Ageing bodies and the carceral circuitry of 'post-welfare' Japan

Speaker: Jason Danely (Oxford Brookes University)

Photo credit: Jason Danely

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Japan's ageing population and widening social and economic and inequality have led to a rise in the number of isolated and impoverished older adults. Within these circumstances of material and existential disconnection, alienation and weariness, crime has become not so much a means to survive as it is a means towards visibility, connection, and even meaning or care. As older bodies circulate between the prison and the community, custody and release, prisons come to resemble old age homes while care facilities and welfare bureaucracies in the community take on characteristics of surveillance and discipline characteristic of the prison. In this talk, I argue that within this circuitous churn, the carceral appears not as discrete institutional faces, but as a multiplicity of traces, repetitions and resonances—what Foucault refers to as ‘normalization’ takes place within the atmosphere of the carceral uncanny. Folded into this atmosphere is old age and death, which itself presents a kind of uncanny repetition, but also an engagement with a history, with memory, with grief. Drawing primarily on five-months of fieldwork in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, this talk will describe the lives of formerly incarcerated older adults who uneasily inhabit the uncanny terrain of the carceral, and the insights they can give us for meeting abolitionist calls for imagining other ways of living together.

Event recording

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Speaker biography

Jason Danely is Reader in Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. His books include Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Transdisciplinary Dialogues (2021) and Fragile Resonances: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England (2022).

Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk