an incredibly threatening attitude. Or rather, a gentleman who has special difficulty communicating. At such times, I think of the life that person led until encountering him at Sanyukai.

A heart’s wound that still has not healed, a shadow power that nothing can be done about, that cannot be controlled with one’s own power. There are such things for anyone. But I am sometimes startled by the fact that that of the gentleman far exceeds our imagination. Being thrown away by someone important, betrayed, being made unnecessary, being insulted … if in the same position, anyone would surely become the same way.

When the gentleman who disappeared comes back, or comes to his senses and takes on things with a serious mind, or when he opens his heart more than before, there is a big happiness that spreads out. Being glad and sad by turns, we are waiting for that day to come again, and believe in it before we know it. Every day, we do not know what will happen. Every individual has their unique rhythm and time. That is why every day is important. Because every individual gradually becomes an indispensable person, as we are changed through our interactions with each other.

1. 46. I cite here from Michel Foucault’s chapter “The Birth of the Asylum,” for what is fundamentally at stake in Akira’s confrontation with Sanyukai is an attribution and organization of guilt. Nor should it be forgotten that, albeit in earlier chapters of Madness and Civilization, Foucault observes that an economic imperative informs the designation of those who are to be confined as “mad,” and by this point in Akira’s relationship with Sanyukai, he had been deemed not only useless but troublesome. Thus, Akira was simply ignored. Writing of the loosening of chains and the consignment of relations in the asylum to “silence,” Foucault says: “Henceforth, more genuinely confined than he could have been in a dungeon and chains, a prisoner of nothing but himself, the sufferer was caught in a relation to himself that was of the order of transgression, and in a non-relation to others that was of the order of shame. The others are made innocent, they are no longer persecutors; the guilt is shifted inside, showing the madman that he was fascinated by nothing but his own presumption.… The language of delirium can be answered only by the absence of language, for delirium is not a fragment of dialogue with reason, it is not language at all; it refers, in an ultimately silent awareness, only to transgression. And it is only at this point that a common language becomes possible again, insofar as it will be one of acknowledged guilt.” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 261–62.

2. 47. For an in-depth, ethnographic consideration of the death-inducing effects of social expulsion and medical misdiagnosis, see, for instance, Biehl, Vita.

5. DISINTEGRATION

1. 1. Marx, Capital, 272.

2. 2. Fowler writes: “Whether resolutely or resignedly, the men leave something behind by coming here: jobs, families, creditors, prison records, gangster connections, failed businesses—the list is perhaps nearly as long as the combined roster of the area’s two hundred lodging houses. They may indeed gain anonymity and freedom of movement, but the price they pay for these is very dear: a loss of contact with the outside world. It is a price that newcomers pay perhaps more willingly than veterans of the yoseba; the latter know the tally of loneliness adds up over the years with compound interest.” Fowler, San’ya Blues, 16.

3. 3. I draw here on Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in which a mode of production blocks lateral relations and the realization of a “common interest”—as opposed to the “general interest” of capital, emblematized in the revenant figure of Bonaparte, the emperor. Marx, “Brumaire,” 115–16.

4. 4. The family registry (koseki) refers to the state-endorsed family registry and provides the grounds for discrimination by preserving such information as Buraku background or parental marriage status.

5. 5. On haji, see Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword; and Ukai, “Future of an Affect.” Ukai observes how Benedict’s text has become a classic in Japan, serving as a point of identification. He writes: “At the end of Orientalism, Edward Said criticized the conservatives in the Arabic world, saying that the serious problem today is that people or the ruling class of the people who are represented by Orientalism themselves deepen their complicity with Orientalism, equally or more so than the ‘representation’ or ‘creation’ of the Orient by the West. This situation is consistent with post-war Japan.” Ukai, “Future of an Affect,” 17.

6. 6. A term that would secure the inscrutability of “Japanese culture,” it is not surprising that haji was interpreted by an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. While the term has emerged as a point of identification for Japanese culture more generally, haji carries anachronistic connotations and is generally not used outside of specific circles, be they right-wing or traditionalist. In San’ya, haji was described with virtually the same terms that Benedict used to explicate the normative force of shame among “the Japanese”: “A failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior, a failure to balance obligations or to foresee contingencies is a shame (haji). Shame, they say, is the root of virtue. A man who is sensitive to it will carry out all the rules of good behavior. ‘A man who knows shame’ is sometimes translated as ‘virtuous man,’ sometimes ‘man of honor.’ ” Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 224.

7. 7. The 1983 gangster movie Ryūji refers to its main character as “a man of legend” (densetsu no otoko). As much as Japanese literature, films, TV shows, shame culture, or karaoke, the myth of the yakuza is constituted through the gaze of the West and, specifically, through the gaze of the United States. See, for instance, Sydney Pollack’s cult classic 1984 movie, The Yakuza; Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza; or, more recently, Adelstein, Tokyo Vice.

