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Reviewed by:
  • Class Structure in Contemporary Japan
  • Mary C. Brinton (bio)
Class Structure in Contemporary Japan. By Kenji Hashimoto. Trans Pacific Press, Melbourne, 2003. xi, 254 pages. A$99.95, cloth; A$44.95, paper.

The field of Japanese studies boasts surprisingly few English-language books on social class and inequality. While the field of social stratification is by no means small in Japanese sociology, few studies make their way into English, particularly in book form. The most thorough and well-researched volume to date has been Hiroshi Ishida's 1993 Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan (Stanford University Press), using 1975 data to compare the intergenerational mobility of several cohorts of men in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Ishida's book marshaled a large body of evidence to demonstrate that despite common assumptions, Japanese society is no more open than other industrial societies in regard to educational opportunity nor is it more open in the degree of mobility across social classes. It thus challenged the notion of a distinctly egalitarian Japanese social structure.

Kenji Hashimoto presents a different though ultimately not a fundamentally contradictory picture of social class in Japan. He originally published Class Structure in Contemporary Japan in Japanese (Aoki Shoten, 2001) and the present volume is an able translation into English. He takes as his central challenge the formulation of a categorization of social class that will be theoretically consistent with prior categorizations but that will be tailored to the case of Japan. Hashimoto's insistence on class as an analytical category is stronger than that of Ishida and others who have focused more on occupational and educational attainment across generations, and much of the book is concerned with arguing for the intellectual significance of class as an analytical construct. Hashimoto begins by summarizing how the concept of social class fell out of vogue among many Japanese sociologists by the late 1970s. This was due to a number of factors. For one, many Japanese quantitative sociologists became fascinated with new methods promoted by American sociologists to study occupational status attainment, which deflected attention away from social classes per se. Second, the late 1970s and early 1980s in Japan saw the publication of Murakami Yasusuke's "new middle mass" theory, arguing that the large majority of the Japanese population had come to consider themselves middle class and that they actually experienced working conditions that were effectively middle class in nature. Finally, the so-called "collapse of socialism" in 1989 further weakened Marxist-derived conceptions of class and the promise of working-class revolution. [End Page 146]

But with the surge of the bubble economy and its subsequent collapse in the early 1990s, attention to the possibility of rising inequality in society surfaced in a number of prominent Japanese social science publications that focused particularly on income disparities across social groups. It is this development in part that prompts Hashimoto to intervene and attempt to restore the viability of social class as an empirically sound category. In order to do so, he reviews Marxist theory and a number of its interpretations and reformulations in the hands of prominent Western theoreticians, including Nicos Poulantzas, Harry Braverman, John Roemer, and Erik Olin Wright. He advocates that the term "Marxism" be abandoned by all but the most ardent political Marxists, in favor of a "Marxian" theoretical position that puts class front and center stage but without the associated political dogma.

Based on the social realities of Japanese society, in particular the continued existence of small-scale self-employment in agriculture and business as well as low-income and unpaid family workers, Hashimoto proposes a four-tiered class schema to represent the Japanese population: capitalists, the new middle class, the working class, and the old middle class. These categories are based especially on the degree of control over the means of production, the quantity of corporate capital to which each class has access, and the degree of exploitation propagated or endured by each class. Hashimoto argues that these represent a person's location in the economic structure, which in turn determines one's income, the nature of the work in which one is engaged, and the degree of one's workplace...

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