ABSTRACT
Today, about 20% of Japanese men work as non-regular workers. They began to increase in the 2000s after several waves of labor market deregulation from the mid-90s onwards. Reflecting this increase, there is now an emerging generation of men whose life-course is constructed in the non-regular segment of the labor market. Some of them are already in their 30s and 40s and located outside Japanese welfare employment regime. Sociological studies of youth and masculinity hypothesized that this shift should change their masculinity. The chapter found that they experience the inferiority in everyday life in relation to their employers and their colleagues with regular status, who do not have to question the existing norms of the gender regime. Under such an environment, these young men need to justify themselves, putting oneself in moratorium, claiming social independence, or upholding gender conservatism. The existence of these strategies reveals the very fact that young men in non-regular employment feel trapped in emasculated life-courses that are stigmatizing them. Embodying breadwinner ideology more strongly than regular men reveals that the oppression makes them follow the central element of the dominant gender ideology in order to gain legitimacy for their lives.
