HIROKAZU MIYAZAKI

Research Articles

The Temporalities of the Market

ABSTRACT Social theorists' recent interest in global capitalism is partially driven by their sense of "being behind" in a changed and
changing world. It is also part of their larger efforts to critique the present. In this article, I seek to find analogues of this sense of tem-
poral incongruity between knowledge and its objects in the Tokyo financial markets. My focus is on the anxieties and hopes animating
some Japanese securities traders' life choices. I argue that these traders' differing anxieties and hopes resulted from their divergent
senses of the temporal incongruity among trading strategies, workplaces, and Japan's national location vis-a-vis the United States.
Drawing on a parallel between social theorists' and traders' efforts to generate prospective momentum in their work, I propose that
anthropologists investigate the work of temporal incongruity in knowledge formation more generally. [Keywords: time, Utopian vision,
knowledge formation, financial markets, Japan]

T HIS ARTICLE AIMS TO CONTRIBUTE to the ongo-

ing efforts in social theory to theorize and critique
the current moment of global capitalism (e.g., Carrier and
Miller 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Coronil 2000;
Lee and LiPuma 2002; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Maurer
1995, 1999; cf. Henwood 1998; Sassen 1998; Soros 1998;
Strange 1986). The novelty of financial instruments such
as futures, options, and currency swaps, and the scale and
speed of economic transactions enabled by technological
innovation has led social theorists to suggest that capital-
ism has entered a new phase (cf. Thrift 1996, 2001). This
sense of novelty, however, is problematic from an anthro-
pological point of view not only because, as Daniel Miller
has noted, new financial instruments may just be perpetu-
ating the old unequal distribution of wealth and risk
(1998:210) but also because the sense of novelty is predi-
cated on an old theoretical problem concerning how to ac-
cess the now (see, e.g., Bloch 1998:120; Hanks 1996:
295-296; Mead 1959; Miyazaki in press; Munn 1992; cf.
Hayek 1980:77-91). Ironically, in other words, in contem-
plating problems posed by the crisis of the "new" capital-
ism, social theorists may already be behind, that is, their
contemplations may be incongruous with the temporality
of the market. At the heart of social theorists' turn to fi-
nancial markets and other new research objects is a more
general anxiety regarding the incongruity between the
temporal orientation of their knowledge and that of the
changed or changing world (Fox 1991; Marcus 1999; cf.
Miyazaki in press). This anxiety is perhaps intrinsic to all
retrospective modes of knowing such as social theory. Yet,
for practitioners of such knowledge, the very novelty of
their research objects at least temporarily generates its
own prospective momentum (cf. Strathern 1981). As Ju-
dith Butler, Biddy Martin, and Robyn Wiegman have com-
mented for the case of queer theory, however, the very ob-
jectification of these new research objects tends to undo
this prospective momentum (see Butler 1994; Martin
1994; Wiegman 1999-2000). Confronting the limits of
novelty as the engine of knowledge formation, social
theorists' impulse has been to appeal to various open-
ended modes of inquiry designed to foreground complex-
ity, provisionality, and indeterminacy such as the cur-
rently popular tropes of becoming and emergence (see,
e.g., Fischer 1999; Smith and Plotnitsky 1997:8; Wiegman
2000). I wish to suggest, however, that these two seem-
ingly mutually incompatible movesa move to update
knowledge through new research objects and a move to
put knowledge in perpetual motion through open-ended
modes of inquiryhave something in common, that is,
an anxiety about being behind and a hope for accomplish-
ing the impossible task of achieving simultaneity with the
present moment.
The purpose of this article is to apprehend the anxiety
and hope surrounding temporal incongruity between
knowledge and its objects by turning to its analogues (cf.
Strathern 1981, 1996) in financial markets. In more specific
terms, I examine some economic actors' own encounters
with temporal incongruity and their implications for the
possibility of knowing and acting in the market. Drawing
on 16 months of fieldwork from 1997-2000 among securi-
ties traders at a major Japanese securities firm, my focus is
on how a particular group of Japanese securities traders

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 1O5(2):255-265. COPYRIGHT 2003, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

256 American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003
came to terms with temporal incongruity of many kinds
in the global financial markets. My ultimate goal is to
carve out a space for a different kind of anthropological
knowledge formation that finds an opportunity, rather
than a problem, in social theorists' collective sense of be-
latedness. I suggest that the explicit construction of tem-
poral incongruity as an opportunity in financial transac-
tions makes financial markets a particularly suitable site
for such exploration.
It is important to note that by temporal incongruity I
do not simply mean the accelerated speed and simultaneity
of financial transactions enabled by new electronic tech-
nologies. In this sense, my approach to the problem of
temporal incongruity in the market does not derive from
the long-standing debate about the contradiction between
the old and new notions of time in the market (e.g., E. P.
Thompson's well-known discussion of "time-discipline" in
industrial capitalism as a radical departure from the concep-
tion of time in the preindustrial world; see Thompson 1967;
cf. Postone 1996:186-225). My claim is that this popular
representation of financial trading as cause and effect of
the ever increasing speed of exchange was actually very
distant from Japanese securities traders' own experience of
their work. What was salient from their point of view,
rather, was the intersecting temporal orientations of fi-
nancial instruments, trading strategies, workplaces, and
Japan's location vis-a-vis the United States that came to-
gether in traders' life choices.
My attention to this temporal nexus of entities of dif-
ferent domains derives from recent efforts in science and
technology studies to examine the process by which dif-
ferent properties and possibilities of machines, concepts,
and other artifacts, temporal and otherwise, converge and
diverge, or are foregrounded and backgiounded over time
(see, in particular, Callon 1998; Latour and Woolgar 1986;
Pickering 1995). In particular, my approach to Japanese se-
curities traders' experience of temporal incongruity resonates
with Sharon Traweek's study of high-energy physicists' ex-
perience of incongruity between "the negotiable and cu-
mulative 'beamtime'pulses of the accelerator beam
and the intractable and limited lifetimes of their careers,
their detectors, and their ideas" (1988:xi). In more concrete
terms, my concern with temporal incongruity focuses on
the intersecting temporal properties and possibilities con-
tained in certain economic concepts and practices. Both
Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger's study of currency
traders in Zurich and Theodore Bestor's study of the
Tsukiji seafood market have drawn attention to the prob-
lem of "coordination" with regard to intersecting tempo-
ralities, or what Bestor terms "timescapes," in the global
flow of capital and commodities (Bestor 2001:92; Knorr
Cetina and Bruegger 2000:162-163). In contrast to these
studies, however, my focus is rather on the situation in
which the different temporal properties of economic knowl-
edge and action become visible to actors themselves.
