Question: How is the Lithuanian cultural model of romantic love similar to and different from an American model? Are you convinced by the evidence that De Munck presents, and why?
INTIMATE
JAPAN
❖ ❖ ❖
Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict
Edited by Allison Alexy
and Emma E. Cook
University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Alexy, Allison, editor. | Cook, Emma E., editor.
Title: Intimate Japan : ethnographies of closeness and conflict / edited by
Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook.
Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003982 | ISBN 9780824876685 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Intimacy (Psychology)—Social aspects—Japan. | Social
change—Japan.
Classification: LCC HQ682 .I58 2019 | DDC 303.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003982
Cover photo by Photographer Hal. Reproduced with permission.
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries
working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make
high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBNs for this book are
9780824882440 (PDF) and 9780824882457 (EPUB). More information about the initiative and links
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The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded
and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works
and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Contents
❖ ❖ ❖
Acknowledgments
xi
Chapter One
Introduction
The Stakes of Intimacy in Contemporary Japan
A l lis on Ale xy
1
Chapter Two
Students Outside the Classroom
Youth’s Intimate Experiences in 1990s Japan
Yuk ar i K awa ha ra
35
Chapter Three
Resisting Intervention, (En)trusting My Partner
Unmarried Women’s Narratives about Contraceptive Use in Tokyo
Shana F ruehan S a nd ber g
54
Chapter Four
Romantic and Sexual Intimacy
before and beyond Marriage
Laura Dal e s an d Be ver ley An n e Ya ma mo to
73
vii
Introduction
5
panics. Instead we suggest the broad scope of intimacy represents a focus
of ontological debate, if not crisis, in the contemporary moment. By focusing on intimacy, we trace how social change is becoming manifest through
deeply personal choices.
DEFINING INTIMACY
Before framing this volume’s contributions, we first contextualize and
define our key term. The diversity of scholarship locating “intimacy”
across cultural contexts demonstrates the concept’s centrality but muddies
definitional waters. To cite some recent research framed through this key
word, is the intimacy desired when a male tech worker hires a “temporary
girlfriend” for a liaison (Bernstein 2010) at all congruent with the intimacy
leveraged by state violence within the Peruvian civil war (Theidon 2012) or
the expectations of an American liberal arts education (Abelmann 2009)?
While plausible to use the same term in English for each of these contexts,
do we find productive personal, social, or phenomenological resonances
among the parallel terminologies? What do we gain or lose, analytically,
by joining diverse instances of intimacy within the same term? To situate our answers, I engage some of the most commonly cited definitions of
intimacy and delineate this volume’s use of the term and its relationship
to the broad body of research.
Although a popular dictionary (Merriam-Webster 2015) defines “intimacy” as “a state marked by emotional closeness [and] something that is
very personal or private,” academic definitions challenge and complicate
this simplistic equation of intimacy with closeness. An intimate relationship, Viviana Zelitzer argues, is not merely close, but also clearly marked
as such; it is close in demonstrable, recognizable ways with “particularized knowledge received and attention provided” (2010, 268). She labels
two types of connected and overlapping intimacy—first, the transfer of
personal information and, second, wide-ranging long-term relations, both
of which can contain different “kinds” of intimacy: “physical, informational, emotional” (2005, 16). Boris and Parreñas similarly suggest that
intimacy might come from either “bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity” or “close observation of another and knowledge of personal information,” factors that need not be simultaneous (2010, 2). Berlant
(2000) convincingly argues that intimacy is never only as private as it
might feel. Political and popular attention, not to mention moral panics,
regularly focuses on intimate lives and practices, from same-sex marriage
to abortion rights or citizenship acquired through family membership.
Despite its feeling, intimacy is never only private and operates “intertwined
6
Allison Alexy
with material social relations and public fantasies” (Frank 2002, xxviii).11
Therefore although intimacy is often assumed to be only private, in practice it exists at the center of public consciousness (Faier 2009, 14; McGlotten
2013; Ryang 2006). Emphasizing the actions involved in intimacy, Plummer
writes that “intimacy exists in the doing of sex and love, obviously, but also
in the doing of families, marriages, and friendship, in child bearing and
child rearing, and in caring for others” (2003, 13).