8. 8. In this respect, not much has changed since the early 1990s, when Gill wrote: “Who can get social security? A doctor’s letter stating that the bearer has a long-term illness or disability preventing him from working usually guarantees the success of an application: but people who are old or weak but lack any specific disabling condition must rely on the discretion of local officials.” Gill, “Sanya Street Life,” 278.

9. 9. As an obsessive object of identification, I draw here on the psychoanalytic concept of the “Thing.” See Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics,” 51–53. In the context of Japan, see Ivy, “Mourning the Japanese Thing.” See also chap. 3.

10. 10. Although there are many versions of the mujin kō, pooling club, or rotating savings and credit association, Geertz sums up the mujin kō as I saw it: “The basic principle upon which the rotating credit association is founded is everywhere the same: a lump sum fund composed of fixed contributions from each member of the association is distributed, at fixed intervals and as a whole, to each member of the association in turn. Thus, if there are ten members of the association, if the association meets weekly, and if the weekly contribution from each member is one dollar, then each week over a ten-week period a different member will receive ten dollars (i.e., counting his own contribution). If interest payments are calculated, by one mechanism or another, as part of the system, the numerical simplicity is destroyed, but the essential principle of rotating access to a continually reconstituted capital fund remains intact.” Geertz, “Rotating Credit Association,” 243. See also Ardener, “Comparative Study.”

11. 11. Like the lottery, the mujin kō has premodern origins and has been considered a form of gambling, as its success depends on the reliability of its members. In some of its iterations, the individual who takes the pot home was even decided by a draw. But the mujin, which translates as “inexhaustible” (mujin), followed by “compassion” or “traditional cooperative” (kō), has historically functioned as financial aid for the poor or as a bank for people without credit. Moreover, as an underground institution designed to protect its members against destitution, the mujin has been subject to regulation by the Japanese state and the Ministry of Finance. Tetsuo Najita provides an exhaustive genealogy of the mujin kō, grounded as it is in practices and discourse connected to figures like Miura Baien or Ninomiya Sontoku. Najita writes: “Based on commoner or commensense epistemology, commoners wrote and published in the hope that other commoners would read and reflect on how ordinary people were able to control knowledge and overcome poverty. Such efforts were intrinsic to ethical practice and not demeaning to human virtue. The issues addressed here were fundamentally about trust and contract relations that could save lives by means of initiatives taken without any expectation of political benevolence. Everyone in the community understood that as a matter of common sense, as many people as possible had to join in this self-help effort.… Except for scholars like Baien, who will be discussed later, this remains a history without names, primarily one about social thinking and action and not about scholarly debates that abounded in Tokugawa times. Mine also is a history that discusses the theme of organization and practice in the form of economic insurance confraternities known as kō, termed most commonly as cooperatives of ‘inexhaustible compassion’ (mujin kō) and of trust like that between ‘mother and child’ (tanomoshi kō).” Najita, Ordinary Economies in Japan, 16–17. See also Embree, Suye Mura.

12. 12. While the mujin kō or tanomoshi kō has become relatively rare on the Japanese mainland, it continues to thrive in Okinawa, where it is known as the moai. Whether the practice of the mujin kō in San’ya derived from the Okinawan identity of many of its members, from a historical practice specific to San’ya, or from a combination of the two, I do not know. Writing of Okinawa, Christopher T. Nelson describes the affective, commemorative, and social power of the moai: “As they make whatever sacrifices they need to make and come together to recreate the moai, as they share this deceptively ordinary moment together again, they experience once more the pain, the pride, and the pleasure in that act. As they look to each of the moments that extend into the past, they know what they can hope for in the future: To be known and valued, to be in the company of those upon whom they rely. It is a kind of creative dialectic. They seize the opportunity to remember who they are and what they can do, to make the most of this moment—of all moments. In doing so, they mobilize capacities and practices that can move beyond this moment, to transform their lives and their worlds in new ways.” Nelson, “They Were Right,” 140.

13. 13. Of the moai, Nelson writes: “As romanticized as it might be in popular culture, most Okinawans know that the moai can be inadequate to the challenges that threaten the everyday. The moai can even become oppressive mechanisms in which unpleasant or exploitative relationships are reproduced and renewed. Every Okinawan knows stories about moai that have careened out of control, demanding greater and greater contributions from members until many broke under the weight of financial obligation. Some became speculative, vehicles for the valorization of capital rather than mutual support. Others collapsed as members proved themselves unworthy of friends’ trust, slipping away with their winnings and breaking the cycle of reciprocity.” Nelson, 134.