What is at stake, in other words, is the question of when
and how temporal incongruity becomes evident from the
viewpoint of market participants and what uses they make
of the incongruity.
My investigation is grounded in a specific moment in
the history of the Japanese financial markets. My field-
work took place in the midst of Japan's "Big Bang," or
comprehensive financial deregulation, initiated by the
Japanese government in 1996. Under the banner of "free,
fair, and global," the government and news media pro-
moted a new set of standards for market practices, which
they described as global standards (see Dore 1999). In-
deed, during this period, in order to demonstrate its ad-
herence to these new principles, the government allowed
a number of prominent financial institutions to fail. Ja-
pan's so-called convoy or fleet of mutually protecting bu-
reaucrats and corporations (see Johnson 1982) and keiretsu,
(or alliances of corporations [see Gerlach 1992]), once
celebrated as the secret of Japan's economic success, were
falling apart (see Katz 1998). Likewise, during this period,
Japanese corporations were abandoning longstanding prac-
tices of permanent employment-1
From 1997-2000, I was able to follow members of a
trading team at a securities firm I call Sekai Securities. The
team was a proprietary trading team, that is, a team de-
voted to investing the firm's own assets in various mar-
kets. In the midst of my fieldwork in 1998, Sekai Securities
announced that it was to be taken over by a major U.S. fi-
nancial conglomerate and that the merger would take
place in 1999. During the fall of 1998, I spent each day in
the team's trading room as negotiations proceeded with
the U.S. conglomerate concerning plans for the firm's re-
organization. Finally, in late 1998, Sekai offered each of its
employees aged 40 years or older an early retirement pack-
age and encouraged them to leave the firm. By the spring
of 1999, the team had been disbanded and many of its
members aged 40 or older had accepted the package and
left the firm. Some younger traders had also moved to for-
eign securities firms or to other Japanese financial institu-
tions. For 12 months from August 1999 to July 2000, I fol-
lowed the former members of the team as they sought out
other opportunities in Tokyo or, in some cases, remained
in nontrading sections of Sekai Securities. This article
draws, therefore, on these traders' shifting views of the
market during these tumultuous four years.
The focus of my discussion is on Sekai traders' analogi-
cal extension of certain features of arbitrage trading to other
facets of their life, and on various forms of temporal in-
congruity exposed in this process. Arbitrage is a kind of
trading that seeks to exploit differences in the price of a
single asset in two different markets. Whereas speculators
bet on the future direction of the price of an asset, arbitra-
geurs typically aim to lock in profits by simultaneously
selling and buying the same asset in the two markets in
which the asset is traded at different prices. The introduc-
tion of new financial instruments such as futures and op-
tions2 in the late 1980s created numerous arbitrage oppor-
tunities3 and it was in this environment that most of the
Sekai traders I knew had learned to trade. By the late

1990s, arbitrage had become a popular metaphor among
Sekai traders for contemplating their life decisions.
It is important to note at this point that arbitrage is
predicated on a faith in the market's inherent propensity
toward a state of equilibrium. Secondly, it is assumed that
arbitrage plays an important role in facilitating this pro-
pensity by taking advantage of price discrepancies in the
market. In other words, the act of arbitrage reduces arbi-
trage opportunities. Arguably, this faith is premised on
false assumptions about market realities (see Soros 1998
for a critique of the economic rationale of arbitrage). How-
ever, the arbitrageurs I knew understood this market pro-
pensity toward equilibrium to be a fact.
For the present purpose, what are crucial are the im-
plications of this faith for the temporal orientation of
their practice. To the extent that arbitrage assumes the
market's propensity toward a future moment of equilib-
rium, a moment when, by definition, arbitrage opportuni-
ties will have disappeared, arbitrage trading demands an
orientation toward a moment of its own erasure. In what
follows, I turn to the Sekai trading team's history and in-
vestigate how this temporal feature of arbitrage has inter-
sected with the temporal orientations of Japanese work-
places embedded, for example, in the practice of
permanent employment, or again in Japanese corpora-
tions' collective determination to "catch up" with and ex-
ceed their U.S. counterparts by borrowing, adapting, and
refining U.S. technology and knowledge. My focus is on
how a sense of temporal incongruity generated at these in-
tersections has in turn resulted in divergent anxieties and
hopes.
BEING BEHIND
Sekai's proprietary trading team was established in 1987 at
the time of Japan's bubble economy. At that time the Japa-
nese economy as a whole seemed poised to take over a
leadership role in the global economy owing to the
strength of the Japanese manufacturing sector. Neverthe-
less, those within the financial industry saw themselves as
lagging far behind their U.S. counterparts. The 1980s saw
the Japanese government and financial industry strug-
gling to catch up. In particular, the Tokyo Stock Exchange
launched trading in Japanese Government Bond futures in
1985,4 and the Tokyo and Osaka Stock Exchanges intro-
duced stock index futures in 1988.s
At the outset, the stated objective of Sekai's proprie-
tary trading team, officially known as the "Futures and
Options Promotion Team," was to educate Japanese insti-
tutional investors such as banks and insurance companies
about the uses of new financial instruments such as stock
index futures and options. Another objective was to acquire
what they termed "know-how" (no-hau) from U.S. traders.
In the late 1980s, Sekai Securities sent a number of employ-
ees to work as trainees at futures brokerage firms in Chicago.
