Perilous Wagers: Gambling, Dignity, and Day Laborers in Twenty-First-Century Tokyo (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

By: Klaus K. Hammering

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Synopsis: The lives of the men depicted in Perilous Wagers take place in the squalor of Tokyo's old day-laborer district, San'ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San'ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, Hammering's book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. Perilous Wagers tracks these underdog values across construction sites, non-profit organizations, hospitals, bunkhouses, and illegal gambling dens, giving imaginative life to a stigmatized, forgotten social world.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9781501776434
Related ISBNs:: 9781501776410, 9781501776441, 9781501776427
Publisher:: Cornell University Press
Date of Addition:: 08/15/24
Copyrighted By:: Cornell University
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Business and Finance, Social Studies, Politics and Government
Grade Levels:: Graduate Student
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.