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female protagonists figure prominently. Lukacs explores technologies of subject production in 1990s Japan through an ethnographic study of television dramas that focus on the workplace. In her analysis of one such drama,
Shomuni
, which proved to be an unexpected success, especially with young male viewers, we see dramatized many of the new management practices that Inoue encountered in her field research—indeed, one of the characters is assigned the task of addressing complaints about gender discrimination in the workplace. Lukacs suggests that this series, which was pitched as social realism, was really a fantasy about the emergence of a new labor subject who takes responsibility for his or her own success in the workplace and in making his or her work life meaningful—if only to have fun with it. The irreverent attitude of the principle female character epitomizes an approach to work that is meant to be a refreshing antidote to the labor contract of the high-growth era, which had been based on lifelong job security and benefits for male wage earners in exchange for rigid hierarchy, loyalty to the firm, an ethic of workaholism, and the subordination of women’s labor. Instead, Chinatsu, the principle female character, projects the image of a woman who is contemptuous of her male bosses, takes on each new assignment as a challenge to her ingenuity and sense of fun, and emphasizes her individuality and strong sense of self.
    Lukacs argues that Chinatsu, in fact, represents much more than women workers but becomes a stand-in for the
freeter
, the new labor subject, both male and female, that is demanded by the conditions of Japan’s postrecessionary economy. The Japanese term
freeter
is a neologism that combines the English word
free
with the German word
arbeiter
(worker) to designate a new generation of Japanese workers who no longer desire the guarantees of life-long labor but wish to remain free to develop their life career as a project that entails no loyalty to any employer. If the neoliberal ethos rests on ideas of freedom, then freedom is differently articulated in each localized project of reform. This new laboring subject is one who desires his or her freedom from a labor regime that is, in fact, no longer a possibility for this generation of Japanese youth. The
freeter
is represented as a lifestyle choice rather than a condition that is imposed by the economic changes in the wake of Japan’s economic recession. However, representations of this figure are fraught with contradiction, being both celebrated as figures of freedom and creative energy unleashed from the stultifying labor regime of the high-growth era and also reviled by elders as a generational failure to understand the importance of hard work. The
freeter
therefore exemplifies the “new spirit of capitalism” in which the subject seeks emancipation from what was oppressive in prior labor regimes as a project of self-fulfillment, but one that is entirely resonant with the post-Fordist reorganization of capitalism itself (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006). Neither of these two
freeters
(Driscoll 2007) adequately captures the desperation of many Japanese youth who have not been able to secure regular employment but are bused from one location to the other as a reserve army of labor with no way to map out a future.
    In Chapter Ten , Jesook Song explores the meaning of freedom in post-democratization South Korea in the context of the Asian Debt Crisis of 1997–2001, which had upset the occupational stability South Korea had enjoyed in the preceding couple of decades. Under pressure from the IMF, South Korea had to agree to a program of economic restructuring in which the downsizing of the large state-subsidized conglomerates (
chaebol
) to liberalize the market economy led to massive unemployment. However, as Song carefully lays out for us, these economic policies must also be placed within the context of Kim Dae Jung’s specific problem of government as