An Introduction To Japanese Societyq [5 ed.] 9781108724746

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A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O J A PA N E S E S O C I E T Y Fifth edition Now in its fifth edition, An Introduction to Japanese Society provides a sophisticated, highly readable introduction to Japanese society by internationally renowned scholar Yoshio Sugimoto. Taking a sociological

approach,

the

text

examines

the

diverse

and

multifaceted nature of contemporary Japanese society with chapters covering class, geographical and generational variation, work, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, popular culture, and the establishment. This edition begins with a new historical introduction placing the sociological analysis of contemporary Japan in context, and includes a new chapter on religion and belief systems. Comprehensively revised to include current research and statistics and to address in detail contemporary changes within Japanese society, the text covers changes to the labor market, evolving conceptions of family and gender, demographic shifts in an aging society, and the emergence of new social movements. Each chapter now contains illustrative theme boxes, which provide contemporary perspectives on each topic, as well as research questions, recommended further readings and online resources to consolidate student understanding and guide further exploration. Written in a lively and engaging style, An Introduction to Japanese Society remains essential reading for all students of Japanese society.

Yoshio Sugimoto is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

AN INTRODUCTI ON TO JAPANESE S OCIETY Fifth edition Yoshio Sugimoto

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108724746 © Yoshio Sugimoto 1997, 2003, 2010, 2014, 2021 This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 Second edition 2003 Third edition 2010 Fourth edition 2014

Fifth edition 2021 Cover designed by Cate Furey Typeset by SPi Global Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International, September 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia ISBN 978-1-108-72474-6 Paperback Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.edu.au/academic/japanesesociety Reproduction and communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact: Copyright Agency Limited Level 12, 66 Goulburn Street Sydney NSW 2000 Telephone: (02) 9394 7600 Facsimile: (02) 9394 7601 E-mail: [email protected]

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Contents List of figures, tables, and theme boxes Preface to the fifth edition Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Historical backdrop: disintegration and restoration I Introduction II Japan as a variable 1 Japan’s external boundaries 2 Internal rivalry III Ancient times up to the Nara period IV Heian period: rise and fall of the nobility V The ascent of the samurai class and the duality of power VI Disintegration: the Warring States period 1 The ascendancy of daimyō 2 Recentralization and external expansionism VII Tokugawa: sweeping centralization and national closure 1 Centralization 2 National seclusion 3 Demography and status classification 4 Commoners’ culture 5 Modernity in late Tokugawa Japan VIII The Meiji Restoration

1 Alliance of strong peripheral domains in the west and the south 2 The end of power duality: the establishment of Tokyo as the capital 3 Rapid catch-up programs from above 4 Land tax reform and the ‘parasite’ landlord class 5 Expansionism and colonization IX Taishō democracy X The Fifteen Years’ War 1 The Manchurian Incident 2 The Second Sino-Japanese War 3 The Pacific War XI Looking ahead XII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Chapter 2 The Japan phenomenon: analysis and understanding I Introduction II Sampling and visibility III Four models for understanding Japan 1 Monocultural model: group orientation and homogeneity 2 Multiethnic model: minority issues 3 Multiclass model: social stratification and inequality 4 Multicultural model IV Control of ideological capital V Seven phases of Japan analysis

VI Three areas of deliberation 1 Convergence debate 2 Cultural relativism 3 Legitimation of dual codes VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 3 Class: stratification and disparity I Introduction II From middle-class society to disparity society III Classification of classes and segments 1 Hashimoto’s model 2 Kikkawa’s model: eight-segment analysis 3 Status inconsistency 4 Postmodernity and upper goods IV Reproduction of inequality 1 Inheritance of financial and property assets 2 Socialization and marriage V Debate and caution about the kakusa shakai thesis VI Japanese emic concepts of class VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources

Chapter 4 Generations and geography: variations in an aging society I Introduction II A rapidly aging society 1 Prolonged life expectancy 2 Declining birth rate 3 Pressure on the welfare structure III Generational variations 1 The wartime generation 2 The postwar generation 3 The prosperity generation 4 The global generation IV Geographical variations 1 Japan as a conglomerate of subnations 2 Eastern versus western Japan 3 Center versus periphery 4 Ideological centralization V Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 5 Work: ‘Japanese-style’ management and cultural capitalism I Introduction II Small businesses: evolving bedrock of the economy 1 Small businesses as numerical majority 2 Plurality of small businesses

III Large companies: ‘Japanese-style’ management in transition 1 Firm-based internal labor markets 2 Manipulative definition of employee ability 3 The family metaphor as a socialization device IV Social costs of ‘Japanese’ work style 1 Excessive hours of work 2 Karoshi 3 Tanshin funin V Job market rationalization 1 Casualization of labor 2 Performance-based model VI Cultural capitalism: an emerging megatrend VII Enterprise unionism and labor movements 1 Decline and skewing in union membership 2 Capital–labor cooperation VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 6 Education: diversity and unity I Introduction II Demography and stratification 1 Two paths of schooling: academic and vocational 2 The ideology of educational credentialism 3 The commercialization of education 4 School–business interactions

5 Articulation of class lines III State control of education 1 Textbook authorization 2 Curriculum guidelines 3 Conformist patterns of socialization IV Regimentation and its costs 1 Excessive teacher control 2 Costs of regulatory education V Continuity and change in university life VI English: means of status attainment? VII Competing educational orientations 1 Market-oriented neoliberals 2 Regulatory pluralists 3 Anti-government democrats 4 Developmental conservatives VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 7 Gender and family: challenges to ideology I Introduction II The household registration system and ie ideology 1 Household head 2 Children born out of wedlock 3 Deterrence to divorce 4 Surname after marriage 5 Family tomb

6 Seki and ie III The labor market and women’s employment profiles 1 The flattening M-shaped curve 2 The two-tier structure of the internal market 3 Four types of married women IV Control of the female body 1 Contraception and abortion 2 Domestic violence 3 Sexual harassment V Marriage and divorce VI Types of households 1 Spread of single-person households 2 Nuclear family patterns 3 Decline in extended families 4 Schematic summary of the family VII Gender and sexual diversity VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 8 Ethnicity and Japaneseness: defining the nation I Introduction II Japanese ethnocentrism III Indigenous Ainu IV Buraku liberation issues V Zainichi Koreans 1 Nationality and name issues

2 Generational change and internal diversity 3 Advancement and backlash VI Immigrant workers VII Deconstructing the Japanese VIII Problems and pitfalls IX Japan beyond Japan X Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 9 The establishment: competition and collusion I Introduction II The three-way deadlock III The dominance of the public bureaucracy 1 Regulatory control 2 Amakudari 3 Administrative guidance IV Two competing political economies 1 The business community’s push for deregulation 2 Privatization of public enterprises 3 Globalism versus nationalism V Interest groups in support of the LDP VI The challenges of reforming political culture 1 Heavy reliance on the bureaucracy 2 Money politics and its social basis 3 Local politics against the national bureaucracy

VII The case of Fukushima: collusive center and civil defiance 1 TEPCO and the nuclear village 2 Manipulation of hardship on the periphery 3 Division in the business and civil communities VIII The history war IX The media establishment 1 A high degree of centralization 2 Similarities with other large corporations 3 Institutional linkage with the establishment X Five rifts in the elite structure XI Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 10 Religion: belief and secularization I Introduction II Traditional religions 1 Shinto 2 Buddhism 3 Christianity III New religions 1 The expansion of new religions 2 Spirituality movements IV Aspects of this-worldliness 1 Worshippers’ earthly expectations 2 Religion as business

3 Religion and the state V Revitalization amid secularization VI Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 11 Culture: the popular and the cool I Introduction II The two dualities of Japanese culture 1 Elite versus popular culture 2 Traditional versus imported culture III Mass culture 1 Entertainment media 2 Cost-effective diversions 3 Cross-status cultural consumption IV Folk culture 1 Local festivals as occasions of hare 2 Regional variation of folk culture 3 Marginal art V Alternative culture 1 Mini-communication media and online papers 2 Countercultural events and performances 3 Communes and the natural economy VI The political economy of Cool Japan 1 Manga: groundwork for Cool Japan 2 Cool Japan as commercial market 3 Cool Japan abroad

4 Producers and consumers 5 Promise or illusion? 6 Counterculture or postmodern Nihonjinron? VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 12 Civil society: activism and friendly authoritarianism I Introduction II The fragmentation of social relations III Post-Fukushima protest movements 1 Demonstrations on the streets 2 Characteristics of participants 3 Social segment effects IV Volunteers, NPOs, NGOs, and resident movements 1 Volunteers 2 NPOs and NGOs 3 The prevalence of resident movements 4 Three-dimensional typology 5 Interest groups V Seikatsusha as an emic concept of citizens VI Friendly authoritarianism 1 Mutual surveillance within small groups 2 Visible and tangible power 3 Manipulation of ambiguity 4 Moralizing and mind correctness

VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources References Index

Figures, tables, and theme boxes Figures 1.1 Map of Japan 1.2 Hiroshima Castle 2.1 Takeshita Dōri Street, Tokyo 3.1 Factory worker 3.2 Status-consistent and status-inconsistent clusters 3.3 Changes in the Gini indices over time 4.1 Senior citizens jogging together 4.2 Adults and children in an air-raid shelter, 1943 5.1 Commuters at Umeda Subway Station in Osaka 5.2 Skilled blue-collar worker 5.3 Changes in the unionization rate and strike numbers, 1947–2018 6.1 Disparities of age-based wages among male and female employees, 2018 6.2 High-school students taking an examination 6.3 Schoolchildren doing radio calisthenics 7.1 Workforce participation is growing across a range of industries

7.2 Age-based female labor participation rates, 1985–2017 7.3 Businesswomen exchanging business cards 7.4 Numbers of households with a full-time housewife and twoincome households, 1980–2018 8.1 Popo dolls 8.2 Pyramid showing definitions of ‘the Japanese’ 9.1 Three-way rivalry among power centers 9.2 National Diet Building, Tokyo 9.3 Bullet train 9.4 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station 10.1 Traditional Bon dancing 10.2 Stone statues of jizō 10.3 Child on Shichi-go-san 11.1 Akihabara, Tokyo 12.1 Anti-government demonstration, 2015 Tables 1.1 Condensed chronology of historical turning points 1.2 Changing geopolitical centers 1.3 Snapshot of expansionary attempts 2.1 Population distribution, 2010–20

2.2 Relative sizes of ethnic and pseudo-ethnic minorities in Japan and selected countries 2.3 Relative Gini indices of Japan and selected OECD countries, 2015–16 2.4 Relative poverty rates in Japan and selected OECD countries, 2016 2.5 Comparison of societal models 2.6 ‘Which words represent the characteristics of the Japanese?’ Survey responses, 1958–2013 2.7 Japanese studies in English-language publications: fluctuations in frameworks and analytical tools, 1945–2020 2.8 Comparison of convergence debate theses 2.9 Comparison of subcultural dimensions: Japan and Germany 3.1 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Japanese survey responses, 1965–2018 3.2 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Relative survey responses for Japan and selected other countries, 2005–6 3.3 Class distribution, based on Hashimoto’s model of Marxian categories, 2012 3.4 Comparison of major classes 3.5 Population composition, based on Kikkawa’s eight segments, 2015 3.6 Comparison of status-consistent and status-inconsistent classes, 2010

3.7 Distribution of financial assets, 2017 3.8 Intraclass and interclass marriages, 2015 3.9 Marriages in terms of partner’s educational background, 2005 4.1 Comparison of four generations born in the twentieth century 4.2 ‘Which is the most congenial lifestyle?’ Survey responses, 1930– 2013 4.3 Comparison of village structures in eastern and western Japan 5.1 Distribution of private sector firms and employees, by firm size, 2016 5.2 Comparison of large and small firms 5.3 Comparison of small-business types 5.4 Comparison of management models 5.5 Comparison of types of capitalism 5.6 Distribution of employees in private sphere megasectors, 2016 5.7 Unionization rates, by firm size, 2018 6.1 Distribution of final education levels, 2010 6.2 Distribution of high-school student population after graduation, 2018 6.3 Participation rates in learning English as self-education, 2016 6.4 Comparison of educational orientations 7.1 Positions of power held by women, 2016–19 7.2 Comparison of permeations into the lives of married women

7.3 Distribution of household types, 1980–2015 7.4 Comparison of family types 8.1 ‘Do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners?’ Survey responses, 1953–2013 8.2 Comparison of minority groups 8.3 Comparison of types of buraku communities 8.4 Comparison of identity orientations of zainichi Korean youth 8.5 Distribution of class positions of Japanese nationals and of zainichi Koreans, 1995 8.6 Comparison of Japaneseness markers 8.7 ‘How important are certain criteria for determining “Japaneseness”?’ Survey responses, 2003 8.8 Comparison of types of national identities, 2003 9.1 Comparison of political economies 9.2 Comparison of major power players’ orientations 11.1 ‘Of which Japanese cultures can Japan be proud?’ Survey responses, 2009 11.2 ‘Which categories of cultural or artistic activities did you appreciate in the past year?’ Survey responses, 2019 11.3 Comparison of types of cultures 11.4 Comparison of types of popular culture 11.5 Types of marginal arts

11.6 Comparison of three phases in popular images of Japan abroad and predominant paradigms of Japanese studies 12.1 Changes in affiliations to voluntary associations, 1986–2017 12.2 Comparison between contemporary social movements and the Ampo struggle in 1960 12.3 Comparison of types of voluntary organizations 12.4 Comparison of types of interest groups 12.5 Comparison of emic conceptions of social relations 12.6 Comparison of strategies for moral indoctrination 12.7 Comparison of types of friendly authoritarianism Theme boxes Chinese influence on early Japan Samurai loyalty to feudal lords Life in Edo Challenges of introductory images Class impact on socialization Homelessness The advent of aging society Memories of the wartime generation Young generation’s choices Towards work-style reform

Long working hours Emphasis on collective integration School lunch as part of education Hikikomori sufferers Career women Variations in gender identity The Sayama case Exploitation of foreign workers Three ‘non-Japanese’ Japanese Nippon Kaigi Reiwa Shinsengumi Okinawa and the US military bases In the wake of Fukushima The royal family Different but coexistent: Shinto and Buddhism ‘Where should my ashes go after death?’ Diversity in Japan’s popular culture Land of manga Enduring demonstrations in Tokyo Equality of opportunity and institutional sexism

Preface to the fifth edition It is now nearly a quarter of a century since the first edition of this book was published, in 1997. I initially wrote it less as a primer for students beginning Japanese studies than as a scholarly challenge to the prevailing discourse that defined Japanese society as uniquely monocultural. With the passing of time, Japanese society is increasingly regarded as multicultural, fraught with cultural diversity and class competition, and I am pleased to see that the book has not only stood the test of time but also contributed in a small way to the ongoing paradigm shift. I felt that it was time for the book to be thoroughly refurbished for use as a textbook by a broader readership, including those new to studying Japanese society in higher education and beyond. Readers of the last four editions will notice that the fifth edition is more user-friendly and multidimensional. It has links to videos and websites, lists of questions for research and discussion, and photos and case studies, features which the previous versions did not have. To extend the coverage of the book, I have introduced two new chapters, on history and religion, in addition to comprehensively updating the narratives, tables, and figures of the preexisting chapters. The COVID-19 crisis emerged as the book was being prepared for press. Should another edition be available in the future, it will fully discuss the impact of the 2020 pandemic on Japanese society, as by

then social science data and studies about its repercussions will be available. This is not a book which I could produce single-handedly. I am immensely grateful to Tanya Bastrakova and Penny Mansley for their outstanding editorial assistance at different phases of the revision. Their judicious, constructive, and professional advice helped me improve the book greatly. I would also like to note that I have drawn inspiration from countless daily conversations I have had for decades with my partner, Machiko Sato, at the dinner table, while driving our car, and while taking walks together. Some of my old friends will observe her intellectual influence on this work. Completing the fifth edition, I again feel a sense of liberation and hope that readers will share some of my delight in analyzing and reanalyzing the unresolved debates and pending issues raised in this book. Yoshio Sugimoto Melbourne May 2020

Acknowledgements The author and Cambridge University Press would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce material in this book. Figure 1.2: © Getty Images/moaan; 2.1: © Getty Images/Pola Damonte via Getty Images; 3.1: © Getty Images/Michael H; 4.1: © Getty Images/Taiyou Nomachi; 4.2: Wikimedia Commons/Shigeru Tamura; 5.1:

©

Getty

Images/Robert

Essel;

5.2:

©

Getty

Images/Trevor Williams; 6.2: © Getty Images/ferrantraite; 6.3: © Getty Images/Kasei; 7.1 (left): © Getty Images/Taiyou Nomachi; 7.1 (right): © Getty Images/iryouchin; 7.3: © Getty Images/SetsukoN; 8.1: © Getty Images/electravk; 9.2: © Getty Images/fotoVoyager; 9.3: © Getty Images/sot; 9.4: © Getty Images/Taro Hama @ e-kamakura; 10.1: By Flickr user Guilhem Vellut, ‘Tsukiji Honganju Bon Dance Festival’, www.flickr.com/photos/o_0/9434414142/, licensed under CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/; 10.2: © Getty Images/I am happy taking photographs.; 10.3: © Getty Images/kohei_hara; 11.1: © Getty Images/Marco Bottigelli. Chapter 9: Discussion adapted from Sugimoto 2011 licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bynd/4.0/.

Available

from

The

Conversation

at

https://theconversation.com/japans-fatigued-corporate-culture-414. All videos cited in the theme boxes are hosted on YouTube; these and websites cited in ‘Online resources’ sections were accessed on 30 April 2020.

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright. The publisher apologizes for any accidental infringement and welcomes information that would redress this situation.

Chapter 1

Historical backdrop: disintegration and restoration ◈ The flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same. Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long. So it is with man and all his dwelling places here on earth.1

I Introduction Kamo no Chōmei, the thirteenth-century Japanese intellectual quoted above, wrote with a sense of the transience of the world: ‘Days constantly come and go, yet change is incessant.’ From such perspective, an infinite number of histories can exist, like the countless bubbles that foam and burst on the surface of a river. As a prelude to the analysis of contemporary Japan that this book undertakes, this opening chapter tries to scoop up just a few of these bubbles

to

position

present-day

circumstances

in

historical

perspective, bringing them into relief against the past. This chapter also traces the historical transformations in the patterns of landownership and tax collection which conditioned class formation and disintegration at different times. Table 1.1 provides a highly condensed chronological table to pinpoint some key moments of Japan’s history. Table 1.1 Condensed chronology of historical turning points Century / year

Event

3rd century

Yamataikoku recorded

710

Nara established as the capital

720

Hayato clan in southern Kyūshū revolt

794

Capital moved to Kyoto

Century / year

Event

801

Expedition sent to subjugate inhabitants in the north

1192

Kamakura Shogunate formally established

1274 & 1281

Attempts by the Mongol Empire to invade Japan

1336

Ashikaga Shogunate established

1429

Ryūkyū Kingdom established

1467

Warring states begin hostilities

1573

Oda Nobunaga obtains hegemony

1590

Toyotomi Hideyoshi achieves national unification

1592 & 1597

Hideyoshi invades Korea

1600

Battle of Sekigahara

1603

Tokugawa Shogunate established

1639

National isolation policy put in force

1854

Japan–US Treaty of Peace and Amity concluded

1868

Meiji Restoration completed

1875

Farmer-soldiers dispatched to Hokkaidō

1879

Okinawa incorporated

Century / year

Event

1894

Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin Sensō) breaks out

1904

Russo-Japanese War breaks out

1910

Korea annexed

1931

Manchurian Incident erupts

1937

Second Sino-Japanese War (Nicchū Sensō) breaks out

1941

Pacific War begins

1945

Defeat in World War II

II Japan as a variable Although Japan is often described as an internally homogeneous island nation, it has never been a stable territorial unit with consistent cultural uniformity. In reality, Japan has had fluctuating national boundaries and changing constituent regions.

1 Japan’s external boundaries The territorial boundary of Japan that exists today is a post–World War II concept. Even in the early twentieth century, Japan colonized Korea, Taiwan, northeast China, and Karafuto (Sakhalin), with their populations constituting about 30 percent of ‘imperial Japan’.2

Figure 1.1 Map of Japan The independent Ryūkyū Kingdom endured in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan today, for about four centuries during Japan’s feudal period, until the central government formally

absorbed it as a prefecture in 1879. Before its full incorporation into Japan, Ryūkyū enjoyed close trade relationships with China and other Southeast Asian polities, maintained its own autonomous culture, and identified only to a limited extent with main-island Japan. After the end of the Allied occupation of Japan, which followed its defeat in World War II, Okinawa remained under US occupation to serve as the American bulwark against communist nations and did not return to Japanese rule until 1972, when the United States gave it back to Japan. Hokkaidō, today Japan’s northernmost island, was long inhabited by the Ainu, the island’s indigenous people. In the late feudal era, the Tokyo-based government firmed up its control over this territory in the face of possible Russian advancement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, colonial militiamen were sent to Hokkaidō from Honshū, Japan’s main island, to work as farmers in peacetime and as soldiers in wartime to territorialize it securely. Karafuto, a long and narrow island situated further north, was a contentious terrain claimed by both the Japanese and the Russian authorities in a lengthy conflict. This intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century when those involved attempted to fulfill their respective imperial geopolitical ambitions at the expense of the indigenous Ainu. Japan obtained the southern half of the island in 1905 after winning the Russo-Japanese War, though it has been occupied by Russia since the end of World War II. Other territorial disputes abound between Japan and neighboring states today, as discussed in Chapter 8. All of these cases concern the territorialization of the peripheral islands – reflecting the fact that

Japan is surrounded by the sea – which are sites of dissonant culture and practice.

2 Internal rivalry Throughout Japanese history, many people living in the area now known as ‘Japan’ were not conscious of being Nihonjin (Japanese). Even in Honshū, Japan’s largest island and its most vital and powerful region, this consciousness has fluctuated. The term Nihon (Japan) emerged at the time of the establishment of the Japanese state in the late seventh century. At that point the concept mainly referred to the Kinai region – the area covering present-day Nara, Osaka, southern Kyoto, and southeastern Hyōgo prefectures – evident in the fact that nobles and officials sent outside it regarded their assignments as postings to a foreign area or a ‘land of foreigners’.3 At the time, ordinary people dwelling outside the Kinai region did not think of themselves as belonging to the nation of Japan. Several territorial blocs, which initially were almost nations in themselves,4 were identifiable during the formation of the Japanese state. Far from being a uniform nation, Japan has developed as one with multiple internal subnations. From the establishment of imperial rule, based in Nara and Kyoto in the seventh century, until the Meiji period, in the nineteenth century, these subnations engaged in bitter warfare in a bid to defend or expand their respective hegemony. In the initial phase, the Kinai subnation gradually conquered other blocs, placing them under its control. The feudal period, from the end of the twelfth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, eventually shifted the seat of real power to the samurai class of the Kantō subnation, but the Kinai area remained the locus of imperial power and the most dynamic hub of Japan’s commercial activity. As a

geographical and cultural unit, Japan should thus be seen as a variable rather than a constant, changing its external contours and shifting the balance of internal power between rival regions over time. Setting up the signposts that direct this brief historical journey, Tables 1.2 and 1.3 provide simplified portrayals of these and other variations. Table 1.2 focuses on changes in the locations of the center of power in Japan, while Table 1.3 describes the country’s fluctuating external boundaries. Table 1.2 Changing geopolitical centers

Period

Regional center of power

Ruling institution

Dominant political class

Economic powerholders

Yamato & Nara, 4th century – 794

Kinai

Imperial court

Provincial clans

Administrators of stateowned land

Heian, 794– 1192

Kinai

Imperial court

Nobility

Holders of private shōen estates

Kamakura, 1192–1333

Kantō (Kamakura)

Shogunate

Samurai

Holders of private shōen estates

Period

Regional center of power

Ruling institution

Dominant political class

Economic powerholders

Muromachi, Warring States, 1336–1603a

Kinai and others

Shogunate (imperial court for a short period)

Samurai

Warlords in gekokujō

Tokugawa, 1603–1868

Kantō (Edo)

Shogunate

Samurai

Feudal lords, emerging merchant class

Meiji, 1868– 1912

Kantō (Tokyo)

Imperial court

Exsamurai, SatsumaChōshū clique

‘Parasite’ landlords, zaibatsu

Notes: Shōen – privately owned estates; gekokujō – political turbulence in which the low dominated the high and mighty; zaibatsu – giant family conglomerates. a

This time span includes the Northern and Southern courts period, 1336–92, when the imperial household was split, and the so-called Azuchi–Momoyama period, 1573–1603, when the warlords Oda Nobunaga, his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and their followers unified and ruled Japan. Table 1.3 Snapshot of expansionary attempts

Period / year

Targeted region

Major consequence

369–401

Korea

Temporary occupation and withdrawal

Influence over Imnaa

663

Korea

Defeat

Battle of Hakusukinoeb

712–24

Northern periphery

Expulsion of the Emishic

Establishment of Kinai as the center

720–800

Southern Kyūshū

Incorporation of the Hayato group

Establishment of Kinai as the center

1592 & 1597

Korean Peninsula

Withdrawal

Hideyoshi’s undertaking

1583–

Hokkaidō

Incorporation

Since the rule of Matsumae-han

1879–

Okinawa

Incorporation

Abolition of the Ryūkyū Kingdom

1894–5

Taiwan

Cession

Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin Sensō)

1910–45

Korea

Annexation

Russia’s southward advance

1905–45

Southern Karafuto

Cession

Russo-Japanese War

Context

Period / year

Targeted region

Major consequence

Context

1931–45

Northeast China

Establishment of Manchukuo

Manchurian Incident

1937–45

China and Southeast Asia

Temporary occupation

Second SinoJapanese War (Nicchū Sensō), Pacific War

a

A region in southern Korea.

b

An area in northern Korea.

c

The term used to refer to the inhabitants of the northern tip of Honshū and Hokkaidō, including the Ainu, the indigenous people of this area. See Chapter 8 for further details.

III Ancient times up to the Nara period The Japanese mythology of the origin of Japan claims that the country was created by the goddess of the sun (Amaterasu Ōmikami), who resided in the abode of gods and goddesses.5 According to the myth, when Amaterasu hid herself behind the Gate of the Celestial Rock Cave, the whole world was left in total darkness. Unnerved, the pantheon got together to discuss various ways of luring her out. As one goddess (Ame no Uzume) performed an erotic strip dance, all the others burst into laughter.6 Curious, Amaterasu opened the gate slightly to see what was happening and was then pulled out of the cave. Immediately, the entire world brightened up, with some gods and goddesses leaving heaven to live on the earth, marking the beginning of the nation. In this ancient myth, Amaterasu, the deity of the sun, representing splendor, brightness, and warmth, was symbolized in female form. This is a notable exception in the mythology of most world cultures, where the powerful sun god was generally male. The earliest description of the situation in the Japanese archipelago appears in third-century Chinese documents portraying the politics and customs of a state known as Yamataikoku, headed by a female leader by the name of Himiko, most likely a shaman. After winning intertribal wars, the state was said to have controlled some thirty provinces in the archipelago and to have brought tribute to China on a few occasions. The Chinese Wei Dynasty was recorded as having given Himiko a golden seal as the ruler of Japan, which was

then called Wa. A long-running debate remains as to the exact location of Yamataikoku. Some argue that it was situated in northern Kyūshū close to continental Asia, while others maintain that it prevailed in the Kinai region in central Japan. After the collapse of Yamataikoku,7 numerous powerful clans in the Japanese archipelago engaged in warfare, which culminated in the gradual establishment of the Yamato nation from the fourth to the seventh century. This polity was based on a coalition of victorious regional clans in central and western Japan with the imperial family at the helm. The Yamato government progressively succeeded in the formation of the power center in the Kinai district. Maintaining the momentum, it also made several attempts to invade deep into the Korean Peninsula in the mid-seventh century, though it failed in the end. Within the archipelago, the Yamato armed forces overcame the resistance of the Hayato clan in Kyūshū in the early eighth century. Furthermore, the imperial navy attacked the northern end of Honshū throughout the seventh century to repel the clans of the area, including the ancestors of the Ainu, in an attempt to expand the Japanese territory to the north. During this period Japan was extremely fluid both externally and internally. While imposing tax and forced labor on dominant local clans, the Yamato court gave them hereditary status titles and occupational roles and afforded them a degree of autonomy, including in terms of possessing land and slaves. After a spate of intra-court conflicts and coups, the nation’s capital was established in Nara in 710, at which point the government began to model its administrative system after

the codes of the Chinese Tang Dynasty and developed the first centralized regime based on complex laws and regulations. In principle, under this system all farmland was state owned and lent to members of the public on a periodic basis in return for the payment of tax in rice administered through local government offices. The conversion of all privately owned land to public land under the control of the imperial family was indicative of the expansion of centralized power.

Chinese influence on early Japan Despite the prevailing notion that Japan has been an isolated and solitary island nation, throughout its history it has in fact been heavily reliant on the surrounding sea, which forms a variety of corridors through which people, goods, and information have traveled back and forth. Japan has been a sea-dependent society which enriched itself through maritime and mercantile activities.8 Early in its history, Japan was subject to the influences of Chinese civilization; this was facilitated by the nautical interaction between the two regions. As a peripheral country on the Asian continent, Japan adopted technology, art, and legal practice from China, long at the center of the region politically, via trade and diplomatic sea-lanes. From the seventh to the ninth century, Japan’s government sent nearly twenty official missions to China to study its culture and institutions. As Japan had no written language, its leaders imported ideographic characters invented in China (kanji) and phoneticized some of them (hiragana and katakana) to produce the Japanese alphabet, with hiragana initially widely used by women. The Japanese elite also brought in Confucianism – the ethical teachings of governance said to have been advocated by China’s most influential philosopher, Confucius (551–479 BCE; see Chapter 10) – and it became the major doctrine learned and practiced in the country, providing the basis for the highly bureaucratic style of government that developed at the time

and persists today. Traditional Chinese medicine was also brought to ancient Japan, though it underwent substantial advancements and domestic modifications from the sixteenth century onwards. Throughout premodern Japan, the elite were treated using the Japanized Chinese medicinal practices called kanpō, which have taken hold at various levels of contemporary Japanese society.

Until this era, females often occupied the throne. Throughout Japanese history, eight empresses existed, and six of them reigned before or during the Nara period. The most recent female empress was Gosakuramachi Tennō, who reigned from 1762 to 1770. The rules about imperial succession around this time were relatively gender neutral in comparison with the post–World War II Imperial Household Law (enacted in 1947), according to which only males in the imperial lineage are entitled to accede to the throne. Reflecting the increasing unification of the nation, the Man’yōshū (Collection of 10,000 leaves), the earliest anthology of Japanese verse, was compiled in the second half of the eighth century. It comprised twenty volumes – some 4,500 poems – composed not only by the sophisticated literati but also by people from all walks of life, expressing their unrefined feelings in a direct manner and revealing the energy of the formation of the ancient nation. The collection provided an important model to Japanese poets in later periods.

IV Heian period: rise and fall of the nobility Marking the state-building process further, in 794 the capital was moved to Kyoto, then called Heian-kyō, where it remained the seat of imperial power until 1864, well over ten and a half centuries later. The four centuries up to nearly the end of the twelfth century, when the Kamakura samurai group seized centralized power, is conventionally labelled the Heian period. During this era, the imported legal code system was refined and solidified: powerful clan heads were given occupational posts, titles, ranks, and stipends and were absorbed into the bureaucratic structure instead of directly controlling land and people. They now formed the nobility, enjoying prestige and privilege intergenerationally as high-status officials at the imperial court. Financially, the nobility regime was based upon privately owned estates called shōen, which caused the gradual collapse of the system of state-owned land. The government legalized private ownership in the mid-eighth century, a move which intensified competition among wealthy locals to acquire and expand newly developed rice fields. Analogous to manors in Britain, Grundherrschafts in Germany, and seigneuries in France, these estates spread around the country to occupy a comparable area to publicly owned land. Owners of this type of private land included officials who were initially dispatched from the central government and permanently settled down to enjoy their local advantages and benefits. Private landholders collected ground rent, mainly in the form of rice, from the farmers who worked their land, who

on occasion were also forced to do service labor, unpaid work with no financial or material returns. Nobles and religious institutions in the center were immune from land levies. To avoid tax, many shōen owners donated their estates to these privileged groups, became the administrators of the land, and were rewarded with management fees. This type of tax avoidance scheme undermined the revenue sources of the Kyoto authorities and eroded the basis of the nobility rule. Nobility culture, notably literature written by female courtiers, flourished against the backdrop of the opulent lifestyles of the elite. In particular, a full-scale novel, Genji monogatari (The tale of Genji), which novelist and poet Murasaki Shikibu produced early in the eleventh century, portrayed with an elegant and sensitive touch the romantic life of a handsome noble. Long acclaimed as the most monumental work in Japanese literature, the tale has since attained an international reputation. During this period the nobility started to modify their culture by, for example, developing a Japanized dress style to replace the previous one modeled on Chinese court attire.9

V The ascent of the samurai class and the duality of power To protect their shōen estates from outside forces, landholders required and trained armed groups, as did nobles and other highranking officials. These military groups were known as samurai, and with mutual cooperation and intense rivalry, they developed into several large regional clans that vied to claim central political power. In the end, the Genji clan, based in eastern Japan, was victorious and established its base in Kamakura, near present-day Tokyo, and was appointed to the post of seii-tai-shōgun (shogun) by the imperial court in Kyoto. The clan formed the first long-term warrior-led shogunate regime (bakufu) in 1192, commencing the military-class rule that endured for almost seven centuries, while the emperor (tennō) continued to reside in Kyoto, backed by court nobles. This was the beginning of Japan’s dual power structure; the imperial court retained formal, cultural, and symbolic authority, while the shogunate exercised military, political, and legal power. The relative influence of the two establishments differed, depending upon the era. Japan’s feudal system began with the consolidation of the reciprocal relationship wherein the shogun granted land, through multiple steps of distribution, to his immediate vassals, who in return could be called upon at any point to go to the battlefield. The core of the bilateral connection lay in the exchange between the samurai’s remunerative indebtedness and provision of military services to the shogunate. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the Kamakura

Shogunate covered mainly the shōen estates in the Kantō region and did not deviate significantly from the system of the Heian period. Yet, this was the first time that the political center emerged and solidified in eastern Japan, distant from Kinai. As a sea-girt nation, Japan was subject to foreign naval attacks. The Mongolian Empire tried to invade Japan twice in the latter half of the thirteenth century, crossing the Sea of Japan with naval forces from Korea and China. Though the shogunate weathered the attempted assaults, serious financial difficulties ensued. The samurai class was impoverished as a result, and some of them took the opportunity to form new regionally based groups to compete with the central power. Their moves led to an eventual instability involving power struggles between a variety of old and new forces, resulting in the downfall of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1333.

VI Disintegration: the Warring States period

1 The ascendancy of daimyō Out of these conflicts, warlord Ashikaga Takauji achieved a final victory and established the Muromachi Shogunate in Kyoto in 1338, shifting the power center once again. Soon thereafter, however, the imperial house was split into the Southern Court and the Northern Court, though they were reunited half a century later. The Muromachi period was plagued by a number of civil wars and rebellions over the subsequent two centuries, including lengthy years of hostilities among warlords from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, an era referred to as the Warring States period. At this point the pendulum swung towards disintegration and decentralization. In these tumultuous years, feudal lords who owned large tracts of land and had numerous followers began to establish themselves as strong regional power-holders. They were called daimyō and arose from two different backgrounds. The old type consisted of those who were appointed by the shogunate as the provincial heads of law enforcement. With the erosion of centralized power, however, they gradually lost full control over their territories. New types of daimyō emerged in the mid-fifteenth century when low-ranking retainers reversed the existing order, provoked upheavals and successfully supplanted the elite in a political turbulence called gekokujō (where the low dominated the high and mighty). During this period, each daimyō consolidated their power by enforcing taxation, labor, and military services upon the populace within their territory and managed to have a high degree of local autonomy vis-à-vis the shogunate and the imperial court in Kyoto. Each daimyō territory functioned as a minination in which the feudal lord exercised sole governmental authority.

Japan as a centralized entity was in complete disarray during this period. The globally popular images of ninja derive from the specialist samurai capable of performing the martial art ninjutsu, which they perfected in the Warring States period, with the best-known groups based in present-day Mie and Shiga prefectures, in central Japan. They had military skills that allowed them to infiltrate into enemy camps and hostile territories either individually or collectively to conduct secret investigations for specific purposes. They often carried out assassinations, night raids, rear-guard harassments, and other surprise attacks. Ninja groups won prominence, serving warring daimyō during hostilities. However, the long, peaceful period during the later years of this period obviated the necessity for ninja, the subsequent portrayals of whom as superhuman characters capable of performing fanciful and fantastic feats were exaggerated for mass entertainment.

2 Recentralization and external expansionism After a series of wars between powerful daimyō, victors Oda Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi reversed the clock and set the process of recentralization in motion. Most importantly, they conducted national cadastral surveys to establish land registers uniformly around the country. The registers were used to identify the actual cultivators and yields of each patch of land. These nationwide land censuses made it possible to measure the aggregate rice production of each fiefdom and enabled the center to control the finance of each daimyō more exactly than before, while eliminating the intermediary exploitation by local clans and wealthy farmers. At the same time, the monetary economy expanded, with many daimyō through rich merchants monetizing the rice collected as land tax, in response to escalating interregional trade that cut across fief boundaries.

Figure 1.2 Hiroshima Castle, around which a castle town was developed in the feudal period

Moreover, the central regime implemented the separation of warriors and peasants. The samurai groups that lived in villages were gradually moved to towns and cities and were thus unable to directly control agricultural land. Castles were constructed in these urban centers where the samurai were major residents, symbolizing each daimyō’s power. Most prefectural capitals in Japan today used to be castle towns in the feudal period. With the consolidation of the city-based samurai groups as the military ruling class, Japan’s rulers once again tried to conquer the Korean Peninsula. In the late sixteenth century, Hideyoshi’s troops waged war twice in a major attempt to subject Korea to Japanese control, at one point advancing to its northern end and gaining a temporary foothold there. In the end they were defeated by the Korean armed forces, navy, and volunteer soldiers supported by the military might of China’s Ming Dynasty. Again, Japan was far from a geographically stable entity at this time. Memories of these attacks linger on in Japanese–Korean relations even today. While the samurai class was involved in frequent domestic warfare, the merchant class steadily expanded its influence in some cities. In the sixteenth century, for instance, the port of Sakai, located near Osaka, prospered so much that wealthy merchants there assumed special prerogatives and established it as an almost independent city with exceptional status bestowed by the national regime. In Kyoto, the merchant class formed autonomous associations which managed local festivals and handled community events outside central government authority. In this environment, the tea ceremony,

flower arrangements, and other classic cultural forms began to flourish. The final phase of competition between rival daimyō was the crucial battle at Sekigahara, in present-day Gifu prefecture, in 1600, which was fought between the daimyō forces of eastern Japan and those of western Japan. Warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu led the eastern group and won the battle, setting the course of modern history.

VII Tokugawa: sweeping centralization and national closure

1 Centralization Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1603, setting the stage for the full-blown centralization process, which had a fundamental effect on the development of Japan’s social structure over the coming centuries. The Tokugawa Shogunate lasted for more than 260 years, until the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, when the regime came to an end and Emperor Meiji assumed the power to head the nation. Throughout the Tokugawa period, there were some 260 daimyō, each of whom controlled a feudal domain called a han. The Tokugawa Shogunate classified them into three groups: the three branch families of the Tokugawa House, the fudai daimyō in hereditary vassalage to the Tokugawa, and the tozama daimyō, who did not belong to either. While trusting the first two groups, the shogunate was always suspicious and distrustful of the third, which might have rebelled against its rule at any point. Throughout the nation, the shogunate claimed the right of possession of land but granted tenure to samurai in return for their loyalty to the shogun. Their territories were rank ordered in terms of stipends assessed by their level of rice production. Daimyō were given such areas and allowances far above other samurai and managed their allocated land and people while pledging their allegiance to the center. To control each han carefully, the shogunate occasionally moved some from one domain to another. Furthermore, each daimyō was required to go to Edo to engage in alternate-year residence, taking his family and vassalage to show his obedience to the shogunate, a program which imposed a heavy financial burden on

local daimyō. Internally, the Tokugawa regime thus perfected the process of centralization, exerting heavy-handed nationwide control from Edo.

Samurai loyalty to feudal lords In each han, retainers pledged and practiced their absolute loyalty to their feudal lord (daimyō). As a partially true story demonstrating such utter allegiance, ‘Chūshingura’ (The treasury of loyal retainers) has sustained enduring popularity over centuries, repeatedly shown in theatre, movies, and animation and on television. The tale begins in 1701 when a young daimyō, Asano Takuminokami of Akō-han, stationed in Edo and chosen by the shogunate to entertain an imperial envoy from Kyoto, gets the cold shoulder from an old daimyō, Kira Kōzukenosuke, who is expected to teach him the complicated rules of entertainment. Insulted and angry, Asano unsuccessfully attempts to stab Kira with a dagger in the corridor of the Edo castle. The shogun immediately

commands

Asano

to

commit

seppuku

(disembowel himself) as a form of honorable suicide and orders the dissolution of Akō-han. Kira is not punished. Ōishi Kuranosuke, principal retainer of Asano, tries to rebuild their han, an option rejected by the shogunate. Loyal to his lord, Ōishi then secretly plans to take vengeance on Kira, gathers together forty-seven retainers (including himself) and waits for the right moment for twenty months without showing any signs of this preparation. The opportunity comes on a night of heavy snow in December. The Akō retainers surround and invade Kira’s magnificent residence. After a lengthy fight and a frustrating search, Ōishi’s group finds Kira in his hiding place

and beheads him. After wreaking bitter revenge, the men march to their lord’s graveyard in Edo and report to him that they have finally avenged him. Though Edo citizens are said to have applauded the undertaking of Akō’s samurai as a heroic and chivalrous deed, the shogunate ordered them to perform seppuku, a command which they were forced to obey.

2 National seclusion At the same time, the Tokugawa Shogunate banned Japanese from overseas travel, prohibited nationals from such ‘Christian countries’ as Portugal and Spain from entering Japan, and limited trade activities with foreign countries in the middle of the seventeenth century, establishing a range of border control policies – a scheme later called sakoku (national seclusion). Trade with China, which was a nonChristian country, was exempt, as was trade with the Netherlands, which declared it would refrain from missionary work. The Tokugawa Shogunate took great interest in maintaining ties with the Dutch to obtain information about European countries. Diplomatic relations with Korea and Ryūkyū were maintained. Yet, Japan was virtually closed to foreign countries and remained in a state of almost total isolation internationally for more than two and a half centuries, until the closing days of the Tokugawa period. As a result, in the absence of internal and external warfare, the nation relished a long period of peace and tranquility, though the domestic system of exploitation remained harsh; from 1590 to 1867, more than 2,800 peasant disturbances broke out across the country.10 In the middle of the nineteenth century, the national seclusion policy came under threat as the ships of Western colonial powers appeared on Japan’s coasts and their captains demanded the establishment of trade relations. In 1853, warships and other vessels of the United States arrived in Uraga (present-day Yokosuka, near Tokyo), pressing for Japan to open up to the outside world. The conclusion of a peace treaty between the two countries the next year

ended the seclusion policy, and similar treaties with the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Netherlands were also put into effect, destabilizing the Tokugawa government.

3 Demography and status classification During the Tokugawa period the population was categorized into four groups: samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. This was a mixture of the system of social stratification and that of occupational classification, though the samurai group (which comprised some 5 percent of the population)11 undoubtedly enjoyed many special privileges and formed the ruling class. Farmers, craftsmen, and merchants constituted the commoners’ class without clear class grading. The so-called farmers in this classification (approximately 80 percent) actually included agrarian laborers, traders, handicraft manufacturers, fishermen, and many other types of inhabitants in rural communities. Though the term hyakushō has often been translated as ‘farmers’, it literally means ‘100 surnames’, indicating that rural inhabitants were engaged in a wide range of occupations.12 The countryside population was much more complex and diverse than simply agricultural. Reflecting this demography, in some villages, since earlier times, land tax had been paid in forms other than rice, such as salt, silk, cotton, clothes, gold, and iron.13 In the meantime, city residents (10 percent) comprised the so-called craftsmen and merchants, between whom there was little rank-ordering. The buraku outcast groups14 (1.73 percent) were placed below these four groups.15 In principle, each occupational status was hereditary, and no intergenerational mobility across status lines was permitted. Thus, the status system in Tokugawa Japan was based on three tiers, with the samurai class at the top, commoners including farmers, craftsmen, and merchants in the middle, and buraku groups at the

bottom. After the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Meiji government set up a new status system that placed most of the exsamurai class into a few layers of the Meiji nobility and the second and third groups into the category of commoners.16

4 Commoners’ culture Commoners’ city culture attained full maturity during the Edo period both in the Kinai area and in the capital, Edo, reflecting the material empowerment of the merchant and artisan classes. In the early Tokugawa period, Kyoto and Osaka emerged as the sites of thriving popular culture. Later, fully fledged commoners’ culture flourished in Edo in multitudinous forms. For instance, ukiyo-e (literally, ‘pictures of fleeting life’) – woodblock prints which portrayed women in pleasure districts, female beauties, stage performers, scenes from folk tales, erotica, and so on – found a large mass market with the development of printing technology. Literature which focused on the everyday life of common people broke new ground, featuring stories of amorous lifestyles and people’s obsession with lust and money. A fresh genre of Japanese poems, haiku, gained popularity among common people, describing their observations succinctly in seventeen syllables. Many ordinary people enjoyed writing sarcastic poems known as senryū, which have a similar format to haiku; these ridiculed the powerful and mocked those in authority. Commoners also enjoyed attending performances at theaters, which proliferated in urban areas. Kabuki, a form of drama and music performed by male actors,17 developed in earnest and attracted large audiences; so did jōruri, puppet theater in which dialogue and narrative are accompanied by the playing of a shamisen, a musical instrument. A range of comical novels called kokkei-bon were published and enjoyed wide popularity in Edo and beyond.

In competition with stoic samurai culture, these and many other types of mass consumption cultures flowered in Tokugawa Japan, and some continue to thrive even today. Major newspapers still allocate regular space for senryū contributions from around the country, indicating that the genre has long had grassroots support. In 2005, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed Kabuki theater to be an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In many forms and shapes, Tokugawa Japan’s rich and refined popular culture was fostered by people outside the ruling class and has reverberated in modern and postmodern eras.

5 Modernity in late Tokugawa Japan Late in the Tokugawa era, Japan was well prepared to take on the process of modernization in at least four areas: industrialization, education, urbanization, and bureaucratization. First of all, the country had already undergone a measurable degree of industrialization towards the end of the Tokugawa period. Cottage industries were in progress in many rural areas, particularly in silk and cotton production. Many homes subcontracted work from wholesale merchants in cities, negotiated a division of labor among themselves, and used simple manufacturing machinery, laying the foundation, from below, for fullblown industrialization towards the end of the nineteenth century. Second, in education, each feudal domain established han-kō (domain schools) to educate the children of the samurai class in Japanese and Chinese classics, mathematics, martial arts, and, in some cases, medical and chemical sciences. At least 255 schools of this kind were founded across the nation, making the military class highly cultured and well trained in the arts of brush and sword. Furthermore, tens of thousands of private terakoya schools (literally, ‘temple schools’), which taught reading and writing as well as basic mathematics to the children of commoners, thrived in cities and some parts of the countryside, lifting the literacy and numeracy levels of the general population. The nationwide level of literacy was similar to that in Western nations. At the start of the Meiji Restoration, some 40 to 50 percent of males and 15 percent of females are estimated to have been literate.18

Third, the property succession system in Tokugawa Japan was based on the principle of primogeniture, which allowed the first son of a family to assume its headship and inherit land, housing, and wealth (see Chapter 7). The practice left daughters and subsequent sons unrewarded and disadvantaged but provided an ample supply of labor when Japan was in the process of industrial takeoff in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many emigrated from their villages and moved to urban centers to become industrial workers, giving rise to the extensive urbanization required by Japan’s capitalism. Fourth, the bureaucratic structure of the samurai class was also beneficial to the establishment of a modern state. Since the Tokugawa era recorded virtually no internal or external warfare, the warriors were not required to perform military functions and increasingly worked as bureaucrats within the finely graded hierarchy. After the collapse of the old regime, they were able to swiftly occupy new governmental posts and effectively use their bureaucratic skills for the Meiji administration. Modernity was already in its embryonic form in Tokugawa Japan.

Life in Edo The city of Edo (present-day Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate, was a metropolis of mass consumption which supported the production and distribution of goods of the Kinai area, in western Japan. A majority of Edo residents were migrants from other regions, and in the middle of the Tokugawa period, about two-thirds of its inhabitants of commoner status were men, making the capital a predominantly male city. While the Tokugawa period was the era of centralization, seclusion, and status distinction, Edo was a city of vibrant and mature culture developed by commoners. Various aspects of life in this period are illustrated in a comic fashion in the video Life in Edo Japan (1603–1868), at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIygLo_W1Sw (Simple History, 27 April 2019).

VIII The Meiji Restoration

1 Alliance of strong peripheral domains in the west and the south Against the background of the weakening central regime, a series of bloody civil conflicts erupted towards the end of the Tokugawa period between those feudal daimyō who advocated the end of the feudal system and those who supported the status quo. The anti-Tokugawa group was led by the coalition of Satsuma-han (present-day Kagoshima prefecture), in the southern end of Kyūshū, and Chōshūhan (Yamaguchi prefecture), in the western end of Honshū – two powerful tozama (outsider) provinces far removed from Edo, the seat of the shogunate. The partnership was strengthened by the participation of two other strong tozama provinces, Tosa-han (Kōchi prefecture), in the Shikoku region, and Hizen-han (Saga prefecture), in northern Kyūshū, also at a distance from the center. The domains predominantly in the Tōhoku area, in northeastern Japan, fought against this alliance in defense of the existing regime but ultimately lost the struggle.

2 The end of power duality: the establishment of Tokyo as the capital In 1867, the Tokugawa shogun formally returned political power to the emperor at Nijō Castle, in Kyoto. In 1868, the emperor issued the Imperial Covenant to establish himself as the head of the nation. Soon after, the imperial era name was changed to Meiji, and it was decided that the nation’s capital be moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, where the emperor then settled. The power duality between the two cities thus came to a close, and Tokyo became the single and unrivaled center of the country. After the Restoration, the leading figures of the two revolutionary peripheral regions mentioned above – Satsuma and Chōshū – almost completely monopolized the key offices of the new government. The tables were turned to enable the peripheral provinces to form the new center in Tokyo and to push aside the old leadership to the political periphery. In terms of class analysis, the major Restoration forces were organized by the low-level samurai class with the support of the rich merchant class. The Restoration was less a revolution which completely toppled the establishment and more a transformation led by a section of the ruling class. This meant that many ingredients of the past system were retained, in spite of the radical changes of the ensuing decades. In particular, the Civil Code, which was enacted in 1896, was modeled after the patriarchal system of the feudal samurai class, in which each household had a formal head who held wide-ranging

power over household members. For instance, he could exercise the right to agree or disagree to a proposed marriage in order to maintain the household lineage.19 Promulgated in 1889, the Meiji constitution decreed that sovereignty resided with the emperor, who had the unfettered power to proclaim war, conclude a treaty, command the armed forces, declare martial law, and issue extraordinary imperial ordinances. The constitution did not spell out exactly who was able to directly advise the emperor on matters pertaining to state affairs. Declaring that the unbroken imperial line continued from ancient times, the constitution assigned theocratic authority to the emperor.

3 Rapid catch-up programs from above The Restoration triggered sweeping structural transformations. The old feudal domains (han) were abolished, and the nation was divided into prefectures. Under the slogan ‘Enrich the nation and strengthen the armed forces’ (fukoku kyōhei), the nation’s leadership made all-out attempts to catch up and compete with Western countries both economically and militarily, though these programs were accompanied with harsh labor conditions and serious environmental costs. As silk constituted the most important export good in Meiji Japan, many young women, mostly teenagers, were recruited as silk spinners under stringent employment contracts. Placed in company dormitories after work, they had little free time and were compelled to labor long hours for little pay, with illness often gnawing at their bodies.20 Industrialization also produced environmental disasters, the first well-known case of which emerged at the Ashio Copper Mine, in Tochigi prefecture, around the turn of the nineteenth century.21 The nearby river was contaminated by waste fluid from the mine, severely affecting rice fields downstream. The mine also discharged poisonous fumes into the air, threatening the health of villagers in the area. Though protest movements against the mine erupted many times, the government was unresponsive, partly because the nation required copper for the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war efforts. Since Japan started to industrialize later than the United Kingdom and France, the state intervened heavily into the developmental process as a latecomer. The central regime took the lead in

establishing government plants to advance its industrialization programs and facilitate the development of capitalism from above. The Tokyo government also instituted compulsory and universal male conscription, laying the foundation for the modern military system. Infrastructure programs were rapidly initiated, with Japan’s first railways in operation between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, only four years after the Restoration. In the sphere of education, formal schooling was introduced around the country, and the enrollment rate in elementary schools reached 98.1 percent in 1910,22 just four decades after its initial implementation. This was an extremely rapid spread

of

primary

education

throughout

the

country.

These

accomplishments owed much to the abovementioned pre-Meiji social conditions, conducive to modern development.

4 Land tax reform and the ‘parasite’ landlord class The new land tax system introduced by the Meiji government marked a far-reaching change in the way tax was collected. The old system – in force throughout the feudal period – had used the amount of rice production per area of land as the basic criterion, and tax was paid chiefly in rice. In contrast, the revised system assessed the value of land in monetary terms, and tax was collected in cash on the basis of a set percentage of this figure. The new taxation framework led to an absentee landlord system in which landlords did not cultivate their own land and instead were totally reliant on rent from tenancy. Most had initially been farmers who later expanded their holdings, gradually converted the acquired fields to tenant land, and finally made all of their land subject to tenancy agreements, thereby ceasing land cultivation themselves. Together with usurers, wealthy merchants, and other commercial capitalists, they formed the so-called parasite landlord class, which exploited tenants, a development that resulted in a new bifurcation of the rural population. Nearly half of Japan’s arable land was under tenancy agreements around the turn of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the imperial diet was established in 1889 to legitimize the constitutional monarchy. It was made up of two houses: the House of Peers, which comprised imperial nominees including the imperial family, the nobility, distinguished academics, high-ranking bureaucrats, and high taxpayers (primarily affluent absentee landowners); and the House of Representatives, which consisted of popularly elected members, though the eligible voters were limited to taxpayers above a

certain level, mainly landowning farmers, approximately 1 percent of the entire population. The system excluded women and a vast majority of citizens until 1928, when universal male suffrage came into effect in response to the rising tide of demands for more democratic enfranchisement.

5 Expansionism and colonization After establishing a modern army, the Japanese state could afford to be expansionary and rival Western colonial powers in East Asia. Winning the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Japan acquired Taiwan and its adjacent areas as colonial holdings and forced their residents to be ‘Japanese’ by using a variety of means.23 In 1910, Japan colonized Korea, attaining sovereign power over the entirety of the peninsula and establishing the Government-General of Korea in Seoul, a situation that lasted for more than three decades, until Japan’s defeat in World War II. During this period, Koreans were forced to assume Japanese surnames, use the Japanese language at school, and turn themselves into subjects of the Japanese emperor. These warfare and colonization policies were overseen and promoted by the high-ranking generals and top-level politicians who had their bases in the Satsuma-Chōshū alliance at the time of the Restoration. These regions produced a dominating clique at the helm of the nation and almost totally monopolized its leadership for half a century. Domestically, in parallel, the concentration of capital intensified, as moneyed merchants who had cultivated close connections with politicians and bureaucrats accumulated their wealth. After the industrial transformation primarily in heavy industries – such as steel, shipping, and machinery – these merchants arranged to purchase large government-sponsored firms at low prices, benefited from special procurements during the two wars against China and Russia,

and formed giant family conglomerates called zaibatsu, the most powerful of which were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Internally, each zaibatsu group had a stockholding company at its center. It controlled other companies in the group, which specialized in particular

industries.

These

enormous

concerns

acquired

overwhelming market shares in such major industries as banking, trading, mining, shipbuilding, maritime transport, electricity, and warehousing. While competing with each other in each field, zaibatsu wielded immense power in promoting corporate concentration in the war-dependent economy until the end of the Pacific War. Though they were dissolved thereafter, their structure has since revived, and they continue to retain their prewar system in contemporary Japan as part of the keiretsu (enterprise grouping) system (as discussed in Chapter 5).

IX Taishō democracy The power pendulum swung in the democratic direction in the first quarter of the twentieth century, called the period of Taishō democracy, because it more or less corresponded to the time when Emperor Taishō, the successor to Emperor Meiji, sat on the throne. At the beginning of the century, the urban middle class, made up of white-collar employees and other salaried workers, expanded in size and influence. This was the time when the notion of the salaryman (a Japanese-English term discussed in Chapter 3) was constructed as Japan’s model employee.24 This cohort allied with the emerging industrial capitalist class, based in small businesses, which started to compete with the old privileged class. These groups pressed for the principle of constitutional government based on popular (male) suffrage25 and the parliamentary cabinet system. In defiance of the existing notion of the emperor as a divine existence above all institutions, the advocates of constitutionalism were equipped with the fresh thesis of emperor as organ, which claimed that sovereignty rested with the state, whose will the emperor – as an organ of the state – was compelled to exercise. As the will of the state was represented by the parliament, the theory allowed that parliamentary democracy was possible under the Meiji constitution.26 Social movements intensified during this period. The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement called for democracy and the abolition of the clique politics in which cronies connected with the old han of Satsuma and Chōshū dominated top governmental positions.

Tenancy disputes arose frequently, and tenant farmers formed a national association. The buraku people, still subject to widespread discrimination, even after the dissolution of the feudal status system, established a national organization, Suihei-sha, to demand their basic human rights. The Communist Party came into existence as an underground political organization. Women’s movements were also on the rise, demanding female voting rights and increasingly influenced by socialist ideas.27 To maximize their profits, the ‘parasite’ landlords engaged in speculations in rice prices, which put pressure on household budgets around the country and often triggered rice riots, the most significant of which broke out in 1918, protesting against the high prices of rice and destroying rice merchants’ shops. Initially started by a small group of housewives in a remote town of Toyama prefecture, the protests became the largest popular disturbances in the first half of the twentieth century, spread to 369 locations, and lasted for fifty days. In excess of 1 million people demonstrated, with more than 100,000 soldiers mobilized to respond and over 25,000 participants arrested.28 The Taishō democracy era was not a period of one-way liberalization and diversification. The Great Kantō Earthquake hit the Tokyo metropolitan area in 1923. In the widespread confusion that followed, unfounded rumors flew claiming that Koreans and socialists had risen up in rebellion. Exploiting the hearsay, not only the police and the military but also bands of vigilantes murdered at least several hundred, and possibly a few thousand, Koreans,29 a tragedy which highlighted the capacity of ordinary citizens to be cruel and brutal towards ethnic and ideological minorities.

X The Fifteen Years’ War After the worldwide economic depression starting in 1929, Japan plunged into a total war. This was the Fifteen Years’ War,30 which lasted from 1931 to 1945 and spanned three phases: the Manchurian Incident, which triggered hostilities in northeast China (1931–3); the Second Sino-Japanese War (Nicchū Sensō), which brought Japan into a quagmire of incessant battles in large parts of China (1937–45); and the Pacific War, in which Japan fought the United States and the Allied countries in the theater of the Pacific Ocean (1941–5). This was a period marked by an unprecedented degree of internal centralization and external belligerence.

1 The Manchurian Incident The long war started in 1931 with the Manchurian Incident, in which Japan’s Kwantung Army blasted the South Manchuria Railway in the vicinity of Mukden, China. On the pretext that the incident was carried out by the Chinese National Revolutionary Army (the Kuomintang army), the Japanese army came to occupy the whole of Manchuria in a few months, despite the Tokyo government’s unwillingness to expand the battlefield. This was the beginning of the civil government’s loss of control over the military’s unrelenting aggression. The zaibatsu groups found Manchuria’s abundant natural resources enticing and had every reason to support the military advancement into the region. In 1932, the Japanese Kwantung Army installed Puyi, the last emperor of China’s Ching Dynasty, as the head of Manchukuo, a puppet nation under Japan’s control.

2 The Second Sino-Japanese War The hostilities in China expanded in 1937 with the outbreak of all-out warfare beginning with the Japanese military’s invasion of Beijing, which led to the formation of the United Front against Japan, based on collaboration between the two major Chinese resistance groups, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. To deal with the unresolved situation in China and put the nation on a wartime footing, the Japanese establishment implemented general mobilization programs, which inspired patriotism and imposed various austerity measures on the population while weakening the diet and strengthening the monopolistic position of the government. The zaibatsu groups made maximum use of the tightened wage, price, and industrial controls, secured labor and goods to their advantage, and reinforced the statecapital complex.

3 The Pacific War While the Japanese army widened hostilities with China on the Asian continent, the theater of war moved to the Pacific, with the Japanese Air Force making a sudden air raid on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. This marked the third phase of the Fifteen Years’ War and the start of the Pacific War, which formed a part of World War II, fought between the Allied powers (including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and others31) on the one hand and the Axis powers (composed of Germany, Italy, and Japan) on the other. The Japanese war propaganda machine claimed that the military waged the war to liberate the colonized countries from the yoke of Western dominance and to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership. In the 1940s, Japan shaped itself as a totalitarian society which prohibited any form of individual or collective opposition to the state and secured an extremely high degree of control over the private lives of its citizens. For the attainment of its war goals, no dissenting views were allowed. Specifically, all political parties were dissolved to establish one political organization, Taisei Yokusan-kai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association). In workplaces, all existing labor unions were abolished, and Sangyō Hōkoku-kai (Industrial Patriotic Society) was formed to compel workers to devote themselves totally to the nation’s war activities. At the community level, tonarigumi (neighborhood associations) were organized in every corner of the country to mobilize each member household to comply with the authorities’ wishes. In educational institutions, university students were conscripted to fight

on the front line, with middle- and high-school students called up to do labor service. The secret police had extensive powers and operated to suppress anti-government views. At the same time, popular and voluntary support for the war was also considerable. Many intellectuals willingly made ideological conversions to countenance the ongoing war. Towards the closing days of the Pacific War, the United States carried out a series of major air raids on Tokyo, landed on Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost group of islands, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 3 million Japanese died during the war. The Pacific War ended on 15 August 1945 with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied forces, which occupied the nation for seven years, until a peace treaty was concluded in 1952.

XI Looking ahead After total defeat, Japan implemented equalization reforms, some relatively thoroughly and others half-baked. A new constitution was promulgated in 1946, proclaiming that ‘sovereign power resides with the people’. Overall, compared with the numerous wars and hostilities in which it involved itself in earlier times, the nation has relished a relatively peaceful period for three-quarters of a century since 1945.

XII Conclusion Scooping several bubbles of foam from the river of Japanese history, this chapter has briefly outlined some of its key narratives, showing the ways in which the compositions of, and meanings attached to, Nihon and Nihonjin have changed over time. Against this backdrop, Japanese society today faces fresh opportunities and challenges unimaginable in the past. This book attempts to unravel some of them. The ensuing chapters consist of four major themes. The first (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) presents an overview of class and stratification in Japan and of Japan’s demographic variation, preparatory to depicting other dimensions of Japanese society. The second (Chapters 5 and 6) addresses stratification based upon the achievement criteria of occupation and education and investigates the degree of class reproduction in these spheres. The third (Chapters 7 and 8) studies the ways in which Japanese society is stratified on the basis of gender and ethnicity, two ascriptive characteristics that are determined before birth and are generally, if not always, unalterable thereafter. The fourth (Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12) explores the patterns of trade-off and tug-of-war between forces of control and dissent in the Japanese social system.

Research questions 1. How did the pattern of landownership change in premodern Japan and how did it determine entry into the ruling class? 2. Compare the Meiji Restoration with a major transformation in one of the Western nations in a parallel period. 3. Identify similarities between the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes. 4. Given that modernity unfolds in different societies in different ways, how is Japan’s modernity characterized in comparison with others? 5. What were the strengths and weaknesses of the Taishō democracy?

Further readings Amino, Yoshihiko 2012, Rethinking Japanese History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies. Dower, John 2000, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton. Gluck, Carol 1985, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Andrew 2013, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Totman, Conrad 2014, Japan: An Environmental History. London: I. B. Tauris. 1 Kamo no Chōmei 1998, p. 31. Used by permission of Stone Bridge Press. 2 Prewar school textbooks, published by the Ministry of Education, stated unequivocally that the Japanese nation was multiethnic. Oguma 2002, pp. 133–8. 3 Ōtsu 1993. 4 Amino 1992, pp. 127–40. 5 The narratives were recorded in the documents Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan) and Kojiki (Records of ancient matters),

imperially approved texts in the formative years of the nation, during the seventh and eighth centuries. 6 For the symbolic significance of Ame no Uzume, see Aoyama 2018. 7 The description of Yamataikoku disappears from Chinese imperial documents from the mid-third century to the early fifth century, and it is unknown how it collapsed. 8 Haneda and Oka 2019. 9 Morris 2013. 10 Aoki 1966, p. 13. 11 The percentage figures in this paragraph are estimated from Sekiyama 1958, pp. 310–11. 12 Amino 1996, pp. 8–47. 13 Amino 1996, pp. 106–31. 14 Buraku was a discriminated-against community in which outcast groups lived while subjected to harsh prejudice. Residents in buraku were called burakumin. See Section IV of Chapter 8 for details. 15 Sekiyama 1958, p. 310. 16 The prejudice towards the third group persisted long after the rearrangement. 17 Kabuki first appeared in the early seventeenth century with troupes of female performers playing both male and female parts.

However, claiming that this would corrupt public morals, the Tokugawa Shogunate prohibited women from acting, with the consequence that Kabuki was performed only by male actors, some of whom played female roles. 18 Dore 1976. 19 These rules were based on the ie system, which is discussed in Chapter 7 in detail. 20 Hosoi 1996; Yamamoto 1968. 21 Nimura 1998. 22 The enrollment rate of boys was 98.8 percent, and that of girls was 97.4 percent. Tsuzuki 2013, p. 2. 23 Endo 2019, pp. 142–216. 24 Dasgupta 2012. 25 Popular suffrage was achieved in 1925. 26 The government excluded the organ theory by the mid-1930s. 27 Mackie 2002. 28 Watanabe and Inoue 1959–62. 29 The exact number of Korean victims remains unknown. Available estimates range from over 200 to more than 66,000. Central Disaster Management Council 2008, pp. 206, 218.

30 The phrase was coined by Shunsuke Tsurumi. See Tsurumi 1986. 31 The Soviet Union declared war against Japan on 5 August 1945, ten days before Japan’s surrender to the Allied countries.

Chapter 2

The Japan phenomenon: analysis and understanding ◈

I Introduction This chapter deliberates on major conceptual and theoretical debates in the studies of Japanese society. First and foremost, the question of stereotype formation is addressed to inspect sampling issues and visibility problems and to examine why particular parts of the Japanese population tend to be highlighted to make generalizations about it. The discussion is followed by the comparison of competing frameworks for understanding Japanese society: monocultural, multiethnic, multiclass, and multicultural models. After a review of how the holders of ideological capital control the way Japanese society is characterized, the chapter looks back on a variety of studies published over the past few decades and dissects major phases of analysis, reflecting altering domestic and international contexts. The discussion then moves to focus on areas in which the particular case of Japan has something to offer to social science issues in general: the convergence debate, cultural relativism, and the distinction between ideologies and lived realities in the description of a given society. This final section also demonstrates why it is necessary to be sensitive to two types of relativism: intrasocietal and intersocietal.

II Sampling and visibility Hypothetical questions sometimes inspire the sociological imagination. Suppose that a being from a different planet arrived in Japan and wanted to meet a typical Japanese person, one who epitomized the Japanese adult population. Whom should social scientists choose? To answer this question, several factors would have to be considered: gender, occupation, educational background, and so on. One might decide to choose a female, because women outnumber men in Japan; 65 million women and 61 million men live in the Japanese archipelago. With regard to occupation, she would definitely not be employed in a large corporation but would work in a small enterprise, since only one in eight workers is employed in a company with 300 or more employees. Nor would she be guaranteed lifetime employment, since those who work under this arrangement are concentrated in large companies. She would not belong to a labor union, because only one in six Japanese workers is unionized. She would not be university educated. Fewer than one in five Japanese have a university degree, even though nearly half of the younger generation gained admission to a university for a four-year degree at the beginning of the 2020s. Table 2.1 summarizes these demographic realities. Table 2.1 Population distribution, 2010–20 Majority

Variable

Group

Gendera

Female

Employees by firm sizeb

No. (millions)

Minority No. (millions)

%

Group

%

64.69

51

Male

61.33

49

Small firms

48.50

85

Large firms

8.30

15

Educationc

Without university education

70.80

80

University graduates

17.70

20

Union membership

No

48.50

83

Yes

10.00

17

Sources: Gender: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2020. Employees: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016a. Education: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2010. Union membership: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018c. a b

Population estimates as of 1 January 2020.

The data cover all private sector establishments except individual proprietorship establishments in agriculture, forestry, and fishery. Small firms: fewer than 300 employees; large firms: 300 or more employees.

c

University graduates do not include those who have completed junior college and technical

college. Figures do not include students currently enrolled in schools and preschoolers. The identification of the average Japanese would certainly involve much more complicated quantitative analysis. But the alien would come closer to the ‘center’ of the Japanese population by choosing a female, nonunionized, and nonpermanent employee in a small business without university education than by choosing a male, unionized, permanent employee with a university degree working for a large company. In imagining Japanese society, however, casual observers tend to focus on numerical minorities – men rather than women, career employees in large companies rather than nonpermanent workers in small firms, and university graduates rather than high-school leavers – because they have higher levels of visibility on television and in newspaper and magazine articles. They also form the immediate demographic environment which surrounds most academics, journalists, and communicators. Some scholarly writings have attempted to generalize about Japanese society on the basis of observations of its male elite sector and have thereby helped to reinforce this sampling bias.1 Moreover, because a particular cluster of individuals who occupy high positions in large companies have greater access to mass media and publicity, the lifestyles and value orientations of those in that cluster have enjoyed a disproportionately high level of presence in the analysis of Japanese society at the expense of the wider cross-section of its population. Since the 1990s, a fresh trend – possibly a new stereotype – has spread, with images of Japanese obsessed with manga and anime and their associated merchandise, and with the portrayal of Japan as the land of fanatic consumers of popular culture. Several nationwide studies demonstrate that it is far from the case that such people can be classified as a representative majority of the Japanese at large, let alone as typical: 1. NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Japan’s public broadcaster, conducts a large-scale national survey on Japanese perceptions of many aspects of life every five years. The survey carried out in 2018 found that only 9.9 percent of the Japanese regarded manga reading as one of their many choices of indispensable activities.2 2. NHK also carries out a national survey on the time-use patterns of the Japanese every five years. The survey conducted in 2015 observed that only about 16 percent of the Japanese read ‘magazines, manga or books (including e-books)’ on weekdays.3 Those who only read manga would account for a much lower percentage. 3. The Marketing Section of Kadokawa Corporation conducted a national internet survey of more than 10,000 persons from five to sixty-nine years of age in 2016 and estimated that approximately 32 percent of the relevant population were anime viewers – less than a third. Their ‘core group’ members, who watched six pieces or more per week and most likely purchased anime-related goods, formed merely 15.9 percent of all the anime viewers.4 4. Otaku is a notion which originated in Japan and has now entered English-language dictionaries, referring to a person who is obsessed with manga, anime, and other forms of popular culture in

Japan to the detriment of their social skills.5 In 2018, Yano Research Institute conducted an internet survey of people from fifteen to sixty-nine years of age, asking whether respondents felt they were otaku or had been identified by others as otaku. The institute estimated the number of manga otaku to be 6.40 million and of anime otaku 5.98 million, neither figure reaching 6 percent of the population.6 In spite of the worldwide visibility of manga and anime, their domestic readers and viewers are a minority of the population, possibly limited mainly to urban youth.7 To examine central tendencies and fluctuating diversities in Japanese society, it is necessary to scrutinize the conceptual tools for studying it. The next section attempts to identify a few analytical frameworks and outlines the multicultural model as the key instrument of investigation used in this book.

III Four models for understanding Japan In the space of three-quarters of a century, from the end of World War II to the 2010s, four models for understanding Japanese society were identifiable: monocultural, multiethnic, multiclass, and multicultural. This section inspects them, bearing in mind the visibility and sampling issues noted above and underscoring the importance of not losing sight of marginalized groups.

Figure 2.1 The hustle and bustle of Takeshita Dōri Street, close to Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

1 Monocultural model: group orientation and homogeneity The monocultural model, built on the proposition that Japan is a uniquely homogeneous society with little ethnic or class variation, dominated Japanese studies at the time of the nation’s rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s. It was thought that a high level of internal homogeneity accounted for Japan’s speedy comeback from the World War II devastation to economic prosperity. Monocultural, nonindividualistic, group oriented, and conflict free, Japan was thought to occupy a distinctive place in the world. The socalled group model of Japanese society represents the most explicit and coherent formulation of this line of argument. Put most succinctly, the model is based upon three lines of argument. First, at the individual, psychological level, the Japanese are portrayed as having a personality which lacks a fully developed ego or independent self. The best-known example of this claim is Takeo Doi’s notion of amae, which refers to the allegedly unique psychological inclination among the Japanese to seek emotional satisfaction by prevailing upon and depending upon their superiors.8 They feel no need for any explicit demonstration of individuality. Loyalty to the group is a primary value. Giving oneself to the promotion and realization of the group’s goals imbues the Japanese with a special psychological satisfaction. Second, at the inter-personal, intragroup level, human interaction is depicted in terms of Japanese group orientation. According to Chie Nakane, for example, the Japanese attach great importance to the maintenance of harmony within the group. To that end, relationships between superiors and inferiors are carefully cultivated and maintained. One’s status within the group depends on the length of one’s membership of the group. Furthermore, the Japanese maintain particularly strong inter-personal ties with those in the same hierarchical chain of command within their own organization. In other words, vertical loyalties are dominant. The vertically organized Japanese contrast sharply with Westerners, who tend to form horizontal groups which define their membership in terms of such criteria as class and stratification that cut across hierarchical organization lines.9 Finally, at the intergroup level, the literature has emphasized that integration and harmony are achieved effectively between Japanese groups, making Japan a ‘consensus society’. This is said to account for the exceptionally high level of stability and cohesion in Japanese society, which has aided political and other leaders in their efforts to organize or mobilize the population efficiently. From a slightly different angle, Takeshi Ishida argues that intergroup competition in loyalty makes groups conform to national goals and facilitates the formation of national consensus.10 The group model of Japanese society is an articulated version of the so-called Nihonjinron (theories on Japaneseness). For decades, Japanese writers have debated the essence of ‘Japaneseness’. Numerous books have been written under such titles as What Are the Japanese? and What Is Japan?.11 Many volumes on Nihon-rashisa (Japanese-like qualities) have appeared.12 Social science discourse in Japan abounds with examinations of Nihon-teki (Japanese-style) tendencies in business, politics, social relations, psychology, and so on. Some researchers have been preoccupied with inquiries into the ‘hidden shape’,13 ‘basic layer’, and ‘archetype’14 of Japanese culture. Their works portray Japanese society as highly homogeneous, with only limited internal variation, and give it an allembracing label.

Hamaguchi, for example, who presents what he calls a ‘contextual model of the Japanese’, maintains that the concept of the individual is irrelevant in the study of the Japanese, who tend to see the inter-personal relationship itself (kanjin), not the individuals involved in it, as the basic unit of action.15 Kaoru Amanuma argues that the Japanese core personality is based on the drive for ganbari (endurance and persistence), which accounts for every aspect of Japanese behavior.16 Publishing in Japanese, a Korean writer, Lee O-Young, contends that the Japanese have a unique chijimi shikō (a miniaturizing orientation), which has enabled them to skillfully miniaturize their environment and products, ranging from bonsai plants, small cars, and portable electronic appliances to computer chips.17 Nihonjinron continues to flourish even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tetsuo Takeda and others have argued that Japan has a unique omotenashi bunka (hospitality culture) which other societies should adopt,18 with the term omotenashi suddenly enjoying wide circulation in mass media.19 Héctor García and Francesc Miralles pick up on the exotic-sounding Japanese term ikigai, which can be variously translated as ‘reason for living’, ‘raison d’être’, or ‘passion for life’.20 The list of publications that aim to define Japanese society with a single keyword is seemingly endless, and, although the specific appellation invariably differs, the reductive impulse is unchanged. At least four underlying assumptions remain constant in these studies. First, it is presumed that all Japanese share the attribute in question – be it amae or miniaturizing orientation – regardless of their class, gender, occupation, and other stratification variables. Second, it is assumed that there is virtually no variation among the Japanese in the degree to which they possess the characteristic in question. Little attention is given to the possibility that some Japanese may have it in far greater degree than others. Third, the trait in question is supposed to exist only marginally in other societies, particularly in Western societies. The feature is thought to be uniquely Japanese without systematic comparison with non-Western societies (such as Korea, China, and other Asian countries). The fourth presupposition is an ahistorical assumption that the trait has prevailed in Japan for an unspecified period of time, independently of historical circumstances. Writings based on some or all of these assumptions have been published in Japan endlessly and have generated the genre referred to as Nihonjinron. The discourse has retained its popular appeal, attracting many readers and maintaining a commercially viable publication industry. The notion of Japan being homogeneous goes in tandem with the claim that it is an exceptionally egalitarian society with little class differentiation. This assertion is based on scattered observations of company life. With regard to resource distribution, some contrast the relatively modest salary gaps between Japanese executive managers and their employees with the marked discrepancy between the salaries of American business executives and their workers. Focusing on the alleged weakness of class consciousness, others point out that Japanese managers are prepared to get their hands dirty, wear the same blue overalls as assembly workers in factories, and share elevators, toilets, and company restaurants with low-ranking employees.21 Still others suggest that Japanese managers and rank-andfile employees work in large offices without status-based partitions, thereby occupying the workplace in an egalitarian way. Furthermore, public opinion polls taken by the Prime Minister’s Office have indicated that eight to nine out of ten Japanese classify themselves as middle class. While there is debate as to

what this figure means (see Chapter 3 for further discussion), it has nevertheless strengthened the images of egalitarian Japan. A few observers have gone so far as to call Japan a ‘land of equality’22 and a ‘one-class society’.23 Firmly entrenched in all these descriptions is the portrayal of the Japanese as identifying themselves primarily as members of a company, alma mater, faction, clique, or other functional group, rather than as members of a class or social stratum. Though somewhat timeworn and outdated, the monocultural Nihonjinron model of Japan has continued to influence the academic and popular debate over the characteristics of Japanese society. This is partly because this model contributes to the identity formation of the Japanese and serves as a kind of civil religion,24 and partly because it forms the basis for Japan’s cultural nationalism.25

2 Multiethnic model: minority issues The monocultural model has drawn serious criticism from empirical, methodological, and ideological angles since the 1980s.26 The portrayal of Japan as a homogeneous and egalitarian society has been contradicted by ample evidence that reveals it is a more diversified and heterogeneous society than this stereotype suggests. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a different framework, which one might call the ‘multiethnic model’, took root, challenging Nihonjinron images of Japanese society and emphasizing its ethnic diversity. The notion of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous society has come under question as a consequence of the growing visibility of foreign migrants in the country. The shortage of labor in particular sectors of Japan’s economy has necessitated the influx of workers from abroad for the past quarter of a century or so, making the presence of various ethnic groups highly conspicuous. Throughout manufacturing cities and towns across the nation, Japanese Brazilians, descendants of Japanese migrants to Brazil, work in large numbers. At many train stations and along major city roads, multilingual signs and posters, including those in English, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese, depending upon the area, are prominently displayed. Women from neighboring Asian countries form indispensable support staff in medical institutions, nursing-care centers, and welfare facilities. In 2018, over 3 percent of all marriages in Japan were between Japanese and non-Japanese nationals.27 In the national sport of professional sumo wrestling, overseas wrestlers, particularly those from Mongolia and eastern Europe, occupy the summit levels of the top sumo ranks of Grand Champion, Champion, and others. In the popular sport of professional baseball, American, Korean, Taiwanese, and other international players are familiar public faces. In international competitions in athletics and tennis, Japan is strongly represented by Afro-American Japanese. On national television, many Korean soap operas attract exceptionally high ratings. The reality is that Japan has an extensive range of minority issues, ethnic and quasi-ethnic,28 which proponents of the homogeneous Japan thesis tend to ignore. One can identify several minority groups (discussed in Chapter 1) in Japan even if one does so narrowly, referring only to groups subjected to discrimination and prejudice because of culturally generated ethnic myths, illusions, and fallacies (as Chapter 8 documents in detail). First, there is an indigenous minority. More than 13,000 Ainu live mostly in Hokkaidō, the northernmost island of the nation. Their minority status can be traced back to around the sixth and seventh centuries when Japan’s central regime first attempted to unify the nation under its leadership and conquer the Ainu territories in northern Japan. Second, some 2 to 3 million burakumin are subjected to prejudice, and many of them live in separate communities, partly because of an unfounded myth that they are ethnically different.29 Their ancestors’ plight began in the feudal period under the Tokugawa Shogunate, which institutionalized an outcast class at the bottom of a caste system. Though the class was legally abolished after the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, discrimination and prejudice have persisted (see Chapter 1). Third, as of 2018, over 2.7 million foreigners lived in the country,30 chiefly as a result of their influx into the Japanese labor and consumer markets since the 1980s, mainly from Asia and the Middle East,

with more than 760,000 Chinese forming the largest foreigner group. Some 450,000 Korean residents comprised the second-largest cohort. In addition, 320,000 special permanent residents constituted another large group, most of whom were descendants of those Koreans who had worked in Japan as cheap labor for industries during the Japanese colonization of Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of them were fourth- or fifth-generation residents, and they chose not to apply for Japanese citizenship, for a variety of complex reasons (see Chapter 8). Finally, more than 1.4 million Okinawans, who live in the Ryūkyū Islands, at the southern end of Japan, face occasional bigotry based on the belief that they are ethnically different, and they incur suspicion because of the islands’ long-standing cultural autonomy. Different societies define minority groups on the basis of varying criteria. The ethnic and racial boundaries are imagined, negotiated, constructed, and altered over time and space. In defining them, administrative agencies, private institutions, voluntary organizations, individual citizens, and marginalized groups themselves have different and competing interests and perspectives. Furthermore, international numerical comparisons of ethnic minority groups are complicated and compounded by the fact that the government of each country has different criteria for defining and identifying ethnic minorities. Japan seems to be unique on this front: not in its absence of minority issues, but in the decisiveness with which the government and other organizations attempt to ignore their existence. As a conservative estimate, the total membership of these groups is about 6 to 7 million, which represents some 5 percent of the population of Japan.31 If one includes those who marry into these minority groups, the number is greater. In the Kansai region, where burakumin and Korean residents are concentrated, the proportion of the total population composed by ethnic minorities exceeds 10 percent. These ratios may not be as high as those in immigrant societies, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia,32 but they seem inconsistent with the claim that Japan is a society uniquely lacking minority issues. These issues tend to be obfuscated, blurred, and even made invisible in Japan, partly because the principal minority groups do not differ in skin color and other biological characteristics from the majority of Japanese. In international comparisons, Japan does not rank uniquely high in its composition of minority groups which exist because of their ethnicity or the ethnic fictions that surround them. Table 2.2 lists some of the nations whose ethnic minority groups constitute less than 12 percent of the population. Provided that the Japanese figure is 5 percent, Japan’s position is somewhere in the second band. Table 2.2 Relative sizes of ethnic and pseudo-ethnic minorities in Japan and selected countries Band

% in minorities

Country

1

1–4

Bangladesha, Hungarya, North Korea, South Korea, Tunisiab

2

5–8

Czech Republicc, Greecea, Japand, Icelande, Mongoliaf, Portugala

3

9–12

Austriac, Chinaf, Egyptg, Finlandh

Sources: National census data or government estimates produced in the years specified in subscripts. Figures for countries without a note are taken from Lehmeyer 2006. Notes: The percentages are estimated proportions of the total populations of the countries named. a

2011.

b

2014.

c

2001.

d

2015.

e

2018.

f

2010.

g

2006.

h

2017. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, studies that undermine the supposed ethnic

homogeneity of Japanese society have amassed. Harumi Befu, who challenges what he calls the ‘hegemony of homogeneity’,33 shows how deeply seated ‘primordial sentiments’ spelled out in Nihonjinron are and reveals how they play key roles in hiding the experiences and even the existence of various minority groups. In tracing the origin of the ‘myth of the ethnically homogeneous nation’, Eiji Oguma demonstrates that this notion started to take root only after Japan’s defeat in World War II; in prewar years Japan was conceptualized as a diverse nation incorporating a mixture of Asian peoples with which the Japanese were thought to share blood relations. So, the transition from the prewar mixed nation theory to the postwar homogeneous nation theory is rather recent.34 Michael Weiner argues that the alleged racial purity of the Japanese is an illusion, and he discusses the realities of minority groups subjected to prejudice and discrimination.35 John Lie, in his aptly titled book Multiethnic Japan, argues that Japan is a society as diverse as any other, and he discusses the ways in which the ‘specter of multiethnicity’ haunts the hegemonic assumption of monoethnicity.36 Building on his studies on zainichi Koreans, Yasunori Fukuoka suggests that there are several types of ‘non-Japanese’ on the basis of lineage, culture, and nationality, the three analytical criteria that call attention to multiple dimensions of what it is to be Japanese.37 Covering a significant time span, from the archaeological past to the contemporary period, historians and sociologists put together a volume titled Multicultural Japan,38 which focuses on the fluctuations in ‘Japanese’ identities and shows that Japan has had multiple ethnic presences in one form or another over centuries. The accumulation of these scholarly studies has led to a discourse that can be labeled as the ‘multiethnic model’ of Japanese society. Though regions themselves do not constitute ethnic groups in the conventional sense, regional identities are only one step away from that of the nation.39 Japan is divided into two subcultural regions, eastern Japan, with Tokyo and Yokohama as its center, and western Japan, with Osaka, Kyoto, and

Kobe as its hub. As is discussed in Chapter 4, the two regions differ in language, social relations, food, housing, and many other respects. The subcultural differences between the areas facing the Pacific and those facing the Sea of Japan are also well known. Japan has a wide variety of dialects. Different districts have different festivals, folk songs, and local dances. Customs governing birth, marriage, and death differ so much regionally that books explaining the differences are quite popular.40

3 Multiclass model: social stratification and inequality The image of Japan as an egalitarian society, promoted by the monocultural model, experienced a dramatic shift at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the emerging claim that Japan was kakusa shakai (literally, a ‘disparity society’), a socially divided society with sharp class differences and glaring inequality, a point which Chapter 3 examines in some detail. This view gained ground among the populace during Japan’s prolonged recession in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, the so-called lost decades. Although lifetime employment used to be the hallmark of Japan’s large companies, two in five employees in the workforce proved to be ‘non-regular workers’ whose employment status is precarious. Even ‘regular’ employees who were guaranteed job security throughout their occupational careers were thrown out of employment because of their companies’ poor business outcomes and the unsatisfactory performance of their own work. In mass media, two groups are highlighted. At one end of the spectrum, the new rich who almost instantly amassed vast wealth in such areas as information technology, new media, and financial manipulation were celebrated and lionized as fresh billionaires. At the other end of the spectrum were the unemployed, homeless, day laborers, and other marginalized members of society who were said to form karyū shakai (the underclass),41 revealing a discrepancy which gave considerable plausibility to the imagery of kakusa shakai. In regional economic comparisons, affluent metropolitan lifestyles often appeared in sharp contrast with the deteriorated and declining conditions of rural areas. Comparative studies of income distribution suggest that Japan cannot be regarded as uniquely egalitarian. On the contrary, it ranks high among major advanced capitalist countries with a significant level of unequal income distribution. Table 2.3 confirms this pattern via the international comparative analysis of the Gini index. It is a measure of income distribution across income percentiles in a population. The index ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality). A higher Gini index indicates greater inequality, with high-income earners having larger percentages of the total income of the population. Using this measure, in 2015–16 Japan ranked third in terms of inequality on a list of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, behind only the United States and the United Kingdom, as Table 2.3 shows. Table 2.3 Relative Gini indices of Japan and selected OECD countries, 2015–16 Country

Gini index

Country

Gini index

United States

0.39

Korea

0.30

United Kingdom

0.35

Germany

0.29

Japan

0.34

France

0.29

Australia

0.33

Sweden

0.28

Italy

0.33

Denmark

0.26

Canada

0.31

Norway

0.26

Country

Gini index

Country

Gini index

Ireland

0.30

Finland

0.26 Source: Adapted from OECD 2019a.

Japan’s relative poverty rate, an indicator of the percentage of low-income earners, was one of the highest among the thirty member nations of the OECD (see Table 2.4). The relative poverty rate represents the percentage of income earners whose wage is below half of the median income. According to this measure, one in six workers lived under the poverty line in Japan in 2016, a reality that hardly made the country a homogeneous middle-class society, the image promoted by the monocultural model. Table 2.4 Relative poverty rates in Japan and selected OECD countries, 2016 (%) Country

Rate (high)

Country

Rate (low)

United States

20.9

Germany

10.1

Japan

15.7

Ireland

9.8

Korea

13.8

Sweden

9.1

Italy

13.7

France

8.3

Australia

12.5

Norway

8.2

Canada

12.4

Finland

5.8

United Kingdom

11.8

Denmark

5.5 Source: Adapted from OECD 2019b.

Subcultural groups are reproduced intergenerationally through the inheritance of social and cultural resources. Those who own or expect to inherit financial assets (such as bank savings and stocks) and property and land assets have a considerable advantage over those who do not, and the asset differentials are so wide that it could be argued that Japan is a class society based upon savings, shares, and property ownership.42 In the area of consumer behavior, those who possess or expect to inherit properties such as houses and land spend lavishly on high-class, fashionable, and expensive goods, while those without such financial and property assets are restricted to more mundane purchases designed to make ends meet, a pattern that has continued for more than three decades.43 The Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) and the Stratification and Social Psychology (SSP) projects, conducted by expert stratification analysts, respectively identify distinct classes and segments in the Japanese adult population on the basis of such major stratification variables as occupation, education, gender, age, and income (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, with regard to opportunities for education, students from families of high-educational backgrounds with high-status occupations have a much better chance of gaining admission to high-prestige universities. A majority of the students of the

University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, are the sons and daughters of company managers, bureaucrats, academics, teachers, and other professionals.44 Mindful of the intergenerational reproduction of social advantages and cultural prestige, the mass media have sarcastically used the term nanahikari-zoku (those who have attained prominence thanks to the seven colorful rays of influence emanating from their parents) in reference to such privileged groups. Unlike company employees, professionals, and managers, small independent proprietors frequently hand over their family businesses to one of their children.45 In the world of entertainment, numerous sons and daughters of established entertainers and television personalities have achieved their status with the aid of their parents’ national celebrity. The SSM study suggests that the class characteristics of parents significantly condition their children’s choice of spouse, a pattern resulting in class reproduction (see Chapter 3, Section IV). Ostensibly spontaneous partner selection is patterned in such a way that the class attributes of parents creep into the decision-making process, whether consciously or not. Gender differences in value orientation are arguably more pronounced than ever, with a gradual rise of feminist consciousness at various levels. Opinion surveys have consistently shown that more women than men disagree with the notion of home being the woman’s place. The proportion of women who feel that marriage is not necessary if they can support themselves invariably outnumbers that of men.46 Women show much more commitment than men to community and school activities, neighborhood associations, hobby and sport groups, cooperatives, and other locally based interests.47 These observations of social diversification and segmentation, and of the polarization of lifestyles, imply that Japanese society is not only diversified horizontally but also stratified vertically like other advanced capitalist societies.

4 Multicultural model Although the multiethnic model and the multiclass model stress different aspects of diversity and variation in Japanese society, one can combine them into a more comprehensive perspective that locates both ethnic diversity and social stratification as key elements of Japanese society. Table 2.5 illustrates the location of this perspective, which can be labeled the ‘multicultural model’ of Japanese society, the model that forms the basis of this book. Table 2.5 Comparison of societal models Class variation Ethnic diversity

No

Yes

No

Monocultural

Multiclass

Yes

Multiethnic

Multicultural

Subcultures proliferate in Japan in spheres including ethnicity, region, gender, age, occupation, and education. To the extent that subculture is defined as a set of value expectations and lifestyles shared by a section of a given population, Japanese society reveals an abundance of subcultural groupings along these lines. As a conglomerate of subcultures, Japan may be viewed as a multicultural society, or a multi-subcultural society. Furthermore, most subcultural units are rank-ordered in terms of access to various resources, including economic privilege, political power, social prestige, information, and knowledge. In this sense, Japan as a multicultural society is multistratified as well as multiethnic.48 Let us pose a hypothetical question further to that at the beginning of this chapter. Suppose that our curious being from another planet has capped all adult Japanese with hats of different colors, depending upon their educational background: blue hats for university graduates, yellow hats for those who have completed high school, and red hats for those who have completed middle school or less. The alien might also place different color marks on the foreheads of all working Japanese: white on employees in large corporations, gray on those in medium-sized firms, and black on those in small enterprises. Would we then see different color combinations depending on the location of our observations? Would the color mixtures differ between an exclusive golf club on the outskirts of Tokyo, a meeting at a buraku community in Kyoto, a museum in Nara, a karaoke bar in a fishing village in Hokkaidō, a pachinko (pinball) parlor in Hiroshima, and a parent–teacher meeting at a prestigious private high school in Yokohama? One wonders to what extent the introductory images of Japan are sensitive to these issues.

Challenges of introductory images Japan invokes a wide range of images, both traditional and modern, both conventional and super-advanced. On the one hand, it conjures up visions of temples, shrines, sushi, performing arts, tea ceremony, geisha, and martial arts. On the other, it is seen as a country of high technology: inspiring animation, sophisticated manga, punctual and speedy trains, good-quality cars and electronic appliances, long life expectancy, efficient customer service, and intelligent robots. To what degree is Japan a nation which has achieved a high degree of modernity while retaining the traditional lifestyles lost in other advanced countries? To what extent does exoticism play a role in the examination of Japan from outside? In watching the videos cited below, weigh up their descriptions considering how informative and helpful they are as well as how stereotypical and misleading: Japan: Where Tradition Meets the Future, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLIv7HnZ_fE (JNTO, 6 November 2016), and Japan: Interesting Facts about Japan, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7eczoBQhYo (CoolVision, 22 November 2017).

The alien could use many more invisible colors, denoting the value of an individual’s assets (such as properties and stocks) as well as their occupational position, region of residence or origin, and minority or majority status. If we were to see these colors, how would they be distributed and in what patterns would they cluster? These are questions that a multicultural model of Japanese society can attempt to address by rejecting the thesis of a homogeneous and egalitarian Japan.

IV Control of ideological capital Japanese culture, like the cultures of other complex societies, comprises a multitude of subcultures. Some are dominant, powerful, and controlling and form core subcultures in given dimensions. Examples are the subculture of management in the occupational dimension, the subculture of the large corporation in the firm size dimension, male subculture in the gender dimension, and Tokyo subculture in the regional dimension. Other subcultures are more marginal and may be called the ‘peripheral’ subcultures. Some examples are part-time worker subculture, small-business subculture, female subculture, and rural subculture. Core subcultures have ideological capital to define the normative framework of society. Even though the lifetime employment and the company-first dogma associated with the subculture of the large corporation applies to less than a quarter of the workforce, that part of the population has provided a model which all workers are expected to emulate, putting their companies ahead of their individual interests. The language of residents in uptown Tokyo is regarded as standard Japanese not because of its linguistic superiority but because of those residents’ social proximity to the national power center. Dominating in the upper echelons of society, core subcultural groups are able to control the educational curriculum, influence the mass media, and prevail in the areas of publishing and publicity. They outshine their peripheral counterparts in establishing their modes of life and patterns of expectations in the national domain and presenting their subcultures as the national culture. The samurai spirit, the kamikaze vigor, and the soul of the Yamato damashii (‘Yamato race’, to which most Japanese are popularly presumed to belong), upheld by some male groups as part of the dominant male subculture, are promoted as representing Japan’s national culture. And although the liberalization of the domestic agricultural market affects many consumers positively, producer groups that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo and are connected with the country’s leadership have often succeeded in presenting their interests as those of the entire nation. More generally, the slanted views of Japan’s totality tend to proliferate because writers, readers, and editors of publications on the general characteristics of Japanese society belong to the core subcultural sphere. Sharing their subcultural base, they conceptualize and hypothesize in a similar way, confirm their portrayal of Japan among themselves, and rarely seek outside confirmation. In many Nihonjinron writings, most examples and illustrations are drawn from the elite sector, including male employees in managerial tracks of large corporations and high-ranking officials of the national bureaucracy.49 Core subcultural groups overshadow those on the periphery in intercultural transactions too. Foreign visitors to Japan, who shape the images of Japan in their own countries, interact more intensely with core subcultural groups than with peripheral ones. In cultural exchange programs, Japanese who have houses, good salaries, and university educations predominate among the host families, language trainers, and introducers of Japanese culture. Numerically small but ideologically dominant, core subcultural groups are the most noticeable to foreigners and are capable of presenting themselves to the outside world as representative of Japanese culture.

To recapitulate the major points: Japanese society embraces a significant degree of internal variation in both ethnic and stratificational senses. It comprises a variety of subcultures based on occupation, education, asset holdings, gender, ethnicity, age, and so forth. In this sense, Japan is multicultural and far from being a homogeneous, monocultural entity. One can grasp the complexity and intricacy of Japanese society perhaps only when one begins to see it as a mosaic of rival groups, competing strata, and various subcultures.

V Seven phases of Japan analysis At popular levels, the Japanese self-images have been fairly consistent over time, as a time-series study spanning half a century demonstrates. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics has conducted a nationwide random survey on what it calls the ‘national character of the Japanese’ every five years since 1953, asking on each occasion, ‘What words represent the characteristics of the Japanese?’. The survey results shown in Table 2.6 suggest that the Japanese regard themselves, and have done so more or less unchangingly over the past six decades, as industrious, well mannered, generous, and patient, while also being uncreative and cheerless. Regardless of whether these self-portrayals reflect social realities or not, such images have taken hold and have fixed in the minds of many Japanese, forming the bedrock of Nihonjinron culture. These self-perceptions are not derived from systematic comparative analysis, though the characterization of any society would have to be based upon its comparison with other societies. To that extent, the Japanese self-images represented here are popular stereotypes. Table 2.6 ‘Which words represent the characteristics of the Japanese?’ Survey responses (%), 1958– 2013 Year Characteristic

1958

1963

1968

1973

1983

1988

1998

2003

2008

2013

Diligent

55

60

61

66

69

72

71

66

67

77

Courteous

47

43

47

37

47

50

50

48

60

77

Kind

50

42

45

31

42

38

42

41

52

71

Persevering

48

55

58

52

60

50

51

46

49

57

Idealistic

32

23

23

21

30

27

23

20

20

16

Rational

11

8

10

13

22

22

18

17

17

12

Liberal

15

10

12

9

17

14

13

14

15

12

Easygoing

19

15

13

14

12

13

14

14

11

9

Cheerful

23

14

13

9

12

9

8

8

10

11

Creative

8

7

8

7

11

10

7

9

9

8

Source: Adapted from Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Question #9.1. Notes: The question was not asked in the surveys conducted in 1953, 1978, and 1993. The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who chose each characteristic in the survey year. Multiple responses were permitted; therefore, the total for each year exceeds 100 percent. The surveys were

based on national random samples. The latest survey was conducted in 2018 but its results were not publicly available at the time of writing, in May 2020. At a more conceptual and theoretical level, Japanese society has inspired social scientists over several decades to address a complex set of issues. For the past few decades, the pendulum of Japan’s image overseas has swung back and forth between positive and negative poles, and between universalistic and particularistic approaches. As Table 2.7 displays, seven distinctive phases are discernible during the postwar years.50 Table 2.7 Japanese studies in English-language publications: fluctuations in frameworks and analytical tools, 1945–2020 Focus on interna variatio

US–Japan relationship

Evaluation of Japan

Possibility of convergence

Conceptual tools

1945–60

Japan’s total dependence on the United States

Negative / positive

No

Particularistic

Social obligations, hierarchal order

No

1955–70

Japan as the showcase of the US model

Positive

Yes / no (modernization)

Universalistic

Evolutionary change

No

1965–80

Japan’s high economic growth and emerging competition with the United States

Positive

No (unique Japan)

Particularistic

Amae, tate shakai, groupism

No

1970–80

Japan outperforming the United States in some areas of the economy and technology

Positive

Yes (reverse convergence)

Universalistic / particularistic

Japan as number one

No

1980–90

Intense trade war between Japan and the United States

Negative

No (different capitalism)

Universalistic

Enigma, threat

No

Period

Keywords

Focus on interna variatio

US–Japan relationship

Evaluation of Japan

Possibility of convergence

Conceptual tools

1990–2020

Japan’s stagnation and the US boom

Negative

Yes (global standard)

Universalistic

Borderlessness, structural reform

Yes / no

2000–20

Japan as soft power, the US stagnation, and the rise of China

Negative/ positive

Yes (cultural capitalism)

Particularistic/ universalistic

Manga, animation, food, sushi, hospitality

Yes / no

Period

Keywords

The first phase, immediately following the end of World War II and continuing through the 1950s, saw a flow of writings which characterized the defeated Japan as a backward, hierarchical, and rather exotic society which Western societies should educate. In particular, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) had a most significant impact on the postwar development of Japanese studies. Methodologically, Benedict took a patterns-of-culture approach which assumed that Japanese society could best be understood as a social or cultural whole composed of a rather homogeneous set of individuals. Benedict used anthropological techniques for describing small societies with relatively undifferentiated populations in her study of the complex society of Japan. Substantively, Benedict highlighted what she regarded as the most common denominators in Japanese social organization which contrasted markedly with their counterparts in the West.51 The influence of the anthropological framework can be seen in Tokugawa Religion (1957),52 Japanese Factory (1958),53 and Village Japan (1959).54 This vein of literature set the stage for the persistent style of analysis in which Japanese society was portrayed as both monolithic and unique. In the second phase, which dominated the 1960s, modernization theory provided a framework within which Japan was assessed in a more positive light. The mainstream of American scholarship began to regard Japan as a successful case of evolutionary transformation without revolutionary disruption. In the context of the intense Cold War, the US establishment also began to see Japan as the showpiece of the noncommunist model of development in Asia. A five-volume series on the modernization of Japan published by Princeton University Press (1965–71) represented the culmination of collective efforts to examine Japan on the basis of a set of universalistic criteria. Using the yardstick of pattern variables developed by Talcott Parsons,55 a leading sociological theorist of modernization, one of the most influential volumes, entitled Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan, attempted to measure the degree to which Japan exemplified the expected changes from traditional to modern patterns.56 Although the series used the universalistic model as its overall framework, however, its empirical findings were equivocal, pointing out a number of distinctive features of Japan’s modernization.

The third phase saw the revival of a more particularistic approach, lasting for about a decade from the late 1960s. Partly as a reaction to the universalistic modernization framework, there was emphasis on the supposed uniqueness of Japanese psychology, inter-personal relations, and social organization. As discussed earlier, the notion of amae, which Doi spotlighted as the key to unlock the psychological traits of the Japanese, attracted much attention.57 Edwin O. Reischauer contended that the Japanese were essentially group oriented and differed fundamentally from individualistic Westerners.58 According to Nakane, Japanese social organizations were vertically structured and apt to cut across class and occupational lines, unlike their Western counterparts, which were horizontally connected and inclined to transcend company kinship lines.59 These writings were published when the Japanese economy began to make some inroads into the US market and the Japanese leaders began to show increasing confidence in the ‘Japanese way’. The fourth phase, which commenced in the early 1970s and persisted for two decades, witnessed waves of learn-from-Japan campaigns. Japan’s management practices, industrial relations, and education programs were praised as the most advanced on earth and endorsed as what other societies should emulate. Against the background of a gradual decline of American hegemony in the international economy and a visible ascendancy of Japanese economic performance, Ezra F. Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979) was one of a number of works which championed what was regarded as the Japanese model. Many who wrote along these lines suggested the possibility of injecting some Japanese elements into the Western system to revitalize it. In the main, these attributes were seen as transferable, transplantable, and therefore transcultural. The fifth phase, which started in around 1980, witnessed the rise of the revisionists, who saw the Japanese social system in a much more critical light than previous researchers. Chalmers Johnson, the author of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), argued that Japanese capitalism is a different kind of capitalism, based on the developmental state in which the national bureaucracy plays a pivotal role in shaping national policy for Japan’s national interests only. He cautioned that this structure poses an increasingly grave threat to the wellbeing of the international community. Against the background of Japan’s economic-superpower status, the intensification of trade friction between Japan and the West, and the rise of Japan-bashing, the revisionist writings pointed to the strategies with which Western societies may be able to contain the influence of Japan and make its social system more compatible with theirs. The revisionist analysis attached importance to the institutional peculiarities of Japanese society and their consequences both domestically and overseas. The sixth phase started after the collapse of the so-called bubble economy, with the commencement of the unprecedentedly prolonged recession that persisted throughout the 1990s and continued into the beginning of the twenty-first century. During this period, Japanese advocates of Nihonjinron lost confidence in promoting Japan’s cultural uniqueness, let alone attributing to it the characteristics of the Japanese economy. Overseas observers also gradually lost interest in the once hotly debated ‘Japanese model’. Many opinion makers, from business consultants to media columnists, started calling for the globalization of Japanese society and for structural reform at various social and economic levels. Such titles as Kenichi Ohmae’s The Borderless World (1990) and The End of the Nation State (1995) hit the bestseller lists, suggesting that the Japanese should be aware that national

borders are detrimental to global economic transactions. The cultural elite of the Japanese establishment appeared to have abandoned justifying the economic and political behavior of the Japanese in terms of cultural uniqueness and to have advocated the necessity of integrating Japan into the international community. Furthermore, the critical analysis of Nihonjinron initiated by a handful of social scientists in the late 1970s and the 1980s60 gradually took root in Japan’s intellectual community,61 making it difficult for cultural essentialists to naively write about Japan’s ‘cultural essence’ without qualifications. Although the tide of overt Nihonjinron somewhat waned, it continued to exert persistent influence over Japan’s intellectual life. For instance, in psychology, Shinobu Kitayama and his associates asserted that Japanese culture and the Japanese mind interact with one another, that Japanese conceptions of individuality emphasize the ‘relatedness of individuals with each other’. Hence, while American culture values an independent view of the self, Japanese culture assumes an interdependent view of the self.62 In economics, Kazuhiro Arai maintained that the Japanese system of mutual trust in corporations must be upheld as the basis for the revival of the Japanese economy.63 As discussed in the section on the monocultural model, the key concepts that prevail in Nihonjinron-style stereotyping – group orientation, mutual cooperation, in-group harmony, and a sense of unity with nature, egalitarianism, and racial uniformity – continued to frame many contemporary attempts to analyze and understand Japanese society in the 1990s and thereafter. During this time, the polemic surrounding so-called Asian values echoed and, in effect, reinforced many controversial aspects of Nihonjinron. Proclaimed by Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamad,64 and other political leaders and intellectuals in Southeast Asia, Asian values were defined in contradistinction to Western ones. They asserted that Asians valued groups ahead of individuals, a claim that was almost a pan-Asian version of Nihonjinron, expanding the putatively unique-to-Japan traits to other Asian countries. This explains why Mahathir and the Japanese nationalist Shintarō Ishihara were able to join forces to write a bestselling book on how to say ‘No’ to the United States and other Western countries.65 It is noteworthy that the advocacy of Asian values arose only once countries in the region had attained a measurable level of development and could compete with the West economically. Cultural nationalism, like Nihonjinron and the notion of Asian values, flourished when a society reached a significant level of economic maturity and could defend its national sense of self against other ideologies. In the seventh and latest phase, dating from the beginning of the twenty-first century and continuing to the 2020s, as shown in Table 2.7, Japan’s images around the world have spread with the global proliferation of Japanese cultural goods, ranging from manga and anime through computer games to sushi and sashimi. Dubbed Cool Japan, these commodities have received enthusiastic acceptance in some quarters of Japanese society and overseas, with Japan showing a playful, fun-loving, and postmodern face in stark contrast with its serious, diligent, and monotonous appearance during earlier decades. The products are packaged as being technologically sophisticated, suave, and refined with a touch of humor and lightheartedness. These representations reflect the expansion of the sphere of what one might call ‘cultural capitalism’, which thrives on outputting knowledge and information products, as distinct from ‘industrial capitalism’, which is based on the production of material and physical goods – a

point that Chapter 5 examines in detail. While Japan’s industrial capitalism displayed the faces of hardworking, scrupulous, rigid, and bureaucratic businessmen in gray suits, Japanese cultural capitalism attempts to display funny, fashionable, unassuming, maverick, and at times bizarre individuals in various modes. Douglas McGray’s oft-cited notion of Japan’s Gross National Cool (an index that measures the overall level of cool popular culture products)66 epitomizes these attributes and points to how Japanese cultural capitalism might develop and appropriate new areas of production and consumption, even if the nation’s industrial capitalism stagnates. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that the global enhancement of Japan’s cultural merchandise owes much to the success of the nation’s industrial commodities; the notion that Japan’s industrial goods, such as cars and electronic appliances, are of high quality has aided the expansion of the idea that Japanese cultural products are of a similarly high standard. To attain soft domination in worldwide competition, Japan’s cultural export industry requires calculations of the positives and negatives of two rival representations. At one end of the spectrum, exoticism is considered to be good business. The supposed peculiarities of Japanese culture in housing, architecture, gardening, food, clothing, and so on attract tourism on the appeal of mystery, divergence, and otherness. At the other end, the trans-spatial and transcultural appearance of products – such as high-tech robots, supermodern city life, and suave gadgets – is market friendly to the extent that their narratives can be entertaining and captivating in any cultural milieu, thus appealing to a wide range of global consumers, cutting across national and ethnic lines. The success of cultural export products depends much on the ways in which these two orientations interact and coalesce. On the whole, the Japanese cultural industry finds it profitable to present its products in a globally palatable and hybrid fashion, while it also does not forget to inject some elements of ‘Japaneseness’ to underscore their national background. Although many Japanese manga and anime characters have ‘un-Japanese’ big, round eyes and manipulate pan-cultural technological devices, the landscape, customs, and symbols that are associated with Japan form indispensable components of these cultural export products. Doraemon, the main character in a globally popular animation for children, uses a highly sophisticated dokodemo door (a door to wherever you like) while he lives in a Japanese house with tatami mats and interacts with very Japanese-looking friends. The imagery is neither completely exotic, foreign, and inscrutable nor fully cosmopolitan, transnational, and transboundary, but it is a balanced mixture of both, to the extent that it proves of much benefit and interest to the expansion of Japan’s cultural capitalism. This process has unfolded alongside the main features of Nihonjinron. The assumption of Japanese homogeneity has hardly been questioned, and the traditional continuity and supremacy of Japanese culture have been underscored. It is argued, for example, that Japan’s manga and animation products have a long domestic history and were exposed to diverse markets long before their popularity exploded abroad in recent decades. The oldest Japanese manga is believed to be chōjū giga, illustrated around the twelfth century on horizontal picture scrolls by a high priest in Kyoto and featuring personified and playing frogs, rabbits, monkeys, birds, and other animals in a caricature fashion. Some famous artists drew comical pictures in ukiyo-e (colored woodblock prints of the demimonde) during the feudal period, as discussed in Chapter 1. These partial-historical episodes are used to advance the notion of the

continuous superiority of Japan’s national culture despite their tenuous linkage with the current propagation of Japanese manga.67 As the final section of Chapter 11 explores, it remains unresolved whether the new Cool Japan discourse represents postmodern counterculture or postmodern Nihonjinron. Throughout the early twenty-first century the Japanese national ethos continued to be glorified in a variety of cultural arenas. Takashi Saitō, for instance, produced many bestselling works that admire the beauty of the Japanese language.68 In praise of the ‘grace of the Japanese nation’, Masahiko Fujiwara maintained that the Japanese must revive the samurai spirit rather than pursue democracy and must restore Japan’s traditional warm emotions and feelings rather than adhere to Western-style logic.69 In the sphere of food culture, in 2006, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries tried to draw a plan to provide certificates of ‘authenticity’ to a limited number of overseas Japanese-food restaurants, an attempt that eventually went nowhere. The Nihonjinron belief that there is something genuinely Japanese remains deeply ingrained in Japan’s cultural establishment. It is important to remember that the rise of Japan’s cultural industry received international recognition only after its soft-power status was debated in the United States, though Japanese cultural goods have been most extensively exported and linked to the cultural markets of Asia. To be accepted in the United States, Japan’s entrepreneurs have been willing to cut or change some scenes and even story lines. The success of Japan’s anime owes much to considerable de-Japanization and partial Americanization. Since the middle of the twentieth century, Japan’s economic performance on the international stage in general and the changing political and economic relationships between Japan and the United States in particular have shaped the framework of analysis of Japan. Observed from outside, the analytical tools used to assess Japanese society have alternated between particularistic and universalistic types, while foreign evaluation of Japanese society has swung between positive and negative appraisals. A complex mosaic of Japanese studies to date provides a rich heritage upon which further research can be built. Japanese studies is not simply an area study; it can be a stepping-stone to the development of a cosmopolitan understanding of various societies. The next section sketches three spheres of deliberation in which studying the case of Japan may enable the strengthening of social analysis power in general.

VI Three areas of deliberation

1 Convergence debate At the highest level of abstraction, the convergence debate has made Japan the focal point of analysis for decades. The debate itself is as old as social sciences and has had many twists and turns. At one end of the continuum, convergence theorists have maintained that all industrial societies become akin in their structural arrangements and value orientations because the logic of industrialism entails a common batch of functional imperatives. At the other end, anti-convergence theorists have argued that the cultural background and historical tradition of each society are so firmly entrenched that the advent of industrialism cannot simply mold them into a uniform pattern; no convergence eventuates, because each culture fosters its own style of industrial development on the basis of its own momentum and dynamics. Japan provides a logical testing ground for this debate since it is the only nation outside the Western cultural tradition that has achieved a high level of industrialization. On balance, a majority of Japan specialists have tended to underscore the unique features of Japanese society, thereby siding either explicitly or implicitly with the anti-convergence stance. Yet, this position has presupposed that the West continues to lead the direction of industrialism, though the Japanese pattern deviates from it. Many convergence theorists saw the so-called unique features of Japanese society mostly as the expression of the nation’s late development, lagging behind the early-developer countries. Ken’ichi Tominaga, for example, regarded four patterns of transformation in progress for decades in Japan as pointers that suggested it was becoming increasingly like advanced Western societies.70 First, Japan’s demographic composition was changing from one in which a young labor force comprised an overwhelming majority of the population to one in which the aged comprised the larger portion. The proportion of those aged sixty-five years or older exceeded 10 percent in France in the 1930s, in Sweden and the United Kingdom in the 1940s, in Germany and Switzerland in the 1950s, and in the United States and Italy in the 1970s, while Japan arrived at this stage in the middle of the 1980s. This meant that the comparative demographic advantage that Japan enjoyed in the past began to disappear. Tominaga predicted that, if the trend continued, Japan would become the nation with the highest ratio of aged people to the rest of its population in the early part of the twenty-first century, thus completing the catch-up cycle, a forecast which proved to be correct. Second, Japan’s family and kinship groups dwindled and even disintegrated in a similar way to those of Europe and the United States. Nuclear families turned out to be the norm, and the percentage of singles increased. While the anti-convergence theorists used the Japanese family system and kinship networks as cornerstones of their argument for the distinctive character of Japanese society, Tominaga underscored their decline and suggested that the Japanese were undergoing a Western-type experience somewhat belatedly. Third, so-called Japanese management was changing. The twin institutions of permanent employment (shūshin koyō) and seniority-based wage (nenkō chingin) structure would not be able to sustain themselves. Company loyalty was weakening among young employees. The aging profile of the corporate demographic structure made it difficult for starting workers to expect smooth and automatic promotions at the later stages of their careers. Headhunting became rampant, and intercompany mobility was rising. In the long run, the convergence theory predicted, the Japanese employment structure and its concomitant management styles would more resemble Western patterns.

Fourth, the emphasis of the Japanese value system gradually shifted from collectivism to individualism. The rising number of students enrolled in universities and other institutions of higher education led to the mass production of citizens exposed and oriented to individualistic and rational thinking. The disintegration of the family and kinship systems, plus the gradual dissolution of the local community, tended to liberate individuals from intense social constraints imposed by these traditional structures. As Japanese workers became accustomed to material affluence, their legendary work ethic would dissipate, with their lifestyles becoming more hedonistic. In this process, the Japanese would lose a sense of devotion to the groups and organizations to which they belonged and experience the state of anomie (normlessness), much as did citizens of advanced industrialized societies in the West. Tominaga conceded that these four transformations had not yet run their course but maintained that they headed undeniably in the direction of convergence with advanced industrialized societies, contrary to the view of unique-Japan theorists, who frequently ignored the significance of different levels of development and made erroneous static comparisons between Japan and Western societies. Tominaga maintained that it would be fair for social scientists to compare Japan’s features at the time with their counterparts in Western countries at different points of socioeconomic maturity, an argument which deserves due consideration even in the twenty-first century. The convergence debate made another turn with R. P. Dore’s formulation of the reverse convergence hypothesis.71 According to his argument, industrialized societies were converging on a set of patterns observed not in Euro-American societies but in Japan. This proposition found considerable support with the proliferation of ‘Japanese-style’ management around the world: an increasing number of industrial and industrializing societies appeared to have adopted the systems of multiskilling, just-intime, and enterprise-based labor negotiations. In terms of the role of the state in industrial policy implementation, many Western analysts (Johnson, for example) made a positive assessment of the coordination and orchestration functions of national public bureaucracy à la Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry.72 In the sphere of education, too, the Japanese-style structured and regimented mode of teaching attracted international attention and made inroads into some education systems abroad. In the area of law enforcement, the Japanese kōban police box system was being instituted in many parts of the world. The reverse convergence perspective signaled a new phase in the debate, in which the West was no longer regarded as the trailblazer in industrial development. Advancing this line of thinking, another position, which could be labeled the ‘multiple convergence thesis’, gained ground. It postulated that two or more types of development were observable, depending on when industrialization began or on the type of cultural background that predominated. The proposition suggested that these types generated plural patterns of convergence in structures and values. Table 2.8 maps the relative locations of the four perspectives under discussion. Table 2.8 Comparison of convergence debate theses The West is the dominant pattern

One point of convergence Yes

No

One point of convergence

The West is the dominant pattern

Yes

No

Yes

Convergence

Anti-convergence

No

Reverse convergence

Multiple convergence

The multiple convergence perspective had many versions. One was the so-called late-developer hypothesis that Anglo-American capitalism was a unique type of development of early industrializers, while late-developer societies such as Japan had to evolve different social configurations to cope with different domestic and international constraints. Yasusuke Murakami, for example, contended that, unlike Anglo-American societies, Japan, Germany, Italy, and other late-developing countries could not achieve political integration suitable to industrialization at its initial phase.73 To cope, these countries had to devise a strategy of catch-up industrialization by preserving some elements of traditional heritage while establishing a powerful bureaucracy that steered the process of development. Reflecting the swift rise of Asian economies since the 1980s, another multiple convergence version pointed to the possibility of ‘Confucian capitalism’,74 in which the ethic of obedience to authorities and the emphasis on selfless devotion to work led to a path of development different from the Western type but conducive to rapid economic growth. Similar arguments surfaced under the rubrics of the ‘East Asian model’,75 ‘Oriental capitalism’,76 the ‘Pacific century’,77 and so on. Japan’s economic structure was regarded as the most refined and polished of this type. In a broader perspective, some theorists explored the ways in which different types of civilizations took different routes of development. Civilization in this context included not only culture but social organizations, structures, and institutions. This approach attempted to place different civilizations in some evolutionary hierarchy in which Japan occupied a position near the top.78 As early as the 1950s, Tadao Umesao proposed an ecological model of the history of civilizations, in which he attempted to demonstrate that Japan belonged to the same civilization zone as western Europe in having an internally stimulated process of ‘autogenic succession’ and attaining higher levels of development than continental Asia and eastern Europe.79 Yasusuke Murakami, Shunpei Kumon, and Seizaburō Satō argued that Japanese society was built upon what they called ‘ie civilization’, which emphasized quasikinship lineage and functional hierarchy. They maintained that the ie principle permeated Japanese history as a ‘genotype’, playing a central role in the formation of Japanese-style capitalism. They refuted the assumption of unilinear development and argued for a model of multilinear development in which the Japanese pattern represents a distinctive type.80 Samuel P. Huntington saw the fundamental division of the world in the clash of several civilizations, singling out Japan as the only non-Western civilization that succeeded in the quest to become modern without becoming Western.81 Civilizational scholars, including S. N. Eisenstadt and Johann P. Arnason,82 published some important books on Japanese civilization in which it was argued that Japan’s case was unique and represented a civilization sui generis, unparalleled in other parts of the world. All these generalizations used civilizations as the units of analyses and explained multiple patterns of development in terms of macrocultural variables. The multiple convergence thesis perhaps

represented a return to emphasis on cultural variables in the convergence debate and reflected the fluctuations in the tone of another debate: that concerning cultural relativism.

2 Cultural relativism (a) Cultural relativism between societies In anthropology, it is almost trite to distinguish two types of concepts. One type is emic concepts, which are specific and peculiar to a particular culture and meaningful only to its members. The other type is etic concepts, which are applicable to all cultures, transcending national and ethnic boundaries.83 Most sociological concepts are assumed to be etic, but it can be argued that they were initially emic concepts of Euro-American societies which became etic notions because of the cultural hegemony of Western nations. Here, one should not lose sight of the extent to which sociology contains elements of cultural imperialism.84 Cultural relativists would argue that the time is ripe for a wide range of Japanese emic concepts to be examined and used in comparative analysis of advanced capitalism. At the conceptual level, the Nihonjinron literature has a wide repertoire of emic notions that can be tested and scrutinized for cross-cultural studies. This may be an important contribution of this genre, because, with some refinement and elaboration of conceptual boundaries and substance, Japan-based notions can be developed as viable tools for sociological analysis. Merry White and others maintain, for example, that indigenous definitions of women’s lives differ between Japan and the West.85 They also argue that feminism has different meanings depending on the cultural context, thereby making it impossible for a universally valid model of women’s lives to be developed. Doi’s notion of amae, which he regards as peculiar to the Japanese personality, may be used as a conceptual tool of comparative analysis. When these Japan-specific concepts are used as variables for cross-cultural studies, Japanese society might not always rank highest in exhibiting the characteristics these Japanese emic concepts represent. In other words, if the Japan-specific variables were studied cross-culturally, it might be found that they are more prominent in other cultures. A quantitative comparative study of Australia, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, and the mainland United States, for example, shows that the level of kanjin (interperson) orientation, which Hamaguchi contends is emic to the Japanese, is lower in Japan than in any other country and lowest among Japanese men.86 While the abovementioned notion of ikigai is presumed to be the Japanese secret to a long and happy life, more than 20,000 Japanese committed suicide in 2016 without finding any ikigai, a record hardly indicating that the Japanese share the highest level of finding meaning in life.87 This was the highest rate among the countries in the Group of Seven (G7; an intergovernmental economic organization of seven advanced economies made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). At the theoretical level, some scholars, notably Harumi Befu and Christoph Deutschmann, maintain that theories of bureaucracy, as developed in the Western sociological tradition, are ‘culture-bound’.88 Large bureaucratic corporations in Japan tend to give priority to such paternalistic arrangements as company housing, company leisure facilities, and company excursions. At the level of inter-personal interaction, an elaborate system of informal arrangements enables superiors to maneuver their subordinates with great ease. In corporations, every supervisor spends an enormous amount of time paying personal attention to employees under his charge, beyond the call of his job specifications. He entertains his subordinates in pubs, bars, restaurants, and clubs after working hours, serves as a formal

go-between in their wedding ceremonies, listens to personal problems of their families, and even attends the funerals of their grandparents. None of these activities is formally required, yet no manager in a Japanese firm could retain his position without them; the expectation is that his subordinates, in return, are willing to devote their time to work and to commit themselves to it beyond the call of their work requirements. This inordinate exchange of expressive resources between superiors and subordinates characterizes Japan’s bureaucratic organizations. Befu and Deutschmann contend that the particularistic qualities of Japanese bureaucratic organization contradict the key thesis of Western theories of bureaucracy: that bureaucracy’s most efficient mode is a legal-rational one. From Weber to Merton, sociologists of modern bureaucratic organization have argued that its operation must be governed by universalistic law, formal criteria, and functional specificity and must transcend particularistic interactions, affective considerations, and functional diffuseness. This is one of the reasons why nepotism is regarded as dysfunctional in formal organizations in the Western model of bureaucracy. Those researchers who find Japanese bureaucracy essentially non-Weberian suggest the possibility that the legal-rational approach may not be the only way of achieving bureaucratic efficiency; the opposite, which the Japanese pattern represents, is another possible path.89 On a different front, Takami Kuwayama pinpoints the power relationship inherent in what he calls the ‘academic world system’, in which the global intellectual community is divided into core (center) and periphery (margin).90 Focusing on anthropology, he maintains that the core is made up of the United States, the United Kingdom, and, to a lesser extent, France, while areas outside these countries, including Japan, constitute the academic periphery. More broadly, in core countries it is not only anthropologists but social scientists in general who maintain an academic hegemony throughout the world. The writings of social scientists in the center are in international circulation and form required reading for researchers in the periphery, who study and even imitate their theories, methods, findings, and styles of writing to keep abreast with scholarship in the metropolitan West. The converse is untrue to the extent that academics in the core can afford to ignore the scholarship in the periphery or to dismiss it as unsophisticated, immature, or underdeveloped. As a peripheral country, Japan is, by and large, at the receiving end of such one-way traffic from core areas. A new academic trend in the United States and western Europe, be it cultural studies, postmodernism, or postcolonialism, is translated into Japanese and studied intensely, often with a few Japanese scholars serving as its interlocutors and interpreters to the Japanese academic community. In comparison, very few Japanese scholarly books are translated into English and other Western languages, and most remain unknown in the core countries, despite the accumulation of significant studies in Japanese academia. This asymmetry often enables social scientists in core areas to criticize Japan’s ‘native’ research as vague, inarticulate, or vaporous, without realizing that their yardsticks may be ethnocentric. Focusing upon these issues, the Eurocentric tendencies in Japanese studies in the context of the Asia-Pacific region are on the agenda.91 (b) Cultural relativism within a society

Studies of development and social change certainly require comparative analyses of national averages. When carefully made, nation-level summaries and generalizations help one take a snapshot and global view of each society. One should not underestimate the importance of this approach, though the pitfall of stereotyping should be avoided. A multicultural approach to Japanese society sensitizes one to such a danger and provides some guideposts to avoid it. In addition to examining Japanese emic concepts at societal level, studies can probe the patterns of distribution of various emic notions of subcultural groups within Japan – for example, women’s versus men’s emics, emics of inhabitants in the Kantō area versus those in the Kansai area, and elite emics versus mass emics. This approach implies that researchers can invoke the concept of cultural relativism not only cross-culturally between Japanese culture and other national cultures, but intraculturally, between subcultural groupings within Japan itself. The multicultural framework will allow systematic comparative analysis of Japanese subcultures and their counterparts in other societies. One can compare, for example, the quality of life of small-shop owners in Japan and Britain, the lifestyles of school dropouts in Japan and Germany, the life satisfaction of part-time female workers in Japan and France, and so on. One can also compare distributions of social resources and value orientations across different groups in Japan with those in other countries. Such analyses would spotlight some hitherto unanalyzed social groups and their subcultures and rectify national stereotype biases. To highlight the point, we may think of another hypothetical situation, in which four individuals – two from Japan and two from Germany – get together, as shown in Table 2.9. Table 2.9 Comparison of subcultural dimensions: Japan and Germany Nation Subcultural dimensions

Japan

Germany

Business executive, large firm, male, large city

Mr Toyota

Mr Müller

Worker, small firm, female, small town

Ms Honda

Ms Schmitz

Those from Japan are Mr Toyota, a business executive of a large corporation in Tokyo, and Ms Honda, an assistant in a small shop in a small town in Shikoku. Those from Germany are Mr Müller, an executive director of a large firm in Frankfurt, and Ms Schmitz, a clerk in a small firm in a small town in northern Germany. They can communicate in a common language. Which pair would be most similar in their thought and behavior patterns? According to the conventional national culture argument, Mr Toyota and Ms Honda would form one cluster and Mr Müller and Ms Schmitz the other, because the pairs would be based on shared national culture. The subcultural model suggests the possibility that the close pairs may be Mr Toyota and Mr Müller on the one hand and Ms Honda and Ms Schmitz on the other, membership of each pair being determined by similarities of gender, occupation, firm size, and place of residence. (c) Negative correlation

The text above has shown that the mix of two types of multicultural approaches would allow the sociological pulse of contemporary Japan to be taken in a realistic way. However, one must be careful to identify their merits and demerits. On one hand, intersocietal relativism tends to prioritize the internal uniformity of each culture and thereby falls into the trap of Nihonjinron and other forms of cultural essentialism. On the other hand, intrasocietal relativism invariably underplays the importance or denies the existence of intersocietal cultural relativity, often rendering its proponents insensitive to Eurocentric or other forms of international or trans-ethnic cultural imperialism. This means that a negative correlation exists between intrasocietal and intersocietal cultural relativism. The greater the emphasis on intersocietal cultural differences, the greater the cultural homogeneity presumed, affirming an assumption of internal cultural imperialism. However, the greater the stress on the significance of intrasocietal cultural relativism, the more the threat of external cultural domination and ethnocentrism is played down. This dilemma, which the Japanese case so clearly illustrates, has placed the theory of the relativity of relativities on the contemporary intellectual agenda.

3 Legitimation of dual codes The two types of cultural relativism discussed above point to another set of relativities in the descriptions of a given society: differences between ideologies and lived realities. While distinctions between sanitized public appearance and hidden private life are facets of human behavior in any society, the Japanese norm explicitly legitimizes double codes in many spheres of life, with the emic vocabulary which sharpens contrasts between what is normatively proper and what is publicly unacceptable but engaged in privately or among insiders. In examining Japanese society, one should caution against confusing these two aspects and pay special attention to at least three such pairs.92 These pairs can be useful tools in the analysis of other societies as well. One set is tatemae (literally, ‘façade’) and honne (true feelings). Tatemae refers to a formally established principle which is not necessarily accepted or practiced by the parties involved. Honne designates true intentions and desires which cannot be openly expressed because of the strength of tatemae. If tatemae corresponds to political correctness, honne points to hidden, camouflaged, and authentic sentiment. Thus, an employee who expresses dedication to their company boss in accordance with the corporate tatemae of loyalty and harmony may do so because of their honne ambition for promotion and other personal gains. Or an advocate of the tatemae principle of the unique place of Japanese rice in Japanese culture may be a farmer whose honne lies in the promotion of their agricultural interests. Another pair is likened to two sides of a coin or any other flat object with omote (the face) and ura (the back). The implication is that omote represents the correct surface, or front, which is openly permissible, whereas ura connotes the wrong, dark, concealed side, which is publicly unacceptable or even illegal. Thus, in the business world, ura money flows with ura negotiations and ura transactions. Wheeler-dealers use various ura skills to promote their interests. At some educational institutions, students whose parents have paid ura fees to school authorities buy their way into the school through the ura guchi (back door). In community life, ura banashi (inside accounts) are more important than omote explanations. The third pair consists of soto (outside or exterior) and uchi (inside or interior). When referring to individuals’ group affiliation, the dichotomy is used to distinguish between outsiders and insiders, or between members of an out-group and those of an in-group. When talking to outsiders, company employees often refer to their firm as uchi, drawing a line between them and us. One cannot candidly discuss sensitive matters in soto but can straightforwardly break confidentiality in uchi situations. In the context of human interaction, while soto aspects of individuals or groups represent their superficial outward appearances, their uchi facets account for their fundamental essence and real dispositions. For instance, a female worker may make a pretense of being obedient to her male supervisor in soto terms but may in fact be quite angry about his arrogant behavior in her uchi. These dichotomies also exist in other cultures and languages. In Japanese society, however, these particular forms of duality are invoked in public discourse time and again to defend the publicly unacceptable sides of life as realities to be accepted. According to the dominant social code, the honne

of the uchi members should be winked at, and the ura of their activities must be purposely overlooked. The legitimation of duality underlying the Japanese vocabulary provides a pretext for corrupt activities. In the ura side of business transactions, for example, Japanese companies use the category of shito hitoku kin (expenses unaccounted for) to conceal the identity of the recipient of the expenditure. They can do this as long as they declare those expenses to be subject to a high taxation rate. The construction industry uses this method extensively to hide secret payoffs, kickbacks, and political donations.93 The honne of the participants in these deals is to promote the mutual interests of uchi networks of business and politics. The notion that the dual codes must be seen as facts of life is sometimes used to justify murky collusion known as dangō, the illegal practice most predominant in construction tendering for public works projects. Companies which take part in dangō engage in artful pre-tender arrangements in which they agree in advance among themselves on their bids and on which company will be the successful tenderer. In return, they agree that the unsuccessful companies are entitled to a certain share of the successful company’s profits. The practice of dangō rests upon the prevailing closed tender system in which a government body designates several companies as entitled to tender. As the number of companies designated is normally limited to ten or so, they can easily engage in pre-tender negotiations and come to mutually agreed clandestine deals. To win designation, companies vie with each other for the arbitrary favor of bureaucrats and the influence of politicians, and this also tends to create an environment for corruption. The practice rests upon the ura operations of uchi insiders attempting to materialize their honne of profit maximization among themselves. To accomplish the ura part of their business exchanges, Japanese companies spend enormous amounts on entertainment expenses. The tatemae and omote justifications of these expenses include the importance of informal contacts and communications. Many key governmental policy decisions are made by politicians who wine and dine in high-class Japanese-style restaurants (called ryōtei) where ura-type trading is done behind closed doors. Similarly, local government officials used to entertain their national counterparts in these and other restaurants in order to secure high allocations of national government subsidies, a ura practice which citizens’ groups criticized as illegitimate use of taxpayers’ money and which is now illegal. In the sphere of environmental politics, while the Japanese government presents Japan’s whaling as scientific in omote terms, Japanese environmental groups claim that its ura reality is commercial. Studies of Japanese society are incomplete if researchers examine only its tatemae, omote, and soto aspects. Only when they scrutinize its honne, ura, and uchi sides can they grasp its full picture. To be Japan literate, researchers should not confuse outward appearances with inside realities when examining a society in which double codes play significant roles.

VII Conclusion As an overview of contemporary Japanese studies, this chapter has proposed a multicultural model for understanding Japanese society. The above analysis has demonstrated that, far from monocultural, Japan is both a multiethnic and a multiclass society, with ample social diversity and class competition. The discussion has traced the changing emphases of Japanese studies since the middle of the twentieth century and identified seven phases, then examined three spheres in which the Japanese experience has the potential to contribute to broader issues of social analysis worldwide: the convergence debate, cultural relativism, and the legitimation of dual codes. Based on these conceptual, theoretical, and paradigmatic considerations, the following chapter scrutinizes the class stratification of Japanese society as a general introduction to the subsequent chapters, which examine social inequality in terms of region, generation, work, education, gender, and ethnicity.

Research questions 1. While every society is unique, why is it that Japan has long been predominantly portrayed as more unique than any other society? 2. Choose a society with which you are familiar and identify the national stereotypes (à la Nihonjinron) it has developed. Examine how they differ from its reality and explore why they were produced. 3. Which position is most defensible in the convergence debate, and why? 4. Are there indications that we are about to enter a new phase of Japanese images overseas, following the seven phases discussed in this chapter? If so, what will the eighth phase look like? 5. Choose a Japanese emic concept and design a research project to test the degree to which the phenomena it represents are prevalent in other societies.

Further readings Befu, Harumi 2001, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 1997, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. London: Routledge. Mouer, Ross and Sugimoto, Yoshio 2015, Images of Japanese Society: A Study in the Social Construction of Reality. London: Routledge (originally published in 1986 by Kegan Paul International). Oguma, Eiji 2002, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Yoshino, Kosaku 1992, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London: Routledge.

Online resources Asahi Shimbun 2020, website. Asahi Shimbun, www.asahi.com/ajw. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2020, website. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, https://apjjf.org. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2020, website. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, www.japanesestudies.org.uk. Kyodo News, 2020, website. Kyodo News, https://english.kyodonews.net. Mainichi Shimbun, 2020, website. Mainichi Shimbun, https://mainichi.jp/english. NHK World – Japan, 2020, website. NHK, www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/. 1 See Mouer and Sugimoto 1986, p. 150. 2 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2018. The question was, ‘In the following list, which activity (activities) do you find indispensable in your daily life? Please choose as many items as you want (multiple choices).’ 3 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2016. 4 Kadokawa Corporation Marketing Section 2017, p. 14. 5 The Japanese term otaku literally means ‘your house’ and also ‘you’ in formal speech. As this group has global attention, it entered the vocabulary of English so that the Oxford English Dictionary (2004), for example, explains its origin, saying that it was initially used by some pop culture fans as ‘an affectedly formal way of addressing others with similar interests’. 6 Yano Research Institute of Economics 2019. 7 Chapter 11 examines why such small sections of the population have been treated internationally as representative of the Japanese more broadly. 8 Doi 1973, 2005. 9 Nakane 1967, 1970, 1978; Nakane and Gendai Shinsho Henshū-bu 2019. 10 Ishida 1983, pp. 23–47. 11 For example, Umesao 1986; Yamamoto 1989; Sakaiya 1991, 1993; Umehara 1990. 12 For example, Hamaguchi 1988; Watanabe 1989; Kusayanagi 1990. 13 Maruyama, Katō, and Kinoshita 1991.

14 For example, Takatori 1975. 15 Hamaguchi 1985, 1988. For a debate on this model, see Mouer and Sugimoto 1987, pp. 12–63. 16 Amanuma 1987. 17 Lee 1984. 18 Takeda 2013. 19 According to Kikuzō, the database of The Asahi Shimbun (one of the major national dailies), the newspaper used this term 217 times in the 1990s, 1,775 times in the 2000s, and 6,817 times in the 2010s, an increase indicative of growing public interests in the concept. 20 García and Miralles 2017. 21 White and Trevor 1984. 22 Tominaga 1982. 23 De Roy 1979. 24 Befu 2001. 25 Yoshino 1992. 26 Befu 1980; Sugimoto and Mouer 1980; Mouer and Sugimoto 1986; Dale 1986; Sugimoto and Mouer 1989; Yoshino 1992; Takano and Ōsaka 1999; Takano 2008. See also Neustupný 1980. 27 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 28 Some groups – burakumin, for example – face discrimination and prejudice on the quasi-ethnic grounds that their bloodlines are different from those of the majority Japanese, a notion that is completely false. 29 This is why some observers called them ‘Japan’s invisible race’. De Vos and Wagatsuma 1966. 30 Ministry of Justice 2018. 31 De Vos and Wetherall (1983, p. 3) make a similar estimate. Nakano and Imazu (1993) also provide an analogous perspective. 32 These societies are perhaps ‘unique’ in their high levels of ethnic and racial diversity. 33 Befu 2001. 34 Oguma 2002. 35 Weiner 2009.

36 Lie 2001. 37 Fukuoka 2000, p. xxx. 38 Denoon et al. 1996. 39 Anderson 1983. 40 For example, Shufu to Seikatsusha 1992. 41 Miura 2005. 42 Shimono 1991. 43 Ozawa (1989) predicted this polarization. 44 Tokyo Daigaku Gakusei Iinkai 2017. 45 Ishida 2011, pp. 44–5. 46 Kokuritsu Josei Kyōiku Kaikan 2012, p. 178. 47 See, for example, Iwama 2011, pp. 331–3. 48 Shiobara, Kawabata, and Matthews 2019. 49 Kawamura 1980; Sugimoto and Mouer 1995, pp. 187–8. 50 See Kawamura 1980, pp. 56–7; Mouer and Sugimoto 1986, pp. 57–8. 51 Benedict 1946. Benedict wrote the book without visiting Japan, and her major observational sample comprised Japanese Americans in the United States. 52 Bellah 1957. 53 Abegglen 1958. 54 Beardsley, Hall, and Ward 1959. 55 Parsons 1951. 56 Dore 1967. 57 Doi 1973. 58 Reischauer 1977. 59 Nakane 1967, 1970, 1978. 60 For example, Sugimoto and Mouer 1980; Befu 1990a; Mouer and Sugimoto 1986; Dale 1986.

61 See, for example, Yoshino 1992, 1997; Oguma 2002; Amino 1990, 1992, 1994, 2000; Takano and Ōsaka 1999; Befu 2001; Takano 2008. 62 Markus and Kitayama 1991; Kitayama 1998; Kitayama et al. 1997. 63 Arai 2000. 64 Mahathir 1999. 65 Mahathir and Ishihara 1996. 66 McGray 2002. 67 Iwabuchi 2007, p. 83. 68 For example, Saitō 2001. 69 Fujiwara 2005. 70 The description below follows Tominaga 1988, pp. 2–50. 71 Dore 1973. 72 Johnson 1982, 1990. The name of the ministry changed to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2001. 73 Murakami 1984a. 74 Dore 1987. 75 Berger and Hsiao 1988. 76 Twu 1990. 77 Linder 1986; Borthwick 1992. 78 For example, Itō 1985. 79 See Umesao 2002. 80 Murakami, Kumon, and Satō 1979; Murakami 1984b. 81 Huntington 1993. 82 Eisenstadt 1996; Arnason 2002. 83 See Befu 1989 for a discussion of these two types of concepts in the context of Japanese studies. 84 Clammer (2001) takes a comparative, non-Western perspective seriously and attempts to bring the study of Japanese society into dialogue with some developments in cultural studies.

85 White 1987. 86 Kashima et al. 1996. The same study also demonstrates that the level of kanjin orientation is consistently higher among women than among men in all the societies under analysis. See also Hamaguchi 1985; Hofstede 1984. 87 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2017a. 88 Befu 1990b; Deutschmann 1987. The discussion below follows Befu’s argument. 89 The Befu-Deutschmann argument is possibly subject to debate on two grounds: many analysts of Western bureaucratic organization have pointed out a number of informal and nonrational elements in it, and the Japanese bureaucracy is basically a highly formalistic system and expressive ties may be a matter of nuance. The exact opposite of legal-rational bureaucracy would be pure nepotism or patrimonialism. 90 Kuwayama 2004. On the same issue, see Kosaka and Ogino 2008. 91 Okano and Sugimoto 2018; Johnson, Mackie, and Morris-Suzuki 2016. 92 See, for example, Shibata 1983; Nitoda 1987. 93 Mainichi Shimbun, morning edition (hereafter MM), 22 January 2016.

Chapter 3

Class: stratification and disparity ◈

I Introduction The public discourse on class and stratification in Japan experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. Although widely portrayed as an egalitarian and predominantly middleclass society during the period of high economic growth until the early 1990s, Japan was suddenly deemed a society divided along class lines under the prolonged stagnation that characterized the Japanese economy for three decades, from the 1990s to the 2010s. Based on macrosociological data, this chapter delineates the focal points of debate on the analysis of class and stratification in Japan as a general prelude to specific spheres covered from Chapter 4 onwards: cultural diversity and class competition in relation to generation, region, labor, education, gender, ethnicity, and so on. To these ends, the chapter: sketches the paradigm shift in class analysis and the robustness of middle-class consciousness presents quantitative studies by Japanese sociologists on the ways in which classes and segments are formed discusses several factors which contribute to the blurring of class lines examines the extent to which inequality is reproduced from one generation to another discusses a few points that require a cautious approach in examining the disparity society thesis investigates a number of Japan-specific concepts related to class and stratification.

II From middle-class society to disparity society In the heyday of what some commentators called the ‘Japanese miracle’, the spectacular comeback of Japan’s economy after the devastation of World War II, a considerable amount of literature suggested that the basic rifts in Japan were not those between social classes but were those between corporate groups.1 It was argued that in Japan ‘it is not really a matter of workers struggling against capitalists or managers but of Company A ranged against Company B’.2 Some went so far as to claim that the Western notions of class and stratification did not find expression in the daily realities of the Japanese. Others contended that class consciousness was weaker in Japan than in Western countries.3 Oftenpublicized government statistics which showed that some 90 percent of Japanese regarded themselves as belonging to the middle class appeared to bear out this line of thinking. However, with the economic recession in the 1990s and thereafter, the nation’s public perception shifted to emphasize the advent of kakusa shakai (disparity society), with marked divisions between classes with rival interests. Toshiki Satō maintains that the sharp decline of social mobility of the privileged upper-middle white-collar sector has resulted in what he calls the breakdown of middle-class society.4 Toshiaki Tachibanaki, who led a debate over deepening inequality, argues that the level of social inequality in Japanese society has increased to the extent that it ranks among the most highly disparate societies in the world.5 Atsushi Miura posits that a large new lower class – what he calls karyū shakai (lower-stratum society) – has emerged, the members of which not only earn low incomes but also have low levels of desire for communication, work, study, consumption, and many other areas of life.6 Masahiro Yamada points out that Japanese society is polarized between those with the ability to cherish hopes and realize them and those with no capacity to do so.7 The new discourse has gained further ground since the worldwide financial crisis from 2008 onwards. Suddenly, it is widely argued that middle-class society has collapsed and kakusa shakai has come into being. David Chiavacci spells out three dominant models of class analysis of Japan: the class struggle model immediately after World War II, the general middle-class model during Japan’s growth and prosperity period, and the divided-society model during the nation’s economic stagnation from the 1990s to the 2010s, and possibly beyond.8 Interestingly, despite the claim of the emergence of kakusa shakai, an overwhelming majority of Japanese continue to regard themselves as belonging to the middle class, a pattern that has persisted for decades, as Table 3.1 shows. Paradoxically, despite the reality of Japan’s material and cultural inequality, most Japanese appear to believe that they themselves are situated somewhere in the middle range of class structure. Moreover, as Table 3.2 shows, comparative studies of class affiliation in a number of nations found that 80 to 90 percent of people identify themselves as middle class, which suggests that this phenomenon is far from unique to Japan. Table 3.1 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Japanese survey responses (%), 1965–2018 Period Class

1965–9

1970–4

1975–9

1980–4

1985–9

1990–4

1995–9

2000–4

2005–9

2010–

Period Class

1965–9

1970–4

1975–9

1980–4

1985–9

1990–4

1995–9

2000–4

2005–9

2010–

Upper

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.6

0.5

0.8

0.7

0.8

1.0

0.9

Upper middle (A)

7.1

7.0

7.8

7.6

6.7

9.5

9.9

9.7

10.4

12.0

Middle middle (B)

51.6

58.5

59.5

54.6

52.6

54.1

56.8

54.8

54.1

55.1

Lower middle (C)

28.8

24.4

23.0

27.0

29.1

26.2

24.2

25.6

25.7

24.7

Lower

7.7

6.0

5.3

6.8

8.0

6.1

5.5

6.3

6.7

5.7

Middle total (A)+ (B)+ (C)

87.5

89.9

90.3

89.2

88.4

89.8

90.9

90.1

90.2

91.8

Source: Calculations are based on Cabinet Office 2019a. Notes: The figures are the mean average percentages of surveyed people who self-identified as belonging to each class in the survey period. ‘Do not know’ responses were permitted; therefore, the total for each period does not equal 100 percent. Table 3.2 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Relative survey responses for Japan and selected other countries (%), 2005–6 Country

Class

Japan

Australia

China

Finland

Germany

Italy

Korea (South)

Sweden

United States

Upper

0.8

0.7

0.3

1.2

0.7

0.7

0.7

1.8

0.9

Upper middle (A)

14.1

27.0

4.9

21.6

20.0

26.1

23.7

33.9

26.4

Middle middle (B)

44.0

32.7

38.5

36.1

36.4

27.3

54.2

33.4

33.0

Country

Class

Japan

Australia

China

Finland

Germany

Italy

Korea (South)

Sweden

United States

Lower middle (C)

28.5

31.5

27.9

33.0

32.2

33.4

15.8

14.6

28.3

Lower

8.6

3.3

18.7

3.0

4.0

4.4

5.7

4.3

6.0

Middle total (A)+ (B)+(C)

86.6

91.2

71.3

91.7

88.6

86.8

93.7

81.9

87.7

Source: Adapted from Inglehart et al. 2014, Question V252. See also Dentsū Sōken and Nihon Research Center 2008, p. 218. Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who self-identified as belonging to each class in the survey year. ‘No answer’ and ‘don’t know’ responses were permitted; therefore, the total for each country does not equal 100 percent. The sense of inequality is quite marked in many dimensions of stratification, including those of income, assets, education, gender, and ethnicity. Although the nation remains the third-largest economy in the world at the beginning of the 2020s, many nationwide surveys indicate that a significant proportion of respondents deem Japan a society of excessive disparity.9 Approximately half of the Japanese regard Japan as a country lacking in spiritual wealth.10 The widespread notion that Japan is gakureki shakai (a society oriented inordinately to educational credentialism)11 testifies to the popular belief that it is unfairly stratified on the basis of educational achievement. Moreover, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, Japan has a relatively strong Communist Party, which often polls nearly 10 percent of total votes in national elections and some 15 percent in its strongholds like Kyoto, suggesting that some sections of the country harbor a strong sense of class inequality. These observations suggest that the thesis of 90 percent Japanese being middle class may be losing sight of the honne (reality) side of Japan’s social stratification structure. There is an abundance of data on class in Japan. A group of class analysts have conducted the SSM survey every ten years since 1955, the most recent at time of writing being in 2015, thereby amassing systematic time-series data over six decades.12 Another large-scale nationwide study, the SSP project, commenced in 2015.13 Government agencies, newspaper organizations, and private research institutions have also published a large amount of quantitative data on the ways in which resources, values, and behavior patterns are distributed among different strata in Japanese society. Taken together, these resources provide ample material for understanding internal stratification.

