Abstract
In societies where both labour power and care have been commodified and care further systemically devalued, ‘care’ has emerged as a critical concept for social transformation. However, care transformation cannot be separated from labour transformation. This paper redefines care as the affective-ethical dimension inherent in labour (metabolic activity) and theorises labour-care transformation as a political-ecological process of world-making from an urban political ecology perspective.
The study examines Chinbotsukazoku (Sinking Family), a childcare experiment in 1990’s Tokyo emerging when the Japanese welfare model began to collapse. Forged through encounters with Japan's disability movements, participants rejected the dominant care infrastructure—wage labour, the nuclear family, and state welfare—and actively invited strangers into care spaces, constituting what this paper calls ‘the urban care infrastructure’—relational and affective patterns through which strangers meet, correspond, and build shared forms of life, becoming a commons with others. Drawing on 11 volumes of childcare diaries and rich socio-historical contextualisation, this study reveals how the alternative infrastructure was created through ‘unproductive work’ and ‘relaxed care’.
Theoretically, the paper extends UPE's metabolic analysis to subjectivity production. Empirically, it demonstrates how alternative infrastructure is constituted through open metabolism. Politically, it decentres care and UPE scholarship by showing how diverse alternatives emerge within specific socio-historical contexts, embodying the legacy of autonomous movements. Ultimately, the paper reveals that care transformation requires cultivating bodily capacities to entangle with others through working together, building forms of interdependence that spread through countless variations rather than universal forms.
Keywords
Introduction
In societies where labour power becomes a commodity and work is divided into productive and reproductive labour based on capitalist productivity, care has been devalued as unproductive ‘women's work’ (Federici, 2020). Its belated commodification has produced deepening inequalities (Green and Lawson, 2011; Lutz, 2018). The care crisis vividly displayed by the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that care is indispensable for sustaining our lives, and care has emerged as a key concept for social transformation (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). Yet what is the care through which we should transform society?
Feminist care ethics has made crucial contributions by foregrounding relational ontology and the ontological interdependency of lives (Gilligan, 1993; Tronto, 2013). Yet many discussions of care transformation remain caught in modern epistemologies that divide independence/interdependence, individual/community, and private/public. Calls to expand public care risk reproducing existing structures by presupposing wage labour as central to life (Fraser, 2016), while attempts to rebuild communities for care can, as Rose (1996) pointed out, become tools of governmentality that offload responsibility while reinforcing exclusionary identities.
A further difficulty in care discourse is that the specific meanings, sensibilities, and practices surrounding care are always products of specific social relations. Simultaneously, as a fundamentally affective activity, care in turn is “directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities” (Hardt, 1999, 89). For instance, the nuclear family and the state function as oppressive infrastructures (Rodgers and O'Neill, 2012) that distribute what is produced through wage labour in specific ways. By doing so, it also reproduces people who take for granted a world centred on wage labour, commodity relations, and state governance. In such social relations, care is not only considered a scarce resource, confined within the narrow boundaries of self and intimacy, but also takes on specific meanings: self-care as sacrificing present time for future security (Casalini, 2019); childcare as preparing children for competition and transforming them into homo economicus, suitable for survival in capitalist cities (Vandenbeld, 2014). As we will see, Japan's postwar welfare model offers a particularly instructive case: by delegating welfare provision to corporations and confining reproduction to the domestic sphere, it produced the ‘salaryman society’ in which the male breadwinner and the professional housewife together internalised specific forms of care as obligation, sacrifice, and self-erasure.
Ultimately, even those who consider themselves as ‘independent individuals’ are always produced collectively through specific social relations. In other words, individuals are always “individuals of the collectivity, of particular social relations and structure” (Read, 2011, 119), and, within such collectively produced social relations, they internalise specific care sensibilities. Care-centred social transformation therefore cannot be separated from the transformation of care itself, which in turn cannot be separated from the transformation of our labour that produces specific kinds of cities and human relations, and infrastructure—understood as both “things and also the relation between things” (Larkin, 2013, 329).
Urban Political Ecology (UPE) provides crucial insights that enable us to understand people as always-already part of the collective and ecological processes that surround them. UPE scholars have effectively expanded Marx's notion of socio-metabolism by examining how urban metabolic processes generate specific socio-ecological relationships (Swyngedouw et al., 2006). They have also shown that infrastructure embodies social relations—connecting and moving things, people, and ideas in ways that orient and stabilise urban life (Anand et al., 2018; Gandy, 2005). In other words, people's activity together with material and immaterial things produce and reproduce the relationships they are a part of and the infrastructure, which materialise those relationships (see also Simone, 2004). Recent scholarship has begun to connect UPE with care and social reproduction (Doshi, 2017; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022), including healing justice approaches (Camponeschi, 2022).
Building on embodied UPE, which has shown that metabolism is “embodied politics” and called for attention to how bodies are sites for the formation of political subjectivities (Doshi, 2017), and on feminist infrastructure scholarship demonstrating that particular bodies act as urban infrastructure — bearing the invisible, gendered labour that keeps cities functioning while accumulating slow violence (Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022) — this paper extends these insights in a specific direction. While existing scholarship has powerfully analysed how bodies are differentially positioned within and burdened by dominant metabolic systems, this paper attends to a different question: what metabolic arrangements do experiments seeking to escape dominant systems constitute, and how do those arrangements actively cultivate specific affective capacities and relational sensibilities — that is, specific subjectivities? Here, subjectivity refers not to individual identity but to the bodily capacities, affective orientations, and ways of sensing interdependence that particular forms of labouring and caring together produce and sediment over time.
