Men of Uncertainty
Subtitle: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan (Suny Series in Japan in Transition)
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: January 2001
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 263
ISBN-13: 9780791448281
Subjects: Ethnic studies; POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; Yokohama-shi (Japan); Labor; Business/Economics; Business & Economics; Archaeology / Anthropology; Yokohama-shi; Working class; Social conditions; Anthropology - Cultural; Sociology - General; Day laborers; Japan
Description: "Men of Uncertainty presents an unknown side of Japanese society - the world of Japan's day laborers (hiiyatoi rodosha), the urban labor markets where these men gather to find work (yoseba), and the cheap lodging districts where many of them live (doya-gai). Nearly every major Japanese city has a yoseba. These are centers of proletariat culture in the heart of the postindustrial metropolis, similar in many ways to the prewar American skid row.

Within these districts, day laborers tend to live outside the two dominant institutions of contemporary Japanese society: the nuclear family and the company.".

"Focusing mainly on the day-laboring district of Yokohama, and with extensive comparative ethnography from five other cities, author Tom Gill finds a society of men who have opted out of the regular, communal way of life.

This book details their libertarian, egalitarian lifestyle, oriented to the present yet colored by an awareness that in Japan today being a yoseba man usually means exclusion from mainstream society, absence of family life, and a career that can easily lead to homelessness and an early death on the street."--BOOK JACKET.