Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. vii, 241 pp. US$26.00, paper. ISBN 9781503633780.
Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2022. xix, 236 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$31.00, paper. ISBN 9788776943127.
Akiko Takeyama’s monograph Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry comes at a time when discussion of precarious contract work, exploitative “black” companies, and shakeups of labor laws are almost constant fixtures in the Japanese news media. At the same time, wider discussions surrounding sexual consent and what it means to say “yes” (particularly in cases when unequal power relations are at play) are becoming increasingly mainstream. It is these two issues that intersect as Takeyama takes on the mammoth task of understanding “forced performance” in the adult video industry. Approaching the issue from multiple perspectives, Takeyama draws on years of fieldwork and interviews with adult video actresses, managers and management companies, industry insiders, and adult video consumers and fans, to “analyze consent and question liberal premises at the heart of the AV industry” (27). The book wrestles with age-old debates, asking “How do women who nominally give consent to sex on camera—as well as emotional labor on and off the set—make sense of the lines between consent and coercion, euphoria and suffering, and agency and subordination?” (27), and explores how “not only liberty but also violence is experienced in the space between consent and coercion, freedom and slavery, and justice and injustice” (21). Through a beautifully in-depth ethnography Takeyama reveals the complexities inherent in a system well known for exploitation, and the legal frameworks that make such exploitation not only possible but perhaps inevitable.
I first delved into Involuntary Consent just as the Johnny and Associates scandal broke and it was revealed that the head of one of Japan’s largest talent agencies had for decades been sexually assaulting young boys and men signed to the agency. The Johnny’s scandal joined many other stories of the exploitative relationships between celebrities and their management companies and as I read Involuntary Consent I began to consider whether the arguments Takeyama makes can be extended further, whether all public performance, all celebrity, is deeply interwoven with abusive practices. Certainly, exploitation is, as the system stands, unavoidable. For the women about whom Takeyama writes, this abuse may be more easily apparent as it involves coercion and permanent records of sexual activity that can never be erased, no matter how hard the actress may try. But within wider Japanese society, the coercion of often young, vulnerable people who lack support networks occurs in many industries, and the entertainment industry in particular. What does it mean for Japanese society (and AV consumers) to prize “young, inexperienced women with open arms as untainted, valuable commodities” (90). The adult video industry Takayama writes of operates as the proverbial canary in the coalmine, illuminating the “multilayered sexual, symbolic, and structural violence” (90) that permeates all facets of society in late-capitalist Japan. Longer work hours, less pay, less stability, taking on work even when uncomfortable and unwilling, and ever worsening precarity are hallmarks of this era that can be understood through the lens of the adult video industry Takeyama explores.
To this end, the symbolic violence explored in Involuntary Consent is particularly interesting, and I hope future work will build on her arguments to further understand the systematic violence towards women emblematic of contemporary capitalist societies. Takeyama’s focus on law, and on contracts in particular, is an interesting choice. I appreciate that the author’s ethnographic work led her to this perspective, but at times I wondered if there were a more interesting way to take on the questions of consent and coercion inherent in the AV industry, and all industries. As Takeyama outlines, “The liberal assumption of ‘possessive individualism,’ moreover, makes no place for structural inequalities and violence animating the lived experience of laboring under contract” (32). I very much hope then that future work will build on the arguments made in Involuntary Consent and will turn to the hypocrisy of a society that at once consumes vast amounts of pornography, while at the same time marginalizes the women who appear in it, marking them with lifelong stigma. Exploitation in the form of “forced performance” is one issue in need of address, but the stigma that follows those in the adult video industry (willing or coerced) is another area that I believe needs more attention.
Ultimately, I returned time and time again to the argument Takeyama makes on page 81, that the silencing of women by other women is “symptomatic of a deeper form of structural violence to state the problem as primarily a fight between women over their ideological differences, which deflects public attention from the fundamental problem—sexism” (81). Involuntary Consent is not a discussion of pro-sex work and anti-sex work. It is a discussion of systematic, structural violence towards women in a “masculinist sexual commerce and the juridical system perpetuate the sexist status quo” (81), and it is a discussion that adds much needed depth to the field of porn studies in Japan. Involuntary Consent offers an important perspective on the so-called “porn debates” and fleshes out an often-overlooked aspect of the discussion through in-depth conversations with industry insiders. In fact, any concerns I had over the scope of the book were tempered by the meticulous and thorough way in which Takeyama understood the industry from multiple perspectives. As demonstrated in her previous monograph Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (Stanford University Press, 2016) Takeyama is a master ethnographer, gathering rich data from a wider variety of interlocuters and using it to weave together a vivid picture of a time, place, and industry.