This paper theorises labour-care transformation as precisely such a process of metabolic re-cultivation. From this perspective, the capitalist city –referring here to the specific organisation of urban life around wage labour, commodity relations, and their attendant infrastructures – can be understood as a system that organises socio-metabolism in specific ways. As mentioned above, the family and the state, as hegemonic infrastructures, reproduce people who take for granted a world centred on wage labour and commodity relations by distributing material and affective surplus in specific ways. The key point here is that this metabolic process operates within predetermined goals (profit pursuit, family reproduction) and fixed roles (worker/employer, provider/dependent). Within this fixed metabolic system, people become oriented toward repeatedly reproducing the specific subjectivity that the system demands—homo economicus. In this process, care is cultivated in the form of self-sacrifice or sauve qui peut, and interdependence is experienced only as hierarchical dependence or abstracted exchange.
The central question of this paper is: If the capitalist city repeatedly produces fixed subjects (homo economicus) by organising metabolism within fixed goals and roles, how is it possible to constitute an alternative metabolic system within and against this system?
To answer this question, this paper undertakes three tasks. First, it reconceptualises care as an affective and ethical dimension of metabolic activity by re-theorising care within the context of labour, which Marx (1976, 283) defined as the metabolic activity of human life.
Second, to microscopically observe how the transformation of labour and care occurs in a case that actively sought to escape from the capitalist metabolic system, it examines the practices of Chinbotsukazoku (沈没家族, Sinking Family), a collective childcare experiment in Tokyo in the 1990’s and Dameren (だめ連, a league of good-for-nothings, 1992 ∼ current), a gathering of the voluntary poor who rejected the salaryman life path. 1 By rejecting dominant care infrastructure and actively inviting strangers into spaces of care without predetermining roles or goals, their experiment vividly demonstrates the microscopic transformation of labour and care.
Finally, to conceptualise the alternative metabolic relations discovered through this empirical analysis, this research develops the concept of ‘the urban care infrastructure’, showing how Chinbotsukazoku inherited and activated the embodied legacy of Japan's autonomous movements shaped by the disability rights movements. Here, ‘the urban’ refers not to demarcated administrative units but to what Lefebvre (2003, 118) defines as “pure form: a place of encounter, assembly, simultaneity”. The urban care infrastructure is therefore oriented not toward an intimate community or an aggregate of atomised individuals, but rather toward facilitating metabolic relations in which strangers concretely entangle with each other while roles and goals remain open. This infrastructure emerges from an arrangement of bodies and affects and is sustained by the performative repetition of such open and flexible metabolic processes, thereby cultivating a relational capacity that enables people to correspond and catalyse new encounters and transformations.
Through this, the study makes three contributions. First, it extends UPE's urban metabolic analysis into the realm of subjectivity. While existing UPE has analysed multispecies relations within urban space by traversing the human-nature binary (Tzaninis et al., 2021; Gandy, 2024), this paper emphasises that even the category of the human is always already multispecies. The capitalist city, which reproduces life centred on wage labour, operates as a metabolic system to produce a singular subjectivity—homo economicus. What metabolic processes and what alternative infrastructures do subjectivities that resist this activate? This paper shows how the metabolic reorganisation of labour-care constitutes alternative socio-ecological relations that produce subjectivities beyond homo economicus. This extends UPE's metabolic analysis into the ontological transformation of care and social reproduction, theorising care transformation as a political-ecological world-making process that changes not only material conditions but also the ontological grounds of interdependence.
Second, at the empirical level, by tracing concrete practices of labour and care transformation, it demonstrates how care entangles with labour processes to constitute alternative infrastructure beyond the family, state, and traditional community. While existing UPE scholarship has critically analysed how infrastructure produces unequal urban environments (Gandy, 2003; Truelove, 2019), this paper focuses on the production of the urban care infrastructure that pursues the activation of life. The case of Chinbotsukazoku shows how metabolic processes constitute not only material conditions but also the ontological grounds of interdependence. It also expands the concept of infrastructure itself by showing how intentionally relaxed and unstructured metabolic patterns can be infrastructural—through what Lancione (2023, 842) calls “[c]aring as the metabolic act of the counter-political”.
Finally, it complicates care scholarship through rich contextualisation. Chinbotsukazoku demonstrates how alternative sensibilities around care emerge while simultaneously reflecting and resisting specific contexts, as well as the legacy of movements inscribed in the city. By showing how care alternatives emerge not as universal prescriptions but within and against specific socio-historic, economic, and cultural contexts, it complicates the care discourse.
This paper draws on the author's doctoral dissertation, which examined precariat movements in Tokyo and Seoul from an urban commons perspective. The original research included 13 months of participant observation in Tokyo (2017-2019), extensive archival research, and interviews with 34 Tokyo activists, including 6 Dameren participants involved in Chinbotsukazoku, as well as an interview with Tsuchi, who grew up in Chinbotsukazoku (from 8 months to 8 years old). It also utilises documentary records and publications by the participants. They produced numerous publications, including books, records of events and newsletters for external distribution. In particular, the eleven volumes of childcare diaries preserved by Tsuchi provided very important data.
The paper proceeds as follows. In section 2, care is redefined from a UPE perspective and theorised, particularly in relation to labour (metabolic activity). Section 3 situates Chinbotsukazoku within Japanese society and the autonomous movements. Section 4 analyses the concrete labour and care practices of Chinbotsukazoku. Section 5 discusses Chinbotsukazoku as the urban care infrastructure. The conclusion summarises the contributions of the paper and discusses the implications for labour-care transformation and the construction of alternative infrastructure.
