Inside a Japanese Sharehouse

This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction the home by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse. Sharehouses, which emerged in the 2007 sharehouse boom', are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities. Through a description of the micro-level, mundane, material interactions among residents within a mid-sized, mixed-sex sharehouse, the book considers what these interactions indicate about existing and often conflicting ideas about intimacy, privacy, gender, the individual, family, community, and the home. In so doing it highlights how sharehouse residents, though a dramatic rejection of the twentieth-century domestic model, with its ideal of the family home as a partnership between a male wage-earner and a dedicated housewife, and its implied separation of family' and outsiders', are nevertheless uneasy about overturning existing gender roles and giving precedence to the individual over community, and are regarded as a foreign import.