Focused on a group of Okinawan construction workers in Tokyo, this talk tracks the transformation of working day time into the narcotic of gambling, such that the worker - turned gambler - stakes his social existence on a negativity that repulses the normative gaze of general Japanese society.
Klaus Yamamoto-Hammering’s writing so far has focused on the violence of state recognition in contemporary Japan, and specifically, on the intersection of this violence with certain social differences which statist discourse would eliminate. As an anthropologist, Yamamoto-Hammering’s writing has taken the form of an ethnographic engagement with: school teachers who refuse to pay homage to imperial symbols of the state; construction workers in the vanishing day laborer district of Tokyo; a handful of “radical” leftists and their cry for revolution; the “internet right-wing” and its hate speech; and “Fukushima.” He is invested in embedding critical theory in his writing, and in the capacity of ethnography to prompt the imagination of social differences where the order of state recognition would foreclose hospitality. During the fall term he taught “Recognition, Shame, and the State in Contemporary Japan.”