Inside a Japanese Sharehouse - Dreams and Realities

This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction - the home - by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse. Sharehouses, which emerged in the 2007 'sharehouse boom', are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities.

Through a description of the micro-level, mundane, material interactions among residents within a mid-sized, mixed-sex sharehouse, the book considers what these interactions indicate about existing - and often conflicting - ideas about intimacy, privacy, gender, the individual, family, community, and the home.

In so doing it highlights how sharehouse residents, though a dramatic rejection of the twentieth-century domestic model, with its ideal of the family home as a partnership between a male wage-earner and a dedicated housewife, and its implied separation of 'family' and 'outsiders', are nevertheless uneasy about overturning existing gender roles and giving precedence to the individual over community, and are regarded as a foreign import.

List of contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Aspiration

Chapter 3: International Exchange
Chapter 4: Public and Private
Chapter 5: Nuisance

Chapter 6: Waste

Chapter 7: Village Society

Chapter 8: Conclusion

References

Summary

This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction - the home - by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse that are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities.

Product details

• Authors: Caitlin Meagher, Caitlin (Skidmore College Meagher
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.08.2022
• EAN: 9780367561666
• ISBN: 978-0-367-56166-6
• No. of pages: 148
• Series: Japan Anthropology Workshop Series
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Japan, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Society & culture: general, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Social and cultural anthropology, Society and culture: general