Labour and care as different dimensions of metabolism
Care ethics, which problematises the notion of the self-sufficient individual, is fundamentally based on a relational ontology that emphasises the immanent entanglement of life (Clement, 2018). To live, we must be connected with various human and non-human others. Such a relationship is the ontological condition for us as part of nature to sustain life. In this sense, Fisher and Tronto (1990, 40) define care not as categorised activities or services but as “a species activity that include everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”.
This comprehensive definition challenges the capitalist conception of care, which has systemically devalued care –whether by confining it to the private sphere (Federici, 2020), externalising its costs to the state and non-profit sectors (Fraser, 2016), or directly commodifying it (Lutz, 2018). At the same time, it encompasses relational thinking that recognises us as constitutive parts of the world. However, this definition does not distinguish care from labour. Indeed, Fisher and Tronto's definition of care is very similar to what Marx (1976, 133) defined as labour: “a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself”.
As Damasio (2018) explains, metabolism is “the single name” (34) for the process through which different entities—from cells to organs—come together in cycles of exchange, giving up independence for “access to the commons” (51). Metabolism is, in this sense, the fundamental activity of life itself across all scales—and it is at the human level that this process takes the form of labour (Marx, 1976). Labour is the metabolic process through which humans engage with non-human nature and with one another, continuously performed as living beings to inhabit the world and sustain everyday life. 2
Two things are important. First, the human metabolic process (labour) is not limited to material production for survival. People share resources with and care for those who, for various reasons, cannot fully participate in material production, thereby producing affective relations. What is commonly called ‘care labour’ or ‘reproductive labour’ refers to this second process. This is a socio-metabolic activity among humans, a process in which people are produced as members of a community and collectively care for life and death. These activities are essential labour for humans as species-beings.
Second, metabolism—as inherently a process of connection with others—produces not only commons themselves but also the infrastructures through which these commons are reproduced, sustained, and circulated. These infrastructures thus operate at two levels: materially, as the physical arrangements that facilitate metabolic exchange; and affectively, as patterns of relations through which specific emotions and affects are channelled and cultivated, shaping particular forms of subjectivity and sociality. UPE scholars have productively developed Marx's concept of socio-metabolic transformation to analyse how urban metabolic processes produce specific socio-ecological relations (Swyngedouw, 1996). Critical infrastructure studies further elaborate this, showing that infrastructure is not merely physical facilities but the embodiment of social relations (Anand et al., 2018) that organise the movement and circulation of things, people, and ideas across urban space (Larkin, 2013). Infrastructure thus produces what Berlant (2016, 393) describes as “the patterning of social form”—the living mediation of what organises life.
From this perspective, we can understand the capitalist city as a system that arranges metabolism in specific ways. In the process of constructing circuits of capitalist metabolism through wage labour, the labour of raising humans and building community was naturalised (feminised) under the name of ‘reproduction’ and confined to the domestic sphere (Federici, 2020). Subsequently, in the process of extending commodification, this labour has been summoned back into the commodity sphere and reframed as ‘care labour’—a designation that renders care exceptional, as if there were forms of labour that do not involve care. Yet, all labour essentially entails and cultivates specific forms of care, because labour is always a process that involves others.
Both the Latin cūra and the Japanese sewa (世話, care) illuminate care's meaning across different cultural contexts. Latin cūra encompasses attention, concern, worry, and management simultaneously—carrying not merely service provision but the dimension of sustained ethical attentiveness toward others. The etymology of sewa is revealing: originally meaning ‘the talk of ordinary people in society’, it shifted during the Edo period to mean ‘taking care of’ (Gogen-yurai, 2026). This transition suggests that care is constituted through social relations—through the concrete practice of speaking to and entangling with one another.
What must be noted is that metabolism—as a process of entanglement with others—always entails “the unavoidable messiness of life—conflicts, bad timing, shortcomings” as Weber (2019, 15) points out. Marx (1976, 289) captures this concretely: “iron rusts; wood rots. (…) Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead”. However, without understanding the properties of iron and wood, one cannot awaken them. Labour is thus not only a process of entangling with others but also a process of learning to entangle: attuning and corresponding with them.
Watsuji (1996) states that human existence is constituted only in the ‘in-between (間柄, aidagara)’ of self and other, and ethical sensibility is cultivated through this relational in-between. Metabolism (labour) is, in this regard, the concrete practice through which this aidagara is enacted via specific modes of entanglement. The ethical sensibility cultivated through repeated friction and attunement within that entanglement is precisely care. The example of farmers shows how affects of care can be cultivated through concrete metabolic processes with non-human others. Through engaging with soil, water, and plants in their metabolic activity, farmers develop specific affects: attention to soil moisture and fertility, responsiveness to plant needs, and sensitivity to seasonal rhythms. As these affects are repeatedly cultivated through continuous farming practices, they can sediment into a relational ethics of care—a disposition toward others.
Notably, in the context of farming, care is not defined as altruism or self-sacrifice; rather, it is an embodied understanding of interdependence, recognising that polluted water and devastated land directly harm one's own life. This calls into question the dominant imagination of care as warmth and tenderness, which has been constituted through a specific historical process — namely, the domestication and feminisation of care. Indeed, in many societies, care has taken forms that are blunt, seemingly indifferent, or distancing (see Graeber, 2011; Han, 2025; Mol et al., 2010). That the forms of care vary according to the metabolic processes and social relations in which they are cultivated is precisely why care transformation cannot be separated from labour transformation.
Japan's disability rights movement since the 1970’s sensed this connection sharply. Under the slogan “Mother! Don’t kill me” — the title of a landmark text of the movement (Yokotsuka, 1975)—the movement challenged both family care and institutional care as forms that suppress the self-determination of the cared-for (Azumi et al., 1990). The warmth and devotion of family love can itself become the powerful vehicle for imposing the caregiver's internalised capitalist subjectivity onto the disabled person: a subjectivity grounded in productivism and the modern ontology of private ownership, within which disabled people are interpellated as lacking, incapable, and pitiable. In response, the movement developed the practice of ‘independent living’—imagined not as the negation of interdependence but as its pluralisation. Tateiwa (1997), a key theorist of Japan’s disability movement, critically challenged not only productivism but also the notion that individuals own their bodies and the results of their labour.
The disability movement sensed the violence of capitalist metabolism constituted through the commodification of labour. When we convert labour power into time and exchange it for money, we no longer experience labour as a vivid connection with tangible others. The purpose of metabolism becomes fixed (profit pursuit), people are assigned roles to serve it (worker, housewife, breadwinner, etc.), and they come to see each other as objects of exchange and themselves as self-sufficient individuals (Marx, 1993). Also, the care produced by commodified labour is fundamentally transformed. Where everyone must sell their labour power to survive, economic profit pursuit appears as rational self-care. Commodified labour cultivates care as self-love for becoming a more expensive commodity or as sacrifice for the family as extended self—reinforcing a world of sauve qui peut. Care as an ethic of connection is removed; narcissistic care oriented toward atomised survival (homo economicus) is cultivated.
This paper defines care as the affective-ethical orientation inherent in the metabolic (labour) process, operating in two interconnected dimensions: as affect—immediate, bodily attunement and responsiveness in each metabolic encounter with others (human and non-human); and as relational ethics—dispositions and sensibilities cultivated as these affects are repeated, sedimented, and habituated through continuous labour practices. Labour and care are distinct but inseparable: care is the affective-ethical orientation inherent in and arising from labour—the sensibility cultivated through the very process of metabolic entanglement with others.
Labour is a world-making activity through which we, as part of nature, (re)produce our world through specific forms of metabolism (entanglement with others). Care, as affect and ethics cultivated in labour processes, produces specific forms of ‘we’ that sense autonomy and interdependence in particular ways. Crucially, this definition reveals how labour and its inherent care connect to the production of specific kinds of human—subjectivity—and why care transformation cannot be separated from labour transformation. As Doshi (2017, 126) states, metabolism is “embodied politics”.
From this perspective, transforming the world through care means asking anew: What forms of labour do we want to engage in? With whom and what do we want to produce? How do we want to share and live? What do we want to care for? In what kinds of relations do we want to ground our world? Chinbotsukazoku is an experiment that began by asking precisely these questions. Before examining their experiment, however, I first situate it within the extreme homogeneity of Japanese society, controlled through powerful gender norms and labour ethics—a homogeneity shaped by two key factors: the Japanese welfare model and the modern history of Japanese social movements.
Contextualising Chinbotsukazoku from a metabolic perspective
The experimentation with Chinbotsukazoku took place in the 1990’s, a time when the bubble collapse had rendered the existing infrastructure inoperable.
Chinbotsukazoku was initiated by Kano Hoko, a 22-year-old single mother who, upon becoming pregnant, chose collective childcare over marriage or returning to her parents’ home. Working as a water meter reader by day and attending photography school by night, she distributed flyers recruiting participants in front of train stations and on neighbourhood utility poles.
The project began operating when Hoko connected with Dameren. After learning about Dameren from a friend, Hoko posted flyers at a bar they frequented. As members appeared, collective childcare started. Amid discourses of social collapse, when a right-wing politician distributed flyers claiming “Japan will sink if traditional values of men working outside and women protecting the home disappear”, participants declared such families should sink and named their project ‘Chinbotsukazoku (Sinking Family)’.
After a year in Hoko's apartment, they rented an entire dilapidated three-story house, creating ‘Sinking House’ where Hoko, two other single mothers, their children, and several single adults lived communally. Operation was extremely loose: no qualifications, participation at available times (preferably in pairs), beer and meals provided but no monetary transactions. People regularly made newsletters recruiting participants. 20–30 people participated in childcare; 60-70 gathered for events like birthdays. Tsuchi, who grew up there for eight years and later made a documentary, recalls asking who held him in a photo—Hoko could not remember. The project continued five more years after Hoko and Tsuchi moved to Hachijo Island in 2003.
Participants often describe Chinbotsukazoku not as “utopia” or “seeking a new family form” but simply as “survival”. Yet, I would argue, this “survival” exceeded mere economic survival, which was still possible through existing families or state welfare for the single mothers in Chinbotsukazoku. They chose collective childcare because family and state felt “suffocating (…) requiring highly fixed roles with nowhere to escape” (Raichi interviewed by Yi, 2024). Understanding this “suffocating” life requires examining Japanese society's characteristics.
Family and state as oppressive metabolic systems
Postwar Japan constructed an extremely fixed metabolic system based on highly institutionalised and gendered labour. The so-called ‘Japanese-style welfare system’ provided welfare to male breadwinners while confining reproduction to the domestic sphere, sharing features of Fordist welfare described by Lorey (2015). However, the Japanese model functioned as a powerful governmental mechanism by delegating welfare provision, especially housing, to corporations, producing workers and families as subjects who would “ultimately serve corporate objectives” (Peng, 2000, 96).
When buying a house with a company mortgage became the model of sound citizenship, lifetime employment became essential (Oizumi, 1994). Corporate principles—loyalty, extreme labour intensity, and absence from home—are internalised into family life, forming a ‘salaryman society’ with powerful work ethics (Goldfarb, 2016). The expression ‘guys of weekday daytime’ reveals how working-age men are “considered suspicious only due to the reason that he is wandering around in the town during the daytime on weekdays” (Tanaka, 2016). Women were given the ethical duty to protect the family as “professional housewives” raising children and supporting breadwinners (Kazue, 1994).
In this context, Chinbotsukazoku participants were subjects seeking to escape the life forms imposed by the modern program of economic growth and national revival. Single mothers questioned the ethical duties and responsibilities imposed on women, especially mothers, as Hoko (cited in Kano, 2020) wrote in a recruitment flyer for collective childcare:
I did not want to be confined at home thinking only about family all day, which will make me lose not only my child but myself.
Meanwhile, one regular topic of Dameren's talks, who pursued a life without work, was the problem of ‘guys of weekday daytime’.
Above all, they clearly recognised how care becomes distorted in the oppressive metabolic processes constructed by Japanese society. As Kikuike notes, social security should be “the result of mutual care among individuals” but, in the abstracted welfare system, it appears as “monthly bills or favours granted by the state”, erasing concrete relations (Dameren, 1999, 56). They were also wary of care within intimate communities symbolised by the family. This was not only because of the hierarchy between providers and dependents, but also because the intimacy, closeness, or absoluteness of that relationship could turn care into violence. (ibid., 126). Nishiike, a single mother in Chinbotsukazoku, described how her ex-husband “tried hard for the family, based on the resolution of a man works outside, a woman takes care of home”, but “failed to care for family members’ feelings”.
Rejecting oppressive social movements
Crucially, Chinbotsukazoku and Dameren sought to escape not only oppressive family and the hierarchical state but also Japan's social movements mobilised for fixed ideological purposes. Understanding this requires examining postwar Japanese social movements.
Japan's New Left movement, which challenged the Japanese Communist Party's orthodoxy, peaked in the 1960’s. However, it ended in a self-destructive internal struggle known as uchigeba—extremely violent conflicts among sectarian organisations (toha) involving torture-like acts that caused over a hundred deaths over years (Ando, 2013). This led the leftist movements to lose popular support, traumatised radical movements, and ushered in an ‘era of apathy’ dominated by nihilistic individualism. Sectarian movements, though advocating different goals from capitalism, were another oppressive metabolic system—fixing goals and roles and violently punishing deviation.
What is often overlooked is that even during this period, experiments in open metabolism emerged in the suffocated social movement scene. As sociologist Sakai (2020) notes, open and egalitarian movements existed under the ambiguous umbrella of “non-sectarian radicalism”, tracing back to the 1960’s Zenkyōtō (All-Universities Joint Struggle Committees, 1968-1969). Yamamoto Yoshitaka (2017, 91–133), representative of Tokyo University's Zenkyōtō, describes its organisational principles: There is neither control nor coercion by an organisation. There is neither guidance nor representatives. Each individual struggles through their own responsibility while building solidarity with other individuals, horizontally. (…) Let even those who have complaint or doubts in; Let them in and make discussions inside; do thorough discussions. This was the policy.
Though sectarian organisations came to dominate after Zenkyōtō lost momentum, non-sectarian student movements continued on campuses, creating autonomous spaces like self-governing dormitories in the 1980’s-90 s while avoiding sectarian organisations and police. Simultaneously, the non-sectarian student activists were greatly influenced by Japan's disability rights movement, which since the 1970’s challenged oppressive care structures of family and institutions. The disability rights movement criticised how family intimacy could turn into violence and institutions stripped autonomy, advocating self-determination and flexible support (Hayashi and Okuhira, 2001). As a Dameren member, Q-tarō states: One disability rights slogan was ‘Mother! Don’t kill me’. For disabled people, family is not only the closest non-disabled person but also the one who most forcefully imposes non-disabled perspectives (…). This shows problems inherent not only in families with disabilities but in all family relations” (Dameren, 1999, 201-202).
Many Chinbotsukazoku and Dameren participants had themselves been directly involved in disability support activities, and were deeply shaped by the disability rights movement's discourses. It was precisely this formation—the embodied practice of supporting disabled peers without fixing roles or hierarchies—that they carried into the childcare experiment. In this sense, Chinbotsukazoku extended the disability rights movement's critique of family and state welfare into a broader domain of life.
Chinbotsukazoku participants pursued freedom from goals assigned by oppressive society and ideological movements, and from the roles they allocated, as the following quote in their newsletter clearly shows: “Our lives are always too infinitely rich to serve any single force. Rimbaud is cool!” (cited in Kano, 2020)—evoking the poet as emblem of life that refuses instrumentalisation. However, this freedom differed from Western notions presupposing an independent individual. On the contrary, they clearly recognised that there is no such thing as an ‘independent individual’. As Kikuike noted, “Because humans cannot live alone, we must necessarily form relationships with others” (Dameren, 1999, 56).
Vaneigem' (2001) distinction between survival and life (vie) offers a useful lens for theorising what Chinbotsukazoku participants seemed to be reaching for—life, as more-than-survival. Survival means life reduced to a single purpose: staying alive. When survival becomes the sole goal, people conform to its order—working to eat, competing to work, producing humans “ground up in the machinery of hierarchical power, caught in a net of interferences, a chaos of oppressive techniques” (21). In contrast, life itself extends purposelessly, overflows programmed survival, accidentally encounters others, entangles, proliferates, enriches, and activates—a life-form open to infinite possibilities.
This distinction parallels fixed versus open metabolism. In fixed metabolism—performing assigned roles for predetermined goals—people are reproduced as ‘programmed’ subjects. Open metabolism, by contrast, refers to metabolic activity in which roles, goals, and relational outcomes remain genuinely undetermined. Chinbotsukazoku participants desired lives open to chance, unpredictably transforming and expanding. Crucially, for them, encountering strangers was an active condition for self-transformation and life activation. “Unlimited minglings” was their frequent expression. As Pepe, who started Dameren and actively participated in Chinbotsukazoku, often said, “Nothing happens when similar people stick together”.
To sum up, what they contested was not the absence of interdependence and care but the form of them organised by Japanese society. They rejected both the state's abstracted care and absolutised care within small communities. Simultaneously, they presupposed no ideal life form. In the flyer, Hoko (1995) asked, “What exactly is ‘collective’ in collective childcare, and how far is it possible?” This shows that Chinbotsukazoku's commonality—care for becoming a commons with others—emerged only through concrete labour practices of world-making together, gauging others’ needs and desires. What, then, were these concrete labour practices, and what forms of care did they cultivate?
Transforming labour and care for becoming a commons with others
Chinbotsukazoku began through childcare but was not strictly a childcare collective. Participants joined for various reasons: “to experience raising children without marriage”, “because hanging out with people was fun”, and even “to use childcare as an excuse to date someone I liked”. Many had no interest in childcare, which was not considered problematic. Apart from the minimal rule of “not leaving newcomers alone with children”, people participated when and as much as they wanted. Tsuchi, who grew up in Chinbotsukazoku, recalls Sinking House: It was chaotic. Many weirdos, including those who had mental issues, came to the house that was never locked. Some of them were not even interested in childcare. People drank every day (laugh). There was always somebody in the living room, like sleeping on my school bag… (laugh). Many of them drank or smoked. Well, in terms of smoking, there was a rule, such as smoking should be under the ventilator. But basically, you didn’t have to be a respectful human to take care of a child in the Sinking House. (…) I would say that nobody cared about such things. (12 December 2019)
Some might consider placing children in such an environment irresponsible or even dangerous. Childcare diaries record a visiting official asking suspiciously, “Isn’t this like Aum Shinrikyo?”—referring to the destructive religious group that carried out the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack. But if Aum Shinrikyo showed how homogeneous communities pursuing a single ideology could become violent and oppressive, Chinbotsukazoku was an attempt to escape from such communities.
Chinbotsukazoku presupposed no ideal life form. Rather, participants were conscious of precisely the danger that pursuing any ideal life form could oppress individuals. Hoko (Kano, 1997) noted: Once we became slightly anxious about what exactly we were doing and held a meeting to talk about collective childcare. But it ended up with each person talking about what they wanted to do. We realised we could only do what each of us wanted to do. Whether we called it collective childcare or not, something would emerge from it (…). We call it collective childcare, but actually, we’re just forming friend-like relationships according to each person's needs.
Unproductive labour and the politics of Hima for corresponding
The eleven volumes of childcare diaries show that what created Chinbotsukazoku's relationships was labour imbued with care—activities toward others just like any other childcare. However, the labour building Chinbotsukazoku's concrete lifeworld clearly differed from dominant labour (either wage labour or reproductive labour). Above all, Chinbotsukazoku's labour was “unproductive”, which went beyond any passive meaning by actively refusing productive labour.
This refusal resonated with Dameren's labour critique. As mentioned, Dameren's central activities were ‘mingling’ and ‘talking’, and they frequently advocated the value of hima (暇,leisure, idleness, gaps, loafing time)—a term carrying negative connotations of ‘wasting time’ in Japanese society where ‘guys of weekday daytime’ are suspect. But Dameren redefined hima. Pepe describes it as time for “reading, watching movies, listening to music or losing oneself in thought, looking at grass moving in the wind or listening to raindrops falling” (cited in Cassegård, 2014, 50). Kaminaga says hima is “time to carefully contemplate what one truly likes and dislikes”, enabling life transformation “by creating interesting small events, publishing independent magazines, or even participating in social movements” (Kaminaga and Hasegawa, 2000, 118-119).
Chinbotsukazoku participants decided to give this hima to children they did not know. The most central labour performed was being-with children (in each person's way) and sharing and reflecting on experiences and emotions with other participants through daily conversations and diaries. Childcare diaries meticulously record unproductive labour filling their hima: not only activities but affective records—crying when a child woke crying (though the child soon calmed), reflections on being at a loss when “children's moods changed without context”, worries about negative impacts, confessions of “feeling hatred for the first time” toward a tantrum-throwing child. All this, incalculable and unexchangeable, created Chinbotsukazoku's specific relationality.
Chinbotsukazoku's labour was distinctive in how it positioned children. Children were not merely care recipients but strangers with whom participants shared no common language or codes. Furthermore, the three children (Tsuchi, Megu, Yuri) each had unique expressions and personalities.
One participant recorded worrying all day about five-year-old Megu, who had cheilitis and would not speak, finally realising Megu was “expressing that speaking hurt by not speaking”—a significant moment of recognition. Also, vocabularies actively collected of “Tsuchi-language” and “Yuri-language” humorously depicted participants as foreigners learning foreign languages: “Coach in Yuri-language: exact meaning still unknown, probably imitating words used by daycare friend Riko”. Treating children's expressions as foreign languages to be learned shows participants’ attitude toward children as others deserving respect.
