消耗品（人）

shoumouhin(in): tokyo skateboarders: consumable goods/expendable bodies

This is a short paper presented at the conference, Youth and Imaginative Labor: East Asia and beyond, held in Tokyo on July 21-22, 2007. I'm primarily interested in a series of large, black and white ads that Nike SB placed in strategic spots around Shibuya and Harajuku, zones that have been increasingly hostile to actual skateboarders. In the absence of skaters, Nike is able to draw on the authenticity skaters seem to represent. This is an authenticity furthered by the fact they are unwelcome in public space, especially in places of hyper-consumption like Shibuya. Relegated to skateparks or late night forays into forbidden sites, the skaters engage in a practice that is dangerous and destructive to both their equipment and themselves. It is exactly this "failure"--the damage they suffer--that makes them "real", in a way that traditional sports find antithetical. So while the shoes and boards get consumed in the process of skating, so too the skaters themselves are "consumed" by Nike's advertising. Additionally, the skaters, many of whom work dead-end low-wage jobs, appear as "expendable" labor within neoliberal Japan. Under neoliberal logics which fix blame on individual failings, they are held responsible by newspaper columnists and government officials for their own "failures" to secure a steady job and thereby ensure a valid (recognizable) position within society. The young men I'm researching don't make sense to normal social and economic structures: they are floating labor outside the dominant systems of control exercised through the workplace, and they use their excess energy to skateboard, hardly a suitable recreation for Japan's youthful future. At the same time, they provide the authenticating practice, the evidence, of an "outside" to normative society and its logic of public space and this "outside" or non-place grounds the fantasy of bodily rapture that Nike uses to push product.

This paper is dense and I'm trying to open up other questions about phenomenology, bodily experience, identities and self-understandings produced in intense practices, practices that signify a dedication but show no coherent or expected results or pleasures. Is there ecstasy? Is there a kind of possession? Is there a feeling of sociality? How does all this intersect with the fantasies produced in consumer capitalism, as in the dense areas of Shibuya or Harajuku?

Skate and destroy.