Building from these careful phrasings, in this volume we define intimate relationships to be those (1) marked by particular emotional, physical,
or informational closeness or aspirations for such; (2) taking place within
realms commonly understood to be “private,” although we recognize the
constructed nature of such a category; (3) often, though not always, framed
through bonds of love and/or sexual desire and contact. We use our ethnographic attention to focus on the doing of intimacy—actions, practices,
and patterns that are always shaped by imagination, fantasies, and various mediations.
In Japanese discourse and scholarship, intimacy stands within a cluster
of terms, and the most direct translations from English are not necessarily
the terms at the center of contemporary Japanese discussions. For instance,
bekkon (別懇), shinai ( 愛), and shitashimi ( しみ) all gloss the idea of intimacy. They describe relationships that are particularly close or familiar,
and they can be used to describe a range of intimate relationships from
friendships to parent-child bonds to sexual partnerships. In the contemporary moment there is a similar range of vocabulary used to talk about
romantic love, including ren’ai (恋愛), ai (愛), daisuki (大好き), and rabu (ラブ).
There is regular debate about which terms are best used to describe different forms and styles of love, and people regularly switch among these
terms when they’re discussing intimacy. In many confessions or expressions of love, for instance, people are more likely to use daisuki (“I really
like you”), such that ren’ai or ai can, at times, sound a bit more formal or
conservative.12
When people discuss or debate tensions between people who have or
might want particularly close relationships, they regularly refer to a catchall term, ningen kankei (人
係), which literally means “human relationships.” Often used to discuss relationality, this term represents a category
broader than the intimate but has come to symbolize both a central aspiration and conundrum of the contemporary moment. Citing Shinmura (1998),
Prough describes ningen kankei as “1) person-to-person association or interaction within society; 2) relations between individuals including a correspondence of emotions; 3) the number one workplace complaint” (2010, 2;
see also Van Bremen and Martinez 1995; Rohlen 1974). As suggested by
Introduction
7
Prough’s third point, figuring out how to relate to other people—what
forms of relationships might be ideal, pleasurable, or possible—not only
takes energy, but can cause significant stress and has become a discursively
common complaint. Navigating the particularities of intimate relationships is a small subset of this broader category of human relationships, but
contemporary Japanese discourse about the former firmly situates them in
the latter. Working from this shared definition, the chapters in this volume
carefully trace differences in the terminology people use to describe their
intimate relationships.
THEORIZING INTIMACY
In recent decades, scholarly attention to “intimacy” has boomed, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. Referring to a wide range of
beliefs and practices, “intimacy” stands at the center of an amorphous but
growing body of academic attention.13 The analysis within this volume
links this extensive theorization of intimacy to the myriad questions surrounding intimacy, its stakes and significance, in contemporary Japan, and
in this section I provide a brief overview of this scholarship to better situate Japanese trends.
Although within anthropological literature intimacy has been explored
through a myriad of themes—for example, sex, sex work, kin and friendships, violence, transnationalism, migration, citizenship and nation, and
as mediated through technology—it is often linked with configurations,
practices, and experiences of romantic love.14 Although the particulars of
what counts as romance are frequently shifting and remain under debate
in various cultural contexts, scholars have positioned romance as a key
platform through which to understand intimacy. In particular, scholarship in various cultural contexts has focused on the rising popularity of
companionate marriage, also called love marriage, which Hirsch characterizes as a “new form of marriage focused on the affective elements of the
relationship” (2003, 9). Rather than being founded on family obligations,
reproduction, or a sense of duty, these relationships are based on a sense
of “partnership” (Smith 2009, 163) or emotional intimacy, as well as “friendship and sexual satisfaction” (Simmons 1979, 54).
Across cultural contexts, anthropologists have found companionate romance represented as “the epitome of progressive individualism”
(Masquelier 2009, 226), and people frequently link their love marriages
with self-consciously modern sensibilities (Collier 1997; Smith 2008, 232).
Thomas and Cole suggest that “claims to love are also claims to modernity” (2009, 5), and Gregg describes companionate marriages as “a core
Chapter Title: Encounters of Intimacy and Economy
Book Title: The Purchase of Intimacy
Book Author(s): Viviana A. Zelizer
Published by: Princeton University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt7s3t2.5
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14
Chapter 1
More often than not, the analyses that follow involve transfers of
money. Money ultimately consists not of dollar bills but of accounting systems—those systems that produce equivalence among goods,
services, and titles to them, plus the media used to represent value
within the systems. For practical purposes, however, here we can
call the media themselves money. Media range from very specific
tokens, such as merchandise coupons, to extremely general devices,
such as electronic currency transfers. The media used in the economic transactions that are the focus of this study most often consist
of legal tender and its close equivalents, such as checks, credit cards,
and commercial paper. I single out money-based transactions for
three reasons: first, because they leave obvious traces in available
records; second, because they dramatize questions of valuation that
arise throughout this zone of mingled intimacy and economic transactions; and third, because many people (including social scientists)
consider monetization an extreme and threatening form of economic rationalization (Zelizer 2001).