Crucially, this otherness worked bidirectionally. Children appeared not only as others but also as affective catalysts—sometimes tyrants—stirring participants’ emotions. To maintain emotional boundaries while building relationships, participants had to attend not only to children but to their own emotions. Through childcare diaries, they recorded and reflected on daily events and emotions while hearing others’ experiences. Reading the diaries as an adult, Tsuchi observed: It was really interesting. There were so many descriptions of me that I don't remember, and nobody knew what to do in various situations. It said they seriously discussed what to do when Tsuchi cried, whether to keep soothing or leave alone briefly. It was moving that people who didn't know me thought so hard about me. (12 December 2019)
Through this process, participants attempted to objectify their experiences—describing genuinely hating a tantrum-throwing child as a “dilemma arising from closeness”, reaching tentative conclusions like “maybe it's better not to think too deeply about children's emotional expressions to get along well with them”, developing the capacity to be-with children in their own ways and at their own pace.
Ingold'Ingold (2020) concept of ‘correspondence’ captures the character of labour in Chinbotsukazoku. Unlike interaction between already-defined purposes and identities, correspondence is “going along together, a co-evolving” (Ingold, 2022). Japanese scholar Fukada (2016) illuminates the unstable bodily dimension of correspondence. He describes carework as inherently “co-bodily” process: the caregiver feeding someone finds themselves opening their own mouth as the other opens theirs—bodies involuntarily synchronising across the gap between self and other. Yet synchronisation is not a stable process. It emerges through repeated encounters with the other's irreducible otherness—moments of confusion, friction, and surprise—in which each party discovers the other anew. In Chinbotsukazoku, this co-bodily synchronisation extended beyond the dyadic encounter: participants recorded these bodily moments in diaries, read each other's entries, and responded—transforming involuntary bodily attunement into a collective, reflective practice of written correspondence. Chinbotsukazoku's labour was thus a metabolic process of correspondence—mutually transformative participation that attended to each other, recognised one's own and others’ moods and needs, attuned relationships, and expanded the collective capacity for being-together.
Relaxed care and the pluralisation of interdependence
The metabolic process described above generated a distinctively relaxed form of care. Above all, in Chinbotsukazoku, care was not something caregivers provided to children. Tsuchi observes: In Chinbotsu, there was a perspective that you didn’t need to be a proper adult to care for children, and both children and adults could not know what they didn’t know. What was required of participants was simply ‘being there’ in their own way when they wanted. In participants’ own words, Chinbotsukazoku's care was ‘relaxed’ and ‘something you could avoid whenever it became burdensome.’ (12 December 2019)
Many participants had gravitated toward Dameren and Chinbotsukazoku precisely because they struggled with social life and communication with others. For them, Chinbotsukazoku was a space where they could “spend fulfilling time without talking to others” and “go without burden when they did not want to be alone”.
For single mothers, Chinbotsukazoku was a space to interact with children without the emotional pressure of ‘being a mother’. Raichi explains: Having many people around means being less hurt. When a child gets angry and yells at you, it's really hard when just the two of us. Due to the existence of others, the conflict can be softened. After the storm passes, we can talk about it with a light heart, saying something like, “it was pretty tough last night, wasn’t it?” (Raichi in Kano and Takahashi, May 2019).
From children's perspective, Chinbotsukazoku was a place where people were always around, meaning there was always “somewhere to escape”. In the documentary, Megu recalls how reassuring this was. In Tsuchi's words, Chinbotsu had “multiple spaces, multiple relationships, multiple possibilities like different fields in a game world”. Chinbotsukazoku's openness and looseness diluted the possibility of absolute domination characteristic of closed family spaces.
Chinbotsukazoku's labour was unproductive activity seeking to escape existing social relations, manifesting as concrete practices of correspondence with others. This generated uniquely relaxed care that was not concentrated on anyone nor transformed into obligation, preventing the absolutisation of relationships. Ultimately, what was cared for in Chinbotsukazoku was not only children but also the sense of joy, safety, and freedom that each person experienced differently.
This care was not something bestowed by someone on those deemed weaker in ways they considered right, but was constituted and sensed through broad and relaxed interdependence where anyone could participate according to their capacities and needs. Participants often called Chinbotsukazoku “friend-like relationships”, which well captures the interdependence Chinbotsukazoku constituted—forming friend-like relationships even with complete strangers without absolutising relationships.
Activating the urban care infrastructure from within
Chinbotsukazoku's “friend-like relationships” express new forms of interdependence for freedom. While Western conceptions have reduced freedom to individual choice within predetermined life forms, freedom—as Graeber (2011, 203) emphasises through its etymological connection to ‘friend’—is a profoundly relational concept. It refers to the ability to make collective decisions, without either dominating or subordinating, regarding what kind of society and relationships we want to live in, thereby reshaping society (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021).
Chinbotsukazoku exercised freedom in this radical sense. Through bodily refusal of the oppressive forms of communality expanded by modern Japanese society (family, company, state, and even ideological movements resisting the status quo), they constituted new forms of life by extending life in directions “left to chance and never imagined”—to borrow Pepe's words (4 September 2018). This new form of interdependence generated unique care through ‘friend-like relationships’ that traversed boundaries between family/community and strangers. Instead of creating communities that closely link individuals together to enhance internal interdependence, they aimed to create new arrangements that would rearrange both the distances between individuals and their community and the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
Crucially, Chinbotsukazoku constructed an urban care infrastructure, generating a field where they could live together in ways that differed from the dominant care infrastructure. The ‘Japanese-style welfare model’ mentioned earlier had built the existing care infrastructure by (re)producing powerful work ethics and gender roles. When this model began to collapse, Chinbotsukazoku sought to performatively constitute infrastructure for more-than-survival, rather than repair the malfunctioning system. What made this infrastructure specifically urban — in Lefebvre's sense — was precisely its openness to strangers: unproductive labour with unknown others, bound neither by kinship nor ideology, generated a form of care that could not have emerged within the closed boundaries of family or community, demonstrating how transforming our labour can create alternative care infrastructure — one in which we are entangled without predetermined roles and ends, activating more liberated life.
