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...

Analysis of Japanese society has been hampered by its use of static models: by its assumption that there is a unique and unchanging structure explainable by reference to a handful of native terms. That approach was always suspect, and has been further undermined by the fact of globalization, in which interactions between Japan and the rest of the world have become faster and further-reaching than ever before. This collection of papers, by a varied team of anthropologists and sociologists, is a bold attempt to come to terms with change, by putting a wide range of aspects of contemporary...