This week: Anomie is a sociological condition and also a personal condition regarding unrest and a sense of purposelessness. It’s also a word I learned this week, so we talk about it. A lot.
Interestingly Enough
One of the newsletters I regularly read is called Why Is This Interesting? Every issue, the authors pull a topic from the news of the day and discuss it. For their April 19, 2022 issue, they invited Emanuel Derman, a professor at Colombia University, to write about his experiences with Japan. As the title promises, it is interesting, to me all the more so because it is a Japan I am only marginally acquainted with, a Japan of first class plane rides and luxury hotel1 stays.
Derman first arrived in Japan in the 1990s as a member of Goldman Sachs; he made a habit of staying at the Okura hotel2, where he lived a life of borrowed luxury, saying:
One had no worries living in the Okura… Left behind were bills, mail, email, chores, hassles, the weight of the world; your belongings were restricted to what you could carry in a garment bag
But luxury comes with a price. Twelve-hour work days, unavoidable late dinners with co-workers, and, within the hotel itself, overly-attentive staff become more nuisance than comfort, these could be taken as part of the cost of doing business. But.
There was a downside to visiting Japan. First of all, the numbing anomie that went with the stuporous body-wringing jetlag.
And there, at last, is the Japan I know, showing up in a beautifully pronounced but thoroughly obscure noun, a Japan of purposeless and genial but continual alienation.
anomie
:social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values
:personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals
Just a year or two after I had moved to Japan, an opportunity dropped in my lap. My friend Matt had lined up an interview with a UK hip-hop artist doing a tour of Japan. He needed a photographer. Cool.
DL, the rapper, met us in the lobby of his mansion3. He didn’t actually live there, the record company had rented it for him. Matt did the interview while I shot a few frames, then we headed out to get some more shots in the bright neon of Shinjuku. It was a great night. DL introduced us to his DJ, the then unknown Nujabes, rang down for snacks and drinks, got us tickets for a show later in the week. I felt like I had made it; I had a new purpose - to bring the the real Tokyo to British Hip-Hop fans. Only, it ended.
We thanked DL and Nujabes4, got back on the train and headed for home. A few nights later Matt and I crowded into my girlfriend’s car and DL and Nujabes perform. Another great night. But. The magazine ran the photos and the story, Matt and I got paid, and that was it. No editors started blowing up either of our phones, no more stories just dropped into our laps. Our assignment was done. Good job, boys. Go home.
I felt utterly unmoored.
Years later, I appeared as a talking head on a panel show. The production paid for my travel down to Tokyo, provided lunch and snacks, and were generally pleasant, professional people with whom I enjoyed working. And then I realized there were a couple of fairly well-known, high profile writers on our panel. And the level of “star treatment” they got once again showed that even from a far more adept and privileged position, I was still far down the ladder. No coffee gophers for me, no assistants calling cabs or scheduling hotel changes. For as well as I was treated, the second the show was wrapped, I was sent packing with no ceremony.
Once again, I felt more than a little lost.
Anomie has its greatest use in sociology, as shown in the first definition above. Coined by Jean Marie Guyau, the term was popularized by Émile Durkheim in his work on suicide, wherein he created a class of social problems rooted in the idea that people would become disaffected in societies where he norms and values that were once present have disappeared. This terminology would later be extended and applied to individuals as a state wherein ones goals cannot be achieved…
On the surface, this doesn’t necessarily apply to me so much as it does the generations that have come after mine. Millennials and Gen Z have been set the expectation that they would participate in the “normal” societal milestones of career, marriage, home ownership, and children. And then the means to do so have been slowly stripped away.
I’m in Gen X5. And while I don’t think we have, or had, it as bad as the younger generations, I think we can sympathize. But where I really feel the societal anomie is in being an ex-pat. The truth is, I never set out to live the majority of my adult life in Japan. It just kind of happened. And, as any long term non-Japanese resident can tell you, you never fit in. Doesn’t matter how well you speak the language, doesn’t matter how well attuned to the customs and traditions you are, if you stand out, by definition, you don’t fit in.
And, for me, personally, that’s the key. In both the photo shoot and t.v. appearance and a whole slew of experiences in between, I was allowed in for just a moment, before being politely shown back out again.
End Notes
I never set out to be a teacher. Japan was always meant to be a short detour between computer-related jobs. But, life, as they say, happens while you’re making other plans and life in Japan is actually pretty good, most of the time. And, though I had not set out to become a teacher, I think I have become a fairly good one. For all that I don’t fit in with Japan at large, I fit in pretty well in my chosen society of academics, educators, and linguists. So I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy or bitter. Rather, anomie is such a good word that almost from the second I looked it up, I felt it connect to these disparate, formative memories and so I wanted to see where that led. Thank you for indulging me.
Also, I think I’m using anomie correctly in the latter parts of this essay, but I’m not as confident as I usually am. This particular word sent me way down a very unfamiliar rabbit hole. I’ve studied a little psychology and a little sociology but this was all new material to me. And so, while I am fairly sure I used it correctly in the personal sense, I’m less sure of the broader sociological one.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Because anomie led me down such an interesting one, I’m going to forgo the usual hodgepodge and instead share a few links that I read in preparation for writing this essay. In other words, I’m showing you my sources, feel free to tell me just how wrong I got it.
From the Archives
I don’t write about Japan all that often. The truth is, I kind of burned out on it during those first years of trying to be a writer. Trying to find new ways to write about the same things everyone else is writing about…well, that’s the challenge, isn’t it? But I have written about certain aspects of life here over the years, so here are a few you might be interested in reading:
First up is Learned, Volume 1, Issue 18: Shichi-go-San from July 30, 2018, where I look at the Japanese custom of photographing one’s children at ages 3, 5, and 7.
Next up is a look at a Japanese word that doesn’t exist in English! And doesn’t really exist in Japanese, either. Learned, Volume 1, Issue 20: Tsundoku from August 30th, 2018.
Learned, Volume 2, Issue 33: Carry Your Bones, from November 11th, 2019 rounds out our round-up with a meditation on a Japanese idiom I love.
If you’re coming to Tokyo, I have to recommend this great capsule hotel in Ueno. It’s only about $40 a night and they’ve got on-site dry cleaning and a spa.
Currently about $500 USD per night for a mid-sized room
Read pension; when mansion jumped from English into Japanese, the meaning changed a bit.
Sadly, a few years later, Nujabes would be killed in a hit and run car accident. It remains a highlight of my time in Japan that I got to hang out with him for a couple of nights and see him perform at a tiny club in the middle of nowhere just a few months before he would blow up and become a major talent.
Generational stereotypes are useful right up until they aren’t. But, when you look at generations less as a static number of years and more as a collection of cultural touchstones and shared references, the outlines hinted at by stereotypes begin to solidify into actual delineation.
Used the word 'anomie' for the first time when reading the Unabomber manifesto for that youtube video. LOL
Anomie is indeed a great word. Somewhere on the spectrum between dysphoria and malaise, eh?