Another crucial point is that Chinbotsukazoku not only built alternative infrastructure but was also part of the larger urban care infrastructure for freedom that Japanese autonomous movements engaging with the disability movement had created. In Japan, disability studies developed into what Tateiwa (1997) calls a study of life and survival itself (生存学)—an inquiry into the ontological conditions of human existence that extends far beyond disability as a medical category. Many participants engaged in non-sectarian movements and disability support activities, shaped by the disability discourses and practices. Uis, a Chinbotsukazoku participant now working at a disability support centre, notes that Chinbotsukazoku “extended what the disability rights movement tried to do into the childcare field” (15 December 2019). Hoko, who started Chinbotsukazoku, continues participating in disability movements on Hachijō Island where she moved with Tsuchi, creating autonomous spaces with disabled people and the elderly.
That is, Chinbotsukazoku was less a childcare experiment than an experiment formed by a question: how is it possible for different human beings, as irreducible others, to live together without dominating one another? Chinbotsukazoku participants were subjectivities that had embodied, through these movements, the bodily capacity to entangle with others without fixed roles, the affective sensibilities to refuse to hierarchise and absolutise relations, and the concrete techniques of correspondence. They were, in this sense, infrastructuring bodies—constituting, through their open metabolism, an urban care infrastructure.
Conclusion
As Haraway (2016, 31) states, “Nobody lives everywhere; but everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; but everything is connected to something”. When we accept that we are always connected to something, the question becomes: With whom and how do we want to be interdependent? If the world is a vast web of interdependence, labour is ultimately a world-making activity in which we, as part of the world, constitute various forms of interdependence in metabolism (connections with others), thereby (re)producing the world and ourselves in unique ways. This activity connects us with others in unique ways, creating a specific ‘we’ that senses interdependence in specific ways.
This paper extends UPE discourse into the realm of subjectivity by redefining care as an affective-ethical dimension of metabolic activity and theorising labour and care transformation as a material and political-ecological process of world-making. Drawing on the Chinbotsukazoku case, it reveals how micro-transformations of labour and care are essential to constituting alternative urban care infrastructure. Finally, it complicates discourse around care and UPE from an East Asian perspective by demonstrating how concrete sensibilities around labour and care emerge, reflecting and contesting the specific contexts in which practices are rooted.
As we saw, Chinbotsukazoku's attempt to live differently from dominant life forms necessarily entailed changes in labour and care. Against Japan's oppressive life forms—the family-corporate system controlling how people work and form interdependent relationships—Chinbotsukazoku participants, in Kami's words, decided not to waste their “one and only life” imitating others (Dameren, 1999, 4). Simultaneously, they willingly devoted their time to children they did not know. In other words, for them, time was not something to own, save, and accumulate—not what Franklin (1748) famously equated with ‘money’. Rather, time is ‘life’ itself, enriched through entanglement with others.
Chinbotsukazoku's labour focused on refusing capitalist productivity concepts and inventing new ways of entanglement and corresponding with others. Such labour cultivated relaxed care that enhanced the capacity to be together while caring for each other's freedom. In Chinbotsukazoku, labour and care were experienced as performative processes of sharing life's time with others and newly weaving the patterns of relationships—the world they live in. Their direct action transforming labour and care at a micro level yet with ontological significance constitutes a unique infrastructure of care that cares for freedom.
Above all, the care infrastructure for freedom that Chinbotsukazoku built for becoming commons with others reflects and continues the practices of non-sectarian movements that experimented with equal and open interdependence and disability rights movements that sought to create care forms different from family and institutions. In other words, Chinbotsukazoku was not only a practice building care infrastructure but also a site inheriting and activating the embodied and affective infrastructure cultivated through autonomous movements—horizontal sensibilities, resistance to closed communities, freedom to refuse oppressive life and build different forms of life with others, and techniques of correspondence for becoming commons with others.
These transformations point to a broader reimagining of freedom and interdependence. In a world where individuals prioritise their own interests, many people are unable to escape wage labour for survival and find themselves trapped within the limited confines of home and wage work. Chinbotsukazoku's aspiration to escape oppressive society manifested not as constituting communities that feel safe through belonging, but as urban imagination weaving the world into extensive relational networks with others.
Chinbotsukazoku may appear as a small case difficult to universalise and unlikely to be sustainable, but we must recognise what it reveals about our current predicament. The tremendous ecological crisis we currently face is ultimately the result of abstracting and commodifying labour—removing care from labour for greater profit. In other words, if we cannot transform the labour and care that sustain and vitalise our lives, any institutional consideration will eventually return us to the same place. In precisely this sense, the micro-transformations of labour and care observed in Chinbotsukazoku are important because they show the very moments when labour and care—how we entangle with each other and constitute the world—ontologically transform. What Chinbotsukazoku ultimately reveals is that transforming care is not simply creating new institutions or policies but cultivating and transmitting bodily capacities to live differently by working together with others. Such collective work builds alternative care infrastructure, a new way of interdependence, spreading beyond any single experiment with countless variations, rather than appearing as a universal and absolute form. Ultimately, care transformation occurs only through concrete bodies that ‘labour’ it into actualisation together with others.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the The Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea, (grant number NRF-2021S1A5C2A03088606).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.