ABSTRACT

This chapter presents empirical data on employment trends and interprets precarity in the context of changing labor market conditions and the unraveling of the reproductive bargain. Japan's celebrated economic miracle had supported a form of company citizenship, basing rights and entitlements on the masculine embodiment of labor associated with the employment of a core male workforce in large enterprises. The chapter illustrates the state's investment in the mythologization and mystification of standard employment. The state's discursive production of precarious labor categories shaped the liminal spaces that nonstandard workers occupy. The chapter focuses on the formation of new labor associations organizing the unemployed and precarious workers in a changing landscape of work and politics. The growing number of young men employed in precarious work challenges the dominant image of Japan represented symbolically by the heteronormative, middle-class, citizen worker in Japanese culture and politics.