These trainees returned to Tokyo with an understanding of
the general workings of the U.S. futures markets-
Miyazaki The Temporalities of the Market 257
Beginning in 1988, the Futures and Options Promo-
tion Team hired several mathematicians and engineers
from manufacturing companies and graduate programs.
These scientists set themselves to studying U.S. academic
articles about the complex workings of financial products
and translated a number of these into Japanese. This pro-
ject coincided with and participated in a number of the
firm's projects aimed at catching up with U.S. investment
banks. For example, Sekai Securities established a research
center in California through which it funded a number of
U.S. finance professors' research, and it invited these pro-
fessors to supervise its traders and analysts. Sekai also
formed a partnership with a Chicago-based options trad-
ing firm and brought U.S. traders to Sekai's trading room
so that Sekai traders might observe these U.S. trading prac-
tices.
The animating ambition for all of these projects was
an appreciation of the time lag between Japanese and U.S.
markets concerning the launching of new financial instru-
ments, and between Japanese and U.S. firms concerning
expertise about these products. The outer frame of the
Sekai proprietary trading team's activities, in other words,
was the temporal orientation of modern Japan as in step
with and yet behind the United States. As in the manufac-
turing sector, this temporal orientation was experienced
in the modalities of learning by copying, and adapting.6
Hence there was a doubleness to this time lag: In being be-
hind the United States and, hence, in making of the
United States a model, Sekai and other financial firms
were also being behind and making a model of the Japa-
nese manufacturing firms whose successes had led to the
glories of the bubble years. In retrospect, however, traders
were to conclude that the act of copying posed particular
temporal problems for finance that did not exist for the
production of cars or transistors, for example. It is to these
incongruities between the wider Japanese temporal orien-
tation of being behind, and the temporal orientation of
the financial market that I now turn.
THE TEMPORAL CONSEQUENCES OF COPYING
The founder of the Futures and Options Promotion Team,
Aoki, was familiar with U.S. investment banks' proprietary
operations. Aoki had been posted to Sekai's New York of-
fice in the 1980s when proprietary trading was the most
profitable activity of U.S. investment banks. At that time,
several U.S. investment banks had tried to hire him away
from Sekai, but as a former anti-Vietnam War activist with
nationalist tendencies, Aoki did not want to work for a
U.S. firm. Aoki's ambition, rather, was to copy and exceed
U.S. proprietary trading practices in Japan. Toward this
end, Aoki assembled a team of young scientists and set
them to learning all they could from the Americans.
Under Aoki's leadership, Sekai's Futures and Options
Promotion Team launched index arbitrage operations in
October 1988, only a few weeks after U.S. investment
banks began their own arbitrage operations in Japan- Soon
258 American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003
after futures on the Nikkei 225 Index were launched at the
Osaka Stock Exchange in 1988, U.S. investment banks in
Japan had noticed that this newly established market was
highly "inefficient" and, hence, that the index futures
were largely "mispriced" (cf. Adachi and Kurasawa 1993).
In other words, this market presented numerous arbitrage
opportunities (Avril 2001:101; Dattel 1994:192-193; see
also Brenner et al. 1991a, 1991b). Aoki assigned the task of
developing arbitrage strategies to a mathematician who
had recently joined Sekai Securities from the University of
Tokyo's doctoral program and a recent college graduate
with a background in engineering. The arbitrage team
grew quickly with the recruitment of more young scien-
tists.
Acting on such arbitrage opportunities was predicated
on certain assumptions about the nature of the relation-
ship between the futures and cash markets. Index arbi-
trage in the Japanese markets at the time typically entailed
simultaneously taking a short (selling) position in the Nik-
kei 225 Index futures market and a long (buying) position
in all 225 stocks that made up the index at the particular
moment at which the price of the index future exceeded
its theoretical value. The calculation of the theoretical
value of an index future was usually based on the value of
the underlying basket of stocks that made up the index
and transaction costs and taxes associated with the execu-
tion of arbitrage (see Avril 2001:95-96). Generally speak-
ing, traders regarded such index arbitrage as a risk-free op-
eration because at the settlement date of the futures
contract, the value of the futures contract became identi-
cal to the value of the underlying basket of stocks, that is,
the value of all stocks that made up the index.
Sekai's traders soon came to believe, however, that
they could not compete with U.S. investment banks in ar-
bitrage. First, the traders complained that management at
Sekai did not understand arbitrage and regularly interfered
with their activities- In Sekai, as in many other Japanese
securities firms, the management did not value proprie-
tary trading and sided with the firm's sales forces when
there was a conflict between the proprietary trading team
and the firm's sales forces (and their clients)/ As a result,
the traders in the proprietary trading team were often
forced to close their positions prematurely because of mo-
mentary loss caused by an unexpected movement in the
market even though they believed that eventually they
would regain their positions.8 As one trader recollected,
"We were just watching how foreign firms [gaishi] col-
lected money so easily after we closed our positions pre-
maturely. [The traders at foreign firms] were so different.
They could take huge risks. We were not like them" (per-
sonal communication with author, February 28, 2000).
The traders faced other practical problems in import-
ing the U.S. arbitrage market to Japan. Because of stock ex-
change rules that prohibited traders from linking up directly
with the information system at the exchange, traders and
their part-time assistants were forced to fill out individual
order forms for the hundreds of stock purchases each act
of arbitrage required. The forms were in turn transferred to
another section of the firm and eventually transmitted to
the stock exchange. Each time they did so, however, they
found that foreign firms had beaten them to their goal. In
index arbitrage, the time it took to execute orders to buy
the basket of individual stocks that corresponded to the
index made all the difference. Sekai traders suspected that
U.S. investment banks had beaten them by illegally con-
necting their computers to the exchange. As Aoki told me
in retrospect,
Foreign capital is go-getting. They look for prey. They
have that instinct. The Japanese body doesn't know that
instinct. Americans, the animals, have that instinct. They
just look at Japan as a place with a lot of prey. Americans
will do what would be illegal in the U.S. markets in the
Tokyo market, while we Japanese cannot do it. Those
Japanese who move to foreign firms do the same. So
maybe it's Japanese culture [that holds us back], [personal
communication with author, October 1, 1998]
More importantly, it was common knowledge that
more participants meant less profit: More arbitrage would
reduce available arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage oppor-
tunities are moments at which assets are "mispriced" rela-
tive to their theoretical value. However, this theoretical
value is in turn predicated on the so-called efficient mar-
ket hypothesis. The hypothesis is that if market partici-
pants are behaving rationally, the market will quickly ab-
sorb information about price disparities and correct itself.