Start here What about intimacy?2 Like most value-laden terms, intimacy
scintillates with multiple meanings, ranging from cool, close observation to hot involvement. The Oxford English Dictionary offers
these main definitions: “1. (a) the state of being personally intimate;
intimate friendship or acquaintance; familiar intercourse; close familiarity. (b) euphemism for sexual intercourse. (c) closeness of
observation, knowledge, or the like. 2. Intimate or close connection
or union.”
Following the OED’s lead, let us think of relations as intimate to
the extent that interactions within them depend on particularized
knowledge received, and attention provided by, at least one person—knowledge and attention that are not widely available to
third parties. The knowledge involved includes such elements as
shared secrets, interpersonal rituals, bodily information, awareness
of personal vulnerability, and shared memory of embarrassing situations. The attention involved includes such elements as terms of
endearment, bodily services, private languages, emotional support,
Bawin and Dandurand 2003; Cancian 1987; J. Cohen 2002; Collins 2004; Davis
1973; Giddens 1992; Hochschild 2003; Neiburg 2003; Simmel 1988; Swidler 2001.
2
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Encounters of Intimacy and Economy
15
and correction of embarrassing defects. Intimate social relations
thus defined depend on various degrees of trust. Positively, trust
means that the parties willingly share such knowledge and attention
in the face of risky situations and their possible outcomes. Negatively, trust gives one person knowledge of, or attention to, the
other, which if made widely available would damage the second person’s social standing. Trust in either sense is often asymmetrical—
for example, a young child trusts its parent more than the parent
trusts the child—but fully intimate relations involve some degree of
mutual trust.3
This broad definition of intimacy covers a range of personal relations, including sexually tinged ties of the type illustrated by Patsy
and Miller, but also those between parent-child, godparent-godchild, siblings, and close friends. It also extends to the varying degrees and types of intimacy involved in the relations between psychiatrist-patient, lawyer-client, priest-parishioner, servant-employer,
prostitute-customer, spy–object of espionage, bodyguard-tycoon,
child-care worker–parent, boss-secretary, janitor-tenant, personal
trainer–trainee, and hairdresser-customer. In all these social relationships at least one person is committing trust, and at least one
person has access to information or attention that, if made widely
available, would damage the other. All these relations, moreover,
generate their own forms of economic transfers.
Legal scholars have sometimes recognized these varieties of intimacy, including both wide-ranging personal relations and specialized aspects of professional services. Kenneth Karst, for example,
introduces a distinction between two types of intimacy. The first
involves transfer of possibly damaging private information from one
party to the other, information not typically available to third parties. The second entails close enduring relations between two people. Karst points out that legally the second typically entails the first.
He goes on to comment: “Personal information disclosed only to a
counselor or doctor may be intimate facts; similarly, even a casual
sexual relationship involves intimacy in the sense of selective discloFor a survey and synthesis of trust’s place in social structure, see Barber 1983;
for a contrasting view, Weitman 1998.
3
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16
Chapter 1
sures of intimate information” (Karst 1980: 634n.48). This book
deals with both kinds of intimacy—transfer of personal information
and wide-ranging long-term relations—showing how they connect
and overlap.
In fact, intimate relations come in many more than two varieties.
They vary in kind and degree: the amount and quality of information available to spouses certainly differs from that of child-care
worker and parent, or priest and parishioner. The extent of trust
likewise varies accordingly. Because we are dealing with a continuum, exactly where we set the limit between intimate and impersonal relations remains arbitrary. But it is important to see that in
some respects even the apartment janitor who knows what a household discards day after day gains access to information with some of
the same properties as the information flowing in more obviously
intimate relations. The variety of intimate relations could complicate this book without clarifying its arguments. I have simplified
things through two steps. First, I have concentrated my attention
on longer-term, wider-ranging, more intense relations in which at
least one party gains access to intimate information. Second, within
that range, I have deliberately included and compared different kinds
of intimacy: physical, informational, and emotional. The comparison will serve us well, for it counters the widespread suspicion that
some sorts of intimacy are necessarily deeper, more crucial, or more
authentic than others.
