Perilous Wagers

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.

Klaus K. Y. Hammering received his doctorate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is currently an independent scholar who writes on issues of cultural politics, ideology, fascism, labor, and transgression in Japan today.

Perilous Wagers is a poignant, evocative and moving tale of a class of people who were critical to Japan's postwar, but have been cast aside by it.

Harry Harootunian, Max Palevsky Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Chicago:

Hammering has written an epic contemporary history of Japan. His account of everyday life of Okinawan construction laborers in the declining San'ya district is the best ethnographic account in any language.

Christopher T. Nelson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

Perilous Wagers is first and foremost, a superb ethnography. Intimately experienced, carefully observed, and beautifully written, it is exemplary of the ethnographer's art and labor.