Working Hard at Having Fun Through Hobbies and Community

This chapter follows the working men's lives beyond the workplace, such as weekly volunteer cleaning in Tokyo Bay and marathon club activities. It introduces the vibrant space of the Bayside Half Marathon Club, whose active membership consisted of around fifty to sixty people who met regularly on weekends as well as after work. It also looks at the kinds of issues that arose in the club in terms of Japanese-style, highly managed leadership and provision for members versus laissez-faire-style, self-directed leadership that resonated with the kinds of tensions echoing in corporate hallways across Japan. The chapter explains how a leisure club like Bayside Half is deeply embedded in Japanese society as the social dynamics and ideologies resonate with those found in other leisure spaces and corporate spaces. It addresses the question on whether the highly institutionalized leisure space of a marathon club is a microcosm of corporate Japan.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on Japanese men who are working men, family men, aging men, and complex individual men in twenty-first-century Japan. It examines Japanese employees' life stories as they are interwoven with work, family, and leisure spaces in order to shed light on the complexity of employees' lives and on the shifting meanings of various interconnected contexts that are obscured by the economic logic of twenty-first-century Japan. It also analyses how oppositional ideological systems and different individuals clash, operate, and create new meanings. The chapter reveals the restructuring and resilience that marks the ways Japanese employees wrestle with, navigate through, and manipulate dominant ideologies operating in the local and global economies. It discusses the salarymen's shifting identities since the 1990s and the relationship between gender roles, employment structures, and the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese economy.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the different meanings of the new middle class, which describe the historical and cultural configurations of postwar Japan and universalized notions of socioeconomic class used in social science. It reflects on the configurations, relations, and operationalizations of the slippage between discursive and ideological characteristics of “middleness” that have been elided under the term the new middle class in postwar Japan. It also offers new insights on the understanding of dominant ideology and dominant groups, including anthropological theorizations of power, ideology, and subjectivity in late capitalism. The chapter emphasizes on the issues of individual self-cultivation and concerns of families in practice in the midst of socioeconomic change. It explains how salarymen or any other social actors represent both the nexus and product of ongoing self-cultivation and socialization in the changing global economy.

Working in and Working on Neoliberalism

This chapter explores how globalization and neoliberal economic reforms operate and are operationalized on the ground by companies. It discusses how Japanese workers responded to large-scale economic restructurings since the 1990s. It also reveals that the ideology of neoliberalism has been co-opted by Japanese corporations and management to reengineer older corporate practices in ways that were not possible before. The chapter describes key technologies of neoliberal restructuring in the form of the performance-based merit system and massive corporate restructuring that have destabilized the older corporate governance. It examines economic reforms on the ground level through the experiences and voices of employees and managers who have been on the front line of restructuring in postbubble Japan.

Historicizing Japanese Workers and Japanese Capitalism

This chapter begins with a brief historicization of salarymen from the late 1800s to the early 1990s. It focuses on the formation of the socioeconomic category of the New Middle Class and the cultural production of the new middle-class orientation within Japan's economic and industrial structure. It also traces the historical trajectory through which the modern configuration of welfare, work, and family emerged in prewar Japan and then took new shape in postwar Japan through the fractious struggle of workers and management. The chapter examines how the particular construction of the new middle class as a lived experience has been articulated through the socioeconomic category of the new middle class. It situates the contemporary discourse of neoliberal economic reforms within the historical development of Japanese corporate governance and Japanese capitalism.

Escaping the Corporate Shackles

This chapter reviews the life stories of individual men that complement their lived experiences with how they reflected and talked about the way they lived. It offers silhouettes that reflect the comprehensive structures and dynamics of individuals, institutions, and ideologies operating in contemporary Japan. It also narrates stories of succeeding through, struggling with, or reacting against the social and economic expectations incumbent with the discourse of salarymen in Japan. The chapter examines the concept of the salaryman as a dominant category under the dominant ideology of companyism, which is discursively decipherable due to its perceived distinction of Japanese nonsalarymen. It presents the glaring disjuncture of nonsalarymen who grasp the key characteristics and organizing idioms of those who are classified as salarymen.