Stanford University Press Blog

Embracing Daughters in China

Breaking with centuries of precedent, village families are embracing a singleton daughter.

by LIHONG SHI

Photo by Trey Ratcliff. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.  

In late 2015, China announced the end of its controversial one-child policy, a law that was on the books for thirty-five years, during which time most Chinese families were limited to having only a single child. One of the most consequential aspects of this decades-old policy was the preference it created among Chinese households for sons—a bias with both socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings and drastic demographic consequences. Today in China, men outnumber women by over thirty million—but this stunning statistic obscures a significant and rarely acknowledged shift in Chinese society.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow rural couples in most regions to have a second child, if their first child was a girl. The policy was designed to give families another chance to have a son. And yet surprisingly, in recent years, many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity and have willingly accepted a singleton daughter. Was the preference for sons over daughters waning? And if so, why? Between 2002 and 2012, I conducted long-term ethnographic research in a rural community in Northeast China to understand this emerging reproductive pattern.

In the mid-1980s, China relaxed its one-child limit to allow couples to have a second child if their first child was a girl. And yet surprisingly many couples have voluntarily forgone this opportunity.

Immigration, Families, and Solidarity

In transnational families, grandmothers become caregivers to support their loved ones.

by KRISTIN E. YARRIS

Angela, Laleska, and Laleska’s coresident cousin Alexa pictured above. Photo by Kristin E. Yarris.

In a working class barrio of Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, lives Angela, a mother to four adult children—two who live with their spouses and families in Managua, and two who have immigrated to the United States. One of Angela’s migrant children, Karla, emigrated in an attempt to rejoin her father, who had left for the United States about a decade prior. Upon Karla’s departure, she left behind her then one-year-old daughter, Laleska, for whom Angela assumed care, thus becoming responsible for her granddaughter’s physical and emotional wellbeing for more than a decade.

The story of Angela’s family is shared by many transnational families. Their experience illustrates the trials of transnational life.

While Angela, who is now in her 50s, finds a sense of purpose in caregiving, it has also been hard work: caring for her granddaughter has proven to be both physically demanding and emotionally trying. For Laleska, separation from her mother over more than a decade was not easy either, though Angela’s carework sustained the tie between Laleska and her mother, a tie made tenuous by absence, distance, and the uncertainty of family reunification, all of which are exacerbated by U.S. immigration policies.

During my time in Nicaragua conducting fieldwork with families like that of Angela and Laleska’s, I also volunteered with Servicio Jesuita para Migrantes (SJM, or Jesuit Migration Service), an NGO spearheading a nationwide campaign to protect and defend the rights of migrants. As part of the campaign, SJM produced a weekly radio program called La Mochila Viajera (The Traveling Backpack), which was designed to raise public awareness about immigration. La Mochila Viajera aired short public service vignettes, designed to raise awareness about the challenges facing Nicaraguan migrants and their families at home and abroad.

I reached out to families, like Angela’s, who were participating in my research study and invited them to share their stories on La Mochila Viajera if they were inclined to do so. Laleska decided this was something she wanted to do, and I escorted her to the radio studio one muggy Monday morning to record her vignette. Laleska was visibly nervous, but also committed to telling her story, as she told me, in order to let other children of migrant parents know they were not alone in the challenges they faced.

 

TRANSLATION: "Hi, I’m Laleska. I am twelve years old. I’ve lived with my grandmother since I was one year old because my mom left, for economic reasons, to the United States. Since then, I only see her in December. But for three years, I haven’t been able to see her. We just communicate by phone. Truthfully, I don’t like talking with her because I feel bad about not having her near."

 

Making a Home for the Disappeared

As the Peruvian state uncovers mass graves, relatives find ways to honor their missing loved ones.

by ISAIAS ROJAS-PEREZ

Photo taken by the author at the Museo de la Memoria, Para que no se Repita, established in Ayacucho by ANFASEP (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados, Detenidos, y Desaparecidos del Perú).