In this hypothesis, arbitrage is what makes the market effi-
cient, therefore, but in the process arbitrage also closes off
its own arbitrage opportunities.
Sekai traders' understanding of arbitrage resonates
with Donald MacKenzie's observation that finance theory
is "performative," that is, that "finance theory itself [plays]
an important role in its assumptions becoming more real-
istic" (2001:133). The proposition that arbitrage opportu-
nities in the Nikkei 225 Index futures market disappeared
because of the increase in the number of arbitrageurs in
that market is traders' own interpretation of events and
like all interpretations cannot be read transparently as
"fact." What is important for the present purpose, how-
ever, is the problem of how traders' own understanding of
arbitrage in turn made explicit to them incongruity be-
tween the temporal orientation of their mode of engage-
ment with the market, specifically, being behind, and that
of arbitrage.
Sekai traders' understanding of arbitrage contained
within itself a particular temporal orientation. As soon as
arbitrage opportunities arise, it was assumed, all rational
actors would seize on them. Under this assumption, the mo-
ment of the arbitrage opportunity, then, is instantaneous
and immediately foreclosed. What I wish to emphasize is
that the temporal orientation of arbitrage had a particular
implication for traders' wider temporal orientation of be-
ing behind U.S. firms. In other markets from electronics to
automobiles, in which Japanese firms had found success
in the temporal oiientation of being behind and had

placed their hope in the fact that one could maintain such
a position, in arbitrage such a temporal orientation was
patently impossible- If the temporal orientation of arbi-
trage was incongruous with the temporal orientation of
being behind, however, Sekai's traders soon discovered
that arbitrage contained within itself other temporal pos-
sibilities- It is to these possibilities that I now turn.
REFINEMENT
At the outset, this problem of what traders understood to
be the self-closing propensity of arbitrage led them to seek
out ever more hidden arbitrage opportunities. When arbi-
trage opportunities disappeared on the Nikkei 225 Index,
for example, their attention shifted to another index, the
TOPIX Index. The appeal of TOPIX, as compared to the
Nikkei 225, lay in its complexity. Unlike the Nikkei 225,
which reflects the value of 225 stocks on the Tokyo Stock
Exchange, the value of the TOPIX is based on the value of
all the stocks traded at the Exchange. Because it would be
impossible to buy all the stocks on the index, as the trad-
ers had done with the 225 stocks that made up the Nikkei
225, arbitrage in TOPIX required a far more complex
method of replication: In order to find arbitrage opportu-
nities, the traders would have to construct a basket of se-
lected stocks that would move in price in the same way as
the index as a wholethey would have to replicate the in-
dex virtually. This demanded complex computer simula-
tions and statistical modeling. It was in this complexity
that Sekai traders placed their hopes for success. From
1992-95, they spent much effort and time researching
how to construct the best basket of stocks for TOPIX arbi-
trage trading.
It is necessary to say something at this point about the
appeal of complexity for the traders I knew. Unlike their
foreign counterparts, who habitually received a share of
the profits they earned, Sekai traders received no financial
incentives. Their wages were calculated according to sen-
iority, and their jobs were secure. Their intense motivation
to succeed, therefore, stemmed from their commitment to
knowledge and their sense of competition (cf. Cole 1979;
Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Vogel 1979). It is here that
the complexity of arbitrage trading had its appeal. In
1991, for example, Koyama, a trader in the team, devel-
oped a computer model for forecasting the movements of
the Nikkei 225 Index futures market. The program proved
very successful, and the firm's management, delighted
with the results, asked Koyama to develop further pro-
grams of the same kind for other indexes. Koyama refused.
As he recalled in 2000, "Rules for futures trading are too
easy. . . . It is all about how to handle past market data. As
a game, it was not so interesting" (personal communica-
tion with author, February 28, 2000). For Koyama, the
limits of technical analysis consisted in its simplicity. In-
stead, he turned to options trading, a form of trading
predicated on the concept of arbitrage rather than the pre-
diction of market movements.9 The appeal of what Koyama
Miyazaki The Temporalities of the Market 259
described to me as his "escape" (tohi) (personal communi-
cation with author, March 16, 2000) to complexity lay in
the temporal orientation options trading shared with arbi-
trage. Where speculation required predicting the future of
market movements, arbitrage was agnostic about where
the market would go but entailed a faith that whatever its
future position would be, it would be a position of equilib-
rium and efficiency. One could say that arbitrage repre-
sented an anticipation of retrospectiona moment at which
the ending point would be given. For believers in the effi-
cient market hypothesis, anomalies, that is, arbitrage oppor-
tunities, are moments that are predestined to reach clo-
sure. In their opinion, finding such anomalies was a much
more complex intellectual process than engineering rules
for predicting the future, and, for them, there lay the appeal.
As I have described, therefore, the orientation of arbi-
trage toward self-closure, that is, the fact that arbitrage
theoretically facilitates the market's propensity towards an
arbitrage-free state of equilibrium, has an associated pro-
pensity for complexity. This turn to complexity in turn
has an interesting relationship to the temporality of being
behind. If, as I have described, there was an incongruity
between the temporality of being behind and the orienta-
tion of arbitrage toward self-closure, the drive for com-
plexity that followed from arbitrage's propensity for self-
closure had affinity with the temporal orientation of being
behind. That is, the refinement of modeling that this turn
to complexity required was an extension of the strategy of
learning and copying that had always followed from being
behind. This strategy is predicated on a linear cumulative
form of knowledge formation. In the Sekai traders' com-
mon understanding, it was precisely this strategy of refine-
ment that had been the secret of Japan's economic success
in the postwar era (see Rohlen 1992). For them, therefore,
the appeal of arbitrage trading lay in stretching one aspect,
one of its propensitiesits propensity for complexity
and backgrounding arbitrage's propensity for self-closure.
