Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9-to-5 low-cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work related. And with monday.com, work is just easier. monday.com for whatever you run. Go to monday.com to learn more. With Lulu Lemon, the real gift happens when they're living in it. When you give the fan favorite everywhere belt bag, the real gift is... And when the ultra soothing rest feel slides are the gift, you're really giving them... This holiday, Lulu Lemon makes it easy to give little luxuries that go beyond. Open the moment. Shop now at lululemon.com. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the new books network. And I'd like to tell you that we have a new and improved website. It has two new features that we think you'll love. One of them is a vastly improved search engine so that when you type in keywords, you'll get a bunch of episodes really quick. The other is the ability to create a listener account. And in that listener account, you can save episodes for later listening. So you can create a kind of listening list. We think these features are neat and we think you'll enjoy them. Please visit the site today. Hi, I'm Carla Napi and this is New Books in East Asian Studies. Welcome and thank you very much for joining me today. I just spoke with Paul Christensen about his new book, Japan Alcoholism and Masculinity, Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo. This came out in 2015 with Lexington Books. In this book, Paul uses a very local case study to open out into much broader consequences. So the local case study is an ethnography of Japanese men who are struggling with sobriety, who are struggling with an identification as alcoholics. In the context primarily of two major treatment programs, the only major treatment programs available to them in modern Tokyo. And these are Alcoholics Anonymous and Don Shukai. And the book uses this very local case study to open out into questions about how we understand the relationship between the individual and the collective, how we understand the social production of ideas of normalcy and abnormalcy, how we understand the ways that local social historical context can shape particular ideas of addiction, particular ways of dealing with and treating addiction, and how all of these relationships and these contexts can go on to constrain and provide opportunities for the development of a self of an identity. When you are, for example, an individual who is in this case that Paul describes, struggling with how to create a sense of self, a new self, a new identity, in a social context where the assumptions behind the treatment program that you are working in to make yourself, to make your new self, don't match up with the society and the culture that you live in necessarily. So it's a really interesting local case, again, that has, I think, much broader consequences. And it's of interest not only to anthropologists, to readers and listeners interested in anthropology in Japan, but also to readers and listeners interested in the history of medicine, of health, of conceptions of disease, of addiction, and of the ways that society's language, social bodies create individuals. So it was a real pleasure to talk with Paul about this. The book is really, really interesting and I'm really grateful to you, as always, for listening and for supporting us in that way. So thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoy. I'm here to talk with Paul Christiansen about his new book, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity. Welcome to new books in East Asia and studies. Paul, and thanks very much for making time to be with me today. Thank you very much for having me. It's very exciting to talk about my book. Oh, for me too. So as is traditional for the channel, let's start by saying a little bit about how you came to the field. What brought you to work in Japan and in a kind of ethnographic approach to Japan specifically? Well, coming to Japan was initially mostly teenage rebellion. I took Japanese in high school because my parents didn't want me to. They thought it would be too difficult or too time consuming. And when I went to Japan for the first time when I was 17, I and all the teachers I was with went out and had a beer at the end that we didn't get our IDs checked and we were allowed to do this. And so it felt very rebellious for a group of American teenagers. And that was kind of whether I fully recognized it or not. That was the first moment I sort of paid attention to alcohol and drinking in Japan and how it's organized, how it's structured, some of the rules around it. So yeah, that was how I first got to it. And then many years later with grad school, I had maintained my interest in Japan and I was trying to sort of find a topic. And I wanted to do something with alcohol and drinking, I think psychoactive substances are just fascinating, particularly ethnographically fascinating. And that's what the project was actually originally supposed to be was to look at drinking and to look at drinking culture. And I was going to have these ideas of going and working in a bar and observing people as they came and drank alcohol and got drunk and all the sorts of stuff. And I got to Japan and realized that had sort of been done already and probably wasn't going to work out quite the way I envisioned it. But recovery kind of presented itself and opened itself up. And there were these opportunities that I think like a lot of anthropologists kind of fell into. But then they started to grow and mature and some really interesting things started to come out of them. So that was the shift from initially wanting to look at how and why people are drinking to considering how and why people aren't drinking. So why Tokyo that the book focuses on Tokyo is a space for your study. What brought you there specifically and what kept you there for the purpose of the study? Well, I do kind of love Tokyo to be kidding with. So it was there was some, I guess, personal motivation as a place I enjoyed being and wanting to go back to. But it also just has it's where things are certainly concentrated in Japan. There are a lot of bars. There are a lot of people drinking and being drunk. And there are also a lot of the groups that I worked with, these the alcohol support groups there. And it certainly is the largest concentration of meetings of members, more just sort of the way the demographics of Japan work and that there's also the most people there than anything else. But it was something I certainly thought about because there are some, I think if I had done a book on alcoholism in say rural Japan or a smaller city in Japan, it would have been very different. So Tokyo does certainly feature kind of prominently in the book. And that was a deliberate choice. I think it is structured in a specific way in Tokyo. But part of the reason for going there was also just I find it to be a fascinating place. And I really thought doing field work there would be wonderful, certainly challenging, but also wonderful. Great. And we'll talk about the nature of some of these recovery groups that you briefly mentioned later on in our conversation. There's a really interesting and very detailed accounting of your experience with those groups and also the consequences of not only your but individual members experience of the groups for the larger argument of the book. So you've already mentioned graduate school and the book started out as a dissertation project, is that