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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Young Japanese are at the center of a number of crisis discourses. In political debates youth tends to be cast primarily as the “central resource for the future of Japan” while a range of media present young Japanese simply as passive agents in processes of social change, as a solution to Japan’s demographic crisis, or as subjects of unstable employment and delayed marriage and childbirth. This ethnographic panel shifts the focus to the perspective of youth themselves and their perceptions of increasing insecurity and dissatisfaction with conventional life choices. In response, youth employ different strategies that highlight their creation of new understandings of identity, maturity and adulthood.
Collectively we explore the various ways in which young Japanese approach decisions about their life paths in the process of growing up. We examine their perspectives on the choices they make, their attitudes regarding their future, and their views of Japanese society as a whole. Anthropologist Etsuko Kato proposes that “self-searching migrants” create a subjective and age-independent definition of youth; cultural sociologist Silke Werth explores migration as prolonged moratorium period in search of a suitable social and geographical place; anthropologist Emma Cook highlights how young part-time workers strive to frame their actions as intentional and cultural psychologist Vinai Norasakkunkit discusses motivational styles of youth at risk of being economically and socially marginalized. Together with anthropologist Roger Goodman as discussant we hope to deepen and broaden the debate about youth and the changing meanings of “adulthood” in Japan and beyond.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Silke Werth, University of California, Santa Barbara

Chair

• Sabine Fruhstuck, University of California, Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Indefinitely “Young”: Japanese Self-Searching Migrants and Subjective Definitions of Youth - Etsuko Kato, International Christian University

• Generation Z’s Moratorium Migration: Young Japanese Navigate Their Maturation - Silke Werth, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Growing Up is Giving In? Negotiating Adulthood through Intentional Action - Emma Cook, Hokkaido University

• Demotivated to Align Self with Cultural Norms: Psychological Consequences of Youth Marginalization - Vinai Norasakkunkit, Gonzaga University

Discussant

• Roger Goodman, University of Oxford