IMPROVISATION
In retrospect, however, for some Sekai traders, the fit be-
tween the propensity for refinement in the temporal ori-
entation of being behind and the propensity for complex-
ity in arbitrage foiled their successes. Tanaka, one of the
Sekai traders involved in developing arbitrage strategies,
moved to a French securities firm in 1998. To his surprise,
he discovered that traders at foreign firms were not par-
ticularly interested in constructing complex models:
Japanese traders tend to examine their trading model very
carefully, like people at manufacturing companies used to
do when they developed vacuum cleaners. Japanese are
really good at it and are content to say that they are simply
trying hard whether they make or lose money. To tell you
the truth, that kind of attitude does not take you too far in
the world of derivatives. In fact, foreign firms have knowl-
edge of all the fancy theories about trading but we traders
[at foreign firms] do not pay attention to half of what we
are told about those theories. We just keep repeating
whatever method has been effective [When I was at
260 American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003
Sekai,] a senior trader lost a million dollars in a single day
and our boss was summoned by the firm's executives. Our
boss came back and told the trader to present a paper list-
ing points for improvement in his trading method. Here
[in a foreign firm] one just loses one's job if one loses
money.. . . Sekai traders have placed too much emphasis
on theories. There is no point in Studying theories. Theo-
ries exist for the purpose of making money. There is no
point in refining one's trading model just for the sake of
its refinement, [personal communication with author,
May 16, 2000]
In contrast, trading at a foreign firm was like jazz im-
provisation, according to Tanaka. When something ceased
to work, or when arbitrage opportunities were foreclosed,
foreign traders just tried something else. I want to empha-
size here that the contrast Tanaka drew between refine-
ment and improvisation, as modalities of trading, was a
contrast between temporal orientations. Japanese traders'
attraction to complex models was an effort to extend the
temporal orientation of being behind that had worked so
well for production and that was predicated on a correla-
tion between time spent and achievements. In contrast,
Tanaka's allusion to jazz improvisation reflected his acute
sense of the irrelevance of such cumulative time to the fi-
nancial market and "the purpose of making money." If
the strategy of refinement had an academic orientation
(cf. Bernstein 1992:292-293), Tanaka's rendering of trad-
ing as improvisation emphasized an artistic quality in
which every moment was unique and succeeded or failed
for itself.
GROWTH
Tanaka's awareness of the incongruity between the tem-
poral orientation of the Japanese workplace and the finan-
cial market reflected a broader sense shared by other mem-
bers of the team that the time spent at work was decoupled
from its effects. By 1998, many of the members of the
team had stopped trading altogether. Sudo left the firm in
early 1998 for a foreign consulting firm in which he pro-
vided advice to securities firms on matters such as reor-
ganization, employment, and other aspects of their busi-
ness unrelated to trading. In 2000, he recalled:
In 1997, the market was [so volatile] that 1 realized that
the outcome of one's trading depended on one's sheer
luck or innate talent. Sometimes I would go to the toilet
and come back to my desk to find that my gains had tri-
pled or quadrupled or that 1 had made huge losses. When
I thought that I had devoted my life to this kind of profes-
sion, I felt empty. . . . In this profession, the length of
one's experience does not contribute to one's value. I
thought that it might be better to move to a profession
where one's skills correlate to the time and efforts one has
spent, [personal communication with author, February
14, 2000]
Nonaka, another member of the team, remained at
Sekai after the team was disbanded but was transferred to a
newly established section devoted to invest in start-up
companies. Nonaka had been a particularly successful
trader, but he told me that he had lost interest in trading
because he had found the market limiting:
There is something deeper in the world of stocks than
trading, and that is growth. This is a much deeper world
than the world of winning and losing. .. . Trading is al-
ways about yourself. . .. The time span of trading is two
to three weeks at the longest. The market moves every
day. There is no time for self-reflection. Investing in busi-
ness enterprises is different. The real question is whether
these business enterprises will grow.. . . Trading is fun be-
cause every day you get results [from your actions]. Even
if you don't think or don't act, you can make yourself be-
lieve that you are working because the market moves [and
generates results.]... [In contrast,] in this world of invest-
ment, unless you move, nothing happens, [personal com-
munication with author, May 16, 2000]
In different ways, both Sudo and Nonaka pointed to
the alienating effect of securities trading. What generated
this sense of alienation for them was neither the pace of
the market nor its level of abstraction, but the incongruity
between the temporal orientation of work in the Japanese
context and the continually self-closing character of trad-
ing. Sudo and Nonaka sought to ground their work in an-
other kind of temporal orientation, that of personal and
corporate growth. I now want to turn to one final alterna-
tive contained within the temporal orientation of arbi-
trage, and embodied in the life choices of the team's
leader, who rather than abandoning arbitrage, sought to
extend its Utopian possibilities.
THE ONTOLOGY OF NOT-YET
In early 1999, at the age of 47, Tada left Sekai and the
Japanese corporate world altogether. He entered into a
partnership with a young Japanese trader who had just re-
turned to Japan from working at a U.S. investment bank in
New York. Given Tada's age and standing in the Japanese
financial markets, the partnership itself defied Japanese
ideas of seniority, and this defiance was amplified in the
informal, ad hoc character of their business. Unlike other
members of the team, Tada was single, and he emphasized
that he had no financial obligations or expensive desires:
"I could just be farming," he told me (personal communi-
cation with author, January 15, 2000). Working out of a
small office, Tada used his substantial personal contacts to
gather information about businesses of all kindsfrom
cosmetics to used cars to fast food stands selling takoyaki
(fried octopus), in search of potential investment opportu-
nities.
Tada told me that his new business enterprise was
"just like arbitrage" (personal communication with author,
June 23, 2000) and his approach to investment was an ex-
tension of his acutely developed arbitrage sensibility. His
task was to discover what appeared to be mispriced invest-
ments wherever they might be. For example, he pointed
out to me that memberships in golf courses in Japan are
extremely expensive (and, hence, mispriced) and predi-
cated on norms of exclusivity, prestige, and hierarchy,
which, he asserted, have no intrinsic economic value.

And, yet, he pointed out, many golf courses are in poor fi-
nancial condition because of poor management. Why not
buy golf courses, he suggested with excitement, manage
them efficiently, and sell memberships to the public at
large, thereby at once turning a profit and dealing a blow
to the irrational Japanese propensity to overvalue status?
However, there were some important differences be-
tween the arbitraging of index futures prices and the "arbi-
traging" of golf club memberships. First, strictly speaking,
the latter is not really arbitrage. Arbitrage typically entails
a simultaneous execution of orders to sell and buy a single
asset in two markets where the asset is traded at different
prices. However, there is no market for golf club member-
ship futures. Behind Tada's use of arbitrage as a metaphor
for his new adventure, in other words, was his effort to ex-
tend only one feature of arbitrage beyond the securities
markets, that is, its ostensible role in bringing the market
into a state of equilibrium. Tada's accomplishment, in ex-
tending arbitrage beyond finance, lay in his ability to strip
it down to a most simple orientation, or move, which
could be repeated in an infinite number of contexts.
Tada's motivation for extending arbitrage to the mar-
ket, and even to society at large, lay in his faith that by
making things efficient he was doing good. One late night
after many drinks over which I had described to him my
earlier work on the character of faith among Fijian Chris-
tians (Miyazaki 2000), he suddenly became excited. He
told me that his ultimate dream was "to help people" (per-
sonal communication with author, March 24, 2000), and
that he believed that this could be done by providing peo-
ple with a true religion, one that, unlike all the religions
that existed in Japan, did not overcharge their followers.
In Japan, he explained, it is difficult to obtain tax-exempt
status for a new religion, but he had learned that if one
were to buy an existing religion, one would also acquire its
tax-exempt status. He had already identified several mis-
managed religions now in financial trouble. Why not buy
one of these together, he proposed to me, and found a re-
ligion on the Internet, based on my theory of faith, that
would provide a religious product at an efficient price,
and, hence, fulfill his dream of helping people while also
turning a profit?
As Tada's image of arbitrage as a way of life and a
blueprint for a better society suggests, arbitrage contains
within itself a particular Utopian visiona vision of effi-
cient markets in the form of correct prices. As I have ex-
plained, the calculations inherent in arbitrage are predi-
cated on an assumption, a faith, that efficient markets will
develop, and hence that equilibrium will be reached at a
future point. There is a recursive dimension to this faith
because in acting upon this assumption through his ac-
tions in the market, the arbitrageur helps the market to re-
alize its inherent orientation toward efficiency. In other
words, what is at stake is a particular self-image, of the ar-
bitrageur as both swept up in the "invisible hand" and part
of its agency (cf. Miyazaki 2000). In this view, the exist-
ence of the arbitrageur as rational actor is the condition of
Miyazaki The Temporalities of the Market 261
possibility for the efficient market that, in turn, vanishes
the arbitrageur.
The dislocation of arbitrage from a market of arbitra-
geurs, such as the stock index futures market, to a market
without arbitrageurs, such as the market for golf courses
and religions, had a particular effect on the temporal ori-
entation of arbitrage. Where there were no other arbitra-
geurs, the propensity of arbitrage for self-closure was
stretched out over time, since there was no competition
among arbitrageurs to snap up existing market anomalies.
Under this condition, the agency of the invisible hand was
assumed by Tada, since he alone corrected the market. As
he told me, "my dream is to cast a net over the whole
world, and to catch it all, in one fell swoop [ichimodajin]"
(personal communication with author, June 23, 2000).
What is critical here for the present purpose is Tada's he-
roic conception of his mission to drive the market to its
own end.
Tada's analogical extension of arbitrage makes possi-
ble some wider observations about the particular temporal
orientation of Utopian thought. As I have shown, the pos-
sibility of arbitrage rests on traders' perpetual efforts to lo-
cate gaps between actual and ideal prices. As Paul Ricoeur
has pointed out, Utopian thought depends on the mainte-
nance of a gap between reality and the ideal (1986:
179-180; cf. Fox 1989:33; Mannheim 1985). From my
point of view, what is more interesting is that by virtue of
its emphasis on incompleteness, this Utopian gap gives the
present moment a future orientation. It is this temporal
orientation of the incomplete present, as it anticipates the
eschatological moment of market efficiency, which gives
arbitrage its Utopian propensity. In this sense, the present
moment of arbitrage entails what Ernst Bloch calls the on-
tology of "not-yet" and a propensity for completion
(1986:11).10 Like the task of Walter Benjamin's messianic
historian who facilitates the fulfilment of unfulfilled hope
in the past (1992:247; cf. Szondi 1986),11 the arbitrageur
generates prospective momentum in the present by expos-
ing a gap between realities and the ideal. My claim is that
such prospective momentum is a temporal feature of Uto-
pian thought of all kinds.12
I have examined a variety of techniques by which a
particular group of Japanese securities traders sought to re-
orient their knowledge in response to temporal incongrui-
ties of many kinds. I have suggested that these temporal
incongruities in turn derived from the intersecting tempo-
ralities of financial instruments, market strategies, organ-
izational practices, and personal life choices. Yet, from a
broader perspective, it can also be said that temporal in-
congruity was already inherent in the Japanese self-loca-
tion of being behind. The growth of the postwar Japanese
economy predicated on production has rested on a perva-
sive strategy of copying U.S. firms and exceeding them.
What is interesting about debates about capitalism in Ja-
pan at the end of the 20th century, however, that finan-
cial transactions seemed to have replaced production as
the perceived engine of the economy (cf. Comaroff and
262 American Anthropologist Vol. 105, No. 2 June 2003
Comaroff 2000; Lee and LiPuma 2002). From the point of
view of the argument presented in this article, it can be
said that at the very moment at which Japanese firms' col-
lective determination to catch up with their U.S. counter-
parts had produced such spectacular economic growth
that it threatened to foreclose the very gap that had sus-
tained its own prospective momentum, finance replaced
production and, thereby, recreated a temporal gap be-
tween reality and the ideal, between Japan and its model,
"the United States," and once again situated Japan as "be-
ing behind." The temporal gap that had served as Japanese
firms' ontological foundation had been recreated.