Class impact on socialization The class environment of the family into which one is born conditions the range of options available to one in later life in terms of education and employment. One’s motivations, perceptions, and values in adulthood are not free from the initial socialization processes of one’s childhood, which are influenced by one’s early class locations. Social and cultural resources are passed on through stratified channels. Examining these general patterns microscopically, the documentary 21 Up Japan (available online), traces the life courses of several Japanese girls and boys from the age of seven to twenty-one and shows how their class positions affected the paths their lives have taken.

III Classification of classes and segments Exactly how many classes or strata are there in contemporary Japan? Researchers on social stratification have failed to establish a consensus on this basic issue. This section starts with two sociological empirical approaches, based on the random nationwide samples: the SSM and the SSP projects, both mentioned above.

1 Hashimoto’s model Some researchers have produced representations of class distribution in contemporary Japan on the basis of Marxian categories.14 For example, Kenji Hashimoto identifies four classes with distinct characteristics and estimates Japan’s changing class composition as displayed in Tables 3.3 and 3.4. Table 3.3 Class distribution (%), based on Hashimoto’s model of Marxian categories, 2012 Class

Total

Male

Female

Capitalist

4.1

5.4

2.2

New middle

20.6

24.2

15.6

Working

62.5

55.4

71.9

Regular employees (seiki shain)

35.1

40.7

27.6

Non-regular employees (hi-seiki shain)a

14.9

14.7

15.0

Housewife part-timers

12.6

n/a

29.3

Old middle

12.9

14.9

10.2

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

Source: Adapted from Hashimoto 2018a, p. 67. The figures were calculated from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2012. a

Excludes housewife part-timers.

Table 3.4 Comparison of major classes Class Characteristic

Cap.

New

Old

Reg.

Und.a

No. of persons (’0,000)

254

1,285

808

2,192

929 (+ 785 HWPT)

% of class members in workforce

4.1

20.6

12.9

35.1

14.9 (+ 12.6 HWPT)b

% of women

23.6

32.6

33.8

33.7

43.3a

1,060c

798

587

630

343

% of households with no assets

3.5

5.9

11.1

14.5

31.5

Relative poverty rate (%)d

4.2

2.6

17.2

7.0

38.7

Average household income (¥ ’0,000)

Class Characteristic

Cap.

New

Old

Reg.

Und.a

% of married men

81.4

79.4

82.9

62.4

25.7

% of married women

86.8

68.2

77.5

54.3

–

% of university graduates

42.3

61.4

27.2

30.5

27.7

% of HTM individuals

56.2

42.8

31.0

26.5

11.9

% of individuals satisfied with their jobs

47.7

37.8

41.4

32.3

26.3

–

28.9

–

38.9

13.8

% of individuals who belong to labor unions

Sources: Adapted from Hashimoto 2018a, pp. 82–3. All the data are based on SSM 2015 except for number of persons and percentage of class members in the workforce: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2012. Notes: Full column headings are as follows. Cap.: capitalist; New: new middle; Old: old middle; Reg.: working I (regular workers); Und.: working II (non-regular workers; underclass). HTM: identifying as higher than middle (persons who feel that they belong to the upper-middle section of the population or above); HWPT: housewife part-timers. The age range of married men and women is 35–54 years. a

The underclass section of the working class II includes housewife part-timers, who constitute 12.6

percent of the entire workforce. However, for technical reasons, this group is not included in the calculations of the figures in this column. b

The percentage of women in this cell is based on SSM 2015.

c

Those members of the capitalist class who work for companies with 30 or more employees earn

¥12,440,000 on average. d

See Chapter 2, Section 2 and Table 2.4. The capitalist class consists of corporate executives and managers (with at least five employees).

In 2018 three out of four members of the capitalist class were men.15 They have high incomes, considerable assets, and many durable consumer goods. Their political orientation is conservative, and, by and large, they regard the status quo as impartial and fair. The middle class is divided into two groups: the new middle class, which is made up of white-collar employees, including middle managers, professionals, and upper-grade career clerical office workers; and the old middle class, composed mainly of self-employed, independent businesspeople. Members of the new middle class are generally guaranteed long-term employment and follow career tracks throughout their occupational lives. The model figure in Japan’s new middle class is (in the Japanese English phrase) a salaryman, a white-collar, male company employee in the private sector. He embodies

all the stereotypical images associated with the Japanese corporate employee: loyalty to his company, subservience to the hierarchical order of his enterprise, devotion to his work, a long and industrious working life, and job security in his career. The new middle class, which salarymen typify, constitutes less than a quarter of the labor force but is an ideological reference group for the working population. In literature, the genre of salaryman novels focuses on the joys and sorrows of Japanese organization men. In the world of manga, salaryman manga, such as Salaryman Kintarō and Kachō Shima Kōsaku, attract a substantial readership. Television dramas based on the everyday lives of salarymen also draw many viewers. In housing, salaryman dwellings are simple units with three small rooms and a kitchen. In money management, the salaryman finance system enables financially ambitious corporate employees to borrow substantial amounts at high interest rates without the need to mortgage property. In psychoanalysis, salaryman apathy refers to white-collar employees’ psychological state of work rejection, in which they display psychosomatic symptoms every morning when they have to leave for work. Members of the new middle class are generally well educated but well behind the capitalist class in terms of their income (see Table 3.4). Though smaller in number, career-track women constitute part of the new middle class, competing with their male counterparts in the corporate structure despite many overt and hidden barriers of gender discrimination, as elaborated in Chapter 7. Hashimoto estimates that new-middle-class men make up 24.2 percent of the male labor force, whereas new-middle-class women comprise 15.6 percent of female workers.16 The old middle class comprises farmers and independent small proprietors, classified as jieigyō (with fewer than five employees). Their numbers do not significantly change over time. Many of the latter run the small and medium-sized stores that line the streets of shopping areas (called shōten-gai) throughout the country. Running greengroceries, liquor stores, barbershops, pharmacies, fish shops, confectioneries, and so on, within or adjacent to residential communities, these independent businesspeople make up a formal association in each shopping area with executives and other officeholders and play lively and leading roles in community affairs. Owners of small family factories and backstreet workshops comprise another important group of independent proprietors. Some have highly specialized manufacturing skills, and others serve as subcontractors, and they buttress Japan’s economy and technology. The old middle class, some members of which are cash rich, is generally conservative, both politically and socially, low in educational credentials, and not inclined to engage much in cultural or leisure activities. In rural areas, a declining number of farmers form part of the old middle class. The working class comprises mainly blue-collar workers, both skilled and unskilled, plus temporary and part-time workers. This was by far the largest class in Japan in the 2010s, with more than 60 percent of the workforce falling into this category (see Table 3.3). In comparison with the new middle class, a majority of the working class have only low levels of education, income, and job satisfaction. Yet, they remain apathetic and pessimistic about political change. In both small and large enterprises, the culture of blue-collar workers differs significantly from that of office employees. Generally, blue-collar workers view their work as a means of livelihood and not as a source of gratification and fulfillment. They see themselves as holding ignominious and inglorious

positions on low rungs of the social ladder. On the whole, blue-collar workers begin each working day early and prefer to leave their working environment as early as possible.17 The major line of demarcation in the working class is drawn between regular workers (type I in Table 3.4), whose employment status is relatively safe, and non-regular workers (type II), whose job security is weak. While regular workers are generally assured of long-term and secure employment, non-regular workers are hired as either part-timers or casuals with no continuous job guarantee. The latter group expanded in the 2010s, with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications estimating the proportion of non-regular workers to be 38.3 percent of the workforce in 2019, a trend that shows an increasing level of job uncertainty in the labor market.18

Figure 3.1 Factory worker Hashimoto argues that these non-regular workers form Japan’s underclass19 and have distinctive characteristics, as Table 3.4 demonstrates. Members of the underclass have the lowest levels of household income and assets and are least satisfied with their work, hovering over the poverty line and clearly identifying themselves as belonging to the ‘lower than middle level’. These non-regular workers include a large group of housewives who support their households as supplementary income earners alongside their husbands as the main breadwinners. A separate analysis of the physical characteristics of members of the male underclass in the Tokyo metropolitan area in 2016 showed that both their average height (169.4 centimeters) and their weight (65.8 kilograms) were the lowest among all the classes. Capitalist-class members were on average the tallest (173.2 centimeters) and heaviest (72.9 kilograms).20 Hashimoto maintains that interclass mobility is increasingly restricted – so much so that Japan is not really a kakusa shakai anymore but a rigid class society in which it is difficult for individuals to cross borders between classes.

2 Kikkawa’s model: eight-segment analysis From a different perspective, Tōru Kikkawa and his associates portray Japan’s class structure based on another large-scale quantitative study, the SSP project, which they undertook in 2015.21 Focusing on the working population from the age of twenty to sixty, the study mixes three dichotomous variables – gender, generation, and educational background – to classify the labor force (with the exclusion of students enrolled in universities and colleges but with the inclusion of such unremunerated workers as full-time housewives). With respect to gender, it is simply divided into females and males. As to generation, the line is drawn between young workers in their twenties and thirties and middle-aged workers in their forties and fifties. With regard to educational background, the workforce is dichotomized between those who are university and college graduates and those who are not. Combining these three dimensions, Kikkawa discerns eight segments in the Japanese working population, as exhibited in Table 3.5. As the second column demonstrates, these segments are more or less of the same size22 but display different profiles, as follows. Table 3.5 Population composition, based on Kikkawa’s eight segments, 2015 Workforce (20–60 years, N = 60.25 million)

Income (¥ ’0,000)

Employee status (%)

No. (’0,000)

%

Individual

Householda

Nonregular

Bluecollar

1. Middle-aged male graduates

649

10.8

659.4

886.9

5.3

16.4

2. Middle-aged male nongraduates

1,011

16.8

466.6

650.0

7.6

57.4

3. Middle-aged female graduates

582

9.7

222.1

854.2

35.1

10.3

4. Middle-aged female nongraduates

1,062

17.6

152.5

606.6

40.8

27.0

5. Young female graduates

682

11.3

179.5

683.8

24.4

6.9

6. Young female nongraduates

652

10.8

140.2

514.6

35.5

20.7

7. Young male graduates

711

11.8

378.4

652.0

9.2

20.6

8. Young male nongraduates

676

11.2

322.0

500.8

14.0

64.3

Segment

Sources: Adapted from Kikkawa 2018, pp. 123–48. Workforce columns are based on the 2015 census. Income and employee status columns are based on the 2015 SSP project. a

Total amount of income of the household to which the individual belongs. Members of the first segment, middle-aged male graduates, form the most successful group, with

most having entered the job market upon graduation in the twentieth century as white-collar regular employees, relishing lifetime employment, seniority-based pay structures, and the world of male dominance. They earn handsome incomes and enjoy family lives, with some attaining senior occupational positions. Nearly half of this cohort stayed in the same company throughout their working years. Seven out of ten in this group attained education levels higher than those of their parents. The second segment comprises middle-aged male nongraduates who completed middle or high school only. It consists largely of blue-collar workers whose positions are stable as regular company employees or the self-employed. Members of this group earn relatively high wages, and most are married with children. Most started working in their late teens and supported the Japanese economy as adults for both high-growth and stagnation periods. Their parents belonged to this relatively uneducated segment, a pattern that exhibits a high degree of class reproduction. Together with their female counterparts (the fourth segment), the members of this segment tend to live outside metropolitan areas and support the economic and social activities of local communities. The third segment is made up of middle-aged female graduates whose household incomes are high. They work relatively short hours, generally live comfortably, and are capable of choosing options between pursuing occupational careers and remaining housewives. Compared with its nongraduate counterpart, this segment has more white-collar regular employees, and its members draw incomes higher than the national average. Most are married, their husbands are graduates, and their household earnings are high and stable. The fourth segment, middle-aged female nongraduates, constitutes the largest group, with a quarter engaged in home duties. Those with paid employment are largely unstable non-regular workers, with relatively low individual incomes. An overwhelming majority are married with children, and their husbands are mostly nongraduates. These females are also subject to class reproduction, with their parents having completed either middle-school or high-school education only. The women in this segment represent the flexible workforce engaged in a variety of jobs – clerical, sales, manufacturing, professional, and so on – susceptible and adaptive to labor market fluctuations. The fifth segment, made up of young female graduates, is characterized by the diversity of its members’ lifestyles, reflecting the fact that they are still in the middle of their careers or family formation. About a quarter of this group are out of the gainful labor market, staying home for various reasons. Those who are working occupy white-collar positions, working long hours and standing on par with their male counterparts. A majority are married, and their husbands tend to be graduates, a situation which ensures a comfortable level of living. With many of its members residing in cities, this segment forms the largest in urban areas. The sixth segment comprises young female nongraduates, whose individual income is the lowest of those represented by the eight segments, an indication that their economic life is insecure. A majority

are married, and their partners are largely young male nongraduates who live in similarly precarious economic conditions. These women have the largest number of children among all women in the youth segments, slowing down the decline in the birth rate of Japanese society as a whole. The seventh segment is made up of young male graduates. Among the youth segments, their individual income is the highest, and many are employed as regular white-collar workers, mostly as professionals. They tend to move from one company to another, showing a high degree of mobility but generally securing good socioeconomic posts. Approximately half of them remain unmarried, and those in this segment have the smallest number of children, with their residence concentrated in city areas. The eighth and final segment consists of young male nongraduates, who are in the most underprivileged position among the cohorts. They mostly work as manual employees – mechanics, repairmen, processing workers, drivers, construction laborers, salespersons, and so forth – mostly engaged in blue-collar work which requires few qualifications. Kikkawa observes that the eighth segment is the most disadvantaged and isolated and calls its members ‘LEGs’ (‘Lightly Educated Guys’) to draw attention to their distinctive qualities in the spectrum of Japan’s working population. More than 80 percent of the parents of these men married partners with the same nongraduate background, with the intergenerational reproduction of educational background firmly entrenched.23 Thus, with middle-aged male university graduates at the top and young male nongraduates at the bottom, Japanese society is stratified into more or less equal-sized segments with diverse social backgrounds and value orientations. It has been pointed out that the educational divide between workers with university education and those without is the most fundamental source of other disparities, and the two groups hardly socialize with each other in their workplaces, communities, and family lives.24 Using different data and adopting different approaches from Hashimoto’s, Kikkawa reaches similar conclusions. Both find that the most marginalized group in Japan today are relatively uneducated, manual and non-regular workers, whom they call the underclass or LEGs, respectively. Homelessness On the fringes of Japanese society, people who are homeless struggle to make a precarious living in major cities. They numbered over 4,000 for all of Japan in 2019 and stay in parks, on riverbanks, on roads, and in railway stations,25 an uncomfortable reality that the authorities attempt to make as invisible as possible. Living in makeshift tents and cardboard ‘houses’ of various kinds, they face forceful removal raids by police from time to time. While eating leftover food from restaurants and convenience shops at times, many survive by picking up used aluminum cans and discarded newspapers and selling them to collection traders. Japan’s livelihood protection system fails to reach out to these individuals. The videos cited below include expert analysis and concrete illustrations of the situation at the bottom of Japan’s class structure and kakusa shakai: Who Are Japan’s Homeless? (Part 2), at www.youtube.com/watch? v=-9RgkZebW1s&t=502s (Life Where I’m From, 3 September 2017), and Housing Japan’s Homeless (Part 3), at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBPyN3LE65g (Life Where I’m From, 30 December 2017).

3 Status inconsistency Some analysts use a multidimensional framework in an attempt to identify several class groups using the concept of status inconsistency. They define an individual as status inconsistent when they rank high on one scale of social stratification (for example, occupation) but low on another (for instance, school background). A Korean female doctor in Japan, for example, would be a status-inconsistent person in the sense that she is high on the ladders of income and educational qualifications but low on those of gender and ethnicity because of prevailing prejudice and discrimination. The notion of status inconsistency has been widely used to explain the apparent paradox that middle-class consciousness (as described at the beginning of this chapter) remains at high levels in spite of existing class disparity. Some sociologists and economists – notably, Ken’ichi Tominaga and Yasusuke Murakami26 – contended in the last quarter of the twentieth century that boundaries between classes were generally blurred, with most Japanese leading a split-level existence, high in one dimension of social stratification and low in another. Status-incongruent individuals tend to identify themselves according to the highest position they occupy on different stratification ladders. For example, those high in income but low in education would focus on their income level, while those high in prestige but low in asset possession would be likely to heed their prestige, with both types regarding themselves as middle class. In other words, status-inconsistent people form middle-class consciousness in a variety of ways and generally fail to share coherent class-based interests and class solidarity. Observers who deem Japan as relatively free of sharp class awareness attribute such class-unconscious tendencies to the rise of status inconsistency. Though different researchers use different methods of analysis, the share of status-inconsistent individuals in the population appears to have fluctuated from half to three-quarters between the mid1950s and the mid-1990s. Junsuke Hara estimates that status-inconsistent people comprised 48.2 percent of the Japanese in 1955, 59.5 percent in 1965, 65.2 percent in 1975, 70.6 percent in 1985, and 61.8 in 1995.27 As discussed in later paragraphs, based on a different method of measurement, Yūsuke Hayashi uses 2005 data to show that the proportion in that year was 60.3 percent.28 And yet another analysis, by Shō Fujiwara, Takashi Itō, and Ken Tanioka, in this case of 2010 data, demonstrates that the percentage amounted to 53.4 in that year.29 Using the notion of status inconsistency and the 2005 SSM data,30 Hayashi dichotomizes the population into high and low groups according to three criteria: 1. Educational background: four-year university and junior college graduates and those who have completed high-school or middle-school education only 2. Occupation: professionals, managers, and white-collar workers, and salespeople, blue-collar workers, and farmers 3. Income: those earning above and those earning below 2.5 million yen (¥) per year.31 This method identifies eight analytical categories, three of which are empirically small in number and practically negligible, with five groups constituting major classes in contemporary Japan, as Figure 3.2

demonstrates. Two of these (A and E) are status consistent and form the upper and lower ends of Japan’s class structure, consistently showing high or low scores respectively on all three measures. Three other groups are status inconsistent, exhibiting different patterns of incongruence across the three ladders of stratification.

Figure 3.2 Status-consistent and status-inconsistent clusters. Source. Adapted from Hayashi 2012, p. 48, Table 2. Average years of education were personally provided by Hayashi (email, 16 March 2019). Notes: Status clusters are as follows. A: consistent upper; B: inconsistent middle with low occupation; C: inconsistent middle with low education; D: inconsistent middle with low education and low occupation; E: consistent lower. Stratification variables are as follows. E: educational background; O: occupational prestige; I: income level. The income figures (which do not include assets) are in ¥10,000s. Class A mostly comprises individuals whose positions are high in all three dimensions, with a good educational background, prestigious job, and sizeable income. Between their thirties and fifties, at the height of their occupational careers, most of these individuals have four-year university degrees or postgraduate qualifications, occupy either managerial or professional posts, and enjoy the highest levels of household income and assets. Members of this class can afford to relish ample cultural lives, possess high-tech goods, and study foreign languages. They visit museums, art galleries, and libraries, enjoy sporting activities, travel overseas, and read books more frequently than any other class. They form the top layer of Japan’s stratification hierarchy. Class B is mostly made up of relatively young university graduates with reasonably good incomes but without managerial or professional positions. They are status inconsistent in the sense that their positions are high on education and income but low on occupational attainment. While they are still in the early phase of their careers and in their twenties and thirties, they strive to move up to Class A. Many are employees of large corporations or public servants and form the middle layer of these large organizations, including the upper tier of blue-collar workers. Their income and asset levels are lower than those of Class C, with their house ownership rate being the second lowest among the five classes. Class C is another status-inconsistent group in the sense that its members are high in terms of occupation and income but low on education. Most are not university educated but have managerial or professional positions and earn good incomes, second only to Class A. Most are in their forties or older, a pattern that suggests they are at the height or towards the end of their careers, having achieved good occupational and income status with only high-school education. The members of this class have the highest house ownership ratio among all the classes and tend to participate in volunteer work and other civic activities more actively than those in any other class.

Class D is the largest class in Japan, constituting more than half of the working population, and is status inconsistent in the sense that its members’ income exceeds the subsistence level (namely, the relative poverty line), while their educational background and occupational status are on the lower side of the scale. More than two-thirds of this class’s members are either blue-collar or agricultural workers and are employed by or own small businesses. With some three-quarters of this group’s members having completed high-school education only, their positions are neither managerial nor professional, while the proportion of self-employed people in the class is relatively large. The house ownership rate of this class is the second highest among the five, but its members’ cultural and leisure activities are quite limited. An overwhelming majority of the members of this class regard themselves as belonging to either the lower-middle class or the upper-lower class, a perception that perhaps correctly reflects their position in the nation’s stratification structure. Class E represents the lowest class in Japan, consistently low on all three dimensions. This is the only class whose members’ average income is below the poverty line. Compared with workers in the other classes, those in their thirties and below, as well as in their sixties and above, are disproportionately represented in this class, an indication that poverty prevails mainly among young and senior citizens. About a quarter of this class completed middle-school education only. A majority of the members of Class E are employed by small businesses, with blue-collar and agricultural workers being predominant. They constitute Japan’s working poor, who enjoy very few cultural activities in their leisure time and rarely travel overseas, let alone learn foreign languages. Most members of this group see themselves as belonging to the lower class. The abovementioned study conducted by Fujiwara, Itō, and Tanioka, based on data collected in 2010, shows that the Japanese are divided more or less equally between status inconsistency and status consistency.32 Using four key variables – education, occupation, income, and assets – and performing latent class analysis, they identify four groups and explore the patterns of the group members’ class identification. Table 3.6 exhibits the two status-consistent clusters (I and IV) at the upper and lower ends of the class hierarchy and the two status-inconsistent clusters (II and III) between them. Cluster II comprises those who are high in education (university graduates) but low in occupation, income, and assets. Those in the other inconsistent cluster (III) are low in education and occupation but high in monetary terms – namely, income and assets. Although this study employs a different method of investigation from that of the previous analysis, it discovers that status-inconsistent groups (Clusters II and III) make up approximately 53 percent of the population, a finding that is not appreciably different from the figure reported in the previous analysis. Table 3.6 Comparison of status-consistent and status-inconsistent classes, 2010 Characteristic Cluster

E

O

I

A

Consistency

%

Class identification

I

High

High

High

High

Yes

25.7

Upper middle

II

High

Low

Low

Low

No

22.9

Lower middle

Characteristic Cluster

E

O

I

A

Consistency

%

Class identification

III

Low

Low

High

High

No

30.5

Lower middle

IV

Low

Low

Low

Low

Yes

20.8

Upper lower

Source: Adapted from Fujiwara, Itō, and Tanioka 2012, pp. 53–5. Notes: Characteristics and their rankings are as follows. E (education): high – university graduates, low – other; O (occupation): high – upper white-collar (professional and managerial), middle – lower whitecollar (clerical and sales), low – blue-collar (skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled, agricultural); I (annual income): high – ¥9 million or more, middle – ¥5–9 million, low – less than ¥5 million; A (assets): high, middle, low. Class identification rankings are as follows: upper, upper middle, lower middle, upper lower, lower lower. As the table shows, whereas persons in the two status-inconsistent clusters are inclined to see themselves as members of the lower-middle class, status-consistent individuals tend to identify as members of the upper-middle class and the upper-lower class. It is also notable that some threequarters (Clusters II, III, and IV) place themselves below the middle line of class identification.

4 Postmodernity and upper goods Some researchers point out that the criteria for defining important resources and the basis for class formation have been shifting since Japanese society achieved a measurable degree of affluence, a condition which tends to alleviate conventional class consciousness. Takatoshi Imada, for example, maintains that the types of aspirations and rewards that Japanese workers desire have qualitatively changed, with the society as a whole exhibiting more and more postmodern characteristics.33 Specifically, a considerable number of people whose basic daily needs are fulfilled now attach more importance to lifestyle values. To capture such a value shift one can make a conceptual distinction between two types of status positions: achieved status, based upon the attainment of high income, occupation, educational credentials, and material possessions; and relational status, derived from active participation in volunteer work and civic community involvement, as well as leadership in hobby and leisure clubs. Imada argues that the overall affluence of the nation has offered an ample breeding ground to ‘class transcendentalists’, people who give a high priority to values other than class betterment. Gratified by their current level of consumption, they now seek satisfaction in less material aspects of life. Some individuals increase their quality of life through the pursuit of hobbies, creative expression, or spiritual fulfillment, while others engage in volunteer work, environmental protection, and forms of socially meaningful or relationship-oriented activities that earn them respect and esteem in their family. At the turn of the twentieth century, one-third of Japanese people were oriented to this expressive, relational form of status, with the remaining two-thirds continuing to focus on the attainment of instrumental, achieved status within the class structure.34 One may suggest that most Japanese lead a schizophrenic existence. On the one hand, they are forced to deal with the market economy, yet on the other, they yearn for a more satisfying and fulfilling mode of life. Likewise, Junsuke Hara and Kazuo Seiyama argue that the criteria for class formation have altered and contend that inequality has been removed in contemporary ‘affluent’ Japan as far as ‘basic goods’ are concerned, while the nation is increasingly stratified in pursuit of what they call ‘upper goods’.35 They maintain that absolute poverty was eradicated when the population’s subsistence needs were met. Almost every household can now afford a television set, telephone, car, rice cooker, and other essential goods for a comfortable daily life. Virtually all teenagers advance to senior high school and fulfill their basic educational requisites. In the meantime, community perceptions of social stratification are becoming multidimensional. The different sectors of the Japanese population are increasingly divergent in their respective evaluations of status indicators. Some attach importance to asset accumulation, while others regard occupational kudos as crucial. Still others would deem quality of life the most significant dimension. In each sphere, what Hara and Seiyama call ‘upper goods’ are scarce, be they luxury housing, postgraduate education, or deluxe holidays, with these expensive commodities being beyond the reach of many people. Thus, social divisions in contemporary Japanese society, where essential goods are easily available, derive not so much from the unequal distribution of commonplace and mundane industrial goods as from that of prestigious and stylish cultural goods. Under these conditions, class consciousness in the conventional sense tends to be obscured.

IV Reproduction of inequality How are economic and cultural resources transmitted from one generation to another? Occupation and education are the most visible factors that perpetuate inequality intergenerationally across social classes. Chapters 4 to 7 deal with these areas in some detail, but this section briefly looks at two processes. On the economic side, the degree to which assets are handed down from one generation to another has consequences for the continuity of interclass barriers. On the cultural side, the continuity of different class groups is affected by the ways in which people are socialized into certain values and whether marriage partners come from a similar class background. Although often less conspicuous and more latent, these variables are fundamental to the processes of intergenerational economic and cultural reproduction of classes.

1 Inheritance of financial and property assets The differentials of financial and property assets have invariably been twice as much as those of income differentials, as Figure 3.3 displays. Financial assets include bank savings, stocks, and bonds, while property assets include both housing and landholdings. To examine inequalities in contemporary Japan, therefore, one must investigate its financial and property ownership pattern. On the whole, financial disparity has gradually increased, overtaking property disparity, which has decreased as a result of the decline in house and land prices from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s. Overall, these two types of inequalities constitute the most crucial dimension of social disparity in Japan today.

Figure 3.3 Changes in the Gini indices over time Notes: See Chapter 2 for an explanation of the Gini index. The figure with an asterisk is the 2004 score adjusted on the basis of the calculation method used for 2014. Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016c. A small proportion of rich households possesses a large share of financial assets. The Nomura Research Institute estimates their distribution and observes that Japan’s households are stratified into five levels, as shown in Table 3.7. The top two groups are what the researchers call the ‘super-rich’ and the ‘rich’, collectively constituting approximately 2 percent of all households while owning some 20 percent of financial assets in Japan. At the bottom level, about three-quarters of all households, classified as the ‘mass’ stratum, possess less than half of total financial assets. Unsurprisingly, those who can expect to inherit these and other assets tend to have good ‘financial literacy’ and show high sensitivity to fluctuations in the stock market and bank interest rates.36 Table 3.7 Distribution of financial assets, 2017 Asset-owning group

Characteristic

Superrich

Rich

Semirich

Upper mass

Mass

Total

Asset-owning group

Characteristic Amount owned per household (¥ million)

Superrich

Rich

Semirich

Upper mass

Mass

Total

500 or more

100–500

50–100

30–50

30 or less

–

% of population

0.1

2.2

5.9

13.4

78.2

100.0

No. of households in group (0,000)

8.4

118.3

322.2

720.3

4,203.10

5,372.30

Amount owned by group (¥ trillion)

84

215

247

320

673

1,539

% of all assets owned by group

5.4

13.9

16.0

20.7

43.7

100.0

Source: Adapted from Nomura Research Institute 2018, p. 1. Notes: ¥1 million was approximately US$9,300 on 13 August 2020. Keiko Shimono and Miho Ishikawa estimate that more than half of net household asset holdings are inherited and argue that bequests constitute more than one-third of national wealth.37 Moreover, the highest level of inheritance tax has been lowered since the 1990s. All this suggests that the asset owners of Japan largely sustained and even expanded their holdings intergenerationally through inheritance. Asset disparities not only produced but also reproduced two subcultural groups that show distinctly different consumer behavior patterns in Japan: a small number of spenders who have resources to pay for costly luxury commodities and a large group of those who cannot afford to do so. Those who have considerable financial assets and large property incomes form a minority stratum at the top, and only they can enjoy extravagant lifestyles, purchasing expensive houses, bearing inordinate social expenses, and spending lavishly on fashion goods. The remaining majority, whose livelihoods are constrained by housing mortgages and bank loans, must carefully calculate their expenditure and cannot assume such profligate lifestyles. However, there is very little difference between the asset haves and have-nots in their purchasing of more ordinary commodities, including cars, bicycles, medical services, musical instruments, sports goods, audio equipment, and education, what Hara and Seiyama call ‘basic goods’, as described earlier in this chapter.38 It is notable, as Figure 3.3 shows, that social disparities based on such financial assets as stocks and savings are also much more substantial than those based on income. Accordingly, one’s income as measured in terms of salary and wage levels does not directly represent one’s power to purchase commodities. The point is obvious when one compares, for instance, two company employees – Yamada and Suzuki – who have the same annual net salary, of ¥5 million. Yamada inherited his parents’ house and apartment and leases the apartment at ¥2 million per year, thereby enjoying a net annual disposable income of ¥7 million. Suzuki has not yet been able to purchase a house and rents a condominium at ¥2 million per year, having therefore a net yearly disposable income of ¥3 million. One

can imagine that, though their corporate salaries are identical, their purchasing powers are substantially different.39 Purchasing power and consumption capacity are determined chiefly by size of property and financial assets rather than by wage income, and this pattern is transmitted from one generation to another mainly through asset inheritance.

2 Socialization and marriage More broadly, cultural capital appears to be passed on through highly stratified channels. In her pioneering studies, Emi Kataoka explores the extent to which the amount of cultural capital individuals inherit in their childhood affects the amount they possess in their adulthood.40 To generate a quantitative indicator of cultural capital in childhood, Kataoka examines the cultural environment of individuals in their preschool and elementary-school days and uses a combined index that takes into account how frequently they listened to classical music at home, made family trips to art galleries and museums, and had family members read books for them, and whether they had collections of children’s literature at home and played with building blocks. She also looks at the types of cultural activities of individuals in their adulthood and classifies them into ‘orthodox’ culture and ‘mass’ culture. Orthodox culture activities include writing poems, visiting art galleries, museums, and exhibitions, and appreciating classical music, while mass culture activities include going to concerts of popular music, rock and roll, and jazz, singing karaoke songs, and playing pachinko. For both males and females, her research demonstrates very significant connections between cultural environment in childhood and participation in high culture activities in adulthood. The cultural capital available before one’s teenage years influences one’s style of cultural activity more strongly than do other variables, such as one’s occupational prestige, household income, and even educational background. The cultural resources of a family condition and even determine its children’s cultural lives after they reach adulthood. Overall, more recent studies, in the mid-2010s, have made findings consistent with these general patterns.41 The process of choosing a marriage partner is neither random nor unstructured. Table 3.8, based on the SSM 2015 data, exhibits the degree to which husbands and wives share similar class backgrounds. The table shows how the combinations of class backgrounds are distributed, based on a total random sample of 1,404 married couples. The figures in parentheses show the percentages of marriages according to women’s class backgrounds. For instance, 36.9 percent of wives of new-middleclass background married husbands of working-class background. The figures in bold indicate marriages of couples of the same class background, whose total number of cases is 670 (69 + 149 + 331 + 121). This means that intraclass marriages constitute 47.7 percent of all of the marriages (670 ÷ 1,404), nearly half of the sample. As marriages within identical class categories remain predominant, ‘class homogamy’ persists as an entrenched pattern. Table 3.8 Intraclass and interclass marriages, 2015 Husband’s class Wife’s class

Capitalist

New middle

Working

Old middle

Total

Capitalist

69 (81.1)

4 (4.7)

3 (3.5)

9 (10.6)

85 (99.9)

New middle

14 (4.7)

149 (50.5)

109 (36.9)

23 (7.7)

295 (99.8)

Husband’s class Wife’s class

Capitalist

New middle

Working

Old middle

Total

Working

39 (4.5)

286 (33.6)

331 (38.9)

194 (22.8)

850 (99.8)

Old middle

11 (6.3)

23 (13.2)

19 (10.9)

121 (69.5)

174 (99.9)

133

462

462

347

1,404

Total

Source: Calculated from Hashimoto 2018b, p. 157. Notes: N = 1,404 married couples. Figures outside parentheses indicate the number of marriages; those inside indicate the percentage of women’s marriages. Bold figures show marriages in which the husband’s class and the wife’s class belong to the same category (intraclass). Roman figures show marriages in which the husband’s class and the wife’s class belong to different categories (interclass). The table does not include unmarried people or wives without jobs. In most marriages, people find partners from the same educational backgrounds.42 Table 3.9 shows the extent to which married couples share the same educational qualifications, a pattern indicated by the numbers in bold font. The total number of educational intraclass marriages amounts to about twothirds of the total sample. This is most robust among university graduates, and intergenerational class continuity endures most firmly in most-educated strata of Japanese society. The table also demonstrates that marriages between a woman and a more highly educated man (shown in italics) are more prevalent than those between a man and a more highly educated woman (in roman). This not only suggests that, in general, men attain higher levels of education than women, but also that marriage remains one means by which women acquire upward social mobility.43 Table 3.9 Marriages in terms of partner’s educational background, 2005 Wife’s education

Husband’s education University or college

High school

Middle school

Total

University or college

701 (68.9)

304 (29.9)

12 (1.2)

1,017 (100.0)

High school

607 (24.2)

1,621 (64.6)

283 (11.3)

2,511 (100.0)

29 (4.1)

227 (31.8)

457 (64.1)

713 (100.0)

1,337

2,152

752

4,241

Middle school Total

Source: Calculated from Shirahase 2008, p. 73. Notes: N = 4,241 married couples. Figures outside parentheses indicate the number; those inside indicate the percentage of women’s marriages. Intraclass marriage ratio: (701 + 1,621 + 457) ÷ 4,241 =

0.655. Bold figures show marriages in which the husband’s educational qualifications and the wife’s educational qualifications are the same (intra-educational marriages). Italic figures show marriages in which the husband’s educational qualifications are higher than the wife’s educational qualifications (woman marrying upwardly). Roman figures show marriages in which the husband’s educational qualifications are lower than the wife’s educational qualifications (man marrying upwardly). At the top end of the highest class, a complex web of elite-school old-boy networks, hereditary successions, marriage connections, and uxorial nepotism stretches among political, bureaucratic, business, and media leaders, who are interconnected to form a ‘class of privilege’.44 In the 2017 House of Representatives elections, 29 percent of the elected parliamentarians who were the members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) inherited their constituencies from their parents or relatives.45 Many elite diplomats come from families of high-ranking diplomats and inherit their status, having moved from one country to another in their childhood with their parents and accumulated linguistic skills and personal networks.46 Pedigree and lineage play significant roles in preserving the intergenerational continuity of the nation’s establishment.

V Debate and caution about the kakusa shakai thesis Although gaining broad acceptance, the kakusa shakai thesis – the view that Japanese society is socially divided and fraught with class disparities – is subject to much debate and must be examined with caution. First, the assertion that Japanese society has suddenly become a kakusa shakai raises much skepticism. There is much well-founded argument that Japan was always a class-divided and stratified society and never the unique middle-class society described by the Nihonjinron model. From this perspective, an abrupt shift took place in public awareness and sensitivity, not in empirical substance and reality. Even at the prime of the uniquely egalitarian society argument, a considerable number of studies demonstrated that such a claim may represent only the tatemae (façade) side of Japanese society. Some comparative quantitative studies suggest that Japanese patterns of socioeconomic inequality show no systematic deviance from those of other countries of advanced capitalism.47 Income inequality is higher in Japan than in Western countries.48 The overall social mobility rate in Japan is basically similar to that observed in other industrialized societies.49 The second reservation about the claim that a kakusa shakai suddenly emerged bears upon the illusion that appears to have persisted during the high economic era. There is no doubt that the highgrowth economy of postwar Japan led to changes in the occupational composition of the population and shifted large numbers from agriculture to manufacturing, from blue-collar to white-collar, from manual to nonmanual, and from low-level to high-level education.50 However, this transfiguration left a false impression: that industrialization was conducive to a high measure of upward social mobility. In reality, the relative positions of various strata in the hierarchy remained unaltered. For example, the educational system which produced an increasing number of university graduates cheapened the relative value of degrees and qualifications. To put it differently, when everyone stands still on an ascending escalator, their relative positions remain unaltered even though they all go upwards. A sense of upward relative mobility in this case is simply an illusion. When the escalator stops or slows down, it becomes difficult for the illusion to be sustained. The occupational system cannot continue to provide ostensibly highstatus positions, and eventually it must be revealed that some of the social mobility of the past was in fact due to the inflationary supply of positions. This is exactly what many in the labor force began to feel when Japan’s economy came to a standstill, recording negative growth and entering into a deflationary spiral in the early 2000s. The reality of class competition began to bite only when the economic slowdown failed to discernibly enlarge the total available pie. Third, Japan’s socioeconomic disparities were accelerated not only by unorganized structural transformations but by deliberately engineered policy changes in the taxation system. They decreased the rate of progressive taxation with the result that its redistribution functions have been weakened. For one thing, the consumption taxation scheme was put in motion in 1989, making it necessary for each consumer to pay 5 percent of the price of purchased goods as sales tax. The rate changed to 8 percent in 2014 and rose to 10 percent in 2019. This system benefited the wealthy and harmed the poor, because the consumption tax was imposed on all consumers in the same way, regardless of incomes

and assets. Further, the reduction of the inheritance tax rate in 2003 lessened the burdens of asset owners in the intergenerational transfer of ownership. Finally, one would have to see the paradigm shift in class analysis in Japan from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. Apparent or real, changes in class situations at the beginning of the twentyfirst century took place close to the everyday life of opinion makers and data analysts. Even when economic hardship and class competition were daily realities in the lower echelons of Japanese society, many of these commentators paid little heed to the issue, because they occupied privileged positions distant from the lower levels of social stratification. However, their perceptions began to alter when the shifting class structure affected acquaintances and friends in their networks as a consequence of the economic stagnation and downturn from the 1990s through the 2010s. The job security of full-time employees in the elite track of large companies was at risk.51 The upper-white-collar employees, a category that comprises managers and professionals, were an increasingly closed group, breaking into which the younger generations of other social strata found difficult.52 There are grounds to suspect that the class position of class observers influences their sensitivity to stratificational divisions in Japanese society.

VI Japanese emic concepts of class How do the Japanese conceptualize dimensions of social stratification? The Japanese equivalents of ‘class’ and ‘stratum’, kaikyū and kaisō, do not constitute part of the everyday folk vocabulary of ordinary citizens in Japan. Yet, anyone familiar with the Japanese language would attest to the wide circulation of such Japanese terms as jōryū kaikyū (upper class), chūsan kaikyū (middle class), kasō shakai (lowerstratum society), and shakai no teihen (bottom of society). The Japanese have a clear conception of stratification in their society even if their notions may not be conceptually identical to those of their Western counterparts.53 One can easily list several Japanese emic terms that describe the dimensions of stratification. Kaku denotes a finite series of ranks. As a generic term, it can be applied to a wide range of ranking systems. Mibun implies a status position into which one is born. Although used more loosely at times, the term connotes ascriptive characteristics and points to caste-like features. In feudal times, a samurai’s mibun clearly differed from a peasant’s mibun. Even today, ‘blue-blood’ families are supposed to have higher mibun than that of the masses. The term kakei (family line) has a similar connotation, with a more explicit emphasis upon lineage and pedigree. In contrast, chii means a status position that one achieves over time. One’s chii moves up or down in an occupational hierarchy. A company president occupies a higher chii than a section chief of the same company. The most common word for rapid social mobility is shusse. It applies to successful promotion to high positions accompanied by wide social recognition. When one moves from a low chii to a high chii, one would achieve an appreciable level of shusse. With regard to the concept of the middle class, different imagery underlies each of the three terms used by survey analysts to indicate a middle position in a pyramid of ranks.54 The first of these, chūsan, tends to point to the dimensions of property and income and to the middle to upper positions in the economic hierarchy. The second category, chūryū, has connotations of a middle domain of social status, respect, and prestige, rather than straight economic capacity. In interpreting this term, respondents primarily think of their occupational ranking and of such things as their family status, educational background, and friendship network, situating themselves in the middle on the basis of a combination of these criteria. A white-collar company employee might see himself as located below small-business owners and skilled blue-collar workers economically but would still describe himself as middle with regard to educational qualifications and occupational prestige. In contrast to the first two concepts, the third, chūkan, carries somewhat negative implications and suggests a middle location of insecurity, uncertainty, instability, and ambivalence between high and low positions. Although the Japanese may not define stratification in precisely the same way as other nationalities, there is little doubt that people in one of the most competitive capitalist economies on earth live with their own sense of class and inequality.

VII Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of class and stratification by focusing on the emergent debate about the ways in which resources and rewards were distributed in Japanese society. It has analyzed rising concerns over the consolidation of the kakusa shakai, with special attention paid to the observations derived from the SSM and the SSP projects. The chapter has also examined the argument seeking to explain why clearly defined class consciousness was not formed in Japan but has shown, nevertheless, that intergenerational class reproduction continued to persist through asset inheritance, socialization, and marriage. In addition, it has sounded a few notes of caution in considering the disparity society thesis and ended with a list of Japan-specific concepts about class and inequality. Following the general discussion on class and stratification, subsequent chapters scrutinize the particular dimensions of diversity and inequality in greater depth. Chapter 4 examines geographical and generational variations and inequalities as two basic sets of demographic diversities. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the worlds of work and education, in which people compete in an attempt to optimize their resources and rewards through achievement. Chapters 7 and 8 shift the focus onto such ascriptive modes of stratification as gender and ethnicity, attributes which are overtly hereditary and generally extremely difficult to change. These five chapters also probe the institutional and ideological apparatuses which sustain and reproduce the patterns of inequality and stratification.

Research questions 1. Compare Japan’s class structure with that of a country of your choice, drawing on as much comparative data as possible. 2. Are the Japanese levels of inequality high or low in cross-national comparison? Using international data, juxtapose Japan with other countries of comparable development and evaluate Japan’s position. 3. Choose a novel which deals with contemporary Japan and explore the classes or segments of its fictitious characters. Are any of them status inconsistent? 4. In contemporary Japan, are cultural resources more important than economic ones? 5. Suppose Karl Marx and Max Weber visited Japan today and met at a coffee shop in Tokyo. Write out their conversation, based on their observations of Japan.

Further readings Chiavacci, David and Hommerich, Carola (eds) 2017, Social Inequality in Post-growth Japan: Transformation during Economic and Demographic Stagnation. London: Routledge. Hara, Junsuke and Seiyama, Kazuo 2005, Inequality amid Affluence: Social Stratification in Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Ishida, Hiroshi and Slater, David H. (eds) 2011, Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting and Strategies. London: Routledge. Shiobara, Yoshikazu, Kawabata, Kohei, and Matthews, Joel (eds) 2019, Cultural and Social Division in Contemporary Japan: Rethinking Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion. London: Routledge. Shirahase, Sawako 2013, Social Inequality in Japan. London: Routledge.

Online resources 2015-nen SSM hōkokusho (Reports on the 2015 Social Stratification and Mobility study) 2015, 9 vols. Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, www.l.utokyo.ac.jp/2015SSM-PJ/report.html. Kikkawa, Toru and Fujihara, Sho 2012, ‘Class awareness in Japan and the U.S.: Expansion and stability’. Sociological Theory and Methods, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 205–24. J-Stage, www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ojjams/27/2/27_205/_pdf/-char/en. Ministry of Labour, Health and Welfare 2020, Labor Statistics. Ministry of Labour, Health and Welfare, www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-l/index.html. Slater, David H. 2010, ‘The making of Japan’s new working class: “Freeters” and the progression from middle school to the labor market’. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 8, issue 1, no. 1, article 3279, https://apjjf.org/-David-H.-Slater/3279/article.html. SSP Project 2015, partial reports. SSP Project, http://ssp.hus.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/. Thomson, Stéphanie 2016, Think You Know Japan? These 5 Charts Will Make You Think Again. World Economic Forum (3 October), www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/japan-explained-in-data-charts/. 1 The most influential books which take this line are Nakane 1967, 1970, and 1978. 2 Nakane 1970, p. 87. 3 Reischauer 1977, pp. 161–2. 4 Satō 2000. 5 Tachibanaki 2005. 6 Miura 2005. 7 Yamada 2004. 8 Chiavacci 2008. 9 For example, Asahi Shimbun, morning edition (hereafter AM), 8 April 2016, p. 1. 10 Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Question #9.12e. 11 I. Amano 2011. 12 SSM 2015. Ishida and Slater 2011; Hara and Seiyama 2005; and Hashimoto 2003 are based on the 1995 survey. See Kosaka 1994 for a summary of the 1985 survey.

13 Kikkawa 2018; Kikkawa and Hazama 2019. 14 For example, Hashimoto 2003. 15 Hashimoto 2018a, pp. 67–8. 16 Hashimoto 2018a, p. 68. 17 NHK Yoron Chōsabu 1992, pp. 82–3. 18 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019. 19 See Aoki 2006; Gill 2000; and Iwata and Nishizawa 2008 for the life conditions of the underclass, written in English. 20 Hashimoto 2018c, pp. 123–4, based on 2016 survey data of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The scores of other classes were: new middle class – 171.5 centimeters, 68.1 kilograms; working class in general – 170.9 centimeters, 69.7 kilograms; and old middle class – 170.8 centimeters, 69.6 kilograms. 21 Kikkawa 2018; Kikkawa and Hazama 2019. 22 The segments for both male and female middle-aged nongraduates are a bit larger in size than other segments. 23 Kikkawa 2018, pp. 432–3. 24 Kikkawa 2018, pp. 170–1. 25 Maruyama 2019; Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2019b. 26 Tominaga 1979; Murakami 1984a. 27 Hara 2000, p. 31. 28 Hayashi 2012, p. 48. 29 Fujiwara, Itō, and Tanioka 2012. 30 SSM 2005a, 2005b. 31 This section is based on Hayashi 2012. Those with income below ¥2.5 million per year are regarded as the ‘working poor’. Hayashi 2012, p. 46. 32 Fujiwara, Itō, and Tanioka 2012. 33 Imada 1998, pp. 419–22, 434–5. 34 SSM 1995a, vol. 5, pp. 19–25.

35 This is a major theme of Hara and Seiyama 2005. See pp. 164–7 in particular. 36 Nomura Research Institute 2018, pp. 1–4. 37 Shimono and Ishikawa 2002. Household asset holdings comprise anything one owns that has monetary value, including real estate, car, cash, jewelry, furniture, and so on. 38 Hara and Seiyama 2005. 39 For a similar illustration, see Ozawa 1989, p. 177. 40 Kataoka 1992, 1998, 2000. 41 Iso and Takenoshita 2018; Kondō 2011. 42 Shirahase 2008, especially pp. 73–7. 43 Focusing on those active in the labor force, Kikkawa (2018, p. 432) similarly points out that some 70 percent of married couples share the same educational background. 44 Takarajima Henshūbu 2007. 45 AM, 24 October 2017, p. 4. 46 Takarajima Henshūbu 2007, pp. 70–3. 47 See Table 2.3 for the Gini indices of OECD countries in 2015–16. See also Ishida 1993, 2010; Seiyama 1994. 48 In addition to Table 2.3, see Table 2.4, which shows the relative poverty rate of OECD countries in 2016. See also Tachibanaki 1998. 49 Ishida, Goldthorpe, and Erikson 1991. 50 The total index of structural mobility records a consistent upward trend throughout the postwar years. The agricultural population provides the only exception to this propensity, showing a consistent downward trend. The total index arrived at its peak in 1975, reflecting a massive structural transformation which transpired during the so-called high-growth period starting in the mid-1960s. 51 Morioka 2009. 52 Satō 2000. Some experts dispute this thesis. See, for example, Hara and Seiyama 2005, pp. xxiii– xxvi. 53 Befu 1980, p. 34. 54 Odaka 1961.

Chapter 4

Generations and geography: variations in an aging society ◈

I Introduction Contemporary Japan faces a serious dual demographic crisis, with a fast-aging population and a birth rate in rapid decline. As the active labor force diminishes in comparison with the swelling number of retirees, Japan is in the forefront of many advanced economies in confronting this problem, raising the fundamental issue of the redistribution of economic and social resources across different generations. More broadly, age-based variations are stark, with the young, the middle aged and the elderly exhibiting dissimilar attitudes and behaviors. The country is also divided geographically: the Japanese have different lifestyles depending on their place of residence. Their eating habits, type of housing, language, style of thinking, and many other aspects of everyday life hinge upon where they live. This chapter first focuses on the dynamics of an aging society, presenting the most crucial issues in Japan’s demographic change, and then more broadly examines both generational and geographical variations with a view to assessing the ways in which these primary demographic characteristics condition the options and preferences of various Japanese persons.

II A rapidly aging society

1 Prolonged life expectancy In 2017, Japan recorded the highest proportion of aged people in its population of any country in the world, with 27.7 percent at the age of 65 or above compared with 4.9 percent in 1950.1 The average life span in 2017 was 87.3 years for women and 81.1 years for men, the second and third longest in international comparisons respectively.2 The figures were 61.5 and 58.0 respectively in 1950.3 While many Western countries have progressively aging societies, Japan has arrived at this position with startling rapidity. Strikingly, in 2018 the number of persons aged 100 years and over amounted to 70,000, with females constituting 88 percent of this figure, and the number of centenarians nearly doubled in the 2010s.4 The advent of aging society The quickly changing age structure of Japanese society impacts on other spheres of life, including work style, family structure, educational institutions, and overseas migration. While every advanced economy has encountered aging issues, Japan’s case is characterized by an unparalleled rapidity of changes to the age pyramid, a situation for which neither Japan nor any other country had been prepared. As the videos cited below show, Japanese society must navigate uncharted waters, with an unknown destination: Work until You’re 100: Japan’s Incredible Life Expectancy, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl2PU4E3GsI (Journeyman Pictures, 7 September 2016), and The Impact of Japan’s Declining Birthrate, at www.youtube.com/watch? v=L1kFik1BZRo (SBS Dateline, 9 April 2013).

Speculation abounds as to the reasons for the longevity of the Japanese – healthy dietary habits, good medical services, and the dissemination of fitness information among them – though no conclusive evidence is available. At least, most Japanese are free from the challenges posed by obesity, with Japan’s obesity score the lowest among OECD member countries.5

Figure 4.1 Senior citizens jogging together for routine daily exercise The life cycle of the Japanese changed dramatically during the twentieth century. In prewar Japan, the average life expectancy was less than fifty years, and each family produced a number of children.

The size of the average household was a little over 5 persons between 1920 and 1950 but began to decline sharply from around 1955. It was 2.47 in 2017.6 The increasing life expectancy of the Japanese has altered the retirement age of workers and the job market for the aged. The retirement system in Japan started in large firms at around the turn of the nineteenth century and became widespread in small businesses after World War II. It used to set the mandatory retirement age at fifty-five, but with the advent of an aging society, companies were legally required to raise the age to sixty-five before 2013. In reality, many firms have changed internal corporate work rules to enable those over sixty years of age to continue their employment under reduced work arrangements. Many workers find jobs in subsidiary companies or through personal networks and remain employed until their mid-sixties or even into their seventies, with diminished income and shorter working hours.

2 Declining birth rate Japan is among the countries with the lowest birth rates. The number of children born in 2017 was 946,000, the lowest figure ever recorded in Japan.7 The average number of children that a woman bears was 1.43 for that year and remained among the lowest in the industrialized world. This shows a substantial decline from 4.53 in 1947, immediately after World War II. Since the rate needs to be at least 2.07 to maintain the population level, if the trend continues, the population will decline to almost twothirds of that level by about 2065.8 The dwindling birth rate is attributable to the changing attitudes of women towards marriage and family life. There appear to be at least three factors underlying the transformation. First, the availability of childcare facilities is a serious issue. The number of childcare workers is not sufficient to meet the demand, and many children are on childcare centers’ waiting lists. Further, older people, who pursue their own quality of life and are no longer likely to live with their children, tend to have more complex quests for life satisfaction than caring for their grandchildren full-time.9 Second, a growing number of women feel that they cannot afford to raise many children when education costs are an immense burden. Third, women increasingly prefer to marry later, as more and more job opportunities become available to them. In 2016 the average age of women at the time of their first marriage was over twentynine years,10 which contrasted sharply with previous decades, when women tended to marry when they were much younger. In 1950, for instance, women were an average age of twenty-three years when first embarking upon marriage. Consequently, Japan is an aging society with a declining birth rate, facing a diminishing population in the long run. The continuous supply of young, active labor that underpinned the postwar expansion of Japan’s economy no longer exists. Currently, about 2 persons between fifteen and sixty-four years of age support 1 person in the sixty-five and above age bracket, but, if the trend in the twenty-first century continues, the situation is likely to worsen, with the ratio being estimated to shift to 1.5:1 by 2040.11 These demographic realities are posing a heavy burden on both the labor market and the social welfare sector.

3 Pressure on the welfare structure The age pension system in Japan consists of three major programs that cover nearly all pension policyholders. The first of these is the National Pension scheme, to which every adult between twenty and fifty-nine years of age is supposed to belong. It is the most basic layer of Japan’s pension system, to which all workers must contribute during their work life and from which they are paid a pension after retirement. Started in 1961, the scheme was initially intended to look after individuals not covered under any other pension program. It provides a system in which all persons in the workforce, particularly those in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, as well as independent proprietors and their families, can expect to receive pensions. It is compulsory for students aged twenty years or over to join the National Pension scheme. Generally, members of this program start receiving pensions at sixty-five years of age. The second major scheme is the Employees’ Pension Insurance, designed to cover employees after retirement in both the private and the public sectors. Only people who have contributed to a pension insurance program during their working life receive a pension in Japan. Their monthly entitlement after retirement depends upon the sum of their contributions. In addition to these two state-administered pension schemes, private pension programs operate as the third category. Since many find the pension insufficient to cover their cost of living after retirement, some privileged few contribute to additional pension funds during their working lives so as to have a third-level pension income after retirement. Many large corporations have their own enterprise pension schemes, which provide participating employees with handsome sums after retirement in addition to the first-level National Pension and second-level Employees’ Pension Insurance payments. Thus, the lifestyles of elderly Japanese differ substantially depending upon which combination of these three levels of income they receive. If the three pension tiers were imagined to be floor levels in housing, one might say that those with the National Pension can live only in single-story dwellings, while retirees, most of whom belong to the Employees’ Pension Insurance, reside in double-story houses. Public servants who are entitled to a special addition plan and private sector workers who could afford to make additional contributions during their working lives are able to enjoy luxurious three-story houses. Approximately one-third of people made no contributions at all to the National Pension system in 2017,12 either because they could not afford to do so or because they chose to manage personalized funds instead. No doubt the increase of non-regular workers was a major contributing factor. This trend poses a challenge to the long-term viability of the program. To cope with the labor crisis caused by the aging of the workforce, and to bring cheap labor into the job market, the Japanese establishment has been exploring two options. One of these focuses upon women as the chief source of additional labor. The alternative involves using foreign workers to resolve the problem. Although these solutions are not mutually exclusive, the predicament must inevitably force the Japanese leadership to abandon the predominantly male and Japanese-only labor market and to manage the labor system on the basis of a more heterogeneous working population. Chapters 5 and 7 discuss these issues at some length.

III Generational variations The rapidity of change in the Japanese social structure has produced distinct generational subcultural groupings. Different age groups underwent diverse family socialization and educational training. They also encountered varied social and political circumstances in their childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Accordingly, the outlooks of contemporary Japanese differ depending upon whether they experienced in their youth the three fundamental phases of Japan’s recent history. The first of these was World War II and its aftermath, during the 1940s and 1950s; the second was the relative stability and affluence from the 1960s to the 1980s, consequent to the nation’s rapid economic growth; and the third began in the 1990s and continued to the 2010s, marking the unprecedented stagnation and recession of the Japanese economy. In relation to these three stages of recent history, the Japanese can be classified into four generations. The oldest of these is the wartime generation, which comprises those born in or before the 1930s, who grew up before and during the war and who became a tiny minority in the early 2020s due to their age. Despite their small and declining number, this generation provides a benchmark against which the subsequent age groups’ lifestyles and values can be measured. Next is the postwar generation, born between the 1940s and the mid-1950s, whose childhood occurred during the nation’s recovery from postwar devastation and impoverishment through the rapid economic growth of the 1950s and early 1960s. Third is the prosperity generation, born between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, which has no recollection of Japan’s wartime activity or postwar poverty and which grew up during the period when Japan achieved economic prosperity and high status in the international community. Now in their forties, fifties, and even early sixties, many members of this generation occupy leadership positions. Finally, the global generation was born in the early 1980s and thereafter. This generation grew up in a period when the waves of globalization crashed upon Japan’s shores, when the information revolution was in full swing, and when the Japanese economy began showing signs of serious stagnation. The socialization experiences of these four generations reflect the changing patterns of social constraint in the everyday lives of the Japanese. Over the decades, disciplinarian, repressive, and stoic styles of sanctions and control have given way to manipulative and permissive forms. Concurrently, the key elements of generational subculture have shifted away from perseverance, patience, and diligence towards indulgence, relaxation, and leisure. Table 4.1 presents the characteristics of the four generations. Table 4.1 Comparison of four generations born in the twentieth century Generation Characteristic

Wartime

Postwar

Prosperity

Global

Decade of birth

1930s and before

1940s to mid1950s

Mid-1950s to late 1970s

Early 1980s and thereafter

Generation Characteristic

Wartime

Postwar

Prosperity

Global

Approximate age range in 2020

80 or older

65 to 80

40 to 65

40 and younger

General lifestyle aspirations

Premodern

Modern

Postmodern

Global

Experience of postwar hardship

As adolescents

As children

None

None

Employment pattern

Lifetime employment as the norm

Lifetime employment as the norm

Increasing casualization of labor

Widespread casualized labor

School life experience

Breakdown of the wartime value system

Social anarchy, emphasis on democracy and freedom

Growing control and regulation

Both bureaucratization and commercialization

Economic situation at entry into job market

Recovery from war devastation

High-growth economy

‘Bubble economy’

Recession and rising unemployment

Exposure to information revolution in adolescence

No

No

Increasing

Full

Environment of social movements in early adulthood

Rise of labor movements

Rise of citizens’ movements

Rise of environmental and residential movements

Rise of antinuclear movements, NGOs, NPOs, and volunteer groups

Attitude to sexuality

Closed and strict

Relatively open

Permissive

Liberal

Gender equality consciousness

Low

Low

Increasing

Considerable

General political orientation

Unclear

Liberal

Unclear

Conservative

1 The wartime generation Most members of the wartime generation went to school under the prewar and wartime education system, which placed an emphasis upon emperor worship, jingoism, and austerity. Many men in this generation fought in the war and still justify aspects of Japan’s wartime aggression. Others carry feelings of remorse, guilt, and shame for their actions and have committed themselves to pacifism. These experiences provide a yardstick by which one can measure how far ahead Japanese society has forged since the end of the Fifteen Years’ War, discussed in Chapter 1. Most members of the generation began their school life during the war. City pupils in this group were evacuated to the countryside under the supervision of their teachers, grew up separated from their parents, and at the end of the war were still schoolchildren. The wartime generation remembers how penurious the whole country was during and immediately after the war. Some experienced food shortages, even acute hunger, and shortages of cloth and other basic daily necessities. Others recall the days when people burned wood to cook rice and heat baths, warmed their hands and rooms in winter with charcoal braziers, and used newspapers as toilet paper. Members of this generation witnessed – and were themselves the engine of – the spectacular transformation of Japanese life into a situation in which satiation, the oversupply of automobiles, and the overconsumption of paper posed national problems. Those of the wartime generation were children during the most turbulent years of change of the past century. In their elementary- and middle-school years they witnessed the breakdown of their value system and remember a time when their teachers, who previously had preached imperialistic, militaristic, and totalitarian values, suddenly began to lecture on the importance of democracy, equality, and freedom.13 The youngest members of the wartime generation comprise those who were born in 1939 and commenced their elementary schooling in April 1946 as the first batch of pupils to receive postwar education without exposure to wartime state propaganda.

Memories of the wartime generation Older generations often hold alumni reunions after retirement as they have much free time and enjoy looking back on their school days with nostalgia. At one of those gatherings, an anonymous group of members of the wartime generation recalled the final moments of World War II, as follows. Haruko’s memory is all about hunger during the war. Food shortage forced her family and their neighbors to eat dried orange peels, sweet potato vines, and other things not edible under normal circumstances. She recalls how excited she and her brothers and sisters were when her father came back from the battlefield and gave them a small bag of spiky sugar candy balls, which tasted so sweet. Yukio vividly remembers the moments his family spent in the underground air-raid shelter his father had built in their garden. He recollects that he wore a velveteen hood and often sat inside the dark shelter for a few hours at a time holding his brother’s hand until the American bombers disappeared from the sky.

Figure 4.2 Adults and children in an air-raid shelter, 1943 Sachiko was a returnee from Manchuria, in northeast China, under the Japanese puppet government. Many Japanese, like her family, had emigrated there in the hope of establishing an ideal society, spurred by wartime government propaganda. With her family, she traveled a long distance in packed trains on the Chinese continent and the Korean Peninsula to return home. She remembers that, as her Japanese accent differed from those of her new classmates in Japan, she had to adjust to the new environment. Takeo’s distinct memory concerns the first school classes held in September 1945 when teachers who had lectured on emperor worship, Japanese superiority, and the military ethos made an about-face and started to teach the importance of liberal ideas and democratic practices. He clearly recalls his teacher instructing pupils to blot out belligerent and nationalistic sentences in their textbooks.

Compare these experiences with the stories you have heard about your relatives in their childhood in the final days of the last world war.

2 The postwar generation The postwar generation has experienced a contradictory existence, both critical and obedient, defiant and submissive. The most conspicuous members in this generation were born in the so-called baby boom period of the late 1940s. They faced intense competition at all stages of their lives – entrance examinations to schools and universities, job applications, and promotions – because of sheer numbers. The media have popularized the phrase dankai no sedai (clod and lump generation) to describe the great size of this group.14 Following the social anarchy that prevailed immediately after the war, this generation was brought up in a milieu of reaction, when school life began to show signs of increasing rigidity and control. The postwar generation grew up in an environment in which every traditional value was questioned, liberal values were encouraged, and democratic principles were inspired. When members of this generation reached their late teens and early twenties, they spearheaded the nationwide protests against ratification of the security treaty between Japan and the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s and the social movements against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The baby boomers also led campus protests around the country which challenged all forms of academic and cultural authority. When the tide of these movements subsided, however, most of the activists became company employees and public bureaucrats seeking to climb the occupational ladder, with some turning into ‘corporate soldiers’ devoted to the dictates of their firms. With regard to their internal value system, those of the postwar generation are skeptical of collective dedication to organizational norms and bureaucratic mandates. In their actual behavior, however, they have inherited the style of the wartime generation and worked hard as ‘working ants’, ‘workaholics’, and ‘economic animals’ who toiled for their organizations at the cost of personal pursuits. This discrepancy is perhaps partly attributable to a variety of powerful sanctions imposed upon individual employees against lazy work styles. As delineated in Chapter 5, employers and managers tightened control over workers under devastated conditions in the postwar years. Employees also had strong incentives to work hard, because Japan’s economy could provide tangible rewards in return for their toil during the high-growth period until the early 1970s and during the so-called bubble economy period in the 1980s. The political consciousness of the postwar generation appears to have been awakened when the explosion of the nuclear plant in Fukushima, following the Great East Japan Earthquake, in March 2011, gave rise to waves of antinuclear protests across the nation. Many of this generation came out of their lives of retirement and played important roles in organizing and keeping alive street demonstrations against the dangers of nuclear contamination, a spectacle to be discussed in Chapter 12.

3 The prosperity generation The Japanese economy recovered fully in the 1960s from wartime and postwar destruction, bringing new affluence to the young. The prosperity generation that emerged in this economic environment has become increasingly open in expressing self-interest and defending private life. This generation has been brought up in the context of three trends resulting from Japanese economic success: information revolution, consumerism, and postmodern value orientation. First, the prosperity generation grew up in the beginning phase of the information revolution. The Japanese now live in a highly advanced information environment, which is dominated by such commodities as smartphones, vending machines for food and tickets, satellite and cable television networks, digital audio and video streaming, personal computers, the internet, and emails. With Japanese electronics and information technology companies dominating international and domestic markets, the lifestyle of the Japanese was increasingly automated, their social relations being influenced by electronic media and their mass culture being presented through the medium of electronic devices. As high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive industries have come to occupy a central position in Japan, the prosperity generation has taken for granted the constitution of incessant innovations in the information environment as part and parcel of their daily reality. They diversify their approach to media. Social media play a major role in the lives of this generation as a means of acquiring news and assessing social issues. They have not abandoned print media in general but devote attention to a wide range of information sources, including the internet.15 Second, the prosperity generation matured after Japanese society underwent a fundamental change of economic motivation, from production orientation to consumerism. Sociological analysts maintain that what drives affluent Japanese is not the deprivation motive of people who work to free themselves from economic hardship but the difference motive, which prompts them to purchase luxury goods and services that give them a sense of being different from other people.16 In this respect, Japan has attained a level beyond the stage of development in which consumer conformism dominated. In post-postwar Japan, arguably, consumer preference is diversified, and the distribution market is segmented in such a way that a wide range of individual consumer demands can be met. The consumer conformity of industrial Japan has been transformed into consumer diversity in postindustrial Japan. The third trend of the prosperity generation’s subculture is said to characterize postmodern societies and concerns a decline in both progress orientation and political radicalism. Unlike older generations, the prosperity generation is not interested in pursuing knowledge for the progress of society or in succeeding in the corporate world. Nor is it interested in organizing a revolutionary movement to fight the injustice of the existing order. For this generation, the dominant themes are playfulness,

gaming,

escape,

tentativeness,

anarchy,

and

‘schizophrenic

differentiation’

in

contradistinction to the rigidity, calculation, loyalty, fixity, hierarchy, and ‘paranoic integration of modern society’.17 Members of the prosperity generation show a marked departure from the work ethic of preceding generations, the cornerstone of Japan’s economic ‘miracle’. Far from being loyal to corporate imperatives, those who belong to this generation are willing to change from one job to another. In their

youth, they could afford to have little interest in organization-man careers in large corporations and chose to work for firms only if they provided good salaries and sufficiently long paid holidays. Some members of this generation enjoyed being free casuals, working at a specified task for a short period, moving from one temporary job to another with no clear direction in life and with a strong sense of tentativeness and uncertainty. Their primary aim was to lead a playful life (traveling abroad, mountain climbing, enjoying marine sports, and so forth) after saving a certain amount of money. The prosperity generation was popularly characterized as the shin jinrui (new race), which has qualitatively different values from the old, or as the ‘moratorium generation’, which hesitates to make long-term decisions or life plans. Becoming middle aged and entering the late phase of their occupational life in the 2020s, however, members of the prosperity generation have family responsibilities and cannot enjoy the kinds of lifestyles that they used to relish in their youth. Compared with those in younger age groups, they spend the largest amount of time working and commuting and have the least amount of leisure time.18 Yet, their priority is not devotion to the company but open pursuit of their individual self-interest: some are attracted to the performance-based workplace model, while others see work as a way to facilitate a funloving existence outside the world of production and service. Some of this generation continue to enjoy manga even in their middle age and to sustain the playful visual culture that pervaded their childhood and adolescence. These tendencies are further enhanced in the cohort that follows the prosperity generation.

4 The global generation Japan’s global generation has inherited and retained many characteristics of the prosperity generation, sharpening and expanding them in five key areas. First, members of the global generation grew up after the information revolution had begun and Japan’s economy had been integrated into the global market. Hence, they take it for granted that their everyday lives are connected with those of others in different parts of the world. Some have traveled extensively overseas, often while still only teenagers. Since their adolescence, they have made it a daily routine to send and receive information via the internet and mobile phones and to watch cable television. This has resulted in a decline in the sense of geographical distance and an increase in acceptance and appreciation of the notion of a borderless world. Activist elements within this generation constitute the backbone of Japan’s overseas activities with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Second, this generation does not have a coherent and dominant narrative that governs its values. Its members grew up during and after the collapse of international socialism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and the mass murder committed with the release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway line in 1995 by believers in the Aum cult (regrouped and renamed as Aleph in 2000). These two dramatic events marked the end of ideals for political progressivism and spiritual reformism and created a vacuum for firm belief and fervent conviction. To fill the void, the global generation increasingly lives in the virtual world, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred. Some become sexually aroused by the fabricated characters and images created on the virtual plane. Others find satisfaction not in socializing with people in the flesh but in interacting with purely fictitious, adorable, life-sized figures. Still others see the world from the perspective of computer games as parallel internet database configurations with real-life social structures, regarding internet-based interactions as more real than reality. These attributes are most fully embodied in the otaku groups of this generation, whose members are obsessed with internet products, both virtual and physical, as detailed in Chapter 11. Third, with a high proportion of casual employees becoming a regular feature of the Japanese workforce, the global generation is pessimistic about the job market. This contrasts starkly with the older generations, whose boundless optimism was based on what then seemed a reasonable expectation that the economy would continue to expand and that every prospective worker would be employed. Those now in their twenties and thirties see themselves as belonging to a ‘disposable generation’ and the ‘lost generation’,19 because many companies are no longer able or willing to guarantee their job security into the future. Although some of them have abandoned any hope of establishing a career within the corporate structure, they find gratification in pursuing independent lives of self-actualization. Some move from one enterprise to another without expecting or displaying corporate loyalty, others attempt to establish small-scale businesses, and still others work as casuals in the job market in order to support their own hobbies and pastimes.20 Fourth, as a product of small families and bureaucratized schools, the global generation is one of internal privacy and external caution. Its members are inclined to draw a line of autonomy and isolation around themselves and are sensitive to the intrusion of outsiders into their personal lives. Born in the period of the declining birth rate and raised with no or few siblings, many of this generation are used to

intensive parental attention and protection and to having their own private room, their own autonomous space. Meanwhile, having received a much more structured, controlled, and commercialized education than preceding generations, they tend to be carefully conformist in face-to-face situations and fail to openly express opposing views. Finally, on the whole, this generation is politically conservative but socially progressive. The ruling LDP attracts support from young voters who appear inclined to stick to the status quo for fear of losing what they have. In contrast, they are generally more open-minded and oriented towards progressive social values than older generations – for instance, in support of gender equality and freedom to choose sexual preferences.21 Casual observations suggest that men of this generation are more helpful and participatory in child-rearing and family chores than those of older generations. Young generation’s choices The bleak employment situation has encouraged many young people to delay their marriage plans and to remain at home with their parents as ‘parasite singles’,22 with a consequent increase in the degree of sexual liberalism. Many prefer to have no or few children, a factor which will contribute to the eventual population decline in Japan. What are the reasons for their choices? Based on casual interviews on the streets, the videos cited below give voice to the opinions of young women and men who talk about sex in today’s society and their concerns, reservations, and disincentives regarding having children: Is Japan Really Sexless?, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9qujIImY6M (Asian Boss, 26 December 2016), and Sexless in Japan, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHePoMNeWo8 (BBC News, 9 July 2017).

