Precarious Japan Quotes

“Our table was round,” recalled one of the artists who, from a farming family in Nīgata, returned every planting season to help his now elderly parents plant rice. “A square table has edges, but edges divide people. As a family, we weren't cut off from one another. We ate together and we listened to one another.” Eating together, listening to one another, sharing food. The memory evoked a familiar, now nostalgic, sense of touch in them all.”
― Anne Allison, Precarious Japan

“For many, the present seems fraught, particularly when the reference point is a past remembered, or reinvented, as idyllically stable: a time when jobs and marriage were secure and a future—of more of the same—could be counted on. But belonging, even then, came at a price: an extraction of a particular kind of—constant, competitive, intense—labor. A sacrifice, some say, of everything else, even (or particularly) the soul: the time to touch a mother with Alzheimer's or to shelter a child getting bullied at school or to simply enjoy the rhythm of slow eating with friends.”
― Anne Allison, Precarious Japan