Saori Shibata - Contesting Precarity in Japan: The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus

This book benefited from the guidance, comments, support, and suggestions of many people throughout the research and writing process. Part of the research was conducted at the University of Birmingham, where Peter Burnham provided me with important advice, feedback, and oversight. Others who read and commented on the text as it developed, and to whom I am grateful, include Werner Bonefeld, Peter Kerr, Julie Gilson, Mark Beeson, Juanita Elias, Andre Broome, Len Seabrooke, Ben Clift, Kasia Cwiertka, Lindsay Black, Aya Ezawa, and Guita Winkel. Fran Benson provided important editorial encouragement as the book traveled through the publication process. I also thank the union and NPO activists who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this research, and who continue to impress me with their ongoing efforts to fight for precarious workers. I especially thank David Bailey, without whose support this book would not have been published. Finally, I also would like to thank my children, Itsuki and Masaki, who continue to make my life excitingand who also instructed me to acknowledge them!

Japan, the third-largest economy in the world, appears increasingly unable to generate a sustainable standard of living for its population. Low pay, job insecurity, sluggish economic growth, unaffordable housing, excessive working hours, rising public debt, labor shortages, and declining fertility have each become a stubbornly persistent problem facing Japanese society. As a result, they have grown in prominence in the national debate, routinely troubling the countrys politicians, media, and the wider public. This lingering malaise was initially summed up by the notion of a lost decade, which subsequently became two lost decades and is now nearing the end of a third lost decade (Botman, Danninger, and Schiff 2015). This contrasts starkly with the situation in the 1980s, when the Japanese model of capitalismwith its commitment to lifetime employment, stable industrial relations, and innovations such as Toyotism and just-in-time productionwas widely considered to be the new face of high-growth, high-technology capitalism, generated by an inclusive approach to labor relations. The Japanese model had been widely considered a miracle of economic development, allowing Japan to recover from the defeat and devastation of the Second World War to become a leading economic power with the potential to rival the United States as the next global economic hegemon (for characteristic portrayals of Japans economic miracle, see Friedman 1988; Johnson 1982; on Japans anticipated hegemonic potential, see especially Arrighi 1994). The transition between these two remarkably different contexts is typically dated to the bursting of Japans economic bubble in 1991.

This book traces the post-1991 transformation of the Japanese model and the unraveling of the institutions that until that point had appeared to constitute a mutually beneficial form of coordination between business, organized labor, and a developmental state. It charts the decline of Japans postwar economic institutions and the subsequent emergence of a new and growing body of precarious, or nonregular, workers. This echoes similar developments globally, where neoliberal reforms have resulted in the emergence of a new group of precarious labor, the precariat (Standing 2011). While the emergence of this new class of precarious workers represents a weakening of Japanese labor and a corresponding worsening of workers standard of living, we can also witness the emergence of new forms of resistance, protest, and dissent associated with this new social group. Japans growing class of nonregular workers are also adopting new ways to oppose and contest their precarious working and living conditions. As we shall see, this new disruptive potential has created significant problems for Japans political and economic elite.

Since 1991 we have witnessed a process of creeping neoliberalization. Yet such efforts have been increasingly thwarted and obstructed by a social coalition built around opposition to precarity and the protection of precarious workers. Faced with this new wave of opposition, and in a context where at least a rhetorical commitment to social stability and inclusion remains in place, Japans policymakers and business leaders have found themselves having to backtrack, resort to making concessions, or completely abandon their attempts to implement neoliberal reforms. It is this new contentious political economy of Japan, and especially the influence of this new group of nonregular workers within it, that this book sets out to uncover. Where previous contributions to research and the literature have tended either to lament the passing of Japans era of social harmony and prosperity or to highlight the continuing distinctiveness of Japans political economy, this book shows how Japans political economy has changed, but not only in ways that represent the defeat of labor. Indeed, as we shall see, if anything the turbulence witnessed in Japans political economy reflects precisely the inability to pacify Japans new precarious working class.

Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, terms such as working poor, Net Caf refugees, NEETs [not in education, employed, or in training], McDonalds refugees, and haken (dispatch workers) began to appear with increasing frequency in newspapers and television news. These mentions were in reports of an apparently new form of in-work poverty growing in Japan. Nonregular workers especially were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment, fitting a pattern that many had identified with the onset of the neoliberal reforms introduced across the global political economy, especially in the Global North. Their problems include uncertain, short-term, and rapidly adjustable (or flexible) patterns of employment, low wages, and a lack of social benefits or other workers entitlements (Vosko 2010; Harrod 2006).

As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japans precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. The global economic crisis, sparked by the subprime crisis of 2007 and associated in collective global memory with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, saw an acceleration of each of these trends. December 2008 saw the broadcast of a series of reports depicting homeless and newly unemployed workers queuing at a soup kitchen in Tokyos Hibiya Park. Foreshadowing what would become common occupations of public squares in 2008, workers, activists, and trade unionists collectively undertook an occupation of this public space in Tokyo, protesting both the corporations that had caused the homelessness and impoverishment of their former employees and the governments apparent unwillingness to do anything to address the issue (on the wave of public space occupations that arose in the wake of the global economic crisis, see especially Tejerina et al. 2013; Flesher Fominaya and Cox 2013; Gerbaudo 2017). The occupation of Hibiya Park, known as