The example of Sekai's proprietary trading team show-
cases the encounter between this wider temporal gap that
defined the Japanese condition as it was recreated in the
late 1980s and the particular temporal orientations of se-
curities trading. What compelled the Japanese traders I
knew to make these diverse life choices was not the in-
creased speed of economic transactions nor the associated
heightened degree of abstraction and alienation of labor
from production process (cf. Carrier and Miller 1998).
Rather, it was the temporal incongruity deriving from the
intersecting temporalities of Japan's temporal location vis-
a-vis the United States, of the Japanese workplace, and of
trading strategies themselves. As I have shown, for differ-
ent members of the team, the articulations of these tem-
poral orientations resulted in the emergence of a variety of
desires and possibilities such as a fantasy of refinement, an
orientation towards improvisation, an interest in personal
and economic growth, and, finally, a faith in the possibil-
ity of the extension of arbitrage to economy, self, and soci-
ety at large. In extending certain temporal features of arbi-
trage to all aspects of social life, Tada and other former
arbitragers exposed temporal incongruities in the market
and in turn once again generated hope for themselves in
an increasingly hopeless market. My argument has been
that all of these efforts at temporal Teorientation resulted
from efforts to maintain prospective momentum in trad-
ers' work as it continually foreclosed its own source, that
is, what I have termed "temporal incongruity." Japanese
securities traders' experience of arbitrage trading points to
a need for attention to the specific configuration of tem-
poral possibilities and constraints in the formation of eco-
nomic knowledge. For social theorists, capturing the cur-
rent moment of global capitalism must begin with an
effort to understand the character of such temporal incon-
gruity, and the way in which it opens and closes possibili-
ties for knowing and acting in the market.
Recent events in financial markets from the Asian fi-
nancial crisis to the collapse of Long Term Capital Man-
agement and the Enron scandal have led social theorists to
believe that capitalism has entered a new phase. Many
have argued that the novelty of these events demands a
new kind of critical thought. I have sought to approach
this question in a somewhat different way. At the begin-
ning of this article, I suggested that social theorists' atten-
tion to financial markets as a new target of criticism has
resulted from and, in turn, has intensified their own col-
lective sense of a temporal incongruity between their
knowledge and its object of contemplation, the market. In
this article, my response to this condition has been to
point to analogues of such a sense of temporal incongruity
in the financial markets themselves. I have argued that the
traders I knew generated prospective momentum in their
work precisely by reorienting the temporality of their work
so as to continually re-create various forms of temporal in-
congruity. These analogues to the problems of social the-
ory would suggest that the task of social theorists must be
not so much to find new objects of contemplation on the
constantly receding horizon of the new, such as financial
markets, as to reflect on the work of temporal incongruity
as an engine of knowledge formation, more generally.
HIROKAZU MIYAZAKI Department of Anthropology, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14853
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article draws on a total of 16 months of
fieldwork among the members of a trading team of a major Japa-
nese securities firm in Tokyo from August to September 1997, from
September to November 1998, and from August 1999 to July 2000.
The research was conducted under the auspices of the American
Bar Foundation. The 1999-2000 research was also supported by the
Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council
and the American Council of Learned Society with funds provided
by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership. I thank the
members of the trading team for their patience and interest. An
earlier version of this article was presented at the University of Chi-
cago, Cornell University, and the 2001 Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. I
thank those who commented on my paper at these occasions, es-
pecially Andrew Apter, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Webb
Keane, Danilyn Rutherford, Steve Sangren, Terrence Turner, and
Katherine Verdery. Special thanks are due to Bernard Bate, Jane
Campion, Jae Chung, Davydd Greenwood, Jane Guyer, Michael
Silverstein, and, especially, Annelise Riles for their extremely help-
ful comments on an earlier draft of the article. I also benefited very
much from careful reading of the AA editors-in-chief Fran Mascia-
Lees and Susan Lees and the three reviewers, two of whom identi-
fied themselves as Bill Maurer and Ellen Hertz.
1. This is not the first time Japanese corporations have deviated
from the so-called permanent employment system. See Rohlen
1979 for his discussion of Japanese corporations' employment
strategies during the recession of the 1970s. David Plath and others
also have shown that the temporal dimension of Japanese workers'
career choices is much more complex than the "permanent" in the
idea of permanent employment suggests (see Plath 1983).
2. A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell a certain asset
at a preset price on a future date specified for the delivery of the as-
set. An option is a right to buy or sell a specific asset at a preset
price before a specific date when the right expires.
3. Arbitrage has been one of the most essential strategies in the
practice of derivatives trading (Mikami and Yotsuzuka 2000; U.S.
Congress 1988). For example, arbitrage was the engine of the once
hugely successful hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management.
Long Term Capital Management was led by John W. Meriwether,
the founder of the famous Government Arbitrage Group in Salo-
mon Brothers. Long Term Capital Management's near failure in
1998 has drawn public attention to arbitrage trading (see Lewis
1999; Lowenstein 2000).
4. Commodity futures such as futures contracts on agricultural
products have existed in Japan since the late 19th century or even
earlier if one regards the rice market in Dojima, Osaka, as a futures

market (see Schaede 1991:339-340). Financial futures such as fu-
tures contracts on government securities were first introduced to
the U.S. markets during the 1970s.
5. A stock index is an indicator of value fluctuation of a specific
group of stocks. The method of computing an index varies from
one index to the next. For example, Standard and Poor's 500 is
based on the prices of 500 stocks and is a "value weighted" index
in which the weight of each individual stock in the index is adjusted
relative to the number of its outstanding shares (see http://www.
spglobal.com/indexmain500_description.html, accessed January 30,
2002). Unlike commodity futures, an index futures contract does
not involve physical delivery. Instead, on the delivery date, the
contract is closed by cash settlement on the basis of the difference
between the price of the futures contract and the index's closing
price on the last trading day of the futures contract (see Hull
2000:33; Sharpe et al. 1995:751). Futures contracts on stock in-
dexes were first introduced to the U.S. markets in the early 1980s.
