Inside a Japanese Sharehouse

<p>This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction – the home – by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse. Sharehouses which emerged in the 2007 'sharehouse boom' are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities. <br><br>Through a description of the micro-level mundane material interactions among residents within a mid-sized mixed-sex sharehouse the book considers what these interactions indicate about existing – and often conflicting – ideas about intimacy privacy gender the individual family community and the home. <br><br>In so doing it highlights how sharehouse residents though a dramatic rejection of the twentieth-century domestic model with its ideal of the family home as a partnership between a male wage-earner and a dedicated housewife and its implied separation of 'family' and 'outsiders' are nevertheless uneasy about overturning existing gender roles and giving precedence to the individual over community and are regarded as a foreign import.</p>