The wartime and postwar generations followed the traditional principle of placing the public good before self-interest. With the emergence of the prosperity and global generations came the advent of what a perceptive observer has termed the ‘neglect of the public and indulgence of the self’.23 Table 4.2 shows the changing value orientations of the Japanese at different points in time. It indicates an almost unidirectional trend in which an increasing proportion of Japanese prioritize private interests and individual comfort over public commitments, such as propriety and civic spirit. Despite this change, the work ethic and wealth orientation have fluctuated only slightly and remain more or less constant. Table 4.2 ‘Which is the most congenial lifestyle?’ Survey responses (%), 1930–2013 Year Lifestyle

1930

1940

1953

1958

1963

1968

1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

2

Year Lifestyle

1930

1940

1953

1958

1963

1968

1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

Interests: to do what you find interesting, regardless of money or honor

12

5

21

27

30

32

39

39

38

41

40

41

Comfort: to lead an easy life in a happygo-lucky fashion

4

1

11

18

19

20

23

22

23

23

26

23

Wealth: to work hard and make money

19

9

15

17

17

17

14

15

18

15

17

15

Propriety: to lead a pure and upright life, resisting the injustices of the world

33

41

29

23

18

17

11

11

9

9

6

8

Civic spirit: to live a life devoted entirely to society without thought of self

24

30

10

6

6

6

5

7

5

4

4

4

2

Year Lifestyle Honor: to study seriously and establish a reputation

1930

1940

1953

1958

1963

1968

1973

1978

1983

1988

1993

1998

9

5

6

3

4

3

3

2

2

3

3

3

Source: Adapted from Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Question #2.4; Hidaka 1984, p. 66. Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who chose each lifestyle in the survey year. Other answers and ‘do not know’ responses were permitted; therefore, the total for each year may not equal 100 percent.

2

IV Geographical variations

1 Japan as a conglomerate of subnations A total of about 127 million people live in the 378,000 square kilometers of the Japanese archipelago. In terms of territorial size, Japan is larger than Great Britain, similar in size to Germany, and considerably smaller than France and Italy. But being mountainous, with only about one-third of its land habitable, Japan is more densely populated than any of those countries.24 Not surprisingly, the strain of population density affects the lifestyles of the Japanese. In their crowded environment, urban dwellers in Japan learn early in life how to cope with the pressure of many people living in limited space. On railway station platforms in urban centers, passengers line up in two or three rows in an orderly manner. During rush hours, Tokyo subways and railways use ‘pushers’ to push workers into overpacked trains. Drivers and pedestrians struggle to make their way along the narrow city streets. Most city dwellers live in small houses, tiny condominiums, or meager apartments, a situation that is for them the source of widespread dissatisfaction. Although the housing and furnishing qualities have greatly improved since the late twentieth century and are generally better than those in other Asian countries, many city inhabitants justifiably feel that their houses are not commensurate with the nation’s status as an economic superpower. The Japanese archipelago comprises four major islands. The largest, Honshū, which stretches from Aomori prefecture in the north to Yamaguchi prefecture in the southwest, has the principal metropolitan centers. The four largest Japanese cities – Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya – are all on this island, as are other well-known cities such as Kyoto, Kobe, and Hiroshima. Hokkaidō, the secondlargest island, lies in the north and has the lowest population density. Traditionally the territory of the Ainu, the indigenous Japanese (discussed further in Chapter 8), this island came under the full jurisdiction of the Japanese government only in 1869. For centuries, the Ainu had not considered themselves to belong to the Japanese nation. In northern Honshū and southern Hokkaidō, an autonomous area long existed in which the Ainu and the Honshū islanders enjoyed unique lifestyles based on interactions between the two groups. In the southwest is Kyūshū island, which used to serve as the corridor of contact with the Korean Peninsula, the Asian continent, and the southern Pacific islands. Shikoku, the smallest of the four major islands, has been closely connected with the KyotoOsaka-Kobe nexus in the western region of Honshū and served as its hinterland for centuries. The archipelago’s climate differs greatly from region to region. While southernmost Okinawa is semitropical, northernmost Hokkaidō is snow covered in winter and cool even in summer. In addition, Japan has nearly 7,000 small isles. The Ryūkyū Islands, in the southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, maintain a distinctive regional culture. Near Hokkaidō, a group of islands under Russian occupation – Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu – has been subject to territorial dispute between Japan and Russia for decades. The Sea of Japan is studded with such sizeable isles as Okushiri, Sado, Iki, and Tsushima. The Seto Inland Sea area, between Honshū and Shikoku, is also dotted with numerous tiny isles and the sizeable island of Awaji. Even Tokyo comprises not only urban centers and suburban communities but also many small inhabited islands in the Pacific, including Ōshima, Toshima, Niijima, Shikinejima, Kōzushima, Aogashima, Miyakejima, Mikurashima, Hachijōjima (shima, and its variant jima, being the word for ‘island’), and the group of Ogasawara Islands (Bonin Islands). The total number of people who live outside the four major islands is close to 2 million.

Although numerically few, these islanders maintain lifestyles that are dominated by the marine environment, a reminder that the population of the nation’s rural areas is by no means restricted to ricegrowing farmers. Japan is conventionally divided into eight regional blocs according to climatic, geographical, and cultural differences. These are Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, Kantō, Chūbu, Kansai, Chūgoku, Shikoku, and Kyūshū. The nation is divided into forty-seven prefectures, the largest government units below the national level. Within each prefecture are numerous municipalities – cities, towns, and villages – which form local governmental units, each with a government office and a legislative body. Prefectures were first established in 1871, corresponding to several dozen regional units called kuni (nations) which had existed for more than ten centuries. Throughout Japanese history, these subnations were sources of regional identity and local distinctiveness. Even today in major cities there exist kenjin-kai (prefectural associations) organized by emigrants from each prefecture who wish to maintain social ties among themselves. Takao Sofue finds it profitable to examine kenmin-sei (prefectural character) rather than Japanese national character.25 He maintains, for example, that people in Kyūshū and Shikoku are generally stubborn, authoritarian, and uncompromising. Residents of Kyoto are regarded as schizophrenic in their tendency to stick to traditional norms while introducing radical reforms. Inhabitants in Hokkaidō are said to enjoy relaxed lifestyles, take an open-minded attitude towards outsiders, and have a sense of independence from other areas of the nation. Although these descriptions may be speculative, impressionistic, and stereotypical, the point remains that the prefectural character types are so diverse, and often so contradictory, that one can hardly speak of the national character of the Japanese as though it were cast from a single mold. As discussed in Chapter 1, throughout Japanese history, several geographical blocs, which formed almost nations in themselves,26 competed with each other, based on different traditions, practices and customs. In the economic sphere, each locality in Japan has jiba sangyō, unique local industries which use local resources and merchandise their products nationally or even internationally. These commodities range from ceramic ware, handicrafts, and special produce to luxury cloths. Many of these goods have a history of several centuries. Yūzen-zome, silk kimonos printed with gorgeous colorful patterns, have long been known as Kyoto’s refined local product, manufactured with sophisticated dyeing techniques developed in the seventeenth century. Hakata textiles from northern Kyūshū, which originated in the thirteenth century, made much progress during the feudal period. Other well-known examples of local industries with long histories include Arita ware from Saga, Aizu lacquerware from Fukushima, fabrics from Amami Ōshima island, and family Buddhist altars from Kyoto. Many regions produce unique kinds of sake rice wines (jizake) which are marketed across the nation. Small scale but often innovative in product marketing, jiba sangyō enterprises have survived the challenges by megacorporations based in Tokyo and other major metropolitan centers and have established themselves as the bastions of their regional economies. Popular culture is regionally diversified. Local folk songs called min’yō are distinctively provincial in their contents and tunes, which have developed over time. Among the best known nationally, ‘Tankōbushi’ (Coal-miners’ song) originated in the coal-mining region of Fukuoka prefecture, in northern Kyūshū. Another, ‘Yasugi-bushi’, is a song from Shimane prefecture, on the coast of the Sea of Japan; it

is accompanied by the loach-scooping dance, which imitates the scooping-up of iron-rich sand in the area. A type of song called oiwake derives from travelers’ chants in Nagano and Niigata prefectures, in north-central Japan. In the Ryūkyū Islands, at the southern end of the Japanese archipelago, folk songs accompanied by the long lute called the jabisen have a special scale structure. Northern Japan abounds with such unique regional songs as the obako of Akita prefecture and the okesa of Niigata prefecture. Traditional local festivals are also rich in regional variation, with sharp differences between village and city areas. In rural communities, festivals are generally linked with agricultural rites held in connection with spring seeding and fall harvesting and are oriented to the communion between gods and humans. In urban localities, festivals take place mostly in summer and emphasize human bonding (see Chapters 10 and 11). Grassroots sports culture also appears to differ regionally. Traditional sumo wrestling is popular in relatively peripheral areas, such as Tōhoku, Hokkaidō, and Kyūshū regions, which produce the toprated wrestlers. In contrast, most well-known baseball players come from more urban districts, such as the Kantō, Tōkai, Kansai, and Seto Inland Sea areas. Most teams that win the National High School Baseball Championship also come from these districts, reflecting the popularity there of baseball at the community level.27 Regional differences in popular food cultures are obvious to long-distance train travelers. Ekiben, boxed lunches that are sold at stations or on trains, contain a variety of foods from land and sea, reflecting the distinct tastes particular to each locality. Japanized Chinese ramen noodles have different local styles and flavors, ranging from Sapporo ramen in Hokkaidō to Hakata ramen in Kyūshū. These geographic variations in Japanese society have crystallized into two major dichotomies: competition between eastern and western Japan, and domination of the center over the periphery.

2 Eastern versus western Japan Distinct regional variations are observable between the east and the west. The cultural styles of residents in eastern Japan, especially the Kantō region, are distinctively different from those in western Japan, particularly the Kansai area.28 During the feudal period, Edo (present-day Tokyo and the heart of eastern regional culture) was the seat of samurai regimes, and Osaka (the hub of western regional culture) was the center of commercial activities. The vestiges of their different pasts are still pervasive. Comparatively, Tokyo maintains a warrior-style local culture with the marks of formality, hierarchy, and face-saving, while Osaka retains a merchant lifestyle with an emphasis on practicality, informality, and pragmatism. Community studies suggest that such contrast corresponds to the traditional village structures in feudal and premodern Japan: vertical authoritarian relationships between landlords and tenants prevailed in eastern Japan, while horizontal egalitarian networks among rural households were stronger in western Japan.29 On the whole, family and kinship structures were more patriarchal and less democratic in the eastern region than in the western region. Comparatively, the status of women was higher in western Japan than in eastern Japan. Each household had a higher degree of independence in the village community in the west than in the east. These and other differences in village structures between eastern and western Japan are displayed in Table 4.3. Some analysts suggest that the widely held view that Japan is a ‘vertically structured society’30 derives more from observations of eastern Japan than from those of western Japan, which is more horizontally organized.31 Table 4.3 Comparison of village structures in eastern and western Japan Characteristic

East

West

Relationships within households

Vertical

Horizontal

Relationship of branch family to parent family

Subordinate

Independent

Inheritance

First son (or first daughter)

First son (or last son)

Retirement of house head

Absent

Present

Rank difference between first son and other sons

Strong

Weak

Relationships among relatives

Patriarchal

Matriarchal

Status of bride

Low

High

Control of hamlet community over households

Strong

Weak

Family lineage

Broadly defined kinship groups

Direct lineal descendants

Source: Adapted from Izumi and Gamō 1952, Table 21. The regional distributions of minority groups display a distinct pattern. Nearly 80 percent of the burakumin population is concentrated in the western region.32 Specifically, the Kansai district (Hyōgo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Wakayama, and Mie prefectures in particular), the Chūgoku area (Okayama and Hiroshima), the Shikoku region (Kōchi and Ehime), and Fukuoka prefecture all have large urban buraku communities. In eastern Japan, buraku communities are generally small and scattered in agricultural and mountain villages. This distribution reflects the historical background. Western Japan differed from eastern Japan in its attitude to animal slaughter. In the east, where hunting and fishing played significant roles, the killing of animals and fish was accepted as a routine part of life. In the west, where farming was more important, there developed a tradition in which blood-related trades and activities were held in abhorrence.33 This historical divergence sheds some light on the comparative abundance of discriminated-against buraku communities in the western region and their relative absence in the eastern region in modern Japan. Zainichi Koreans are also more concentrated in the western region than in the eastern areas, though major eastern cities such as Tokyo and Yokohama have large numbers. Osaka is the population center of zainichi Koreans, with about a quarter of them residing in this prefecture. Other areas of concentration include Hyōgo, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima prefectures. This geographical distribution reflects the fact that Koreans migrated, or were taken, to Japan during the colonial period as cheap labor to work for the construction, mining, and shipbuilding industries, which flourished during the prewar and war years in western Japan. The two regions differ even in food taste. While Tokyoites use heavily colored, strong soy sauce, Kansai residents prefer a lighter colored and weaker one. Soba noodles in Tokyo are generally saltier than udon noodles in Osaka. In addition, traditional methods of pain relief and alleviation of stiffness are more popular in the west than in the east. On a per capita basis, prefectures in western Japan have larger numbers of acupuncturists, masseurs, and moxa treatment specialists.34 The Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe district, which used to form the core of the ancient Kinai area (see Chapter 1), stands as a focal point in sharp contrast with Tokyo. While the status of western Japan declined in the postwar years, the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe complex remains the most vibrant counterpoint to the dominance of Tokyo in contemporary Japan. As Kyoto, the capital of the nation until 1868, was the site of political and cultural struggles for centuries, the inter-personal relationships of Kyoto inhabitants are based upon the principles of nonintervention, partial commitment, and mutual freedom, rather than upon total loyalty and obligation.35 Arguing that Kyoto developed a more refined and modern style of group dynamics than Tokyo, some Kyotoite observers contend that Japan is divided into two areas – Kyoto and the rest – the latter of which both adores and hates the former. In this view, Tokyo is simply a local city which embodies the deep-seated inferiority complex of all non-Kyoto areas in relation to the supposed hub of Japanese cultural refinement.36 The residents of Osaka, a long-standing commercial center of the nation in the past, also represent a countervailing force against Tokyo. Many businesses were first established in Osaka. For example, a variety of distribution franchises originated in that city and spread across the nation. They include

department stores attached to private railway terminals, public and private retail markets, consumers’ cooperatives, and supermarkets. Some major media organizations also began in the Kansai area. These include, originally from Osaka, three of the five national daily newspapers, Asahi, Mainichi, and Sankei, and the nation’s first commercial radio station, Shin-Nippon Hōsō, which commenced broadcasting in 1951. Osaka is also the breeding ground of popular culture. On national television, comedians who speak the Osaka dialect dominate entertainment programs. Manzai, dialogue shows in which two comedians exchange a series of uproarious jokes, are a form of entertainment in which performers from Osaka overshadow those from Tokyo. Yoshimoto Kōgyō, the entertainment production house which established itself in the 1910s in Osaka, has continued to produce the nation’s most popular comedians, who have introduced a fresh current into this hilarious comic genre. In addition, karaoke, which spread across the nation and became popular overseas, started in Kobe.

3 Center versus periphery The other geographic variations exist between the center and the periphery. Economic, political, and cultural power concentrates in the industrial belt that stretches along the Pacific coast linking three key metropolitan areas. Between the first two of these – Tokyo-Yokohama and Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, the two major centers of the nation – are both a long-standing competition and the third center, Chūkyō, whose focus is the city of Nagoya. The world-famous Shinkansen (bullet-train line) commenced operation along this coastal route in 1964, consolidating the region’s position as the nucleus of Japan’s economic development. Half of Japan’s population resides in these three urban centers, but one should remember that the other half lives in the peripheries, which depend very much upon the activities of the core. The process of population concentration was expedited by the national bureaucracy, which sought to make Tokyo the center of centers. Under ministerial instructions, each industrial sector established its national headquarters in the capital. Numerous industrial associations mushroomed in Tokyo, ranging from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation. Other professional groups, such as the Japan Medical Association and the Japan Writers’ Association, also operate in the capital. High-ranking officials of the national bureaucracy are given executive positions in these industrial and professional federations after their careers in the public sector. With the intention that governmental programs and policies should be transmitted from these national associations to every member firm in Japan, the national bureaucracy succeeded in establishing a governmentcontrolled, Tokyo-centered industrial hierarchy. Large companies which previously had their headquarters in Osaka gradually shifted them to Tokyo, thereby accelerating the concentration of economic power in the capital. Demographically, some 35 million people, or more than a quarter of the national population, reside in Tokyo and three surrounding prefectures, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba. Yokohama, the prefectural capital of Kanagawa, has a population greater than Osaka’s and has become the second most populous city in Japan. Individuals move to these centers mainly because they provide more job opportunities, higher incomes, and more entertainment venues. As people continuously migrate into Tokyo with such motives, the capital has become the largest megalopolis in Japan, with accompanying functions and dysfunctions. On the positive side, the concentration of offices, firms, and stores makes communication between institutions less costly and time-consuming and promotes efficiency in interorganizational networking and coordination. For corporate negotiations, businesspeople from various companies can call meetings without needing to travel far. Government officials and company managers can meet faceto-face at short notice. However, administrative productivity and efficiency of these kinds are accompanied by negative effects on individual life: poor housing conditions, a congested environment, and extended commuting time. The weekday commuting time of the average employee in the Tokyo metropolitan area, for instance, amounts to one hour and forty-five minutes, with many traveling more than two hours each way.37 Although Japanese industrialization from the middle of the nineteenth century consistently absorbed the rural population into city areas, the high-growth economy from the 1960s onwards accelerated the tempo of urbanization, giving rise to extreme population congestion in some urban

centers and depopulation in some rural villages. Japan’s complications lie not so much in the ratio of the total population to the amount of habitable land as in the skewed demographic distribution across regions. Extremely depopulated areas, called kasochi, are dotted in the regions outside the Shinkansen belt, running from Tokyo through Nagoya and Osaka to Fukuoka. Residents in kasochi are alienated both economically and culturally. With youngsters leaving their villages for work in cities, older people find it difficult to sustain the agricultural, forestry, and fishery economies of those areas. With the liberalization of the agricultural market, the farming population has gradually lost government protection and competitive morale. Negative images of agricultural work make it difficult for young male farmers to attract spouses; an increasing number of them resort to arranged marriages with women from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries. More strikingly, at the end of the 2010s, the owners of some 4.1 million hectares of land – an area larger than Kyūshū – were unknown, because they had not officially registered their ownership.38 Many owners of forests, tracts of agricultural land, and premises mainly in depopulated areas do not bother to declare their possession formally, because their properties are of limited value as a result of the declining population in rural districts and land inheritance registration is not mandatory; in addition, some inheritors want to avoid paying inheritance tax. Furthermore, 8.49 million houses are unoccupied throughout Japan.39 Their owners find little merit in selling or leasing them, as they cannot expect good returns in a market with a diminishing population. At the national level, a series of legal measures has been introduced to promote public works projects such as road construction and resort development in the depopulated areas to stem the tide of rural emigration. At the provincial level, such localities have taken initiatives to organize the so-called mura okoshi (village revitalization movement) to develop agricultural products unique to each village, form networks for their nationwide distribution, and organize events and resorts attractive to city dwellers. In terms of per capita kenmin-shotoku (prefectural income), Tokyo tops the list every year, while peripheral prefectures score the lowest.40 On the whole, however, residents in peripheral areas enjoy a higher quality of life in many ways: they live in more spacious houses, commute to work in less time, and dwell in a more natural environment with fresher air and more trees. In these peripheral areas, goods are also cheaper, and residents enjoy more free time. These are among the factors which have attracted some former emigrants back to their home towns and villages, the so-called U-turn phenomenon that has been in motion since the 1980s.

4 Ideological centralization The concentration of the information industry in Tokyo lessens the visibility of the extensive regional diversity of Japanese society. In the world of electronic media, both the public broadcaster NHK and commercial television networks broadcast an overwhelming majority of programs from Tokyo, transmitting them through local stations. Throughout Japan, most commercial television stations are associated with one of the five key stations in Tokyo and relay the programs made in the capital. Very few locally produced programs have a chance of being broadcast nationally. In the print media, five major national dailies have a total circulation amounting to some 20 million, and most pages of national dailies are edited in Tokyo. Thus, the Japanese public is constantly fed views of the world and the nation that are constructed, interpreted, and edited in Tokyo. Outside the capital, local situations draw attention only as sensational news stories or as provincial items satisfying the exotic curiosity of the Tokyo media establishment. Such reality obscures extensive dialect variations across regions. A person from Iwate prefecture (one of the northernmost areas of Honshū island) would not be able to communicate with someone from Okinawa prefecture (the southernmost district of the nation) if they spoke in their respective dialects. The most distinctive language differentiation is observable between the Ryūkyū dialect in Okinawa and the dialects in the rest of Japan, with the latter further divided broadly into the eastern type and the western type with regard to both accent and vocabulary. These two types are split into more than a dozen subtypes. In the face of such linguistic diversity, the national authorities have long attempted to take control of Japanese ‘language correctness’. Since the Meiji years, the government has tried to create a standardized Japanese language (hyōjun-go) modeled on the dialect used by middle-class Japanese in Tokyo. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the curriculum set by the Ministry of Education dictated that school pupils should be taught to speak ‘standard Japanese’. Dialects of the periphery were often disparaged. For example, the dialect spoken in the Tōhoku district was regarded as rustic, and some schools in the region went so far as to force pupils to speak ‘standard Japanese’ and to avoid using the Tōhoku dialect at school. In some schools, pupils who spoke in their local dialect were forced to wear a ‘dialect card’ as a form of punishment, a practice that prevailed markedly in Okinawa and Kyūshū. Though such custom was abolished in postwar years, ‘standard Japanese’ has been promoted by radio, television, and other mass media and established as the correct language, now called kyōtsū-go (common Japanese). Thus, the dominance of the Tokyo subculture in media and language often veils the reality of regional-language diversity in Japan. The notable exception is the Kansai dialect. The residents of the Kansai region, especially those of Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, do not hesitate to speak openly and publicly in their own language and accent, and Kansai is the only language region which challenges the monopoly of the Tokyo dialect in the electronic media. It can be argued that those who live outside the Tokyo metropolitan area live a richer, dual linguistic life. They hear the dialect of middle-class Tokyoites through radio and television while speaking their

own dialects among themselves. Those raised outside the Tokyo region – the majority of Japanese – are thus bidialectal, being competent in both kyōtsū-go and their own dialects. In socio-geographic terms, Japanese society can perhaps be seen as subject to both the forces of centralization and the persistence of decentralized cultural order. Although there is little doubt that the ruling power of Tokyo has homogenized the nation, distinctive local cultural configurations have also endured. In many ways, this tug-of-war between the centralizing and decentralizing dynamics ends up frustrating the domestic process of convergence of practices and values across regions. In this respect, Japanese society appears to be neither peculiar nor exceptional among advanced capitalist societies.

V Conclusion This chapter has examined generational and regional variations in Japanese society. In combining these two dimensions, it may be useful to visualize two Japanese: a retired farmer in a village in eastern Japan and a young casual worker in the city of Osaka, the center of western Japan. With a matrix of demographic variables – in this case, area and age – affecting their life patterns, it is only natural for their value orientations and behavioral patterns to display many differences. While swiftly urbanized geographically, Japanese society has also been rapidly aging, with the velocity of change unprecedented worldwide. The subsequent chapters scrutinize the spread of cultural diversity and class competition in various aspects of Japanese society under heavy demographic pressure.

Research questions 1. In what ways are peripheral rural regions in Japan exploited by its central metropolitan areas? 2. How are the residents of the Tokyo metropolitan area disadvantaged in comparison with the inhabitants of other areas? 3. Compare Japan with a country of your choice in terms of how the different generations in each are defined and conflict with each other. 4. In what ways is the Japanese eldercare system advanced, and in what ways is it underdeveloped? 5. If you were a policymaker in Japan, what kinds of programs would you implement in order to counter the nation’s demographic crisis?

Further readings Brumann, Christoph and Schultz, Evelyn (eds) 2012, Urban Spaces in Japan: Cultural and Social Perspectives. London: Routledge. Coulman, Florian 2007, Population Decline and Ageing in Japan: The Social Consequence. London: Routledge. Holthus, Barbara and Manzenreiter, Wolfram (eds) 2017, Life Course, Happiness and Well-Being in Japan. London: Routledge. Jou, Willy and Endo, Masahisa 2016, Generational Gap in Japanese Politics: A Longitudinal Study of Political Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Online resources Austin 2014, Kansai vs. Kantō: Can’t We All Just Get Along?. Tofugu (19 February), www.tofugu.com/japan/kansai-vs-kanto/. Heinrich, Amy Vladeck 2020, Japan’s Geography. Asia for Educators, Columbia University, http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/japan/japanworkbook/geography/japgeo.html. Japan Brandvoice 2018, Why Japan’s Aging Population Is an Investment Opportunity. Forbes (12 November), www.forbes.com/sites/japan/2018/11/12/why-japans-aging-population-is-an-investmentopportunity/#2e23f600288d. Nakagawa, Masataka 2019, Japan Is Aging Faster Than We Think. East Asia Forum (17 October), www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/10/17/japan-is-aging-faster-than-we-think/. Sasakawa Peace Foundation 2016, Japan at the Forefront of Super-aging Societies, Issues and Implications of Aging Asian Population Project. Nippon.com (15 August), www.nippon.com/en/features/c02801/japan-at-the-forefront-of-super-aging-societies.html. 1 Cabinet Office 2018b. 2 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018b. 3 Cabinet Office 2018b. 4 Asahi Shimbun, evening edition (hereafter AE), 14 September 2018, p. 2. 5 OECD 2017. The obesity score uses a country’s average body mass index (BMI), measured by a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in meters. The World Health Organization defines people with a BMI score of 30 or more as obese. Based on this measure, the ranking from lowest to highest of the proportions of obese adults in G7 countries is as follows: Japan (3.7 percent), Italy (9.8), France (15.3), Germany (23.6), Canada (25.8), United Kingdom (26.9), United States (38.2). Other countries with high obesity scores include Mexico (32.4), New Zealand (30.7), and Australia (27.9). The OECD average is 19.5 percent. 6 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 7 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018b. 8 According to an estimate made by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2017). 9 Holthus and Manzenreiter 2017. 10 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. The male age was nearly 31 years. Data on the marriage ages of both women and men for each year in postwar Japan are available in the vital

statistics collected by the ministry. 11 AM, 2 June 2018, p. 7. 12 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018d. 13 See Dower 2000 for detailed descriptions of the environment this generation faced immediately after the war. The animated movie In This Corner of the World (Katabuchi 2016) is also instructive. 14 Sakaiya 1980. 15 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2016, p. 696. 16 Imada 1987. 17 Asada 1983. 18 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2016. 19 AE, 7 March 2011, p. 12. 20 Kosugi 2008. 21 Kawaguchi et al. 2016, pp. 141, 196. 22 Yamada 1999, 2001. 23 Hidaka 1984, pp. 63–78. 24 The proportion of habitable land in Japan is 32.8 percent. Mountains, forests, and wilderness constitute the rest. See Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2013b. Even in terms of conventional measures of population density, Japan (347 persons per square kilometer in 2018) is ahead of the United Kingdom (275), Germany (237), Italy (205), and France (122). World Bank 2019. 25 Sofue 2012. 26 Amino 1990, pp. 59–69; 1992, pp. 127–40. 27 AM, 19 July 1992, p. 1; Asahi Shimbun 2018. 28 Amino 1992, pp. 131–40. 29 Fukutake 1949, pp. 34–48, 69–115. 30 Nakane 1967, 1970. 31 For example, Yoneyama 1971. 32 Buraku Kaihō Jinken Kenkyūsho 2001, p. 736. See also Aoki 2009, pp. 191–2. 33 Amino 1990, p. 61.

34 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018g. Moxa treatment is a traditional pain-relieving method in which moxa (a downy substance obtained from the leaves of certain Asian plants) is burned on the skin of the painful part of the body. 35 See Nagashima 1977, pp. 199–211; Yoneyama 1976. 36 For instance, Umesao 1987, pp. 252–5. 37 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2017, p. 66. 38 Yoshihara 2017. 39 AM, 20 October 2019, p. 27. 40 Prefectural accounts are calculated annually by the Economic and Social Research Institute of the Cabinet Office.

Chapter 5

Work: ‘Japanese-style’ management and cultural capitalism ◈

I Introduction The international evaluation of Japan’s work practice has made an about-turn since the beginning of the twenty-first century, from role model to problem case.1 The general response has shifted from admiration to caution and from envy to skepticism. Once heralded as a model from which every country must learn, the nation’s business world now appears to be seen as a framework to be avoided. Yet, at the beginning of the 2020s, Japan remains the third-largest economy in the world, even if its potentials and challenges are being overshadowed by the struggle for international hegemony between the two superpowers, the United States and China. Japan’s world of labor shows a complex mix of continuity and change in the face of globalization, a delicate combination which requires nuanced analysis. This chapter illustrates such plurality by first highlighting the continuation of the old patterns: the prevailing culture of small business and the perpetuation of the ‘Japanese-style’ management model. The second half of the chapter focuses on the emerging changes by examining the growing spread of a new form of capitalism, which one might call ‘cultural capitalism’, based on the knowledge industry and the production and consumption of symbols, images, and representations. The impact of the new megatrend on employment practices and the power of labor unions is also analyzed.

II Small businesses: evolving bedrock of the economy

1 Small businesses as numerical majority Popular overseas images of Japanese society are colored by the notion that it is a country of megacorporations. These perceptions have been engendered by Japanese products and associated with such household names as Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Sony. However, the reality is that, although powerful and influential, large corporations constitute a very small minority of businesses in Japan, both in terms of the number of establishments and the size of their workforce. An overwhelming majority of Japanese enterprises are small or medium in size, and it is these that employ the bulk of the workforce. While small may or may not be beautiful, ‘it certainly is bountiful, and thereby deserving of its fair share of attention’.2 Small and medium-sized companies are the mainstay of the Japanese economy.3 In the Japanese business world medium and small firms are known as chūshō kigyō. For brevity, one may lump both types together and call them ‘small businesses’. The Small Business Standard Law (enacted in 1963 and revised in 1999) defines chūshō kigyō as those companies that employ not more than 300 persons or whose capital does not exceed ¥300 million.4 As Table 5.1 shows, in 2016, large corporations, with 300 or more workers, employed less than 15 percent of the labor force in the private sector.5 The remainder worked in chūshō kigyō. Furthermore, more than half of private sector establishments employed fewer than 30 workers.

Table 5.1 Distribution of private sector firms and employees, by firm size, 2016 No. of employees in firm

% of all firms

% of all employees

1–4

57.1

11.5

5–9

19.8

12.2

10–29

16.5

25.1

30–49

3.1

10.8

50–99

1.8

12.1

100–299

0.9

13.7

300 or more

0.2

14.6

Source: Calculated from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016b, Table 4. Even in the manufacturing sector, small businesses employ three-quarters of all workers, with the overwhelming majority in the textile, furniture, ceramics, and fittings industries. Numerically, small businesses also dominate the parts production sectors of the exportoriented car and electronics industries. In the construction industry, more than nine out of ten employees work in small businesses.6 Since large firms and their employees occupy only a small segment, the Nihon-teki (‘Japanese-style’) management theories based primarily on observations of this minority section lose sight of the dynamics of the great majority of Japanese enterprises.

Macroscopic data analysis shows that one of the most fundamental divisions of stratification in the Japanese male population lies between those employed in large corporations and those in small, although their respective internal variations are increasingly discernible. Table 5.2 shows key differences between large and small businesses. Notably, the so-called lifetime employment system, which has been lauded as the hallmark of the ‘Japanese-style’ management, does not operate in the smallbusiness sector and is increasingly failing to function in the largecompany sector as well, as explained later in this chapter. This is the system under which employees are expected to remain with the same company or enterprise group for their entire career; the enterprise in return provides a wide range of fringe benefits. The system applies only to regular employees in large corporations,7 whose intercompany movement is relatively limited. In general, job mobility between firms is considerably higher in small enterprises. It is often claimed that Japanese companies have accomplished the managerial revolution so fully that their top managers are usually not their owners. This generalization may hold true for large companies, but owner-managers abound in small businesses. Table 5.2 Comparison of large and small firms Firm size Characteristic

Large

Small

Intercompany mobility

Low

High

Firm size Characteristic

Large

Small

Separation of corporate ownership from management

Strong

Weak

Labor union organization ratio (proportion of unionists as employees)

High

Low

Educational background of employees

High

Low

Salary levels

High

Low

Employees’ involvement in community affairs

Low

High

Decision-making style

Bureaucratic

Entrepreneurial

2 Plurality of small businesses Japan’s small enterprises fall into two broad categories, depending upon the extent to which they are controlled by large companies at the top of the corporate hierarchy. The first group comprises small businesses which are subservient to the big businesses that accumulate their profit by controlling them. They have little choice but to offer workers low pay under inferior working conditions. The second group is relatively independent of large corporations and adapts effectively to the changing environment by developing their own technology, know-how, and service methods with vitality, dynamism, and innovation. At the highest level, Japan has three major financial groups: the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the Mizuho Financial Group, and the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. These megabanks were formed and reshaped after a series of alignments and realignments at the beginning of the twenty-first century in an attempt both to rationalize the banking sector, which was overburdened with bad loans accumulated in the 1990s, and to head off challenges from foreign financial institutions eager to gain a foothold in the world’s third-largest economy. More broadly, Japan’s industrial sector has a few major conglomerates: Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sanwa, and Sumitomo. With a major bank at its center, each of these groups includes diverse, large-scale companies ranging from manufacturing to trading. The Mitsubishi group, for example, comprises approximately forty major companies specializing in a range of enterprises,

including banking, the car industry, the electrical industry, the chemical industry, the metal industry, construction, real estate, life insurance, forestry, warehousing, and aluminum refining. Most of these companies’ names carry the prefix ‘Mitsubishi’. In addition to these conglomerates, some big-business combinations dominate particular industrial areas. These include the Toyota, Toshiba, Nippon Steel, AEON, and Kintetsu groups. Positioned at the helm of the business community, these groups each have a string of subsidiary companies and subcontracting firms organized hierarchically in a structure known as ‘keiretsu’ (enterprise grouping). Within each group, the subsidiary companies mutually support each other, arranging reciprocally profitable finances, the cross-ownership of stocks, and long-term business transactions. This business structure is modeled on that of a family and normally requires each company to belong to a single keiretsu group. In a sequence of subcontracting arrangements, higher-level companies give contract jobs to companies lower in the chain, which may in turn give contracts to still lower companies. Generally, the lower the subcontractor, the smaller its size. A significant part of the small-business community remains reasonably free of the intervention and influence of the keiretsu network. Although these relatively independent small firms differ in size, they are comparatively autonomous, self-reliant, and maverick in their behavior. Cross-tabulation of the two dimensions – firm size and the extent of keiretsu intervention by large companies – is shown in Table 5.3, which represents four kinds of small businesses.

Table 5.3 Comparison of small-business types Company size

Keiretsu intervention High

Low

Medium

Medium-sized subsidiary companies in keiretsu networks

Venture businesses, maverick high-tech firms, entertainment promoters

Small to very small

Low-ranking subcontractors, franchise shops under keiretsu control

Independent small proprietors, neighborhood retail shops, professional offices

(a) Medium-sized subsidiaries in keiretsu networks The first type comprises medium-sized firms belonging to a group of enterprises under the immediate direction of large companies. They can rely upon finance, expertise, and other support from their parent companies. In return, parent companies appoint their own employees as directors, managers, and executives of the main businesses under their direct control in the keiretsu network. Large companies regard these positions as suitable postings for management staff that are close to retirement age. (b) Low-level subcontractors under keiretsu control Many of the small businesses that fall into the second type are very small subcontracting factories. On the bottom levels of the subcontracting hierarchy are ultrasmall enterprises called reisai

kigyō (very small firms), which employ fewer than ten workers. This type includes firms run by self-employed individuals with the assistance of family members and tends to remain vulnerable to the manipulations of keiretsu companies at higher levels, which control arrangements about prices and delivery dates from above. Since the 2010s, however, some big companies have demonstrated their readiness to go beyond the walls of keiretsu and subcontract small enterprises outside their keiretsu network in search of high-quality products. Some reisai kigyō do possess exceptional and masterly skills not found in the existing web of affiliated companies, a condition in which diagonal, cross-keiretsu subcontracting may be more fruitful. A small company, for example, may produce and supply certain car parts that no other firms make. Further down the subcontracting hierarchy are daily laborers, who live in such flophouse quarters as Sanya in Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka and who mainly sustain the construction industry.8 They find jobs on a daily basis through recruiters, many of whom work on construction sites and engage in demanding physical tasks. They inevitably compete in the labor market with foreign workers. (c) Venture and maverick businesses The third type is composed of middle-sized firms with a capacity to make decisions with little or no interference from big business. Many of these companies have made independent innovations in product development,

production

technology,

and

marketing,

thereby

establishing significant shares in markets which large corporations failed

to

develop.

These

innovation-oriented

firms

maintain

superiority over rival companies not only in capital procurement, plant, and other hardware areas but also in technical know-how, human resource development, and software spheres. Increasingly, enterprises in this category include venture businesses that depend on knowledge-intensive technology and new service businesses that rely upon the diversification of consumer interests. Enterprises of this type can adapt to changes in market demands more flexibly than large bureaucratic corporations. Some expand by developing niche businesses: business opportunities that big companies have left open and have much potential. Others commit to speedy, entrepreneurial styles of decision-making and to flexible responses to clients’ requests. The entrepreneurs in this group possess confidence and find satisfaction in their work. Independent and highly motivated, the group’s leaders seek self-actualization rather than organization dependency, thereby developing a lifestyle and value orientation different from that of people working primarily within the keiretsu system. These business elites generally possess higher levels of assets than career employees of large firms. Panasonic, Honda, Sony, and Nintendo, which have become household names around the world, emerged from this group. SoftBank and Rakuten, two large high-tech communications companies, also expanded from this sphere to become the leading players in the Japanese economy. Established as multifaceted and diversified megacorporations since the beginning of the twenty-first

century, they are involved in a range of information and knowledgeintensive enterprises. Their names are well known as mobile-phone companies and as the owners of professional baseball teams. Rising all the way from being minor, insignificant businesses, they represent visible success stories in the information revolution age. (d) Independent small proprietors The fourth type of business consists mainly of independent small proprietors such as neighborhood retail-shop owners, snack-bar managers, barbers, hairdressers, rice dealers, public-bathhouse operators, liquor merchants, stationers, dry cleaners, and the like. This sphere also includes some professionals who manage small offices, including general medical practitioners, lawyers, and tax accountants. The subculture of small-business proprietors (jieigyō) differs considerably from that of organization men in large firms. On the whole, nonprofessional self-employed people do not place a high priority on university education and find vocational training more relevant to the achievement of their occupational goals. Many go through high schools specializing in vocationally oriented subjects for industry or commerce. Some special vocational schools for highschool graduates (see Chapter 6) offer further education for those who aim to manage small businesses of their own, many studying with a view to succeeding to the management of their parents’ independent businesses.

Unlike company employees, independent small proprietors, who make up the old middle class (see Chapter 3), tend to pass on their businesses from one generation to another. An overwhelming majority of self-employed businesspeople inherit the businesses of their parents or parents-in-law,9 a pattern that suggests that this group has its own process of class reproduction (see Table 3.8). Most members of this group live in city areas, and a high proportion live with their parents upon marriage, another reflection of intergenerational continuity in this sphere. In comparison with their counterparts in Korea and Taiwan, the group of Japanese independent proprietors has a smaller proportion of outsiders from different class backgrounds.10 Nonprofessional self-employment is institutionalized as a desirable occupational career path. Typically, those who choose this path initially work for a company to acquire skills for the future, then establish independent businesses either on their own or with family members. In other words, many small proprietors themselves used to be workers employed by small independent businesses. During their time as employees, working as trainees or apprentices, they acquire special knowledge, skills, and personal connections. Upon completing high school, a person from this group might first work as an attendant at a gasoline station, then as an auto mechanic at another station, and thereafter they might learn how to manage such a business. Having amassed considerable savings and successfully negotiated a bank loan, they may later establish a gasoline station of their own and become an independent proprietor. In traditional urban Japan, it was an established practice for an apprentice to serve

under an independent merchant for a long period from their teens, to become the head clerk, and finally to set up their own shop with the blessing of their master. This practice, known as noren wake (splitting a shop sign curtain), is less common today in its original form but persists in a similar arrangement for those who start without educational credentials or material resources to establish a solid career route. Independent small-business people are prominent in community organizations and events. In particular, those who manage small shops have a stake in maintaining good relations with their communities and are frequently involved in community festivals, district events, and local fundraising. This group produces many leaders and active members of the neighborhood associations that make political and social decisions about community affairs. Unlike salary employees, who normally work in firms distant from their homes, these community-based, independent shop owners, who live and work on the same premises, combine business with pleasure and promote the social cohesion of their localities. The variety that exists in the small-business community suggests that the value orientations and lifestyles of its workers differ greatly depending on firm size and the degree to which firms are free of the control of large companies. Some are submissive, passive, and evidently exploited. Others are innovative, participatory, and openly entrepreneurial. These facets manifest themselves in different circumstances in different ways. One must be cautious about stereotyping Japanese small-business employees, especially as they constitute an overwhelming majority of the labor force.

III Large companies: ‘Japanese-style’ management in transition The work practices of large Japanese firms have long influenced and shaped the overall images of the nation. At the peak of the performance of the Japanese economy in the 1970s and the 1980s, the ‘Japanese-style’ management model attracted disproportionate attention in labor studies in Japan, where the three treasures of Japanese work organization – lifetime employment, seniority-based wage structure, and enterprise unionism – were said to prevail, although the model derived mainly from the observations of whitecollar employees in large companies, a tiny minority in the workforce. Because of the economic slowdown since the 1990s, ‘Japanesestyle’ management, once lauded as the driving force of the nation’s economic boom, came under critical review and under threat from the performance-based and output-oriented management model which resembled the Anglo-American style of management. The key characteristics of both paradigms are contrasted in Table 5.4. Table 5.4 Comparison of management models Management model Characteristic

‘Japanese style’

Performance oriented

Guiding principles

Employee loyalty to company

Employee contribution to company

Management model Characteristic

‘Japanese style’

Performance oriented

Corporate responsibility for employees

Ensuring job security

Substantial rewards to high achievers; low achievers as disposable

Ideological metaphor

Company as a family based on Japanese culture

Company as each employee’s tool for achieving individual wellbeing

Employment practice

Lifetime employment

Contractual

Wage structure

Seniority based; years of service

Performance based; individual output

Labor unions

Enterprise unionism

Minimal

Mid-career recruitment

Rare

Frequent (headhunting)

Skill formation

In-house training, unportable

In-house training, plus acquisition of portable qualifications

Primary aim of management

Optimization of company profit

Maximization of shareholder dividends

Management model Characteristic

‘Japanese style’

Performance oriented

Source of work motivation

Team work

Individual initiative

Main labor market

Internal

External

Applicable employee sectors

Core employees in large firms, particularly in manufacturing

Employees in small firms, non-regular employees, highly paid professionals with special skills

Social disparity

Undesirable; to be limited

Inevitable; good incentive

1 Firm-based internal labor markets The first model, the ‘Japanese-style’ management system, is predicated upon firm-based internal labor markets which function in conjunction with the lifetime employment system. According to this model, typically, a company will recruit a batch of new graduates every year, conduct intensive in-house on-the-job training, and rotate employees laterally from one department to another to make them multiskilled and versatile. For instance, a fresh employee may be assigned first to the accounting department, then to the sales division, and after a few years to the advertising section. The employment arrangements are based not so much on formal contracts as on informal agreements; a new recruit may be given a statement that they have been hired, but not an explicit covenant which spells out job specifications. Employees have a strong incentive to work hard and improve enterprise performance partly because the bonus system is built in to salary structure, to distribute corporate gains among them. Based on the nenkō chingin (senioritybased wage) structure, salaries are generally determined by length of service in the firm and are structured in such a way that intercompany movement would not pay off in the long run. Large corporations of this type take initiatives to provide their employees with corporate welfare arrangements ranging from company housing to recreation facilities. By establishing themselves as acceptable workers within the corporate framework, employees qualify for long-term, low-interest company loans so that they may

purchase houses or fund their children’s education. To gain access to these schemes, however, employees must demonstrate resolute commitment to their corporate lives, and thus strong corporate allegiance. Once established, such an arrangement ties them more firmly to their company and increases their dependence upon it. Japan’s white-collar employees are often sarcastic about their controlled lives, likening them to miyazukae, the unenviable lifestyles of officials in the service of the court in ancient Japan, who had to put up with various kinds of humiliation to survive in highly bureaucratic government organizations. To a considerable extent, the ways of life of today’s salarymen in this framework resemble those of samurai warriors, who devoted themselves to their feudal lords and to the expansion of the privilege and prestige of their house and fief. The paradigm has long served as a role model for many sectors of the Japanese labor force. In this framework, the top management of large companies is composed of long-serving successful employees who have risen through the ranks; stockholders have little influence in the decisionmaking processes of their company, giving rise to a sharp distinction between corporate ownership and management. Furthermore, because large companies have chains of subsidiary and subcontract firms based upon keiretsu and other arrangements, they can function with relatively small bodies of employees in relation to their scale.

Figure 5.1 Commuters in the morning at Umeda Subway Station in Osaka These features of large corporations have prompted many observers to argue that Japan’s capitalism differs from its Western counterpart.11 Some analysts maintain that Japanese firms have developed corporationism (kaishashugi or kigyōshugi), in which employees are completely tied to the company.12 Others propose a distinction between stockholder capitalism (kojin shihonshugi ) and corporate capitalism (hōjin shihonshugi) and maintain that the latter predominates in Japan.13 In stockholder capitalism as it is found in Western societies, companies function as incorporated bodies formed to maximize stockholders’ returns. In corporate capitalism, it is argued, each corporation becomes a substantive and personal entity, as though it had a personality of its own, with its interests overriding those of individuals connected with it. Since companies are thus anthropomorphized and deified, they become omnipotent and omnipresent in the lives of their members,

executives, managers, and regular employees alike, compelling these groups to dedicate themselves to the companies’ ‘needs’ and ‘commands’. Thus, these ‘corporate warriors’ are expected, in an almost military fashion, to devote themselves to the requirements of the enterprise at the expense of their individual rights and choices. In return, most Japanese companies pay bonuses to their regular employees in summer and winter, the amount depending upon company performance in the preceding term. Many firms also arrange and pay for company excursions and conduct company funerals when managers and directors die. Some firms even maintain company cemeteries. To maintain these semi-totalistic characteristics, the ‘Japanesestyle’ management model uses diffuse and nebulous rhetoric in evaluating employees’ ability in terms of their personal devotion to the company, and likening the firm to the family, as detailed later.

2 Manipulative definition of employee ability Large Japanese companies evaluate their employees, both whitecollar and blue-collar, annually or biannually throughout their occupational

careers.

These

appraisals,

which

determine

employees’ wage levels and promotion prospects, take a range of abilities into account. In this regard, the Japanese vocabulary distinguishes three types of abilities: jitsuryoku, the manifest ability that one demonstrates in a particular project or undertaking; soshitsu, the latent ability that one possesses in relation to a particular

domain

of

activity;

and

nōryoku,

the

latent,

undifferentiated, general, and overall ability that one has as a person. The third is imprecise and comprises vague ingredients like human character, personality traits, and psychological makeup, but it plays a crucial role in personnel evaluation in the firm-based internal labor market.14 This market presupposes the production of generalist employees who can cope with multiple job situations, and therefore each employee is expected not only to display a job-specific manifest ability but to possess a wide range of attributes that are not necessarily connected with their job but are consistent with the broad goals of the firm. This means that the expected attributes encompass such nebulous components as hitogara (human quality) and jinkaku (personhood) that go beyond the specific requirements of one’s occupational duties. Workers are aware that they are assessed in terms of the extent to which they have cooperative,

obliging, and harmonious hitogara and jinkaku in their inter-personal relations.

Figure 5.2 Skilled blue-collar worker When personnel evaluation places a significant emphasis upon these ambiguous areas of nōryoku, employees have to compete with each other to demonstrate that they have general qualities compatible with corporate goals. This is why some employees arrive at the office every morning earlier than the stipulated starting time, to clean their desk and office furniture. For the same reason, many office workers stay after normal working hours until their boss leaves the office. Somewhat similarly, subordinates often assist with the preparation of funerals of relatives of their superiors. Employees engage in these tasks because they know that their human quality and personhood outside their job specifications are constantly subject to corporate appraisal. In this sense, their behavior springs not from altruism but from calculations regarding the presentation of personality traits that might affect their chances of promotion and

salary increases. Their tatemae (façade) has to be unqualified loyalty to corporate norms, but their honne (reality) lies in the maximization of their interests in the system. Meanwhile, as discussed Chapter 2, their superiors are far from being free of similar compulsion. They cannot expect to lead their subordinates smoothly without exhibiting their own human quality and personhood beyond the call of job-specific duties. Thus, at their own expense, Japanese middle managers take their subordinates to pubs and restaurants after work, not only to listen to their complaints and troubles, but also to moralize on the importance of devotion to company work. Managers visit their subordinates’ relatives in hospital and act as go-betweens for their subordinates’ marriages. By so doing, managers can expect to count on the support and dedication of the employees of their department in tasks beyond their designated responsibilities.15 Managers play the role of corporate socializers because their chances of promotion partly hinge upon their success in this area. Managers who can command their subordinates in the extra-duty realm are regarded as competent and as having the abovementioned third ability, nōryoku. Employees’ levels in large companies rise in accordance with the length of their service to the company, and they move up sharply towards the ends of their careers (generally when they are in their fifties). The seniority-based wage structure makes employees reluctant to move from one company to another in the middle of their careers; they can maximize their salary benefits by staying in the same firm.

In the 1990s, in the face of the prolonged recession, increasing offshore corporate operations, and gradually rising unemployment, some large companies started to examine their salary and promotion structures and to introduce a system which placed more emphasis on employees’ manifest abilities and concrete achievements, as discussed later in this chapter. Headhunting turned out to be not unusual, and some middle managers received annual salaries on the basis of their performance in the previous year. In some sections of big business, the lifetime employment system and seniority-based salary scheme were collapsing. Keidanren, the largest employer organization, openly took the stance in 2020 that these practices were no longer suitable.16 In 2017, less than one-third of male regular employees in their late fifties had worked in the same company throughout their occupational career.17 Nonetheless, a national random-sample survey indicated in 2016 that workers’ support for ‘Japanese-style’ management remained strong, with 89 percent in favor of the lifetime employment structure and 76 percent backing the seniority-based wage system.18

Towards work-style reform In the face of population decline and a continuing economic slump, the Japanese parliament legislated work-style reforms which came into force in April 2019. The bills aimed to rectify some undesirable work practices, including long working hours and unreasonable wage gaps between regular and non-regular

employees.

The

reform

programs

also

encouraged companies to implement various work patterns like telework and flexible working hours and to bring gender, ethnic, and other forms of diversity into their workforce. The views of employees about these schemes are recorded in the video

What

It’s

Like

Working

in

Japan,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fTrOmDrDgU (Life Where I’m From, 9 March 2018).

3 The family metaphor as a socialization device Large corporations are innately bureaucratic organizations with complicated rules and regulations, a reality which has given rise to an approach that frames them in antithetical terms. At the level of symbol

manipulation,

their

leaders

–

the

‘Japanese-style’

management type in particular – have likened a company to a family, to inculcate in their employees the norm of total commitment. An enterprise expects its employees to cultivate close internal relationships, develop family-like warmth and order, and regard the company as the center of their lives and in some circumstances more

important

than

their

own

families.

Intriguingly,

many

employees, when speaking of their company to outsiders, call it uchi (‘inside’ or ‘interior’) and, when speaking of competitor firms, use a suffix, san, normally attached to a family name. Toshiba, for example, is referred to as Toshiba-san, and Nissan as Nissan-san. This approach is based upon the clear sense of uchi–soto (inside– outside) distinction and immerses individual employees in their work without an overt sense of alienation, although it does not work fully for every worker. Whether one calls such immersion complete commitment or total exploitation, this Japanese management technique focuses on moralistic indoctrination and introduces emotive symbols to accomplish organizational processes and goals. Within

this

framework,

corporations

invest

heavily

in

socialization programs for their employees. They normally have morning sessions, not only to prepare for the day, but in many cases

to cite company mottoes and sing company songs. At a formal level, major companies hold intensive training sessions for several weeks for new employees, in an endeavor to infuse company policies and practices into their minds. Some of these sessions even attempt to rid the corporate rookies of their sense of self and ego. In extreme cases, for example, some companies compel them to perform physical exercise to the point of near exhaustion. These training programs have no bearing on the substance of the trainees’ future work; instead, the drills are designed chiefly to mold the newcomers into selfless and egoless employees willing to subject themselves to company orders, no matter how unreasonable they may be. Many firms organize resocialization sessions of these and other kinds for low and middle managers. In German sociological language, Japanese companies put up a façade of being gemeinschafts (communities),

although

in

reality

they

are

gesellschafts

(associations). It goes without saying that a business is a complex organization engaged in profit-making and capital accumulation. The firm has to compete, expand, and exploit to achieve these goals. It is far from being altruistic, compassionate, and empathetic. In contrast, the presumed principles of the family are based upon self-sacrifice, mutual assistance, and harmonious affection. It is supposed to be the prototype of communal organization. The tatemae of the firm being the family manipulatively conceals the honne of corporate operations. The Japanese management method has shown that it is effective to use communal symbolism to attain business organization

goals; under some circumstances, it may well be more effective than legalistic, impersonal, and bureaucratic vocabulary. Once fully socialized into this culture, some Japanese salarymen prefer to spend evenings after work in restaurants and bars with their colleagues to going home to spend time with their family. Thus, application of the family metaphor to a corporation has played havoc with the family itself, which has increasingly become subject to the imperatives of the corporate world. In this sense, in many sectors of contemporary Japan the corporation is a family, and the family is a corporation.19

IV Social costs of ‘Japanese’ work style The ideological framework of work practices in Japan, particularly of the ‘Japanese-style’ management type, has had both positive and negative consequences. No doubt it has greatly contributed to the dynamism and achievements of Japanese economic institutions. However, it has also produced a number of social costs, impinging not only on individual rights but also on the health of many workers. These social costs have been generated at both small and large enterprises.

1 Excessive hours of work Excessive hours of work constituted a serious issue for Japan’s employees. In principle, the Labor Standards Act, amended in 1993, stipulated that the statutory norm for working hours in Japan should be 40 hours per week. Anything over this limit was supposed to be treated as overtime, attracting an additional payment at a higher rate. In reality, however, Japanese companies maintained the practice of service overtime, whereby employees worked after hours without receiving overtime allowances.20 To redress this and other concerns, the Workstyle Reform Law was enacted by the parliament in 2018 in an attempt to drastically change the way people work. The legislation consists of three key pillars: setting a legal cap on overtime work, ensuring ‘equal pay for equal work’ for regular and non-regular employees, and exempting skilled professionals on high wages from working hour regulations.21 The legislation set the upper limit of overtime work hours to 45 hours per month and 360 hours per year, with penalty provisions imposed on noncompliant companies, a requirement which was implemented in 2019 for large corporations and in 2020 for small companies. In line with such stipulation, many companies enacted their plans to reduce working hours in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, paid overtime constitutes an important part of workers’ lives. They tend to build overtime payments into their household budgets to cover housing loan repayments and education

costs and thereby compel themselves to work beyond normal working hours. Although Japanese workers are entitled to paid annual leave of up to twenty days, they take only about half of their entitlement.22 Employees also normally use part of their annual paid recreation leave as sick leave, as most Japanese companies do not have clearly defined provisions for paid sick leave. When employees suffer long-term ailments, it is generally at the company’s discretion whether and for how long they are paid during their illness.

2 Karoshi With long working hours established as a norm of corporate life at both large and small firms, a significant number of employees have shown symptoms of chronic fatigue; some have, in fact, worked themselves to death. The term karōshi (which has entered English as ‘karoshi’ and literally means ‘death caused by excessive work’) was coined to describe sudden deaths brought about by extreme exhaustion and stress resulting from overwork. Heart attacks, cardiac insufficiency, cerebral or membrane hemorrhage, and other heart and brain malfunctions top the list of causes of karoshi. In 2017, government labor authorities recognized 190 such cases.23 In some of these instances, the victims worked more than 100 hours per week. Legally, karoshi falls into the category of work-related casualties, which industrial injury insurance is supposed to cover. In reality, however, karoshi is difficult to prove. The recognized cases represent arguably only the tip of the iceberg, as corporate management is generally reluctant to release crucial data. The Workers’ Accident Compensation Insurance Act (initially enacted in 1947) requires that applications for worker compensation be accompanied by detailed reports on the work schedule of the relevant employee prior to their death. The bereaved family must submit the reports to the government Labour Standards Inspection Office, which assesses and authorizes claims for industrial injury compensation. However, companies tend to deny access to full

information about the working hours of the deceased for fear of the corporate reality of inordinate hours of labor becoming public. Instead, the company management often provides the family with a gift of money in token of their sympathy and pays part of the funeral expenses in an attempt to cover up the circumstances leading to karoshi. Initially, karoshi occurred among such frontline workers as truck drivers, migrant workers from rural areas, and local government employees, but it became increasingly frequent among middle managers of small enterprises and, more recently, at top management levels. Even schoolteachers and employees of medical institutions are among the victims. Karoshi occurs in almost every industry, particularly in the transport, food service, and IT sectors, where working hours remain extraordinarily long. Widely called ‘black enterprises’, companies which impose unpaid overtime and other sweatshop conditions on both regular and non-regular employees form a hotbed of karoshi.

Long working hours The working hours of male regular employees in Japan are distinctly high, as is their overtime. This makes their contribution to household chores minimal. The consumption of entitled paid leave is also limited. The cases of karoshi (death caused by excessive work) have shown what can happen at the extreme end of these work practices. It is widely recognized that the Japanese workforce requires a better work–life balance and a wider range of work options, as these videos discuss: Why Does Japan Work So Hard?, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-YJEtxHeo

(CNBC

International, 31 May 2018), and Sex in Japan: Dying for Company,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1jGZUbN06M

(The Feed SBS, 25 September 2018).

3 Tanshin funin The firm-based internal labor market system assumes that firms constantly conduct on-the-job training to develop the skills of their employees, who are required to move from one job to another, from one department to another, and from one office to another. Lateral and diagonal job rotation forms an essential component of developing employees with diverse skills. This system, however, has not only led to economic benefits but also resulted in social costs. Some employees live away from their families because they have been transferred to branches or factories far from their family homes, a practice known as tanshin funin (single posting). It is most prevalent among large corporations and national government agencies and is limited among small businesses, most of which are locally based. A majority of workers in this situation are in their thirties and forties and are male, career-track, white-collar employees occupying managerial, professional, and technical positions.24 The corporate principle follows the logic that, as long as it is arranged ‘because of corporate requirements’,25 employees should endure the disadvantages caused by tanshin funin, which is ‘not illegal even if it vitiates the stability of the family’.26 In some cases, employees accept tanshin funin because it involves promotion; however, major reasons for participation in this practice are difficulties regarding education, housing, and family health.27 First, many tanshin funin employees choose to go along with the arrangement to maintain the stability of their children’s

education. High-school students, in particular, often face difficulty in transferring from one school to another, because admission to a high school is normally granted to those who have successfully passed an entrance examination in the final year of middle school. Transfer procedures

and

requirements

are

often

cumbersome

and

complicated. Moreover, many pupils in elite institutions, even at elementary- and middle-school levels, are reluctant to move to a different prefecture for fear of having to study at a school of lower standard and possibly losing in the race to enter a prestigious university. These problems mean that when the father takes up his new position, he leaves his family behind. Second, in many cases, house-owning employees would have to let their houses if their families moved with them. But the Act on Land and Building Leases (enacted in 1991) gives much protection to tenants, to the extent that they can continue to claim occupancy unless landlords have ‘justifiable reason’ to reoccupy their properties. Because of frequent disputes between tenants and landlords, house owners who are ordered to transfer are often disinclined to let their houses and choose to temporarily separate from their families. Third, a large proportion of tanshin funin employees attribute their choice to the health problems of family members. Many middleaged salarymen live with their aging parents, some of whom might be seriously ill or even bedridden. When transferred to a distant office, employees with ailing parents may choose to leave the task of nursing them with their spouses and to move alone – circumstances

likely to arise more frequently with the expansion of the aging population.

V Job market rationalization While the familial and paternalistic ‘Japanese-style’ model remains idealized and entrenched in Japan’s work culture, the prolonged recession since the 1990s and the concomitant penetration of globalizing forces into the Japanese economy gave rise to two fundamental shifts in the system of work: the casualization of the workforce and the introduction of performance-based employment.

1 Casualization of labor The first distinctive trend, the casualization of the labor force, has been deemed a major contributing factor in the widening inequality between social classes, as discussed in Chapter 3. The restructuring that many companies launched in the face of the sluggish economy produced a growing number of part-time and casual workers and sharpened the line of demarcation between seiki shain (regular employees) and hi-seiki shain (non-regular employees). Regular employees are full-time salaried workers who enjoy various company benefits, with many relishing the privilege of lifetime employment. Non-regular employees – workers hired on either a full-time or a part-time basis with an open-ended or fixed period of employment – include

a

variety

of

impermanent

workers

with

disposable

employment status and an unstable wage structure. Though parttimers and casuals have always existed, employers and managers have attempted to minimize the costs of employment by increasing their proportions, with 38.3 percent of all employees falling into the category of non-regular employees in 2019.28 It is estimated that 56 percent of employed women belong to this group, in contrast to 21 percent of employed men, a pattern demonstrating that this is a predominantly female phenomenon. A majority of these non-regular workers form the working poor,29 a class of individuals who attempt to work hard in vulnerable jobs but are unable to break the cycle of underemployment and deprivation. Because of their unprotected positions, many of them submit tamely to this condition and fail to

demonstrate their dissatisfaction openly for fear of their employers’ refusing to renew their existing contracts. These marginalized employees comprise a few subcategories, some of which overlap. The first is made up of part-time workers. Although classified as such, many in this group work more than thirty hours a week and differ little from full-time regular employees in terms of working hours and the substance of the jobs they perform. Simply called pāto (literally, ‘part-time’), married women who work to help support family finances far outnumber other types of parttimers. Generally, these full-time part-timers receive low hourly wages and stay in the same position for years without career prospects. The second subcategory consists of those who engage in arubaito, a Japanese term meaning ‘side jobs’ and derived from the German word Arbeit (work). Many students have after-school or vacation jobs to cover the costs of their school life. Moonlighters who earn extra money from casual jobs also belong to this category. Although part-time workers are normally assumed to work less than full-time, most who perform arubaito are regarded as having full-time work (including schoolwork in the case of students). In popular parlance, the term freeter is an established classification that combines these two subcategories (though it excludes married female part-timers) and signifies those young workers who are ostensibly willing to engage in casual work of their own volition. The term comes from the English word free combined with part of the German term Arbeiter (people who work); it invokes the image of free-floating, unencumbered youths who work on and

off based on their independent will, though the reality behind this image is highly complex.30 Many are the so-called moratorium-type youths who are buying time against the day when they could obtain better employment status, after dropping out of either school or other work without clear plans for their future. Some set their sights on being hired as regular employees despite the lessening number of these posts over time. Others accept casual work in the hope of obtaining cultural jobs in the arts or doing skilled craftwork, although paths to long-term employment in such areas are narrow and limited. Still others simply drift in the casual job market, living week by week or month by month, with no aspirations for their future life course. Other forms of non-regular workers include keiyaku shain (contract employees), who are employed in the same way as regular workers for only a specified contract period; haken shain (temporary workers), who are dispatched from private personnel placement agencies; and shokutaku shain (part-time employees) who work for a few years after retirement under a new contract. These non-regular workers are firmly embedded in the Japanese economy, which cannot function without their services. They are quite noticeable in Japan’s highly efficient and fast-paced urban life, at the counters of convenience shops and petrol stations and in fast food restaurants, some of which are open twenty-four hours a day. One can also observe many non-regular workers among middle-aged, female shop assistants in supermarkets, elderly security guards at banks, and young parcel delivery workers from distribution companies.

The casualization of employment poses a serious problem for workers in the prime of their working lives. Without having much hope for the future, some drift into the life pattern of the so-called NEET: youth not in education, employment, or training. It is telling that, in the 2010s, only 25.1 percent of non-regular male workers aged thirty to thirty-four years were married – less than half the rate of regular workers (62.1 percent).31

2 Performance-based model The second departure from the conventional internal labor market model is the rise of new work arrangements in which an employee’s market value and job performance form the key evaluation criteria in a short-term employer’s determination of their remuneration and continued employment. Some enterprises have started to offer large salaries, while not ensuring job security, to employees with special professional skills and achievements. These companies no longer take years of service as a yardstick for promotion and wage rises for some employees and have thus opened ways for high achievers to be rewarded with high positions and exceptional salaries regardless of age or experience. Under this scheme, employees opt for the annual salary system and receive yearly sums and large bonuses subject to their achievement of preset goals. Their job security is at risk, however, if they fail to meet the set targets. This system provides good incentives to ambitious individuals and motivates them to accomplish work in a focused and productive manner. Although not representative of a large majority, a few success stories of highfliers who chose this path are splashed in the mass media from time to time. Headhunting and mid-career recruitment have become rampant among business professionals in the elite sector. The performance-based wage system has been adopted by an increasing number of companies, but in the mid-2010s, the proportion of employees working in this system remained a tiny segment of all workers.32 Many large corporations introduced the

system, and managers, rather than rank-and-file employees, took it on, with half of all companies still applying the conventional senioritybased wage system to nonmanagerial employees in one way or another. While the performance-based model is more in line with globally accepted business practice, it tends to be predicated upon the principle of the survival of the fittest, a doctrine detrimental to the general wellbeing of employees. The system, in reality, often requires employees to work inordinately long hours for the attainment of set goals without overtime payments and thereby enables management to pay less per unit of time and reduces the total salary costs of the company. Furthermore, the introduction of the annual salary system not only creates two groups of employees in an enterprise but also enhances the level of intracompany social disparity and reduces teamwork and morale. At issue also is the transparency of the evaluation process regarding the degree to which prearranged goals have been attained. Even in the 2010s, in the sphere of value orientation, the paternalistic ‘Japanese-style’ management model had robust support among Japanese workers: national random surveys conducted by the Institute of Statistical Mathematics have consistently shown for more than half a century that ‘a supervisor who is overly demanding at work but is willing to listen to personal problems and is concerned with the welfare of workers’ is preferred to ‘one who is not so strict on the job but leaves the worker alone and does not involve himself with their personal matters’.33 Likewise, a larger proportion of the Japanese populace would prefer to work in a company with

recreational activities for employees such as field days and leisure outings despite relatively low wages, rather than in one with high wages but without such a family atmosphere.34 It should be remembered that ‘Japanese-style’ management has never fully applied to small businesses, which adjust their employment structure according to economic fluctuations, with workers moving from one company to another with considerable frequency. An increasing number of non-regular workers, those parttimers and casuals with no long-term employment base, are hired and fired depending upon performance and output. One should, therefore, examine the debate over the competing models of work with a conscious focus on the lower end of the labor force hierarchy. The debate will continue in the 2020s over the extent to which the rise of the performance-based model gives credence to the convergence hypothesis discussed in Chapter 2.

VI Cultural capitalism: an emerging megatrend Beneath all these changes, a fundamental transformation of the Japanese business world is underway. In short, it could be described as a gradual shift away from industrial capitalism and a concomitant rise in cultural capitalism. Culture has become big business around the world, with advanced economies increasingly dominated by the information, education, medicine, welfare, and other cultural industries that specialize in the world of knowledge, symbols, and information. Japan’s capitalism has been moving in this direction by producing fresh value-added commodities in the face of growing competition from Asian countries to which the centers of industrial production have shifted. Japan is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, so Japanese capitalism has carved out new markets, through expertise in the worlds of software technology, visual media, music, entertainment, hospitality, healthcare, and leisure. In these fields, Japanese companies continue to hold comparative advantage and claim international superiority, releasing a constant stream of cultural products into the global market and reshaping the Japanese economy. One may argue that, characterizing this trend, Japan has developed cultural capitalism, which relies upon the production of symbols, knowledge, and information as the guiding principle of

wealth creation and focuses upon cultural attractions and activities as the primary factors motivating consumption. The debate over Cool Japan and soft power, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 11, has arisen in this context. Table 5.5 contrasts the features of emerging cultural capitalism and conventional industrial capitalism. It should be stressed that the features listed do not denote exclusive properties of each type but exhibit their relative points of emphasis for comparative purposes. Table 5.5 Comparison of types of capitalism Capitalism Characteristic

Industrial

Cultural

Major goods for production

Physical, material commodities

Symbols, knowledge, information

Predominant economic sector

Secondary

Quaternary

Major worker type

Mass production worker

Knowledge and information worker

Employee relationship to workplace

Fixed, location bound

Mobile, location free

Market structure

Standardized

Segmented

Output mode

Mass production

Mass customization

Capitalism Characteristic

Industrial

Cultural

Means of consumption

Dedifferentiated

Differentiated

Consumer motivation

Practical use, best price

High added value, luxurious brand

Cyberspace dependency

Moderate

High

Corporation structure

Bureaucratic, organized

Entrepreneurial, unorganized

Intercompany mobility

Considerable

High

Job security

High priority

Low priority; casualization of labor

Reward structure

Mixture of company loyalty and performance

Primarily performance based

Labor unions

Pervasive

Weak

Means of wage protection

Collective worker solidarity

Individual employee resourcefulness

Sources of anxiety

Subsistence, freedom from poverty

Loss of identity, existential angst

Capitalism Characteristic

Industrial

Cultural

Psychiatric tendencies

Paranoiac

Manic, schizophrenic

Origin

Industrial revolution

Information revolution

Japanese notion of consumers

Taishū (mass consumers)

Bunshū or shōshū (segmented or divided consumers)

As early as the 1980s, market analysts were quick to point out that the patterns of Japanese consumer behavior were becoming diversified in a fundamental way. Previously, manufacturers sold models standardized for mass consumption, successfully promoting them through sales campaigns and advertisements. However, this strategy became ineffective, as consumers began to seek products in tune with their personal preferences. They turned out to be more unpredictable, selective, and inquisitive. The notion of the Japanese as uniform mass consumers did not effectively account for their consumer behavior patterns. A consumer behavior study suggested the emergence of shōshū (individualized, divided, and small-unit masses) as opposed to taishū (the undifferentiated, uniform, and large-scale mass).35 The Hakuhōdō Institute of Life and Living, a leading advertising agency, also argued that the notion of bunshū (segmented masses) would account for the behavior of consumers more effectively than the conventional view of them as a

homogeneous entity.36 With the advent of the internet, the trend arguably intensified. In short, cultural capitalism thrives with mass customization, the production of many different commodities tailored for specific focus groups, unlike industrial capitalism, which is built on the mass production of a small number of standardized goods. If industrial capitalism survives on the relative homogeneity of consumer lifestyles, cultural capitalism founds itself upon their differentiation. Mobile phones, for instance, are frequently revamped with different functions, designs, and colors, fashioned to fulfill the distinct desires of particular and shifting demographics. Contents of takeout boxed lunches sold to office workers at convenience stores are highly varied to satisfy the diverse tastes of youngsters, women, middle-aged men, and other groups. It is an established convention to divide economies into three sectors of activity: the primary sector (including agriculture, forestry, and fisheries), which transforms natural resources into products; the secondary sector (comprising manufacturing and construction), which produces finished goods from the output of the primary sector; and the tertiary sector, which offers services or intangible goods and encompasses industries ranging from retail, wholesale, finance, and real estate to the public service. Given that some three-quarters of workers in Japan’s private sector are now employed in the tertiary sector,37 this sector needs reclassification according to internal varieties. Specifically, the recent expansion of areas that make knowledge-based, informational, and value-added products forms what may be categorized as the quaternary sector, which branches off from the conventional tertiary sector. Although no governmental

statistics are based on such a category, on a rough and conservative estimate, more than one-third of Japan’s workforce operates in this sphere,

encompassing

employees

in

the

information

and

telecommunications industries; medical, healthcare, and welfare sectors; restaurants, hotels, and other leisure businesses; education and teaching support staff; and academic and specialist workers. As Table 5.6 suggests, the number of employees engaged in the quaternary sector far exceeds the number of employees in the manufacturing and construction industries, which are typically classified as the secondary sector. These figures are admittedly very crude approximations.38 Nevertheless, broadly speaking, cultural workers undoubtedly predominate as much as industrial workers in the landscape of Japan’s workforce. Table 5.6 Distribution of employees (%) in private sphere megasectors, 2016 Sector

Employees

Primary Agriculture, forestry, and fisheriesa

0.6

Mining

0.0

Total

0.6

Secondary Manufacturing

15.6

Sector

Employees

Construction

6.5

Total

22.1

Tertiary Wholesale and retail

20.8

Transport and postal services

5.6

Electricity, gas, heat, and water supplies

0.3

Real estate

2.6

Compound and other services

9.3

Total

38.6

Quaternary Information and communication

2.9

Finance and insurance

2.7

Medical, healthcare, and welfare

13.0

Restaurants and hotels

9.4

Education and learning support

3.2

Academic research and specialist technical services Daily life services and entertainment

3.2 4.3

Sector

Employees

Total

38.7 Source: Calculated from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016b, Table III-1.

a

Excludes privately run household businesses. In tandem with these domestic shifts, Japan is seen

internationally as a superpower in marketing a variety of products around the world in many areas of popular culture, including computer games, popular music, fashion, and architecture, not to mention manga and anime. In the field of education, Kumon, which uses special methods to tutor children in a variety of subjects, has spread across many countries and territories. In music, the Suzuki method is marketed as a unique and special approach to enhance pupils’ talents. Nintendo is a household name around the world, and computer games made in Japan enjoy immense popularity. So do sudoku puzzles, initially actively commercialized in Japan. And, of course, in the global rise of sushi restaurants, Japanese cuisine techniques gain much popularity. These developments reflect the sharp edges of the emerging international division of labor in which the production of cultural goods occupies a crucial position in advanced economies in general and in Japanese capitalism in particular, a point which the last section of Chapter 11 analyzes in some detail.

It is worth noting that an increasing number of workers in the cultural sector, if not all of them, can produce commodities without being bound to a particular physical place of work. If industrial capitalism originated from the industrial revolution, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cultural capitalism exploded with the information revolution, in the late twentieth century, and was accompanied by the sudden expansion of the internet and the proliferation of mobile phones. Cyberspace technology enables cultural workers to be delocalized, and this tends to facilitate the abovementioned casualization of employment. At the same time, the creative expertise of cultural products can easily be copied without authorization and pirated interterritorially. To confront this situation, the Basic Law on Intellectual Property was enacted in 2002 to safeguard not only Japanese patents but also the nation’s contents industry, which produces original texts, images, movies, music, and other creative data, although strict state regulation of cyberspace continues to be a near impossibility. In this environment, workers – white-collar employees in particular – become fragmented, with their work life increasingly individualized, compartmentalized, and mobile. Using information and communications technology, they can work from home or at almost any other location without commuting to a geographically fixed company office. In pursuit of their own independence, some go as far as setting up a small business of their own by making maximum use of the internet. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Japanese were no longer concerned with the survival and subsistence issues that govern industrial capitalism but with the

precariousness of their sense of identity and reality, the existential issues that characterize cultural capitalism. The younger generations in particular are unable to form clear and stable images of their future work life and increasingly ask themselves about the meaning of work, long-term career choices, and the right balance between work and family life. This trend provides a backdrop against which people attempt to carve out a new form of community in expanding civil society, a theme that will be examined in Chapter 12. In this context, labor unions, once the bastion of worker solidarity, have gradually lost membership and power, as discussed in the next section, and individual employees attempt to defend themselves by being self-centered, resourceful, and entrepreneurial.

VII Enterprise unionism and labor movements By and large, Japanese labor unions are enterprise unions which do not cut across company lines. Each enterprise union draws its membership from the nonmanagerial employees and some lowerlevel managers of a firm, regardless of their job classifications, and independently of whether they are blue-collar assembly line workers, clerical office workers, engineers, or company accountants. An overwhelming majority of unionists in Japan belong to enterprise unions of this kind.39 Enterprise unionism differs from most unions in the West, where workers in the same occupational categories or industrial groupings are organized, cutting across company lines. In Japanese enterprise unions, even low-ranking managers hold membership. There are also plural-type unions, which coexist separately within an enterprise and compete with each other as majority and minority unions. In many cases, one tends to be anti-management and the other promanagement. There are also non-regular workers’ unions, though their numbers are limited.

1 Decline and skewing in union membership The proportion of the workforce that joins labor unions has declined to less than one in five. In June 2018, the unionization rate was about 17.0 percent, less than one-third of its peak of 55.8 percent in 1949, as Figure 5.3 shows.

Figure 5.3 Changes in the Japanese unionization rate and the number of cases of strikes, 1947–2018. Source: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018c. A majority of workers in Japan, particularly those in small businesses, are not unionized and have no organized way of defending their rights against management. As Table 5.7 indicates, the unionization rate declines with the size of the firm; more than 41.5 percent of workers in corporations with 1,000 or more employees are labor union members, but only 0.9 percent in small companies with fewer than 100 employees are unionized. Labor movements

in

Japan

are

essentially

a

large-corporation

phenomenon. They tend to defend the interests of large-corporation employees who enjoy full-time employment status, often at the expense of their small-enterprise counterparts and non-regular workers. Table 5.7 Unionization rates, by firm size, 2018 No. of employees in firm

% of employees unionized

Fewer than 100

0.9

100–999

11.7

1,000 or more

41.5

Source: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018c, Table 4. Since the turn of the last century, new-type unions have operated mainly in the margins of the workforce. They tend to be craft unions based on occupational similarities and to transcend enterprise lines. Cases in point include unions of temporary and parttime workers, of people with mental health issues and physical disability, and of female workers. These unions attract membership mainly from workers in medium, small, and very small firms and represent interests vastly different from those of workers in the core sectors. Union activities remain peripheral, however, as mainstream organized labor tries to find its way into the Japanese establishment and to acquire influence in national decision-making. Increasingly conciliatory and yielding, unions resort less and less to strikes and

other forms of industrial disputes. In addition to corporationism making inroads into workers’ lives, the strategy of the national leadership of organized labor has contributed to the decline in union militancy. An overwhelming majority of enterprise unions are organized under the umbrella of their industrial national centers in such sectors as the automobile, electric machine, and chemical industries. These industrial unions are further centralized into the Japan Trade Union Confederation, popularly called Rengō. It came into existence in 1987 with the amalgamation of separate national federations of unions in the private sector, such as Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan), Dōmei (Japanese Confederation of Labor), Chūritsu Rōren (Federation of Independent Labor Unions of Japan), and Shinsanbetsu (National Federation of Industrial Organizations). With the incorporation of public sector unions, mainly under Sōhyō in 1989, Rengō had a total membership of 6.86 million in 2018, accounting for 68.3 per cent of all unionists in the nation.40 A competing

national

union

federation,

Zenrōren

(National

Confederation of Trade Unions), which is more politically oriented and closely associated with the Japanese Communist Party, had a much smaller membership, amounting to about 536,000 (5.3 percent of all unionists). Management groups at all levels consistently attempted to weaken organized labor throughout the postwar years, but at least three additional factors, all of which represent aspects of emerging cultural capitalism, contributed to the downturn of labor unions. The first of these was the change in the industrial structure of the

Japanese economy. The manufacturing sector, particularly the textile and shipbuilding industries, where the unionization level was high, went through intensive rationalization programs and lost a considerable number of workers. Concomitantly, the service sector, in which unions had traditionally been weak, expanded rapidly, and the number of non-regular, part-time and casual workers increased dramatically. These changes stood in the way of union attempts to maintain membership. The second negative factor was the implementation of privatization and deregulation programs, which the government brought into effect in the 1980s. These programs attenuated, fragmented, or abolished public sector unions, which had formed the bastion of postwar Japanese labor movements. In this process, the Kokutetsu Rōdō Kumiai (National Japan Railway Workers’ Union) and Nihon Yūsei Kōsha Rōdō Kumiai (Japan Postal Workers’ Union), which had engaged in numerous nationwide militant labor disputes in the past, vanished from the forefront of the labor movements. The third catalyst for the decline in union membership was the increasing apathy of the younger generation towards political causes, reformist activities, and organized protests, a tendency which marks the prosperity and the global generations, as discussed in Chapter 4. Once potent political forces pertinent to the interests of a large proportion of the working population, most labor unions in Japan have little bearing on a majority of their former constituencies in the twenty-first century.

2 Capital–labor cooperation Union militancy is now a thing of the past. As is evident in Figure 5.3, the number of cases of industrial strikes peaked at 9,581 in 1974 but was merely 68 in 2017. At the firm level, the enterprise union structure makes it difficult for workers of the same job classification to form an intercompany alliance. At the national level, labor has often acquiesced in management’s call for controlled wage increases and long working hours in the name of defending the international competitiveness of the Japanese economy. Behind these conciliatory styles in Japan’s labor lies a union structure in which only a tiny fraction of union leaders remain labor advocates throughout their careers. A significant proportion of union officials at the enterprise level assume their posts as stepping-stones to managerial positions within the companies that employ them. Within the framework of enterprise unionism, union leaders, who know that their term of office is limited, often cultivate connections with high-level executives when dealing with management. This experience gives an advantage to former union officials who seek promotion within the company. In a considerable number of companies, the head of the personnel department or the labor division is a former union leader. In most cases, the company management provides union offices and pays union officials’ wages. Thus, in many large corporations, enterprise unions often act as the ‘second management’ to pacify the labor force.

Enterprise unionism presents a major obstacle to the reduction of working hours. Each union engages in decentralized, firm-based negotiations with company management, but no firm can find it easy to shorten working hours without knowing what competing firms might decide about the issue, since a one-sided reduction may weaken the company’s competitive edge. In contrast, by and large, European Union countries are able to shorten working hours, because they have institutionalized centralized collective-bargaining systems.41 Within this structure, agreements that unions and employers’ organizations make at the center bind all firms in the relevant industry and ensure that uniform practice prevails. With regard to working conditions, and specifically working hours, then, the centralized system of bargaining frees both employers and unionists from the anxiety of intercompany competition that is embedded in Japan’s enterprise unionism makeup. Japan’s large corporations successfully reorganized the system of management and supervision of blue-collar workers throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As the core of the rearrangement, they attempted to open an avenue for promotion for blue-collar workers beyond the level of foreman and thereby lower the wall between them and white-collar workers.42 The system paved the way for a new career structure in which blue-collar workers could expect to be able to move up to middle-management level. Invoking the principle of equality, unions also pressed for implementation of a structure in which blue-collar workers had the opportunity of promotion beyond the demarcation line between blue- and white-collar workers. When the barrier was removed, or at least obscured, unions approved and

even encouraged competition among blue-collar workers seeking those opportunities; in that sense, labor and capital have been in accord.43 Notwithstanding their general partnership with management, Rengō and other industrial federations try to orchestrate labor demands every March and April in their shuntō (spring offensive), in a bid to secure annual wage and bonus increases. Because enterprise unions have varied levels of bargaining power, they benefit by coordinating their negotiations in the same season and making concerted efforts to garner the best possible outcomes for their members. For these purposes, every spring, unions of the major automobile, electricity, steel, and other manufacturing companies take the lead in negotiations with management and set the benchmark of salary gains by settling their cases at the outset of the overall offensive. This is followed by negotiations between unions and employers in the nonmanufacturing sectors and finally by those in small businesses. The spring offensive used to be accompanied by acute industrial action, but this is no longer the case. Japan was practically a strike-free society in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

VIII Conclusion An overwhelming majority of workers in Japan are employed in small businesses, though they are subject to the influence of large companies to varying degrees, with their work practice diverging immensely. The world of some megacorporations is well known in terms of the ‘Japanese-style’ management model, though its internal variety is vast. Japan’s work culture is much more diverse than notions of workaholism, job dedication, company loyalty, and group orientation circumscribe. Built on firm-based internal labor markets, most of Japan’s large companies use family metaphor to describe their corporate structure and place an emphasis on expressive criteria for defining employee ability. This often yields undesirable consequences like overwork, giving rise to the enactment of the Workstyle Reform Law. Facing the tide of globalization, big firms abandoned the timehonored lifetime employment system and seniority-based wage structure to a limited extent and partially adopted the performancebased model. With the advent of cultural capitalism built mainly on the production and consumption of knowledge-intensive goods and image-based

commodities,

the

labor

force

was

casualized,

diversified, and destabilized, resulting in redundant employees being dislodged from their positions or simply fired. Most Japanese unions are enterprise unions and are made up mainly of employees of large companies. With their membership and

militancy declining, they tend to refrain from industrial action and assume a conciliatory stance vis-à-vis employers, making Japan a country almost free of strikes.

Research questions 1. To what extent does the trend in Japan’s world of work resemble or differ from that of other advanced economies? 2. In the climate of declining labor union membership, how can individual workers’ rights be defended collectively? 3. Does the future of Japan’s capitalism lie in the expansion of the cultural industry or in the reinforcement of the manufacturing sector? 4. To what degree will the forces of neoliberal globalization affect the established configuration of ‘Japanese-style’ management? 5. What positive impact will the casualization of labor have on the everyday life of Japanese?

Further readings Fu, Huyan 2011, An Emerging Non-regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers. London: Routledge. Gordon, Andrew 2001, The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mouer, Ross and Kawanishi, Hirosuke 2005, A Sociology of Work in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tachibanaki, Toshiaki and Taki, Atsuhiko 2012, Capital and Labour in Japan: The Functions of Two Factor Markets. London: Routledge. Zacharias-Walsh, Anne 2016, Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan. Ithaca: ILR Press and Cornell University Press.

Online resources Evans, C. D. A. 2011, ‘The future of the Japanese labor movement’. Dissent (13 August), www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/thefuture-of-the-japanese-labor-movement. Jancer, Matt 2016, ‘How eight conglomerates dominate Japanese industry’. Smithsonian Magazine (7 September), www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-eight-conglomeratesdominate-japanese-industry-180960356/. Japan Times, Small Businesses, www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/smallbusinesses/ (may require registration or subscription). Koll, Jesper 2018, ‘Japan has a form of capitalism that works’. Japan Times (4 May), www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/05/04/commentary/japancommentary/japan-form-capitalism-works/#.XjouwS2caIE (may require registration or subscription). Lufkin, Bryan 2020, The Future of Japan’s Master Artisans. BBC (20 February), www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200219-the-future-ofjapans-master-artisans. Okutsu, Akane and Sugiura, Eri 2018, ‘Five things to know about Japan’s work reform law’. Nikkei Asian Review (29 June), https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Five-things-to-know-about-Japan-swork-reform-law.

1 Chiavacci and Hommerich 2017, p. 4. 2 Granovetter 1984, p. 334. 3 This pattern is not unique to the Japanese situation but universal across advanced capitalist economies. The observed reality contradicts the long-held view that the development of capitalism would annihilate small-scale enterprises to pave the way for monopolistic domination by large companies, although oligopolies do dominate and control small businesses. 4 Some areas in tertiary industry are exceptions to this general definition. For the wholesale sector, the employee and capital ceilings decrease to 100 persons or ¥100 million respectively. For the retail sector, the cutoff figures are much smaller: 50 employees or ¥50 million. For the service sector, they are 100 employees or ¥50 million. 5 These patterns do not change even if one eliminates agriculture, forestry, and fisheries from the calculations. 6 Based on Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016b. 7 There is a debate over whether the lifetime employment system has been a unique Japanese structure. Koike (1988), for example, contends that long-service workers are so numerous both in Europe and in the United States that Japan is not unique. 8 Gill 2015, 2001, 2000. 9 Tokyo Shōkō Research 2017, Questions 9, 22.

10 Miwa 2010; SSM 2005a, vol. 2, pp. 37–51. 11 For example, Johnson 1990. 12 Sataka 1992, 1993a, 1993b; Matsumoto 1991. 13 Okumura 1991. 14 The discussion here follows Iwata 1981, pp. 117–45. 15 Befu 1990b. 16 AM, 22 January 2020, p. 7. 17 Recruit Works Institute 2017. 18 Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2016a. 19 The situation has generated many popular expressions referring to the inability of company-first men to fit in to the family environment. They have been sarcastically called ‘huge garbage of no use to family life’. Also, a popular saying has been in circulation in the mass media: ‘It is best for the husband to be healthy and not at home.’ 20 Japan Trade Union Confederation 2015. 21 AM, 30 June 2018, pp. 1–2, 4. 22 In 2017, the average annual entitlement was 18.32 days, but the average annual leave actually taken was 9.03 days (49.29 percent). Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2013, 2018e. In

2018, the percentage increased only marginally, to 52.4 percent. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2019a. 23 AE, 6 July 2018, p. 23. 24 Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2016a. 25 The Supreme Court’s reasoning on 17 September 1999. 26 The Tokyo District Court’s ruling in September 1993. 27 Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2017. 28 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019. 29 AM, 14 June 2019, p. 3. 30 For details, see Kosugi 2008. 31 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2013a. 32 Ogihara 2017. 33 Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Table 5.6; Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2017b. Eighty-one percent of respondents supported the former type and 17 percent the latter. This pattern has been stable over the past six decades. 34 Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Table 5.6b. The scores were 57 percent versus 39 in favor of the family atmosphere type. 35 Fujita 1984.

36 Hakuhōdō Institute of Life and Living 1985. 37 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016b. 38 The approximation here is quite conservative and simply shows that the quaternary sector forms an independent, expanding, and sufficiently large category in its own right. 39 Mouer and Kawanishi 2005; Kawanishi 1992. 40 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018c. 41 Eurofound 2015; Deutschmann 1991. 42 Watanabe 1990, pp. 87, 189–90. 43 See Ihara 2007, based on the author’s experience as a bluecollar worker in one of the best-known companies in Japan.

Chapter 6

Education: diversity and unity ◈

I Introduction The ideology of educational credentialism pervades Japanese society and spreads an examination culture across considerable sections of Japan’s schools.1 In the distribution of occupational positions in Japan, it is believed that educational background plays an exceptionally important role. At the level of higher education, universities are rank-ordered in terms of prestige and reputation in such a way that degrees from top-ranking universities are regarded as essential qualifications for high positions in the occupational hierarchy. An overwhelming majority of upper-bracket officials in the national bureaucracy are the graduates of the University of Tokyo. Large corporations are also believed to promote employees on the basis of the university from which they graduated. This ideology influences the normative framework of Japanese education that positions its top layer as the model to be emulated. It induces

many

university

examination

candidates

to

choose

prestigious universities over disciplines in which they are interested. Thus, at this level, those who aspire to tertiary education are intensely competitive in preparing for the entrance examinations of reputable universities. On the other hand, about half of those who have completed high school do not advance to universities, and some low-ranking tertiary institutions find it difficult to attract the prescribed number of

applicants and accept those who do apply without examination, a reality in which the competitive examination culture is hardly present. This chapter surveys Japanese education by first inspecting its demography and stratification in detail and scrutinizing how class variables play out throughout the educational process. The following section investigates how the state attempts to control the substance of education at primary and secondary levels, while the next focuses on some of the costs of the regimented style of teaching. The chapter then examines continuity and change in university student life and looks at how Japanese education is facing the rising tide of globalization, with particular attention paid to English-language teaching. The final section describes four competing educational orientations.

II Demography and stratification The Japanese education system comprises four phases: elementary (primary), middle (junior high), and high school, and tertiary (university, college, and beyond).2 At the age of six, children enter elementary school, which has six grades (each of which lasts one year). They then proceed to middle school, which consists of three grades; completing it is mandatory. Virtually all who complete compulsory education then progress through the three grades of high school.3 Thus, nearly all students complete twelve years of schooling, making high-school education virtually semi-mandatory. An overwhelming majority of government schools are coeducational, but some private schools are single sex. Beyond high-school level, four-year universities and two-year junior colleges operate as institutions of higher education. Nationally, half of new high-school graduates proceed to four-year universities.4 The proportion of students enrolling in tertiary institutions has steadily increased. However, those who possessed university degrees in 2010 amounted to 19.9 percent of the entire population, as Table 6.1 exhibits. Japanese who are university educated are a minority; the vast majority of Japanese have had little to do with university life. Table 6.1 Distribution of final education levels, 2010

Final education level

No. of people (millions)

% of population

Elementary and middle school

16.8

18.8

High schoola

41.4

46.5

Junior and technical collegeb

13.2

14.8

University and graduate school

17.7

19.9

Total

89.1

100.0

Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2010. Notes: The figures are based on the entire population at the age of 15 and above. a

Includes five-year middle schools in the pre–World War II system. These schools correspond to high schools in the postwar system. b

Technical colleges (kōtō senmon gakkō) differ from specialized training colleges (senmon gakkō). Small in number and mostly run by the central government, technical colleges offer five- to seven-year specialized courses mainly in mercantile marine studies, engineering, and technology to those who have completed middle-school education.

Outside the sphere of universities and junior colleges, a large number of private commercial schools called senmon gakkō (specialized vocational colleges) run vocation-oriented courses for those who have completed high school but who are unable or unwilling to attend universities and colleges. Some full-time university students are double-schooled in these vocational schools to strengthen their technical skills and qualifications. The average formal education level of the Japanese is among the highest in the world. Parents and students in Japan are conscious both of the prestige associated with higher educational credentials and of the long-term pecuniary rewards that they bring. As Figure 6.1 indicates, the average level of lifetime salaries and wages of university graduates is much higher than those of people who completed only high-school education.5 With the general rise of living standards, parents are increasingly prepared to invest in education in the hope of their children acquiring a comparative material advantage in future life.

Figure 6.1 Disparities of age-based wages among male and female employees, by educational background, 2018 Note: The black circles indicate the highest point in each group. Source: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018f. There are various types of high schools. Some are government funded and others are privately funded, the respective student numbers being in the ratio of 7:3. The most visible class cleavages emerge at entrance to high school. With regard to curricula, high schools are divided into two main groups: those providing general education with the expectation that a significant proportion of their students will advance to universities and colleges, and those specializing in vocational education (such as for agriculture, industry, and commerce) on the assumption that their students will enter the job market of their specialization on completion of their studies. The distinction between the two types is somewhat blurred; some general-school students start working immediately after finishing high school, while some vocational-school students proceed to universities and colleges. A further significant proportion enters vocational colleges.

It is widely believed that the Japanese educational structure is of a tournament type, in which losers who have failed in their teens are virtually unable to have a second chance. This propels students, particularly in elite schools, to make fervent preparations for university-entrance examinations. On close inquiry, however, one discovers that the Japanese system is closer to the league type, in which one defeat is not the end of the road, because a ‘return match’ is built into the system.6 This framework induces many unsuccessful candidates to devote another year or even two or three years to preparation for the entrance examination of their desired faculty. These students, who are between high-school and university levels, are popularly labeled rōnin (lordless samurai), as they are attached to no formal educational institution and are therefore regarded as ‘masterless’. Many rōnin attend private cramming schools which train students specifically for university-entrance examinations.

1 Two paths of schooling: academic and vocational The demography of the high-school student population is given in Table 6.2, which shows four major options open to those who complete high-school education. Table 6.2 Distribution of high-school student population after graduation, 2018 % of students

Destination 1. Academic: universities

49.7

2. Semi-academic and semi-vocational: junior and technical colleges

5.1

3. Vocational: jobs

17.5

4. Vocational: private vocational schools

15.9

5. Others (including rōnin)

11.8

Source: Ministry of Education and Science 2018a. The first option (Row 1 in Table 6.2) is taken by about half of all high-school graduates, who progress straight to universities with four-year degree courses. These universities are made up of three types. The first comprise national universities supported financially by the central government, including many of the most prestigious – for example, Tokyo and Kyoto universities. The second type

comprises a small number of public universities funded chiefly by prefectural or municipal governments, such as Tokyo Metropolitan and Kyoto Prefectural universities. The third type consists of private universities and colleges, including such well-known institutions as Waseda and Keiō universities. In 2018, of a total of 782 four-year universities, approximately three-quarters were private institutions.7 Institutions of higher education differ greatly, not only in repute but also in the nature and quality of the education they provide and the quality of their students. The second option (Row 2) comprises 328 junior colleges that provide two-year degrees. The number of these colleges has declined over time since a peak in the mid-1990s, when the number approached 600. Some 90 percent of students who take this option are female, contrasting with four-year university courses, in which the male to female ratio is around 1:1. With little academic motivation, many females regard their time in these institutions as a phase between high school and marriage. Though junior colleges are classified as academic institutions, most of them are private and similar to vocational schools in their educational substance, with much emphasis placed on training for homemaking and domestic science. Only 5.1 percent of high-school graduates take this option. The third available option (Row 3) is employment, which approximately 17.5 percent of high-school graduates opt for. Most vocational or commercial high schools prepare their students for this path, and some students who have graduated from general high schools also choose it.

The fourth option (Row 4) is privately managed vocational schools. About 15.9 percent of high-school leavers take this path. The schools offer courses in secretarial assistance, English conversation, cooking, sewing, bookkeeping, nursing, computer programming, flower arrangement, hairdressing, and so forth. These schools have thrived outside the formal education system and absorb potentially unemployed youth into a vocational training environment. To a considerable extent they mask the extent of latent unemployment.8 They accommodate many of those who have completed studies at low-ranking general high schools but who cannot pass a university-entrance examination or get a job; in this sense, they provide a rescue mechanism for mediocre and low performers at high school. Mostly privatized, commercial, and profitoriented, these institutions remain outside government regulations and subsidies, drawing their earnings almost wholly from students’ tuition fees on the basis of a full-fee user pays principle. Some individuals remain outside these four routes, including resourceful entrepreneurs who establish their own businesses, the abovementioned rōnin, who devote one or two years to preparing for the entrance examination of their desired university,9 NEETs (youth not in education, employment, or training), and others who choose neither to study nor to work (see Chapter 5). One should bear in mind that about one-half of Japan’s youth do not advance to four-year universities, and most of the students outside the first option make no preparation for university-entrance examinations. With clear vocational orientations, they are less academically driven and more practically minded. The well-

publicized examination hell of Japanese youth (see the following section) is reserved for a minority.

2 The ideology of educational credentialism Nonetheless, it is a reality that elite academic high schools, which constitute approximately the top 10 percent of all academic high schools, are imbued with

examination-oriented

culture.

The

increasing severity of the competition at this level has filtered down through high school in such a way that middle-school pupils struggle to get into high schools which produce large numbers of successful entrants to highly ranked universities. Pupils who begin this process early commence their preparations in elementary school, so that they may gain admission to established private secondary schools which have systematic middle- and high-school education geared to university-entrance examinations and high pass rates for entry into prestigious universities.10 Students are expected to digest a considerable amount of material to reach the levels demanded by arduous high-school and university examinations, a condition sometimes described as ‘examination hell’. Still, there are fine variations between the following two types. On one hand, longestablished schools, which were founded before World War II, have room to maintain a ‘legacy of cultivating well-balanced “enlightened” all-rounders’.11 On the other hand, newer elite schools, many of which were established during the 1960s, are more focused on producing results.

Figure 6.2 High-school students taking an examination The examination-oriented culture of Japanese education necessitates

an

elaborate

system

for

assessing

students’

knowledge. On the pretext of avoiding subjective evaluation, priority is given to the supposedly objective appraisal of pupils’ capacities to memorize facts, numbers, and events and to solve mathematical and scientific equations. This framework attaches little importance to the development of creative thinking, original problem formulation, and critical analysis in the areas of social issues and political debates. Thus, rote learning and repeated drilling are the predominant features of Japan’s education, particularly at secondary-school level, where examination culture permeates deeply into the classroom. Consequently,

Japanese

students

rank

high

in

international

comparisons of mathematical and scientific test results. The nation’s school system produces an army of youngsters who have excellent training in basic factual knowledge, though they have limited education in critical social thinking.

Meanwhile, the degree to which educational credentialism actually prevails in Japanese society remains a moot point. Some studies suggest that in the private business sector promotion rates of graduates from prestigious national universities are in fact lower than those of graduates from certain less well-known private and local institutions,12 findings that point to the possibility that the promotion structure of Japanese companies may be based more on performance and merit than on the importance of the alma mater.

3 The commercialization of education Education in Japan is expensive business. The system imposes a considerable financial burden on families. Although tuition fees were made gratuitous in public high schools from 2010, education is especially costly for those studying in private schools and universities. University education in Japan is regarded as a private privilege rather than a public commodity. Public universities funded by national, prefectural, or municipal governments constitute only a quarter of higher-education institutions. In 2016, tuition and other educational expenses were ¥643,000 at national universities and ¥661,000 at prefectural and municipal universities. The average salary earnings of employees in the private sector were ¥4.22 million. Thus, educational fees at these public universities amounted to some 15 percent of the national average annual income of salary earners. Although partially subsidized by national government, private universities and colleges have much higher tuition fees plus considerable entrance fees, which exceed the national average annual income at some institutions.13 Japan is consistently at the bottom of OECD rankings of per capita public spending on higher education.14 Approximately half of all university students are the recipients of so-called scholarships (shōgakukin),15 most of which are government-funded student loans to be paid back after graduation. Furthermore, since most tertiary institutions are clustered in major metropolitan centers, students from rural and provincial

areas must pay considerable accommodation costs.16 Accordingly, students depend heavily on their parents’ financial support during their university years. This support constitutes some 63 percent of students’ tuition and living costs.17 Thus, parents’ capacity to support their children affects their advancement to the tertiary level. Parents’ willingness to invest in their children’s education has paved the way for ‘shadow education’18 outside formal schooling, and an examination industry controls and makes profits from such extra-school education. Most important in this industry are juku schools, private after-school coaching establishments that thrive because of the intense competition over school- and universityentrance examinations. These schools range from large-scale training institutions to small home-based tutorial arrangements. In 2017, some 46 percent of elementary-school pupils and 61 percent of middle-school pupils went to juku after school.19 Some attend to catch up with schoolwork, while others prepare for entrance examinations. Still others regard juku as a social place, somewhere for them to spend time with their friends. Whatever the motivation, the result of this mushrooming in juku attendance has been a decline in young people’s after-school leisure time. The juku phenomenon also implies that schools fail to meet students’ educational needs. Some large juku chains have developed such examination knowhow that a considerable number of minor universities and colleges commission them to formulate entrance examination questions.20 For many years, Japanese schools used to hold classes on Saturdays. In response to the increasing trend for a five-day working week in industry, the Ministry of Education introduced a five-day

week in the government school system in 2002. It was intended that this would provide pupils with more time outside school to play and enjoy individual freedom. Ironically, however, the system has provided the commercial education industry with the opportunity to compete intensely for the expanded Saturday market. With more and more

students

studying

at

juku

and

other

after-school

establishments, the new arrangement appears to have simply transferred a large section of the student population on Saturdays from the formal school system to the commercial sector. The extent to which parents can invest in the education of their children depends very much on their resources. Youngsters who finish their education in government high schools and start working at the age of eighteen mostly come from families lacking economic resources. Some well-placed and well-resourced parents put their children into expensive elite private schools, which have singlestream middle-school and high-school curricula. Some of these schools have links with private universities or track records of producing students successful in obtaining admission into nonprivate prestigious universities. In the overheated climate of examination fervor for university entrance, a measure called hensachi (deviation score) spread widely among commercial education firms in the 1960s and took hold thereafter. It is a statistical formula to gauge the test result of each student in a large sample with a view to predicting the probability of their passing the entrance examination of a particular school or university and is designed in such a way that the mean score for a group of students taking a test is always 50 and the standard

deviation 10. From time to time, commercial test companies organize prefecture-wide or nationwide trial examinations taken by a large number of students from various schools. Locating each applicant’s hensachi score on the distribution curve, the companies measure the likelihood of success with high accuracy on the basis of past data on the minimum entry score for the school or university department in question. These scores have provided valuable information for applicants wishing to decide which institution they should apply to enter, and students remain interested in obtaining pre-examination numerical data on their scholastic attainments compared with those of students from other schools. Consequently, firms in the examination industry have continued to conduct examinations outside schools. In the absence of interschool comparative data prior to high-school-entrance examinations, held in January and February each year, teachers as well as parents choose to rely on commercial tests that produce students’ hensachi. Hensachi arrangements are routine among high-school students vying for university places. They sit for commercially organized trial examinations which provide candidates, both third-year high-school students and rōnin, with fairly accurate ideas of their chances of getting into their preferred university department. These scores not only rank students but do so in relation to a numerical ranking of university departments. Education culture within the elite-school setting has gradually come to reflect corporate culture within the enterprise environment. Just as performance-based salaries increasingly represent the human worth of each employee, so too are the numerically

calculated hensachi marks treated as though they were the sole indicator of the total value of each student. At the core of the examination culture of Japanese schools is a ‘one-dimensional system of the rank ordering of abilities measured solely by hensachi scores’.21

4 School–business interactions Companies in Japan make a practice of recruiting fresh high-school graduates through school guidance-counseling units. Therefore, Japanese schools interact intensely with the business community in organizing job placements for students. In this nexus, many dedicated high-school teachers devote themselves to finding employment

for

their

students.

The

teachers

in

relatively

disadvantaged schools, from which most students enter the job market immediately after high-school education, play a vital role in helping students secure positions.22 Through the assistance of these school officers, high-school students who wish to find work would normally start looking for a job and sit employment examinations for various companies in the summer or fall of their final year. New recruits complete high school in March and commence work en masse on 1 April, the first day of Japan’s financial, school, and academic year. On this day, throughout the nation, companies conduct formal ceremonies at which new employees assemble in large halls to listen to pep talks given by their executive bosses. The

school-based

recruitment

system,

which

is

legally

supported by the Employment Security Law (Shokugyō antei-hō), initially promulgated in 1947 and revised in 1949, became a widespread practice in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing employers to choose the schools to which they would send job application forms and related employment information. Students attending schools

which companies do not approach have virtually no way of gaining an interview. If prospective employers are dissatisfied with the quality of students they hire from a given school, they can switch their preference to other schools. This situation causes guidancecounseling teachers to maintain and expand recruitment channels with companies in rivalry with their counterparts at other schools. In turn, corporate personnel officers compete with each other to secure a constant supply of quality students from quality schools. Locked into reciprocal transactions, schools and enterprises thus form a central nexus in the recruitment market. These school–business interactions also shape the hierarchical ranking of schools in each area. A school’s ranking reflects its standing with companies as a supplier of quality job applicants, as well as the standings of the companies with which it deals. A similar system prevails at university level. Prospective graduates commence job-hunting early in their final year, but large corporations (prestigious ones in particular) consider applications mainly from students of the universities that they have targeted in advance. Students from mediocre universities have limited chances to be seriously evaluated by these firms. This practice, which covertly preferences high-class universities, is the major reason for the

stratification

of

tertiary

institutions

in

the

job

market.

Approximately half of all major companies target only a small number of top universities for the recruitment of fresh employees.23 Corporations justify the system on the grounds that, in the absence of dependable detailed information about the quality of each student, the most reliable indicator is the level of the university which they

have succeeded in entering: the more difficult it is to get in, the more ability the prospective employee must have. From the point of view of the human resources departments of large companies, the difficulty level of entry to each department of each university can be measured most credibly by its entrance examination score as reflected by the hensachi. With the hensachibased university designation system firmly established, high-school students who wish to advance to higher education must pass an entrance examination of a university with a high hensachi standing in order to have the prospect of obtaining a good job after graduation. Given that employment opportunities with the best material rewards exist in the internal labor market, particularly in the large-corporation sector, students’ hensachi scores not only represent their chance of gaining admission to a reputable university but are constant reminders of their position in the race for good employment. In the face of the changing corporate model trend, from the ‘Japanese’ to the performance-based style (discussed in Chapter 5), a long-standing recruitment method has been partially eroded. It was the conventional rule that all jobseeking prospective university graduates received pre-graduation interviews and job offers only after a specified date agreed upon by major corporations and that successful students were formally employed en bloc on 1 April. In the 2010s, however, a growing number of nonconformist firms, particularly foreign-affiliated companies and venture businesses, began to accept job applications and offer employment year-round, a tendency which opened up opportunities for jobholders already in the workforce as well as for talented, maverick students. Among the

employees of large corporations, about 60 percent are estimated to be employed through the conventional path, with the remaining 40 percent via the year-round route.24

5 Articulation of class lines Educational institutions are, in principle, meant to provide avenues for upward social mobility and to perform equalization functions among different social classes. Provided sufficient educational opportunities are available, the bright daughter of a laborer in a rural area should be able to pursue higher education and to climb to a higher position in the social hierarchy. Most Japanese perceive that this is not really the case; they regard educational inequality as more serious than other dimensions of inequality, such as age, occupation, ethnicity, and gender.25 Education-based class lines are discernible in at least four areas: geographical distribution of high-achieving and underperforming processes,

schools,

stratification

differences in

in

high-school

family culture,

socialization and

social

backgrounds of students in prestigious universities. (a) Class ecology of schools Elementary and middle schools, which deliver compulsory education, show different levels of student academic achievement depending upon where they are located. By and large, high-achieving schools are situated in middle-class communities where living space is plentiful, amusement centers are far away, crime prevention associations are few, and misbehavior and deviant behavior are rare. Schools in lower-class districts show opposite characteristics, and their pupils are comparatively underachieving.26 The contrast reflects

the class ecology of schools, which tends not to be discussed openly. The publication of the results of national academic tests conducted annually for Grade 6 and 9 students by the Ministry of Education, for instance, has often met strong opposition from some educators who fear that the revelation of school scores could lead to the public ranking of schools and inevitably unveil the class environment of each school – a visible, physical, and spatial reality of class differentiation of education which contradicts the ideology of egalitarianism at the compulsory education level. (b) Family socialization The ideology of meritocratic competition in schools often veils who defines what is meritorious and who gains an advantage over whom on the basis of defined criteria. One example is the way in which class background affects the amount of study undertaken outside school, an indicator of students’ motivation to learn.27 The children of professionals and managers study after school far more than those whose parents are in other occupations. Both fathers’ and mothers’ educational backgrounds also influence the extent to which students study outside school hours. Pupils with disadvantaged backgrounds are generally deprived of motivations to develop academic skills after school hours. Section IV of Chapter 3 discussed in detail the extent to which the cultural capital that individuals inherit in their childhood determines their later life courses.

(c) School culture High-school students’ interests differ significantly between high- and low-ranked schools. Examination hell in high-ranking schools provides merely a partial picture. Students on the bottom rungs of the school ladder find more significant meaning in their part-time jobs outside school, regarding them as enjoyable, useful, fulfilling, and relaxing. Many of them hardly study at home, distance themselves from classwork and extracurricular activities at school, and selfactualize in outside work, where they willingly acquire a sense of responsibility and the qualities of perseverance and courtesy. These job-oriented students expect to live independently of their parents, to become self-supporting in their future full-time job, and to marry earlier than school-oriented students. In this sense, part-time jobs facilitate students’ self-reliance, self-support, and independence. In comparison with students in schools at the top of the school hierarchy, those near the bottom acquire real-life experiences outside school and mature relatively quickly.28 At the bottom of the high-school hierarchy are a few thousand part-time schools (teiji-sei kōkō), most of which operate as evening schools, catering for 80,000 students.29 Though little attention is given to this segment of the student population, a broad variety of disadvantaged students is accommodated: underachievers at middle-school level, ‘problem children’, ex-sufferers of school phobia, dropouts from daytime high schools, and students with disability. Other students include middle-aged and elderly adults who could not go to high school in their youth. These part-time schools

also cater for many newcomer youths and adults from overseas who want to acquire literacy and a high-school graduation certificate. Correspondence high schools provide another learning option to students who do not want to be tied to a structured school life. These students include teenagers with health problems or difficulties in adjusting to group life, as well as adults who were unable to receive high-school education in their youth. They study materials prepared by the schools without physically attending classes and can get a high-school graduation certificate upon completing the required subjects. The number of students enrolled in schools of this type is nearly 200,000,30 accounting for approximately one in twenty highschool students across the nation, another indication of the diversification of secondary education. (d) Patterns in prestigious universities The class background of high-school graduates influences their likelihood of proceeding to prestigious universities. In 2019, an overwhelming majority of students who gained admission to the medical schools of leading national and public universities graduated from private high schools which provide six years of integrated middle- and high-school education, while those who graduated from government schools constituted a tiny minority of admissions.31 Highly selective medical schools were almost monopolized by elite private-school graduates. In these schools, students complete all the high-school curricula by the end of the second year of high school

and exclusively spend their third and final year preparing for university-entrance examinations. The social backgrounds of students at the University of Tokyo are concentrated in the elite sector.32 A majority of the students come from families in which the father is engaged in a professional, technical, managerial, or educational occupation. The average income of their parents far exceeds the national average income of male wage earners in their late forties and fifties. About half the students at this university come from abovementioned elite private high schools connected with their own middle schools; students in these schools are trained in a six-year continuous course. With regard to parental occupation, income, and school background, there is little doubt that the children of those who occupy the higher echelons of the social hierarchy and possess greater economic and cultural resources comprise an overwhelming majority of the student population of Japan’s most prestigious university.

III State control of education The Japanese education system is characterized by a high degree of centralization and domination by the national government. This pattern derives from the fact that Japan’s modern school system was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century at the initiative, and through the intervention, of the powerful Ministry of Education. As discussed in Chapter 1, Japan had an extensive community base in education towards the end of its feudal years, in the form of many grassroots temple schools run by priests and local intellectuals, as well as schools for youngsters of the samurai class managed by feudal lords. But the strong leadership of the central government determined not only the tempo of the spread of schools as modern institutions but also the shape and content of their curricula. And although the education system was decentralized and democratized

immediately

after

World

War

II,

the

postwar

liberalization process never overturned the dominance of the state in the management of schools. Even in the 2020s, the Ministry of Education33 controls the content and tone of all school textbooks, supervises curricula throughout the nation, and has considerable power over the administration of universities. The vestiges and legacy of prewar centralized education remain a potent force, counteracting the diversification of school culture and propelling the unification of education in a number of ways.

1 Textbook authorization The Ministry of Education has the power to approve or disapprove the contents of all textbooks used in elementary and middle schools, a system that is deemed a form of political intervention. In prewar years, it compiled its own textbooks and enforced their use at primary and secondary levels throughout the nation. After World War II, the system of state textbooks was abolished, and numerous commercial publishers began producing their own textbooks for various subjects. However, the ministry retained the authority to modify the content and wording of any textbook and made it a legal requirement that no textbooks should be distributed without its authorization. By and large, the ministry’s textbook inspectors tend to expurgate descriptions of Japanese atrocities perpetrated during World War II, depictions of political dissent and social movements against the government, and discussions of individual rights and choices. They have tried to sway the writers towards emphasizing submission and obedience to social order, and duties and obligations to society. The ministry attracted international criticism in the 1980s for its directives that the textbook description of Japan’s military activity in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s be changed from shinryaku (aggression)

to

shinshutsu

(advancement).

Similar

emphatic

disapproval was voiced when it was revealed that textbook examiners insisted that Korea’s independence movements during the Japanese colonial period be portrayed as violent rebellions and

attempted to dilute the depiction of Japanese wartime activities. Section VIII of Chapter 9 discusses these issues in more detail. The constitutionality of the government’s textbook authorization system surfaced as a controversial issue with a series of lawsuits brought from 1965 to 1997 by Professor Saburō Ienaga, an eminent historian, against the Ministry of Education. The Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that the system was constitutional and maintained that the state had the right to control the substance of education. Approved textbooks are chosen for use in the classroom not by individual teachers or by schools, but by the education board at prefectural, county, or municipal level, and are bought and distributed en bloc. Because of the size and profitability of the textbook market thus organized, publishers cannot avoid making pecuniary calculations in dealing with ministry textbook examiners. Thus, market-driven conformity prevails because of monetary considerations on the part of publishing houses.

2 Curriculum guidelines The Ministry of Education exercises further control over the substance of education through its requirement that schools follow gakushū shidō yōryō (official guidelines for school teaching), the detailed instructions on what is to be taught and how it is to be taught at each grade from elementary school to high school. The guidelines also require all schools to hoist the Rising Sun flag as the national flag on ceremonial occasions and to sing the ‘Kimigayo’ song as the national anthem, although the public is divided over these requirements because the flag and song were used as symbols of nationalistic education during the war years. The guidelines of the moral education subject are often the target of criticism over the extent to which they intervene in the individual’s freedom of thought, ethical beliefs, and religious convictions. Textbook inspectors check whether textbooks exhaustively cover the items listed in the guidelines. Although educators have debated whether or not they are legally binding for individual teachers, the reality is that the ministry effectively uses them to force teachers to comply with the government’s educational framework.

3 Conformist patterns of socialization The central government’s guidance and domination of the development of Japan’s education structure have left their marks on the way in which routines, conventions, and practices cut across regional lines. Several common patterns of socialization at school deserve attention. (a) Disciplinarian ethics Japanese schools invoke militaristic ethics for the personality formation of students. These ethics have multiple layers, but all embrace the notion that some physical training is needed to produce a socially acceptable person. At the mildest level, Japanese children are expected to follow various forms of military discipline in the classroom. It is part of Japanese classroom routine for a classroom leader to shout at the beginning of a session, ‘Kiritsu!’ (stand up), ‘Rei!’ (bow), and ‘Chakuseki!’ (sit down). The entire class is expected to follow these calls as a greeting to the teacher. It is also customary for teachers to arrange their pupils by height order in classrooms and assemblies. Although this gives the external appearance of sequence and regularity, the underlying presumption is that the taller the better; students are always conscious of their physical location in the height order of their classmates. Some schools, and many school sports clubs, require male students to have their hair cropped close, a practice similar to that

applied to soldiers in the Japanese military before and during World War II. Of nearly 4,000 schools which participated in the National High School Baseball Championship in 2018, approximately threequarters made it a rule for players to have a close-cropped hairstyle.34 The idea is that Spartan simplicity in school life will cultivate a strong, manly, and austere personality. A system of quasi-military age-based hierarchy is ingrained at the inter-personal level. Commencing at secondary school, pupils are introduced to a pervasive student subculture in which junior students (kōhai) are expected to show respect, obedience, and subservience to senior students (senpai). Even outside school, kōhai students are supposed to bow in greeting when they encounter senpai on the street. Inside school, the senpai–kōhai relationship is perhaps most intense and articulated in sports club activities; new members, who are usually first-year pupils, are normally required to engage in menial tasks for the initial phase of their membership. At the instruction of older members, they must serve as ballkids, clean the playing field and equipment, and even wash team members’ clothes, without themselves being allowed to practice or train for the probationary period. This convention stems from the rationale that one can become a good player only after one has formed a submissive personality, willing to follow orders from a coach or captain without question.

Emphasis on collective integration Elementary

schools

in

Japan

underscore

children’s

integration into their groups and classes through a variety of practices. Virtually all have school songs which pupils sing to enhance their sense of collective unity. In most schools, students are required to clean their classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds to learn that they are jointly responsible for keeping their surroundings spotless. Many schools make it mandatory for pupils to walk to school in a group, an arrangement which fosters togetherness. These and other features of Japanese primary education are observable in the videos

School

in

Japan,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?

v=5A09HhxXht4 (Where’s Andrew?, 24 September 2011), and Japanese Students Clean Classrooms to Learn Life Skills, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv4oNvxCY5k (AJ+, 28 October 2015).

(b) Psychological integration Schools

in

Japan

have

developed

techniques

to

promote

psychological uniformity and cohesion among pupils. It is standard routine in many subjects for a teacher to instruct an entire class to read a textbook aloud, in unison. This gives the class a sense of working together and makes it difficult for any child to deviate from the set pattern. Not only high and middle schools but all elementary

schools in Japan have their own school song, which pupils sing together at morning assemblies, sporting events, and other ceremonial occasions to promote emotional integration. Every school has a few annual events for which pupils collectively prepare and which are designed to generate a sense of group cohesion and achievement. Among those key events is a sporting day (undō-kai), which all schools have either in late spring or in the fall, scheduled to avoid the heatwave season. On that day, every pupil competes in running, hurdle, and relay races, and so on. By convention, in most schools, pupils are divided into red and white groups, which vie with each other for a higher total score. Teachers and parents participate in some races, and undō-kai is usually an exciting community affair. A day for dramatic and musical performances is another important occasion on the school calendar. Before an audience of the entire school, each grade performs a drama, some classes sing several songs, and some clubs play music, traditional and Western. Every pupil is expected to take part in this occasion, for which a full day is reserved. All children in Japan learn standard gymnastic exercises in groups, which are performed not only in physical education classes but also at athletic meets and many other sporting events. On such occasions every participant is expected to perform the exercises to a standard musical accompaniment, generating an atmosphere of unity and solidarity. The exercises are practiced to certain tunes on a radio calisthenics program that has been broadcast by NHK every morning since prewar days, when schools across the nation adopted

it as part of their physical education curriculum. As a result, most people in Japan know how to perform the exercises.

Figure 6.3 Schoolchildren doing radio calisthenics on a sports day Participation

in

school

athletics

clubs

provides

another

mechanism for the psychological integration of students into school life. Compulsory in the majority of middle schools, such bukatsu (extracurricular activities) take place after formal school hours and often on Saturdays and Sundays as well. At middle-school level, three-quarters of boys and half of girls participate in sports-oriented bukatsu activities.35 As part of interschool competitions and regional and national games, bukatsu both promote a sense of togetherness and decrease the amount of free time available to pupils, some of whom manage to attend juku in the evening after finishing school club activities late in the afternoon. (c) Checkups and attitudinal correctness

Japanese schools generally have excellent medical- and physicalexamination programs. Each school has a doctor or doctors who conduct physical checkups of all pupils on a regular basis. All schools keep good records of the height, weight, and vision of every pupil, measured at least once a year. No doubt this meticulous concern with pupils’ physical condition contributes to early detection and treatment of health problems. A similar interest in the wellbeing of pupils extends to their attitudinal ‘correctness’. Posters with such slogans as ‘goal for this week’ and ‘aim for this month’ usually fill the walls of Japanese classrooms. These class aims are normally of a moralistic nature: ‘Let us not run in the corridors,’ ‘Let us try to answer teachers clearly,’ ‘Let us keep our school toilets clean,’ and so on. In some cases teachers set the objectives; in other cases pupils are instructed to collectively formulate them in class discussions. These exercises are followed by ‘soul-searching’ sessions in which the entire class is expected to discuss whether the set objectives have been attained and if not what should be done in the future. In many schools, each class has fūki iin (students in charge of discipline), shūban (students on weekly duty), or nicchoku (students on daily duty), who are expected to maintain class morals and assume classroom management. These students assist teachers in ensuring that all pupils comply with school norms in relation to their clothes, belongings, punctuality, and so on. Most elementary-school pupils travel between home and school in a group; the group sizes differ depending on the area. They meet in a park, civic center, or other public facility, then, forming lines,

each group is led on their way by upper-graders. The practice is supposed to protect the children from traffic accidents and crimes, while fostering a sense of togetherness. It is not common for parents to drive their children to school. (d) Moral emphasis Moral education pervades nonmoralistic subjects and activities in Japanese schools. Taiiku, the Japanese notion of physical education, is about not only strengthening bodies, achieving good results, or simply having a good time but also fostering a sense of morality defined by sporting authorities. In taiiku, students are instructed to learn courtesy and good manners, which contribute to their personality formation. Sports and taiiku are interrelated but separate areas of activity; if sports emphasize individual initiatives, taiiku stresses collective conformity and discipline. Behind the practice of pupils cleaning their classrooms is the moral principle that they learn to be both humble and hardworking through sweeping with a broom, wiping the floor with a damp cloth, and getting their hands dirty. This routine is supposed to train pupils to be compliant, cooperative, and responsible citizens.

School lunch as part of education Eating is an opportunity for moral education. Most Japanese schools provide lunches for pupils, paid in part by their parents along with other school fees. Eating lunches prepared in accordance with standard recipes, students receive moral training called shokuiku (dietary education) and learn how to eat correctly, as discussed in the video School Lunch

in

Japan:

It’s

Not

Just

about

Eating!,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL5mKE4e4uU (CafCu Media, 19 April 2015). The program is included in the national curriculum and implemented in accordance with the Basic Law on Dietary Education, enacted in 2005. A nationwide study conducted by public health experts on middle-school students in Japan shows that the country’s school lunch program reduces the likelihood of overweight and obesity at least among male students.36

IV Regimentation and its costs

1 Excessive teacher control Rigidity, stringency, and regimentation have increasingly dominated Japanese education since schools increased teacher control of pupils in the 1970s and 1980s. This trend reflected the response of educators to a growth in school violence in the late 1970s and early 1980s and, before that, to the rise of political protests in secondary schools in the late 1960s influenced by student power movements on university campuses. High-school students’ demands ranged from changes in teaching curricula to the liberalization of school uniforms. To suppress potential deviance from school norms, school administrators and teachers tried to tighten their grip on students by shaping their outward behavioral patterns into a uniform mode. This tendency gave rise to what was called kanri kyōiku (control-oriented education), the regulatory style of education that underscores control of students’ bodily expressions and tries to standardize their appearances and personal effects. Schoolteachers are not uniform in supporting this trend unreservedly. Many resisted the moves and attempted to maintain the relatively decentralized, liberal structure of education established immediately after the end of World War II. This was most visible in a series of confrontations which the Japan Teachers’ Union mounted against the Ministry of Education. The union took a firm stance in the name of democratic education against almost every move to reverse postwar educational reform and tighten state control. Though the union gradually lost ground to the ministry, and lost membership as part of the overall decline in unionization, many teachers are

sincerely concerned about the wellbeing of their pupils, anxious to see them develop their potential fully, and eager to introduce innovative methods of teaching. Accordingly, one must look at the costs of Japanese education in some perspective. Nonetheless, the price of regulatory education is highly visible in many aspects of school life. (a) Corporal punishment It is illegal in Japan for teachers to use force against pupils. However, in reality some teachers resort to taibatsu (physical punishment), occasionally inflicting serious injuries. According to a survey of the Ministry of Education, 733 cases of corporal punishment were reported in 699 schools in 2017, with 1,347 students subjected to teacher violence and 204 cases resulting in physical injuries. The survey covered only those cases in which teachers

received

official

reprimands,

however,

and

heavily

underestimated reality.37 Certainly, such incidents do not occur in Japanese schools every day. Nonetheless, teacher violence against students is not a rare occurrence, and many cases remain unreported, for obvious reasons. Some Japanese educators, particularly many teachers of physical education, believe that the military style of training is necessary to make pupils face the world. They see education as a way of fostering in pupils what they call konjō, the fighting spirit, tenacity, and doggedness. These teachers rationalize the use of violence as necessary to achieve this goal.

Despite frequent media reports on specific cases, the practice has not abated. To make matters worse, a considerable number of students, as well as parents, encourage or connive in the imposition of illegal corporal punishment.38 Some discipline-oriented parents go so far as to praise violent teachers for their zeal and enthusiasm and see the violence as an important means of motivating their children. The behavior of such teachers is predicated on this sort of community attitude. (b) School regulations Another area of national controversy is the extensive application of detailed school regulations, including trivial restrictions on the length and color of hair, mode of dress, size and type of school bag, type of shoes, and so forth. In many schools, teachers stand near the school gate every morning to ensure that pupils wear the correct items in the correct way, in accordance with school regulations. Many middle and high schools prescribe that boys wear a black or dark-blue uniform jacket with a stand-up collar, a design which can be traced back to military clothing in prewar years. The prevalent school uniform for girls in Japan is a sailor suit, with a middy blouse and skirt. The idea is that female students should not show too much individuality and must wear plain, quiet, and modest clothes without dressing in gaudy or bright colors. For similar reasons, some schools impose strict rules on girls in terms of ribbons, eyebrows, socks, accessories, and hair styles and check these from time to time.

In these respects, some elements of the Japanese education system display patterns contrary to trends in other industrialized societies, where a style of learning shaped by permissive choiceoriented guidance is favored over authoritarian training. Ironically, since commercialism and consumerism dominate the world outside school, the very discrepancy between these two spheres of life induces some students to indulge in deviant behavior.

2 Costs of regulatory education The regimented style of education leads to student frustrations, which are often translated into the gloomy situation, widely called the ‘desolation of school culture’. Its two aspects have formed the focus of national debate. (a) Ijime and school violence Ijime (bullying) has become rampant in schools since the mid-1980s, the very time when Japan’s economic performance became the envy of other industrialized nations. Ijime is an individual pupil’s act or a collective act by a group of pupils to humiliate, disgrace, or torment a targeted pupil psychologically, verbally, or physically.39 In most cases of ijime, a considerable portion of pupils in a class take part as supporting actors. In this sense, it differs from other types of juvenile delinquency whose actors are restricted to a few individuals. In ijime, a majority brings ignominy upon a minority of one, a strong group gains satisfaction from the anguish of a pupil in a weak and disadvantaged position, and a large number of spectator pupils acquiesce in such harassment for fear of being chosen as targets themselves. School bullying remains a constant feature of Japan’s school life, with 414,000 reported cases during the 2017 school year alone.40 Some children victimized by acts of ijime have committed suicide. Bullying

often

takes

a

soft

form,

damaging

victims

psychologically rather than physically, and even appears on the

surface as playful rather than manifestly violent. Recent years have seen the spread of cyberbullying, in which perpetrators abuse, ignore, and ostracize targeted students through online platforms such as social media. To the extent that the world of children reflects that of adults, the ijime phenomenon appears to mirror the way in which the pressures of conformity and ostracism operate in work environments and the community at large. The frequency of violence that pupils committed in school against teachers, classmates, and school properties suddenly increased from the late 1990s, with the total reported number of cases in elementary, middle, and high schools amounting to more than 59,000 in 2017.41 Although violence is most prevalent in middle schools, some elementary-school teachers are forced to deal with so-called classroom disruptions, in which recalcitrant pupils pay them no attention and eventually rob them of their confidence, rendering them incapable of running a classroom. (b) Hikikomori Japan’s education system has produced an alarming number of children who refuse, for a lengthy period of time, to go to school. Staying at home in their own rooms, they often display autistic tendencies and refuse to even communicate with their parents. Similarly, the Japanese work system has given rise to adults who reject going to work and hardly step out of their rooms in their parents’ homes. These extreme recluses spend most of their time watching television, playing cyber games, or just surfing the internet.

Initially observed as a problem of school nonattendance (futōkō), the phenomenon has spread to the post-compulsory-education sphere and now involves the adult population of working age and beyond. People with this condition are called hikikomori (literally, ‘social withdrawal’). It vexes a significant number of families around the country.42 According to an estimate by the Ministry of Education, some 35,000 elementary-school and 109,000 middle-school students did not attend school for thirty days or more in 2017 for reasons other than illness or economic difficulty.43 Many of these futōkō children failed to go to school for psychological reasons, including various combinations of anxiety and fear about their family, school, and community life. Cases of school refusal are, in a sense, children’s body language or body messages sent in response to the regulatory school culture which attempts to control their bodies.44 According to a Cabinet Office investigation, the number of adults aged fifteen to thirty-nine who were in the hikikomori situation in 2015 amounted to 541,000.45 Many had remained in this predicament since failing to attend school or to adapt to their work environment. One-third of those in the hikikomori classification in this age group had been so for more than seven years. This is no small problem and is complicated by the disturbing fact that hikikomori is not a short-term youth issue but continues to distress its sufferers chronically even into their midlife years and beyond. In 2018, the Cabinet Office conducted a study of hikikomori among the middle-aged cohort and estimated that 613,000 people aged from forty to sixty-four years belonged to this category,46

outnumbering the younger cohort. Three-quarters of the older group were men. If the two government surveys are combined, the total number of hikikomori amounts to 1.2 million, approximately 1 percent of the population, and the figure is probably much higher in reality.47 As many hikikomori are long-term sufferers and their parents age, a situation called the ‘8050’ quandary has emerged, in which parents in their eighties have to look after their hikikomori children in their fifties. Likewise, the ‘7040’ problem, in which parents in their seventies must take care of their hikikomori children in their forties, looms large; hikikomori is not only a youth issue but a protracted, drawn-out mire involving aged persons at the end of their lives. Furthermore, hikikomori sometimes leads to violence, with some sufferers inflicting injuries on family members and strangers, with some tragic cases involving fatalities. Mental illness is often a taboo subject, and the families involved tend to refrain from openly discussing their plight and from seeking help from psychiatric professionals. Parents try to contain the problem within their families in the belief that caring for their child at home both psychologically and financially is an expression of their love. The notion of shame also comes into play, with some families wanting to conceal the situation from their neighbors and the wider community. Very few choose to kick their child out of the house. This kind of problem was not apparent in pre-growth Japan, partly because most houses did not have a private room for each child, a layout which gradually became prevalent during the era of rapid economic expansion peaking in the 1980s. The hikikomori issue started to surface on a large scale in the 1990s when the

Japanese economy began to show signs of stagnation, with personnel reduction, labor casualization, and long working hours spreading

in

the

corporate

world.

The

new

demanding

circumstances prompted some vulnerable individuals to withdraw from work and confine themselves to a room of their own. No nationwide assistance programs have been implemented, though a small number of local governments and volunteer groups run hikikomori support centers, and there is a growing community realization that something must have gone wrong in the Japanese educational and work systems for so many people to withdraw into an acutely reclusive state. Hikikomori sufferers Most families with hikikomori sufferers attempt to cope with the situation privately and domestically but often struggle to do so. Hikikomori is the product of a mix of socioeconomic forces in Japanese society at large, including the conformist pressures both students and workers constantly face to comply with the prescribed standard at school and work, as discussed in some detail in Chapter 12. The video Japanese Men

Locked

in

Their

Bedrooms

for

Years,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxYs2Pv86WA (ABC News InDepth, 10 July 2015), explores the experience of hikikomori sufferers.

Meanwhile, these costs of Japanese education must be examined against what it has attained. The Programme for International Student Assessment, an OECD survey, which was conducted in 2018 to compare the academic abilities of fifteen-year-old students in seventy-nine member countries, found that Japanese students performed well, particularly in both numeracy and science, ranking fifth and sixth respectively.48 No doubt the Japanese educational system has produced a highly intellectual and skilled adult population. Despite a complicated system of writing, virtually everyone who has gone through Japanese compulsory education can read and write, making Japan virtually free of illiteracy. The regulatory-style education system has made youngsters responsible and cooperative; stations, trains, and other public areas in Japanese cities are generally clean and free from graffiti, unlike some cities in Western countries. These observations formed the background against which rival orientations to Japanese education emerged, as discussed later in this chapter, in Section VII.

V Continuity and change in university life One irony of Japan’s education scene lies in the sharp contrast between the stringency of schools and the slackness of universities. Although primary and secondary education in Japan produces highly trained pupils, Japan’s universities tend to be a resting space or ‘leisure land’ for many youngsters, particularly those in humanities and social sciences programs. Exhausted, both mentally and physically, by examination hell, some students seek relaxation, enjoyment, and diversion in their university life. Others take advantage of the permissive and noncompetitive culture of their institutions. A national survey in 2019 reported that university students enrolled in arts courses spend an average of only thirtyeight minutes per day studying outside the classroom, with those majoring in sciences spending an average of sixty-one minutes.49 Japanese university students can afford to be lazy, because Japanese firms hire university graduates not so much on the basis of what and how much they have studied as on the hensachi ranking of their university. The employment race is more or less over after the university-entrance examinations, and grades achieved in university subjects do not significantly alter the situation. University students are aware that employers are not interested in what they have learned in university and rely on on-the-job training and other intracompany teaching techniques to train their new university graduates.

It is true that ambitious students who intend to pass competitive state examinations for the legal profession or for elite public service jobs study hard. The same is true of medical, engineering, and some other science students. On the whole, however, Japanese students – especially those enrolled in arts-based courses – do not see their university life as a value-adding process for enhancing their qualifications but rather as a moratorium period to be enjoyed prior to their entry into the job market. For many students, higher education has come to mean less a productive pursuit of knowledge and more a consumption phase of relatively uncontrolled leisure time. Because of the high expenditure that university life requires, most students engage in arubaito (casual or part-time jobs), ranging from private tutoring of primary and secondary pupils to various kinds of manual work: working in restaurants, serving as shop assistants, delivering goods by truck, cleaning offices after working hours, and so on. Although university students all around the world work as part-timers and casuals, such work is almost built into Japanese student life, and the Japanese economy depends heavily on the external labor market filled by university students’ arubaito, as discussed in Chapter 5. By and large, university teaching staff are prepared to pass most students without a strict evaluation of their academic performance. They are allowed to cancel their classes a few times a year without arranging substitute sessions. Students take this for granted and are often delighted to see class cancellation announcements on campus noticeboards. It is more or less assumed

that, once one is admitted to a university, one will likely graduate from it. For a long period, the hierarchical structure of Japanese academia has resembled that of Japan’s business community in several respects. A system of keiretsu akin to the corporate world is widespread among institutions of higher education, with low-ranking universities being affiliated with established high-status universities. Professors of major prestigious universities have informal power to transfer their postgraduate students and junior staff to minor universities under their control, just as large companies relocate their employees from time to time to smaller enterprises under their command. In universities of repute, ‘inbreeding’ is the governing norm, with alumni occupying the high tiers of faculties. Upon the retirement of a full professor holding a chair, it is usually the case that their associate professor is promoted to the chair. In top-ranking universities, few outsiders who have graduated from other institutions are appointed to high-status posts. Just as large corporations maintain a system of lifetime employment, so do universities of high standing fill their positions with their own graduates. In both cases, long-term insiders occupy the executive or professorial posts, and outsiders even of high merit find it difficult to make inroads. However, this pattern was relaxed and underwent significant changes. In the climate of globalization, deregulation, and privatization, national and other public universities have been transformed since the early 2000s into independent corporate bodies and are expected to display the flexibility, productivity, and

accountability of a business enterprise. This means that universities cannot remain complacent and must prove innovative, efficient, and responsive to the demands of both the student market and the broader community.50 Universities are constrained to publicly advertise vacant positions which were once, in most cases, filled through internal deliberations on candidates recommended via the personal networks of high-ranking academics. Yet, it remains open to debate whether each appointment accords with merit-based open competition or is a result of ‘horse-trading’ behind the formal process. Universities are also under pressure from the business world as globalization

escalates

transnational

competition

for

top-rate

students. To recruit talented students from around the world and to produce internationally competitive graduates, some universities offer courses conducted in English. Many Japanese students on these campuses are expected to study in English, so that, upon graduation, they are competent and at ease in transnational communications, although the number of professors who are fully capable of delivering lectures in English is limited. To be in tune with European and American university calendars, these institutions have introduced some flexibility in accepting overseas and domestic students at multiple times in the year, relaxing the system of April admissions only. Meanwhile, as a result of the declining birth rate (discussed in Chapter 4) and the diminishing student population, three tiers of tertiary institutions have formed. The old, prestigious universities maintain the culture of elite institutions, while low-ranking universities

are increasingly oriented towards the job market and show little difference from junior colleges and vocational schools. In between the two, middle-level universities mix both orientations. Tertiary institutions are not a uniform entity.

VI English: means of status attainment? The

dominance

of

the

English

language

in

international

communication has drastically expanded with the development of global communication based on information technology. Information sharing and opinion exchange via the internet are increasingly carried out in English between people with different first languages. In Asia, where Chinese is the most widely spoken language, crossborder communications are conducted mainly in English, the unrivaled elite language in the region. Unsurprisingly, English-language learning constitutes a focus of debate about how Japan should ‘internationalize’ and represents an activity that goes beyond formal school education. At one end of the spectrum, some opinion leaders argue that, as English is the lingua franca of global communications, it should be the second official language in Japan, to enable future generations of Japanese to manage international dealings without difficulty.51 At the other end of the spectrum, critics maintain that the Japanese should be mindful of what they see as ‘English-language imperialism’, in which English is the cultural arm of Anglo-American dominance in the world.52 They argue that the allocation of excessive amounts of time for English teaching at school will not only reduce hours allocated for Japanese reading and writing but also lead to the virtual colonization of Japanese culture.

With an increasingly sharpened focus on English learning, another debate has emerged, about the name order of the Japanese to be used in English.53 For over a century, it has been taken for granted in the world of English education in Japan that, in accordance with the English style, a person’s given name should be placed first, followed by the surname (for instance, Yoshiko Suzuki), despite the fact that in the Japanese style, the surname comes first and the given name second (Suzuki Yoshiko). Revisionists claim that the Japanese should use the Japanese convention, even when communicating in English, in the same way as Chinese and Koreans stick to their own traditions. Mao Zedong (in which Mao is the surname) is not changed to Zedong Mao in English. The opponents of this position contend that maintaining the Japanese name order would make things unnecessarily confusing in business transactions and academic citations and hold that Japanese should adopt the rule of the language in use and follow the given-name-first practice when using English. Some government ministries attempt to endorse the surname first principle, applying it to school textbooks in English, passports, and official documents, although political and economic leaders are not uniform in this respect. Many global corporations (like Toyota) use the given-name-first rule, as do most Japanese credit card companies.54 The existing diversity raises some thoughtprovoking questions about cultural relativism and globalization. In reality, business firms with global interactions implement programs to compel their employees to communicate in English. Some – for example, UNIQLO (a casual clothes shop chain) and Rakuten (an internet mall management company) – went so far as to

make it a corporation rule for staff to speak English within the company setting. Most large companies rely on an English-language test, the Test of English for International Communication, initially developed in the United States (for people with different first languages, with a focus on business English) at the request of the Japan

Business

Federation

and

the

Japanese

Ministry

of

International Trade and Industry. In 2018, more than 2.66 million people took the test in Japan,55 indicating that a large number of enterprises use the test score for employment and promotion. Career-track bureaucrats must acquire practical English. In 2015, it became compulsory for applicants for employment examinations for national bureaucracy elite paths to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which is used internationally to assess a person’s ability to study at universities in the United States and other English-speaking countries.56 This is another move away from examinations that focus on English-reading ability towards more balanced appraisals that include speaking, listening, and writing. Thus, a wide range of Japanese business and education leaders are galvanized to improve the level of English proficiency in companies and schools. However, in schools, English teaching faces a challenge. English classes in secondary schools have long focused on book learning, with an emphasis on grammar and translation, to enable high-school students to prepare for universityentrance examinations, which tend to test their grammatical and vocabulary knowledge rather than general communication skills. Under the initiative of the Ministry of Education and in an attempt to

immerse children in the conversational-English environment at an early age, simple English is introduced at the elementary-school level. In 2020, new nationwide standards required all pupils to start learning English in grade three and all fifth and sixth graders to be formally assessed on their English ability. Many schoolteachers are not competent enough to teach spoken English. In their school and university days, an overwhelming majority of them were taught English through book learning and did not master communicative English. To meet the classroom demand, the government-initiated Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, in operation since 1987, increased the number of young teaching assistants recruited from English-speaking countries to help Japanese teachers in English sessions. With the rise in enthusiasm for acquiring English-language skills in some quarters of Japanese society, an increasing number of people regularly attend English-conversation schools, study English lessons on television and radio, and engage in other forms of English learning as part of their self-education. These activities are patterned along regional and class lines, as Table 6.3 shows. Residents in urban centers are more prone to learn English than those in rural areas. Individuals with high levels of annual income are far more engaged in English learning than those who are worse off. By and large, the former are more exposed than the latter to the world outside Japan and find it necessary to study English to meet the daily requirements of their business lives. On the whole, English self-education is a city-based phenomenon taking place among welloff people.

Table 6.3 Participation rates (%) in learning English as selfeducation, by prefecture and income, 2016 Variations

Proportion of population

Prefecture Tokyo

17.9

Kanagawa

16.1

Kyoto

12.6

Hyōgo

11.5

Osaka

11.3

Iwate

5.7

Niigata

5.3

Aomori

5.1

Kagoshima

5.0

Yamagata

4.9

Annual income (¥ ’0,000) 1,500 or more

24.5

1,000–499

24.9

900–99

20.1

800–99

20.2

Variations

Proportion of population

700–99

16.0

250–99

8.1

200–49

8.1

150–99

7.5

100–49

6.5

No income

8.3

Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2017a. Note: Only the prefectural and income categories which show the five highest and five lowest percentage scores are listed. Predictably, the level of English fluency among Asians correlates with the degree of their exposure to the global environment: the AsiaBarometer survey, conducted by a team of social scientists across Asia, suggests that in virtually all countries in Asia, including Japan, those who consider themselves to have a good command of English are likely to have a family member or relative who lives abroad and to have friends from foreign countries. They also tend to make international trips frequently, watch television programs produced overseas, and communicate globally via the internet, for their work or in their private lives.57 Focusing on the Japanese and South Korean situations, Ingrid Piller, Kimie Takahashi, and Yukinori Watanabe examine English-

language learning in economic rather than educational terms. They see it as an economic commodity whose availability differs depending upon the social positions of the learners.58 Privileged students can afford to pay for private tuition in English to improve their access to higher education and to higher status, whereas the underprivileged cannot. The consumption of English-language learning is encouraged as a means of self-transformation, and such learning is conducive to increased social stratification in the context of free market capitalism. Kaoru Koiso suggests that there is every indication that an ‘English divide’ in the population – a discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots of English fluency – is taking shape.59 On the whole, upper-white-collar employees have the highest level of command of English, followed by lower-white-collar employees. Blue-collar workers and those engaged in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries are at the lower end of the scale. The level of education also affects the level of proficiency. In terms of generational differences, younger people are more likely to be fluent, because they have more opportunities to use English. Those who enjoyed a higher level of parental income at the age of fifteen have a better command of English, a pattern which suggests that family resources available in one’s mid-teens are crucial. The English divide does not appear to have been reduced as a result of the socioeconomic development of Japanese society.60 It remains to be substantiated whether or not those with a good command of English can achieve higher-status positions. Englishlanguage competence, however, may not necessarily serve as all-

powerful linguistic capital that enables its acquirers to attain high socioeconomic

status.

Takunori

Terasawa’s

macrosociological

research casts doubt upon the widely accepted view that English expertise is a ‘weapon’ to enable Japanese people at large to earn a good income and secure a good job.61 Correlations between English skillfulness and income, for instance, are discernible only in the world of highly educated employees engaged in work in which English communications are essential. Arguably, English proficiency is not the key expertise required for upward mobility but simply an auxiliary skill which does not ensure a successful career by itself. English

users

without

other,

more

significant

professional

qualifications or certificates – whether in legal, medical, engineering, information technology, administrative, sales, or accounting fields – will not become high achievers. Meanwhile, if individuals are equipped with one or more of these qualities plus English competency, the combination puts them in a stronger position. To that extent, English fluency could be seen as a supplementary, not the principal, determinant of social stratification.