An enlarged identity card photo of a boy wearing his school uniform alongside one of his class notebooks are among some of the most moving artifacts displayed at the Museo de la Memoria—the small museum that the Quechua-speaking mothers of the disappeared built in memory of their missing relatives in Ayacucho, Peru. The notebook displays what could be the work of any Quechua-speaking boy in a Spanish-speaking state institution such as the school: the unsteady lettering, the misspellings and grammatical errors, the playful drawings. It is the work of a joyful boy preparing to enter into adult society and the political community by mastering the state’s writing and reading practices. But at midnight on June 24, 1984, a military squad burst into his house and kidnapped him. He was never seen again. Only his class notebook and the enlarged identity card photo remain.

Pablo Gerardo Albites Pariona is one of the thousands of people “disappeared” by the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. In August 2003, at the end of its mandate, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, or CVR) compiled a preliminary list of four thousand “disappeared” people. In 2011, another state-sponsored institution, the Central Register of Victims, registered 8,661 cases. Yet, as the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances observed as recently as July 2016, the real figure may be much higher. Citing such institutions as the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the UN Working Group considers that figure “to lie between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand victims of enforced disappearance.” According to Peruvian human rights organizations, the actual figure may be as high as eighteen thousand disappeared.

Abstract figures tallying the number of lives lost cannot convey the visceral quality of the horror that families like Pablo Gerardo’s experienced.

Transformative Activism

In Argentina activism is an ongoing process of working on the self and acting on the world.

by SIAN LAZAR

A demonstration in Argentina organized by the Argentine Central Trade Union (Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina), 2012. Photo by Sian Lazar.

In my home country, the UK, we have just come out of a general election. Many of us—including the prime minister who called it—thought that this election would consolidate Conservative power by creating an unassailable majority in the House of Commons. But, although the Tories won the most votes, they actually lost seats, resulting in a hung parliament. This impasse raises plenty of problems and is hardly the most strong and stable outcome, but we have, at least for now, collectively warded off the specter of a one-party state. And it looks as though that achievement in large part came down to the Labour party running an extremely effective campaign: people taking to the streets and knocking on doors to talk to voters, organizing rallies, meetings, discussions, hustings, social media campaigns, and so on. In other words, good old-fashioned activism. Meanwhile, in the US, people are organizing and attending town hall meetings with their representatives; they are protesting at airports and outside courtrooms; they are taking to the streets in enormous numbers to object to President Trump and his policies. Again, good old-fashioned activism. At the same time, in both countries hundreds of everyday campaigns are taking place: for fair wages, fair policing, environmental protection, reproductive rights, clean water, and the list goes on.

What is it that impels people to take up the role of activist?

But what is it that impels people to take up the role of activist, to spend time seeking to persuade others of their cause and to collectively resist the attacks on social life and reproduction wrought by corporate capital and its allies in government? This question is at the heart of my research. I ask it of labor union activists in Argentina, a group of people who have been highly organized since the turn of the 20th century. Over generations, labor unionism has persisted as a vibrant and powerful movement at the heart of Argentine politics, despite being attacked and threatened, at times with lethal force. That persistence is based on many individuals choosing to become activists and to continue organizing in the face of public stigma and state repression. These days the latter tends to take the form of rubber bullets rather than disappearances and such confrontations occur with less frequency than they used to, but activists’ perseverance remains impressive all the same.

The Not-So-Secular Age

In times of neoliberal precariousness, religion helps master everyday dread and ignominy.

by VIKASH SINGH

An image from Kanwar, India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Photo by Vikash Singh.

In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist, Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernized. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance. Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernization as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophes of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth—one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

We are wont to approach the resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. But one must be careful.

I spent about a year, studying the Kanwar, a religious movement in India, in which millions of people carry water from the river Ganga to local Śiva shrines. This used to be a modest event, involving a few thousand people, but the pilgrimage has grown explosively over the last couple of decades. We are wont to approach such resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. And considering the rapid political ascendancy of the Hindu right over the same period of time, there may be some justification for such a reading. But one must be careful, because that is precisely the trap of abstraction.

