Economic Shifts, Institutional Change, and Compensatory Masculinity in Japan

• In Event: 308 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01.Sexual Violence and Masculinity

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Japan’s decrease in the social and cultural pressure to marry by a certain age, combined with the decline of the Japanese economy, further increased the number of single households in a society in which the birthrate was already declining and the population aging. Moreover, due to the decline of lifelong employment, the lives of young Japanese men have become increasingly stratified. Meanwhile, a social shift toward consumption and an immaterial labor-based economy have further entrenched an autonomous consumption-based lifestyle and increased the availability of sexual commodities and opportunities for men. This paper looks at how Japan’s postwar model of hegemonic salaryman masculinity has been destabilized as a result of these economic shifts, and reveals how marginal or alternative masculinities, such as “otaku man” and “herbivore man,” have emerged in Japan’s hierarchy of manhood. It also explores how, given the surge in non-marriage and the immaterial-economy-based lifestyle, various forms of hyper-gendered sex and sexual imagery-based commodities in Japan are providing men with compensatory masculinity scripts. The paper argues that the pervasion of commodified sex may continue to change the traditional meanings of intimacy, family, and manhood in Japan, and may recast Japanese men's desire for reproduction and the maintenance of the population.

Author

• Kumiko Nemoto, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies