Envisioning the after-hours home: family, childhood, and deviance in Japan

The sensory space of night indexes normative family dynamics in Japan. The after-hours home is upheld as a time to be at home, yet ethnographically situating the visuality of night vis-à-vis social care illuminates new forms of control over household deviance. Drawing on yearlong fieldwork in Tokyo, this paper centres on how children and adults utilise the night as a visual tool to perceive and police proper meanings of home and familial belonging. The visuality of night, in turn, provides a sensory window into social inequity. Connecting this inequity to the broader transformation of the night into a capitalist time–space suggests a social terrain wherein state authorities create subversive subjects through their attempts to surveil the after-hours home.