Widely recognized as a social problem in Japan, kodokushi (solitary death) stereotypically happens when old people living alone, detached from kin and neighbors, die alone without being noticed immediately, leaving the body to decompose. Reorganizing Japanese discourses of kinship, locality, and other modalities of “connection” ( en ), practices and projects concerning solitary death articulate an emergent fantasy of sociality. I analyze this fantasy as an ideology of communication that draws upon idioms of “contact,” or phaticity: “touching-together” ( fureai ), “connecting” ( tsunagari ), and so on. Due recognition of such an ideology reveals different ways in which sociality is understood in Japan today. Reclaiming the concept of phaticity through a more explicit theoretical metalanguage, I offer an exploration of the cultural concept of en to suggest that the condition of solitude transpires in an interstice between two qualitatively different chronotopes of sociality.

This article examines an emerging art of self–fashioning and sociality in Japanese–language virtual communication. Through an ethnographic exploration I argue that crucial to the structure and experience of Japanese virtual communication are acts of opacity. People in the Japanese virtual mobilize elaborate techniques of material camouflage and anonymity to effectively conceal their body and obscure their identity. They are normatively faceless. I offer this ethnography to suggest that these acts of obfuscation, the presentation of the self–in–disguise in everyday life, force us to reorganize our own modernist epistemological framework. Treating acts of opacity in the Japanese virtual not as a question of presence, secrecy, and truth but instead as themselves a complex social project, this article aims to parse out competing ideologies of communication in the contemporary culture of media. I will address these ideologies as they inform a set of interconnected categories such as anonymity, privacy, and personhood, which are themselves deeply couched in modernist epistemological terms.

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The Japanese and British reality television programs Tearful Sojourns and Tribal Wives both feature protagonists’ adventures and residence in “tribal societies.” Each program constructs different primitivist images through distinct tropes of kinship; Tearful Sojourns fetishizes filiation and consanguinity, while Tribal Wives fetishizes marriage and affinity. The emphasis on descent and affinity reflects and contributes to cultural kinship crises—the breakdown of filial piety in Japan and of marriage in the United Kingdom—felt among their viewers. The shows subtly manipulate images of kinship, the primitive, and suffering to generate a globally mediatized primitivist discourse that purports to therapeutically help audiences find in the primitive Other something they have lost, providing a path to redemption. This discourse contributes in turn to popular perceptions of anthropology. [primitivism, kinship, reality television, media, United Kingdom, Japan] 日本のテレビ番組ウルルン滞在記とイギリスの番組Tribal Wivesでは主要登場人物の「原始的社会」における生活風景が描写されるが、この二つの番組におけるプリミティヴィズムの構築の仕方には親族関係の修辞において違いがある。ウルルンにおいては血族的系統に、Tribal Wives においては婚姻による婚戚関係に重点が置かれている。こうした修辞は、それぞれの社会において広く認識されている家族を巡る文化的危機 – 日本における孝行やイギリスにおける婚姻にまつわる危機の言説 – を反映している。親族関係や「原始的なもの」、苦難といったテーマの番組中の細かな演出は、グローバルな規模で媒介されるプリミティヴィズムの言説を喚起し、近代社会の喪失を「原始的」他者の中に投影する癒し救済の手解きとしてその視聴者に提供される。一方、こういった言説は人類学そのものの社会一般における理解にも影響を与える。[プリミティヴィズム、親族関係、リアリティ番組、メディア、イギリス、日本]

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