We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others.

This article rethinks the hegemonic “sex-work” discourses—popular sex-work discourse and radical-feminist discourse—that associate Japanese night work with prostitution and consider young women workers in this industry as victims. These discourses reinforce sex-work oppression–empowerment paradigms, which limit workers’ experiences to either oppressive/empowering, good/bad, and positive/negative. This research draws on transnational feminism and a polymorphous approach to the complex nature of sex work. In doing so, this article addresses three aspects of Japanese night work, including young Japanese women’s motivation to go into night work, their conceptualization of work they engage in, and shakai-keiken (social experience) that they gain out of doing night work. This article encourages readers to step away from dominant Western discourses and look closely at the nuanced nature of Japanese night work in its own context.