The Reproductive Bargain Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, la, and Columbia University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Alfredo Saad Filho (University of London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University) VOLUME 77 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss The Reproductive Bargain Deciphering the Enigma of Japanese Capitalism By Heidi Gottfried LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Street in Ueno, Tokyo, Japan, with in the background the National Flag of Japan; photo taken by Jason Go (Singapore) on 6 June 2013. Source: Pixabay.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gottfried, Heidi, 1955- The reproductive bargain : deciphering the enigma of Japanese capitalism / by Heidi Gottfried. pages cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573-4234 ; vol. 77) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29149-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29148-5 (e-books : alk. paper) 1. Job security--Japan--History. 2. Industrial relations--Japan--History. 3. Employees--Japan--History. 4. Labor-- Japan--History. 5. Unemployment--Japan--History. 6. Capitalism--Japan. I. Title. HD5708.45.J3G68 2015 331.0952--dc23 2015011615 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573–4234 isbn 978-90-04-29149-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29148-5 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xv List of Tables xviii 1 The Enigma of Japanese Capitalism: An Historical Introduction 1 Forging a Reproductive Bargain in Postwar Japan 5 State and Society: The Formation of Japanese Capitalism 8 The Japanese Employment System: Regulating Labor, Labor Regulations 10 Unraveling Bargains: The Crisis of Reproduction 14 Conclusion: Precarity in Japan 17 The Enduring Enigma of Japanese Capitalism 18 2 Gendering Work: Deconstructing the Narrative of the Japanese Economic Miracle 24 The Japanese Employment System and the Hidden Bargain 26 Mapping Nonstandard Employment 30 The Reproductive Bargain 37 The Political Basis of the Reproductive Bargain 38 Conclusion 42 3 The Logics of Part-Time and Agency Temporary Employment 45 Trends and Tendencies 46 Parsing Part-time Employment 49 Socio-demographics of Agency Temporary Employment 52 Making Precarious Employment: Different Trajectories 54 National Regulatory Reform 55 Precarious Employment: Lessons from Japan 59 4 Temp(t)ing Bodies: Shaping Gender at Work in Japan 61 Feminist Theories of Embodiment 61 The Body at Work and the Work on the Body 61 Situated Selves: Gender and Embodiment at Work in Japanese Studies 63 Appropriate Methods 65 vi contents Gender, Bodies and Culture in Late 20th-Century Japan 68 Accounting for Gender Differences: the Rise of Nonstandard Employment 68 Temp(t)ing Options: Embodiment and Gender Regimes 71 Screening for Temp(t)ing Bodies 73 Age as Embodied Capacities and Competencies 76 Dis-placement in the Organizational Body 78 Conclusion 79 5 Compromising Positions: Emergent Neo-Fordisms and Reproductive Bargains 81 Fordism, Regulation and Reproductive Bargains 82 Neo-Fordism: What’s in a Name? 82 Compromising Positions: Fordism and Emerging Reproductive Bargains 85 Charting the Connections 86 Neo-Fordism and Bargains in Sweden, Germany and Japan 88 Social Democratic Corporatist Fordism: Sweden’s Third Way 88 Diversified-Quality Fordism: The German Bargain 91 Company Fordism in Japan 93 Alternative Paths to Emerging Neo-Fordisms: Stability and Change 96 Mapping Neo-Fordisms and Reproductive Bargains 100 6 Precarity among Youth: Current Challenges, Future Prospects 103 Introduction 103 Interpreting Youth Unemployment and Precarity 104 New Forms of Precarious Work and Precarity: Creating the Lost Generation? 106 Organizing Unemployed Youth 111 Conclusion: Accounting for and Consequences of Precarity among Youth in Japan 113 7 Another Lost Decade? The Future of Japanese Capitalism 117 The State of the Labor Movement: From Challenges and Opportunities to Precarity 122 Organizational Transformations and New Forms of Labor Activism 127 <UN> contents vii Unraveling of the Reproductive Bargain in Japan 134 Shifting Boundaries, Shifting Perspectives 136 Toward a New Political Agenda: Concluding Remarks 140 Bibliography 143 Subject Index 164 Name Index 167 <UN> Preface Wither Japanese Capitalism: Closely Watched Trains The station, a vast organism, which houses the big trains, the urban trains, the subway, a department store, and whole underground com- merce – the station gives the district this landmark which, according to certain urbanists, permits the city to signify, to be read. The Japanese sta- tion is crossed by a thousand functional trajectories, from the journey, to the purchase, from the garment to food: a train can open onto a shoe stall. barthes 1982, 38 Like most visitors to Japan, my trip begins at the nexus of air and rail in the Narita International Airport. The railroad and the airport are symbolic hubs emblematic of Japan’s modernity; both represent sites of private and state interventions building the new nation-state and sites of post-war contentious politics over the economic fate of the nation. Railroads are remnants of the prewar military complex, the infrastructure for industrial modernization, thrusting Empire into their territories, and epitomizing the iconic Japanese corporate networks (kiretsu) that own rail-lines to combine transportation with urban commerce in department stores at the terminus. From the earliest rail-line of the Edo period linking Yokohama and the new capital in Tokyo, to the nationalization of many rail-lines in 1906, the construction of railroads and later airports parallel stages of capitalist development. At the turn of the 20th Century, Japan built an extensive railway system throughout the colonies, con- solidating the physical empire and supporting the circulation and transmis- sion of art, material culture, and cross-border exchanges (Kleeman 2014, 7, 18). Japan’s postwar model crystallizes in the twin development of rail and air transport. To ensure reliable transportation in their effort to rebuild capitalist productive capacity in 1949, the us General hq issued a directive to reorganize much of the rail system by forming the Japanese National Railways (jnr), a state-owned public corporation. The Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) realized its postwar economic agenda, introducing and expanding high-speed rail including the line to Narita airport, with little input from unions and despite strike activity throughout the 1960s. Following a neo-liberal playbook, jnr was dismantled and privatized in 1987. This book follows the arc of my own intellectual journey in search of an explanation for the rise and decline of secure employment in an increasingly precarious Japan. In the spring of 1998, I board the Shinkansen, aka bullet <UN> x Preface train; it speeds along past barely noticeable vegetable farms and rice paddies, and slows down as dusk covers the Tokyo cityscape before stopping at “a vast organism” known as Tokyo Station. Amidst the blur of jetlag I merge with the swarm of thrumming people on the move in all directions despite the late hour. We join hundreds of thousands of passengers boarding trains daily. Overwhelmed, I try to find my way in this enclosed city within the city. On this first, and then on subsequent trips, Tokyo Station never loses its velocity and vitality, its dizzying array of offerings, its allure. From this location, I would embark on follow up research visits to the temporary-help agency Manpower’s offices at the heart of the financial district in Tokyo, then to their new head- quarters in Yokohama, still in close proximity to workers and clients linked by frequent trains leaving Tokyo Station. On the same track, the new Manpower offices herald the global processes of work (dis)placement and dislocation – now enclosed in a shopping mall.1 But I always return to the main train stations in Tokyo metropolitan area. At multiple train hubs around Tokyo, it is possible to “read,” as Roland Barthes’ postmodern travelogue invites the reader to do, an “empire of signs” of the setting sun. Whether standing on the platform or walking in and around the station, I apply my ethnographic imagination