Over the past two decades, Japan's socioeconomic environment has undergone considerable changes prompted by both a long recession and the relaxation of particular labour laws in the 1990s and 2000s. Within this context, "freeters," part-time workers aged between fifteen and thirty-four who are not housewives or students, emerged into the public arena as a social problem.

This book, drawing on six years of ethnographic research, takes the lives of male freeters as a lens to examine contemporary ideas and experiences of adult masculinities. It queries how notions of adulthood and...