Growing Up is Giving In? Negotiating Adulthood through Intentional Action

• In Event: Re-Negotiating Adulthood: Changing Ideals and Identities of Young Japanese

Abstract

In the postwar period before the 1990s, routes to adulthood and maturity in Japan appeared to be well structured and strongly linked to status transitions such as entering employment, marriage, parenthood and home ownership. However, with significant changes in employment practices, a weakening of school-to-work transitions, and the rapid increase of the irregular labour market, achieving such status transitions has become harder, and for some, less desirable. Freeters, part-time workers aged between 15-34 who are neither students or housewives, have been one group at the epicentre of these discussions in Japan. By drawing on participant observation and interviews conducted since 2007, this paper explores male freeters’ changing understandings of adulthood and maturity as they age, and their attempts to delink adulthood and maturity from status transitions through a focus on individualised notions of responsibility and intentional action. I argue that whilst these attempts are gradually reconfiguring ideas of adulthood in contemporary Japan, they are also simultaneously mediated by gendered expectations held by both themselves and the people around them. Their ideas also shift as they age and in interaction with others, leading to complex and often contradictory negotiations of what constitutes adulthood. Rather than giving in to social expectations of adulthood, however, they frame their actions as intentional and work to carve out socially legible understandings of adulthood that fits their values and lifestyles.

Author

• Emma Cook, Hokkaido University