Overview

Depictions of an alcohol-saturated Japan populated by intoxicated salarymen, beer dispensing vending machines, and a generally tolerant approach to public drunkenness, typify domestic and international perceptions of Japanese drinking. Even the popular definitions of Japanese masculinity are interwoven with accounts of personal alcohol consumption in public settings; gender norms that exclude and marginalize the alcoholic. And yet the alcoholic also exists in Japan, and exists in a manner revealing of the dominant processes by which alcoholism and addiction are globally influenced, understood, and classified. As such, this book examines the ways in which alcoholism is understood, accepted, and taken on as an influential and lived aspect of identity among Japanese men. At the most general level, it explores how a subjective idea comes to be regarded as an objective and unassailable fact. Here such a process concerns how the culturally and temporally specific treatment methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which much of Japan’s other major sobriety association, Danshūkai, is also based, has come to be the approach in Japan to diagnosing, treating, and structuring alcoholism as an aspect of individual identity. In particular, the gendered consequences, how this process transpires or is resisted by Japanese men, are considered, as they offer substantial insight into how categories of illness and disease are created, particularly the ramifications of dominant forms of such categorizations across increasingly porous cultural borders. Ramifications that become starkly obvious when Japan’s persistent connection between notions of masculinity and alcohol consumption are considered from the perspective of the sober alcoholic and sobriety group member.

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Toasted salarymen weaving through nighttime streets and swaying drunkenly on the last train of the evening is a common enough sight in Japan. Christensen's study explores the cultural history surrounding alcohol consumption, as well as the awkward understandings and treatments for alcoholics. By tracing the way drinking is intertwined with notions of masculinity and male sociality, Christensen exposes the damaging struggles faced by men who want to dodge expectations that they imbibe with others. This is a superb book that addresses a gap in our knowledge about contemporary Japan. -- Laura Miller, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis

Toasted salarymen weaving through nighttime streets and swaying drunkenly on the last train of the evening is a common enough sight in Japan. Christensen's study explores the cultural history surrounding alcohol consumption, as well as the awkward understandings and treatments for alcoholics. By tracing the way drinking is intertwined with notions of masculinity and male sociality, Christensen exposes the damaging struggles faced by men who want to dodge expectations that they imbibe with others. This is a superb book that addresses a gap in our knowledge about contemporary Japan. -- Laura Miller, University of Missouri, St. Louis Drinking in Japan is a powerful cultural imperative and social lubricant, especially for being and becoming a man. Christensen looks beyond the camaraderie to show how easy it is to drink up and how challenging it is to dry out in contemporary Japan. He provides a sensitive and moving analysis of the social worlds of drinking, of those individuals who are led to excess, and of the sobriety organizations that provide pathways to living in recovery for those desperate enough and brave enough to confront their condition. His ethnography of alcoholism and alcohol abstention as daily experience, lived identity, and organized support is a thought-provoking contribution to Japan studies and a rare analysis of the cultural framing of substance abuse and recovery therapies. -- William W. Kelly, Yale University

Toasted salarymen weaving through nighttime streets and swaying drunkenly on the last train of the evening is a common enough sight in Japan. Christensen's study explores the cultural history surrounding alcohol consumption, as well as the awkward understandings and treatments for alcoholics. By tracing the way drinking is intertwined with notions of masculinity and male sociality, Christensen exposes the damaging struggles faced by men who want to dodge expectations that they imbibe with others. This is a superb book that addresses a gap in our knowledge about contemporary Japan. -- Laura Miller, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis Drinking in Japan is a powerful cultural imperative and social lubricant, especially for being and becoming a man. Christensen looks beyond the camaraderie to show how easy it is to drink up and how challenging it is to dry out in contemporary Japan. He provides a sensitive and moving analysis of the social worlds of drinking, of those individuals who are led to excess, and of the sobriety organizations that provide pathways to living in recovery for those desperate enough and brave enough to confront their condition. His ethnography of alcoholism and alcohol abstention as daily experience, lived identity, and organized support is a thought-provoking contribution to Japan studies and a rare analysis of the cultural framing of substance abuse and recovery therapies. -- William W. Kelly, Yale University

Author Information

Paul Christensen is assistant professor of anthropology at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

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