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Arai’s analysis of this discourse raises important questions about the reworking of national cultural identity formations in the face of epochal economic shifts remapping capital flows across national boundaries. The success of Japan Inc. no longer rests on a reciprocal exchange of obligations between state and citizen but continues to demand sacrifices on the part of the latter in exchange for increasingly precarious conditions of living.
    Governing “Free” Subjects
    What is understood by the word
freedom
is often cast as a repudiation of a national past that continues, nonetheless, to condition its possibilities in the present and for the future. 14 In each instance,
freedom
has meant a liberation from structures of the past that are now perceived to constrain individual freedom. Often this entails a massive overturning of values under the pressure of the heightened competition of globalization. However, this shift in what constitutes value has come at the cost of making the future increasingly precarious. The erosion of job security and social insurance is also accomplished in the name of freedom through new models of citizenship (in which individuals take responsibility for themselves). The chapters in this section therefore explore the specificities of what
freedom
might mean and how libratory projects of social change can become folded into neoliberal projects of economic restructuring.
    In Chapter Eight , Miyako Inoue explores the effects of corporate practices to address gender inequality in a workplace in Japan in which the underlying structural causes of inequality are left undisturbed. The confessional practices of training workshops focus on a failure of women workers to realize their full potential as professionals. Either they fully accept the requirements of full integration into the workplace or they are “free” to relinquish their professional lives for homemaking. In Inoue’s analysis of how these technologies of subject production operate, we see a striking parallel to the training objectives of the Fuping School described by Yan Hairong. Both contexts teach women to objectify their labor as entrepreneurs of themselves and to optimize their opportunities by becoming self-governing subjects fully responsible for their own success or failure. Gender reform thereby becomes a process of working on the self and the production of laboring subjects of a particular determinate form. Rather than being a form of false consciousness, it is a question of how discursively difficult it becomes to think outside the construction of a rational self who pursues her own interests. In liberal governments, as Inoue is careful to remind us by citing Foucault, “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (1983: 221). In this respect, we can begin to see this activity of gender reform as yet another form of affective labor in which the “happiness, sense of fulfillment, and aspirations” of women workers become the central focus of management. Inoue carefully maps out how this process of subject formation is enacted by noting the limits of what can be spoken in addressing the question of gender inequality—hence, neoliberal speech acts—in new managerial tools such as the workplace climate survey. In her detailed analysis of such instruments, Inoue is able to elucidate the apparent paradox of how constructing what it is that women want can result in a new mode of subjection for women that is in tune with the new demands of competitiveness in a globalized economy. Gender issues become a problem of interpersonal EQ between supervisors and workers and therefore subject to new modes of human engineering rather than structural reform in gender relations.
    Inoue’s discussion of what freedom means in this new neoliberalized labor regime foreshadows Gabrielle Lukacs’s discussion, in Chapter Nine , of televisual celebrations of the possibility of not taking work seriously, in which