As soon as I approached these subjects in their situated material and moral circumstances, I found not “fanatics,” but poor young men and women coming of age in conditions of hopeless uncertainty. These were people trying to find a meaning for their lives and find a path to life, livelihoods, and honor, in a sea of traumatic misfortunes and deprivation. In an exclusive global economy, premised on seducing and ingesting people as consumers while violently rejecting them as workers, religion becomes an alternate field for performed existence as well as social and self-recognition. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, and the prospects of a stable livelihood and respectable future are faint if not illusory, the often painful journey repeats, performs, and prepares for a daunting transition to an elusive adulthood. It is an open and freely accessible, yet formidable and valued stage for people to practice and demonstrate their talents, resolve, and moral worth.

The Hand Work of the Footbound

Chinese women practiced footbinding for centuries—why is still too little understood.

by LAUREL BOSSEN and HILL GATES

Old woman in traditional clothes with woven basket. Yunnan Province, China 2009. Photo by Hu Jing.

People love to tell stories, preserving—and also confabulating—our pasts. The story of footbinding in China is an intriguing case in point: the curious practice has been given the full romance-sex-and-violence treatment, inviting us to cry over and thrill to the image of women sacrificing years of agony, ostensibly for beauty, self-expression, and a desirable husband. In recent years, news reports have periodically announced the discovery of the last surviving footbound women in one or another remote village of China, or the demise of the last shoemaking company that produced specialized shoes for footbound women, proving that this now defunct but once prevalent custom—the wrapping, warping, and crushing of young girls’ feet—continues to fascinate and remains mysterious. How could a civilization have supported such a deleterious custom that left tens of millions of Chinese women hobbling throughout their lives?

How could a civilization have supported such a deleterious custom that left tens of millions of Chinese women hobbling throughout their lives?

The most common explanation given is that small feet were considered beautiful and improved a girl’s marriage prospects. The practice has been treated as one type of “oddity” in the human experience of bodily deformations, and interpreted as a form of status-seeking behavior motivated by the quest for beauty and improved social standing. Many writers and scholars have portrayed the practice as a phenomenon largely limited to urban, non-laboring elites who lived in cities and towns where fashion and status took precedence over pragmatism and economic necessity. But this is not the whole picture.

One common assumption about footbinding is that footbound women couldn’t work. They were assumed to be status-giving trophy wives whose leisure reflected positively on their husbands. The assumption of footbound female leisure survived in part because there is so little visual or textual evidence regarding the way footbound women lived. The photographs from the early twentieth century that depict footbound women nearly all show them seated or standing in a formal pose, often in a studio, alone or with family members, and usually wearing their best clothes. While photographs of village men working outdoors are abundant, photographs of footbound village women out of doors in public places, or working at anything are extremely rare.

The Political Stakes of Anthropology

Studying the Middle East at the height of US empire reveals the politics of academia.

by LARA DEEB and JESSICA WINEGAR

Supporters of academic boycott during the annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 2015. Photo by Alex Shams.

The consummate image of the scholarly life is that it is defined by the free and impassioned pursuit of ideas. We conduct research and we teach; we produce, question, and impart knowledge. Yet all of us working in colleges and universities know that the life on which we once, perhaps naively, embarked is also filled with politics, much of it quite fraught. Perhaps nowhere is this more salient today than in the field of Middle East studies. In particular, anthropological study focused on this region provides a compelling lens through which to view some of the key stakes in the political struggles of academe and their relation to broader structures of power—particularly as the region has taken center stage in US imperial ambitions.

US global engagements in the Middle East and North Africa has for decades influenced how and why people research and teach about the region.

Those ambitions have, on the one hand, precipitated significantly more interest in funding work on the region and hiring scholars to research and teach about it. On the other hand, since at least the 1970s, academics who research or teach topics against the grain of dominant US national narratives about and interests in the region have faced the prospects of not having their research funded, not being hired, being accused—by parents, students, administrators, and people unassociated with academe or their campus—of bias and even treason in their teaching and public lectures, being targeted by blacklists and hate mail, and even losing their jobs.