VII Competing educational orientations Japanese education appears to be both first class and uncreative. It looks premodern in some areas and postmodern in others. This somewhat contradictory picture of Japanese education has given rise to a variety of scholarly and policy-oriented debates about the overall quality of the Japanese education system. At one end of the debates, some observers point out that Japanese education is geared to producing students who are good at answering multiplechoice questions but who lack creativity and originality in thinking.62 These

analysts

maintain

that

Japanese

schools

suppress

spontaneous behavior and enforce discipline so harshly that bullying and other forms of deviant behavior darken school life. For these observers, Japan’s education system is a case not to be emulated. At the other end, ethnographic researchers tend to point out its high standards,

egalitarianism,

and

meritocratic

orientation

while

acknowledging its problematic features as well.63 Some take a positive view of what they regard as the harmonious, groupcohesive, and collectivist emphasis of Japanese education. Others are explicit in suggesting that American schools must learn from Japanese schools.64 The two competing perspectives reflect fundamental ideological differences among researchers regarding whether educational institutions should perform functions that legitimize the existing order and transmit social values and basic

skills from one generation to another or should liberate students from past conventions and traditions. Against this backdrop, from the 1990s onwards, a strong lobby group of businesspeople and academics have successfully pressed for what they call the ‘liberalization of education’, in line with the philosophy of privatization and deregulation, and for the reduction of government control and the operation of the free market within the education system. They maintain that overly obedient workers without much initiative are counterproductive to the increasingly internationalized Japanese economy, which now requires diverse, innovative, and creative human resources to confront global competition. Moreover, it is argued that the egalitarianism which Japan’s school culture embraced in the second half of the twentieth century had negative effects on student motivation. Because schools attempted to ensure equal treatment of all pupils regardless of their academic abilities and achievements, the degree to which students are motivated to study depended more on their family background than on any school-based incentives. In this sense, ‘parentocracy’ rather than meritocracy prevailed.65 Proponents of the market-oriented education system, often referred to as ‘neoliberals’, set the stage for a series of debates since the turn of the last century. Although few would disagree with the importance of students’ academic achievements and creative skills, educators differ on two fronts as to how to achieve these broad goals: first, the degree to which the state should control education, and second, the extent to which Japan’s education should focus on incentive-based variety or structural equality. As shown in

Table 6.4, four models compete with each other, exhibiting different positions vis-à-vis these two issues.66 Table 6.4 Comparison of educational orientations State control Institutional focus

Curtailment

Preservation

Incentive-based variety

Market-oriented neoliberals

Regulatory pluralists

Structural equality

Anti-government democrats

Developmental conservatives

1 Market-oriented neoliberals The neoliberal approach favors market-driven elite education. This stance has gained ground against the backdrop of the globalization of the economy and with the support of major business organizations and the urban middle class. The exponents of this position maintain that the Japanese economy requires individuals who can adapt themselves

to

the

increasingly

internationalized

business

environment with individual initiative, flexibility, and cultural skills. This approach takes the view that Japan’s educational system must introduce more student-centered, innovation-oriented, and problemsolving programs to produce a labor force which can meet the challenge of the rising tide of capitalism that is knowledge intensive and focused on high technology. Neoliberal thinking has influenced a number of areas. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of individual teachers and schools have been given the freedom to introduce a new interdisciplinary subject. To provide a wide range of choices, strict school zoning was relaxed in some prefectures, enabling students to enroll in schools of their preference. Some schools recruit principals from the business world to bring in management methods to make teaching efficient and productivity based. English classes, which used to be taught at middle-school level and beyond, are compulsory at elementary schools, as noted earlier; the belief is that the younger generation should be more

literate and fluent in the contemporary lingua franca of the global economy.

2 Regulatory pluralists Regulatory pluralists support some liberalization in education while maintaining that state control should remain intact. Policymakers in the Ministry of Education are headed towards this direction in terms of both meeting the neoliberal challenge and maintaining their vested interests. Since the late 1980s, they have encouraged education that is generally more liberal, aimed at the formation of the whole person and free from excessive pressure to rote learn. They argued that Japanese children lacked both individual autonomy and interpersonal sociability and should develop broader skills for social activities and contributions in the age of internationalization in a more relaxed and pluralistic environment. In 2002, the Ministry of Education revised its official national guidelines to promote so-called yutori kyōiku (pressure-free education), which led to the reduction of educational curricula and class hours and the introduction of interdisciplinary classes.67 Instead of assessing a schoolchild’s ability relative to others, the ministry instituted an evaluation scheme based on an absolute scale. It was emphasized that pupils’ achievements should be measured not only in terms of results but also of processes, so that the efforts of pupils who work hard but still attain only low marks can be properly rewarded. A scheme of special educational zones (kyōiku tokku) introduced in 2003 entitled schools in particular areas to prioritize specific programs. Many schools took advantage of teaching English beyond national benchmarks on the basis of this system. In addition,

some of them operated as companies. Civil nonprofit organizations (NPOs) were allowed to set up schools in specified localities for alternative education, for underachievers, or for students with special needs or from underprivileged backgrounds. Some of the schools occupied the facilities of closed schools, others encouraged their students to learn in direct contact with the natural environment in the countryside, and still others ran correspondence classes which enabled pupils to attend physically on a flexible basis. These pluralists implement their projects without fundamentally challenging the overall structure of the state control of education.

3 Anti-government democrats The anti-government democratic model is preferred by those who are concerned with what they regard as increasing inequalities in education and who are critical of state regulatory power, favoring deregulated, relaxed education that allows latitude for a variety of choices and options. They claim that this framework inherited the educational ideals of postwar democracy, which underscored a spirit of egalitarianism and social justice. The Japan Teachers’ Union is committed to this line of thinking, together with such left-leaning political groups as the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, which have taken anti-government positions over decades. Disapproving of the state control of education and the examination-focused practices in schools, those in this camp, who often label themselves as ‘progressive educators’, are concerned with prevailing structural inequalities that afford different educational opportunities to different social classes. Generally inclined to be antiestablishmentarian, progressive educators direct their criticism at educational credentialism, rote learning, competitive university examinations, and after-school educational providers (such as juku) and argue for a curriculum that develops students’ originality, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Although neoliberals use similar language, democrats depart from this group in stressing that these attributes be encouraged equally among all students and not reserved for the elite.

Democrats point out that the introduction of market-oriented liberalism in education has enabled elite private schools, ambitious government schools, and juku to offer excessive inducements to students to compete successfully in examinations. Many top private schools that conduct six-year integrated middle- and high-school education teach required materials over five years, as discussed earlier, and reserve the final, sixth year exclusively for preparations for high-ranking universities. Some government schools hire juku instructors and organize evening and weekend classes to equip their students with the skills and techniques needed to pass the entrance examinations of prestigious universities. Democrats maintain that the relaxation

of

national

curricula

enables

the

private

sector

examination industry to expand its influence on the formal school system.

4 Developmental conservatives The conventional state-led education puts an emphasis on national homogeneity and equality. This approach is in harmony with the discourse that governed the high-growth economy of the 1960s to the 1980s, when Japan underwent rapid development under the powerful national bureaucracy. The advocates of this model argue that it ensures relatively egalitarian and uniform education across regions and classes, a pattern eroded by neoliberal and pluralist policies. Influential in the LDP and the interest groups that represent rural residents and independent small-business owners, this view tends to attribute the ills of contemporary Japanese society to the failure of the excessively liberal and democratic styles of education that reforms brought about after World War II. Its proponents are also adamant that forms of education that gave children too much freedom and too many choices lowered the level of their academic ability.68 The supposed decline in students’ scholastic outcomes paved the way for the introduction in 2007 of a nationwide achievement test which measures the distribution of academic scores across areas and schools. Attaching importance to the nation’s tradition, national pride, and patriotism, conservatives argue that stricter control and discipline should be introduced into schools to educate pupils to ‘love Japan’ and to respect the national flag and anthem. On the right wing of the conservative spectrum, they are hostile to the school culture that they believe the Allied occupation forces imposed on Japan

immediately after the surrender, in 1945, and they have successfully managed to require schools to hoist the flag and have students sing the anthem on ceremonial occasions.

In some respects, the four models overlap, and the lines of demarcation between them are blurred, because they often employ the same language, although they may have different motives. Yet, the complex interrelations and interactions between educational liberalism and academic attainment, student motivation and family background,

and

ideological

egalitarianism

and

structural

stratification form intricate matrices, the interpretation of which will continue to dominate Japan’s pedagogical debate into the 2020s.

VIII Conclusion The Japanese education system has multiple facets, some successful and others not so much, and shares many elements with other countries. Despite the fact that egalitarian principles are thought to be widespread, student access to various levels of schooling is stratified along class lines. Regimented school life appears to have produced well-disciplined students on the one hand and nonconformist and anxious students on the other. Universities as well as primary and secondary schools are undergoing reforms to meet the challenges posed by globalization, including the extensive introduction of English classes at all levels. On the whole, the Ministry of Education has significant power to control the contents and styles of teaching under a highly centralized system. Shaped by the collision of old and new educational philosophies, education in Japan is mixed, heterogeneous and in a state of flux, leading to a variety of educational outcomes around the country.

Research questions 1. Compare Japan with another country with regard to class divisions in education. 2. In what ways and to what extent does school life reflect the practices of work life in Japan? 3. Considering the Japanese case, what are the advantages and disadvantages of centralized and decentralized systems of education? 4. How do Japanese educational experiences differ depending on region? 5. Contrary to the widely held view, it could be that Japanese students are creative and original but fail to perform well in standardized rote learning. List as many examples as possible in support of this position.

Further readings Bjork, Christopher 2016, High-Stakes Schooling: What We Can Learn from Japan's Experiences with Testing, Accountability and Educational Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cave, Peter 2016, Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeCoker, Gary and Bjork, Christopher (eds) 2013, Japanese Education in an Era of Globalization: Culture, Politics and Equity. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Kariya, Takehiko 2012, Education Reform and Social Class in Japan: The Emerging Incentive Divide. London: Routledge. Tsuneyoshi, R., Okano, Kaori, and Boocock, S. (eds) (2011). Minorities and Education in Multicultural Japan: An Interactive Perspective. London: Routledge.

Online resources Baseel, Casey 2015, ‘5 ways college life is different in Japan and U.S.’ Japan Today (9 December), https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/5-ways-college-lifeis-different-in-japan-and-u-s. Bright Side 2020, 10 Distinctive Features of the Japanese Education System That Made the Nation the Envy of the World. Bright Side, https://brightside.me/wonder-places/10-distinctive-features-of-thejapanese-education-system-that-made-this-nation-the-envy-of-theworld-214655/. Jones, Colin P. A. 2018, ‘School rules in Japan offer harsh lessons in mindless assimilation’. Japan Times (25 November), www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2018/11/25/issues/harsh-lessonsmindless-assimilation/#.XkTAfC2cZOI (may require registration or subscription). Singleton, James 2015, The Tightly Regulated ‘Independence’ of Japanese Children. Nippon.com (21 November), www.nippon.com/en/nipponblog/m00096/the-tightly-regulatedindependence-of-japanese-children.html. Tokunaga, Tomoko 2017, ‘Multicultural education in Japan’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (19 December),

https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/978019026409 3.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-65. 1 See I. Amano 2011 for the origins of educational credentialism in Japan. 2 ‘School’ in this book includes elementary and high school (junior and senior) as well as all other educational institutions below universities and colleges. 3 In 2018, the percentage of middle-school students progressing to the high-school level was 98.8. Ministry of Education and Science 2018a. 4 The percentage was 49.6 in 2018. Ministry of Education and Science 2018a. 5 Some studies cast doubt on the popular view that one’s educational qualifications influence one’s long-term monetary rewards more decisively in Japan than in Western societies. For example, Ishida 1993 showed that the relationship between the two variables was stronger in the United States and the United Kingdom than in Japan. 6 Takeuchi 1991. Takeuchi argues that the United States’ system is closer than the Japanese system to the tournament-type arrangement. 7 Figures in this section are drawn from Ministry of Education and Science 2018a. 8 Inui 1990, p. 230.

9 It is estimated that 21 percent of new university students admitted in 2018 were rōnin. Ministry of Education and Science 2019. 10 Though in comparative terms they are few, pupils who go through the so-called examination hell are overrepresented in media stories and scholarly writings, partly because most journalists and academics themselves trod this elite path and tend to identify with those who follow it. Newspapers and magazines play up how hard these students work to pass a series of examinations: curtailing sleep, abandoning summer and winter vacations, and studying unceasingly during weekends. The public is accustomed to annual media hype over the number of students produced by each high school successful in gaining admission to each university. Every year, public commentators routinely lament the negative impact of examination hell on the psychological wellbeing of students. 11 Okano 2009a, p. 94. 12 Diamond Online, 30 November 2011, p. 2; Koike and Watanabe 1979; Takeuchi 1981. 13 Private universities and colleges receive some 10 percent of their revenue from government subsidies. Tōyō Keizai Online 2018. 14 OECD 2019d. 15 Japan Student Services Organization 2018.

16 The average living cost (including tuition) of all university students in 2016 was approximately ¥1.83 million, nearly half the average income of salary earners. Japan Student Services Organization 2018. 17 Japan Student Services Organization 2018. 18 Enrich 2018. 19 Estimated from National Institute for Educational Policy Research 2017. The samples were taken from Grade 6 and Grade 9 pupils. 20 AM, 25 January 2010, p. 28. 21 Inui 1990. 22 See Okano 1993; and Okano and Tsuchiya 1999 for detailed ethnographic studies in this area. 23 HR Sōken 2018; Sakuta 2018. 24 AM, 27 April 2019, p. 2. 25 Kanazawa 2018, p. 47. 26 Yoder 2004, pp. 28–9. 27 Kariya 2012, pp. 78–85. 28 Takeuchi 1993, pp. 120–1. 29 Ministry of Education and Science 2018a.

30 Ministry of Education and Science 2018a. 31 Shūkan Asahi, 26 April 2019, p. 90. 32 Tokyo Daigaku Gakusei Iinkai 2017. 33 Following the amalgamation of other government units, the ministry was officially renamed the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. For this text, it is simply called the Ministry of Education. 34 AM, 15 June 2018, p. 18. 35 Japan Sports Agency 2017. 36 Miyawaki, Lee, and Kobayashi 2019. 37 Ministry of Education and Science 2018b. 38 Two-thirds of respondents to an Asahi Shimbun digital survey regarded corporal punishment meted out by coaches and other leaders as an absolutely unacceptable form of discipline under any circumstances. However, one-quarter remained equivocal, saying it should be avoided as much as possible, while one in ten thought it should be exercised when necessary. AM, 6 January 2019, p. 7. 39 For a detailed analysis of ijime in Japanese schools, see Naitō 2009; Yoneyama 1999. 40 Ministry of Education and Science 2018c. 41 Ministry of Education and Science 2018c.

42 For hikikomori cases, see Saito 2013; Zielenziger 2006. 43 Ministry of Education and Science 2018c. 44 Imazu 1991, pp. 80–8. 45 Cabinet Office, Policy Controller 2016. The Cabinet Office regards as hikikomori those persons who, for more than half a year, hardly come out of their room or house. Those who are in this condition but occasionally go out to do shopping in their neighborhood or only to follow their hobbies are included in the hikikomori category. 46 Cabinet Office 2019b. 47 Calculated differently, roughly 1 out of 60 adults from 15 to 64 years of age were hikikomori. 48 OECD 2019c; AM, 4 December 2019, pp. 1, 14, 23. Japan ranked 15th in literary, still maintaining a high position though dropping from 8th in the 2015 survey – a decline which educators and mass media attribute to the weakness of Japanese students in expressing their own views to others using convincing reasoning abilities. 49 Zenkoku Daigaku Seikatsu Kyōdō Kumiai Rengōkai 2019. 50 See Eades, Goodman, and Hada 2005 for the consequences of the institutional reforms of universities, which were set in motion in 2004. 51 Funabashi 2000.

52 AM, 18 September 2016, p. 15; Ōishi 2005; Tsuda 2003. 53 AM, 26 June 2019, p. 12; AE, 7 July 1993, p. 15. 54 AE, 6 September 2019, p. 10; AM, 28 May 2019, p. 29. 55 Institute for International Business Communication 2018. 56 AM, 5 May 2013, p. 1. 57 Inoguchi et al. 2006, pp. 417–19. 58 Piller, Takahashi, and Watanabe 2010. See also Piller and Choi 2013. 59 Koiso 2009. 60 Terasawa 2017. 61 Terasawa 2018, pp. 222–47. 62 Ambaras 2006; McVeigh 2000; Schoolland 1990. 63 Cave 2007; Fukuzawa and LeTendre 2001; Sato 2003. 64 Stevenson and Stigler 1992; Vogel 1979. 65 Kariya (2001, 2008) argues that ideological egalitarianism in schools has served only to intensify a family-based, intergenerational consolidation of stratification and inequality in the educational process. 66 See Okano 2009b for a different typology.

67 Bjork 2015. 68 Tose, Okabe, and Nishimura 1999, 2000.

Chapter 7

Gender and family: challenges to ideology ◈

I Introduction The rise of feminism outside and inside Japan has sensitized observers to gender stratification in Japanese society and has directed attention to a wide range of questions. In what ways are Japanese women subjected to a Japan-specific system of gender control? What kinds of gender barriers exist in Japan’s labor market? How is female sexuality regulated in Japan? How are women disadvantaged in the Japanese family structure? These issues are among the most fundamental problems of stratification and inequality in contemporary Japan. Specifically, this chapter examines the patriarchal household registration system, which is embedded in gender relations and the family system in Japan; women’s employment situation in the labor market; issues of sexuality and reproduction; marriage and divorce; and various types of family life. Aware that studies of gender relations include both the world of women and that of men, this chapter attempts to examine them primarily from women’s perspective, as they command a numerical majority of the Japanese population while forming a sociological minority subject to various forms of gender discrimination. In international comparisons, in 2020 the World Economic Forum reported that the gender gap in Japan was exceptionally vast, ranking 121st out of 153 countries, well behind the Philippines, China, and South Korea, and in last place among major advanced economies.1 To understand Japanese society, women’s situations

and voices must be given priority and studied in depth with a critical eye. After all, they are more representative of the ‘Japanese’ than men in the quantitative sense used in the hypothetical questions in Section I of Chapter 2.

II The household registration system and ie ideology Beneath Japan’s gender relations and family structure lies an elaborate framework of registration which penetrates into the life of every Japanese and controls it in a fundamental way. The koseki (household registration) system, which officially came into force with the enactment of the Koseki Law, in 1872, is the cornerstone of the scheme, representing the usually veiled ura aspect of Japanese family structure. Understanding of gender relations in Japan requires an in-depth knowledge of the workings of the household registration system, which affects all Japanese at every turn of their lives, functioning as an often-invisible, but highly effective, way of maintaining patriarchal order. The basic unit of koseki is not an individual but a household. The records of each individual’s gender, place and date of birth, parents’ names, position among siblings, marriage, and divorce are kept in detail in each household koseki and filed in the local municipal office. The concept of family lineage is built into the koseki system. Technically, one can remove one’s name from the current register and establish an independent koseki at any time, but most people do this at the time of marriage. Up to two generations, typically a couple and their children, can be included in a koseki. A three-generation register is legally unacceptable; for example, if grandparents, a married couple, and their children live under the

same roof, the grandparents must keep their own koseki and the two younger generations a separate one. How each individual branched off from a previous koseki register is an important piece of information in the current register. It became widespread practice for organizations to require potential members to submit a copy of their koseki when they apply; thus,

it

proved

a

powerful

instrument

that

provided

such

organizations with full personal information about their members. Koseki data were required for many other crucial occasions. In the past, companies required job applicants to submit their koseki papers. Minority groups, particularly the buraku activists (see Chapter 8), vehemently opposed this practice, because the companies were able to discriminate against burakumin whose minority backgrounds were indirectly identified by the papers showing their birthplace and permanent address. Although this convention was gradually abolished in the 1970s in response to the protests of buraku movements, the system still works as a powerful deterrent to deviant behavior, because ‘stains’ in koseki negatively affect the life chances of all family members. As each koseki is organized on a household basis, those who acquire a copy can examine the attributes not only of an individual but also of their family members. Supporting the household registration scheme, a jūmin-hyō (resident card) system requires each household to register its address and members with the municipal office of its current place of residence. Accordingly, when a family moves from one area to another, it must remove its old residence status from the municipal

office of the first then report its new address and other family information to the municipal office of the second. In this way, the Japanese government secures detailed information about each household and its history through local governments. The resident card previously contained information identifying the gender, sibling order, and legitimacy status of each child, but the scheme was revised in 1995 so that each child is listed simply as ‘child’, a change which feminist groups had long demanded. (In the koseki system, the sibling order of each child constitutes an essential piece of information.) Behind the twin institutions of the household registration system and the resident card system lies the ideology of ie, which literally means ‘house’, ‘home’, or ‘family’ but signifies something much more than these English words imply. Ie represents a quasi-kinship unit with a patriarchal head and members tied to him through real or symbolic blood relationships. In the prewar version of the Civil Code, the head was equipped with almost absolute power over household matters, including the choice of marriage partners for his family members. The headship of ie was transferred from one generation to another through primogeniture, whereby the first son normally inherited most of the property, wealth, and privilege of the household, as well as ie headship. As a general rule, the second and younger sons established their own branch families, which remained subordinate to the head family. For the continuation of ie arrangements, it was not unusual for a family without a son to adopt a boy from a different family. Each ie unit was expected to provide fundamental support for the imperial system. The postwar

modifications to the Civil Code considerably dismantled the patriarchal elements with the introduction of the general principle of gender equality. However, the ideology associated with the ie system persists as an undercurrent of family life in Japan, and some key ingredients of the ie practice survive at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, in the maintenance of the koseki system, which disadvantages women in a number of ways.

1 Household head The koseki system makes the household the source of information and requires each household to nominate its head.2 In reality, nearly all heads are male: according to a government survey, 96.3 percent of couples who marry nominate the husband as head of the household.3 The head is listed at the beginning of the register, separately from his individual entry as a member of the household. His honseki (permanent address) becomes that of his household, requiring its members to assume the same honseki as long as they remain listed in the same register. If the household head changes his surname for some reason, the members of the household must change their surname in the koseki to match his. Even when the household head dies, his headship continues in his household register for as long as other members of the household remain listed in it. Accordingly, in many cases, a widow remains in her husband’s koseki even after his death.4 Furthermore, Article 772 of Japan’s Civil Code stipulates that a baby born within 300 days of a formal divorce is entered into the koseki of the household head, who is the ex-husband in nearly all cases. This requirement applies even if he is not the baby’s biological father. If the mother refuses to register her baby into his koseki, then the baby remains without koseki until formal legal actions are taken. Thus, the koseki scheme deters women from divorcing, preserves the male advantages of the patriarchal order, and protects the ie system in a fundamental way.

2 Children born out of wedlock The koseki system makes a status distinction between children born during lawful marriage and those born out of wedlock. Article 49 of the koseki law requires that a new baby be registered as either a legitimate or an illegitimate child. This requirement was not removed when Japan’s Civil Code was amended in December 2013 to abolish the stipulation that children born out of wedlock were entitled to only half the inheritance of legitimate children. The amendment followed the Supreme Court ruling in September 2013 that this provision of the Civil Code violated Article 14 of Japan’s constitution, which guarantees equality under the law.5 However, the abovementioned koseki law requirement remains intact because of conservative parliamentarians’ opposition to changes to what they regard as the traditional Japanese family system. In Japan in the mid-2010s, only approximately 2 percent of babies were born out of wedlock.6 This is a very low proportion in comparison with such countries as Sweden, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States, whose ratios all exceed or come very close to 40 percent.7 This indicates that the koseki system serves as a disincentive to de facto relationships (jijitsu-kon) and functions to consolidate the norm that formal marriages are the only legitimate form of union.

3 Deterrence to divorce The household registration system has been an important deterrent to divorce. The divorce rate in Japan has progressively increased since the 1960s, reaching a peak at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, it has never matched the level recorded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when couples freely chose to marry or divorce in conformity with their local customs. The highest recorded divorce rate was 3.4 per 1,000 persons, in 1883, while the postwar peak was 2.3, in 2002.8 With the enactment of the nationally uniform Civil Code, at the end of the nineteenth century, and the national consolidation of the koseki system, marriages and divorces became a matter of government regulation and official registration, and the divorce rate declined sharply in the first half of the twentieth century. Although the annual total of divorces increased in postwar Japan, the divorce rate remains close to the level reached at the end of the nineteenth century. In 2018 the rate was 1.7, among the lowest recorded in industrially advanced nations.9 Economic considerations are, of course, the predominant reason why many women stay in marriages; those who depend on their husbands financially have little choice but to continue to live with them. In addition, under the koseki system divorce requires two separate household registers to be established; if the couple have children, each child must be moved to one of the new registers, in most instances the mother’s. On crucial occasions such as employment,10

passport

acquisition,

marriage,

divorce,

and

inheritance, copies of koseki papers are often required, and the children of divorced parents can be stigmatized through this public documentation. Fearful of a ‘stain’ being placed on their children’s registers, many married couples, particularly women who are deeply involved emotionally in their children’s wellbeing, vacillate over divorce even when that option is a sensible one. On the whole, the system serves as an impediment to divorce and thus buttresses the patriarchal marriage structure.

4 Surname after marriage The koseki system requires that on marriage the wife and husband take the same surname, which must be one of their former surnames. Legally, married couples are not allowed to keep different surnames. When Ms Toyota and Mr Suzuki marry, they must both become either Toyota or Suzuki, and one of them must abandon their premarriage surname. In virtually all cases the woman abandons her surname and is entered into the register of her husband, who is usually listed as the household head. Some women, mainly professionals, choose to use their maiden name as a tsūshō (popular name) or promote the practice of fūfu bessei (different surnames despite formal marriage) and thereby challenge the rigid requirements of the household registration system. In response to calls from women’s groups for a more liberal approach to the surname issue, governmental administrative councils made recommendations to change the koseki requirements, although no legislation eventuated. A national survey conducted by the Cabinet Office in 2017 revealed that the proportion of those in favor of amending the Civil Code to enable couples to assume different surnames (42.5 percent) was larger than that of people against (29.3 percent).11

5 Family tomb Japan’s conventional funerals exhibit the endurance of ie principles. The formal practice is for the body of the deceased to be taken home to where the person lived, even if they died in hospital. A wake is held beside the body at the house. In many cases, memorial services are also held at home, before the body is taken to a crematorium. In recent years, these services have been increasingly conducted at commercial funeral homes, attended only by family members of the deceased, with informal gatherings to remember the dead person organized at a later date by close friends. Nonetheless, following the convention of ancestral lineage, most families have family tombs where their ancestors are believed to be interred and pay a visit to them (haka mairi) from time to time (see Chapter 11). By convention, descendants include women who have married male offspring of the family. Because the koseki system is predicated upon the patriarchal logic that the wife belongs to her husband’s family line as his subordinate, she is usually buried in his family

tomb

with

his

ancestors.

Nevertheless,

increasing

interregional mobility, diversified family structure, and land price inflation have induced a substantial number of people, particularly women in urban areas, to reconsider the traditional methods (see theme box on page 280). They object to the custom of family tomb burial, with its close links with ie ideology. Although the household registration system does not dictate where one should be buried, it

provides a framework in which the patriarchal system governs women even after death.

6 Seki and ie In a broader context, the Japanese social system is supported by the notion of seki (register), the view that unless one is formally registered as belonging to an organization or institution, one has no proper station in society. As seki pervades Japanese life fundamentally, most Japanese are greatly concerned about which koseki they are registered in and the form their entry takes. Nyūseki (entry into a register) and joseki (exit from a register) are causes for anxiety. The notion of seki also manifests itself in gakuseki (school registry), which is a national student dossier system. After death, one is supposed to be registered in kiseki (the registry of those in the posthumous world). The ie system survives in community life in a visible way. Many Japanese households have a hyōsatsu (nameplate) on or near the gate or front door. The plate displays the surname of the household, often with the given name of its head. In some cases, the names of all household members are exhibited, with that of the household head first and in slightly larger characters. While aiding postal workers, newspaper deliverers, and visitors, these plates serve as a constant reminder that the koseki ideology permeates the psyche of most Japanese. Those who do not possess Japanese citizenship cannot establish their own koseki and are thus clearly distinguished from Japanese nationals. Even on marriage to a Japanese national, a foreign national cannot be included in their partner’s koseki. Since

same-sex marriage is not recognized in Japan – Article 24 of the constitution states, ‘Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes’ – same-sex partners cannot form their own koseki as spouses. Although every society has some system of registration – such as electoral rolls, social security numbers, and birth and marriage certificates – Japan’s system differs from others in using the household as the unit, packaging a range of information into each koseki, and socially ostracizing those who do not fit into the maledominated conventional family structure it promotes. This is why de facto relationships are rare and are often kept hidden, although de facto couples, as well as gender and sexually diverse groups, have become more vocal in recent years. Women in de facto relationships are mainly professionals who relish economic independence and good career prospects and those of the lower class who have little to lose from negative public perceptions.

III The labor market and women’s employment profiles

1 The flattening M-shaped curve Japan’s female workers in 2019 constituted 45 percent of the total paid workforce. The workforce participation rate of Japanese women has shown a steady upward trend, and 71 percent of all women between fifteen and sixty-five years of age were engaged in waged labor in the same year. Married women from twenty-five to twentynine years of age had the highest labor force participation rate among women in various age groups, with more than four in five being employed in one form or another.12 With regard to industrial classification, women were concentrated in the tertiary and quaternary industries, in particular in the service, sales, restaurant, finance, and insurance sectors. In the manufacturing industry, women were conspicuous in light industries, such as textiles and food production, rather than in heavy industries. On the surface, these statistics suggest that women do not regard domestic labor as their only option and play an indispensable role in the labor market.

Figure 7.1 Workforce participation is growing across a range of industries Unlike most men, however, the majority of women who explore the possibility of entering the job market solve complex equations

involving many variables. From a life cycle perspective, women must generally make decisions at three different times: at marriage, following childbirth, and when their last child commences schooling. The younger generation, which has produced fewer children and has an increased life expectancy, has a far longer period of life after child-rearing compared with preceding generations. Furthermore, only about half of the younger female employees remain in the workforce after giving birth to their first child.13 Although most women aspire to work, the reality is that their careers are constrained in ways foreign to most men. The strength of these pressures manifests itself in the so-called M-shaped curve of female labor force participation, which indicates the percentage of working women in different age brackets. Figure 7.2 captures this picture at three different points in time: 1985, 2007, and 2017. The 2017 curve ascends to the age bracket of the late twenties, descends in the early thirties, and swings steadily upwards to the late forties, when it finally begins to decline. The valley between the two peaks represents the phase in which women leave the labor force for child-rearing. The figure shows that the valley became less steep over the three decades covered, and the Mshaped curve increasingly flattened. While less than half of all women in the first half of their thirties were in the workforce in 1985, three-quarters stayed in the labor force in 2017. By the end of the 2010s, every age bracket from twenty to fifty-nine sustained a level above 70 percent. Thus, gradually and steadily, an increasing number of women have attempted to defy the constraints of raising children, though part-time work has dominated as an option for

women who wish to return to work after child-rearing. Approximately seven out of ten part-time and casual workers were women,14 and housewives constituted an overwhelming majority of this category, thereby creating a large housewife part-time labor market. The flattening of the M-shaped curve is attributable primarily to the rise of non-regular, part-time, and casual jobs among women.

Figure 7.2 Age-based female labor participation rates, 1985– 2017. Source: Adapted from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 1985, 2007, 2017b. This process has been occurring in tandem with the overall casualization of labor, as discussed in Chapter 5. In Japan, the label ‘part-timer’ covers not only those employees with limited working hours but also those who work as long as regular full-time workers but who are hired on a fixed-term basis and paid hourly rates without

fringe benefits. Of the part-timers belonging to the latter category, a majority are women. In other words, to cope with the chronic labor shortage, Japanese capitalism has sought to recruit women, chiefly as supplementary labor, on low wages and under unstable employment conditions. This has generated a new gender-based division of labor, in which many women are part-time housewives and part-time workers (see Table 3.3). These women work not to secure their economic independence but to supplement their household income. When their annual earnings are under ¥1.03 million, they are not required to pay income tax, and under ¥1.30 million, they are exempt from social insurance contributions. As a result, a woman is better off contributing to the family income below these ceilings. Since the average annual income of men amounts to ¥5.45 million,15 wives in this category earn less than a quarter of their husband’s wage, an amount too small to achieve economic equality in the household. To the extent that this situation keeps women in deprived positions in wage labor as well as in domestic labor, it subjects women to the imperatives of both capitalism and the patriarchy.

2 The two-tier structure of the internal market To consolidate this process, Japanese business leaders split female labor into several tiers. At the level of regular full-time employees, female workers are divided into two categories. For women in the category of sōgō-shoku (employees on the managerial track), companies arrange career paths in the same way as for male career employees. These female employees are expected to accept the same conditions as male corporate soldiers. In principle, sōgō-shoku women must be willing to work overtime on a regular basis, to be dispatched to an office distant from their home for a few years (the practice of tanshin funin, discussed in Chapter 5), and to continue work without interruption during the child-rearing phase of their life cycle.16 Outside this small group of elite female employees is a larger category of workers, ippan-shoku (ordinary employees), who play less important roles in their workplaces. They remain peripheral and subordinate workers on low wages, doing general clerical work in offices. Management does not expect them to perform demanding functions or to follow a career path. Most women who prefer to give priority to family life opt for this category. Though some men do work as ippan-shoku employees, approximately 80 percent of employees in this classification are females in companies which have the twotier employment system.17 In contrast, some 80 percent of sōgōshoku employees are men.

Figure 7.3 Businesswomen exchanging business cards The Japanese business establishment justifies this two-tier system from a human capital point of view. This perspective focuses on the way in which management invests in the formation of company-specific skills in internal labor market structures. Japanese corporations place emphasis on intensive on-the-job training and socialization, which commence immediately after employees enter an organization. This practice disadvantages female employees who leave the labor force in the middle of their careers. To optimize the returns of company spending in this area, employers target their investment at male employees, who are statistically more likely to provide continuous service than female employees. When women return to the workforce after a long break, they are far behind men of the same age bracket with regard to acquired skill. Employers therefore vindicate their position on the grounds of economic investment in human capital and find it economically rational to implement a system of statistical discrimination against women, a

stereotypical presumption that overlooks and contradicts vast diversities in the female workforce.18 Table 7.1 shows the harsh realities of gender inequality at the apexes of occupational pyramids. The boards of directors of major corporations listed on Japan’s eight stock exchanges are the least open to women in the private sector. Of public servants in the top levels of the national bureaucracy, women comprise a very small fraction. The worlds of the teaching profession and labor unions also have dismal records in this respect. The World Economic Forum, which annually produces the Global Gender Gap index, a measure of gender-based disparities in economic, political, and educationand health-based criteria, ranked Japan 110th out of 149 countries surveyed in 2018.19 Likewise, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an organization made up of national parliaments from around the world, measures the proportion of female parliamentarians in the lower house of each country and ranked Japan 166th out of 187 member nations in 2020, and the lowest among Group of Twenty (G20) countries.20 Table 7.1 Positions of power held by women, 2016–19

Year

% held by women

House of Representatives

2019

10.2

House of Councillors

2019

20.7

Position Members of the parliament

Year

% held by women

Prefectures

2018

10.0

Cities and wards

2018

15.3

Towns and villages

2018

10.1

Jūyaku (director and above) levela

2018

4.1

Buchō (department head) levelb

2018

6.7

Kachō (section head) levelb

2018

9.3

Kakarichō (subsection head) levelb

2018

16.7

Shikkō iin (union leaders) in Rengō (Japan Trade Union Confederation)c

2016

11.8

Position Members of local legislatures

Business managers

High-ranking officials in the national bureaucracy Shiteishoku (top five grades, called ‘designated posts’)

2018

3.9

Kachō (section head level or above at ministries proper)

2018

4.9

Judges

2018

26.5

Prosecutors

2018

24.6

Position

Year

% held by women

Lawyers

2018

18.6

Doctors

2016

21.1

Dentists

2016

23.0

Elementary-school level

2018

19.4

Middle-school level

2018

6.6

High-school level

2018

7.5

Full professors in universities

2018

16.0

Presidents in universities

2018

11.3

Journalists in newspapers and news agencies

2018

20.2

Principals of public schools

Sources: Cabinet Office, Gender Equality Bureau 2019; Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2018a; Tōyō Keizai Shimpōsha 2018; Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018i; Japan Trade Union Confederation 2017; Nihon Bengoshi Rengōkai 2018; Ministry of Education and Science 2018a; Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association 2018a. a

The figure covers major companies listed on Japan’s main stock exchanges.

b

The figure is for companies with ten or more employees.

c

The figure is at the national industrial union level. Women in the sōgō-shoku career path tend to come from a

particular background: they must hold a degree from a four-year university, preferably a reputable one, and this means that their parents must have both the financial and the cultural resources to support their education. Most of these elite women marry men within the elite track (see Tables 3.8 and 3.9) and receive financial and other support from their parents, who in many cases own substantial personal and real assets. Women in the labor force above the age of forty are highly diversified in terms of income. In their forties and thereafter, female university graduates earn twice as much as those with only highschool education (see Figure 6.1). The increasing demand for female labor and the declining birth rate caused lawmakers and business leaders to institutionalize a few provisions in the late twentieth century to enable women to stay in the workforce. One was the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, enacted in 1985, and the other was the Child Care and Family Care Leave Law, put into effect in 1992 and revised in 2019. Neither has a penalty clause or the teeth to force employers to comply with its terms. In principle, the Child Care and Family Care Leave Law enables female or male employees to take parental leave without pay for up

to one year, to care for a newborn child. After the break, companies must allow the employee to resume work in the same job or in a position of equivalent standing. Yet, in the mid-2010s, some 82 percent of female workers who had given birth took parental leave, while only 3 percent of male partners did so.21 The Child Care and Family Care Leave Law also enables employees to take family-care leave of up to five days per year. In the event that they have to be absent from work to look after a family member for more than two weeks, they can take leave up to ninety-three days per year without pay. These provisions reflect the reality of Japan’s aging society, in which it remains the convention that the family, rather than institutions, must care for the infirm elderly. In most cases, once an old person falls seriously ill or becomes completely bedridden, family members or relatives are expected to attend to them personally. This places a heavy burden on women, who care for bedridden senior citizens in about two-thirds of all cases.22 As those who care for elderly people at home become older themselves, some families have to live in the situation in which the aged look after the more aged. In 2016, the Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace was put into force to compel large companies with 300 or more employees to collect and publicize data on their rate of female employees, gender gap, working hours, rate of female managers, and so on. This enactment was a statement of general principles, and the execution of its particular details was hardly spelled out. Small businesses, in which an overwhelming

majority of the Japanese workforce is employed, also lag behind in this area. Career women Despite the gradual increase in the general level of female labor participation, professional, entrepreneurial, and careeroriented women encounter a number of cultural norms which are foreign to most men. In international comparisons, they have much more difficulty than their counterparts in advanced economies in attaining managerial positions and political posts. Though a series of legislation has been put into force to promote equality in the workplace, these legal provisions do not have penalty clauses. Childcare workers and facilities do not satisfy growing demands. The videos cited below show some of the challenges that career-oriented women face in Japan in balancing work and family life: Balancing Career and Family in Japan, at www.youtube.com/watch? v=qUjGjgAAeF8 (Financial Times, 22 January 2013), and In Japan, Career Women Challenge Cultural Norms, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hDsBoDvsA (PBS NewsHour, 5 November 2017).

3 Four types of married women The life of women can be seen in terms of the extent to which it is integrated into two types of social orders. First is the capitalist order, which concerns the way in which the system of economic production and distribution is organized. Whether one engages in paid employment or not is the most conspicuous indicator of the extent to which one is involved in this order. A married woman’s decisions in this matter are apt to be influenced by her husband’s income and her access to inheritable assets.23 Second is the patriarchal order, in which male power controls women in family and community life. The more gender equality women achieve in this sphere, the freer they are from this control and the less enmeshed are their lives in the patriarchal order. Based on these two orders, Table 7.2 presents a fourfold classification of married women. Table 7.2 Comparison of permeations into the lives of married women Patriarchal order Strong

Capitalist order Strong

Weak

Family-supporting parttime workers and parttime housewives

Full-time housewives

Patriarchal order Weak

Capitalist order Strong

Weak

Career women, many in sōgō-shoku posts (on managerial track)

Community activists and networkers not in workforce

Source: Based on Ueno 1990. (a) Part-time workers and part-time housewives This group includes part-timers who are content with a family situation in which the husband is the breadwinner and the wife plays a supporting role both financially and with regard to household chores. Women who choose to work as part-time or casual employees see their jobs mainly as supplements to the household budget.

Furthermore,

the

abovementioned

two

institutional

disincentives regarding tax and insurance actively discourage parttime working housewives from earning more than a certain amount. In daily life, one encounters such women working at cash registers, as hostesses at snack bars, and as sales assistants in shops and stores. Some women, however, adopt different approaches to their employment. One alternative is to register with a temp (haken) company which sends specialist workers on fixed-term bases to firms that request them. These employees work in a range of areas, including

computer

programming,

interpreting,

secretarial

assistance, bookkeeping, drafting, and cleaning buildings. Women in

their late twenties with some occupational experience make up most of the female haken staff. Work in this area is attractive to them partly because they are assessed on their ability and performance rather than their seniority and partly because they are not bound to a single company. However, the prime reason for women choosing this type of arrangement is its flexibility, which allows them to adjust their working hours and select their job environment to suit their personal situations and preferences. Another option open to women in the external labor market is to start a small business of their own. Some run juku, after-school private tutorial classes, in their homes. Others form groups that own small shops selling a wide variety of goods, ranging from women’s clothing and accessories to crockery. Some groups manage various food-related

operations,

ranging

from

coffee

shops

to

confectioneries. These businesses sometimes operate as part of a franchise network. Most women who take this alternative appear to be motivated by its compatibility with child-rearing and other home duties and, in particular, because it allows them to arrange their working hours flexibly and independently. Many in this category are in their mid-thirties or older and their children have reached school age. Some women choose to work in the evenings as hostesses in the bar and restaurant business. Called mizushōbai, this type of work is widely available in pubs, nightclubs, saloons, taverns, highclass restaurants, and other entertainment venues. Women in this business are expected to amuse male customers eating and drinking before going home. While bordering on the sex industry, the

mizushōbai world provides high wages for women who are prepared to work irregular hours. Although many of them are unmarried young women, married women and divorcees who want quick cash also work in this sector. A small minority even aspire to own such venues of their own and make their careers in this world. Generally, women’s work styles are constrained by differences in the ways in which men and women structure their nonworking hours. On average, in 2016, men spent forty-four minutes per day on such household tasks as cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, and childminding, while women devoted three hours and twenty-eight minutes to these tasks.24 (b) Career women Most sōgō-shoku types comprise career women who compete with men at work and have much support from their spouse and parents in the management of their family lives. The political push for gender equality in recruitment and promotion in the workplace comes mainly from this group. In international comparisons, the proportion of Japanese women in managerial positions is lower than that in European and American and other Asian countries.25 (c) Full-time housewives This group comprises full-time housewives (sengyō-shufu) who have no gainful employment and whose lives are generally subordinated to the requirements of their husbands. They accept a trade-off

between freedom from paid work and toleration of male-dominated family life. At best, the power of full-time housewives remains equivocal. Banks in Japan do not allow married couples to establish joint accounts. To purchase daily necessities, it is not uncommon for a housewife to use her husband’s cash card at an automatic teller machine to withdraw money from his bank account (into which his company pays his salary). This pattern is routine for couples in which the husband is the full-time breadwinner and the wife is the full-time housewife. The number of full-time housewives diminished at the turn of the last century to fewer than half of the number of wives in some form of paid employment. As Figure 7.4 shows, up to the beginning of the 1990s, households in which the husband worked while the wife stayed home formed a majority over two-income households in which both the husband and wife held down jobs. Over the last few decades, the pattern has been irrevocably reversed, with the number of working women escalating, though their internal variety – particularly the dominance of part-time and casual workers – is undeniable. Many of those in the full-time-housewife category can afford not to work because of the comfortable earnings of their husbands.26

Figure 7.4 Changes in the numbers of households with a full-time housewife and two-income households, 1980–2018 Notes: Households in agriculture, fishery, and forestry are not included. The household numbers are in 10,000s. Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019. (d) Networkers The final group in Table 7.2 consists of those who choose not to work in the business world and who at the same time pursue gender equality in the household. Many female community activists and networkers fall into this category.27 Some

women

choose

to

work

in

community-based

organizations. These include, for example, workers’ collectives which aim to establish alternative work structures, in which employees can participate in decision-making processes on the basis of democratic principles.28 Such collectives do not regard profit-making as their prime goal and attempt to provide communal networks among

members. Some collectives organize community colleges or culture centers for adult education. Others establish recycling shops, and still others operate as links of a larger cooperative chain. In a variety of family service clubs, members help each other in such household chores as cleaning, shopping, washing, and infant nursing, for a nominal

fee.

Participants

in

these

organizations

receive

remuneration for their work, but their interest centers on the establishment and expansion of autonomous women’s networks in the neighborhood and beyond. The organizations of these kinds tend to form a kind of horizontally structured society, based on linkages cutting across community lines. Women in their late forties and fifties, who have been liberated from the time and expenditure required for child-rearing and child education, play a major role in these types of activities. With their husbands still working, they have plenty of time and sufficient financial resources to become heavily involved in these ventures. With little access to the established labor market at their age, the women in this category have become a new type of proprietor in pursuit of self-realization through work. Networkers play major roles in reformist political groups at the community level. Some activists are involved in protest activities against development projects which would negatively affect residents’ interests. Others object to the construction of high-rise condominium buildings in densely populated urban centers. Still others take part in movements against the extension of highways and roads, which cause noise and air pollution. Networkers oriented towards environmental issues organize distribution networks of organically grown vegetables and fruit, selling them to consumers

from farmers while serving as intermediaries. The demands of these women are connected with community issues and family needs directly enough to affect local politics. With time available and good networking skills, such activists represent significant political voices in grassroots Japan.

IV Control of the female body

1 Contraception and abortion The Japanese health authorities legalized the use of the contraceptive pill in 1999, more than three decades after it became available internationally. In general terms, the authorities are stringent in regulating available means of contraception and lenient in allowing abortion as a method of birth control. This differs from the pattern in most other industrialized societies, where a wide range of contraceptives, including the pill, are openly available and the issue of abortion remains contentious. One indicator of this divergence is the cost of the pill in Japan. For contraceptive usage, it can be procured only by prescription from a medical doctor and is not covered by medical insurance, unless the patient is diagnosed with dysmenorrhea or endometritis, medical conditions for which the pill is an effective treatment. More importantly, misinformation and disinformation regarding the side effects of the pill have prevailed to the point that even in 2016, about 82 percent of couples who practiced birth control used condoms to prevent pregnancy, with pill users totaling only 4 percent.29 This situation can be traced back to a chemical-poisoning argument which led to the official banning of the pill as a contraceptive in 1972. Before then, Japanese were able to purchase it freely in drugstores without a prescription, officially not as a contraceptive but as a medicine for hormone- and menstruation-related problems. However, a series of chemical-poisoning scandals in the 1960s led the Ministry of Health and Welfare to be concerned about the pill. The scandals (none related to the pill) included babies with malformations born to

women who had taken thalidomide during early pregnancy, and babies poisoned by arsenic in milk powder. Taking an extremely cautious approach, the ministry classified the pill between 1972 and 1999 as a medication available solely by prescription and not as a contraceptive. To complicate matters, the threat of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) enabled critics of the pill to take a new stance and argue that its liberalization would discourage the use of condoms, which are the most effective preventive method against the disease’s spread. In 1992 this argument swayed the Central Pharmaceutical Affairs Council, the advisory body of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, against recommending the legalization of the pill. The council, composed of medical experts, met regularly to discuss the issue and made a negative recommendation despite the demands of feminist and civic liberalization pressure groups. More importantly, the ministry had long taken a moralistic stance regarding the pill, contending that if it were legalized it would foster promiscuity and corrupt women’s morals. The implication was that, having freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, the pill would encourage them to liberally engage in sexual activity and thereby undermine the respectability of the Japanese family system. It is paradoxical, though perhaps not surprising, that while it took three decades for the contraceptive pill to be legalized, the pill for curing male impotence, sildenafil citrate (brand name Viagra), was authorized and freely marketed after only half a year of deliberation and debate, in 1999.

The sexual revolution occurred and had an important impact in Japan despite such moralizing policies directed towards women. Hence, in 2015, more than 80 percent of unmarried people approved of premarital sex, and more than three out of five unmarried persons between twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age experienced sexual intercourse.30 A survey of 14,000 people conducted in 2013 by a major condom-manufacturing company showed that for respondents in their twenties at the time of the survey, the average age at first sexual experience for women was 18.5 and for men was 18.9, while the national figure, which included all respondents, was 20.3, a pattern confirming that premarital sex was an accepted and established norm.31 Mass media in Japan present private sex lives openly and without much restraint. In a popular television entertainment program entitled Welcome Newly Weds, a rakugo comedian (a traditional Japanese comic storyteller) and his assistant interview newly married couples about their initial encounters, sexual experiences, and love lives so hilariously and humorously that the show has been successfully running for more than four decades on national television.32 Many popular magazines are full of nude pictures and sexual descriptions. Adult books and videos are readily available. Still, sex education is often a taboo at home and underdeveloped at school, with both parents and teachers reluctant to have open discussions on the topic.33 The increasing gap between the moral pretenses of the adult community and the behavioral realities of their adolescent children has

created

a

social

atmosphere

conducive

to

unwanted

pregnancies and abortions. Abortion is established as a legal means of birth control in Japan within the first twenty-two weeks of pregnancy.34 The reported number of abortions is a little over 160,000 per year.35 This is regarded as a conservative figure: women normally pay abortion costs in cash, because the National Health Insurance does not cover them; and many doctors do not report all cases of abortion, because they can conceal cash payments without declaring them as taxable income. Japan’s Maternal Protection Law (enacted in 1996) allows women to have abortions for economic reasons. The abortion industry has a peculiar concomitant on the religious front. Some temples have an area which accommodates hundreds of small, doll-like stone statues called mizuko jizō, some covered with baby bibs and caps, others with toys beside them. Feeling guilty and contrite, some women who have had abortions have dedicated these costly stone carvings to the souls of their aborted fetuses. With the sizeable market in mind, some temples openly advertise the availability of this service in newspapers and magazines, specifying fees.

2 Domestic violence Violence at home takes many forms. In prewar Japan, a husband’s violence against his wife was accepted. It still persists, although it is more concealed, and the term domesuchikku baiorensu (from the English ‘domestic violence’) or its abbreviation, DV, is used rather than the original Japanese phrase, kateinai bōryoku (literally meaning ‘intra-family violence’). The National Police Agency reports that in 2018 more than 9,000 people were arrested over the most extreme cases of domestic violence – murder, manslaughter, injurious assault, or assault – and nearly 80 percent of the victims of cases reported to police were female.36 A nationwide government survey conducted by the Cabinet Office in 2017 indicates that 31.3 percent of women experienced ‘physical violence, psychological attack, economic pressure or sexual coercion’ from their husbands or partners.37 A significant proportion of victims of physical violence suffered injuries; the worst injuries included bone fractures, burns, and burst eardrums. Violent men are not restricted to any particular class lines; they include doctors, university professors, and public servants in significant numbers. Despite this reality, only a small number of community shelters for women operate in Japan, primarily on the basis of volunteer support with very limited government subsidies. It is important to note that the same government survey shows that some 19.9 percent of male respondents were subjected to domestic violence from their wives or partners.38 Although the male

proportion is lower than the female, domestic violence is not confined to males using force against women. This remains one of the unexplored areas of gender studies in Japan. Court data show the extent of domestic violence which women suffer. When a wife files a divorce request, the husband’s domestic violence is usually cited as a major reason for the action, second only to ‘personality incompatibility’.39 Although the exact extent of violence of this kind remains unidentifiable, in all probability it is much more widespread than is commonly believed. The nature of the problem makes it less visible than other social issues. The phrase kateinai bōryoku also includes the kind of domestic violence that children direct against their parents.40 Those children who are violent towards their parents are mostly in the middle-school age bracket, and most cases involve a boy kicking, beating, or punching his mother. The family type that produces most domestic violence of this kind typically has a father who pays no attention to the children and a mother who tries to control and protect the children excessively. To a considerable extent, these incidents reflect the predicament of many Japanese families in which the father works long hours and spends little time at home, and the lonely mother finds emotional satisfaction in excessive expectations of the children’s success. In this respect, child-perpetrated domestic violence indirectly represents injuries that Japan’s corporate system has inflicted on Japanese families. Parental child-abuse cases are also being reported to schools, police, and child-consultation centers in increasing numbers.41 They include physical battering, psychological ill-treatment, parental

neglect, and sexual abuse. Article 89 of Japan’s Civil Code allows parents and guardians to discipline their children, and the location of the line between abuse and discipline has been a contentious issue. With the enactment of the Child Abuse Prevention Law in 2000, the argument that the interests of children must come first regardless of the intentions of parents has gained ground. Yet, the problem of parental child abuse does not appear to be easily solved, reflected in the fact that the community tolerates some teachers imposing similar corporal punishment on students at school (see Section IV of Chapter 6).

3 Sexual harassment The notion of sexual harassment has recently been imported into Japan from Western societies, although the practice has a long history in the country. The Japanese term for the concept, sekuhara (sexual harassment), gained wide circulation from court cases that women have brought against men’s behavior in workplaces. With the rise of feminist consciousness, the government took steps to address the issue of sexual harassment as part of a national agenda to establish a gender-equal society. To this end, two types of sexual harassment have been targeted: 1. Retaliatory, in which women who have resisted or reported male sexual approaches are dismissed, demoted, or subjected to pay cuts 2. Environmental, in which photographs of nude females, sex jokes, and sexual innuendo in the workplace adversely affect the morale of female employees and devalue their achievements.42 Because of power relations in workplaces and ambiguities in the legal framework, many cases remain unreported, although a considerable number have surfaced since the concept of sekuhara gained public currency. Approximately three in five working women reported that they were subjected to sexual harassment at work.43 Some women claimed that they were transferred or fired when they rejected their male superiors’ sexual advances. Others complained

that they experienced sekuhara during business trips, company excursions, or drinking parties. Still others pointed out that their male colleagues touched their breasts or hips, causing them an acute sense of unease that negatively impacted on their business performance. In metropolitan areas, working women complain about sleazy sexual harassment in packed commuter trains. To deal with the situation, in the 2000s some railway companies in Tokyo, Osaka, and other major city areas introduced women-only carriages for morning peak hours and late evenings, although the view that this represents reverse gender discrimination persists.

V Marriage and divorce In prewar and immediately postwar Japan, a majority of all married couples were united through family arrangements, with a gobetween serving as intermediary. Over time, however, love marriages consistently increased, and only 5.5 percent of couples who married in the mid-2010s were brought together through family arrangements.44 Most marriage partners in contemporary Japan initiate their own relationships. Many marriage partners initially meet through their school or workplace friendship networks or those of their siblings. Gatherings are frequently organized, over food and drink, to enable single young people to meet potential partners. Online dating is also a popular meeting method. Nevertheless, even in love marriages, procedures can take forms similar to those of arranged marriages. Marriage ceremonies are often conducted in the presence of a go-between couple, and on the understanding that the marriage represents a union between the bride’s house and the bridegroom’s house.45 Ie ideology surfaces on these

ceremonial

occasions,

attaching

importance

to

family

pedigree, lineage, and consanguinity. Outside the venue of the wedding reception, a sign is occasionally displayed to indicate that a marriage is to occur linking the two houses. The marriage market in Japan showed a dramatic surge of interethnic marriages at the turn of the last century. In 2006, of all

marriages in Japan, 6.1 percent were between Japanese and nonJapanese nationals, although the rate declined to 3.5 percent in 2017.46 The overall upward trend resulted from a range of interlaced factors. The influx of foreign workers, as well as students, into Japan since the 1990s increased the chances of Japanese developing relationships with them. A large number of Japanese youths engaged in overseas travel or worked for NGOs in developing countries as activists or volunteers and found their partners there. Unable to find Japanese female partners, some male urban factory workers and rural farmers got married to women in other countries, mainly in Asia, arranged by commercial intermediary agents. These international marriages have made it clear that Japan’s koseki system is organized for Japanese nationals only.47 Non-Japanese spouses cannot be recorded straightforwardly in the system and therefore must go through a complicated process to obtain official papers that show they are formally married. The divorce rate in Japan, measured as the number of divorces per 1,000 persons, was 1.7 in 2018 – low in comparison with major Western countries.48 In postwar Japan, the number of divorces peaked in 2002, and the divorce rate also reached its highest point in the same year, but since then it has been on the decline. Most divorces in Japan occur by the mutual consent of the couple without intervention by the family court. Only about one in ten divorces involves judicial arbitration, judgment, or ruling.49 Divorces by consent prevail among the young, whose divorce rate is high. Those in the middle-aged and elderly bracket, where the divorce rate is relatively low, tend to rely more on the family court. For older

couples, divorce involves a wider range of conflicts over asset ownership, inheritance, and access to children. Most divorce cases in postwar years involved couples married for under two years. Although this pattern persists to some degree, the trend since the 1970s has been an increase in divorces among couples married for more than ten years. This means that the number of children affected by divorce has increased. It is not uncommon for a couple with several children to divorce. At times, divorces are brought on by the husband’s retirement. In cities, particularly among the educated middle class, the gradual spread of feminism has weakened the stigma of divorce. With an increasing number in the labor market, women are more financially capable of leading independent lives and looking after their children following divorce. These women see divorce in a positive light,50 regarding it as an act of courage and autonomy rather than a sign of failure. Nonetheless, both cultural and institutional factors conspire to suppress the general divorce rate. The lack of economic independence on the part of some women makes it difficult for them to take steps to pursue divorce. A housewife without a regular income tends not to have joint ownership of the house or flat where she lives with her husband, a condition often particularly applicable to full-time housewives without steady incomes. In these cases, a housewife who wants a divorce or a separation has no place to go and must look for new accommodation using her own resources. This is why some Japanese women put up with quasi-divorce, in which the wife and

husband live in the same house despite the virtual collapse of their marriage, a practice known as kateinai rikon (divorce within marriage). They do not refrain from divorce out of consideration for their children and parents, and at the expense of their own connubial satisfaction.51 After divorce, only one parent can have legal guardianship over children in Japan; joint custody is not a widely recognized practice. Although the mother obtains custody of her children in more than three-quarters of all divorce cases,52 she cannot realistically expect her ex-husband to share the cost of child-rearing. Legal authorities have limited power to enforce judgments of the family court, and an overwhelming majority of divorced women raise their children without the financial support of their former husband.53 Divorce after the collapse of an international marriage often leads to bitter conflict over child custody, causing international furor. Specifically, in violation of the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, some Japanese parents have unilaterally taken their children to Japan from homes overseas without their ex-spouse’s consent and in many cases, have prevented their ex-spouse from having access to their children. Though Japan ratified the Hague convention in 2013, most situations remain deadlocked, with no law enforcement. The Japanese practice of giving legal custody to only one parent after a marriage breakdown appears at odds with the spirit of the convention.

VI Types of households

1 Spread of single-person households Single-person households are now the largest household group in Japan. In 2010, for the first time in modern Japanese history, their proportion of all household types exceeded that of the model nuclear family (households with a married couple and their child or children), as Table 7.3 shows. According to the 2015 census, the gap between the two groups is widening, and the diversification of the Japanese household system is irreversibly underway. The idealized nuclear family can no longer be imagined as the most typical form of Japanese household. Table 7.3 Distribution of household types (%), 1980–2015 Year Household type

1980

1990

2000

2005

2010

2015

Single person

19.8

23.1

27.6

29.5

32.4

34.6

Couple with children

42.1

37.3

31.9

29.8

27.9

26.9

Couple only

12.5

15.5

18.9

19.6

19.8

20.1

One parent and children

5.7

6.8

7.6

8.3

8.7

8.9

Extended family and others

19.9

17.4

14.1

12.8

11.1

9.4

Nuclear family

Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015. The spread of single-person households is associated with a variety of factors. First, the numbers of youngsters living alternative lifestyles have surged, including lifetime singles, cohabitants without formal marriage, and those with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. These individuals are not recorded as members of conventional nuclear families. Second, many casually employed men find it difficult to form families for economic reasons. Single-male households outnumber single-female households in all age brackets except at or above the age of seventy.54 Third, with the rise of the aged population, the number of senior citizens who have lost their partners and live alone has increased. While heavily reliant on the eldercare system, many of these people live an isolated existence and can go for days or weeks without engaging in conversation. The situation reflects a discrepancy between realities and expectations. On the one hand, what demographers call the ‘lifetime single ratio’ – the proportion of people who never marry – is as high as 23 percent for men and 14 for women.55 On the other hand, this does not mean that the Japanese are becoming more single oriented. A national survey conducted in 2015 suggests that only 12 percent of unmarried men and 8 percent of unmarried women have ‘no intention to marry throughout their lives’.56 On the whole, the institution of marriage remains the most desirable form of male– female relationship, although community acceptance of other forms appears to be rapidly spreading.

2 Nuclear family patterns The declining birth rate brought about a sudden drop in the size of families in postwar years. The average household size hovered at around five people until 1955 but declined to 2.33 people in 2015,57 a change that took closer to a century in major Western countries. Nuclear families with few children dramatically increased during this period, with most families with children choosing to have only one or two. On the whole, nuclear families enjoy a high degree of autonomy and independence; for example, wives do not have to worry about the daily interventions of parents-in-law. These families typically settle down first in a small but well-equipped apartment or condominium. They then move to a detached house, if their financial and social conditions allow. Condominium buildings that sprawl across and around major cities reflect the spread of small families with one or two children. Their self-contained, partitioned, and rather comfortable lifestyles became consolidated in post-growth Japan with the wide availability of reasonably priced household electrical appliances such as refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. Freed from manual family chores, housewives in these circumstances have been free to raise a small number of children the way they like without interference from the older generation. On the negative side, however, many city-dwelling women in nuclear families, particularly full-time housewives, lead solitary and alienated lives. This is not just because their husbands devote

themselves to their companies, rarely attending to family matters, but also because the numbers of children are fewer, the woman’s parents may live far away, and interactions with other families in the neighborhood are rare. Many child-rearing mothers depend upon a support system to avoid the extreme forms of isolation often associated with secluded nuclear families. Despite the decline in extended families, parents or parents-in-law continue to assist in caring for their grandchildren, especially if they live nearby. In the absence of such grandparental support, women in the infant-rearing phase develop neighborhood groups for mutual assistance. They organize playgroups, get together at members’ homes on a rotational basis, and enjoy conversation while their children play together. Some organize voluntary associations of mothers in need of mutual support for baby care. Thus, for young mothers in nuclear families, grandparental backing and neighborhood group support are two practical alternatives to isolated and solitary lifestyles.

3 Decline in extended families The proportion of extended families with two adult generations living under the same roof has halved, to about 10 percent, from 20 percent in 1980.58 In ura reality, most two-generation families make this arrangement for pragmatic rather than altruistic reasons. Given the high cost of purchasing housing properties in major cities, young people in urban areas are prepared to live with or close to their parents and provide them with home-based nursing care, in the expectation of acquiring their house after their death in exchange.59 Even if the two generations do not live together or close by, aged parents often expect to receive living allowances from their children, with the tacit understanding that they will repay the debt by allowing the contributing children to inherit their property after death.60

4 Schematic summary of the family To classify the Japanese family, it may be helpful to consider two dimensions of categorization: the type of residential arrangement, which ranges from extended family to nuclear family, and the family norm, ranging from lineage orientation to conjugal orientation. Combining these two dimensions, one can envisage four family types, as displayed in Table 7.4. Table 7.4 Comparison of family types Residential arrangement

Family norm

Extended family

Nuclear family

Lineage orientation

Traditional ideology and living arrangements

Independent living arrangements, traditional ideology

Conjugal orientation

Independent ideology, near-traditional living arrangements

Independent ideology and living arrangements

Source: Adapted from Mitsuyoshi 1991, p. 141. The two extremes comprise the most traditional type, in which the ie principle predominates and the married couple lives with the husband’s parents, and the autonomous, modern nuclear family type, in which the conjugal ideology prevails. Between these are two intermediate mixed varieties. The first includes families in which two

adult generations live in the same house but value conjugal relations more than lineal ones; they lead mutually independent lives. Because of high property prices, city families, particularly in the Tokyo metropolitan areas, choose this lifestyle by building a two- or three-story residence with self-contained floors for each conjugal unit. The second includes nuclear families that believe in lineagebased relations between generations. These families may live apart for occupational and other reasons but closely follow traditional conventions governing marriage ceremonies, funerals, festivals, ancestral worship, family tomb management, and gift-giving among kin. They interact intimately with each other. Outside these family types, single-person households and individuals pursuing lifestyles alternative to the modern family are swiftly proliferating. Though the institution of marriage holds strong, the irreversible surge of other types of relations appears inevitable.

Variations in gender identity Public acceptance of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities has been slow to appear in Japan. According to an internet survey in 2019, some 78.8 percent of those belonging to sexual minorities refrained from disclosing their orientations and identities,61 an indication that community prejudice based on incorrect understanding of sexual diversity remains deep seated. Yet, a wide range of efforts to promote acceptance and understanding have been underway at various levels. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare takes the position that, if someone is excluded from employment or subjected to verbal or physical abuse in the workplace because of their sexual orientation, that constitutes sexual harassment.62 In the video LGBT Japan: A and O’s Story, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZreQx-WjnLU (Amnesty International, 20 November 2017), a lesbian couple share their experience of parenting their son in a society that does not have the legal or cultural frameworks to support them in the same way that binary parents are supported.

VII Gender and sexual diversity Japan’s population includes people who are diverse in gender and sexuality. An internet consumer trend survey of 60,000 respondents carried out in 2018 by the Research Institute of Dentsū, the largest advertising

company

in

Japan,

indicated

that

8.9

percent,

approximately one in eleven people, identified as LGBT, with a substantial majority choosing not to disclose their sexual orientation and gender identity.63 Another internet survey, conducted in 2019 by LGBT Sōgō Kenkyūsho, collected data from 348,000 persons and found that 10.0 percent of the respondents defined themselves as members of sexual minorities.64 The Japanese legal system does not recognize same-sex marriage. As discussed earlier, the nation’s constitution states in Article 24 that marriage ‘shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes’, a principle on which Japan’s civil law is predicated. This legal requirement poses not only philosophical but also material issues for same-sex couples. For example, they are not entitled to the spouse tax deductions that married couples can claim. Some resourceful same-sex couples devise defensive and instrumental strategies. A case in point is an adoption strategy in which partner A legally adopts partner B as their child, which enables them to have the same surname. With a same-sex couple registered in this way in koseki, the process of property inheritance generally encounters very

few impediments: after a partner’s death, the survivor can easily qualify as the legatee. Japanese lesbians and gays gradually and openly formed organizations in the 1990s. Some run gay magazines, several of which sell tens of thousands of copies. Their market is diversified, with Barazoku for young gay men and Samson for the middle aged. These magazines have brought gay manga writers to prominence. Although lesbian magazines are less prolific, an internet magazine, Tokyo Wrestling, provides forums to debate lesbian concerns and establish networks for lesbians. Some groups organize local meetings and discuss their own issues and agendas, often in open defiance of the general community. Lesbian couples are also increasingly confident of their sexual orientations. Some municipalities – such as Tokyo’s Shibuya and Setagaya wards – officially accept gay and lesbian partnerships as relationships corresponding to formal marriages. However, the koseki system remains an obstinate barrier to the legalization of formal marriages between same-sex partners. A small number of empirical studies in Japan have shown that gay men and women expect household chores to be equally divided between partners, while heterosexual men and women tend to be less egalitarian in this respect.65 Gay and lesbian people are more open to experimenting with relationships and role patterns. They also appear to value omoiyari, the Japanese sense of empathy, very highly in friendships and relationships, and more than those who criticize gays and lesbians as immoral. Advocates maintain that the

public should accept diversity in gender and sexuality and be more liberal in their categorization.66 The moral norm of ‘proper’ marriage as the only acceptable lifestyle lingers, making it difficult even for heterosexual de facto relationships to be recognized as acceptable. Yet, an increasing number of women and men choose to live as singles and prove to be happy and confident. A number of books have popularized the notion of liberated-singles culture, casting it in a positive light.67 The younger generations are apt to regard de facto relationships over formal marriage as their way of life.

VIII Conclusion This chapter has examined aspects of gender relations in Japan, starting with the ie ideology and the koseki system as their bedrock. It then focused on women’s employment patterns, which shape their life conditions and life chances. The chapter has also investigated issues in relation to sexuality as well as problems surrounding control of the female body, including contraception and abortion. The discussion then shifted to marriage and divorce, showing the coexistence of traditional patterns and drastic changes in Japan’s family structure. Examining a variety of families, the following section exhibited the spread of single-person households, demonstrating that a married couple with children is not the typical household anymore. The last section addressed gender and sexual diversity and discussed the hopes and predicaments of the community of Japanese who do not conform to traditional norms. The chapter has observed the trends pointing to the growing diversification and relativization of the Japanese family system and revealed not only the structure of power relations between the sexes but also internal differentiation within the world of women and that of men.

Research questions 1. Why is it more difficult for Japanese women to assume managerial or leadership positions than women in other comparable countries? 2. Compare Japan’s koseki system with registration systems in other Asian countries. 3. Why is income inequality sharper among women than among men in Japan? 4. Why does the aging of the population in Japan result in more adverse effects for women than for men? 5. To what degree is sexual diversity accepted in Japanese society in comparison with other advanced economies?

Further readings AMPO, Japan Asia Quarterly Review (ed.) 2015, Voices from the Japanese Women’s Movement. London: Routledge. Germer, Andrea, Mackie, Vera, and Wöhr, Ulrike (eds) 2017, Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan. London: Routledge. Mackie, Vera 2003, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steel, Gill 2019, Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tachibanaki, Toshiaki 2010, The New Paradox for Japanese Women: Greater Choice, Greater Inequality. Tokyo: I-House Press. Ueno, Chizuko 2009, The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.

Online resources Fotache, Ioana 2019, Japanese ‘LGBT Boom’ Discourse and Its Discontents. E-International Relations (20 August), www.eir.info/pdf/79020. Matanle, Peter et al. 2014, ‘Popular culture and workplace gendering among varieties of capitalism: Working women and their representation in Japanese manga’. Gender Work and Organization, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 472–89. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/261507838_Popular_Culture_and _Workplace_Gendering_among_Varieties_of_Capitalism_Working_ Women_and_their_Representation_in_Japanese_Manga. Perez, Ai Faithy 2017, Sexism and Culture: Japan’s Obsession with Kawaii. Savvy Tokyo (5 September), https://savvytokyo.com/sexismculture-japans-obsession-kawaii/. Rich, Motoko 2019, ‘Craving freedom, Japan’s women opt out of marriage’. New York Times (3 August), www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/world/asia/japan-single-womenmarriage.html (requires account or subscription). Robson, David 2018, Ikumen: How Japan’s ‘Hunky Dads’ Are Changing Parenting. BBC (28 November), www.bbc.com/future/article/20181127-ikumen-how-japans-hunkydads-are-changing-parenting.

Toguchi, Takumi 2019, ‘Concerns rise in Japan over growing number of LGBT people being outed’. Japan Times (19 April), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/04/19/national/socialissues/concerns-rise-japan-growing-number-lgbt-people-publiclyouted/#.XlMpGS2cYxN (may require registration or subscription). 1 World Economic Forum 2020. 2 The Ministry of Home Affairs defines the concept of household head in some detail on the basis of patriarchal principles: 1. In the case of the father and his first son both earning a living for the household, the father should be deemed its head in accordance with commonly accepted ideas, even if the father’s income is less than that of the first son. 2. In the case of the father being his first son’s dependent in terms of income tax law and his first and second sons both earning a living for the household, the first son should be deemed its head even if his income is less than that of the second son. 3. In the case of neither the father nor his first son having any income and the second son being chiefly responsible for earning a living for the household, the first son should be deemed its head in accordance with commonly accepted ideas, so long as he is regarded as only temporarily unemployed. 4. The wife becomes the household head when the husband has no income and the wife earns a living. Satō 1991, pp. 138–9, citing ‘Questions and answers concerning the Law on Basic Registers of Residents’, notice dispatched by the

head of the Administration Department of the ministry. 3 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2006, Table 13. 4 Sakakibara 1992, pp. 88–90. 5 MM, 5 September 2013, p. 1. 6 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 7 OECD 2018. 8 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a; Yuzawa 1987, pp. 166–7. 9 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 10 Although in tatemae (see Chapter 2) companies are not allowed to require job applicants to submit their koseki papers (to protect private information), there are many reported cases in which job applicants were asked to do so immediately after employment. It is usually the case that successful applicants are required to submit to the hiring company certified copies of selected items on their resident card. 11 Cabinet Office 2018a. 12 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019. 13 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016, Chart II-4-5. 14 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019.

15 National Tax Agency 2018. 16 For women’s overall career issues, see Ōsawa 2019; Suzuki 2008. 17 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2014. 18 Ōsawa 2019. 19 World Economic Forum 2018. 20 Inter-Parliamentary Union 2020. The G20 is an international forum for the governments and central banks of 19 major countries plus the European Union. 21 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016a. 22 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016b. 23 Ozawa 1989; Ueno 1991. 24 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2017a. 25 Cabinet Office, Gender Equality Bureau 2018, Figure I-2-13. See also Table 7.1 of this chapter. 26 Hashimoto 2018a, pp. 173–5. 27 See Ueno 2009, pp. 56–7. 28 M. Amano 2011, pp. 133–65. 29 Kitamura 2017.

30 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016. 31 Sagami Gomu Kōgyō 2013. A similar survey conducted in 2017 by MORE, a fashion magazine aimed at females, of 2,000 women aged between 23 and 33 showed the average age at first experience was 19.1 years. Daily More 2017. 32 On the popularity of this program, see AE, 13 June 2015, p. 4; AE, 22 October 2013, p. 1. 33 See, for example, Hayashi 2018. 34 Ministry of Health and Welfare 1990. 35 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018g. 36 National Police Agency 2018. 37 Cabinet Office, Gender Equality Bureau 2017. 38 Cabinet Office, Gender Equality Bureau 2017. 39 Supreme Court 2017, Table 32. 40 National Police Agency 2018. 41 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2019c. 42 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2015, based on Ministry of Labor, Notice 20, 1998. 43 Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2016b.

44 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016. 45 See, for example, Edwards 1989. 46 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. The rate was less than 1 percent in 1980. 47 Endo 2019. 48 The rate was 4.7 in Russia in 2013, 2.9 in the United States (2017), 2.5 in Sweden (2016), 2.1 in South Korea (2017), 2.0 in Australia (2015), 2.0 in Germany (2015), 1.9 in France (2015), and 1.9 in Britain (2014). Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 49 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a. 50 Morimoto 2017. 51 See Ueno 2009, pp. 192–5. 52 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018a; Yuzawa 1995, pp. 182–3. 53 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016c. 54 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015. 55 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015.

56 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2016. 57 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015. 58 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015. 59 Ōtake and Horioka 1994, pp. 235–7. 60 Horioka 1995. 61 Out Japan 2019. 62 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016e. 63 AM, 12 January 2019, p. 3. 64 Out Japan 2019. 65 See, for example, Mackintosh 2009; Ito and Yanase 2001; Lunsing 1995, 2001; McLelland 2000; Summerhawk, McMahill, and McDonald 1999. For award-winning lesbian manga, see Nagata 2017. 66 Fotache 2019; Lunsing 2001, chap. 7. 67 Yamaori 2016; Ueno 2007; Ebisaka 1986.