6. Of course, Japanese corporations' business strategies have been
much more complex and diverse (see, in particular, Aoki 1988,
1994). Moreover, when the Japanese model of management was
celebrated as an alternative model for management in the United
States, it was the particular way that knowledge and information is
handled in Japanese corporations rather than the strategy of copy-
ing that attracted management specialists' attention (see Abegglen
and Stalk 1985:119-147; Drucker 1971; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995;
Vogel 1979:27-52). My focus here, however, is on the way the
popular conception of the Japanese business strategy of imitating
and innovating U.S. ideas served as a concrete model for action for
some Japanese economic actors at a particular moment of Japanese
capitalism. In other words, in more general terms, my interest is in
the way discourse about the uniqueness of Japan (Nohonjin ron) has
been deployed and criticized in Japanese business practices. This
follows a broader long-standing effort among the anthropologists
of Japan to carve out a space in the culturalist and institutionalist
or local and global divide in Japan studies (see Kelly 1991:396-398;
Ohnuki-Tierney 2001).
7. Like most other Japanese securities firms at the time, the major
source of Sekai's revenue came from commissions the firm re-
ceived from its clients. Sekai's most important clients were institu-
tional investors such as banks and insurance companies whose
shares were included in the Nikkei 225 Index and they did not like
the fluctuation of the price of their shares caused by the Sekai pro-
prietary trading team's arbitrage trading.
8. In trading futures on the Nikkei 225 Index, as members of the
Tokyo Stock Exchange, securities firms are required to deposit with
the exchange "margin," that is, a certain percentage of the value of
a futures contract. This margin needs to be adjusted according to
the daily fluctuation of the price of the contract. Suppose that
Sekai sells a Nikkei 225 Index futures contract today. If the price of
the contract goes down tomorrow, Sekai will incur losses relative
to the price it locks in for the same contract today and will need to
increase the margin it is required to deposit with the exchange.
9. Every options trader uses a formula known as the Black-Scholes
formula to compute the fair price of an option in an arbitrage-free
environment. Trading options is inherently a form of arbitrage in
that options traders seek to take advantage of the discrepancy be-
tween the fair price and the market price of an option (see Sharpe
et al. 1995:689-691; see also MacKenzie 2001:132). As one of the
most popular finance textbooks notes, "All current methods of
pricing derivative assets [such as options] utilize the notion of arbi-
trage. .. . Asset prices are obtained from conditions that preclude
arbitrage opportunities" (Neftci 2000:13).
10. Here I am referring to Bloch's notion of the "not-yet" con-
sciousness, that is,
a relatively still Unconscious disposed towards its other side,
forwards rather than backwards. Towards the side of some-
thing new that is dawning up, that has never been conscious
before, not, for example, something forgotten, something re-
memberable that has been, something that has sunk into the
subconscious in repressed or archaic fashion. [Bloch 1986:11]
11. Here I am referring to the famous paragraph in Benjamin's
"Theses on the Philosophy of History":
Miyazaki The Temporalities of the Market 263
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize
it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a
memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical ma-
terialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unex-
pectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of
danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition
and its receivers. . .. The Messiah comes not only as the re-
deemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that his-
torian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the
past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be
safe from the enemy if he wins. [1992:247; emphasis removed]
12. My effort to recapture the Utopian content of economic
knowledge parallels Bill Maurer's recent effort to uncover the re-
pressed theological content of the Black-Scholes options pricing
formula (2002). My interest, however, is not so much in disclosing
the hidden and unconscious content of economic knowledge as in
emulating actors' own effort to replicate the admittedly Utopian
content of economic knowledge as their own hope (cf. Riles 2000).
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FIRE IN THE PLACA THE COLOR OF CLASS THE SAVING LIE

CATALAN FESTIVAL POLITICS POOR WHITES AND THE PARADOX 1 RUTH AND METHOD IN THE
AFTER FRANCO OF PRIVILEGE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Dorothy Noyes Kirby Moss F. G. Bailey

Fire in the Plaga is the first full-
length study in English of the
Patum, a Corpus Chnsti fire festi-
val unique to Berga, Cataonia,
Spam, celebrated annually since
the seventeenth century. In collec-
tive performances such as the
Patum, tensions between cultural
and political representation are
made visible, and the gap between
aspiration and possibility is both
bridged and acknow edged, n this
exceptionally rich ethnographic
study Dorothy Noyes explores the
predicament of provincial commu-
nities striving to overcome internal
confl'ct and participate in a wider
world.
296 PAGES HILLUS.
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U N I V E R S I T Y OF PENNSYLVANIA
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What is it like to be white, poor,
and socially margnalized while, at
the same time, surrounded by the
glowng assumpton of racia privi-
lege? Kirby Moss, an African
American anthropologist and jour-
nalist, goes back to his hometown
in the Midwest to examine ironies
of social class in the lives of poor
whites. He purposely moves
beyond the most stereotypical
image of white poverty in the
U.S.rural Appalachan culture
to illustrate how poor whites carve
out their existence within more
complex cultural and social mean-
ings of whiteness.
176 PAGES
CLOTH $45.00 PAPER $16.50
This book explores the distinction
between selflessness and self-
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one's own advantage and acting,
even when disadvantageous, for
reasons of duty or conscience. This
apparently straightforward contrast
is a source of confusion This is so,
F. G. Bailey argues, because peo-
ple polarize and essentialize both
actors and actions and uphold one
or the other side of (he contrast as
concrete reality, as the truth about
how the social world works The
task of The Saving Lie is to show
that both versions are convenient
fictions, with instrumental rather
than ontological significance, they
are not about truth but about power.
At best they are tools that enable us
to make sense of our experience:
at the same time they are weapons
we deploy to define situations and
thus exercise control
232 PAGES CLOTH $39 95