Militarization and Multicultural Rights

U.S. intervention in Nicaragua has had lasting consequences for Afrodescendants.

by JENNIFER GOETT

United States-supported anti-government "Contra" rebels in Southeast Nicaragua, 1987. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Nicaragua and the United States are approaching the 30-year anniversaries of two periods of national reckoning that took place in the waning years of the Contra War. The conflict erupted in 1981 just two years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the Somoza regime, a brutal family dictatorship that had ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years. Once in office, Ronald Reagan, a devout anti-communist crusader, authorized the training and funding of counter-revolutionary forces or contras as part of a campaign to destabilize the Sandinista state. Armed resistance spread to the Atlantic coast region where dissatisfaction with the revolution grew in indigenous and Afrodescendant communities with the imposition of a new ruling order from Managua. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would extend over $400 million USD in aid to the contras, while the war and destabilization campaign would result in more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in losses for Nicaragua.

What has U.S. militarization meant for the people who live in militarized places around the world?

The Contra War continued until 1990 when the Nicaraguan people removed the Sandinistas from power by popular vote. But indigenous and Afrodescendant resistance began to subside in the mid-1980s as the Sandinista state sought to reconcile the revolutionary project with these communities by recognizing their rights to land and regional autonomy. In November 1986, the state enshrined these rights in law with the adoption of a new constitution followed by the passage of an autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast region in 1987. The reforms established the framework for some of the most expansive multicultural citizenship rights in Latin America. It still took more than two decades for the Nicaraguan state to title indigenous and Afrodescendant territories. And even with formal recognition, conditions remain precarious in these territories where deforestation, land dispossession, capitalist intensification, and drug war militarization threaten community life.

Harnessing Entrepreneurship

Rwanda teaches students that orderly innovation is the path to national progress.

by CATHERINE A. HONEYMAN

A customer at a microfinance center in Rwanda. Photo from Trócaire. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Pineapples with juice dripping down their sides, neatly tied bags of passion fruit and tree tomatoes, shiny green imported apples, golden-skinned finger bananas—at one time, the intersection close to my Kigali home was crowded with women carrying their merchandise, in wide baskets atop their heads and in woven bags slung over each arm. Near them, you could always find a young man or two selling sweets and biscuits from a cardboard box. Needed to clean the dust off your shoes before venturing into town? Someone was always carrying around packages of tissues for 100 francs each.

Rwanda is the site of one of the most extensive efforts to promote youth entrepreneurship in the world.

Once a characteristic image of street life just about anywhere on the African continent, this sort of scene has almost disappeared in Rwanda. Street businesses have been tidied up and brought into the formal market, and they are required to have a fixed and formal place of business. Prepared foods must be properly labeled and inspected for consumer safety; motorcycle taxi drivers must belong to a cooperative, wear numbered uniforms, and provide helmets; all businesses must register, obtain a license, and become part of the tax system.

These are all sensible regulations, arguably modeled on the way things work in many developed economies. And in Rwanda, they are enforced with increasing effectiveness each year. This is Rwanda’s contemporary aesthetic of entrepreneurship, of national progress: clean streets, orderly businesses, everything registered and known—an orderly and regulated form of self-reliance from the broadest policies down to the tiniest details.

Searching for Social Change

Decades after the truth and reconciliation process, South Africans are still seeking justice.

by RITA KESSELRING

Elsie Gishi, a claimant in the apartheid litigation who provided testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Photo by Rita Kesselring.

 

Twenty years ago the first public hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa was heard and tomorrow marks eighteen years since the handing over of that commission’s findings to President Nelson Mandela. The Truth Commission, which has since been replicated in dozens of other countries, was an integral component of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition to what many hoped would be a more open, freer society. Now, two decades after its founding, a whole generation of young people has grown up in South Africa since this first hearing, and the commission has become a part of the new nation’s founding myth but South African officials rarely stop to ponder its success and limitations. If apartheid is mentioned in speeches today, it merely serves to provide reasons for problems the government has not been able to solve. Preoccupied with the present, with party-political scheming, elections, and scandals like the one surrounding renovations to President Zuma’s private home (financed with taxpayer money), the African National Congress—a former liberation movement and now the incumbent ruling party at the national level—is slowly losing its grip on its electorate.

The apartheid past lingers on in today’s South Africa.

While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was intended to be a powerful tool for restorative justice, the apartheid past lingers on in today’s South Africa. The notion of “the past in the present” suddenly pops up everywhere—a fairly new, but pervasive, feature in public discourse. The recent rise of South African students—from privileged universities like the University of Cape Town to the underfunded University of Limpopo in Polokwane—exemplifies this new cry for justice. Increases in tuition fees sparked student protests across the country last year (inspiring the hashtag, #FeesMustFall); but the protests, still ongoing, are equally directed against the non-transformation of the entire education system, the bias in the curricula, and the financial exclusion of the majority of the so-called “formally disadvantaged” groups. Students have not protested so loudly and decidedly since the 1976 Soweto uprising. Indeed, this and other apartheid-era protests against minority rule are today drawn on as models for current protests.

 

No retreat. No surrender. We are coming for free, decolonized, quality education. #FeesMustFall pic.twitter.com/6tD4Vd9L8G

— Wits SRC (@WitsSRC) September 21, 2016

Living in the Hamster Wheel

Ever-increasing cultural and economic pressures are taking their toll on Chinese students.

by SUSANNE BREGNBÆK

Photo by Derek Bruff. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

Shortly after I had started my fieldwork among Chinese elite university students, a young woman jumped to her death from a university building. Statistics around student suicides in China can be difficult to obtain, but suffice it to say that her death was not an anomaly—the phenomenon of suicide among Chinese students at elite universities is something of a public secret: generally well-known but rarely discussed in official channels. I was drawn to this paradox of why young people like her, who have made it to the top of China’s extraordinarily competitive educational system, would choose to take their own lives: What actually happens to the lucky few at the top of the pyramid?

Suicide among Chinese students at elite universities is something of a public secret.

In recent years globally-oriented educational debates often play out in relation to the ambiguous rise of China, which has emerged as a figure of both allure and anxiety for a number of reasons. China’s system of rigorous testing is well known; The fact that Shanghai students topped the PISA tests in 2010 (tests designed by the OECD to assess scholastic performance across countries) gave rise to a sense that China is beating us on our own terms. And yet, as the West seems to be looking East to find the key to success in a brave new knowledge society, the East is looking West.

Zika and the Common Good

Who precisely is the “common good” that the public health sector purports to serve?

by KATHERINE A. MASON

The Zika-carrying Aedes Aegypti mosquito. Photo by James Gathany of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public domain.

It has been barely a year since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa released its grip on the frightened imaginations of the Global North, and already global health officials are in the midst of another viral panic. After spreading across the Pacific to Brazil and Puerto Rico, the mosquito-born Zika virus this summer is expected to continue its march to the mainland United States, where it will make landfall on the Gulf Coast. The message from global and American health authorities is the same as it was in 2003 with the appearance of SARS, in 2006 with H5N1 avian flu, and in 2014 with Ebola: Be very afraid.

“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” writes Peter J. Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “If I were a pregnant woman … in an impoverished neighborhood in a city like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., or Mobile, Ala., I would be nervous right now.” Of course, Hotez is none of the above. So are those women nervous? Will controlling Zika end up helping them? And would Hotez listen if the affected women thought it wouldn’t? As we enter another round of emergency epidemic control, these questions are critical to ask.

Public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this threat carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

What I have found from my own research is that even when a global disease response appears to be effective, unintended consequences can emerge that threaten to undermine, rather than support, the long-term health and well-being of vulnerable communities most affected by the disease in question. In the urban Chinese settings I studied during and after the SARS outbreak, China’s enormous population of rural-to-urban migrant workers was seen as a public health menace capable of spreading the same dangerous diseases that threatened it. In the wake of the 2003 outbreak, Chinese public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this menace carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

Justice in Latin America

The question of what is just is not an ahistorical one—it is answered daily in the spaces of lived experience.

by SANDRA BRUNNEGGER and KAREN ANN FAULK

"Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." May 31 2007. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr. 