Chapter 8

Ethnicity and Japaneseness: defining the nation ◈

I Introduction Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally despite the firm reality that it has many groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism and then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis1 by delineating four minority groups in Japan: indigenous Ainu, burakumin, zainichi Koreans, and foreign workers. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.

II Japanese ethnocentrism The sense of ethnic superiority harbored by many Japanese is not a thing of the past. A nationwide time-series survey conducted by Japan’s Institute of Statistical Mathematics over more than half a century includes a controversial yet thought-provoking question: ‘In a word, do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners?’2 It is intriguing that a prestigious research institute has kept asking the question for more than six decades, a pattern that in itself reflects the degree to which the Japanese are ethnically conscious of their location in the international rank order. The long-term survey results, shown in Table 8.1, point to the enduring ethnic self-confidence cherished by many Japanese while indicating that it fluctuates in accordance with the economic performance and achievements of the country. During the period of national humiliation and devastation in the 1950s, following the defeat in World War II, a majority accepted the notion of Japanese being mediocre and ordinary in comparison with those vaguely referred to as ‘Westerners’. With the resurgence of the Japanese economy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Japanese appeared to regain self-esteem and pride, which culminated in the decade of self-glorification in the 1980s, when Japan’s economy enjoyed a wave of unprecedented prosperity and the nation attained the status of economic superpower. As Japan entered the period of stagnation and recession from the 1990s onwards and struggled under the weight of a sluggish economy, public perceptions sobered for a time, before the ‘superiority’ group regained momentum in recent years. This latest tendency possibly reflects a gradual revival of competitive race consciousness in reaction to rising trade protectionism, the ascendancy of China, and Japan’s sliding status in East Asia. Table 8.1 ‘Do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners?’ Survey responses (%), 1953–2013 Year Response

1953

1963

1968

1973

1983

1993

1998

2003

2008

2013

Superior

20

33

47

39

53

41

33

31

37

44

Inferior

28

14

11

9

8

6

11

7

9

7

Same

14

16

12

18

12

27

32

31

28

29

Cannot say in a word

21

27

21

26

21

20

19

24

22

15

Other

1

1

1

0

2

0

0

1

0

0

Don’t know

13

9

7

7

5

5

6

6

4

5

Source: Adapted from Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Table 9.6.

Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who chose each answer in the survey year. The question was not asked in 1958, 1978, and 1988. The ideology of mono-ethnic Japan is invoked or abandoned according to what is expedient for the interest groups involved in public debate. For decades, the Japanese leadership inculcated in the populace the myths of Japanese racial purity and of the ethnic superiority which was supposed to be guaranteed by the uninterrupted lineage of the imperial household over centuries. Conscious of the extent of support for racist ideology of this type, the Japanese establishment has often resorted to the argument that mono-ethnic Japanese society has no tradition of accepting outsiders. Exploiting this, the government accepted only a small fraction of refugees into Japan from Vietnam and other areas of Indochina in the 1970s and 1980s, although the nation had taken millions of Koreans and Chinese as cheap labor before and during World War II. Since its ratification of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1981, Japan has accepted only a few hundred refugees each year, with the annual approval rate invariably below 1 percent. In 2018, out of more than 10,000 applications, only 42 cases were approved, with a success rate of merely 0.4 percent.3 Based on the slogan Datsu-a Nyūō (Quit Asia and join Europe), the leadership of modern Japan envisaged a ‘ladder of civilizations’ on which European and American societies occupied the highest rungs, Japan was somewhere in the middle, and other Asian countries were at the bottom.4 Also notable is the persistence of the doctrine of wakon yōsai (Japanese spirit and Western technology), the dichotomy which splits the world into two metaphorical hemispheres, Japan and the West, and assumes that the spiritual, moral, and cultural life of the Japanese should not be corrupted by foreign influences, no matter how much Japan’s material way of life may be affected by them.5 Borrowing some elements of imported Western imagery, the Japanese mass culture industry has portrayed black persons in derogatory ways in comics, television programs, and novels.6 Popular among the business elite, books which perpetuate anti-Semitic stereotypes based upon the old propaganda of an international Jewish conspiracy hit the bestseller charts from time to time.7 The Japanese sense of ethnic superiority is buttressed by Nihonjinron (theories about the Japanese), the genre of writings which advocate Japanese ‘uniquely unique’ attributes, as discussed in Chapter 2. This cultural discourse has tangible and institutional consequences that disadvantage some groups, notably minority groups including the Ainu, the burakumin, zainichi Koreans, and foreign migrants. Their minority status results from different historical circumstances, as sketched in Chapters 1 and 2. As summarized in Table 8.2, the Ainu situation derived from the Honshū race’s attempt at internal colonization of the northern areas from the sixth century, the buraku issue stemmed from the caste system in the feudal period, the Korean issues originated from Japan’s external aggression on the Korean Peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century, and the foreign workers’ influx began with Japan’s improving economic performance in the 1980s and 1990s. The following four sections focus on these groups that the Nihonjinron literature ignores. The remainder of the chapter further advances a multicultural framework for portraying the Japanese. Table 8.2 Comparison of minority groups

Group Ainu

Population (no.) 13,000–200,000

Geographical concentration

Cause of minority presence

Hokkaidō

Honshū inhabitants’ aggression in northern Japan

2–3 million

Kansai region

Caste system during the feudal period

Zainichi Koreans

372,000

Kansai region

Japan’s colonization of Korea

Foreign workers

1.46 million

Major cities

Shortage of labor

Burakumin

Sources: Ainu: Hokkaidō Prefectural Government 2017; Poisson 2002, p. 5; burakumin: Buraku Kaihō Jinken Kenkyūsho 2001; zainichi Koreans: Ministry of Justice 2018; foreign workers: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018h.

III Indigenous Ainu The Ainu, the indigenous population of northern Japan, in 2017 comprised at least 13,000 persons and 5,500 households living in Hokkaidō,8 though the figure included only those individuals whom the Hokkaidō Prefectural Government and local municipal governments were able to identify. No systematic survey of the Ainu population in Honshū and other parts of Japan has been conducted. At least a few thousand Ainu were thought to reside in the Tokyo metropolitan area. At the beginning of the 2000s, a highly inclusivist estimate put the number at some 200,000 throughout the entire Japanese archipelago.9 There are several place-names of Ainu origin in the eastern and northern parts of Honshū island. This is testimony to the fact that the Ainu lived in these areas in ancient times and a reminder that Japanese military power pushed them to the north after a series of military conquests. For more than ten centuries, the Ainu suffered attempts by Japan’s central government to invade and deprive them of their land and to totally assimilate them culturally and linguistically. In this sense, their history resembles the histories of the indigenous peoples of the United States and Australia. Under pressure, the Japanese parliament and government formally recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan in 2008, although much still remains to be debated and reformed, including textbook contents, employment security, and heritage preservation. In 1869, immediately after the Meiji Restoration, the Tokyo government took steps to designate Hokkaidō as ‘ownerless land’, confiscated the Ainu land, and established a governmental Land Development Bureau. The dispatch of government-supported militia paved the way for the assault of Japanese capital on virgin forests. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the national government regarded the Ainu as an underdeveloped and uncivilized race, adopted a high-handed assimilation policy, and demolished much of the Ainu traditional culture. Land reform implemented during the Allied occupation of Japan in the late 1940s equalized landownership for the agrarian population in general but had the reverse effect for the Ainu community, because the Ainu land that non-Ainu peasants had cultivated was confiscated, on the grounds of absentee landownership. As a result, the Ainu lost approximately one-third of their agricultural land in Hokkaidō. Governmental and corporate development projects degraded the conditions of the Ainu community. The most contentious such project was the construction of a dam in 1997 near Nibutani, in the southwest of Hokkaidō, where the Ainu traditionally captured salmon. With the construction of the dam, the Nibutani area was submerged, in spite of the Ainu mounting a legal challenge. While dismissing their land acquisition demands, in that year the Sapporo District Court recognized their indigenous rights as a public institution for the first time. Occupationally, many Ainu work in fishery, agriculture, and the construction industry, with a considerable number engaged in family businesses. In spite of the improvement of their level of educational attainment, they lag substantially behind the general population in terms of advancement to universities and colleges.10 Sharing a plight common to indigenous peoples subjected to the commercial

forces of the industrialized world, the Ainu are often portrayed as leading exotic lives and made showpieces for the tourism industry. The Ainu community is increasingly cautious about the exploitation of the curiosity value of their arts and crafts. Some ecologists and environmentalists find fresh inspiration in the customary Ainu mode of life, which emphasizes living with nature. Somewhat analogous to community Shinto, discussed in Chapter 10, Ainu culture is based on animism, a worldview which presumes that everything in nature, be it tree, plant, animal, bird, stone, wind, or mountain, has a life of its own and can interact with humanity. But only the very old remember the songs and folklore which have been orally transmitted through generations, because the Ainu language has no written form. With most Ainu being educated in Japanese schools and their everyday language being Japanese, the preservation of Ainu culture requires positive intervention, without which it might disappear entirely. Against the backdrop of the rise of ethnic consciousness around the world since the late 1960s, Ainu groups became involved in international exchanges with ethnic minority groups in similar plights in other countries. After years of receiving the Ainu groups’ demands, in 1997 the Japanese parliament put into effect a new law governing the Ainu population, to ‘promote Ainu culture and disseminate knowledge about the Ainu tradition’. This historic charter urged the Japanese public to recognize the existence of the Ainu ethnic community and its distinctive culture within Japan. The law also pressed for respect for the ethnic dignity and rights of the Ainu population. At the same time, a discriminatory law called Kyū-dojin hogohō (Law for the Protection of Former Savage Natives), which had been in force since 1899, was repealed. An Ainu representative who ran on a socialist ticket gained a seat in the upper house of the Japanese parliament in 1994 – the first Ainu to do so – and made a speech there partly in the Ainu language. Although few high-school social studies or history textbooks give an account of the contemporary life of the Ainu, their voices at the parliamentary level both made them visible to the Japanese public and gave some hope for its better understanding of Ainu issues. The Ainu Recognition Law (the full name of which is Law on the Implementation of Policies to Realize a Society Where the Pride of Ainu People Is Respected) was passed in April 2019, making it mandatory for both national and local governments to promote and protect Ainu culture and industry. Based on this legislation, the Ainu policy headquarters in the Cabinet Office was tasked with implementing measures funded by state subsidies. The law simplified procedures for obtaining permission to conduct traditional fishing and small-scale forestry operations, though it did not restore Ainu people’s traditional rights to these activities. Further, it failed to guarantee their rights to selfdetermination, education, and land and territorial resources – which are enshrined in the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Though it was supported by the Japanese government, it did not contain an antidiscrimination clause. Ainu communities had mixed reactions to the law.11 Some Ainu leaders criticized it on the grounds that it neither provided an apology for past wrongdoing nor offered formal recognition of internationally endorsed indigenous rights. Others accepted it as landmark legislation and a possible stepping-stone to greater self-determination.

Figure 8.1 Ainu-made popo dolls. Hunters believe that praying to the dolls brings them success in the subsequent chase

IV Buraku liberation issues Burakumin, outcasts who share the racial and ethnic origins of the majority of Japanese, form Japan’s the largest minority group. There are no biological differences between burakumin and the majority of Japanese, nor is there any means of distinguishing between them by sight. The burakumin have fallen victim to the bigoted belief that, since their ancestors belonged to a social category below ordinary citizens during the feudal period, they constitute a fundamentally inferior class. A wide range of discriminatory practices against burakumin reflect an invisible caste system in Japanese society. The term buraku means ‘settlement’, ‘hamlet’, or ‘village community’, and burakumin denotes the residents of such a unit. Unfounded prejudice has forced buraku members to live in secluded communities under conditions of relative impoverishment. The exact size of the burakumin population is unknown, because they are Japanese citizens by race and nationality, and discrimination is based upon elusive labeling. The latest official survey, conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in 1993, gave the number of buraku communities as 4,442 and that of their residents as 2,158,789.12 The survey focused upon localities which the government had designated as entitled to benefit from public projects aimed at the elimination of discrimination. There were at least 1,000 localities whose status was the subject of dispute between the government and community groups. Taking these factors into consideration, some researchers have gone as far as to claim that the number of communities amounted to 6,000 and that of burakumin 3 million.13 However, defining who the burakumin are remains a contentious issue, as discussed later, and the number of buraku residents has been declining, with a significant portion of young adults choosing to leave their communities,14 a situation which makes it all the more difficult to gauge the national distribution of buraku members. Some buraku communities have existed for nearly five centuries. Segregated communities began to emerge in around the sixteenth century and were institutionalized by the strengthening of the class system of the Tokugawa feudal regime. As discussed in Chapter 1, this system placed the ancestors of present-day burakumin at the bottom of the system, even locating them in separate neighborhoods. Two types of outcasts dwelt in these communities. The first, known as eta (which literally means the ‘amply polluted’ or ‘highly contaminated’), comprised several groups: workers in the leather industry, including those who butchered and skinned cattle and those who produced leather goods; low-ranking craftsmen, such as dyers and bamboo-ware and metalware makers; transport workers, including watermen and seamen; shrine and temple laborers; irrigation workers; and guards of agricultural fields. The second, hinin (which literally means ‘nonhuman people’), category comprised entertainers, beggars, executioners, and other occupations despised during the feudal period. Although regarded as lower than eta in rank, those in the hinin classification were allowed to climb to non-outcast status under limited circumstances, whereas those in the eta category were not. In the Tokugawa period, buraku communities existed in large numbers in western Japan, with a distinct concentration in the Kinki region, including Kyoto, Osaka, and Hyōgo prefectures. In contrast, they had very limited presence in eastern Japan. Because their historical pattern of regional distribution

has continued into the recent era, many people in the Tōhoku and Kantō areas today are not even aware of the issue, while social movements for buraku liberation are strong and visible in the west. After the Meiji Restoration, burakumin were reclassified as ‘new commoners’ (shin-heimin), and the status barrier between them and old commoners was formally removed, though little changed in terms of segregation and bigotry. The baseless claim that burakumin had ‘polluted blood’ that distinguished them from the Japanese remained deep seated.15 Another widespread myth, that burakumin were racially different from the majority of Japanese and of Korean ancestry, reflected Japanese prejudice against Koreans. Thus, anti-buraku prejudice became racialized and took the form of domestic racism. Racist prejudice against burakumin continues in employment, education, and many other areas but proves most prominent in marriage, which involves intergenerational pedigree. Faced with this deeprooted bias, intercommunity marriages between burakumin and non-burakumin encounter difficulties, and many buraku residents find their marriage partners in buraku communities. Examples abound of non-buraku parents or relatives opposing intercommunity marriages, refusing to attend marriage ceremonies, or severing relations with the couple after marriage. Discriminatory practices in marriage sometimes involve private detective agencies called kōshinjo. At the request of conservative parents, these agencies investigate the family background, friends, political orientation, and other private and personal details of a prospective bride or groom. At the same time, there are signs that youngsters are gradually freeing themselves from entrenched prejudice and taking a more open stance. At the turn of the last century intercommunity marriages increased among the younger generation. A national quantitative survey of present and past residents of buraku communities conducted in 2010–11 showed that while half of those in their forties were the children of intra-community marriages, only a quarter of those in their twenties were in this category – a trend suggesting the attitude of the majority community was changing.16 Several features of the employment patterns of buraku inhabitants are conspicuous. A significant proportion are engaged in work relating to the manufacture of shoes, bags and slippers, and meat processing. Many are also employed in such industries as construction and public works, car and house wrecking, junk dealing and the like.17 Compared with the labor force in general, workers from buraku communities are more likely to be employed in small or very small businesses at low wages. Yet, a considerable improvement in work opportunities for young people is discernible, indicating that discriminatory practices in workplaces have gradually declined. However, discrimination against burakumin has been sustained in covert ways. Mainly in the early 1970s, it was revealed that some companies secretly purchased copies of clandestinely published documents which listed the locations of, and other data on, buraku communities. The companies engaged in such activities in an attempt to identify job applicants with a buraku background and to eliminate them at the recruitment stage. They were able to accomplish this by checking the lists against the permanent address that each job applicant entered on their koseki papers (see Chapter 7), which were normally required at the time of application. At least ten blacklists of buraku communities surfaced in the 1970s and 1980s. The condemnation of this practice by buraku liberation movements revealed the way in which the koseki system was used to discriminate against minority groups. The protest led to the establishment of a new procedure, requiring applicants to write only the prefecture of their

permanent address on application forms, so from that point address details have remained unknown to prospective employers. Nonetheless, there are instances of unidentified individuals taking advantage of the anonymity of cyberspace and uploading the locations of buraku communities to the internet and posting derogatory images and discriminatory language about them.18 The government introduced special antidiscrimination legislation in 1969 in an attempt to counter discrimination against buraku communities. The law (effective until 2002) ensured that the government provided financial support to projects that would improve the economic, housing, and educational conditions of burakumin. It also enabled burakumin to apply for special funds and loans to improve their houses, community roads, and business infrastructures, and to allow their children to advance beyond compulsory education. Buraku social movements have been militant in pressing their case for the eradication of prejudice and the institutionalization of equality. Their history dates from the establishment in 1922 of Suiheisha, the first national burakumin organization committed to their liberation. Because of its socialist and communist orientation and radical principles, Suiheisha was disbanded during World War II but was revived in postwar years and became Buraku Kaihō Dōmei (the Buraku Liberation League). The largest buraku organization, it took the most radical stance, adopting the strategy of publicly confronting and denouncing individuals and groups that promote discrimination either openly or covertly. This method, known as kyūdan (impeachment), was widely used until the end of the twentieth century and was often accompanied by the tactic of confining the accused in a room until they volunteered satisfactory selfcriticisms. While the practice received criticism from a range of activists and sympathizers and receded in the twenty-first century, the antidiscrimination campaign waged by buraku movements resulted in visible material improvements for buraku communities. With a shifting of emphasis, activists reviewed the impeachment measures that terrified some sections of the majority of Japanese and began to place emphasis on institutional solutions. They also started to promote broader issues of social justice and human rights in collaboration with minority groups with similar problems, including zainichi Koreans, Ainu, and those with physical disability. In 2016, the parliament passed the Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination, to make it a national imperative to root out prejudice against buraku. Though the law did not have penalty provisions, it declared that buraku discrimination should be eradicated on the basis of the principle of basic human rights guaranteed by the constitution. The Sayama case The buraku liberation movement has mounted a number of legal challenges. The best-known is the Sayama case, in which the Buraku Liberation League maintained that a buraku man who was sentenced to life imprisonment for having murdered a female high-school student in 1963 was framed by police and the prosecution, who were prejudiced against burakumin. The Sayama case is explored in the video Japan’s Pariah Descendants Fight Present-Day Discrimination, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=upE7BNG5N1w (FRANCE 24 English, 2 February 2017).

Defining who burakumin are is complicated. The common prejudice against them stems from a belief that they all live in particular, geographically confined communities. Another public belief is that during the feudal period their ancestors all engaged in acts of animal butchery, a type of work believed – due to the idea’s promotion by some Buddhist groups – to be filthy and profane.19 Furthermore, it is also widely believed that all burakumin, even today, work in particular industries inherited from the past: mainly the leather industry. The prejudice, then, contains three clear markers: residence, genealogy, and work.20 Table 8.3 lists five types of buraku communities and shows the diversity of their situations. First are the traditional communities with demarcated territories in which genealogically connected burakumin work in buraku-inherited industries. Although this prototype exists around the country, a majority of buraku communities today are of the second type, whose residents no longer engage in conventional buraku industries and whose occupational structure resembles that of Japanese society at large. Antidiscrimination movements are strong in these two types of communities, although government authorities and buraku activists disagree as to which localities constitute buraku communities. Furthermore, a significant number of other people settled in buraku communities after the Meiji Restoration, when the outcast system was officially abolished. Forming the third type, they have no blood links with those who lived in buraku areas during the feudal period, and few of them work in buraku-inherited industries. Also, a considerable number of burakumin have moved out of buraku areas to live in mainstream communities. The fourth type comprises those who still work in the conventional buraku enterprises, while those in the fifth type do not, often deliberately obscuring their identities. All of this suggests that burakumin status is diverse and problematic in itself.21 Table 8.3 Comparison of types of buraku communities Marker Type of community

Residence

Genealogy

Occupation

Traditional

Yes

Yes

Yes

Residential and genealogical

Yes

Yes

No

Residential

Yes

No

No

Occupational and genealogical

No

Yes

Yes

Dispersed

No

Yes

No

Source: Based on Noguchi 2000, pp. 106–17; adapted from Aoki 2009, p. 193.

V Zainichi Koreans Zainichi Koreans (a term used commonly to refer to Koreans resident in Japan) comprise Japan’s largest long-term minority group with foreign origin and live mainly in western Japan, especially in Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyōgo prefectures. According to Ministry of Justice figures, in 2018, zainichi Koreans numbered nearly 372,000. Of these, more than 90 percent held South Korean passports, and the remainder North Korean.22 If one included as zainichi Koreans those Koreans who have taken Japanese citizenship and their descendants, the number would be far larger, depending upon how many generations back one went. An overwhelming majority of zainichi Koreans are third-, fourth-, and even fifth-generation residents who do not have Japanese citizenship, because the Japanese Nationality Law stipulates that being born in Japan does not automatically make a person a Japanese citizen. However, these younger generations’ native language is Japanese. Given that citizenship is not the only criterion to determine one’s identity, who zainichi Koreans are is a contentious issue. Even after taking up Japanese citizenship, many define themselves as ‘Japanese nationals of Korean heritage’, regarding themselves as distinct from Japanese nationals of Japanese heritage. After the colonization of Korea in 1910, the Japanese establishment took Koreans to Japan as cheap labor in mining, construction, and shipbuilding. In 1945, some 2.3 million Koreans lived in Japan, and about 1.7 million, nearly three-quarters, returned home during the six months following the end of World War II. The remaining 600,000 chose to settle in Japan, realizing that they had lost contact with their connections in Korea and would have difficulty earning a livelihood there. Perceived as secondclass residents, Koreans in Japan have been subjected to discrimination in job recruitment, promotion, eligibility for pensions, and many other spheres of civil rights.23 Because the Korean Peninsula is divided into two nations, capitalist South and communist North, the Korean population in Japan is also split into two groups, one affiliated with the South-oriented organization Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) and the other with the North-oriented Chongryun (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan). Although an overwhelming majority are oriented to South Korea, increasing numbers have become noncommittal and seek to establish new identities as hybrid zainichi Koreans, not necessarily prioritizing their ancestral origins. Political conflicts on the Korean Peninsula are often translated into tensions in the Korean communities in Japan. During the Korean War, in the early 1950s, the two Korean organizations engaged in bitter confrontations at the community level. Throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, Japanese public opinion was also agitated by North Korea’s suspected nuclear development and missile launches over the Japanese archipelago, as well as the revelation that its secret agents had abducted Japanese nationals in the last quarter of the twentieth century, many of whom are still missing. Because of Chongryun loyalty to the North Korean government on these issues, the North-oriented Koreans have faced a community backlash. Meanwhile, however, they remain active in Korean ethnic education and manage dozens of full-time Korean ethnic schools across the country as well as one university in order to foster and maintain the Korean language and culture among young zainichi Koreans.

1 Nationality and name issues The complicated history of Koreans in Japan has compelled them to face citizenship issues throughout the courses of their lives. Japan’s Nationality Law reflects the image of a racially homogeneous society. The law adopts the personal (jus sanguinis) rather than the territorial (jus soli) principle of nationality, determining one’s nationality according to that of one’s parents rather than according to the nation of one’s birth. Foreign nationals’ children born in Japan do not automatically have Japanese citizenship, while children with one parent who is a Japanese national become Japanese citizens at birth regardless of where they are born. Therefore, children of Koreans born and resident in Japan can become Japanese citizens only through applying for, and being approved by the Ministry of Justice for, naturalization. The Nationality Law requires that applicants should be persons of ‘good conduct’, an ambiguous phrase which permits the authorities to use their discretion in rejecting applications. From the Korean perspective, the Japanese government’s position on the Korean nationality question has been inconsistent. During the colonial period, Koreans were made Japanese nationals, although a separate law regulated their family registration system.24 Accordingly, male Koreans had the right to vote and to be elected to national and local legislatures; some were in fact elected as national parliamentarians and city legislators. However, with the independence of South Korea and North Korea and the enactment of a fresh election law immediately after the end of World War II, zainichi Koreans were deprived of voting rights. On 2 May 1947, one day before the promulgation of the new postwar constitution, the Japanese government put into effect the Alien Registration Ordinance, which virtually targeted Koreans in Japan, classified them as foreigners, and made them register as alien residents. Following the outbreak of the Korean War and the intensification of the Cold War in eastern Asia, the Japanese authorities hardened their attitude towards Koreans in Japan and in 1952, upon the termination of the Allied occupation of Japan and the advent of independence, enacted the Alien Registration Law, which was effective until 2012. With the passage of time, a growing number of zainichi Koreans have chosen to take up Japanese citizenship. During the two decades from the mid-1990s, approximately one-third of zainichi Koreans became naturalized.25 In the peak years, from 1996 to 2005, more than 9,000 per year forfeited Korean citizenship.26 While the decision to change nationality is made for complex and mixed reasons, the newly naturalized increasingly cherish the notion that they should now live as Korean Japanese, not as Koreans living in Japan, and share the same obligations and rights with Japanese citizens.27 Although pragmatic and realistic in many respects, this position encounters criticism from some within the zainichi Korean community as being expedient and assimilationist. However, it might represent a future trend as fifth- and sixth-generation zainichi Koreans who have little knowledge about Korean culture and language come to the fore. Housing discrimination against zainichi Koreans is often surreptitious, although some owners of flats and apartments openly require occupants to be Japanese nationals.28 Also, some real estate agents make it a condition for applicants to submit copies of their koseki papers and resident cards for identification purposes, a shrewd attempt to exclude non-Japanese, because foreign residents do not have koseki and their resident cards show their nationality.

Another contentious issue is the names that naturalized Koreans may assume. The Japanese government long took the position that foreigners must officially assume Japanese-sounding names as a condition of naturalization. Those Koreans who acquired Japanese citizenship had to give up such Korean names as Kim, Lee, and Park for names that sounded more Japanese, such as Arai, Yamamoto and Kanemoto. Although this requirement was abolished in 2012, the name issue is particularly sensitive among Koreans in Japan because Koreans were forced to assume Japanese surnames and to officially register them with government offices during the Japanese colonial period in Korea. The program, known as sōshi kaimei (creation and revision of names), which reflected the Japanese method of total psychological control, humiliated Koreans. Yet, most zainichi Koreans now use Japanese names, either always or usually in their daily lives, with only a small minority, less than a quarter, using their Korean names in most circumstances.29 Many switch between Korean and Japanese names, depending on the situation. Overall, Japanization appears to be an inevitable trend in this regard.

2 Generational change and internal diversity Within the zainichi Korean community, a generation gap is discernible. The first generation, a numerical minority that nevertheless retains considerable influence over Korean organizations in Japan, remains committed and loyal to the home country and government, with some hoping to eventually return home. Second- and third-generation Koreans born and raised in Japan have little interest in living in Korea but feel ambivalent towards both Korean and Japanese societies. Many had to struggle to learn Korean as a second language in the Japanese environment. An overwhelming majority have studied in Japanese educational institutions, have only limited knowledge of Korean society and history, and enjoy Japanese popular culture as much as the Japanese. Some have experienced the trauma of discovering their real Korean name only in their adolescence, because their parents used a Japanese name to hide their ethnic origin. On the whole, the younger generations are committed permanent residents, with interests in Japan, who increasingly put priority on the expansion of their legal, political, and social rights within Japan. Despite changing attitudes, marriage between zainichi Koreans and Japanese is a sensitive issue. Many first- and second-generation zainichi Koreans who retained memories of Japan’s colonial past and its direct aftermath felt that marrying Japanese was a kind of betrayal of Korean compatriots. Over time, however, the proportion of intraethnic marriages between zainichi Koreans has declined. Since the mid1970s, zainichi Koreans who married Japanese have outnumbered those who married Koreans.30 Young zainichi Koreans do not accept the older generations’ argument that zainichi Koreans should marry only Koreans, to maintain their ethnic consciousness and identity. Incapable of speaking Korean and brought up in Japanese styles of life, young zainichi Koreans find it both realistic and desirable to find partners without taking nationality into consideration: in contemporary Japan, most zainichi Koreans marry Japanese nationals.31 These trends are indicative of the gradual decline in prejudice against zainichi Koreans, naturalized or otherwise, among Japanese nationals. Overall, the shape of the Korean issue in Japanese society has altered with the passage of time since the end of Japan’s colonization of Korea, in 1945. An overwhelming majority of contemporary zainichi Koreans speak Japanese as their first language and intend to live in Japan permanently. With an increase in interethnic marriages with Japanese, many Korean Japanese are reluctant to take a confrontationist stance and are eager to establish an internationalist identity and outlook, taking advantage of their dual perspective.32 Against this background, zainichi Koreans have become divided about the extent to which they should remember and attach importance to the history of Japan’s colonization and exploitation, and the degree to which they are attached to Japanese society as the environment in which they have grown up. Combining these two factors, Fukuoka constructs a model of four types of zainichi Koreans, as shown in Table 8.4.33 At the practical level, they differ in terms of the language they use in everyday life, and whether they use a Korean or Japanese name. Table 8.4 Comparison of identity orientations of zainichi Korean youth Attachment to Japanese society

Attachment to Japan’s colonial history

Attachment to Japanese society

Strong

Attachment to Japan’s Weak colonial history

Strong

Weak

Weak

Fatherland Koreans who happen to be in Japan Bilingual Korean name

Individualistic Seek self-actualization privately Mostly speak Japanese; eager to learn English Not concerned about the name issue

Strong

Multicultural Want to find ways of cohabiting with Japanese Speak primarily Japanese Korean name

Assimilation Want to be Japanese Speak Japanese only Japanese name

Source: Adapted from Fukuoka 2000, p. 49. (a) Fatherland orientation Zainichi Koreans with a fatherland orientation have a strong sense of loyalty to their home country and define themselves as victims of Japan’s annexation of Korea; they reject any form of assimilation into Japanese society. They are cautious about the multiculturalist group activists’ demands for voting rights for zainichi Koreans and other non-Japanese in Japan, which they tend to regard as assimilationist. Many Koreans of this orientation are educated in Korean ethnic schools and become bilingual. Taking pride in being Korean and using Korean names, many hold membership in the North-oriented Chongryun. The old generation’s members of the South-oriented Mindan also tend to fall into this category. Sharply critical of Japanese discrimination against Koreans and primarily reliant upon zainichi Korean business networks, they tend to form closed zainichi Korean communities, have close friends only among zainichi Koreans, and see themselves as foreigners in Japan. (b) Individualistic orientation In contrast, zainichi Koreans with an individualistic orientation neither take much notice of the past relationship between Korea and Japan nor have strong attachment to Japanese society. They seek to advance their careers in individualistic ways without depending on organizational support. Cosmopolitan, achievement-oriented, and confident of their ability, they are interested in acquiring upward social mobility by going to top Japanese universities or studying in the United States or Europe. Most of them are not concerned about the name issue, use Japanese in most situations, and are eager to learn English as the language of international communication. (c) Multicultural orientation

The multicultural orientation represents zainichi Koreans who are critical of the legacy of Japan’s attitude to Korea, have a strong Korean identity, and use Korean names. However, unlike those with a fatherland orientation, they regard Japanese society as their home base and establish a multicultural lifestyle in which they live with Japanese without losing their sense of Korean autonomy and individuality. Many have previously used Japanese names to hide their Korean identities but have become conscious and proud of their ethnic duality while taking part in antidiscrimination movements with Japanese citizens. They attend Japanese schools, and most of them consider Japanese their first language, but some study the Korean language on their own initiative. These zainichi Koreans are politically conscious and reform oriented while having a deep attachment to the Japanese local community in which they were brought up. Activists with this orientation work closely with Japanese groups to press for equal rights for zainichi Koreans and other foreign nationals in Japan. (d) Assimilation orientation Assimilationist zainichi Koreans’ first priority is becoming Japanese in every way. Brought up in a predominantly Japanese environment, they are totally Japanese, culturally and linguistically, and believe that what was done cannot be undone with regard to Japan’s past colonial policy. Many attempt to remove their Korean characteristics, adapt themselves fully to Japanese society, and thereby seek to be accepted by the Japanese. Most become naturalized Japanese nationals.

Thus, zainichi Koreans are neither monolithic nor internally uniform. They vary in terms of their sense of discrimination, alienation, and inequality, depending on their demographic status and the circumstances they encounter.34

3 Advancement and backlash Ethnic minority groups do not necessarily lack economic resources, nor do they always fall behind mainstream groups in educational and occupational accomplishments. A comparative analysis of the 1995 SSM data and the data on zainichi South Koreans gathered in 1995 and 1996 casts doubt on stereotypical images of zainichi Koreans as being relatively poor and uneducated (see Table 8.5).35 At the end of the twentieth century, Japanese Koreans enjoyed higher levels of income than Japanese nationals and, as such, no longer formed an economic minority. Neither their overall educational level nor their average occupational prestige score differed significantly from that of Japanese nationals. This pattern had hardly changed early in the 2010s, according to a 2013 survey.36 It is noteworthy, though, that zainichi Koreans are predominantly self-employed small-business owners, as shown in Table 8.5, a fact which suggests that they continue to face employment and promotional discrimination in larger Japanese-owned corporations and enterprises. As independent businesspeople, many zainichi Koreans manage yakiniku (Korean-style grilled meat) restaurants and pachinko parlors and run small financial or construction-related enterprises. With the avenues of upward social mobility obstructed in large institutions, most zainichi Koreans rely on kinship networks within the zainichi Korean community in order to find work or establish their businesses. These informal webs of personal and ethnic connections have proven to be valuable social resources, given that the meritocratic route to class betterment in broader Japanese society tends to remain largely unavailable to them. Table 8.5 Distribution of class positions of Japanese nationals and of zainichi Koreans, 1995 Japanese nationalsa

Zainichi Koreansb

Educational attainment (years of schooling)

12.35

12.01

Occupational prestige scored

47.32

48.02

Annual personal income (¥ ’0,000)

494.23

531.84

Upper white-collar

22.4

14.2

Lower white-collar

20.2

12.4

Self-employed (jieigyō)

23.2

52.1

Blue-collar

28.3

21.0

Agricultural

5.9

0.3

Class position Class indicatorsc

Occupational classification (%)

Source: Adapted from Kim and Inazuki 2000, p. 189. Notes: Japanese majority: n = 1,092; zainichi Koreans: n = 676.

a

Includes only male respondents.

b

Excludes women, North Korean nationals, and Koreans who have naturalized as Japanese.

c

The figures for class indicators are averages.

d

Based on SSM 1995a. Over time, the Japanese authorities have taken a conciliatory position, with local governments in

particular assuming generally sympathetic stances towards zainichi Korean communities. In response to zainichi Koreans’ appeals, the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that the constitution does not prohibit permanent residents without Japanese citizenship from having voting rights in local elections. Although many municipalities decided to grant these rights to non-Japanese permanent residents at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a large number of prefectures passed resolutions in the opposite direction chiefly in response to community backlash. Reform-minded Japanese are vocal in their claim that Japan cannot be an internationalized society without cultivating genuine openness and tolerance towards the nation’s largest long-term ethnic minority. In the meantime, the political and economic advancement of zainichi Koreans irritated ultranationalist elements in the 2010s. The group called Zaitoku-kai, an association which challenges what it regards as the excessive privileges given to zainichi Koreans, frequently waged noisy demonstrations on the streets of Tokyo and other major cities, chanting abusive, xenophobic, and chauvinistic language against zainichi Koreans and other minorities. This group, though small in number, attracts mainly young and marginalized men who attribute their plight to the improvement of the situation of zainichi Koreans.37 Although there was mounting concern about the open and public hate speech of Zaitoku-kai, its vocal and noisy presence was testimony to the fact that the deep-rooted antiKorean discriminatory reality has not been wiped out of Japanese society.

VI Immigrant workers The number of foreigners resident in Japan increased dramatically in the 1980s and early 1990s. An influx of workers from the Philippines, China, Brazil, Peru, Thailand, and other developing countries boosted the total number to over 1.46 million in 2018,38 tripling in the decade from 2008. The figure excludes long-term Korean and Chinese residents, the so-called oldcomers, descendants of those who traveled to Japan during the Japanese colonization period in the first half of the twentieth century, as discussed above. In addition, in 2018, there were over 66,000 undocumented foreign residents, whose overwhelming majority are believed to be working in the margins of the Japanese economy.39 This situation has produced a significant diversification in the composition of the foreign population, with new immigrants forming another large minority group in Japan. Numerically, the largest foreign population in 2018 was Chinese, followed by Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Brazilians.40 The national background of foreigners in the workforce correlates with their occupational status.41 A majority of foreigners are employed in factory assembly lines, construction sites, wholesale and retail stores, restaurants, convenience shops, medical and nursing-care facilities, and accommodations. Most foreign workers in these industrial and service sectors are Latin American or Asian. A small number work as professional or technical workers, many of whom are North American or British. The unprecedented flow of foreign workers into Japan developed from the situations in both the domestic and the foreign labor markets. Pull factors within Japan included the aging of the Japanese workforce and the accompanying shortage of labor in unskilled, manual, and physically demanding areas. In addition, the changing work ethic of Japanese youth made it difficult for employers to recruit them for this type of work, which is described in terms of the three undesirable Ks (or Ds in English): kitanai (dirty), kitsui (difficult), and kiken (dangerous). Under these circumstances, a number of employers found illegal migrants, in particular from Asia, a remedy for their labor shortage. Push factors included the strong Japanese yen, which is attractive to foreign workers who wish to save money in Japan, in the hope of establishing good lives in their home countries after working hard for a few years. A majority of foreign workers in Japan became a part of the nation’s labor force after initially arriving as nonworkers. Overseas citizens of Japanese ancestry, relatives of Japanese nationals, foreign students, and technical trainees who traveled to Japan officially for nonwork purposes, ended up joining the workforce to relieve the labor shortage, a pattern which characterizes Japanese labor immigration. Towards the end of the 2010s, these side-door entrants constituted more than 80 percent of Japan’s foreign-worker market.42 The long-term labor shortage is so serious that the Japanese economy cannot function without the labor force participation of foreigners. To deal with the subsequent traffic of migrant workers, complex webs of brokers, service contractors, and travel agencies have proliferated in both Japan and workers’ home countries and have developed into solid institutional structures for international migration.43 Three categories of foreign workers in Japan play key roles. The first is made up of the descendants of overseas Japanese. In 1990, the Ministry of Justice instituted special treatment for this

group, allowing second- and third-generation Japanese from foreign countries to work as residents in Japan, regardless of skill level. Consequently, the number of young Japanese Brazilians, for instance, increased drastically in Aichi, Kanagawa, and Shizuoka prefectures, where the car plants of Toyota, Nissan, Suzuki, and Honda operate. The preferential treatment of Japanese offspring was arguably attributable to the Japanese authorities’ ethnocentric belief that those of Japanese extraction are more dependable, trustworthy, and earnest than other foreigners. Though this arrangement was revised after the economic downturn in 2008, persons of Japanese descent are still allowed to work in Japan because of their special ‘civil status’. In the 2010s, the Japanese authorities expanded the civil-status category and accepted professional and technical experts as well as specialists in humanities and international services from any ethnic or country background, awarding visas without restrictions for the period of employment and practically paving the way for the expansion of long-term foreign workers. Technical interns and trainees form the second group. In 1993, the Technical Intern Training Program was established with Japanese firms to provide foreign workers with residence permits, train them in techniques and skills, and give them experience which they would use in their home countries. For many small firms suffering labor shortages, the trainee program serves as a practical way of recruiting cheap labor because of ambiguities regarding the distinction between real training and disguised labor. The third category comprises foreign students who travel to Japan to study at universities and colleges. To make a living, most of them engage in part-time and casual work, legally or illegally, establishing themselves as essential participants in the Japanese economy. Two stances compete regarding the ways in which Japan should accept non-Japanese as part of the nation. One position contends that the country should admit only skilled workers, already well educated and well trained in their home countries. Underlying this argument is the obvious concern that unskilled workers will lower the standard of Japan’s workforce, and that the nation will have to bear the cost of their training and acquisition of skills. There is also a tacit fear that, uneducated and undisciplined, they may ‘contaminate’ Japanese society, leading to its destabilization and disintegration. The opposing position argues for the acceptance of unskilled workers and is based partly on the pragmatic consideration that the Japanese economy simply cannot survive without unskilled foreign workers filling the lowest segment of the nation’s labor force. The pro-acceptance position also maintains that how Japan addresses its minority issues will perhaps prove the most critical test of its globalization; the nation can hardly claim to have a cosmopolitan orientation while it fails to accept ethnic and racial diversity within. The overwhelming majority of employers who hire foreign workers are themselves either on the bottom rung of the subcontracting ladder in construction and manufacturing or in the most financially unstable sectors of the service industry. These employers generally manage very small businesses which involve late-night or early-morning work and which must weather economic fluctuations at the lowest level of the occupational hierarchy. Male immigrants who work as construction laborers usually perform heavy work at construction sites. Most of those who are employed in manufacturing work in metal fabrication, operate presses and stamping machinery, make car parts, or work for printers and binders. In the service sector, migrant workers are employed in restaurants and other establishments to

do much of the unwanted work. Many female foreign workers are in demand for care facilities for the elderly, nursing homes, and hospitals. Without Japanese-language skills and knowledge of Japanese culture, these new immigrants form the most marginalized cluster within the marginalized population in Japan. Exploitation of foreign workers The labor conditions of foreign workers came under criticism when some claimed they had been exploited due to lengthy working hours and limited worker rights. Many trainees traveled to Japan from abroad under the paid Technical Intern Training Program in operation for three decades. It is officially supposed to enable interns from overseas to learn particular skills and techniques that they can use in their countries upon returning home. However, they are often hired as immediately useful employees and laborers under deplorable conditions. These videos explore the issue: Migrant Workers ‘Exploited’ in Japan, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPcaIL8PFJ4 (BBC News, 27 August 2019), and Used and Abused: Japan’s Foreign Trainees, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfRSoyBXth8 (FRANCE 24 English, 9 June 2017).

In addition to these unskilled workers, Japanese society requires highly skilled professionals at the top of the occupational pyramid. The nation’s information technology industry, for instance, competes globally with its counterparts in postindustrial economies to recruit exceptionally qualified individuals from around the world to develop cutting-edge products and to facilitate international business. Wellpaid managerial and professional expatriates abound in prestigious quarters in Tokyo, which is dotted with expensive condominiums. Educational institutions are under pressure to acquire English-language teachers and academics who can teach in English. These trends are unlikely to abate, although elaborate bureaucratic systems, competing vested interests, and tenacious nationalist ideology decelerate the process of acceptance of foreigners into Japanese society even at this level. Undocumented foreign workers face numerous institutional and cultural barriers.44 They are not entitled to enroll in the National Health Insurance scheme and are therefore required to pay the full costs of medical treatment. In cases of work-related accidents, they can file applications for the Workers’ Accident Compensation Insurance, but in doing so they risk being reported to authorities and sent back to their countries of origin. Schools in which the children of migrant workers enroll face the challenge of teaching Japanese to them with sensitivity to their linguistic backgrounds. The longer undocumented foreign families reside in Japan, the more firmly and extensively their children develop their networks of friends. Many acquire Japanese as their first language and cannot develop fluency in their parents’ mother tongue. These families encounter a situation in which both staying and leaving present cultural and linguistic dilemmas. Grassroots community attitudes to foreign residents in Japan are diverse.45 Research has shown that blue-collar workers and low-income earners tend to believe that Japanese society should remain monocultural and that neither race-based nor nationality-based inequality exists in Japan. In contrast, multiculturalists who feel that Japan should accept foreign residents and believe that ethnic inequality is

prevalent in Japan are well educated and are white-collar workers who occupy relatively high socioeconomic positions in Japanese society. They take an open-minded, egalitarian, and progressive stance, while enjoying a comfortable standing as the victors of status competition.46 In a bid to alleviate the labor shortage and to bring in more than 345,000 workers over the subsequent five years, the Immigration Control Law was revised in 2019, dividing incoming foreign workers with work visas into two tiers. Workers in the first group, with low-level skills, are allowed to stay in Japan for a maximum period of five years and cannot be accompanied by their family members. Those in second group can stay indefinitely and bring their family; they are required to have a higher skill level and a better command of Japanese than people in the first group. The move offered a temporary and compromise solution primarily to the demand for relatively unskilled laborers, the first-tier group, while stifling and minimizing their long-term migration and eventual settlement opportunities. Japan’s policymakers are reluctant to open the gate to this cohort and thus prohibit workers at this level from bringing family members with them, while allowing the relatively skilled workers at the second tier to do so. This is a contradictory measure which invites in low-skilled workers while erecting roadblocks to prevent their permanent settlement. Nonetheless, it is almost inevitable that the number of foreign workers at the first-tier level will increase, because of company demands for them, the rapid aging of Japanese society, the growing number of international marriages, and other demographic and population pressures. Soon, it will perhaps be unavoidable for Japanese leaders to establish institutions, facilities, and legal frameworks that welcome these workers and enable them to settle stably for the long term. Bit by bit, Japanese society is shaping up as an immigration society.

VII Deconstructing the Japanese These minority groups – the Ainu, burakumin, zainichi Koreans, and foreign workers – bring to the fore the fundamental question of who the Nihonjin really are. As Table 8.6 indicates, one may consider at least seven aspects of Japaneseness: nationality, ethnic lineage, language competence, place of birth, current residence, level of cultural literacy, and subjective identity. Each aspect is in some respect problematic. For example, the exact position of the conceptual boundary of the Japanese race remains undecided, though the table relies on the conventional racial classification. Language fluency is also a variable; here, it is defined as native or near-native competency in Japanese. Despite these limitations, the main objective of the table is to show that there are several measures of Japaneseness and multiple kinds of Japanese. In considering the presence or absence of these attributes, one can analytically classify the Japanese into numerous types. Table 8.6 Comparison of Japaneseness markers

Specific examples

Japanese citizenship

‘Pure Japanese genes’

Japaneselanguage competence

Japan as place of birth

Most Japanese in Japan

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

?

?

Zainichi Koreans (not naturalized) in Japan

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

?

?

Japanese businessmen posted overseas

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

?

?

Naturalized foreigners in Japan

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

?

?

First generation overseas who forfeited Japanese citizenship

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

?

?

Current residence in Japan

Level of Japanese cultural literacy

Subjective Japanese identity

Japaneselanguage competence

Japan as place of birth

Current residence in Japan

Level of Japanese cultural literacy

Subjective Japanese identity

Specific examples

Japanese citizenship

‘Pure Japanese genes’

Children of Japanese overseas settlers

Yes / no

Yes

Yes / no

Yes / no

No

?

?

Most immigrant workers in Japan

No

No

Yes / no

No

Yes

?

?

Thirdgeneration Japanese Brazilians working in Japan

No

Yes / no

Yes / no

No

Yes

?

?

Most returnee children in Japan

Yes

Yes

Yes / no

Yes

Yes

?

?

Most children of overseas settlers

Yes

Yes

Yes / no

No

No

?

?

Children of interethnic marriages in Japan

Yes

No

Yes

Yes / no

Yes

?

?

Thirdgeneration overseas Japanese who cannot speak Japanese

No

Yes

No

No

No

?

?

Japaneselanguage competence

Japan as place of birth

Current residence in Japan

Level of Japanese cultural literacy

Subjective Japanese identity

Specific examples

Japanese citizenship

‘Pure Japanese genes’

Naturalized foreigners born in Japan but now in their parents’ home country

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

?

?

Most foreign Japan specialists

No

No

Yes

No

No

?

?

Source: Expanded from Fukuoka 2000, p. xxx; Mouer and Sugimoto 1995, p. 246. Notes: Question marks in the two far-right columns indicate the ambiguity of the notions of cultural literacy and subjective identity; subjective identity varies individually. Who has the right to decide who the Japanese are? In principle, the Japanese Nationality Law (Section 14) does not recognize dual citizenship. If the issue of who the Japanese are is decided not solely on the basis of citizenship – on which bureaucrats make decisions – a number of questions arise.47 The distinction made for Korean Japanese, who differ only in terms of citizenship, seems in many cases to be rather artificial. And should naturalized sumo wrestlers, who have acquired Japanese passports, be considered more Japanese than expatriate Japanese who have forfeited Japanese citizenship? What about two Japanese who work in similar situations overseas and who consider themselves Japanese, although one retains their citizenship while the other takes up citizenship of the country in which they reside? Or Japanese-born children growing up abroad for whom a language other than Japanese is considered their first language? And what about Japanese Brazilians who have moved to live in Japan? The notions of biological pedigree and pure Japanese genes are widespread but controversial and questionable. Especially important is the ill-defined criterion labeled ‘Japanese cultural literacy’. A person’s level of cultural literacy differs greatly according to the particular Japanese culture being considered. For instance, many foreign workers in Japan lack polite Japanese language and know nothing about the tea ceremony but are probably more knowledgeable than middle-class housewives about the culture of subcontracting firms in the construction industry. Some returnee schoolchildren from overseas may not be fluent in Japanese but may be more perceptive than their teachers about the culture of Japanese education observed from a comparative perspective.

Three ‘non-Japanese’ Japanese Ms Akwi Park, aged twenty-eight, was born and raised in Osaka as a fourth-generation zainichi Korean. Her great-grandparents moved to Fukuoka during Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula. She studied at Japanese schools in Osaka, obtained a degree from a university in Kobe and now works for her parents’ family business in the outskirts of Osaka. Her native language is Japanese and she can barely speak Korean. Strangers would hardly recognize her as non-Japanese, though she holds a South Korean passport and has resisted taking Japanese citizenship mainly because of her commitment to what she regards as the zainichi identity. Unsurprisingly, she speaks the Osaka dialect perfectly and has a thorough knowledge of Japanese culture, from manga and anime to rules of communication, better than most of her Japanese friends. Ms Isabella Tanaka, aged thirty-nine, a Brazilian of Japanese descent, moved to Japan more than a decade ago with her family, when her Japanese Brazilian husband acquired a stable job as an assembly line worker in an auto plant near Nagoya. She and her family obtained Japanese citizenship. Her Japanese-language competence and her general knowledge about Japan are limited. However, since she looks Japanese to many, those who do not know her well often speak to her in Japanese. Though sometimes feeling homesick, she and her husband intend to keep living in Japan, because their children have grown up in Japan and are well versed in Japanese language and culture and know little about Brazil. Mr Haruo Honda, aged fifty-five, was born and raised in Hiroshima, graduated from a university in Osaka, worked in Yokohama for six years, and married a Japanese woman. He moved with his wife to the United Kingdom at the age of twenty-nine and then migrated to Australia. After he secured a good job, they decided to raise their two children there. They acquired Australian citizenship for instrumental reasons but at the same time forfeited their Japanese citizenship, because the Japanese law does not allow dual citizenship. They often travel to Japan on Australian passports and go through the foreigners’ section of the passport checkpoint at the airport. During their stay in Japan, he catches up with relatives and school friends and dines and wines with them, speaking in Japanese, of course. At department stores, shopping assistants take it for granted that he is Japanese. Who is most Japanese among the three, and on what basis?

There are different interpretations of the markers which distinguish Japanese from other peoples, ranging from exclusionist, defining as Japanese only those who satisfy all seven criteria in Table 8.6, to inclusionist, regarding those who satisfy at least one criterion as Japanese. There are also many middleground positions between these two extremes. Figure 8.2 presents the expansion and contraction of the definition of ‘the Japanese’ in a pyramid form. Climbing the pyramid (A) represents rigorous and restrictive application of all the criteria in Table 8.6, making each a necessary condition for being ‘pure Japanese’. The higher the ascent, the smaller the number of those who qualify as Japanese. The population increases through monocultural

assimilation: cultural homogeneity is demanded. In contrast, descending the pyramid (B) represents requiring fewer criteria as sufficient for being ‘multicultural Japanese’. The lower the descent, the larger the number of people defined as ‘Japanese’: the term becomes inclusive and multicultural, allowing for the coexistence of many ethnic subcultures. The population increases through a process of multicultural acceptance.

Figure 8.2 Pyramid showing definitions of ‘the Japanese’ Notes: The bold line indicates the Japanese state barrier. Citizenship is the most significant factor that determines who is above or below the line. See Mouer and Sugimoto 1995, p. 244, for a presentation of a similar idea. A B

Zealous application of all criteria in Table 8.6 as necessary conditions for being ‘pure Japanese’. Requirement of fewer criteria in Table 8.6 as sufficient conditions for being ‘multicultural Japanese’. Research conducted by Shunsuke Tanabe based on a national random sample collected in 2003

appears to suggest that contemporary Japanese deem self-definition the most important criterion for determining who is Japanese, as Table 8.7 shows.48 Citizenship ranks second, followed by language competence. The racial dimension (labeled ‘pedigree’ in the table) is given quite low significance in comparison with other criteria. Table 8.7 ‘How important are certain criteria for determining “Japaneseness”?’ Survey responses (%), 2003 Response Criterion

Important

Unimportant

Self-definition

84.8

12.4

Citizenship (kokuseki)

84.5

13.3

Language competence

76.4

21.4

Place of birth

74.4

23.2

Length of residence

71.3

25.9

Pedigree (kettō)

69.7

27.4

Response Criterion

Important

Unimportant

Adherence to the laws

61.4

31.0

Religion

23.1

69.1

Source: Adapted from Tanabe 2012, p. 267. Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who identified each criterion as ‘important’ or ‘unimportant’. ‘No response’ answers were permitted; therefore, the total for each criterion does not equal 100 percent. Tanabe also examines the distribution of national identities among the population. He classifies all respondents in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive in defining who the Japanese are, proud of Japanese culture, proud of Japan politically, and prone to accept foreigners into Japan. Table 8.8 compares these four national identities with respect to their defining characteristics. Table 8.8 Comparison of types of national identities, 2003 National identity Characteristic

Inclusionist

Culturalist

Patriot

Nativist

Definition of ‘Japaneseness’

Highly inclusive

Inclusive

Highly exclusive

Exclusive

Political pride

Very low

Low

Very high

Very low

Cultural pride

Very low

High

Very high

Low

Anti-immigration

Very low

Low

High

Very high

Average age (years)

41.6

42.0

57.6

57.4

Educational level

High

High

Low

Low

% of population

15.2

28.1

31.5

25.1

Source: Adapted from Tanabe 2012, p. 276. The first national identity comprises those inclusive in defining ‘Japaneseness’ who are internationally oriented and highly open to and accepting of foreigners. They have lower levels of political and cultural pride in comparison with those with other national identities. The second resembles the first, except that its members have a high degree of pride in Japanese culture and could also be labeled ‘traditionalists’. People with these two national identities are relatively young and well educated. The third national identity is made up of fervent nationalists who are infused with national pride and hold exclusive orientations towards non-Japanese. The fourth is similar to the third in its strict definition of ‘the Japanese’ and is closed to receiving foreigners into Japan. Its members are generally xenophobic.

They are not as confident in Japan’s politics or culture as those with the third national identity. People with these two national identities are relatively old and less educated. Tanabe’s observations reveal diverse national identities in the Japanese populace and, in particular, cast doubt over the claim of alleged conservative tendencies among Japanese youth, as discussed in Chapter 4. In fact, it appears that older people are more entrenched in ethnocentric orientations. More broadly, larger questions, regarding who controls the criteria and the right to define ‘the Japanese’, frame the debate about minority and ethnicity issues in Japan.

VIII Problems and pitfalls The notion of internationalization propels some segments of the Japanese population towards more open, universalistic, and global orientations. A considerable number of citizens’ groups devote themselves to assisting and protecting foreign residents in Japan. Across the country many individuals of various ages attend study sessions on Japan’s ethnic issues, perform voluntary work in support of workers from overseas, and participate in political rallies for the human rights of minority groups. With the domestic realignment of labor union organizations, minority movements too have shifted their ideological framework away from the orthodox model of class struggle in which links with the working class were given prime importance. Instead, minority group activists have moved towards international cooperation with ethnic and other minority groups abroad. There is perhaps much truth in minority groups’ claims that their problems are the product of distortion and prejudice on the part of a majority of Japanese. Until 1995 Japan was among the few nations which had not ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, brought into effect by the United Nations in 1969. Even after the ratification, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not consider discrimination against burakumin as an area covered by the convention, on the grounds that it is not a racial issue. Challenging this view, buraku liberation movements argue that their minority status derives from community prejudice based upon lineage or pedigree, precisely the realm of discrimination which the convention attempts to eliminate. Japan’s peculiarity perhaps lies not in its freedom from minority problems but in its lack of recognition of and admission that it has such problems. At the same time, minority groups face an awkward dilemma in defending their culture. On the one hand, they take it for granted that they have every right to maintain and advocate their practices and values to challenge the assimilationist ideas of the mainstream majority à la Nihonjinron. This is why Ainu groups, for example, vigorously protest whenever leading Japanese politicians commit gaffes by claiming that Japan is a mono-ethnic and monocultural society. On the other hand, if one accepts the blurring boundaries of each minority group and its internal variations, one would have to avoid the pitfall of stereotyping it. When one says, for example, that zainichi Koreans are entitled to uphold and expound Korean culture, one must ask, which Korean culture? Given that it is diverse, dynamic, and multiple, its substance would differ depending upon class, region, gender, and other factors. In advancing the idea of a singular Korean culture, one would be formulating Kankokujinron (theories of Koreanness) concentric to Nihonjinron. To the extent that other minority groups – be they burakumin or Ainu – are internally variegated, they cannot avoid the same trap if they advance the illusion of their singularity, uniformity, and homogeneity. In addition to the minorities that this chapter has detailed, Japan has a number of other marginalized groups, including people who are gender and sexually diverse (see Chapter 7), people with physical disability or mental illness, and people experiencing homelessness. As one example, the sufferers of Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, have long been stigmatized due to the unfounded community belief that it is untreatable, highly contagious, and transmitted from one generation to another. The state

coercively isolated sufferers in facilities cut off from the outside world for decades, a policy which continued until the end of the last century. Not only the patients but also their families were subjected to prejudice in schooling, employment, and marriage.49 The government formally apologized to them in 2019 for its long-term wrongdoings and promised them compensation.50 One can be multiply disadvantaged, because diverse types of prejudice and discrimination – including those based on gender, sexuality, educational background, work, and so on – crisscross in reality. Female foreign workers may be triply handicapped due to their gender, race, and nationality. Women experiencing homelessness are doubly marginalized,51 as were zainichi Korean sufferers of Hansen’s disease.52 Gay and lesbian residents in buraku communities also fall into this category. On the other hand, anti-prejudice advocates are not necessarily discrimination free on all fronts. Male zainichi Koreans may be dominant at home. Well-educated male professionals could be misogynists. Female liberation activists might harbor prejudice towards foreign workers. In complex ways, therefore, the axes of minority–majority relations intersect, leaving no room for complacency. Multifaceted intersectionality will perhaps be on the agenda for Japanese studies in future.

IX Japan beyond Japan The globalization of Japanese society has produced considerable numbers of three types of Japanese who live beyond Japan’s national boundary. The total number of Japanese nationals living overseas was approximately 1.35 million in 2017.53 The first of these types is Japanese businesspeople and their families who are stationed abroad to manage company business under the direction of corporate headquarters in Japan. With ample financial backing from their head offices, these Japanese nationals enjoy lavish lifestyles whose standards are far above those of the middle class of their country of residence. In most cases, they live in residences larger than their houses in Japan and relish the good living which the strong yen allows them. Since their lives are tied to Japanese corporate and state interests, their notion of internationalization is often coupled with a concern for maintaining smooth business relations with foreign countries and foreign nationals, to conduct peaceful diplomatic negotiations, and to present favorable images of Japanese society abroad. To that extent, the tatemae (façade) of internationalization advocated by these overseas business representatives is tinged with the honne (true feelings) of nationalism. The second type comprises Japanese citizens who choose of their own volition to live overseas semipermanently. Many are ‘cultural refugees from Japan’ who have expatriated themselves from the corporate world, the education system, or the community structure of Japanese society.54 These people differ from previous Japanese emigrants who fled economic hardship. New emigrants attempt to establish themselves abroad to escape what they regard as Japan’s rigid social system. They find satisfaction in living beyond the confines of the uchi (interior) world of Japan and interacting with the soto (exterior) world in a liberated fashion. By and large, the new ‘lifestyle emigrants’ intend to stay in the country of their choice for a reasonably long period, although they may not plan to settle there permanently.55 They have one foot outside and the other inside Japan and endeavor to find some balance between the two worlds. To that extent they live cross-culturally. Some go so far as to savor the pleasure of cultural schizophrenia. Others choose to forfeit Japanese citizenship and become nonJapanese nationals, although their numbers are exceptionally small. In Australia, a most popular destination of such lifestyle migrants, the citizenship acquisition rate of the Japanese is one of the lowest of all migrant groups.56 The strong loyalty of the Japanese to their nationhood and the notion of ‘we Japanese’ appear to be deep-seated, even among those who have chosen to live abroad indefinitely.57 The third type consists of an increasing number of foreigners who reside outside Japan, have acquired fluency in the Japanese language, and are Japan literate, being capable of understanding not only the omote (surface) side of Japanese society but the ura (back) side as well. These people are Japanese linguistically and intellectually, if not in terms of national citizenship (see the bottom row of Table 8.6). Some readers of this book may regard themselves as belonging to this community of cultural Japanese. With an increasing number of Japanese going beyond Japan’s geographical boundaries and more foreigners entering Japan, there are no simple answers to the vexed questions of who the Japanese are

and what Japanese culture is. Although conventional analysis of the Japanese and Japanese culture focuses upon the comparison between straight Japanese and straight foreigners, knowledge of globalized Japan will not improve without thorough investigation into the mixed categories, some of which Table 8.6 displays. Japan beyond Japan sensitizes one to the viability of conceiving of Japanese society both inside and outside the Japanese archipelago.

X Conclusion This chapter has revealed that Japanese society abounds with minority groups that are subject to prejudice and discrimination racially, ethnically, and culturally, as well as in terms of nationality. Such heterogeneity raises issues of intersectionality and creates multiple dimensions of bias that crisscross Japanese society. These issues lead to questions of who the Japanese are and what Japanese culture is, to which multiple responses are possible. One must be cognizant of what assumptions one holds in producing those answers.

Research questions 1. Why has Japan long been described as a homogeneous and uniform society devoid of minority issues? 2. Is the buraku issue unique to Japan? If so, to what aspects of Japanese society should it be ascribed? If not, in which countries do its counterparts exist, and how do they compare? 3. Compare zainichi Koreans’ issues in Japan with those of the descendants of the colonized in a former colony. 4. How similarly or differently are Japan’s foreign workers treated in comparison with their counterparts in other advanced economies? 5. Explore as many ways as possible in which different dimensions of discrimination intersect in Japan.

Further readings Gottlieb, Nanette 2006, Linguistic Stereotyping and Minority Groups in Japan. London: Routledge. Lie, John 2008, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tanno, Kiyoto 2013, Migrant Workers in Contemporary Japan: An Institutional Perspective on Transnational Employment. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Teraki, Nobuaki and Kurokawa, Midori 2019, A History of Discriminated Buraku Communities in Japan, trans. Ian Neary. Folkestone: Renaissance Books. Weiner, Michael (ed.) 2009, Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

Online resources Brasor, Philip 2016, ‘Japan’s resident Koreans endure a climate of hate’. Japan Times (7 May), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/07/national/media-national/japans-resident-koreans-endureclimate-hate/#.Xj_A7i2cb3Q (may require registration or subscription). Kirsch, Griseldis 2018, Japan and the Other: Its (Not-So-) Hidden Minorities. Asia Dialogue (23 May), https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/05/23/japan-and-the-other-i-its-not-so-hidden-minorities/. Martin, Alex 2019, ‘Embracing a buraku heritage: Examining changing attitudes towards a social minority’. Japan Times (16 February), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/02/16/national/socialissues/embracing-buraku-heritage-examining-changing-attitudes-toward-social-minority/#.Xj_h5y2cYxM (may require registration or subscription). Solomon, Richard 2019, ‘Looking overseas to solve Japan’s labor shortage’. Japan Times (8 November), www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/11/08/commentary/japan-commentary/lookingoverseas-solve-japans-labor-shortage/#.Xj-2By2cZOI (may require registration or subscription). Takeshi, Higashimura 2019, No Rights, No Regret: New Ainu Legislation Short on Substance. Nippon.com (26 April), www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00479/no-rights-no-regret-new-ainu-legislationshort-on-substance.html. 1 Befu 2001. 2 Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016. 3 Ministry of Justice 2019. 4 See Tsurumi 1986, pp. 5, 53, 62. See also Oguma 2017a, pp. 1–15. 5 Kawamura 1980. 6 Russell 2011, 1991a, 1991b; Sterling 2011. 7 For racial representations in Asia, see Takezawa 2011. 8 Hokkaidō Prefectural Government 2017. 9 Poisson 2002, p. 5. 10 Hokkaidō Prefectural Government 2017. 11 AM, Hokkaidō edition, 19 April 2019, p. 31. See also AM, 14 May 2019, p. 13. 12 Management and Coordination Agency 1995. See Buraku Kaihō Jinken Kenkyūsho 2001, p. 736.

13 Buraku Kaihō Jinken Kenkyūsho 2001. 14 Uchida 2018, pp. 124–7. 15 See Kurokawa 2011, 2014. 16 Uchida 2012, Table 13. 17 Aoki 2009, p. 188. 18 Buraku Kaihō Jinken Kenkyūsho 2013, pp. 95–108. 19 Asaji et al. 2018. 20 See Noguchi 2000; Aoki 2009. 21 For more on this point, see Davis 2000. 22 Ministry of Justice 2018. 23 ‘Zainichi Kōrian no Jinken Hakusho’ Seisaku Iinkai 2018. 24 Endo 2019, especially chap. 4. 25 Kim 2013, p. 8. 26 Ministry of Justice 2018. 27 Asakawa 2003, especially chap. 4 and concluding remarks. 28 AE, Osaka edition, 16 February 2017, p. 12; AM, 19 June 2004, p. 37. 29 Cho 2013. 30 Mindan 2018. 31 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2016d. The data show that cases in which the husband is Japanese and the wife is zainichi Korean outnumber those in the reverse situation. 32 See Chapman 2008 for various forms of zainichi Koreans’ identities. 33 The discussion here is based on Fukuoka 2000, pp. 42–60. 34 Kim 2013. 35 Kim and Inazuki 2000, pp. 188–9. 36 Kim 2013. 37 Yasuda 2012. Higuchi (2016) questions the marginality of the leadership of this group.

38 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018h. 39 Ministry of Justice 2018. 40 Ministry of Justice 2018. 41 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2010. 42 Tanno 2019. 43 Tanno 2013. 44 Tanno 2013, pp. 63–72; Komai 2001, pp. 105–17. 45 For example, Nakazawa 2007; Tanabe 2013. 46 Ōtsuki 2008, p. 119; 2013. 47 The following discussion is based on Sugimoto and Mouer 1995, pp. 296–7; Mouer and Sugimoto 1995, p. 246. 48 Tanabe 2012, 2013. The data are based on a random sample of 1,102 people. 49 Kurosaka 2019. 50 AM, 25 July 2019, p. 1. 51 See Maruyama 2019. 52 AM, 22 June 2019, p. 13. 53 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017. 54 Sugimoto 1993, pp. 73–85. 55 Sato 2001. 56 Nagatomo 2014, p. 174. 57 Sato 2001, pp. 156–61.

Chapter 9

The establishment: competition and collusion ◈

I Introduction Which groups and organizations govern Japan? How do they cooperate and compete with each other? To what extent is the Japanese establishment connected with voluntary associations at popular

levels?

What

are

the

characteristics

of

Japanese

democracy? This chapter attempts to address these and other questions with a focus on the top layers of Japanese society. It is widely acknowledged that Japan’s establishment comprises three sectors – big business, parliament, and the public bureaucracy (ministries and agencies at the national level) – which are often referred to as a ‘three-way deadlock’. As Chapter 5 examined the operation of the business community, this chapter focuses on the bureaucracy and Japan’s political circles, touching on the business world only when relevant and in terms of its relations to the other two power centers. This chapter is divided into the following nine main sections. Sections II and III examine Japan’s system of three-way deadlock, with national bureaucracy and political circles in pluralistic competition and cooperation. Section IV then investigates the emerging free market political economy, which downplays the bureaucracy-led developmental state and alters the landscape of political groups at the top of Japan’s polity. Section V delves into the interest groups at community level which are at the foundation of the LDP, the long-running ruling party which has governed the nation for

more than six decades almost uninterruptedly and was still in power at the time of writing, in 2020.1 Section VI looks further into the political culture that the LDP dominance has nurtured and the challenge that local and other forces have mounted to alter it. Section VII focuses on the case of the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a concrete illustration of the collusion within the Japanese establishment amid strong civil defiance. Section VIII analyzes the ongoing confrontation in which Japan’s political leaders have been embroiled with Korea and China in relation to competing interpretations of Japanese military activities during World War II. Section IX scrutinizes Japan’s major media organizations as part of the establishment. Section X, the final section, wraps up the chapter by detailing the deep-seated rifts that have opened up within the elite structure.

II The three-way deadlock The economic sphere, overseen by the leaders of big corporations, is subordinate to the national bureaucracy, which controls the private sector through its power to license companies, regulate their activities, and decide upon the implementation of publicly funded projects. However, officials in the bureaucracy are subservient to legislators, especially those of the governing parties, who decide on the bills that bureaucrats prepare for the National Diet (parliament) and whose ranks many officials join after they have climbed to a certain career level. Politicians, in turn, remain submissive to the leaders of the private sector, because they require pecuniary contributions to individual and party coffers to maintain their political machines. Figure 9.1 summarizes the mutual dependence and competition among these three power blocs at the helm of Japanese society.

Figure 9.1 Three-way rivalry among power centers Note: The Japanese notions of zoku and amakudari will be discussed later in the present chapter. The three-way structure of Japan’s establishment resembles the tripartitisms of politics, business, and labor that collectively coordinate the policymaking processes in some European and Australasian characterized

countries. by

the

However, conspicuous

the

Japanese

absence

of

pattern labor

is

union

representatives. Although the largest national labor confederation, Rengō (the Japan Trade Union Confederation), has some influence on the state decision-making process, its level of representation is hardly comparable to that of union organizations in other countries. The public bureaucracy enjoys strong influence over both the economy and the politics of the entire nation. Japan’s constitution defines the parliament as the nation’s highest decision-making body, which is made up of the House of Representatives (lower house) and the House of Councillors (upper

house). Japanese nationals at or above the age of eighteen are eligible

to

vote.

After

the

September

2017

election,

465

parliamentarians constituted the House of Representatives, 289 of whom were elected from single-seat constituencies and the remaining 176 by the regional proportional-representation system, in which voters choose their preferred political parties; for this the nation is divided into eleven separate electoral regional blocs, different from but based upon the eight conventional regional blocs discussed in Chapter 4. All political parties nominate and rank their candidates, with successful candidates elected on the basis of their party’s share of total votes. Following the 2019 election, the House of Councillors comprised 245 members, of whom 98 were elected through the national proportional-representation system and the remaining 147 through the conventional multimember constituency system contested by local representatives. House of Councillors members’ term of office is six years, with half of the seats up for election every three years. In May 2020, the Japanese parliament comprised members of twelve political parties, with the LDP in government in coalition with its junior partner, Komeito. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Democratic Party for the People were the major opposition parties. The Japan Restoration Party and the Japanese Communist Party had double-digit numbers of seats. The opposition side was not well integrated, with much internal conflict and constant realignment. The current electoral system was established in 1996 as part of the reform package designed to put an end to gerrymandering. Yet,

in 2018, for the single-seat constituencies of the House of Representatives, the value of votes for the least populated area (the first district of Tottori prefecture) was more than twice as much as that of the most populated area (the thirteenth district of Tokyo prefecture). With respect to the 2019 House of Councillors elections, a vote in the least populated district (Fukui prefecture) was worth three times more than a vote in the most populated area (Miyagi prefecture). The judiciary ruled that the current situation is in violation of the constitution, with a few lower courts finding some of the latest elections invalid. At the highest level, however, the Supreme Court tends to prevaricate, ruling that the present condition is ‘in a state of unconstitutionality’, an equivocation that admits the existing circumstances are far from constitutional but refrains from actually invalidating past elections. Despite all this, the competing vested interests of the political parties involved have hindered the revision of the current electoral boundaries.

Figure 9.2 National Diet Building, Tokyo Japan’s polity is based on the separation of powers between three mutually independent branches of government: the legislative (parliament), the executive (cabinet and bureaucracy), and the judiciary (courts). Following the British Westminster system, the prime minister, who leads the executive branch, is elected by the diet and is usually the head of its majority party. The judges of the Supreme Court are selected by the prime minister and subjected formally to a people’s review conducted in conjunction with national elections. The bureaucracy is the only branch of government in which incumbents are never evaluated by formal popular vote.

III The dominance of the public bureaucracy It is widely acknowledged that the state, particularly the government bureaucracy, holds supreme authority over private sector companies in

Japan.

Throughout

Japan’s

industrialization,

the

central

government was the engine of economic transformation. To optimize this process, the national bureaucracy has recruited talented university graduates as career officials chosen for management ability and provided with high prestige and official status. Able, dedicated, and often perceived as arrogant, these bureaucrats are believed by many to be the real power-holders in the nation. The perception is consistent with some state practices relating to the private sector. Government ministries hold the power of licensing, permitting, authorizing, and approving a wide range of production, distribution, and sales activities, thereby regulating the private sector even in trivial details. Career bureaucrats often retire from officialdom in the late stages of their careers to take up executive positions in large corporations, a practice referred to as amakudari (descending from heaven). Furthermore, without statutory grounding, public officials are empowered to provide relevant companies in the private sector with gyōsei shidō (administrative guidance) on their business arrangements in the name of national interests. These three practices – regulatory control, amakudari, and administrative guidance – exemplify the power and privilege of elite bureaucrats in Japan.