Another exciting publication on gender and Japan is The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan. Edited by Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi and featuring the work of up-and-coming scholars, The Work of Gender emerged from a 2018 workshop at Newcastle University and its seven chapters focus primarily on fields which are often difficult to access, and interlocuters with whom trust takes time to build. The volume does something I believe to be very important—it provides well-researched, academic perspectives on areas of Japanese society which all too often appear as “weird Japan” journalistic and social media clickbait in the internet age.
Each chapter focuses on the “work of gender” in a particular field, illuminating the intimacies, performances, and conflicts experienced by the people in that field. Marcello Francioni discusses the policing of gender roles as experienced working in a gay bar in Shinjuku Ni-chōme and explains the sometimes surprising power dynamics and emotional work at play. Marta Fanasca explores the experience of escorts at a dansō (male crossdressing) company by training as an escort herself and navigating the construction of gender as a complex transaction. Nicola Phillips considers what it means to perform amateur authentic intimacy at a “delivery health” service ostensibly specializing in “unattractive” women and considers the concept of “bounded intimacy.” The framework of “bounded intimacy” appears again in Maiko Kodaka’s wonderfully in-depth chapter on female-friendly porn fans that considers emotional attachments between the male eromen AV performers and female fans and brings a much-needed perspective to the study of female-friendly porn in Japan today. Robert Simpkin’s chapter on street music performance in Koenji and the gendered nature of image cultivation and experience of performers unpicks what often lies unseen when viewing live music performances. Lyman Gamberton begins with auto-ethnography and expands to illuminate the experiences of transgender individuals and the stubbornly heteronormative parameters they must navigate. Each chapter offers insight into a facet of Japanese society often hidden from view, and explores the complexity often overlooked within journalistic and social media representation. From gay bars to escort companies, cross dressing to sex work, street performances to the lived experience of transgender individuals, the early career researchers featured in this edited volume treat their subjects with great respect and relay the experiences of those on the margins of Japanese society with the care and nuance they deserve.
At the heart of both Involuntary Consent and The Work of Gender are rich descriptions of the authors’ ethnographies. Unfortunately, at times the descriptions provided of the fields, interlocuters, and the perceived motivations behind people’s behavior read as slightly underdeveloped. What someone’s clothing implies about their career, for example, may not be as straightforward as assuming that those in suits are white collar workers and those in more casual clothing may be unemployed. At times I found myself jarred out of the narrative as a result and I was left wondering if the descriptions provided were as accurate as one might hope for in academic work of this kind. While I trust that the authors know their interlocuters well as a result of their time in the field, perhaps more consideration to how the descriptions provided may come across to a reader who has not been to the places described may have added depth. Japanese studies has a long history of unfortunately orientalist or othering representation that draws upon long debunked assumptions about the country and people, rather than serving to reveal complex and diverse realities. I am heartened to see the field move away from this particular tradition, but at times see small remnants persist in contemporary writing. Similarity, the tendency to see Japan as a monolith is something that surfaces at unexpected times. Statements such as that from editors Gygi and Hansen in the introduction to The Work of Gender that in contrast to Euro-American discourses centered on the “authentic self,” “Japanese social experience has a greater appreciation of the fact that to be oneself, one needs others” (19) are perhaps unhelpful in a volume that explicitly sets out to illuminate a diversity of experiences. As each of the chapters illuminates, subjects experience wildly different things even when in the same environment and reducing this experience to something “essentially Japanese” is to overlook the complexity of individual actors and their identities in contemporary Japan.
The other shared theme that runs throughout both books is the nature of precarity in late capitalism, and ways in which people are compelled to engage in affective labor with little hope of security or long-term stability as a reward. Again, this is not a new phenomenon, but it is one which is always shifting in the way it presents. The snapshot of life in Japan at this particular time offered in both Involuntary Consent and The Work of Gender is one that will no doubt serve to inform future work. As every element of the human experience is commodified, as every experience is subject to coercion (both direct and indirect), the question of whether “commodification and authenticity are incompatible” (15) is one that gets returned to time and time again.
Both Involuntary Consent and The Work of Gender bring fresh perspectives and timely voices from the field at a time when Japanese society is undergoing cultural, economic, and demographic upheaval. Both will no doubt find their way on to Japanese studies, gender studies, anthropology, and cultural studies syllabi and will, I hope, work to inspire the next generation of scholars to go out into the field and explore the diverse lived experiences of people in Japan.
Alexandra Hambleton
Tsuda University, Tokyo