Latin America is as culturally diverse as it is geographically vast. Yet, the nations of Latin America share important historical and institutional characteristics. Perhaps most significantly, countries across the region continue to grapple with the legacies of colonialism—from the classical era of Iberian colonialization to the neocolonial domination enacted through economic penetration in the early twentieth century.

At the approach of the twenty-first century, Latin Americans found themselves constrained by the demands of international lending agencies and awash in the flood of cultural and material products made ever more readily available by multinationals striving to captivate and capitalize on the “emerging markets” opened by neoliberal reform. The continent has also had to contend with the legacies of state violence and dictatorial regimes that sought to strip society of its vibrant forms of popular organizations, preemptively crushing opposition and laying the foundation for the economic restructuring that was to come.

In all of these cases, the protagonists are seeking one thing: justice.

These shared processes of emergence paved the way for a diversity of forms of resistance. In the Chilean Atacama Desert, residents have undertaken a prolonged struggle for their right to groundwater. Family members of bombing victims in Buenos Aires brought a case against the state of Argentina before an international human rights body and are still working through a slow process of attempted resolution. In Colombia, some victims of political violence are turning increasingly to the courts for resolution in the wake of devastating personal tragedy, while others reject the state’s ability to fairly adjudicate their grievances and construct instead a nonstate tribunal to consider the damages they have suffered to both persons and property.

The Strange New Ordinary

One Japanese film offers a window into the lived experience of the country’s recessionary period.

by ANDREA GEVURTZ ARAI

A still from the 2008 Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, Tokyo Sonata.

In 1989 through 1991, the Japanese Stock Exchange fell by 60 percent; gross domestic production followed suit, declining precipitously. From the famed double-digit growth of the 1960s through the mid-1970s, and a steady 4 percent annual rate during the 1980s, economic growth dropped to 1.5 percent by the year 2000 and dropped to negative rates by the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. As Japanese banks and businesses began to fail—for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s—terms of financial instability and failure, like bankruptcy and restructuring, identified in Japan with other countries like the United States and China, began to appear with regularity in the Japanese news. The financial plummet was met with domestic and international disbelief. It’s just a correction, wrote many international economists at the time; the Japanese will figure it out.

The financial downturn of the early 1990s led to a decade-and-a-half–long recession, constricting of the job market for young adults, and restructuring of the lifetime employment system.

Tokyo’s Red-Light District

Selling love, romance, and companionship for wealthy women seeking an escape.

by AKIKO TAKEYAMA

Interior of a Tokyo red-light district host club. June 2015. Copyright Akiko Takeyama (used here with permission).

Tokyo has always had a magical effect on me. I grew up in Hamamatsu, a mid-sized industrial city known for producing Yamaha motorcycles and pianos. In contrast to my ordinary life there as an office assistant in the mid-nineties, I found Tokyo to be extraordinary—with its splendid commercial districts, dense population, and urban sprawl.

Tokyo’s host clubs evoke ambiguous feelings of pleasure, danger, risk, and reward among people seeking temporary escape and entertainment.

After studying in the United States for seven years, I returned to Japan in 2004 as an anthropologist to conduct research on Tokyo’s red-light district and the host clubs where men cater to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. While living there, I saw firsthand how rapidly Tokyo had changed since my youth in the nineties. For instance, Roppongi Hills, a 54-story mega-complex of apartments, offices, bars and restaurants, designer boutiques, galleries, and a movie theater had just opened. Real estate developers, politicians, and journalists heralded the project as a vivid symbol of Japan’s future. Tourists took advantage of the building’s rooftop observation deck not only for its panoramic views of the city but also the excitement and even optimism that these scenes of urban life often provoke. While visitors enjoyed the view, global investors were privy to a different vision: such urban developments are also sites of intense speculation.