Chika Watanabe

The Politics of Nonreligious Aid: A Japanese Environmental Ethic in Myanmar

In the spring of 1994, Nakamura,1 from the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), a Japanese NGO, headed to Myanmar for the first time. He was accompanying a Japanese official from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Japanese and Burmese government officials to investigate the possibility of starting an agricultural training programme there. The group travelled all over the central region of the Dry Zone, one of the poorest parts of the country, in search of potential OISCA project sites. This was the dry season when there is no rain and temperatures can rise to as high as 50 degrees Celsius, and the conditions were difficult everywhere. They covered most of the area to the east of the Irrawaddy River, but one day they decided to cross to the other side to Pakokku District where no international agency or NGO had gone. Partly out of curiosity, they headed to a monastery in Yesagyo Township where a small, famous Buddha statue was kept.

Temporalities of Precarity

As recent news articles reveal, the continuing cleanup of Japan’s nuclear disaster has been dumped disproportionately on the backs of unskilled temporary workers. Anne Allison’s profound and at times heartbreaking book shows that this is not a product of the 2011 disaster but rather a manifestation of a longer-term historical malaise that emerged with the end of Japan’s postwar “miracle.” The book focuses on what Allison calls “sensing precarity”—the ways that people in Japan today experience and sense the precariousness of their everyday lives. In a time of high unemployment, growing poverty, and abandoned lives left to die in solitude—with the added specter of nuclear contamination after 2011—Precarious Japan makes a significant contribution to understandings of precarity and of how it not only transforms modes of production but also fractures sociality in painful ways. Drawing on a wide range of materials from news stories, movies, ethnographic material, and interviews with activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens, Allison captures the mood of uncertainty that prevails in Japan today. In fact, the word “uncertainty” does not quite reflect what is at stake. The opening scene indicates a more devastating condition: “The body of a fifty-two-year-old man, ‘mummifying’ already, was discovered one month after starving to death” (1). The social landscape that unfolds in the ensuing 200 pages reveals how a man’s life could end in such a way in contemporary Japan. Allison spotlights the lives of the working poor, temporary workers, NEET (not in education, employment, or training) youth, and hikikomori (socially withdrawn individuals) who struggle to get by without the safety of jobs or human connections. She foregrounds this latter condition—the lack of human relationships—as the central issue of precarity. The “hardship of life” (ikizurasa) that many of her interlocutors voice is fundamentally about the disconnect that individuals feel vis-à-vis others: families, classmates, neighbors, workplaces, the nation. What Allison manages to convey compellingly is that the entrenchment of precarious labor combined with the neoliberal emphasis on self-sustainability is most troubling in its dismembering of sociality. People are

Temporalities of Precarity (book review of Precarious Japan (2013) by Anne Allison)

As recent news articles reveal, the continuing cleanup of Japan’s nuclear disaster has been dumped disproportionately on the backs of unskilled temporary workers. Anne Allison’s profound and at times heartbreaking book shows that this is not a product of the 2011 disaster but rather a manifestation of a longer-term historical malaise that emerged with the end of Japan’s postwar “miracle.” The book focuses on what Allison calls “sensing precarity”—the ways that people in Japan today experience and sense the precariousness of their everyday lives. In a time of high unemployment, growing poverty, and abandoned lives left to die in solitude—with the added specter of nuclear contamination after 2011—Precarious Japan makes a significant contribution to understandings of precarity and of how it not only transforms modes of production but also fractures sociality in painful ways. Drawing on a wide range of materials from news stories, movies, ethnographic material, and interviews with activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens, Allison captures the mood of uncertainty that prevails in Japan today. In fact, the word “uncertainty” does not quite reflect what is at stake. The opening scene indicates a more devastating condition: “The body of a fifty-two-year-old man, ‘mummifying’ already, was discovered one month after starving to death” (1). The social landscape that unfolds in the ensuing 200 pages reveals how a man’s life could end in such a way in contemporary Japan. Allison spotlights the lives of the working poor, temporary workers, NEET (not in education, employment, or training) youth, and hikikomori (socially withdrawn individuals) who struggle to get by without the safety of jobs or human connections. She foregrounds this latter condition—the lack of human relationships—as the central issue of precarity. The “hardship of life” (ikizurasa) that many of her interlocutors voice is fundamentally about the disconnect that individuals feel vis-à-vis others: families, classmates, neighbors, workplaces, the nation. What Allison manages to convey compellingly is that the entrenchment of precarious labor combined with the neoliberal emphasis on self-sustainability is most troubling in its dismembering of sociality. People are