14. 14. Perhaps on account of my friendship with Akira, of which Akira said that Guy-san was jealous, the head of the NPO had taken to giving me the cold shoulder, particularly so after I stopped volunteering.

15. 15. Translated as “you,” omae can be a particularly condescending form of address, as it was in this case.

16. 16. Oyama, himself a day laborer, writes of a similar encounter with doctors: “He didn’t stop writing in his file even when I sat in the chair right in front of him. I waited for the exam to begin, but he didn’t stop writing even then, so finally, unable to bear the silence, I launched into a catalog of my symptoms. The doctor still didn’t lay eyes on me, however; he simply continued scribbling in his file. He seemed to realize that I’d been talking only when I had finished, at which point he whispered something to the nurse standing next to him. She escorted me out of the room to an area where I could have my blood pressure recorded and produce a urine sample.… Later, when she finally called me back into the room, there he was, with his nose still in a file. At this point the form he was filling out seemed to be on my behalf; he handed the completed form to the nurse. ‘That’s all now; we’ll get you your medicine,’ she said, and ushered me out of the room. During the entire exam, the doctor did not look at me or speak to me even once.

17. “I paid this doctor more than ten visits altogether, with virtually the same scenario playing itself out every time.” Oyama, Man with No Talents, 102.

18. 17. Like omae above, anata (you) can operate as a condescending form of address.

19. 18. Journal entry from 2013.

20. 19. Alexandre Kojève writes of this “negating-negativity” as an “absolute liquefaction of every stable-support.” See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 21–23.

21. 20. As Julia Kristeva explicates it, abjection borders on the primal and therefore does not concern itself with secondary elaborations of subjectivity. Rather than “Who am I?,” the abject asks, “Where am I?” Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.

22. 21. Journal entry from 2013. People from Okinawa have long suffered from being unable to readily travel home. Rabson observes how, during the US occupation of Okinawa (1945–1972), the “military imposed strict regulations on travel, businesses, and currency transfers that hindered communication. People on the mainland were unable to reach Okinawa in time to be with critically ill relatives, help with child care when parents were called away unexpectedly, or provide other essential support in family emergencies. ‘When my grandfather was dying, my father couldn’t get a passport to return to Okinawa,’ recalls Osaka resident Kinjō Yūji. ‘So he went by ship as far as Yoron Island [at the southern tip of Japanese jurisdiction], then sailed in a sabani fishing boat all the way to Okinawa. But the shore patrol arrested him there and took him back to Japanese territory, so he couldn’t say goodbye to his dying father.’ ” Rabson, Okinawan Diaspora, 156.

23. 22. Members of the Okinawa-gang were intimately familiar with suicide by disembowelment. Akira attempted suicide in this manner. Shōkawa’s father had taken his life this way. And when I traveled with Akira to Miyakojima in 2015, he discovered that one of his childhood friends had passed away by “cutting the stomach” (hara o kitta). On account of this act, this friend was remembered with a grin by another acquaintance, accompanied by the words “he had grit” (konjō atta). While I cannot generalize beyond the men I knew, suicide by disembowelment was no cause for surprise among the guys. At the same time, suicide by disembowelment is most uncommon in Japan, where the most common way to commit suicide is hanging. The Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare does not offer any statistic on suicide by disembowelment and refers instead to suicide by use of a “sharp object,” which composed 2.5 percent of total suicides in 2017. See Izumi, “Tōkei de Miru Nihonjin”; and the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, “Jisatsu no tōkei.”

EPILOGUE

1. 1. Marx observed that capital accumulation not only mandates a reserve army of labor but that it produces a pauperism sustained by the state. See Marx, Capital, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” For a historical account that considers Okinawa within this framework, elucidating the resistances raised by the people of Okinawa to capitalist processes of dispossession, subsumption, and surplus extraction, especially in early modern Miyakojima, see Matsumura, Limits of Okinawa. For an account of the manner in which the Japanese state has sought to transform the people of Okinawa into a reserve army of labor, see Tomiyama, Okinawajin. Lastly, in The Okinawan Diaspora, Rabson provides a history of the expropriation of Okinawa and of the conditions that have forced generations of Okinawans to emigrate to mainland Japan in search of work.

2. 2. Writing in 2012, Rabson observes of Okinawa: “Along with Japanese government investment, a steadily growing tourist industry has brought economic growth to Okinawa, although mainland corporations have been criticized for building oceanfront resorts that damage the environment, and for siphoning most of the profits back to the mainland. While living standards have improved conspicuously since the occupation years, Okinawa remains the Japanese prefecture with the lowest per capita income (75 percent the national average) and the highest unemployment rate (twice the national average).” Rabson, Okinawan Diaspora, 36.

3. 3. Insofar as these ironic acts were legible to those around Kentarō and not necessarily to those in places of authority, consider the “periformative” as Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick’s develops this concept in Touching, Feeling.

4. 4. Places like San’ya constitute a breakdown in the mirroring structure to which Louis Althusser attributes the force of ideology. See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State.”

5. 5. This statement is not atypical. Rabson recounts the story of “a resident of Osaka in his forties [who] didn’t learn from his migrant parents about his Okinawan ethnicity until he was eight. He recalled feeling ashamed of it for many years, but later developed a pride that motivated him to say ‘I am not Japanese.’ ” Rabson, Okinawan Diaspora, 215.

6. 6. I circle back to Wojnarowicz and to the violence that any kind of exclusive identification entails, be it in masculinity, in being a “man,” an otoko, or in what Wojnarowicz describes as the “ONE-TRIBE NATION.” Wojnarowicz writes: “Words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience. Breaking silence about an experience can break the chains of the code of silence. Describing the once indescribable can dismantle the power of taboo. To speak about the once unspeakable can make the INVISIBLE familiar if repeated often enough in clear and loud tones. To speak of ourselves—while living in a country that considers us or our thoughts taboo—is to shake the boundaries of the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. To keep silent is to deny the fact that there are millions of separate tribes in this illusion called AMERICA. To keep silent even when our individual existence contradicts the illusory ONE-TRIBE NATION is to lose our own identities. BOTTOM LINE, IF PEOPLE DON’T SAY WHAT THEY BELIEVE, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS GET LOST. IF THEY ARE LOST OFTEN ENOUGH, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS NEVER RETURN.” Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 153.

7. 7. Journal entry from 2013.

8. 8. In “Hate Crimes and Violence against the Transgendered,” Tarynn M. Witten and A. Evan Eyler write, “Crimes of violence and victimization against transsexual, transgendered and cross-dressing persons are often characterized as either the action of individuals (males) who do not live within the rules of society, or as being somehow provoked by victims through their deviancy with regard to gender expectation. In each case, these arguments are simply extensions of the traditional discourse regarding violence against women: either the perpetrator is a ‘mad dog’ (i.e. a criminally deviant male) or the victim ‘asked for it’ (via exhibiting the ‘provocative behavior’ of failing to conform to gender role expectations).” Witten and Tyler, “Hate Crimes and Violence,” 461.

9. 9. Susan Stryker observes: “Those who commit violence against transgender people routinely seek to excuse their own behavior by claiming they have been unjustly deceived by a mismatch between the other’s gender and genitals. State and society do similar violence to transgender people by using genital status, rather than public gender or subjective gender identity, as the fundamental criterion for determining how they will place individuals in prisons, residential substance abuse treatment program, rape crisis center, or homeless shelter.” Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges,” 10. Commenting on the constructed character of the order of sex, Rosalind C. Morris writes: “The constructedness of bodies becomes most visible when it deviates from the expectations of the dominant ideology.… Ambiguity is the taboo of medicalized bodies, the impermissible threat against which hormone therapies and surgical intervention are marshalled so relentlessly.” Morris, “All Made Up,” 570. I thank Tommy Birkett for many of these sources and for commenting on this section.

10. 10. See Knight, “LGBT Bullying and Exclusion.” See also McLelland and Suganuma, “Sexual Minorities.” For an older take on theater and the theatricality of cross-dressing in Japan, see Robertson, “Politics of Androgyny.”

11. 11. Stryker writes of the transformative potential of “transgender rage”: “[It] furnishes a means of disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject positions. It makes possible the transition from one gendered subject position to another possible by using the impossibility of complete subjective foreclosure to organize an outside force as an inside drive and vice versa. Through the operation of rage, the stigma itself becomes the source of a transformative power.” Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 253.

12. 12. Of the threat of constructedness and the normative violence it triggers, Stryker writes: “Confronting the implications of this constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence. As the bearers of this disquieting news, we transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others, but we do not willingly abide the rage of others directed against us. And we do have something else to say, if you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists, even within fields of domination that bring about the universal cultural rape of all flesh.” Stryker, 254.

13. 13. Many former members of the Matsuda-group did indeed go to work at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

14. 14. Thus, Sandy Stone writes of “the force of an imperative—a natural state toward which all things tend—to deny the potentialities of mixture, acts to preserve ‘pure’ gender identity.” Stone, “Empire Strikes Back,” 226.

15. 15. Miyazaki, Toppamono, 221.

16. 16. Journal entry from 2012.

17. 17. I translate the “general” (ippan) of “general society” (ippan shakai) as “ordinary” (ippan) or “ordinary folk” (ippan no hito).