Twenty years ago, Gavan McCormack depicted what he called “the emptiness of Japanese affluence.”Footnote ¹⁴ A society hell-bent on economic triumph had become trapped in what McCormack termed the “3Cs”: construction, consumption, and control. Corrupt, profligate state-funded construction served no purpose; high-volume consumption produced no lasting pleasure; and advertising, social pressures, and other “soft” forms of coercion pushed people into conformity and relentless labor. Anne Allison's moving and important new book might be read as a sequel to McCormack's insights. Today, emptiness has darkened into precarity. Japan, Inc. has crumbled, and many Japanese people teeter on the verge of despair. Misery erupts in murder, as in 2007 when a fired temporary worker drove a two-ton truck into pedestrians and then leapt from his vehicle, slashing with a knife. Poverty smothers the hopes of many employed young people due to the extremely low minimum wage. Even college graduates cannot find decent jobs. Japan's high poverty rate is second only to the United States among developed countries. Lacking economic and social security, fewer people marry and become parents. Those dying from “lonely death” leave corpses that sometimes mummify before being discovered. There are ten of these kodokushi per day in the capital alone. Endurance rather than a bright future is the goal of many who struggle daily to find the courage to keep going. Even consolation comes in strange new forms. Tsurumi Wataru wrote Kanzen jisatsu manyuaru (The complete manual of suicide), describing the relative pain, efficiency, and speed of various suicide techniques, not to encourage death seeking but, he says, to “calm people in giving them the knowledge that they have a choice” (p. 133). Such is the bleak landscape of contemporary Japan. The previous “emptiness” analyzed by McCormack had at least been partly cushioned by social welfare and social ties, even though they were geared toward economic imperatives. Today, even those ameliorations have been stripped away. Existential pain and loneliness prevail.

As Precarious Japan makes vividly clear, the nation's postwar economic crescendo was propelled by almost every institution in Japanese society, including the family. Wives stayed home tending to husbands in the thrall of corporate duties and raising children for success in the competitive education system. Husbands chained to their companies through the system of “lifetime employment” paid high prices for “leisure” activities with business associates at golf clubs and hostess bars. These arenas of domesticity, schooling, and (male) leisure were never distinct from the “family corporate system” (kazoku kigyō kan kankei in Kimoto Kimiko's phrase) as Allison's acclaimed earlier research made clear. As a result, when the economic bubble burst and social welfare was drastically slashed by Prime Minister Koizumi in 2002, there was no private network or private space, no ibasho or homey comfort, into which people could retreat. “My Home” collapsed as did the purposefulness of “education mamas” and the hospitality of hostess clubs. Without this system to provide structure, meaning, and care, individuals are now adrift. Relationships of trust and dependency (amae) are being replaced, partly through government exhortation, by self-reliance (jiko sekinin). The elderly, increasingly, are told to “age in place.” The result is devastating, leaving large numbers with neither regular work, social welfare, nor emotional ties.

Allison moves deftly across this landscape of pain. She interviews college women who shrug at the notion of planning for a future. She visits “internal refugees,” the irregularly employed who live hand to mouth. When they have a little cash, they may spend the night in “net cafes” that provide cheap lodging as well as an Internet connection. She collects stories from television broadcasts, films, books, and comics about a former government employee dying of starvation, a homeless middle-school student living alone in a dirty park, a boy beheading his mother, and young men hiding away in their bedrooms for years at a time. Persistently, she explores what it feels like to struggle for daily survival without hope, to live without human connections.

But, Precarious Japan also lingers on brave alternatives to current economic and social structures emerging at the margins of Japanese society. For instance, the Nippon Active Life Club, in common with “sharing economies” around the world, provides a way to exchange skills and time outside the conventional monetized system. Co-founder of the Reverse Poverty Network, Yuasa Makoto works to make homelessness and poverty visible by urging people to vent (or vomit, hakidashi) their pain and frustration. His efforts have been so effective that he was part of Prime Minister Hatoyama's brief non-LDP administration. In Nīgata, local activist Kawata Keiko has created a homelike space for easy companionship outside the family. Anyone can wander in and be made quietly welcome. The flamboyant Amamiya Kan, herself part of this new, insecure social class called the “precariat,” speaks publicly about the need for alternative families of caring, especially for the furīta, those consigned to a life without secure employment or sources of self-worth. Odd establishments such as “cat cafes” assuage loneliness: for the price of a cup of tea, customers can stroke felines and feel better. Labor economist Genda Yūji has founded the first center for the study of hope (kibōgaku or hopology) at Tokyo University's Institute of Social Science to counter bullying and bolster anticipation of the future. All these efforts suggest that rekindling “business as usual” and returning to Japan, Inc., even if that were possible, is undesirable. However inchoately, truer sources of well-being divorced from neoliberal imperatives are struggling to emerge.

Reading Precarious Japan, political scientists and economists may wish for a more precise analysis of the number of Japanese people who fall into the precariat. They may also want to understand the global financial forces creating precarity and why, despite all these difficulties, Japan still boasts the world's third-largest economy. Sociologists might desire comparisons between Japan's newly developing alternatives to neoliberalism and those in other societies. Environmentalists will note the absence of ecological materialism or any reference to such forms of precarity as Japan's infamous Four Big Pollution diseases—Itai-itai, Yokkaichi asthma, Minamata, and Niigata Minamata. Historians will wonder how the present precarity compares with the famines of the early nineteenth century, rural Japan's dislocation in the 1870s, or labor conditions in the two-tiered system of the 1920s. However, what Allison as an anthropologist has illuminated are the conditions of the soul, the cartography of despair, and the sense of futurelessness in contemporary Japan. She goes about her work by layering stories of encounters with those fighting for “bare life” whether as activists or victims or both. The same figures recur in different chapters; the same theorists are referenced; phrases recur. The result is a rich sensorium well-suited to the unsettling experiences she conveys.

Allison had almost finished her book when nature acted as though to confirm her theme of precarity. On March 11, 2011, the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history struck, resulting in the tsunami that devastated Tōhoku and triggered the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima plant. After the 3/11 disaster, in her final summer of research, Allison returned to Japan to investigate this new form of pain and dislocation. The tidal wave that reshaped Japan's northern coast also reshaped her story. As she participates in volunteer activities in the affected zone, she observes the rekindled energy and social connections forged through collective effort. But wisely she understands the fragility of emotions heightened by the emergency, the conflicting imperatives of immediate succor and long-term restructuring, and how, more ominously, a collective sense of beleaguered unity can morph into overbearing nationalism. Perhaps her most hopeful finding, in line with the work of others, such as Peter Matanle, is that local governments and organizations have reservoirs of knowledge, imagination, and flexibility that could be tapped if they were allowed greater independence by the centralized state.

Japan is a shape-shifting nation. Within living memory, it has been a fierce empire, a compliant occupied zone, the manufacturer of cheap merchandise, and the model of triumphant prosperity. Now, sadly, Japanese society falters, ravaged by callous political and market forces. Allison's welcome new book, Precarious Japan, maps this contemporary social terrain, examining what happens as subjectivity becomes unmoored from the “family corporate system” and liquefies into a sea of sadness. Allison insists that we comprehend the Japanese situation from the bottom up, from the heart out. The importance of her research lies not only in showing Japan's desolation but in suggesting that it may be the harbinger of ills everywhere under neoliberal capitalism unless we redefine our priorities. Despite the darkness revealed in many wrenching stories, the light of possible new forms of human connection also filters through Precarious Japan. Allison is as gallant as her interlocutors. One of the many achievements of the book is that its tone remains expansive and gracious, gesturing, tentatively, to hope.