Friendly but pervasive: Non-assertive control mechanisms and the maintenance of

social order in Tokyo

Research questions

• What are non-assertive means of social control? How do they contribute to

maintaining social order in the city?

• How do assertive and non-assertive means of social control intermingle in public

space? What are their respective strategies of deployment?

Background

Order in the city is maintained through an array of legal, administrative and

technological means, such as police patrols or CCTV. Parallel to assertive means of social

control, it is possible to identify ‘gentle’ or non-assertive efforts to regulate behavior in

public places—such as the use of poetry to improve passenger etiquette on the London

Underground (Reynolds 2013). This research will enquire into innovative forms of social

control in the case of Tokyo, where non-assertive means of social control are ubiquitous in

public spaces due to a mass-adoption by state, private and civic actors. For example, train and

subway stations are plastered with colourful ‘manner posters’ instructing people in the

‘correct’ usage of public transport through images of cartoon animals or robots. This is

evidence of a turn from explicit bans to ‘soft’ messages ‘that appeal to peoples’ hearts’ in the

2000s (Asahi Shimbun 2009). Initiatives by civic groups are another example. Community

crime prevention groups have become more prevalent and aim to increase the number of

‘watchful eyes’ on the street through gentle efforts such as flower-planting initiatives or by

integrating surveillance activities into everyday life. Walking your dog thus becomes a ‘woof

patrol’ (wan wan patōru). As in the case of manner posters, social control mechanisms are

given a ‘soft’ and benevolent guise.

 While ubiquitous in Tokyo, non-assertive means of control are not limited to Japanese

cities. The use of ‘cute’ visuals to encourage or discourage certain behaviors is common in

other East Asian nations. In Western countries, this is mirrored by the use of humour and

indirect messaging in some examples of ‘nudge’ campaigns. The overarching goal of this

research is to show how urban order is maintained not just through assertive and determinist

measures, but also through non-assertive and gentle means. It will explicitly examine the

ways subtle and suggestive approaches elicit conformity and work alongside their more

directive and explicit counterparts. Thus, this research will continue the investigation of

broader themes of social scientific inquiry, namely shifting modes of governmentality,

governance through self-regulation, and informalization of authority.

Literature review

Contemporary societies are shaped by an atmosphere of insecurity and desires for

control (Beck 1992; Deleuze 1992; Garland 2002; Rose 1996). These dual themes manifest

themselves most evidently in urban spaces. The city is at permanent risk of falling victim to

disorder and has to be secured accordingly (Coaffee et al. 2009). There is a well-developed

body of literature analyzing assertive means of maintaining order in the city, such as policing

(Fassin 2013) and surveillance technologies (Coleman 2004; Norris and Armstrong 2010).

Researchers have documented wider trends in the governance of cities, including the rise of

‘fortress cities’ (Davis 1990), a ‘urban revanchism’ (Smith 1996) and a ‘military urbanism’

(Graham 2011). Rather than exclusively state-based, researchers have shown urban regulation

and order to work through community involvement and public private-partnerships (Bullock

2014; Kennelly and Watt 2011). Compared to determinist means of control, research on non-

assertive modes of control in the city is sparse. While researchers have started to observe

‘soft’ approaches to behavioral and spatial regulation, these studies are not in explicit

conversation with each other and lack a uniting framework. Scholars have drawn on the term
‘soft’ to describe such different modes of control as therapeutic approaches to regulation and

policing (McCarthy 2014; Cohen 2001), informal control exercised by residents (Mele 2017),

control through ‘cooperation and consensus’ (Thörn 2011) and the informalization of public

social control messaging (Lazar 2003). Providing a comprehensive account of the role of

non-assertive modes of invoking order in the city, this research will enquire into a largely

unexplored type of control mechanisms. Thus, it will help arrive at an empirically-grounded

conceptualization of informal modes of governmentality.

Furthermore, this research will make a region-specific contribution to studies of order

and control. So far, sociological research on control in the city has largely neglected the

Japanese case (Murakami Wood et al. 2007; Murakami Wood and Abe 2011). At the same

time, although contemporary accounts of post-bubble Japan describe a mood of insecurity

and hopelessness (Allison 2013), the impact of this mental climate on Japanese urban life

remains unexplored. Finally, while there is a long-established image of Japan as an orderly

society, explanations of this order are either limited to organizational mechanisms of small

groups (Miller and Kanazawa 2000) or have taken the shortcut of culturalist explanation

(Leonardsen 2010). By conceptualizing urban order in Japan as requiring constant reification,

this research helps question the persistent orientalist trope that depicts Japanese as ‘naturally’

more orderly. Enquiring into matters of order and control in Japanese cities, this study fills a

gap in the literature while building on previous social scientific research about Japanese cities

and the intimate relationship between civic groups and the Japanese state (Brumann and

Schulz 2012; Garon 1997; Pekkanen et al. 2017).

Research approach

This research will enquire into non-assertive forms of social control, their relation to

assertive control mechanisms, as well as perceived and actual levels of (dis)order through the
examples of control messaging and community-based ‘benevolent’ surveillance activities

(flower planting initiatives, dog-walking or jogging ‘patrols’) in Tokyo. Non-assertive control

mechanisms are ubiquitous in Japanese cities and employed by a variety of actors across

different sites, making Tokyo an ideal case study. Japanese cities are among the safest in the

world (The Economist 2017) and issues such as urban crime, terrorism, and race relations that

are frequently met with assertive control mechanisms in Western countries are less

pronounced in Japan. An extremely high degree of urban order will thus enable a focused

analysis of non-assertive social control mechanisms. Furthermore, Tokyo presents itself as a

suitable fieldsite as research will be conducted immediately before the 2020 Olympics. Host

cities are known to engage in a variety of spatial and behavioral regulation efforts ahead of

mega-events (Kennelly and Watt 2011). Fieldwork in Tokyo will thus allow the analysis of

social control efforts at a time that they are likely to be intensifying or changing.

During fieldwork, I will be able to draw on extensive local knowledge acquired in

four years of living in Tokyo, advanced Japanese language skills obtained in seven years of

language study, and previous experience of researching Japanese crime prevention groups. I

hope to obtain funding for fieldwork from the Japan Foundation or the Japanese Ministry of

Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Methodology

As an explorative study, this project will make use of an inductive-qualitative

approach and involve the integration of four research methods:

Text-based research of Japanese primary sources. Sources will include newspaper reports on

related topics (e.g. public order, crime prevention) published during the Heisei era (1989-

2018), material published by public transport companies (e.g. press releases about manner

campaigns), and the Tokyo metropolitan government and individual city district
administration offices (announcements, reports about crime prevention campaigns). Findings

will be documented through memos. Access to Japanese newspapers is provided by the

University of Sheffield library. Company and government documents will be obtained

through online research and while conducting expert interviews.

Expert interviews (Bogner et al. 2009) will be conducted with civil servants of the Tokyo

municipal government and district administration offices (specifically the Division for Youth

and Public Order Measures and Community Planning Division), police officials and

spokespersons of public transport companies engaged in manner campaigns. Furthermore,

semi-structured interviews (Galletta 2013) will be conducted with participants of community

crime prevention groups. Interviews will be recorded and transcribed whenever consent can

be obtained. Institutional concerns may complicate recording during expert interviews. In this

case, analysis will be based on notes taken during and memos written immediately after

interviews. Informants will be recruited through contacts established during my current MA

research (crime prevention groups, Tokyo municipal government) and by reaching out to the

public relations offices of public transport companies.

Participant observation will be conducted as a passenger on Japanese public transport.

Furthermore, observation will be conducted in train and subway stations, residential areas

and entertainment districts. Observations will focus on the presence of and peoples’

interaction with social control mechanisms. Observations will be recorded through fieldnotes

(Emerson et al. 2011). Furthermore, this method will include documenting the ‘linguistic

landscape’ of control (Shohami and Gorter 2009) by photographing and mapping social

control messaging (i.e. poster, signs) for later analysis. Sites will be selected to reflect

varying control requirements as indicated by passenger turnover numbers or local crime rates.

The number of specific sites is still to be determined based on a trial mapping exercise during

my current MA research.
Multi-modal discourse analysis (O’Halloran 2011) of social control messages in form of

posters and signs. Next to the analysis of social control messages documented while doing

observation, this will include posters from past manner campaigns available through transport

company websites and archives such as that of the Metro Cultural Foundation. Research

skills necessary for the social scientific analysis of multi-modal texts will be acquired during

the first year of PhD study.

Analysis will be based on documents generated during the research process (memos,

fieldnotes, interview notes, transcripts) and take the three conceptual urban sites explored

during fieldwork (public transport facilities, residential areas, entertainment districts) as its

axes. Analysis will identify which control mechanisms are at work in different sites, and how

their deployment strategies are shaped by varying structural (e.g. train station vs. residential

area) and specific (e.g. passenger turnover or local crime rates) requirements, as well as by

the agencies and interdependencies of involved actors. Methods are designed to interlink with

each other (e.g. research of primary sources will help generate interview questions,

interviewee narratives will be examined in the context of observation and discourse analysis

findings). The proposed research design will help answer my research questions in the

following ways:

Method Purpose
Text-based research Gather information about the development and background of social
control efforts. Identify involved actors.
Observation Document social control efforts in different kinds of places (public
transport facilities, residential areas, entertainment districts) with
varying social control requirements (passenger turnover, crime rates).
Interviews Enquire into the purpose, logics and anticipated effects of social
control mechanisms from the perspectives of the involved actors and
institutions.
Discourse analysis Analyze formal and informal ways of invoking order. Generate
insights about which behaviors are encouraged/discouraged in
different sites, by whom, and how. Mapping will allow consideration
of the spatially-embedded nature of social control discourses.
Ethical considerations: The parts of the research that involve human participants will be

conducted according to University of Sheffield ethics guidelines. I will aim to obtain written

informed consent from interview participants, who will remain anonymous. Interview data

will be treated confidentially and stored securely.

Timetable

Having completed an ERSC accredited Research Training Master, I am prepared to finish the

PhD programme in three years.

Year One: Literature review and research preparations

Months 1-6 • Revisit research proposal
• Explore theoretical approaches in the sociology of control.
• Literature review: deviance and control in urban spaces
• Apply for ethical approval and fieldwork funding
Months 7-12 • Hone research skills: discourse analysis
• Review Japanese primary sources
• Prepare for fieldwork

Year Two: Fieldwork and analysis

Months 13-18 • Observation and mapping
• Interviews & transcription
• Discourse analysis: ethnographic data
Months 19-24 • Revisit literature review
• Discourse analysis: past manner poster campaigns
• Data analysis

Year Three: Analysis and writing up

Months 25-30 • Data analysis
• Writing up
Months 31-36 • Writing up
• Finish thesis

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