right? Yes, correct. So let's talk a little bit about the transition from dissertation to book. Were there any major transformations either in the way you were conceptualizing the project and conceptualizing perhaps what you were arguing here and or the way you were thinking about the architecture of the written project as a book? Yeah, it was, I mean, I had the standard sort of change in that there's no longer the stereotypical dissertation literature review in the book that was chopped up and sort of moved into other chapters and made, you know, mostly to sort of make the book flow a bit better. The biggest change that was certainly a change kind of in my own thinking about these topics and something I'm still trying to wrestle with and make sense of a bit more, but trying to move, consider how alcoholism is part of a larger conversation, larger set of discussions and disagreements around addiction generally and how can this very specific group in Japan in a group of people that's, you know, not more than certainly not more than 10,000, perhaps not even more than 5,000 people contribute to that conversation about what do we know about addiction? What are some of our taken for granted assumptions about what it means to be an addict? How does that differ based on where you find yourself in the world or, you know, your religious background, all these various things that contribute to, you know, what it means to be an addict and addicted and maybe an addict who's trying to negotiate recovery? So that was far and away the biggest change between the dissertation and the book and, you know, a change is certainly motivated by trying to make this something that's more relevant, more, you know, has a brighter appeal and interest to a larger number of readers, but also just my own thinking about the topic and trying to place alcohols in, I think, within this larger context. And as somebody, speaking as somebody personally who teaches the history of drugs, right, and the relationship between the history of drugs and ideas of what counts as normal in different contexts, I really appreciated that part of the book or that aspect rather of the book because it's in a lot of different parts, right, where you're being thoughtful about this particular case study in terms of larger issues of how we understand not just addiction, but also ideas of normal and normalcy and also the relationship between the individual and a collective or different kinds of collectives. And so there's a lot of broader themes that I think the reader will take away from this book that, you know, are located in this case study but aren't necessarily purely local to them. And I mean, normal is one of the facts and normal and ideas about normalcy are certainly also in the dissertation, but still trying to sort of wrestle with those in the book and even moving forward, you know, continuing to think about how does addiction, you know, in Japan as well as elsewhere, I think that it's a fascinating aspect and I think it's an aspect that's been neglected a bit. So I'm certainly glad that that comes through a bit and I think it's something that needs to be, we need more people considering what it means to be normal and how does this vary and what are the consequences behind it? Absolutely. So getting right into the book itself, let's talk about some of the ways that the book is about a specific kind of person, right. So this is not just about what it is to be normal, but specifically this is about what it is in Japan and Tokyo in particular to be a normal man. So it's a story not just about Japanese alcoholics, but it focuses in particular on Japanese alcoholic men and on masculinity. So perhaps this is a good place, as good a place as any to start. Can you talk about that? Why focus? And I ask you to talk about this not because it's not clear in the book, right, but to open this up for listeners who haven't yet had a chance to read it. Why focus on men and what's important for you about the fact that this is a book about men and masculinity? I mean, in a lot of ways that also it kind of grows out of my original shift from, you know, first wanting to look at drinking in Japan to then looking at not drinking in recovery that so much of what you read and hear about Japan talks about how, you know, to be a man is to drink and to drink with other men. And while this is, you know, an idea that's been around for quite a long time and is in some way somewhat stereotypical and certainly changing a bit in the contemporary, the fastest growing group of people who are consuming in greater and greater levels are young women in Japan, that idea is still quite strong, that men drink and men drink with other men. And so as I shifted my focus and started to look more and more at recovery and not drinking, that question really stuck with me. So what does it mean then when you're a Japanese male, you're an adult, you're, you know, trying to maintain a job and a career and, you know, perhaps a family and all these other sorts of things. What happens when you take alcohol out of that picture when either because you now identify yourself as an alcoholic and you feel you can't do this or you're part of an organization that now labels this is the worst type of failure and lapse and something that will eventually lead inevitably to your death. What do you do with that? So that was really where, you know, I wanted to focus more on the men and masculinity and how are they trying to negotiate this process. And there certainly are, you know, women do feature in the book a bit as well and I think their experiences are in many ways a bit different, at least some of the women who attend some of the sobriety group meetings that I was in. But, you know, for a lot of the men, a lot of the conversation was structured around how difficult it was to be a man in Japan without alcohol. That how all the things they had to be mindful of, how much that could impact their job, men, men who just stop showing up at work because the pressure has gotten too great for them to go out and have a drink with their co-workers and they don't know how to tell others that they're sober and they're trying to stay sober so they just stop going to work. And moments like that really struck me is, you know, in terms of a conversation about masculinity, what it means to be a man in Japan, alcohol really is still a huge part of that and when it's removed, there really isn't a lot left and a lot of these men really struggled tremendously with that. Now, in this particular context that you're looking at in Japan and in Tokyo in particular, alcoholism, the experiences thereof, conceptions thereof and treatment thereof, looks different from what listeners who are based in the US, for example, might be familiar with. Now, some of the recovery groups, I mean, you focus on two recovery groups in particular and one of them, and I say some of because this has different manifestations, right, and we'll talk about that later, local meetings, central meetings, but one of them is alcoholics anonymous. And you talk about the particular local cast that Alcoholics Anonymous has in Japan and there's another recovery group as well that is local to this particular context and that's Dan Shukai. So let's start because both these two groups occupy such an important place in this study, right? Let's start by laying that foundation for listeners that we can then build on later. So Alcoholics Anonymous, can you talk about for listeners who are not perhaps familiar