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

The recent focus on the developmental drive of China and other booming Asian economies has meant that much social science interest has drifted from nearby Japan, mired now for two decades in economic and political stagnation. Times have changed: where once Japan Inc. was the future, challenging even the USA's preminence as the harbinger of futurist modernity, now it struggles to attract new scholars to learn the language and culture. The devastation wrought by the March 2011 Tokohu earthquake and tsunami seems likely to intensify the depression. Yet, as this wide-ranging and groundbreaking volume attests, there is still much to be learned from the trials of a highly advanced industrial society wrestling with the consequences of financial boom-to-bust.

Japan, in its financial heyday, was a model for many things, but it was unusual in the lack of interest it held for researchers of social class and stratification. The essential belief among scholars, both in Japan and abroad, was that post-war Japan was an almost exclusively middle-class society, driven by meritocratic ambition and a rigorous school system that selected the brightest and the best without much regard for social position. Japanese sociologists often rejected social class as a mode of analysis which inappropriately introduced Marxism into understanding a social system built on non-Western values.

The initial target of the introduction by the two editors-Hiroshi Ishida, a senior mainstream stratification scholar from Tokyo University, and David Slater an innovative anthropologist of class and culture also based in Tokyo-is to establish that Japan must be analyzed through the social class lens. Their general message is that there is no reason analytically or empirically to distance Japan from other post-industrial economies and societies, particularly under the convergent conditions of late capitalist liberalization and globalization. Social class distinctions are just one form of diversity that needs to be added to the growing analysis by cultural studies scholars interested in understanding Japan and its far-from-homogenous social group dynamics. They go on to develop a thick and multi-dimensional conception of social class, influenced by the social historian Ira Katznelson, showing how the structural aspects of social class can be distinguished from sorting mechanisms, institutional socialization and the subjective strategies of individuals within the system. A further appealing strength of this collection is its willingness to show how well quantitative and institutional analysis can sit alongside well-selected, in-depth qualitative case studies.

The editors are certainly aided in their task by uniformly high-quality contributions. With so little on the subject outside of one or two leading Japanese scholars, the book is likely to become the standard text on social class and stratification in Japan during the post-1990 period.

Ishida's opening contribution sustains the arguments put forward provocatively in popular works published around 2000 by economist Toshiaki Tachibanaki and sociologist Toshiki Sato: that inequality is growing in Japan, and access to the upper elites getting narrower than ever. Ishida is concerned to defuse the illusions promulgated by the Japanese obsession with seeing themselves as members of an undifferentiated middle class. Sawako Shirohase then complements his work with an analysis of how intra-class marriage exacerbates social closure. She addresses, but does not defuse, the popular perception that falling marriage and birth rates are driven by a mismatch of lower-class males and upper-class females on the marriage market -that woman, especially those who are educated professionals, are choosing to stay single rather than marry beneath them. Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton picks up on the very real suffering of younger lower-class Japanese youth who for one generation-the "lost generation"-faced a labor market of shrinking opportunities and changing educational demands for which they were not equipped. Towards the end of the book, two rather specific ethnographic chapters, by Aya Ezawa and Ayumi Takenaka respectively, look at how single mothers and a migrant minority group-the Peruvian-Japanese-are...