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Scripting Addiction, Constraining Recovery: Alcoholism and Ideology in Japan

ABSTRACT Japan’s medical establishment relies heavily on the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) in treating the nation’s addicts and alcoholics. Japanese individuals diagnosed as ‘alcohol dependent’ and trying to stay sober must embrace and fully incorporate a prescribed recovery ideology into their daily life. A.A. demands acceptance of alcoholism as a lifelong and incurable disease, requires belief in the possibility of a ‘spiritual transformation’, and positions any relapses as the individual’s fault. This organizational system purports to transform individuals into fundamentally new people but runs the risk of casting alcoholics as permanently diseased. It also can shield its methodological framework from criticism. Oftentimes, Japanese alcoholics are cast into a narrow, constraining recovery space without recourse to assert agency over their struggles with addiction. The Japanese A.A. system allows exploration of how prevailing recovery models and views on addiction can exacerbate the suffering of individual addicts through mandated conformity to the dominant views of what constitutes addiction and successful recovery.