Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict

Abstract

This volume provides a much-needed academic investigation and close case study analysis of intimacy in contemporary Japan, mostly since 2000. Through media coverage and historical construction, intimacy in Japan is often presented in an exotic or unnecessarily sexualized way. As Alexy notes in the introduction, Intimate Japan engages and challenges readers who think they know Japan. Intimacy is private; however, it is also public and social, permeating relationship building, friendships, marriages and families. Considering these social aspects of intimacy, the volume focuses on its actions, practices, and patterns – ‘the doing of intimacy’ (p. 6). Alexy’s introduction effectively problematizes the topic under analysis, establishing clear definitions of the terms surrounding intimacy. The chapters by Kawahara, Sandberg and Dales and Yamamoto delve into the currently relevant topics of young people’s intimate expectations and experiences, unmarried women’s narratives about contraception in Tokyo, and women’s emotional and bodily connections outside marriage, respectively. Alexy’s chapter relates these topics to how intimacy is performed, embodied, and practiced in Japan—through silence, atmosphere, and verbal communication and articulation. Turning to different aspects of intimacy, Kuwajima’s chapter on domestic violence changes the volume’s mood by illuminating a recovery process through which victims write their experiences and redefine intimacy to return to intimate life. Chapters by Cook, Miles, Dale, and Goldfarb discuss, respectively, irregular employment in relation to gender roles, the pressure young Japanese men feel to commit to love relationships, ‘x-gender’ identity—which is neither female nor male—as formed through negotiation or interpersonal relationships, and intimate kinship in foster care and adoption. The chapters by Yamaura and Tahhan broaden the volume’s scope beyond Japan: they discuss an imagined intimacy created through brokers that mediate marriages between Japanese men and Chinese women and examine the embodied practices of intimacy via co-sleeping and child-rearing in Japanese Australian families, in which different understandings and interpretations of bodily practices merge, respectively. The concluding chapter, Reflections on Fieldwork, presents contributors’ selfreflection on their ethnographic research methods. While the individual chapters illuminate how ethnographers (like storytellers) convey and analyse accounts narrated by participants, these storytellers narrate themselves in the final chapter,