Intimacy for Sale: Masculinity, Entrepreneurship, and Commodity Self in Japan's Neoliberal Situation

This article examines the creation of entrepreneurial male subjects in Japan's host clubs. Based on my ethnographic study, I argue that hosts' entrepreneurship is constituted by commodifying themselves. This paradoxical - commodified, yet entrepreneurial - male subject is embedded in the new possibilities and constraints posed by Japan's neoliberal restructuring and global economic trends. Hosts, who dream of earning fast cash and achieving upward class mobility, perceive the hosting business as a gateway to success, fame, and luxurious lifestyles. As a result, they 'voluntarily' commodify themselves and feed into the club's profit-making. They are also exploiting the consumer logic of desirability and the neoliberal values of entrepreneurship. By doing so, they hope to better position themselves in contrast to the work ethic and status of Japan's conventionally hegemonic masculine icon, the Salaryman. I contend that neoliberal reform in Japan is not a mere politico-economic reaction to globalization, but a socio-historically specific situation in which individual desires, Japan's social values and ethics, and global economic trends discursively intersect, align, and produce a new mode of attachment to individual freedom and flexible accumulation of capital.Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, National Science Foundation Ethnographic Research Training, Freeman Student Fellowship for Personalized Learning in Asia, Special Research Fellowship at the University of Tokyo, Dissertation Workshop Fellowship on Market and Modernities in Asia at the University of Toronto, New Faculty General Research Fund at the University of Kansas (KU), International Research Travel Grant at KU, George L. Beslow Graduate Fellowship for dissertation writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Graduate Student Summer Research Assistance Awards at UIUC