Modeled after the systematic and standardized job search process (shūkatsu), since the late 2000s Japan has seen the creation of numerous something-katsu: the search for a marriage partner or ‘marriage activities’ (konkatsu), family planning or ‘pregnancy activities’ (ninkatsu), and the preparation of one’s own end-of-life or ‘end-of-life activities’ (shūkatsu). These activities focus on what individuals can do when facing important life events, but they also have a social level. While employing the vocabulary of empowerment, they discursively establish ideals to strive for and thus exert normative power. Taking ‘end-of-life activities’ (shūkatsu) as an example, in this talk I want to show how and why ‘something katsu’ came into being, with which rhetoric they aim at influencing individual behavior and what normative values they are laden with.
Dorothea Mladenova obtained her Master’s and PhD in Japanese studies from Leipzig University, Germany. Her first visit to Japan was in 2007 as an exchange student at Chiba University. In 2016, she received a scholarship from the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo to conduct fieldwork. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese society from a critical perspective of Cultural Studies, Governmentality Studies and Discourse Analysis. Her most recent research dealt with the sociology of ageing, death and dying and asked to what extent organizing one’s own end-of-life is a neoliberal practice. She is currently a research fellow at Leipzig University.
Hosted by the East Asian Studies Center, Indiana University and co-hosted with the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