with the way this looks in Japan, what's notable in your opinion about how Alcoholics Anonymous functions and exists in Japan that might be distinctive to that particular context? Right. What's interesting is that Alcoholics, I guess if we want to sort of maybe consider the broader history, that AA starts in the United States in 1935 and it develops slowly at first, but has sort of this explosion kind of in the 1950s or so. And now it really is this massive force in contemporary American life, even often in ways that I think people don't fully appreciate a lot of the AA slogans that we just use without knowing they originally come from AA. Like, you know, one day at a time is AA language. And I think we're so, we are so familiar with AA even when we don't recognize it in the US and we often don't pause and consider what that familiarity kind of, what is carried with it and how that shapes, how that influences, how that structures, how a lot of Americans at least regard Alcoholics, that Alcoholics are not degenerates, they're not, you know, people you can totally write off. They are still, you know, members of our community and capable and, you know, they are doing this noble thing by working on their struggles and attending meetings. And it's, it has a very different feeling character than it still has in Japan, where if we sort of shift the history then over to Japan, the two groups, Don Shukai and AA, are interesting in that they are distinct groups. They are very different. They share a little bit of membership, but not too much. It's, you're usually members of one group or the other, but they're also in many ways very similar that Don Shukai is based on AA. And prior to official American AA getting to Japan in the 1970s, Don Shukai felt itself to be Japanese AA. And they changed a few things. The early leadership of Don Shukai identified some, they called them fatal flaws in American AA that relied on donations for financial stability. And there was too much emphasis on being anonymous. They didn't include family members in meetings. So they took those things out. And, but otherwise Don Shukai still relies on a lot of the same ideology that AA relies upon in Japan and the United States, that you have to surrender yourself to a higher power, to something beyond yourself. You have to accept that you have this lifelong incurable illness, that alcoholism is a lifelong incurable disease. And you will always be in recovery. You will never be a recovered addict. And you have to then constantly work on this. You have to attend meetings regularly for forever, essentially. And this is always going to be something that you carry around. And so what's interesting then is that not that much has changed for the organization in moving it to a different cultural context. That it still relies on a lot of the same ideological apparatus that it has in the US. Confession, surrender, surrender to something beyond yourself. And if you do this and you do this to the required degree, you will be transformed. You will somehow be fundamentally remade into a new person and a person who's happy, who's who's happy without alcohol and drinking. And so that's often been the struggle for a lot of members, that they're sort of intellectually comfortable and capable with these ideas. But they don't necessarily have some of the other connections. That if confession isn't a meaningful practice to you, particularly say confession to God, even if it's God as you understand him, which is sort of AA's language for framing this, then you can confess all you want. But it maybe won't have the effect that AA is telling a lot of Japanese members it will have for them. That's right. And one of the wonderful things I think the book does is really highlights a critique or a question of the portability of this notion of addiction and alcoholism and the structure built around it by a predominantly that listeners or readers might take for granted as being, you know, global, right? Right. Yes. But you're really showing that in different local contexts, this set of notions comes with a whole bunch of different kinds or this whole set of notions via that we assume to be portable comes with a whole set of baggage that's very local to the US context. And when you move that to another context, it's not necessarily going to be a seamless fit. So exactly. Yeah. So in the kind of early chapters, you talk about this whole set of historical and contextual baggage or this frame that AA fits into. And the early chapters discuss, for example, the history of notions of alcoholism, the history of temperance movements in the US and elsewhere. And you show how that that temperance movement's actually worked out very differently in Japan. And that's one of the things to keep in mind, right? You know, that shapes local experience of AA of AA in Japan, but also the history of alcohol itself and its connections to spirituality is very different in Japan. And in the second chapter, you talk about this, right? The importance of alcohol and its connection to religious ritual historically in Japan and the ways that that has reverberated down and shaped contemporary attitude. So can you talk a little bit about that, Shinto, sort of religion and spirituality and the connections between that and alcohol in Japan? What's important about those connections for you in terms of what happens now and what happens later? Right. Well, I mean, it's really fascinating that I always also kind of consider this in the context of Christianity, that we also do have alcohol at, you know, some of the centers of Christian rights and rituals, right? You know, the drinking of wine, but it certainly takes on a very different meaning than we see in Japan, that sake in particular, right? This was how you kind of, you communed with the gods and drunkenness was often seen as a way to be closer to the supernatural and the spiritual. So it was, it has this sense of being something profound sounds almost a little too strong of a word, but along those lines, right? That this was something that was to be celebrated and enjoyed and brought you to a, at least temporarily, brought you to a better place. I think in the contemporary, we've also seen, you know, the abuse of that idea perhaps by, you know, advertisers in Japan and relying upon some of those, those very productive, those very happy, those very indulgent connections in Japan to then, you know, use that to sell alcohol or use that to continue to cement alcohol's place in Japan is something that's requisite for socialization, is something that, you know, you need in order to make something fun and enjoyable that if you want to go out and have a good time, alcohol needs to be a part of that, but you see this, this really interesting connection with religion, you know, Shintoism in particular, particularly with sake as well, you get, you know, conversations about sake being made from rice and other metaphors of Japan, rice is, you know, the staple food of the nation. So again, it really kind of cement at least one particular type of alcohol as deeply significant, but also deeply enjoyable and something that should be revered, but also something that, you know, this is how you have fun. And that idea, I think, is carried forward in some very powerful ways that you see. And distill, even after all my years of going back to Japan and, you know, spending large amounts of time there, I'm still always struck initially by how, how tolerant and how out in the open drunkenness is that, you