Beyond the contemporary: Crafting practices and visions of the future in Japan

Abstract

How can we capture the future as an ethnographic category in Japan? This special issue brings together ethnographic explorations of how the future is imagined, anticipated and coaxed into being at different levels of society by a broad range of actors: from governments and policy makers, to local heritage groups, to individuals with food allergies. The contributions highlight the ways in which concerns and hopes for the future form the temporal horizon of everyday life and imbue it with temporal affects of hope, uncertainty and despair. This introduction draws on the nascent anthropology of the future to provide a theoretical scaffolding and a larger context for the main findings of the individual contributions.