Seiji doesn't find this out until his mother has reached an almost catatonic state of self-hatred. When the family moved into the neighborhood, Seiichi even bragged about this arrangement, inviting resentment from his richer neighbors, who immediately saw the Takes as living above their station. It is actually owned by Seiichi's company, which rents it out to him for ¥50,000 a month.
It turns out the Takes don't own that nice home. Seiichi downplays his wife's condition as simply a "weak spirit," but Seiji eventually comes to realize that she is the victim of years of ostracism and even outright persecution by their neighbors. The mother suffers from a debilitating depression, which her husband blames on Seiji's willfulness and failure to secure respectable employment, despite the fact that Seiji is the only family member who sees to his mother's special needs.
Seiji also has an older sister who has married very well.īut the Takes are not happy. They live in a nice two-story house in a toney suburb. His mother, Sumiko (Atsuko Asano), is a full-time homemaker. His father, Seiichi (Naoto Takenaka), is an accountant at a medium-size company. Seiji's home life appears to be stereotypically middle class and comfortable. Focusing on Seiji Take (Kazunari Ninomiya), a recent college graduate who heedlessly quits his full-time office job after only three months, the story taps into widespread anxiety over the current employment situation but the dramatic component has less to do with economic hardship than with the fragile bonds that hold a family together.
Freeter japan series#
This idea provides the real-life ballast for Fuji TV's drama series "Freeter, Ie wo Kau" ("A Part-time Worker Buys a House" Tues., 9 p.m.), which is based on a novel by Hiro Arikawa. In between, the middle class is wondering what happened to its bright future. Rich people are now profiled on variety shows while the growing ranks of people living on the margins have become the subjects of searching, portentous NHK documentaries. The bubble era and the subsequent lost decade brought class distinctions out into the open. The poor, of course, exist, but traditionally they were hidden away and it was considered bad form for the rich to flaunt their wealth. That may sound strange since Japanese people have always maintained that they are a uniformly middle class society. The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing by the minute, and in that sense Japan is an appropriate example. Nevertheless, the so-called American dream is likely a thing of the past. The American economy is dynamic while Japan's has always been passive and reactive.
Providing a fascinating alternative to the stereotypical idea of the Japanese male as a salaryman, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, social and cultural anthropology, gender and men's studies.The American media keeps wondering whether or not the United States will have to endure a "lost decade" of sluggish growth and stagnant employment like the one Japan suffered through after the real-estate bubble burst in the early 1990s. Highlighting the continuing importance of productivity and labour in understandings of masculinities, it argues that men experience and practice multiple masculinities which are often contradictory, sometimes limiting, and change as they age and in interaction with others, and with social structures, institutions, and expectations. It queries how notions of adulthood and masculinity are interwoven and how these ideals are changing in the face of large-scale employment shifts. This book, drawing on six years of ethnographic research, takes the lives of male freeters as a lens to examine contemporary ideas and experiences of adult masculinities.
Within this context, "freeters", part-time workers aged between fifteen and thirty-four who are not housewives or students, emerged into the public arena as a social problem. Over the past two decades, Japan’s socioeconomic environment has undergone considerable changes prompted by both a long recession and the relaxation of particular labour laws in the 1990s and 2000s.
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