know, walking around any major city or even small towns, you see people who are, you know, very visibly intoxicated. And it, it, I guess has sort of, you know, an American who grew up in the United States, I have to kind of wrestle with my, I don't know, lingering Puritan morals or something about this and let's go get up here. Why do they tolerate this? And let's quickly go away and, you know, maybe I participate a bit as well. But it's, it's very, it still does sort of strike me when I'm there, how, how prominent drunkenness is and how it's, it's something that's, you know, oftentimes celebrated. There are certainly, you know, restaurant owners or taxi drivers or people like that who get frustrated when they have to deal with the consequences of over consumption. But drinking and drunkenness are very easily visible in Japan. And I think in part because of this, these historical connections that they can make and things that have just been relied upon by for a very long time by a large number of people in Japan. And this chapter, chapter two, not only opens up this landscape of drinking and drunkenness as something that's not just, you know, celebrated, but also tolerated. You talk about the ubiquity of vending machines that sell alcohol and this sort of televised drunkenness and the lots of different ways in the media and also in the practice of everyday life and the technologies of everyday life that alcohol is coded as leisurely and fun and is very, very widely available. And the chapter- We should note that the vending machines are somewhat on the decline, at least in Tokyo. You have to work a bit harder today to find them than, at least you then you had to in 1995 or whenever the first, about then was the first time I went to Japan, but they are still there. You have to dig a little bit more. Yes, there. So this, as this chapter shows, there are some really important consequences to this ubiquitous coding of alcohol is fun and leisurely for Japan's alcoholics and for men in particular. And the chapter really takes us into the ways that this can limit their employment options, this can limit their friendships, their relationships with family members, and also can shift their notions and limit the notions of selfhood and of identity. And we're going to see some of that playing out in the rest of the book as well and specifically in so far as all of these are related to ideas and norms of gender and of masculinity specifically. Yes. Now, as we move through, you take us into sort of some lots more detail about these two programs that we briefly talked about a few minutes ago and that you introduced at the beginning of the book and this is AA and Don Shukai. Now, in both of these cases, you talk about the importance to these recovery programs of something that you mentioned just a bit earlier, which is this notion of spirituality, right? Either in terms of God as, you know, as you conceptualize him or as if he's meaningful to you or it is meaningful to you. And we're broadly in terms of a notion of spiritual awakening that is associated with ideas of healing for these men that you're studying. So let's talk about that a little bit for you. Like, what are some of the most important consequences or elements of this coding of recovery and healing in terms of particular model of spirituality and a particular trope of awakening and spiritual awakening for these men? Well, what I think is most fascinating is that it's that you have these very specific, you know, like you were saying, these very specific tropes of spirituality. Most of them are very very much, if not directly influenced by Christianity. But then this is also largely the only option that a lot of alcoholics have in Japan that if this doesn't move you, if this isn't something that you can derive meaning from, you don't really have anywhere else to go. And that is something that is really stuck with me. You know, ever since I started started with this project and something that I still sort of continue to wrestle with, I think this really is kind of the unaddressed issue here that if AA or Don Shikai don't work, one, the way that the groups frame their ideology, that's your fault. You didn't try hard enough, you didn't work the steps or work the program hard enough, you didn't, you know, confess as much as you should have, or you didn't fully surrender yourself over. But then at the same time, there's no real acknowledgement that maybe this, maybe this isn't a meaningful practice for everyone. Maybe there are a lot of people who don't find really anything in doing these things. And so you get a lot of alcoholics, a lot of people at meetings who really are trying to make this work for themselves, they're working the steps, they're working the program, they go to meetings, you know, every night of the week sometimes. But they're kind of just muscling through it and suffering through it. That's why I wanted to put suffering somewhere in the title. And they're not finding that transformation that you were talking about. That part of the promise, and I think part of the appeal of both AA and Don Shikai is that if you do this, and if you do this to the requisite degree, you will become a new person, you will be fundamentally transformed, you will become someone who is happy without alcohol. And there are a few individuals in Japan who can speak to this and who have had this. There's, you know, one of the people I mentioned a little bit in detail in the book is this man, Toru, who can speak very eloquently about this moment of transformation. And he has this very specific incident that happened to him, you know, he was reading the book, the big book from AA one night and the room lit up and he felt this great sense of calm and release. And ever since then he's been sober and he's been happy and he works really tirelessly to try to help others have a moment like this. But he's also very much the exception, not the norm. And he will go and he'll lecture and he'll talk to, you know, groups of people who are struggling, who are trying to stay sober. And he'll often be the only one who can speak about things this way. So I think that the narrowness around this is what really, I think, becomes problematic in Japan, that it is recovery is framed in a very specific way along the lines of spirituality. And there is really no room to deviate from that or to try to chart a different path towards recovery or even really to question what it means to be in recovery and what a successful recovery looks like, that it looks like what AA and Anshukai say it looks like. And if you can't make your experiences fit with that, then that's a real issue. And there's another important way that this whole system is constrained that you also talk about in this part of the book. And this is really important. And I want to mention this in part so that listeners and potential readers who are interested in history of medicine and biomedicine know that this is there. So you talk about the importance of the implication of addiction and treatment methodology and really in both of these programs within a frame of biomedical authority in this context. So can you talk about this a little bit? What is the importance of Japanese physicians as gatekeepers to recovery programs? And can you talk about the ways that this biomedical context is important for not just how these men learn about and get involved in these recovery programs but for maybe shaping what happens after? Right. Well, I mean that was really