Treating pains of living in Japanese addiction therapies

In contemporary Japan, evidence-based addiction treatment programs organized around self-monitoring and research participation enlist participants in cognitive skills training, where self-assessment modules help render impending incarceration and housing precarity as ikizurasa (“pains of living”). Drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, participant-observation in rehabilitation centers, and a review of peer-produced addiction literature, the article traces the socio-technical process through which structural harms and legal exposure are rendered as emotional damages under the sign of pains of living. This tension between affective experience and social process helps tether local notions of intimacy and together-feeling to punitive and biomedical discourses on addiction.