Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategies (review)

Class analysis is back in fashion in Japanese studies in tandem with a recent paradigm shift. In mainstream public discourse, Japan is no longer portrayed as a homogeneous middle-class society but as kakusa shakai, a society with class divisions and socioeconomic inequalities. In a climate in which both academic and popular attention is focused upon social stratification and disparity, this timely book presents a collection of innovative studies conducted by several of the foremost scholars in class analysis from Japan, the United States, and Europe, all of whom had been advocating the importance of class research long before it came into vogue in recent years. The current volume is groundbreaking in at least three respects.

First of all, while the contributors are non-Marxist authors, they use the concept of class without hesitation and do not attempt to promote the term "stratum." In this they are unlike their predecessors who often tried to dissociate themselves from Marxism by refraining from using this taboo term. The contributors to this book are free from the terminological bifurcation between class and stratum and from what one might call a "cold war preoccupation" with this dichotomy, leaving them free to liberally adopt various theoretical and methodological approaches to class and stratification studies without hang-ups about political ideologies.

In the opening chapter, Hiroshi Ishida classifies the Japanese population into six class categories: professional-managerial, routine nonmanual, self-employed, farming, skilled manual, and nonskilled manual. The scheme is based on the so-called EGP class schema (a class classification system operationalized by R. Erikson, J. H. Goldthorpe, and L. Portocarero) and differs, for instance, from Kenji Hashimoto's four-fold neo-Marxian model: capitalist, new middle, old middle (self-employed and farming), and working classes. Nonetheless, one can now observe an appreciable degree of convergence between the two traditions despite their fundamental differences in meta-theoretical assumptions. Both use occupational classifications as the starting point to construct their class categories, both rely on sophisticated methods of quantitative investigation, and both are sensitive to gender differences in class analysis.

The second strength of this volume lies in its deft adaptation of Ira Katznelson's distinction of class phenomena into four levels: the universal "motion" of capitalism (which the editors call "class structure"); the more specific social organization of society lived by actual people, including workplace relations and labor markets ("class sorting"); shared values, dispositions, class culture, and lived experiences ("class socialization"); and "class consciousness" and collective action ("class strategies"). Calling these different levels the "four Ss," the editors adroitly juxtapose eight contributions into four parts.

In so doing, the study is built upon a delicate marriage between sociological quantitative inquiries and anthropological qualitative observations. Moving from macroscopic survey research in the first half of the book to microscopic fieldwork scrutiny in the second, the contributors strive to complement each other on the basis of the elegant four-level scheme. The introduction to the book, written by the two editors, arguably ranks as the best essay written on social class in Japan in recent years and represents the culmination of years of collaborative, international, and interdisciplinary work.

At one end, conducting a level-1 study of class structure, Ishida uses a wealth of crossnational data to demonstrate that, by and large, Japan's class structure exhibits patterns analogous to those of the United States and Germany. In the three countries, individual class positions are strongly correlated to socioeconomic resources such as income, occupation, and education, a pattern that suggests that status consistency is the prevailing pattern in advanced capitalist democracies. The same is true of intergenerational immobility—the relative chances of inheriting the identical class positions from one generation to another—showing that Japanese class structure is closed to a similar degree to the two other nations. Japanese self-perceptions of their status positions are also class-dependent.

There are, of course, Japan-specific peculiarities derived from the nation's historical circumstances, in particular...