something that really struck me when I when I first started doing this work is that AA likes to sort of to shape itself to present itself as someone who an organization that that kind of usurped the authority of physicians that they gave power back to the alcoholics. The alcoholics are the ones who they have these experiences. They know what's happening and we should we should give give them a greater say in what's going on. And I think that's such a good idea and a good approach. But what I found really interesting and you know potentially somewhat of an issue in Japan is that nearly everyone comes to AA or Don Shukai through hospitalization. They're introduced to either one of those organizations by their attending physician. They're often funneled into the organization. The physician thinks his best for them depending on who they are. So if you're still married and you're particularly if you're a male and you're still married they're going to send you or direct you more towards Don Shukai because they allow for family member participation. And then you know a lot of physicians will say that's the more appropriate place for you. And if you're not married or if you're a woman they will direct you more towards AA because they have a deem that to be a bit more appropriate for for those individuals. So they you really have the physicians in Japan kind of dictating the terms of the conversation. They're the ones who are introducing patients to these programs. Patients who are coming to their programs in hospital who are often their patients for up to three months in these these sort of immediate recovery detox programs and then they're introduced to sometimes both organizations. Sometimes only one of them in hospital and when they get closer and closer to being discharged are increasingly sort of pushed into one group or the other. So this isn't something that the individual is coming to on their own or something that they're maybe coming to through their friends or their family or you know out of a sense of kind of object frustration at at what drinking is doing to their life. But there there being in many ways funneled and directed into it by their doctors. At the same time that these are supposed to be groups that kind of work to move around that that authority-based relationship right that that power imbalance and try to empower the individual to take some control over their life through the groups you know ideological apparatus and the fellowship of other members and you know coming to medians seeing that there are others who are having the same struggles that you're having. So it's it strikes me in some ways as being structurally a bit problematic in Japan how things are organized that this is you know both of these organizations set themselves up as ways around this structure of authority and instead what we find in Japan is that that structure of authority doctor to patient is what's filling the the member ranks and nearly everyone that I met and I worked with it meetings has come to that seat in the meeting through this arrangement they were hospitalized and then directed into this meeting by their doctor. And there's also this larger context and we may have mentioned this before but just to highlight that in this particular moment in the discussion AA has a very particular disease model of alcoholism right like even as a very notion of like what alcoholism is it's coded in biomedical terms even if it's loose biomedical terms as a disease and that's a very specific way of constructing alcoholism as an experience and as an object. But also as the disease that is incurable and that again gets into quite a lot of issues in Japan and quite a lot of misunderstanding or disagreement particularly between members and the general public that there was one member who you know would nearly every week she would talk about how that was an issue for her because people would invite her from her work to go drinking and she would say no you know I'm an alcoholic now I'm in recovery and they would say well but you went to the hospital and you got released so that means you're better right? When you get discharged from the hospital you're recovered so why can't you do this and she really didn't feel she had had the vocabulary had the language to make them understand her situation at least you know her situation through the lens of AA so yeah all sorts of issues start to emerge out of this and I think it again gets back to the issue of trying to move conceptual categories and organizational framework around the world and and dropping it into different cultural contexts without any consideration for that context and even in the context of we've been talking about as a meeting there are variations and how that looks and what that experience is and you take us into that in this middle part of the book so chapter four really looks in detail at your experiences in three different kinds of meeting groups that you worked with between April 2007 and August 2008 so Mondays you describe beginner AA meetings in a hospital on Tokyo's western border Wednesdays were devoted to a central group AA meeting and Fridays were devoted to Ohashi Danchukai meetings right we could spend easily a couple hours talking about the intricacies of these different meetings and there's a lot of ways and there's a lot of detail in the book so I'll just mark that for listeners who want to know more in detail about the different sorts of social and individual practices and structures that were local to these different kinds of meetings and the significance of those differences and of the commonalities among them but I'll just maybe ask you a little bit at this point to open up one or two or you know however many but maybe one or two is good for time there we have of the moments for you in your ethnography that were perhaps the most striking so another way of asking this is was there any moment in the course of your attendance and participation in these meetings that really importantly shaped how you were thinking about the project or struck you or moved you especially in any particular way one was actually at that the beginners meeting that you mentioned what I did on Monday evenings while I was in Japan and I think it was partly sort of due to the nature of that meeting that this was a meeting where long-term AA members came into a hospital and they spoke mostly two patients they would deliver you know almost sort of hour-long lectures on AA and they would talk in great detail about the 12 steps they would usually do you know chunks of three steps each and then cycle through this over and over again do excuse me to a room full of of patients and the patients were often quite sort of passive and would listen to this and and take it all in and then the last bit of the meeting would be a chance for the the patients to say something and they often would say very little you know thank you for coming or you know I won't try my best to to not drink anymore you know things of that nature but there was one day in particular and there was one patient there and he was an older man probably in his his 60s or so and right as the lecture was finishing he raised his hand and said you know I'm sorry can I ask a question and that in itself was unusual or that was the only time I remember that happening while I attended this meeting and the AA volunteer said oh yes of course please you know we welcome questions um and the old man stands up and he you know was quite sort of articulate and eloquent and how he spoke and he thanked them for coming thank them for their time said I know your volunteers and etc etc then he got to what he really wanted to say and he said he didn't really have a question so much as a comment he said you know I listened to what you said it was interesting but I cannot accept this and he said it stinks of Christianity and I want nothing to do with it um it was very used this very sort of powerful language and powerful phrase and it dramatically almost sort of immediately energized all the other patients in the room they got far more animated than I ever remember them being otherwise after he said this um and the AA volunteers really struggled to respond they didn't have much of a response um and you know they talked about oh no it's not Christianity it's spirituality Japan is a spiritual place we have all sorts of spiritual practices and a great history with spirituality this this can work for anyone but the way in which he framed it and he so so immediately linked it to a specific religion and it's one that just was not was intolerable for him that it wasn't going to work for him he couldn't take meaning from the things that they were saying and and so this was simply you know and basically saying this had been a waste of his time um and there wasn't really much to be done about it uh was really startling and startling in that in terms of illustrating you know how difficult it has you know been for some members in Japan to make this work for them but also all the members that get left behind that A and Don Shukai are your only options if you're struggling with your alcohol consumption in Japan and you'd like to try to reduce it and if they don't work there really isn't too much else that you can do and for a lot of people they simply don't work because of who they are and how they see the world and and how they organize their thought and meaning and what's important to them and and that these the organizational structure of these organizations is is incompatible with that um so that was far and away kind of the most notable thing that I remember um there were a lot of stories from other meetings that are quite sort of I think maybe a bit more shocking in terms of what you know just things people talking about things that they had done while they were still drinking and you know often kind of graphic moments of despair um there was one I remembered though that it it struck me for how how deeply embedded alcohol is and alcohol and consumption of alcohol is in Japan and it was at a Don Shukai meeting um and it was near New Year's so the New Year's holiday um and it was from the wife of an alcoholic and she was speaking um about these bottles of sake that they kept getting at their house so this is this practice usually between you know companies and you know people who work together in Japan will they'll send gifts to each other's house at the end of the year um so her husband kept getting these bottles big expensive bottles of sake from you know other people at other companies that he worked with um partly because he hadn't told anyone he's not an alcoholic he just worked very hard to avoid um you know being in a situation where you to drink with them um and then her husband would have to go online and look up how all these different sake tasted so that he could if asked later on by the person who sent it you know how was it he could actually speak accurately you know oh it was good this one was you know it was really dry and I like the dry ones or something like that um so the extent to which he would go to kind of maintain the roots right maintain the illusion that that you know he's still a normal back to our our word from earlier a normal member of society that he really doesn't feel that he can tell these people who he is you know somewhat close to that he's an alcoholic and he doesn't drink anymore out of largely out of fear for how they will receive that news and you know how it could potentially be consequential. And for listeners who are particularly interested in this element of a kind of critique of normalcy and ideas of normalcy that we've been talking about I just want to point them specifically to chapter seven we won't have a chance just because of the constraints of our time to talk in much detail about that entire chapter that looks at collective concepts of normal fuzu and unusual fushiki right as a shape drinking and drunkenness and one of the interesting things here is that drunkenness and public intoxication here is normal as normal lies and then you know you kind of contrast this with refusing to drink in society which is marked as unusual and abnormal and this has really profound consequences for individual people on for individual men and for alcoholics as they struggle to really do you know what you have mentioned already in this conversation and what you emphasize in the book which is not just stop drinking but really produce a new form of self I mean this is about right coming up with a new self and a new identity and the consequences of that in this frame of normalcy and abnormal are really profound and you have an entire chapter that really focuses in on that. And also being told that this new form of self should be one that you're happy with and you find fulfilling and if you don't find that you're not doing it well enough so it can be yes kind of doubly impactful on the individual I think. Right and that struggle is actually manifest in at least a couple different sites right this sort of struggle with this new production of self and the kind of you know how do I be functional and normal in this context you talk about in this middle of the book specifically in chapter five the way that struggle plays out in terms of language as a side of struggle right and you talk about the importance of these tropes of self-loathing of escape of frustration right and there's a really beautiful discussion of that in chapter five but also the body as a side of struggle so listeners who are particularly interested in aspects of embodiment and physicality and physical embodiment of this phenomenon will have a lot that they can look to in chapter five that really takes us into that as well yes I don't want I want to make sure that we don't and the conversation eventually as we as we moved toward the end ish of our time without talking about some of the alternatives so you know functionally speaking AA and Dan Shukai are the are the options as you've laid them out right for right men struggling with sobriety and to some extent women although you know as you as we've talked about that's kind of a different topic for a different that's the next book right exactly this is a different book but you do talk about some alternatives to Dan Shukai and AA one of them is treated in or both of them are discussed at length in chapter six one of them is something called Nikon this is a particular practice that has elements of Buddhist practice elements of meditation and there's a description of that here but there's also another aspect of practice that you talk about as a potential alternative or is another site of self-making that's perhaps not experienced in terms of the same kinds of constraints as these groups Dan Shukai and AA and that's the use of the internet this is really interesting and I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about that the growing use of the internet as a recovery tool for alcoholics in Japan well yeah that was something that that really jumped out at me because it I heard one interviewee mention it and then another and then another um that a lot of them were asked instructed by often by their doctors but sometimes they had already started to do this on their own um to to keep a blog right but and they would often frame it more as keep an online diary of of your your struggles you know your how you're feeling what's going on what it's like to be you know to try to stay sober all these you know different issues that what you might be wrestling with um and I think in some ways there's there's certainly a history of diary keeping in Japan that's you know certainly much older than yeah you know blogging and the internet or and things like that but certainly you know kind of plugging into that a little bit and there are you know quite a few websites that are maintained by individual alcoholics and it's I think back to my own often sort of very pathetic attempts to you know maintain a blog or something like that then I hope that we all have reasons an entry um you know this this rigorous absolute process of of keeping it up to date um and often very you know very intimate posts about their struggles and their feelings and and you know or you know sometimes quite mundane right just how their day was what they ate um you know I walked past a bar that I used to go to today that was a little troubling or you know things of that nature um but really trying to to use the internet as this platform to in a you know maybe semi-autonomous place anonymous place to talk about what's going on in your life how how your struggles are going um and this would come up a lot in meetings too people would talk about how this was a useful place for them to you know to be able to write to put things down um that it gave them this this other platform or this other place that they found useful and I really think um one of the things I often would would ask people in interviews is this something that you know you want to to expand upon or or you know that you could do more with and you'd consistently get this answer oh yes you know I would certainly like to do that um and but I didn't see too much of that it's something I'd maybe like to continue to to to look into a bit more or or go back and revisit a bit that you know has this continued to expand in a way or evolve in a way that is is productive to recovery and this is particularly interesting right in the larger context of the book where you're repeatedly bringing us back to the importance of this disjuncture or the relationship between the individual and the collective or the individual and various types of collective and I think it's one of the really interesting things about any kind of blogging and journaling and sort of the individual activity on the internet right is that right it's a way of producing different forms of collective different kinds of collectivity that might you know exactly right like interesting alternatives to the dominant social norms or social structures of a society so yeah yeah it's really interesting to think about that in light of this larger argument that the book is making oh yeah most definitely yes so as we move toward the last chapter of the book we move toward a really interesting case right so throughout the book i guess right yeah talk about our prints so throughout the book you've talked in various ways about the importance of kind of famous or charismatic figures and this can take different forms sometimes it takes the form of a kind of um figure head that is held as the founder of one of these groups right bob a bill or you know the founder of don chukai sometimes it takes the form of an important figure that's ahead or a leader of a particular meeting here we have an interesting discussion of an important famous figure who becomes a site of potential optimism for the community of alcoholics and alcoholic men in particular in japan and you talk about the the outcome of that optimism so i'll just hit the ball over to you at this can you talk about the case of prince tomahito of mikasa like what's notable about that case and for you um what's important for us to take away from um what you'll describe right i'm about this case what happened there well it was all coincidence it it just all of this started to happen right sort of after i got to talk you and started doing my field work um but the prince um he was always sort of a controversial somewhat controversial figure in the imperial family he's had this reputation for being outspoken and kind of speaking his mind um but he addressed um an audience at a city welfare office and he he used very deliberate language very much taken from aa and he said i'm prince tomahito of mikasa and i am alcohol dependent um and i'm going to enter treatment for this i'm going to try to get sober and recover um it actually delayed one of my interviews with a doctor because that was then the doctor who had to go off and help him with his treatment for a couple of months so he had to postpone um our meeting but i guess i'm make sense i would come in second to a prince i guess that's that's in general um but it was this great moment of optimism among aa and doncukite members they really saw this as you know this potential moment where um our struggles will be better acknowledged people will will take a more nuanced view to alcoholism and what it means to be an addict then you know we will start to get um the the attention that we want right we won't just be written off as as degenerates or things like that but people actually start to to understand our struggle a bit um there were even a couple of two different people who did not know each other both said this is maybe our Betty Ford moment right talking about you know how the first lady really brought addiction alcoholism into popular conversation in the united states through her own you know being honest about her struggles and and what she was going through so there was tremendous sense of you know this is it this is our moment um and then nothing really happened um that conversation didn't really get started and sort of what had been front page news you know the prince the alcoholic prince and stuff like that um kind of disappeared and faded away there was an earthquake in nigata which is city sort of in northern japan a couple weeks later and that became the major news story and for a lot of the AA and don chican members this was just confirmation that they really are neglected forgotten you know people don't want to consider what's what their lives are like or what you know what their struggles are um and a couple of years later the prince he had relapsed he had started drinking again he made you know another admission and talked again about his struggles with sobriety and alcohol and and all of these sorts of things and it was you know very much you know way at the back of the newspaper one sort of short article that that very few people paid any attention to um and so a lot of you had this great moment of optimism right as i was starting my work that then really faded it really kind of confirmed for a lot of people that i was working with and both with both groups that you know they really are they don't factor into the the social landscape of contemporary japan in any in really in any kind of way that they really are pushed to the margins and and a lot of people don't really want to to think about what's going on or consider um yeah some of the nuances of their struggle uh there was even once someone as the story started to fade