Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. xii, 270 pp. US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7668-5.
This collection sets out to challenge the “orientalism and exoticism” (2) that has stereotyped Japanese people as “a population fascinated by sex but not actually having any” (1). It does so by presenting a wide spectrum of practices and arrangements under the rubric of “intimate” lives, going beyond a commonplace conflation of intimacy with heterosex and romantic love. It also provides readers with insights into how the dramatic socio-economic transformations in Japan since the 1990s have played out in individual lives. The featured ethnographies successfully illuminate the tensions and conflicts around intimacy in Japan in this tumultuous period. The last chapter also provides a helpful discussion on the challenges of conducting fieldwork research on intimate lives. Yet it is a pity that there is neither an overarching framework to explain how the chapters cohere, nor how these shifts in intimate relationships could be understood in relation to a changing sense of personhood, embedded in broader processes of economic restructuring, political developments, and globalization.
The exploration of sexual and reproductive practices outside of the marital context illuminates both the strength of the marital ideal and the contestations that continue to unsettle it. Yukari Kawahara’s chapter shows the diversity of high-school students’ ideas and practices of love and sex in the mid-1990s, reflecting both conformity and departures from the ideals promoted by the new sex education curriculum, as well as gendered differences and to a lesser extent class differences. Shana Fruehan Sandberg analyzes the cultural and gendered logic of Japanese women’s perception of the pill as an “unnatural” technology, and thereby their preference for the withdrawal method, in relation to the history of fertility regulation in Japan. With a focus on self-identified “unconventional women” and their pursuit of romance and sexual fulfillment before and beyond marriage, Laura Dales and Beverley Anne Yamamoto argue that single women’s desire for sexual intimacy has been conceptually constructed in contradistinction to the reproductive sex and pragmatic intimacy in marriage.
Naturalized notions of gender and intimate practices are challenged by broader social, demographic, and cultural transformations. S. P. F. Dale’s chapter skillfully unpacks the emergent and complex negotiations of transgender identities in Japan beyond the medicalized understanding of gender identity disorder. Closely engaged with popular culture and individual narratives, Dale analyzes the ways “x-gender” serves as a platform for articulating “specific desires and means of desiring” (165). Gender could, for example, be claimed on the basis of how one wants to be treated in intimate relations, or in the sexual gaze. Kathryn Goldfarb demonstrates the shifting meanings of “blood ties” through the experiences of foster and adoptive families, analyzing the malleability of the term in demarcating boundaries of intimacy in modern Japan. As the search for marriage partners became unmoored from one’s workplace and community, the commercialization of “partner hunting” expanded to the international front. Chigusa Yamaura shows us how transnational marriage brokers and Japanese men discursively construct these unions as “ordinary” to make them socially acceptable. Diana Adis Tahhan examines conflicting understandings of intimacy, parenthood, and family through struggles over sleep arrangements in Japanese-Australian families, highlighting the important role body practices play in intimate inclusion and exclusion.
The chapters on men’s experiences in particular provide insights into internal debates about economic and gender inequalities in Japanese society, illuminating how intimate relations are entwined with access to economic resources. Elizabeth Miles’ chapter examines the “burden of intimacy” on young men in the “marriage/love market” (151). The chapter draws on rich ethnographic vignettes from men’s demonstrations against the “love capital system,” and a commercial speed-dating event. Emma Cook examines how irregular employment impinges on heterosexual relationships, undermining men’s capacity to fulfill normative gender roles, contributing to power struggles in the intimate sphere. It is puzzling that Cook compares an older couple from a documentary film with a young couple from her fieldwork without attending to issues of representation and generational differences.
How do people do and undo intimate relations? How are such actions gendered? Allison Alexy observes a shift from the idealization of non-verbal communication between couples embodied in the idiom “love like air” to that of an explicit articulation of love in the 2000s. Men, in particular, have been called on to change their behaviours accordingly—echoing the changing images of “corporate masculinity” that other scholars have examined (for example, Nana Okura Gagné, “The Business of Leisure, the Leisure of Business,” Asian Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2012): 29–55). In the context of rising rates of domestic violence and new legislation to protect victims of spousal violence in 2001, Kaoru Kuwajima finds that women’s “expectations that violence and intimacy are always intertwined” (125) causes them to stay in abusive relationships. It is only when they “revise and regain their sense of self” (125) that they feel they can leave the perpetrators and move on with their lives. These two chapters raise important questions, but stop short of engaging with shifting notions of selfhood and the association of romantic love with being modern and successful (a theme discussed in works such as Laura Ahearn’s analysis of modernization, literacy, and love in Nepal, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love, and Social Change in Nepal, University of Michigan Press, 2001).
The book will be useful to introductory courses on Japan, marriage, and families, as well as gender and sexualities. The personal stories and struggles of intimacy are clearly negotiations of changing meanings of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” standards, “natural” and “unnatural” ways of practicing intimacy, and of sameness and difference in Japan. The weakness of the collection lies in its focus on the particularities of Japan, and the lack of attempt to locate these intimate negotiations in the regional and global context. This undermines the contribution of the volume to a theorization of intimacy within broader processes of modernization and globalization (see Jennifer Hirsch and Holly Wardlow, eds., Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage, University of Michigan Press, 2006; Mark Padilla et al., eds., Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, Vanderbilt University Press, 2007; Lynn Thomas and Jennifer Cole, eds., Love in Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2009). As such, this is a missed opportunity to use ethnographies to understand culturally specific articulations of intimacy as fundamental human experiences.
Sea ling Cheng
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong