What future are we asked to anticipate? How do such acts of collective waiting shape expectations of the contemporary? Who is erased in future renderings as a means of status quo preservation? Fraught Futures considers how officially disseminated programs concerning the direction of Japan’s future, promoted by the national government and aligned organizations, are antagonistic to the work of advocacy groups aiding Tokyo’s unhoused and hungry populations. In doing so, these programs sustain a persistent occlusion by official forces of any emancipatory or dignity-affirming transformation to the social order.
As a nation often framed through assertions of superficial contradiction, highly technical yet steeped in historical reverence, Japan offers an ideal site for examining how challenges to the prevailing market-based order are stifled. By offering increasingly elaborate and improbable techno-utopian depictions of the Tokyo, Japan, and the world to come, official entities thwart sustained efforts at even limited forms of social transformation. Ultimately, Fraught Futures argues that offici
ally promulgated visions of the future should be approached critically, as deceptive efforts to undermine attempts to actualize a collective future freed from the oppressive strictures of market-driven isolation and authoritarian austerity.
Fraught Futures will be published in late February or early March of 2027 with Cornell University Press.