out of the newspapers who said why can't we be more like depression which i initially found to be this really odd statement and then i looked into it a little bit more and um depression was becoming is becoming something that's more and more recognized more and more accepted in japan you know you talked about how you know you can walk into any bookstore and there's usually uh you know a stack of books near the front you know the latest titles on dealing with depression overcoming depression you know why can't we meaning alcoholics why can't we have that what what do we need to do to to achieve what they've been able to achieve particularly when we had you know what seemed to be like the leader of the figure that that we so needed and even then it didn't it didn't work out thank you so much paul now as we come to the end of our interview we also come to the end of the book the book to this point has looked at the struggles of japanese men to find kind of a public alcoholic persona that's accepted as socially appropriate their sense of masculinity and of a place in society has been dismantled and chapter eight that the final body chapter of the book really focuses on the process of as you put it trying to repair this sense of masculinity in place within japan so perhaps a good um maybe final question before we move to the conclusion is for you to talk a little bit about what might happen next and for you how might anthropology and your project in particular meaningfully contribute to this goal to this sense of repairing um the the sense of masculinity in place within japan of these alcoholics well i mean yeah that's that's something i certainly continue to think about you and after the book is out and um i think you're in sort of a roundabout way one of the things i i really think needs to be emphasized more is is that how context matters and i think that's that's certainly something that comes to the fore with ethnography and it's something that i hope maybe this book can help make a little bit more apparent and and and recognize in in other circles that context is is deeply fundamentally important here in in a lot of ways context is really structuring a lot of the the struggles and frustrations and and um a lot of the issues that the men i talk about in this book are having that because their their their own context is not recognized right that the importance of drinking foreman in japan and and it's not addressed somehow by the recovery apparatus that they're given that it doesn't really factor into what's going on um they don't often have much recourse otherwise they don't have anywhere else to turn too much you know perhaps turn a bit more to the internet and i think that's you know certainly something i want to continue to explore with this topic but more than anything else i think that needs to both you know in a conversation about alcoholics in japan but just a conversation about addiction generally i think there does need to be a lot more focus on you know particularly individual context and how does that influence how does that motivate someone's addiction how to what what role is that plane and in their struggles with whether it's alcohol or you know other addicting substances how does context matter here so now that we're at the conclusion of our hour there's of course a bunch of stuff that we didn't talk about right there's a ton of material in the book um that we just barely um scratched the surface up but is there anything in particular that you'd like to mention for listeners um that hasn't yet come up in the conversation i think i mean just sort of trying to to situate this within a conversation a general conversation about addiction and what does it mean to be addicted what it what who gets to make those decisions on on who gets labeled unaddict or not how are those labels influenced by you know a wide variety of factors if we're talking about alcoholism you know we're talking then about aa we're talking about you know the influence of christianity you know and a particular sort of vein of christianity right i sort of upper middle-class white american protestant view of the religion um so how how do all these things influence you know what we take for granted about addiction and and how have they played a pretty i think a pretty major role in shaping our are very taken for granted assumptions about an alcoholic and addict and and i think you know that's always sort of what i see the role of anthropology to be to it to insert more more kind of messiness and confusion into conversations to to make things a bit problematic but make them problematic in a good productive way and i think that that really needs to happen a bit more with anything that considers alcoholism addiction you know all the other the very varied aspects of this issue and now that the book is out and congratulations thank you what's next for you what's currently inspiring you um i i sort of promised myself i would try to do something a bit happier for the next project that while this was you know a tremendous you know opportunity and i really loved all the people i worked with it it is also kind of it can weigh on you sometimes a bit so i i'm looking at um japanese brazilian baseball players is the next thing i would like to do and players who have played baseball in brazil and have now returned back to japan as baseball players and but also associate a lot more with their their move back you know returning to some kind of ancestral homeland playing a sport that isn't particularly popular in brazil but you know is certainly one of the major sports in japan and and i would like to incorporate ideas about the body and athleticism and and what gets attributed to these different bodies as they move throughout the world and also do something that's a bit more i don't want to say lighthearted but a bit happier perhaps yeah well best of luck with that project thank you very much let me know and when you write that because we'll talk about that too that sounds awesome also and thanks so much for making the time paul it's really been a pleasure thank you very much it's been wonderful yes you've been listening to new books and e-station studies thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time [BLANK_AUDIO]
Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo (Lexington Books, 2014) explores the ways that admitting to and living with alcoholism in Japan challenges prevailing norms of masculinity and sociability, and looks carefully at its profound consequences for the individual sufferer. After a brief history of alcohol and drunkenness in Japan, Christensen considers the ubiquitous coding of alcohol as fun and leisurely in mass media, and directs our attention to the difficulties that this framing creates for male alcoholics. The book then moves to a discussion of historical shifts in notions of addiction in Japan, as well as contemporary debates over treatment methodologies and the ways that methodologies transplanted into Japan from the US map – or not – onto local cultural and religious realities. Christensen follows this with detailed accounts of the major support groups available to sufferers in Tokyo, the languages and bodies of alcoholic experience, and much else. Throughout the study, Christensen offers an extraordinarily sensitive treatment of the struggle of individual men to build a new selfhood while their sense of masculinity, and of a place in society, have been dismantled.
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