Escaping Confusion
Isn’t intimacy a good in itself, a bundle of warm emotions that promote caring attention? Drawing a continuum from impersonal to
intimate helps us avoid some common, morally tinged confusions
in these regards: intimacy as emotion, intimacy as caring attention,
intimacy as authenticity, and intimacy as an intrinsic good. Many
analysts are tempted to define intimacy by the emotions it typically
evokes, such as intense, warm feelings. This is a mistake. Intimate
relations, from gynecologist-patient to husband-wife, vary systemati-
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Encounters of Intimacy and Economy
17
cally in how they express or inhibit emotions. Nor (as most doctors
and most spouses know well) does intimacy exclude anger, despair,
or shame. The word intimacy also often calls up caring attention.
Many intimate relations include a measure of care: sustained attention that enhances the welfare of its recipients. But in other intimate
relationships the parties remain indifferent to each other or even
inflict damage on one another. Abusive sexual relations, for example,
are certainly intimate, but not caring. Such relationships supply risky
information to at least one party and thus entail trust of a sort, yet do
not include caring attention. Intimacy and care do often complement
each other, but they have no necessary connection.
What of authenticity? Analysts of interpersonal relations frequently distinguish between real and simulated feelings, disparaging
simulation with such terms as pseudo-intimacy and emotion management. They often draw on the idea that routinization of emotional
expression in such jobs as waitress, flight attendant, or store clerk
deprives the social relations in question of their meaning and damages the inner lives of the people involved. In such a view, truly
intimate relationships rest on authentic expressions of feeling (see,
for example, Chayko 2002; Hochschild 1983).4 The closer we look
at intimacy, however, the more we discover two flaws in this reasoning. First, no single “real” person exists within a given body; feelings
and meanings vary significantly, understandably, and properly from
one interpersonal relationship to another. In fact, the feelings and
meanings that well up regularly in mother-child relationships can
seriously hinder relationships between lovers. Second, simulation of
feelings and meanings sometimes becomes an obligation, or at least
a service, in some sorts of relationships. Just consider intimate relations between adult children and their aging parents, or between
nurses and their terminally ill patients.
Intimacy, finally, often looks like a good in itself, especially to
social critics who deplore the loss of intimacy in an impersonal
For more general discussion of emotions in social life, see Collins 2004;
Hochschild 2003; Katz 1999; Kemper 1990; for the place of emotions in law, see
Kahan and Nussbaum 1996.
4
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18
Chapter 1
world. Yet a little reflection on undesirable uses of intimacy—date
rape, blackmail, malicious gossip, and more—underlines two more
facts about intimacy. First, it ranges from damaging to sustaining,
from threatening to satisfying, from thin to thick. Second, it matters
sufficiently to its participants and to third parties that people constantly draw moral boundaries between proper and improper uses of
intimacy. Yes, intimacy bears a moral charge, but precisely because
different sorts of intimacy vary in their moral qualities. When people distinguish between “true” and “false” intimacy, treating the
“true” kind as a good in itself, they are making just such distinctions.
In all intimate relationships, accordingly, participants and observers take great care to distinguish them from other relationships that
share some properties with them. As we will see, relations of sexual
intimacy frequently include transfers of money. Those involved,
however, are careful to establish whether the relationship is a marriage, courtship, prostitution, or some other different sort of social
tie. In the absence of sexual intimacy, people also establish fine distinctions, for example, among caring services provided by physicians,
nurses, spouses, children, neighbors, or live-in servants. In each case,
participants and observers frequently engage in fierce debates about
the propriety of different forms and levels of compensation for the
caring attention involved. They often ban certain combinations of
relations, transactions, and media as utterly improper. Later chapters
of this book will provide innumerable examples of variation and
moral boundary drawing. They will even propose explanations for
variation and moral boundary drawing in intimate social relations.
Stop here Take the case of psychotherapy. This sort of relationship is necessarily delicate, since effective treatment depends on the quality of
the relationship itself. A semiofficial American guide to legal issues
in psychotherapy makes the following recommendations concerning payment systems appropriate for a therapeutic relation:
“Special” billing arrangements make the patient “different” and
are associated with an increased opportunity for misunderstanding (real, displaced, or projected) and, when countertransference rears its head, improper or substandard care (cf.
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