1 Regulatory control The public bureaucracy imposes legal controls on institutions and individuals in any society. Japanese officialdom, however, exercises control over an extremely wide range of activities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was estimated that approximately one-third of production activities were subject to state regulation,2 though the expansion of the neoliberal economy in recent years has led to steps towards deregulation and the easing of government regulation. National government ministries can restrict the number of producers and stores in certain spheres and control the prices and shapes of some commodities. Regulation extends to individual lives. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, for instance, requires car owners to have their cars inspected every one to three years, depending on the car type. Because the inspection covers dozens of items, car owners must normally rely on the expensive and oftenexcessive services of private car inspection firms which the ministry designates. Ministries compete with each other to maximize their spheres of regulation. Because different ministries try to expand their domains of influence under their own jurisdiction, national economic and social activity are partitioned along ministry lines. Jurisdictional sectionalism impedes communication between different ministries and thwarts coordination. For instance, despite their functional similarities, the Ministry of Education controls kindergartens, while the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare regulates daycare

centers, requiring the workforce of each to have different qualifications. Despite successive governments’ experimenting with unification of the two preschool streams from the 2000s, full integration was far from realized in 2020. It also happens that national roads are constructed under the control of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, while farm roads are built under the authorization of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries: a further example of jurisdictional sectionalism causing an unnecessary duplication of work. In relationships between the center and the regions, the corresponding

departments

of

prefectural

and

municipal

governments serve as the local arms of national ministries, which delegate nationally funded projects to them while attempting to control

them

from

above.

Since

prefectural

and

municipal

governments have only limited rights to impose taxation, they must rely on subsidies from the national government. This provides national bureaucrats with the power to oversee and influence local governments. Furthermore, national career officials are routinely sent from their base ministry to serve terms in key posts in prefectures and municipalities. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, for example, may dispatch elite-track officials to head the general affairs department of a major city, while the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries might regularly fill a post in the livestock industry division of a prefecture with a career ministry bureaucrat. Most of these officials move between the two spheres of government several times as part of the promotion process. This vertically

partitioned

structure

of

sectionalism

intensifies

interministerial competition and makes bureaucrats obsessed with their departmental vested interests.

2 Amakudari The bureaucracy’s power of regulation is linked with the ways in which elite officials secure posts in public corporations and private companies when their official careers have ended. High-ranking bureaucrats normally find executive positions in semi-government or private enterprises in the industries they once supervised. This practice of amakudari gives rise to collusive links between official circles and large companies. The career track of elite bureaucrats has several phases. Initially, university students who aspire to the national public bureaucracy must pass a national examination before applying for admission to a particular ministry. The examination, which covers a range of subjects, is highly competitive. In 2018, the highest number of successful applicants, at 329, were from the University of Tokyo, followed by 151 from Kyoto University and 111 from Waseda University.3 For career bureaucrats selected in this way, year of entry to the ministry constitutes a prime index of promotion. Although they move across different sections and departments during their career, those who joined in the same year are promoted to positions at more or less the same time. However, because higher posts are fewer, a certain number must drop out of the race every year, and this elimination process continues until someone acquires the position of administrative vice-minister, the highest position in a ministerial hierarchy. Officials eliminated in this process must retire from the

ministry and find jobs outside government through the amakudari arrangement. The business world finds it beneficial to have ex-bureaucrats in upper managerial positions, because they have in-depth knowledge of, and personal networks within, the powerful national officialdom. The Japan Trucking Association, for instance, routinely imports highranking officials from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to fill its top positions. The Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association makes it a rule to have former officials of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare as its leaders.4 These ‘old boys’ are valuable assets for the industry; through them the business world can maneuver officialdom in the directions it prefers. The other side of the coin is that the ‘young boys’ in the bureaucracy know that they will be likely to end up occupying important positions in the corporate world so see no harm in maintaining congenial relations with its representatives. These posts assure former high-ranking national bureaucrats of high incomes, authority, and prestige in their fifties and sixties. Exbureaucrats occupy many executive posts in government and semigovernment corporations, such as the Highway Public Corporation, the Japan Finance Corporation for Small Business, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Many executive members of the Institute of Cetacean Research, an NPO which represents Japan’s pro-whaling position both domestically and internationally, are exbureaucrats of the Fisheries Agency of the Japanese government, a pattern

which

arrangement.

environmental

groups

see

as

an

amakudari

Many former officials move from one corporation to another, collecting large retirement allowances. A majority of the former Ministry of Finance officials who ‘descend from heaven’ find jobs in financial institutions in the private sector, in securities companies, banks, credit unions, and so on. Most of the ex-officials are in executive positions, and a considerable number are in charge of internal audit and inspection. This environment, in which the private sector provides employment for retired public officials, gives rise to a back-scratching alliance between the national bureaucracy and the business community. A case in point is the effective dismissal of the administrative vice-minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in December 2019 for leaking classified information to the senior executive vice-president of Japan Post Holdings, a public corporation supervised by the ministry. The Japan Post executive had previously served as administrative vice-minister of the ministry and, after completing his term, secured his position at the company through amakudari. He obtained secret information about possible punitive measures taken by the ministry over the company’s dubious insurance sales practices. Taking advantage of his former role as a top bureaucrat, he abused his position and colluded with the current administrative vice-minister who oversaw his company.5 While both players in the scandal resigned, the case revealed that the cozy amakudari relations are far from disappearing. Politics is another significant career route for high-ranking bureaucrats who leave the public service. Some enter national politics by standing as candidates for parliament. Approximately one-

third of Japan’s prime ministers after the end of World War II, from 1946 to 1993, were ex-bureaucrats. Others end up winning governorships in prefectures. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is a breeding ground for top local politicians. Seconded to a prefectural government as section or department head from the ministry during their careers, many bureaucrats cultivate ties in the political and business networks in the region and act as a pipeline between the locality and the national center. Some of these career officials are chosen for vice-governorships and make preparations for future gubernatorial elections. Such strong influence in prefectural politics stems in part from the prewar practice in which governors were appointed by the national government, not elected by popular vote. Since the end of World War II, candidates for gubernatorial and mayoral elections have often been chosen by a group of major political parties after horse trades among themselves. The interparty collusion tends to favor candidates who have high technocratic skills and no direct prior party affiliations, conditions which national elite bureaucrats tend to satisfy.

3 Administrative guidance The practice of gyōsei shidō (administrative guidance) provides another illustration of the power of the national bureaucracy over the business world. Both institutionalized and amorphous, the practice involves a ministry giving advice, suggestions, instructions, and warnings to business confederations; these are without statutory basis and are frequently made behind closed doors without written records being kept. In the absence of firm documentation, outsiders have virtually no means of acquiring detailed information concerning such activities. The business world is often a willing partner to administrative guidance and benefits from it. The practice leaves the task of coordinating competing interests in the business world to the overseeing ministry, thereby minimizing the cost of such activities to the private sector.6 Making use of the third-party mediation expertise of the public bureaucracy, the business community can rely on administrative guidance to inexpensively resolve its internal disagreements. Moreover, many managing directors and other key figures in major industrial associations are themselves ex-bureaucrats. They have ‘descended from heaven’ and have been hired by industry to deal with the bureaucrats offering administrative guidance. Although administrative guidance has the appearance of bureaucracy instructing the private sector, it is often the case that officials and business representatives have thrashed out the substance of

guidelines before they are officially proposed. In these instances, the industrial world, as the object of ministerial guidance, is involved in its formulation and therefore becomes the source of guidance to itself.7 Collaborations of these kinds raise the question of who in fact determines the content of administrative guidance. On the whole, administrative guidance and other forms of government intervention rely on manipulation rather than coercion. To impose their recommendations and advice, government ministries dangle such carrots as preferential treatment with regard to taxation and finance, public works contracts, and government subsidies. Since companies must obtain authorization for licenses and registration from ministries, national bureaucrats can use this power to induce businesses to comply with ministerial policies.

Regulatory control, amakudari, and administrative guidance enable national bureaucratic elites to manage the state with enormous privilege and to run the economy with long-term planning of a bureaucratic nature. The webs of influence they weave are so extensive and entrenched that they are unwilling to abandon their vested interests, even though politicians repeatedly attempt to implement

administrative

reform

programs

to

downsize

the

bureaucracy. In a move to strengthen the government’s control over the personnel management of high-ranking officials of the national bureaucracy, the prime minister Shinzō Abe’s administration established the Cabinet Personnel Management Bureau in the

Cabinet Secretariat in 2014, a bureau empowered to approve or disapprove the appointments of administrative vice-ministers, director generals, assistant vice-ministers and other top bureaucrats occupying some 600 posts. In the past, these personnel matters were decided on the basis of internal deliberations within each ministry at arm’s length from governmental political interventions. With the introduction of the new system, career bureaucrats generally became vulnerable to Cabinet Office intentions and tended to conform to its wishes. To this extent, the political wing of government has encroached on a bastion of central officialdom, which is losing its conventional political neutrality.

IV Two competing political economies The bureaucracy-led political economy that enabled Japan to achieve high growth and attain economic-superpower status has been under challenge late in the twentieth century in the face of rapid globalization that affects every sphere of Japan’s economy. The information industry operates across national boundaries, rendering state control useless. Government intervention in the market of diversifying consumer preferences tends to be fruitless and often counterproductive. State imposition of standardization on the private sector reduces incentives for creative ideas and healthy rivalry for better rewards. In response to the situation, a new political economy that revolves around free market competition began to emerge, defying the system of state regulation that obstructs its effective operation. The old political economy is based on the developmental-state model in which the national bureaucracy decides on the long-term goals of the economy for what it sees as the national interest and regulates the private sector to achieve developmental objectives. The new political economy is predicated upon the free market model in which enterprises compete with each other, with state intervention seen as dysfunctional to its dynamics. Instead of one replacing the other, the two political economies coexist, and the pendulum of public opinion swings back and forth between them. Although the rigidity and inflexibility of the

developmental state is an issue, the free market system has been criticized for failing to provide safety nets to the weak and the marginalized, for justifying a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and for polarizing the world of labor. Both the ruling coalition and opposition parties have internal divisions over the two competing political economies concerning the extent to which the Japanese economy should be deregulated and the government’s assets and utilities privatized in order to meet the challenge of globalization, as Table 9.1 exhibits. Table 9.1 Comparison of political economies Political economy Characteristic

Developmental state

Free market

Driving force

State-led planning

Market competition

Leadership sector

National bureaucracy

Private sector

Desirable size of government

Big

Small

Priorities

Defense of national interests

International expansion of business interests

Primary support bases

Rural groups, selfemployed, public sector employees

Big business, urban professionals, cultural workers

Political economy Characteristic

Developmental state

Free market

Management practice

‘Japanese style’

Performance based

Social inequality

Requires state-led balancing

Provides healthy incentives

Decentralization

Needs interregional adjustment

Encourages open contest between regions

Issues

Rigidity, inflexibility

Loss of publicness

The LDP is an omnibus party with wide-ranging support groups. Its old guard has conventional power bases in small business and agrarian interests and therefore remains cautious about the possibility that the globally oriented market economy could damage the national regulation structure which has protected it. This position is at odds with the LDP’s new guard, which has gained support in urban, white-collar, and managerial sectors invested in the development of regulation-free, market-responsive, internationally oriented business structures. Komeito, the city-based junior ally of the LDP, also favors privatization programs. The opposition parties are also internally divided. Many of them have their power base in the urban middle class and generally favor deregulation and privatization programs that empower the private sector and weaken the influence of the national bureaucracy.

However, both the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Democratic Party for the People receive support from Rengō and other labor movements worried about the erosion of their interests as a result of excessive emphasis on labor productivity and work performance. As to the nation’s international relations, both ruling and opposition parties’ viewpoints differ regarding the extent to which Japan should take a strategic and military role in the region, with the possibility of amending the constitution to allow the nation to have armed forces.8 Both the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party are internally coherent and vocal in defending the existing constitution as a barrier against what they see as Japan’s rising militarization and in questioning the country’s unequivocal alliance with the United States in strategic matters. However, the LDP comprises a wide range of politicians with differing views on international relations. Its lawmakers on the right wing of the spectrum argue that the constitution should be amended to empower Japan to be a fully fledged strategic power in the region, while those on the moderate side maintain that the constraints that the constitution imposes on Japan’s military activity have successfully enabled Japan to pursue economic objectives under the umbrella of US military protection. The opposition group, which comprises both economic reformists who fled from the LDP and ex-socialists who are against the revision of the constitution, also has two wings. Its right wing presses for Japan to become a ‘normal’ country, with a constitutionally legitimated military, while its left wing aligns with the

Japanese Communist Party and Social Democratic Party on this issue. In 2015, the LDP-led coalition successfully enacted the Legislation for Peace and Security in parliament, which enables the Self-Defense Forces to counterattack enemy countries if the following conditions are met: Japan’s allies are under attack, the nation’s safety is in danger, and military involvement is the only option. In the past, the Self-Defense Forces were supposed to have the right of individual self-defense – the right to defend the nation only when directly attacked. The new legislation expands this to the right of collective self-defense, which makes it legally possible for Japan to engage in military action along with its allies. When the United States, for example, is involved in war activities, the SelfDefense Forces can assist it militarily. Though a wide range of conditions for such action have been defined, the opposition is of the view that the legislation is an unjustifiably extended interpretation of the present constitution and that it would serve as a stepping-stone to eventual constitutional revision.

1 The business community’s push for deregulation The interests of most business circle sections conflict with the regulatory power of the bureaucracy. Concerned for the efficient operation of their business ventures, private enterprises increasingly find the intervention of the bureaucracy frustrating, as their activities become more diversified, sophisticated, and multinational. These circumstances contrast with those of the past, in which the Japanese business world needed national coordination to make a comeback from World War II and to establish an export-oriented, high-growth economy. The obstructive nature of bureaucratic regulation became more evident in the 1990s with the prolonged recession, the appreciation of the yen, and the increased domestic demand for relatively

cheap

imported

goods.

Furthermore,

the

multinationalization of Japanese corporations posed a threat to the system of government intervention, inasmuch as the national bureaucracy found it difficult to oversee offshore operations. As corporate Japan expanded beyond national boundaries and embraced much more than geographical Japan, it was inevitable that powerful business groups pressed for deregulation. However, while supporting the tatemae of deregulation, some industries are reluctant to facilitate it at the honne level, to protect their vested interests. Agricultural organizations, which have much political clout, make every attempt to defend Japan’s uncompetitive agriculture. Some wholesale, retail, and other distribution outlets which have complicated uchi networks resist the participation of

newcomers from outside. Many construction companies which have enjoyed a number of collusive arrangements have concerns about opening the market to outsiders who do not know much about the ura side of the industry. Yet three dominant national centers for corporate interests are united in demanding speedy deregulation, though they differ in their internal composition. The Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) acts as the public face of the business community and wields considerable power as the central body which collects political donations from business. The leaders of the manufacturing industries are the elite of the federation. It also focuses its activity upon industrial relations and acts as a principal body to strengthen employer solidarity against unions. The Nisshō (Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry) represents more than 500 chambers of commerce and industry in major cities across the nation and, therefore, to a considerable extent reflects the interests of small businesses. Finally, the Keizai Dōyūkai (Japan Association of Corporate Executives) draws its membership from individual businesspeople and aims to assess the national economy from a broad perspective without directly dealing with the specific interests of particular sectors or industries. Although these three major organizations remain separate, each performing different functions, there is overlap in their leadership. The big three have, on occasion, issued joint statements on crucial national issues. For instance, in 1960 they collectively denounced nationwide demonstrations over the ratification of the security treaty between the United States and Japan. At the time of

the oil crisis in 1974, these organizations warned the business community against taking advantage of opportunistic price rises. During the 1984 budget compilation, they opposed an increase in corporation tax and proposed a radical reduction in government expenditure. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, they collectively challenged the bureaucracy with a chorus of calls for deregulation. In the late 2010s, they put pressure on the government for Japan to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TransPacific Partnership,9 which abolishes customs tariff and liberalizes international trade.

2 Privatization of public enterprises The leadership of the LDP, who realized that the developmentalstate model required extensive corrections, made a series of attempts in the 2000s onwards to curtail the public sector, which was dominated by national officialdom and government corporations. Well before then, some administrative reforms in the 1980s proved relatively effective, with the successful privatization of the Japan National

Railways,

the

Nippon

Telegraph

and

Telephone

Corporation, Japan Tobacco Inc., and many other public enterprises. Shinichirō Koizumi, a maverick populist politician within the LDP, assumed the prime ministership from 2001 to 2006 on the policy platform of streamlining the debt-ridden, inefficient government companies and implementing ‘administrative reform with no sanctuary’. The targets of the reform were the so-called specialstatus

corporations

(tokushu

hōjin)

–

semi-governmental

organizations protected by state law and funded by the national government – including the Japan Highway Public Corporation, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and the Agriculture and Livestock Industries Corporation. Despite the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s successive governments had attempted to amalgamate, privatize, or abolish tokushu hōjin, which were increasingly unprofitable, inefficient, and redundant, by 2019 their number still amounted to 33, down from a peak of more than 100. Tokushu hōjin, which mushroomed in the 1960s and throughout Japan’s economic boom, contributed to the consolidation of social infrastructure and to

the promotion of some industries right up until the end of the 1980s. With massive cumulative deficits, however, some began to cast a heavy financial burden on the national government, whose own coffers had been operating on deficit-covering government bonds. It is not surprising, however, that many of the bureaucrats and politicians who benefited from this system actively resisted attempts to reform it. The anti-reform camp took a strong stand on the basis that some of these corporations still played an important buffer role, protecting certain groups and regions from the more brutal forces of globalization. In particular, high-ranking bureaucrats offered stubborn resistance because, on completion of their careers in officialdom, tokushu hōjin provide them with well-paid executive positions in the cozy domains of amakudari. The dominance of bureaucratic executive power is best exemplified by the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (Zaisei Tōyūshi Keikaku), which is controlled principally by the Ministry of Finance. The program raises funds by selling bonds to the financial market with governmental guarantee. The funds thus procured enable the ministries of the central government and the associated semi-governmental organizations to implement their respective priority projects. Through various public finance corporations, government ministries provide low-interest loans to a wide range of priority areas in housing, construction, small business, education, local development, transportation and communication, trade and economic cooperation, and so forth. At the height of the developmental state, much of the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program did not require parliamentary approval. With the penetration

of free market ideology and the call for deregulation, the program has been scaled down and put under a parliamentary microscope since the early 2000s. Nonetheless, it remains the symbol of the power that the national bureaucracy wields in the formation of longterm national policies and programs. The Koizumi reform prioritized the privatization of Japan’s postal system, which was closely connected with the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program’s structure. After several years of pushing and shoving between major political parties, the national postal system was divided in 2007 into five private companies, with postal workers ceasing to be public servants. These new companies, which formed a group called Japan Post Group, separately handle postal, banking, and insurance services as private enterprises.

Figure 9.3 A bullet train travelling at the foot of Mount Fuji on the privatized Shinkansen network

3 Globalism versus nationalism It is not the case that the free market paradigm has replaced the developmental-state paradigm. They are rivals and in competition, representing different interests around the country. The anti-reformist camp claims that the reform went too far in attempting to demolish the developmental-state structure and to introduce the framework of free market competition. Many attribute the expanding inequality of Japanese society to the LDP’s excessive implementation of deregulation programs and other market-oriented policies, which resulted in already-wealthy regular employees and urban centers gaining strength, while poor casual workers and rural areas experienced decline. Many senior citizens felt ill-treated as pension funds shrank, while youths found themselves marginalized with the worsening employment situation. Towards the end of the 2010s, the dynamics of globalization forced the nation to grapple with the extent to which the domestic market should be open to transnational interests. After the withdrawal of the United States, the Japanese government moved to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in 2018, which aimed at trade liberalization between eleven economies in the Pacific region, including Asia, and North and South America. On balance, the Japanese establishment find it beneficial to reduce international tariff barriers to meet the general expectations of big business despite the considerable concerns voiced by such noncompetitive spheres of the economy as agriculture and small businesses.

Japan’s policymakers are carving out the nation’s interface with the outside world, a process which Ross Mouer deems the ‘third opening’ of the nation, following the Meiji Restoration and the Allied occupation.10 With globalizing Japan in mind, Japan’s leadership, on the whole, attempt to engage Japanese in global networks, improve their English-language skills, accept more migrant workers, make tertiary education more competitive, and create favorable images of Japanese culture around the world.

Nippon Kaigi Parts of the Japanese establishment have ties with a large far-right

voluntary

organization,

Nippon

Kaigi

(Japan

Conference), whose ranks include grassroots members across the nation as well as national and local politicians with political might at various levels. Advocating a range of traditionalist, reactionary, and ultranationalistic ideas, the association mounts various activities in the hope of making Japan return to the prewar polity, in which the nation was organized with the heavenly emperor at the helm, Japanese subjects were required to put their public duties ahead of individual rights, the state enjoyed strategic international power, and the mythological origin of the nation was celebrated. The association also campaigns vigorously for the justification of Japanese military activities during World War II and for the concomitant revision of school textbooks. There is more information in the video The Return of Japan’s Imperialists, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSXNv1ksmQQ (FRANCE 24 English, 1 March 2017).

Yet,

Japan’s

establishment

comprises

associations

with

apparently competing and opposing orientations. Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a conservative organization whose nationwide membership in 2017 was 40,000,11 is represented at both national and local leadership levels. Established in 1997, the group has the

support of many parliamentarians, chiefly of the LDP. Many opposition party politicians also hold membership. In 2018, some 290 parliamentarians and 1,800 local legislators belonged to it, with more than half of the government’s cabinet ministers constantly holding membership in the 2010s.12 With the claim that the current constitution was imposed on Japan by the occupation authorities after the defeat in World War II, Nippon Kaigi campaigns for constitutional revision in line with what it regards as the time-honored national tradition and for the explicit legitimation of the Self-Defense Forces. The conference’s agenda is fraught with an array of nationalistic principles. It advocates education based on more traditional and patriotic values, succession of the imperial throne in the male line, respect for the national flag and the national anthem, and parliamentarians’ regular worship of the war dead enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. The organization opposes the teaching of history from a ‘masochistic’ perspective, ‘excessive’ gender equalization, foreign nationals’ voting rights at local elections, and the use of separate surnames by married couples. Many of Japan’s national leaders cherish these nationalist, and even ultranationalist, views while promoting internationalist and globalist standpoints, an ostensible contradiction which nonetheless appears to ensure electoral support from a variety of interest groups. In this particular sense, the Japanese establishment embodies nationalist globalism or globalist nationalism.

V Interest groups in support of the LDP At the level of voluntary organizations, producer and professional interest groups form the bastion of electoral backing for the LDP. The national centers of industry groups – such as the Japan Federation of Construction Contractors, the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, and the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives – are the important pillars that support the LDP. Though some other pressure groups that buttress the LDP experienced internal rifts in the face of the ruling party’s policy changes, they came back to give it solid support in the late 2010s. This section takes up three groups. The Japan Medical Association had more than 170,000 members in December 2019,13 most of whom are doctors working in private practices, clinics, and hospitals across the country. They see patients every day and often occupy positions of high status in their local communities. The association acts as a powerful lobby group to press for the interests of doctors and to campaign for LDP candidates. Many doctors hang posters of their preferred political candidates on the walls of their waiting rooms as a way of influencing their patients’ votes. In proportional-representation constituencies, the association also sends at least one LDP candidate to the House of Councillors to secure a voice in the national

parliament

to

defend

their

interests

remunerations for medical treatment in doctors’ favor.

and

to

keep

Another powerful interest group is formed by the tochi kairyōku (land-improvement units), which are mainly based in rural areas. Each unit is made up of at least fifteen farmers and is legally recognized as a juridical corporate body charged with a wide range of responsibilities in the administration of a given agricultural community.

These

land-improvement

units

manage

irrigation

facilities, establish new farming fields, and reclaim and rezone agricultural land. Collectively, the units form the National Land Improvement Political League, which provides solid support to the LDP. The units have often served as agents for the LDP and other conservative parties, recruiting party members and collecting political donations. Many prefectural league units allocate both the number of new party members to be recruited and the amount of financial contributions to be collected to land-improvement promotion associations at the county level, which in turn allot them to community-level units of land improvement. The allocation number and amount depend upon each unit’s member and administrator numbers and project budget magnitude. Although land-improvement organizations are recipients of government funds, some units illegally redirect these into the political funds of LDP politicians. This practice has occasionally been exposed by the media14 and has drawn strong public criticism. Acting as the political grassroots of rural communities, the majority of these organizations prefer the status quo and have, in effect, been agricultural bastions against major structural reform.

Finally, a network of community post office managers located throughout the country forms the largest occupational grouping buttressing the LDP’s political machine. Community post offices operate in all urban and rural locations, even on isolated islands and in other sparsely populated regions. Entrenched in community life, the national and regional networks of local postmasters have formed a grassroots arm of the Japanese state for nearly one and a half centuries. Their origin dates back to the period immediately after the Meiji Restoration, when local men of property and wealth cooperated with the government to establish small, community-based postal service agents throughout the country. In 1886, they became thirdclass post offices, distinguished from first- and second-class post offices set up by government as state organs. In 1941, the thirdclass post offices were reclassified as ‘special’ post offices and the first and second types as ‘ordinary’ post offices. The special post offices made up three-quarters of all post offices in the nation, and past and present postmasters, their relatives, and other individuals associated with them once constituted the core of the pro-LDP political organization called Taiju (literally, ‘a big tree’), which had a total membership of about 200,000. With the postal privatization program, Taiju virtually disintegrated, and a majority of its members now belong to a newly established organization called Zenkoku Tokutei Yūbin Kyokuchōkai (National Postmasters Association), which still supports the LDP with its considerable local influence on the voting behavior of community residents.

Reiwa Shinsengumi In the upper-house election of July 2019, a new, small, and uncompromising political party, Reiwa Shinsengumi, put two persons with severe disability at the top of its proportionalrepresentation list and secured seats for them, campaigning for

antinuclear,

anti-poverty,

anti-globalism,

and

antiestablishment policies. Though hardly covered by the mainstream media, the party, led by a young, unconventional former actor, Tarō Yamamoto, attracted huge participation at street rallies, received large amounts of individual donations, and scored an election upset. The party’s unpredicted victory was seen to reflect the accumulating dissatisfaction of the marginalized segments of the public with what they regarded as the unfair and stifling status quo which the political class failed to significantly reform. The video Alive Please! A Speech Addressed by ‘Japan’s Bernie Sanders’ Taro Yamamoto, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rdPDib3z6A (Dr. Bullshit, 19 July 2019), shows Tarō Yamamoto on the campaign trail.

VI The challenges of reforming political culture Despite these recent trends, the political style of the LDP, which has governed the nation for so long, has left a lasting mark upon Japanese politics. In the context of the conflicting discourses, major political parties face the challenge of reforming the fundamental features of Japan’s political culture.

1 Heavy reliance on the bureaucracy Japanese parliamentarians rarely draw up their own bills for consideration in the diet. Public bureaucrats draft, formulate, and finalize an overwhelming majority of bills, which the cabinet submits to the legislative body. By and large, the bureaucracy is the virtual legislation-maker of the nation, and the diet simply endorses or rejects the proposed laws prepared by bureaucrats. Politicians propose only a little over 20 percent of bills presented to parliament and bureaucrats the rest.15 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the LDP government established the Cabinet Office under the direct control of the prime minister and strengthened the Cabinet Secretariat to enable the prime minister to have and use bureaucrats for policy formulation. Within ministries, political vice-ministers, political aides to ministers, and other posts were created and occupied by parliamentarians in a bid to curb the political influence of high-ranking bureaucrats. Interest group lobbyists consider the executive branch of government the most crucial political target, with the legislative branch nearly as important, and the judicial branch almost insignificant. On the whole, business and agricultural organizations, most of which have well-established links with the policymaking process, tend to direct their demands towards the public bureaucracy in order to maximize their chances of influencing policy formation. Even when they approach politicians and political parties, their final target remains the decision-making process within the

bureaucracy, with interest groups approaching bureaucrats rather than politicians for consultation and solicitation.16 With frequent changes in government ministers and intensified competition between parliamentary parties, the national bureaucracy remains stable and consolidates its power over daily policy formulation.

2 Money politics and its social basis Political transparency forms the second challenge faced by Japan’s parliamentary culture, in which a heavy emphasis on investmentdriven development paves the way for money politics. In return for electoral support, members of parliament are expected to bring in to their constituencies government-supported construction projects, railways, and trunk roads in order to expand their jiban (solid blocs of voters).

In

this

pork-barreling

process,

kōenkai

(supporters’

associations) for each parliamentarian as informal grassroots units play important roles in distributing the benefits their representative acquires for them. Against this background, the LDP culture nurtured the zoku (literally, ‘a tribe’ or ‘the same kind’) parliamentarians, who represent special interest groups and exercise much political influence over the process of governmental and bureaucratic policy formulation. They have specialist knowledge of particular sectors of the economy, such as

agriculture,

construction,

commerce,

telecommunications,

transport, and education. In return for serving as spokespersons for particular interest groups and swaying the lawmaking process in their favor, these politicians secure enduring financial support bases in influential business communities. This mutual support structure has consolidated the vast foundations of the LDP’s hold on government power. Many recent prime ministers have previously acted as zoku politicians to rise though the LDP ranks and to expand their spheres of influence within the party hierarchy. For example,

the late Nobusuke Kishi (prime minister from 1957 to 1960) was widely regarded as the boss of the zoku group in control of commerce and industry and wielded enormous power in the key industries under the guidance of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Zenkō Suzuki (1980–2) was influential in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and had strong links with agricultural cooperatives throughout the nation. Toshiki Kaifu (1989– 91) was a leader of the education zoku group influential in the Ministry of Education. This coterie expanded its coffers by procuring political donations from nationwide networks of the owners of private schools and kindergartens. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry sits at the hub of the political-industrial-bureaucratic complex of industrial policy formulation. Because the ministry has the power to grant and reject licenses and the authority to offer administrative guidance to the private sector, politicians attempt to influence its decision-making process for the benefit of corporate contributors to their political funds. In turn, they expect those beneficiaries to make continued and increasing donations to their political coffers. Some legislators take advantage of the aging society and put pressure on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare over the interests of nursing homes and hospitals for the aged, whose owners and managers give electoral support.17 Undoubtedly, such financial transactions put zoku politicians in precarious situations. In order to protect themselves against possible legal complications, they often have private secretaries deal with any pecuniary matters. These aides do not normally formulate policies or

draft bills. Instead, they spend much time receiving and entertaining local bureaucrats, businesspeople, and other lobbyists who visit Tokyo to entreat their parliamentary representatives for political assistance. The secretaries also frequently use their positions to find employment or arrange introductions to influential people for children and relatives of voters in their bosses’ constituencies. Beneficiaries are expected to return these favors during elections. The current Political Funds Control Law (revised in 2008) prohibits individual politicians from receiving political donations personally. Each politician can establish a single fund management organization to which enterprises, groups, and individuals can donate up to a legally set limit. The Political Party Subsidization Law (in force since 1994) stipulates that each political party is entitled to receive an annual grant-in-aid from public coffers. The amount which a party is granted depends on its number of elected national parliamentarians and votes received in the previous national election. Furthermore, the revised Public Offices Election Act in 1994 strengthened the guilt-by-association system so that if a chief campaign manager, campaign treasurer, or other electoral leader is arrested and found guilty of election irregularities, the elected politician is supposed to be forced from office. More generally, pecuniary scandals, rife at the highest levels of the Japanese political hierarchy, reflect the popular practice of giftgiving on private occasions. Gift-giving is regarded as an expression of intimacy and affection. This social custom sometimes blurs the line between illegal acts and accepted informal exchanges. For many Japanese it is an established custom to take a gift when

making a visit. Formal gift-giving is an institutionalized practice in summer and winter. Gifts and gift certificates are sent, either directly or through department stores and shops, to acquaintances, friends, and relatives twice a year, in the middle, as chūgen (mid-year gifts), and at the end, as seibo (year-end gifts). Taking advantage of this convention, those who wish to acknowledge, or who seek, a favor from superiors or business connections send them expensive presents. Cash gifts are normal on ceremonial occasions. At marriage receptions, well-wishers are expected to donate the yen equivalent of a few hundred dollars to the marrying couple as an expression of congratulations. The family keeps meticulous records of who gave and returns the gift in kind a few weeks later. At funerals, mourners usually make monetary offerings to the family of the deceased. A majority of employees in large corporations find it socially necessary to make sizeable cash gifts of congratulations and condolence not only to members of their own families but also to senior and junior company colleagues. On New Year’s Day, children collect monetary gifts from parents, relatives, and other adults. In temples and shrines, the names of large donors and the amounts of their gifts are listed conspicuously. In this environment, it is accepted that powerful individuals make lavish cash contributions on such occasions as wedding ceremonies, funerals, and community festivals, collectively called kankon sōsai. To maintain the continuing support of their electorate, politicians require a constant flow of cash, though funds legally received by legislators do not cover the costs of operating their offices. In reality,

they rely upon corporate and other organizational donations for substantial portions of their office incomes. They manage an office or two in Tokyo and a few in their own constituencies, hire a dozen or so secretaries, and attend a number of wedding ceremonies, funerals, and new year and year-end functions. To handle these requirements,

some

politicians

have

contravened

the

abovementioned Political Funds Control Law and other electoral legislation. When conclusively tainted, they resign from ministerial posts and party positions. Others quit the diet or leave politics for a short period of time. The object of resigning is to seek and obtain sympathetic indulgence. In most areas, pragmatic judgments override ethical considerations, and the electorate usually reelects disgraced politicians. The reelected parliamentarians then resort to Shintoist metaphors and claim that reelection implies the completion of the purification ceremony for their past blemish. Since they have performed absolutions, they maintain that they are qualified to make a fresh start. Using this type of logic, discredited political heavyweights usually make successful comebacks as powerbrokers in national politics. To some degree, such community tolerance reflects the daily reality of electors who themselves see nothing wrong in politicians seeking favors by giving expensive gifts to those who may aid them. The practice of those at the helm of the establishment corresponds with the social customs of people at the grassroots.18

3 Local politics against the national bureaucracy Local governments in Japan have considerable autonomy in some areas, in spite of Japan’s highly centralized political and bureaucratic structures. Pluralistic competition exists between the central and local governments, with the latter having two tiers: first, forty-seven prefectural governments, and second, within each prefecture, municipal governments of cities, towns, and villages.19 As the rivalry between various levels has intensified in recent years, prefectural governors and mayors of major cities in particular have joined forces to press for the decentralization of resources and authorities into local governments. As mentioned, the major issue is that the amount of local tax that each local government can collect is limited so that it must rely upon the subsidies of national ministries, which have the final decision-making power over crucial elements of its finances. Though all political parties advocate that the national bureaucracy’s power over prefectures and municipalities be reduced, the realities of local governance complicate the process of decentralization. The political conflict between center and periphery manifests most sharply in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture, where threequarters of the US military bases in Japan are situated. Since the 1990s, social movements have been intense, demanding the reduction and eventual removal of American bases and a review of the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement (ratified in 1960), a bilateral accord that forms the basis of their current situation. The movements have escalated as a consequence of the large number

of sexual assaults of Okinawan women and girls by US soldiers, American helicopter and airplane crashes, and noise pollution issues near the bases. Though the Okinawa prefectural government has repeatedly confronted the Tokyo government over the issues, the status quo has hardly changed. Other prefectures are not willing to share the burden of accommodating US bases, nor are the US forces prepared to make fundamental changes, due to the importance of Okinawa as a strategic location in their Asia-Pacific military program.

Okinawa and the US military bases In the 2010s, the focal point of confrontation between the local Okinawa government and the central Tokyo government was the relocation program of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Camp Schwab in Henoko, a plan that both Tokyo and the US military pressed for and implemented with landfill work initiated at the new site. A large number of Okinawans and their supporters staged demonstrations and sit-ins time and again in protest against the project, and anti-Tokyo governors were elected with the backing of voters across the political

spectrum

despite

the

central

government’s

endorsement of more sympathetic and compromising local opposition groups. The case of Okinawa suggests that the combined might of the national government and the international superpower cannot quell the counter voices at the prefectural and grassroots levels. The issue is discussed in the video On Okinawa, Locals Want U.S. Troops to Leave, at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwHGcT-lrM

(PBS

NewsHour, 16 September 2017).

(a) Project implementation Every local government has its own regional demands and requirements and attempts to reflect them in the lobbying process. The central government does not uniformly impose its strategy upon

local governments, which have the right to request and lobby for the subsidized projects they prefer. For instance, they have day-to-day know-how regarding a number of social welfare programs, which are practically their business rather than that of the state. These programs include the establishment and operation of day-care centers, homes for the aged, public housing for the poor, and other welfare institutions. Unsatisfactory implementation of such programs sometimes means the loss of electoral support for local politicians, who thus have reason to press for their successful management and expansion. In most projects of these kinds, significant input by local government to the process is inevitable, making traffic two-way between the state and localities. In the end, the central government formulates the general direction according to what it regards as the national interest, municipal governments implement the projects, and prefectural governments perform mediating functions. (b) Routine lobbying Prefectural governors, municipal mayors, local legislators, and provincial business representatives visit Tokyo from time to time to negotiate with ministry bureaucrats to win as large a share as possible of the national government’s budgetary and project allocations. Members of parliament who represent the constituencies of these lobby groups play vital roles in bringing political pressure to bear on the decision-making process of ministries. National parliamentarians from rural areas, for example, exercise great influence as representatives of the agricultural community. On the

eve of national budget formulation, it is routine for a variety of local lobbyists to fill the corridors of ministry buildings, where national officials hold hearings with them concerning their situations. (c) Interregional competition Ministerial sectionalism, which filters through local governments, has consolidated an excessively compartmentalized bureaucracy at regional levels, but this represents only one side of the coin. There is also lateral rivalry between municipalities and between prefectures to maximize their performance in local politics and administration. Local governments are conscious of their position in the national ranking and are keen to compete with those of comparable size and status to obtain

subsidies,

projects,

and

other

preferential

treatment.

Neighboring municipalities and adjacent prefectures insist on similar deals, in view of their proximity to favored regions. Appealing to regional identities, local politicians run campaigns to raise the standards of their areas, demands that national bureaucrats cannot easily ignore, for political reasons. Local bureaucrats, too, often succeed in gaining salary levels and working conditions similar to those in comparable prefectures or municipalities. Relatively poor prefectures and municipalities actively seek large-scale projects as a means of redressing the interregional balance. Local initiatives have been essential to such major projects as the establishment of nuclear energy plants, extension of the bullet-train lines, provision of superhighways, development of resort centers, and so forth.

Interregional rivalry of this kind puts pressure on national bureaucrats in their decision-making. Table 9.2 locates the major players on two axes. One is that of competition between centralized and decentralized power structures. The other contrasts orientations in favor of bureaucratic regulation with those favoring deregulation. Although the three power blocs displayed in Figure 9.1 exist in the centralized sector, their activities and orientations are influenced and constrained by various local forces. Table 9.2 Comparison of major power players’ orientations Structural makeup Orientation

Centralized

Decentralized

Bureaucratic regulation

National bureaucracy, some national business organizations

Local governments, some resident movements

Deregulation

Most national business organizations, national political parties

Local business community, local political interest groups, some resident movements

VII The case of Fukushima: collusive center and civil defiance On 11 March 2011 the northeastern region of Japan experienced a massive earthquake, followed by a series of extremely destructive tsunamis. Nearly 16,000 people were killed and more than 2,500 were reported missing.20 Many people lost their families, friends, and homes and had to live in temporary shelters for a long period of time. The crushing calamity gave rise to subsequent explosions at nuclear power plants situated on the coast of Fukushima, some 230 kilometers north of Tokyo, causing further unprecedented disaster around Fukushima prefecture and beyond. Hazardous nuclear substances spread through the nearby area, forcing residents to evacuate to safer communities, while also raising serious health concerns among citizens of adjacent prefectures – including the highly populated Tokyo metropolitan region. A considerable quantity of recycled water which was supposed to be sealed within the nuclear plant’s system kept leaking into the soil and underground water and eventually leached into the sea – awakening alarm among the fishing industry and consumers of marine products. With nowhere to go, contaminated debris accumulated in the areas affected by the earthquake, tsunamis, and nuclear explosions, but few prefectures or municipalities were willing to accept responsibility. No one knows exactly how many years or decades it will take to clean up the radioactive soil and water on the plains, hills, and

mountains and in the ocean. This is undoubtedly the greatest nuclear power plant disaster that Japan has suffered in the nation’s history.

Figure 9.4 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in daytime: aerial view from airplane The responses of Japanese society to this unprecedented calamity dramatically exhibited the centripetal and the centrifugal forces at work as the rival undercurrents of Japanese society. This section focuses both on the way in which the national center made deliberate attempts to conceal and underreport the repercussions of the disaster and on the extent to which concerned citizens have tried to mount antinuclear campaigns (detailed in Chapter 12), a specific case of tug-of-war between the establishment and civil society, whose outcome will seriously affect the future configuration of Japanese society.

1 TEPCO and the nuclear village The Fukushima tragedy was manmade at every step. Although the earthquake itself was unavoidable, much of the resulting human tragedy could have been prevented if Japanese decision-makers had taken a different path before, during, and after 11 March 2011. In particular, the Fukushima nuclear explosion and its ensuing disaster revealed collusion at the top level of the country, involving the nuclear power industry, the national bureaucracy, and the three-way power bloc. Most mainstream mass media, as well as nuclear science academia, were also enmeshed in the complicated web of mutual collaboration and complicity. The network of nuclear power promoters, often referred to as the ‘nuclear village’, formed the complex that generated, disseminated, and benefited from what was called the ‘myth of safe nuclear energy’. A deep-seated structure of complicity was built around the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which ran the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the key government body supposed to oversee the safety of nuclear power plants from an independent and neutral perspective, was part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which promoted nuclear electricity generation as the mainstay of its national energy program. Furthermore, for decades some high-ranking officials of these

government

entities

secured

executive

positions,

amakudari, with TEPCO after retiring from their official posts.

via

Nuclear experts also enjoyed similar cozy interdependence with the government and power companies, which provided them with large research funds. On the whole, these academics were pronuclear scientists who tended to argue that radiation risks were limited.21 Nuclear scientists who voiced concerns about the dangers of nuclear power plants did not share in the benefits of such grants and, in some cases, were prevented from obtaining higher positions in universities. A well-known case in point was a small group of middle-aged, and now retired, concerned nuclear specialists based at Kyoto University, who were forced to remain at the level of research assistant throughout their academic careers.22 TEPCO is the most powerful of the nine regionally based power companies that monopolize both the production and the delivery of electricity across the nation. These power companies have been able

to

maintain

exclusive

rights

despite

the

step-by-step

privatization of most monopoly sectors, including postal services, national railways, airways, and telephones. The companies, notably TEPCO,

embody

the

old-style

management

model

lauded

internationally in the 1980s as the engine of the so-called Japanese miracle, for its internal cohesion, employee loyalty, and behindclosed-doors decision-making practices.23 The company has a checkered history when it comes to transparency. In 2002, it was revealed that the company had fabricated data on the levels of radioactivity in its plant,24 an incident which only added to the post-Fukushima community suspicion that the full extent of the ongoing risks and dangers was being downplayed to protect the future of Japan’s nuclear industry and

shield corporate and ministerial interests. In old-style Japanese corporate culture, the flow of information is often delayed due to the multiple and complex layers of communication channels and consensus formation processes. In the context of the Fukushima crisis, crucial data were withheld by prolonged internal consultations at various levels. TEPCO operates within the conventional convoy system in which government ministries protect companies that are in trouble while supervising and overseeing the private sector in the name of national interest. In peaceful situations, the system cultivates close links between large corporations and governmental agencies in a collusive fashion. Closed to outsiders, Japan’s major banks, which lie within this circle, have been quick to support TEPCO while being slow to offer aid to individual citizens.25 Major companies in this mold in Japan are situated at the top of the corporate pyramid, above their own associated enterprises, subsidiaries, and subcontracting companies; a small number of large businesses prevails over a large number of smaller ones, a dual structure most conspicuous in the keiretsu system, as discussed in Chapter 5. Many workers who continued to battle on the dangerous frontline in and around the nuclear power plant to control the disaster were not TEPCO employees but workers from the lower-level companies under its command. Japan’s conventional corporate culture reflects the community values in which perseverance, patience, and self-control are emphasized. When applied to the convoy system, however, such moral principles give priority to the collective and organizational

interests of government ministries and leading corporations. Closely knit and tightly structured, the ministry-industry complex is based on employees’ quiet loyalty and devotion and is consistent with the values of individual self-restraint and endurance. Virtually no voices of concern or dissent openly articulate from within this structure.

2 Manipulation of hardship on the periphery The disasters drew public attention to regional inequality and the disparity between urban and rural areas. The destruction of small car parts production factories, which are concentrated in the Tōhoku region, paralyzed the car industry in Japan, as well as overseas, an indication of the dependency of multinational car companies on their subsidiaries and subcontractors in the hinterland. The Tōhoku district has long been regarded as the nation’s backwater which has supported the prosperity of the metropolis of Tokyo. Located away from the national center and faced with the danger of nuclear radiation, Fukushima and other regions housing nuclear power plants in Tōhoku have supplied nuclear-generated electricity to the glittering megacities in and around the capital, where one-third of electricity was nuclear dependent. The shortage of power ensuing from the shutdown of the Fukushima plants suddenly limited electricity usage in the major cities and forced residents to realize that their comfortable lifestyles owed much to the supply of energy generated in distant locations that bear the attendant risks. Yet, it is telling that those who live outside the nuclear contamination zones are either covertly reluctant or openly opposed to various programs to move radioactive debris to their communities, a kind of regional egoism in which the center remains unwilling to share the plight of the periphery. In retrospect, the Japaneselanguage book titled ‘Build nuclear power plants in Tokyo,’ published

under this provocative and sarcastic title more than three decades ago by an antinuclear journalist, hits the mark.26 Most cities, towns, and villages where nuclear power plants are situated allowed their construction and operation in exchange for substantial grants and subsidies from the central government and power companies. With no profitable industries and limited employment opportunities, these localities were attracted to the financial carrots dangled in front of them and succumbed to the whims of the national ministries and powerful corporations. The Fukushima incident exposed the relationship between center and periphery to the public eye while making weak municipalities aware of the broader costs a nuclear accident entailed. As a result, they appear to be increasingly unwilling to accept short-term economic incentives in return for extensive and long-term dangers to their populace. In a different context, it emerged in 2019 that peripheral localities often took the initiative in luring electricity companies to establish and maintain nuclear power plants in their areas. The deputy major of Takahama town in Fukui prefecture, where a nuclear power plant is situated, kept giving cash, gold, and other gifts to the executives of the Kansai Electric Power Company – which supplies electricity to Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and other Kansai areas – in an attempt to sustain and expand the nuclear arrangements. (He passed away in March 2019 at the age of ninety and was never subjected to police investigation.) The center–periphery link involves two-way traffic of unscrupulous complicity.

3 Division in the business and civil communities The Japanese are still divided over the continuation of nuclear power supply. The business community is not uniform. At one end of the spectrum, Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), the most influential employer organization, takes a pronuclear stance and actively explores the possibility of exporting Japanese nuclear power plant packages to Vietnam, Turkey, Jordan, South Korea, and Russia. Meanwhile, the knowledge industry tends to favor the expansion of sustainable energy and calls for environmentally friendly developments. After Fukushima, Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank, a leading mobile-phone company, pressed for the establishment of nationwide networks of solar panels in cooperation with local municipalities across Japan.27 Hiroshi Mikitani, the head of Rakuten, a leading online shopping mall, resigned from Keidanren in June 2011 in protest against its pronuclear stance.28 Studio Ghibli, the most well known Japanese anime production company, which produced such internationally acclaimed movies as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbor Totoro (1998), and Spirited Away (2001), attracted much public attention in 2011 by placing a huge banner on the company’s office building that read, ‘We want to make films without using electricity

produced

by

nuclear

power.’29

These

enterprises

constitute the driving force of Japan’s new economy and take a nonnuclear line, which is not only ethically and morally more seemly but also economically compatible with their business opportunities

and interests – a reflection of the wider division between industrial and cultural capitalism becoming evident in the Japanese economy in general (as discussed in Chapter 5). At the community level, the proportion of nuclear skeptics has significantly increased since the Fukushima disaster. The risks and dangers were highlighted for the emerging skeptics who had benefited

from

cheap,

reliable

power

and

had

long

and

unquestioningly believed in the myth of safe nuclear energy. Yet, many of them would prefer to pursue a less nuclear-dependent society slowly, without drastically altering their present lifestyles of convenience, efficiency, and comfort. These gradualists are willing to refrain from overusing air-conditioners and to turn off electricity at home as frequently as possible, thereby reducing the overall level of power consumption, but are unwilling to accept substantial hikes in electricity bills, which nonnuclear alternatives might bring about. Chapter 12 examines the rise of antinuclear movements that erupted after Fukushima as part of widespread social dissent in the 2010s.

In the wake of Fukushima The Fukushima nuclear meltdown continues to affect the environment and people in the area. Highly radioactive wastewater has nowhere to go, and many former residents who evacuated are reluctant to return. No political will has effectively addressed the aftermath of the disaster. The image of a technologically sophisticated nation is now accompanied by the impression that it is both highly vulnerable and unresponsive to natural disasters and the realization that the advance of science has hazardous side effects. The video Returning

to

Fukushima,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?

v=jFv5yY7pMgQ (National Geographic, 27 February 2019), shows the fear, anger, and ambivalence of residents who wish to go back to their home towns.

VIII The history war While coping with a variety of domestic issues, the Japanese establishment has faced condemnation from countries in the region over the nation’s military past. Some seven decades after the end of World War II, Japan is still embroiled in a history war with neighboring countries about what the Japanese military did or did not do during the war. While Germany is accepted as a leading nation in Europe after full apologies and compensations for its fascist past, Japan still bears the brunt of criticism by Korea and China for remaining equivocal about the country’s wartime activities. Five historical issues in particular have provoked bitter and highly charged controversy. The first, a long-burning problem, pertains to the issue of ianfu (comfort women). During the war, many women, mainly from Korea, which was a Japanese colony at the time, were recruited to frontline brothels to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers. Public opinion is divided over the extent to which the Japanese military was involved in the recruitment of these women. In August 1993 the cabinet secretary of the Japanese government issued a statement to the effect that the Japanese military had initiated the establishment and management of the brothels, had engaged in the transfer of the women, and was involved in the brothels’ operations not only indirectly but also directly. In many cases, at the request of the military, commercial dealers mainly recruited the women, often against their will. The authorities were

directly privy to these activities. Observing that the comfort women endured much pain and incurable psychological and physical damage, the Japanese government expressed ‘sincere apologies’ and

underwent

a

thorough

self-examination

in

the

official

statement.30 However, this is not a consensus interpretation of what occurred. Many Japanese politicians, historians, and revisionist ideologues dispute the government’s formal position, arguing that the comfort stations were commercial brothels and that there is no documented evidence in existence to show enforcement by the Japanese military. The issue became knotty as a result of the widely circulated testimony of a writer who claimed that he had been involved in the forceful recruitment by Japanese soldiers of Korean women in Cheju Island, South Korea. The Asahi Shimbun, a major national daily, repeatedly reported his narratives in the 1980s and early 1990s but in 2014 withdrew them, claiming they were concocted stories, a development that complicated the controversy further. In Korea, citizens’ groups in support of comfort women erected statues in various parts of the country, including in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, as reminders of the women’s sufferings. Some Korean residents abroad and other sympathizers also put up similar statues in the United States, China, Australia, Canada, and other countries, moves that have caused conflict with Japanese residents in those areas as well as with Japanese government representatives. The second point of dispute centers on South Korean laborers who were recruited before and during World War II to work for

Japanese companies. Some ex-laborers maintained that they were treated as slaves and filed lawsuits against more than seventy Japanese companies involved in their recruitment. In one of these cases, in October 2018 the Supreme Court of Korea ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered these companies to provide them with compensation. Against this ruling, the Japanese government claims that the issue had been resolved with the 1965 agreement between the two governments in which Korea agreed to relinquish its compensation claims completely in return for Japan’s financial and material contributions to rebuild the country. The Japanese side argues that the Korean position violates the intergovernmental accord. The conflict resembles the comfort women dispute in the sense that the core disagreement concerns the extent to which the victims were willing to work or were coerced against their volition. With many similar lawsuits underway in South Korea, Japan’s colonial past in the first half of the twentieth century remains a thorn in the side of the Japanese establishment. The third issue concerns what has become known as the Nanjing Massacre, in 1937, in which a large number of Chinese soldiers, prisoners, and citizens were murdered in the largest city in southern China by the Japanese military in its war against China. At one end of the spectrum, a claim mainly advanced by Chinese advocates estimates the number of people massacred at more than 300,000, a figure based on a ruling handed down by the military court held to judge Japanese military leaders in Nanjing in 1946 by the Chinese nationalist government and used by the Chinese communist government. Japanese historians tend to suggest smaller

numbers, although they still range from tens of thousands to more than 100,000. At the other end, some revisionist historians in Japan maintain that the entire incident is an outright fabrication. The fourth divisive issue revolves around the Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead are enshrined, including the fourteen leaders of the Japanese military who were executed immediately after World War II as class-A war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, often referred to as the Tokyo Trial. Located in the center of Tokyo, the shrine was established in 1869 specifically for the repose of soldiers and military officers who lost their lives on battlefields, and it holds a special place in the Shinto system. The shrine is closely connected to the state and has been visited, in either official or private capacity, by prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and parliamentarians who are committed to nationalistic principles and patriotic doctrines. Ill feelings run high against these visits in East and Southeast Asian countries, theaters of World War II, where many find it offensive that Japanese politicians pay homage to the wartime military leaders. At the fifth level of historical dispute, Japan has territorial issues with

neighboring

countries,

conflicts

arising

from

different

interpretations of historical documents. In particular, two groups of uninhabited islands, which the Japanese government assumes to belong to Japan – Senkaku (Okinawa prefecture), called Diaoyutai in Chinese, and Takeshima (Shimane prefecture), called Dokdo in Korean – are contested respectively by China (as well as Taiwan) and South Korea as their territories. In addition, Japan claims that Russia has illegally occupied a group of islands – Habomai,

Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu in Hokkaidō – since the end of World War II. The sovereignty of these islands has been subject to territorial dispute between Japan and Russia for decades. In order to clarify Japan’s general position about its military past, on 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, issued a statement which read, During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations. In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again, my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology. Allow me to express my feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad, of that history.31 While the statement has represented the official position of successive Japanese governments for more than two decades, a significant number of parliamentarians question whether Japan’s military activity was an act of aggression. Some go so far as to maintain that Japan engaged in the war as the liberator of Asian countries under the colonial rule of Western nations. Others argue that Japan is unfairly singled out as the guilty nation despite similar past acts committed by Western nations.

Ideology that is regarded as ultranationalistic and extremely right wing in most Western societies occupies a legitimate position in the Japanese establishment and conservative politics and enjoys noticeable popular support. From time to time, populist politicians have emerged, presenting themselves as ordinary people and attacking Japan’s established institutions: the mainstream political parties, national bureaucracy, and mainstream media. Their targets include foreign countries, especially the dominance of the Caucasian West and the threat of rising Asian neighbors. These leaders tend to advance a sharp dichotomy of the populace versus the elite, and the foes versus the allies, and represent themselves as heroes defending the common people in the fight against the enemies. Meanwhile, in the face of the emotional politicization of the interpretations of East Asian history, some Japanese, Korean, and Chinese scholars engage in dialogue on historical analysis to develop a sober, rational, and transnational understanding of the history of the region.32 Recognizing the differences in the collective memories of the nation-states, these scholars are attempting to integrate and transcend such narratives to advance a shared historical knowledge and launch a collaborative project to write history textbooks together, in the hope of laying the foundation for mutual understanding among East Asian countries.

IX The media establishment Japan’s fourth estate, the world of the mainstream media, is an influential bloc which exists separately from, but closely linked with, the three centers of power.33 It has several distinctive characteristics. Media organizations exhibit a high degree of centralization and keiretsu arrangements similar to those in the corporate circles of manufacturing and trading. They enjoy close links with establishment institutions through exclusive reporters’ clubs (kisha kurabu). Furthermore, the educational and social backgrounds of journalists in large media firms resemble those of elites in other spheres.

1 A high degree of centralization Japan’s print media establishment is highly centralized; the concentration of major media industries in Tokyo facilitates ideological centralization, as discussed in Chapter 4. Five nationally distributed dailies, Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi, Nikkei, and Sankei, collectively claim about half the market. All have their headquarters in Tokyo, maintaining major editorial offices and printing facilities in Osaka and a few other large Japanese cities. These newspapers enjoy mammoth circulations, with the Yomiuri, the most widely circulated newspaper in the world, printing some 8 million copies daily in 2020.34 Almost all Japanese newspapers are available online. On the whole, these newspapers remain politically neutral so as to

maintain

their

large

readership

and

avoid

antagonizing

subscribers. The Asahi and the Mainichi tend to be left of center, and the Yomiuri and the Sankei are regarded as being on the right, but none of them editorially supports any political party in elections. In major urban areas, these newspapers appear in both morning and evening editions, and stories in the morning editions are continued in the evening editions. Each edition has several subeditions distributed to different regions. The contents of each subedition differ substantially to cater for local interests. Each morning edition has local news pages, which staff writers at prefectural bureaus write and edit.

The book industry is also highly centralized, with some 80 percent of publishers operating in Tokyo. Most editors and writers are Tokyo based because of the high concentration of book and magazine publishers there. There is at least one bookshop in every shopping area and near to almost every railway station, with some 10,000 bookshops operating throughout the country as community outlets of the knowledge industry,35 though their numbers have been declining. Two book sales agents based in Tokyo, Tōhan and Nippan, together

nearly

monopolize

distribution

networks;

bookshops

purchase books through them, not directly from publishing houses. Thus, a bookshop in Nagano, for example, normally cannot buy books directly from Nagano publishers; the latter must ship them first to the agents of the Tokyo-based distributors, who in turn sell them to the bookshop. Publishers who publish news and current affairs magazines are unwilling to operate outside the metropolis, because they cannot afford to make such a detour in marketing their magazines. In electronic media, the NHK networks, which are partly funded by the government, occupy a special place and are in the strongest position with regard to funding, prestige, and ratings.36 Broadcasting since 1925, NHK monopolized nationwide radio networks until the early 1950s, when commercial radio stations were given licenses. NHK began television broadcasting in 1953, before commercial networks entered the field. It has two nationwide radio networks, two nationwide terrestrial digital television networks, and two satellite television channels beamed across the nation. NHK may be

considered partly a pay television organization, as its budget comprises not only government subsidies but also fees that television viewers are supposed to pay to it.

2 Similarities with other large corporations The internal structure of Japan’s mainstream media organizations resembles that of many other large business corporations. For commercial operations, major media organizations use keiretsu arrangements similar to those of large industrial and trading companies. Five key television stations in Tokyo are directly connected with the five national dailies; their executives move across the print and electronic spheres of their organizations, a practice analogous to the amakudari system discussed earlier. In the distribution market, keiretsu principles prevail: of more than 18,000 newspaper distribution agents around the country, a majority are exclusive or semi-exclusive outlets of major dailies. The big three newspapers – Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri – have their own chains of distribution agents across the nation and compete fiercely for subscribers. Newspaper carriers deliver one of these three publications, plus its associated newspapers, exclusively. The sales division of each major newspaper sends sales agents to households across the nation to persuade them to subscribe. Newspapers frequently give away various commodities, such as detergents, towels, watches, travel tickets, and gift vouchers, to expand their long-term market share. In this respect, Japanese newspapers epitomize the market expansion strategy of Japanese corporations. Their blatantly intrusive methods of soliciting for subscriptions have attracted public criticism, revealing a discrepancy

between the high moral principles they advocate in their publications and the manipulative tricks they use in order to increase sales. Journalists in major media organizations stay with the same company for their entire working lives. Although some exceptionally high profile star journalists permit themselves to be headhunted, moving from one organization to another, the overwhelming majority resemble the salarymen and salarywomen in other large firms, remaining loyal to their corporations for some forty years. Multiskilling and lateral promotion form part of the training of print media journalists. Reporters beginning their careers with major national dailies commence work in a local bureau. Usually, they are first assigned to a police newsbeat, covering cases of homicide, suicide, robbery, embezzlement, fire, traffic accidents, natural disasters, and other incidents in which police are involved. This initiation is aimed at developing general skills in young journalists. In this way, it resembles the training of employees in other large enterprises and of officials in the public bureaucracy. Newspaper companies and television networks rely on the same labor supply as other major corporations in recruiting prospective graduates from universities. Thus, journalists and members of the bureaucratic and business establishment in Japan have quite similar social backgrounds, with a majority of news writers being male graduates of high-ranking universities. Although they may be a countervailing force to Japan’s establishment, their sociological attributes are similar to those of the Japanese power elite and differ vastly from those of the majority of the population.

3 Institutional linkage with the establishment Japan’s press freedom has been under international scrutiny because of the way in which the information-gathering units of major media organizations are based in and connected to government and business establishments. Government ministries, prefectural and municipal governments, police headquarters, and business and union organizations all provide reporters of major print and electronic media with office space called kisha kurabu (reporters’ clubs). These clubrooms are normally equipped with telephones and other communication machines, service personnel, and other facilities. Media organizations use them at nominal charge. In almost all cases, club membership is restricted to the reporters of major news organizations and is not open to journalists from minor presses or to foreign journalists. In return, government officials, politicians, and business and union leaders use the clubs as venues for prepared public announcements which the reporters write up as news stories. By constantly feeding information to reporters in this environment, representatives of the institutions which provide club facilities can obliquely control the way in which information is reported to the public. Reporters cannot risk being excluded from their club, because they would then lose access to this regular flow of information. The sentiment of mutual cooperation among all parties runs deep, and club members at times agree to place reporting embargoes on sensitive issues.37 The media establishment is also

involved in the policymaking process of government, as it sends representatives to government advisory councils. Japan remains a country where freedom of the press is generally ensured and established. Yet the relationship between major media organizations and political and economic institutions contains elements of congenial rivalry and cordial coordination. Such affinities derive from the media’s reliance on Japanese business practice and from the information-gathering infrastructure of exclusive reporters’ clubs.

The royal family Japan is a liberal democracy based on the principle that sovereignty rests with the people, as the present constitution proclaims. The emperor, the head of state, derives his position from ‘the will of the people’ and performs only ceremonial functions; he has no political or legal powers to govern the nation. The constitution defines him as ‘the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people’, unlike the prewar Meiji constitution, which vested the source of sovereign power totally in the emperor. The emperor appoints the prime minister designated by parliament and the chief justice of the Supreme Court designated by the cabinet and undertakes nominal and symbolic duties as spelled out in the constitution. Both the current and former emperors pledged to ‘abide by the constitution’. Some advocates for constitutional amendments have been unhappy with such declarations while continuing to promote the imperial tradition. The present emperor, Naruhito, whose reign bears the era name of Reiwa, was enthroned in May 2019 after the abdication of his father, Akihito. During his reign (the Heisei era), Akihito popularized and improved the image of the imperial household, towards which a significant majority – some

three-quarters

–

of

the

Japanese

now

‘feel

affectionately’. The present Imperial Household Law (enacted in 1947) allows only males to become emperor, and Naruhito

has only a daughter. Though conservative leaders are reluctant to legislate the enthronement of female emperors, public opinion is strongly in favor of this occurring in the future.38 Negative comments about the imperial household were taboo during the preceding periods of Meiji, Taisho, and Showa, but tabloid newspapers and weekly magazines now freely publish gossip about its members, just as they do about movie stars and media celebrities. The public responded positively to Akihito’s visits to former wartime battlefields like Okinawa and Saipan to console the souls of the war dead. His trips to areas like the Tōhoku region, disaster stricken by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, to express his sympathy also helped him become relatable to the common people.

X Five rifts in the elite structure Various elements within Japan are poised to contend with each other. To recapitulate the major points made in this chapter, one might identify five divisions in the elite structure in Japan. There is, first, a sharp rivalry between the nationalistic, racist, and particularistic elite on the one hand and the more internationally minded, purely profit-oriented, and universalistic elite on the other. The symbolic embodiment of the former type is the head of the Japanese imperial family, tennō (the emperor). The latter type is exemplified by shōsha, the well-known Japanese trading houses which have acted as intermediaries between Japanese domestic enterprises and overseas companies in exporting and importing and thereby have contributed to the international stature of the Japanese economy. Tennō capitalism and shōsha capitalism were compatible as long as the economy was not fully incorporated into the international market. With Japan becoming a global economic superpower, however, shōsha capitalism has become increasingly multinational, locating both its production bases and its consumption outlets beyond Japan’s national boundaries on a massive scale. For multinational organizations, domestic considerations are only part of a broad international strategy. In contrast, tennō capitalists find it difficult to accept encroachment on Japan’s domestic priorities; they vigorously oppose the liberalization of agricultural imports and the acceptance of foreign workers in the domestic labor market. They

favor moral education and strict discipline in schools, defend Japan’s activities during World War II, and attack foreign criticisms of Japan. The

second

rift

appears

between

economic-superpower

expansionists and strategic power-seekers. The former believe that the nation must continue to give priority to the economy-first policy of postwar Japan, make efforts to further strengthen its economicsuperpower status, and refrain from taking political and strategic leadership in the international context. According to these advocates, the constitution should be maintained, and nationalism and jingoism should be avoided in favor of the economic wellbeing of the nation. In contrast, strategic power-seekers take the view that Japan must explore the possibility of assuming international responsibilities in political and strategic areas in accordance with its economic position in the world. These contenders stress the importance of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces participating in United Nations peacekeeping operations, suggest the possibility of amendments to the constitution for the nation to become a fully fledged military power, and recommend vigorous efforts to acquire a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The third division exists between US-oriented and Asia-oriented capitalists. In the late 2000s, China displaced the United States as the most important country for Japanese exports and overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in the world, a development that has inevitably compelled the Japanese economic establishment to calculate the relative importance of the US and Asian economies for Japan.

Japanese

companies

have

expanded

their

offshore

production in Asia, where cheap labor and facilities are available.

Japanese business finds vast and attractive markets in the booming economies of East and Southeast Asia. In this context, economic pragmatism overpowers ideological dogma. It is not surprising that the Asia-oriented business elite finds it helpful for the Japanese political establishment to make public apologies for, and to engage in self-criticism over, Japan’s wartime atrocities in Asia. This helps smooth the way for Japanese business in the region. In the long run, they argue, the conciliatory stance of some leaders towards Asian countries will pay dividends. Meanwhile, the pro-American group finds it essential for Japan to give top priority to US–Japanese transactions in every sphere of international relations, since the United States is still the most powerful and innovative country with which Japan shares the fundamental values of democracy and advanced market capitalism. In contrast, China in particular is arguably a nation of dictatorship, with little space for civil society, individual freedom, and political pluralism, a system which fundamentally contradicts Japan’s polity. The nation’s general prosperity owes much to the strategic protection of the region by the military might of the United States. The pro-American group contends that Japan’s long-term benefits lie in its stable relationship with the United States, which has enabled the country to establish its economic and technological status in the world. The fourth area of competition is between rural and urban interests. For a long time, the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives group has delivered votes to the LDP, which in return has done as much as possible to close the agricultural market to imports. The exportoriented urban manufacturing and service sectors of the economy,

however, see the possibility of such protectionism backfiring and making it difficult for them to export goods and commodities overseas on a reciprocal basis. In view of the fact that the farming population is now a small minority in comparison with the workforce in export industries, the business hierarchy of Japan has deserted rural interests in pressing for Japan to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership scheme, which attempts to remove customs tariffs across the board among its member countries. The fifth contest is between those who give top priority to economic competition and those who emphasize the importance of political protection of the weak, and it underlies arguably the most fundamental ideological cleavage in contemporary Japan. As the neoliberal paradigm prevails, economic indices have become universally regarded as the most significant measures of human existence. Economy-first principles have become established more firmly than ever as the dominant ideology of Japanese society. However, Japan’s economic stagnation has sensitized its public to fairness issues such as quality of life, ecology, eldercare, gender and ethnic equality, and democratic representation that the nation’s elite cannot ignore. Those who press for the protection of the weak regard contemporary Japan as a society whose concern with social justice has become tenuous in favor of economism. This conflict is examined again in Chapter 12 with a focus on the dynamics of contemporary civil society in Japan.

XI Conclusion The Japanese establishment has been broadly characterized by the long-standing connections between the public bureaucracy and the ruling LDP, buttressed by influential interest groups. This structure at the top of the polity unavoidably undergoes readjustment and realignment, with the penetration of globalism, deregulation ideology, and the free market paradigm. At one end of the continuum are groups staunchly committed to the status quo. At the other end are those advocating major reforms on all fronts. In between, diverse groups form complex networks of alliance and rivalry, thereby creating an increasingly pluralistic structure of competition for power. Though community political culture in support of Japan’s establishment endures, reformist forces are also at work at prefectural and grassroots levels. While the Fukushima nuclear disaster revealed the complicity of the nation’s establishment, the resistance of the peripheral regions to the center has been most conspicuous in Okinawa, where US military bases are concentrated. Furthermore, the country’s leadership faces the challenge of the long-term history war with East Asian countries. Overall, Japan’s electorate is disenchanted with the nation’s politics. Turnout at local elections is especially low, with a half of voters abstaining in the 2010s. Many nonvoters feel that their votes would

have

little

chance

of

altering

the

present

political

circumstances. The younger generations in particular tend to stick to

the status quo in fear of the impact of significant political changes on their existing circumstances. Though lacking in transparency and abounding in ambiguity, the Japanese establishment at the parliamentary level appears to remain robust in the absence of credible opposition parties and convincing alternative narratives with the capacity to persuade the nation’s electorate.

Research questions 1. To what degree does the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial power succeed in Japan’s polity? 2. What historical factors contributed to the strength of the national bureaucracy in Japan’s establishment? 3. In terms of relations between center and periphery, what are the similarities and differences between the case of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and that of the proliferation of US bases on Okinawa? 4. What aspects of the establishment’s organization have enabled the LDP to govern Japan continuously for such a long period of time? 5. How do ultranationalist groups in Japan compare with their counterparts in Europe and the United States?

Further readings Johnson, Chalmers 1982, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1935–1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McCormack, Gavan and Norimatsu, Satoko Oka 2018, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States, 2nd edn. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Neary, Ian 2019, The State and Politics in Japan, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Pempel, T. J. 2019, Patterns of Japanese Policymaking. London: Routledge. Stockwin, Arthur and Ampiah, Kweku 2017, Rethinking Japan: The Politics of Contested Nationalism. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Online resources ‘Japanese industry donations to Liberal Democratic Party in 2018 hit ¥2.46 billion, up for seventh straight year’ 2019. Japan Times / Kyodo (29 November), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/11/29/national/politicsdiplomacy/japanese-industry-donations-liberal-democratic-party2018-hit-¥2-46-billion-seventh-straight-year/#.XknbmS2B0sU (may require registration or subscription). Maclachlan, Patricia L. 2014, ‘The electoral power of Japanese interest groups: An organizational perspective’. Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 429–58. Cambridge University Press, www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridgecore/content/view/S1598240800005555. McNeill, David 2016, ‘False dawn: The decline of watchdog journalist in Japan’. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 14, issue 20, no. 2, article 4969, https://apjjf.org/2016/20/McNeill.html. Mulgan, Aurelia George 2018, What’s Wrong with Japan’s Bureaucrats?. East Asia Forum (3 May), www.eastasiaforum.org/2018/05/03/whats-wrong-with-japansbureaucrats/. Stockwin, Arthur 2018, ‘Explaining one-party dominance in Japanese politics’. Australia & Japan in the Region, vol. 6, no. 1 (January),

https://ajrc.crawford.anu.edu.au/department-news/12145/explainingone-party-dominance-japanese-politics. Yee, Wesley 2018, ‘Making Japan great again: Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party as a far right movement’, undergraduate honors thesis. San Francisco: University of San Francisco, https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1023&context=honors. 1 The LDP was occasionally driven into opposition between the early 1990s and the early 2010s but eventually returned to power in the 2012–13 elections, winning landslide victories in both houses. 2 Management and Coordination Agency 2000. 3 Ōbunsha Kyōiku Jōhō Sentā 2019. 4 For an extensive list of major amakudari cases, see Shūkan Gendai 2017. 5 AM, 21 December 2019, pp. 1–2. 6 Shindō 1992, p. 105. 7 Shindō 1992, pp. 105–13. 8 For the debate on Japan’s constitution, see Hook and McCormack 2001; Higuchi 2001. 9 AM, 24 October 2017, p. 7.

10 Mouer 2015. 11 AM, 12 October 2017, p. 38. 12 Sawada 2018. 13 Japan Medical Association 2019. 14 For example, AM, 27 September 2002, p. 14. 15 AM, 11 March 2019, p. 4. 16 Tsujinaka 2002, p. 174. According to Tsujinaka (1988), this pattern contrasts sharply with the US situation, in which lobby groups and pressure organizations give the highest priority to persuading legislators in Congress and the Senate. 17 AM, 14 October 2013, p. 4. 18 See Befu 1974 on how law tangles with culture in Japan. 19 For more on the discussion in this section, see Muramatsu 1988, 1997; Muramatsu, Igbal, and Kume 2002. 20 National Police Agency 2019. 21 Asahi Shimbun 2012–15. 22 Koide 2011. 23 The discussion here is adapted from Sugimoto 2011. 24 AM, 12 December 2002, p. 35.

25 Shūkan Gendai, 16 November 2013, 28 January 2014. 26 Hirose 1986. 27 AM, 14 September 2013, p. 9. 28 AM, 28 July 2011, p. 7. 29 Cinema Today 2011. 30 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1993. 31 The full text is available at Murayama 1995. 32 Bu 2018. 33 Akhavan-Majid 1990; Pharr and Krauss 1996; Krauss 2000. 34 Yomiuri Shimbunsha 2020. 35 Bunka News 2019. 36 See Krauss 2000 for the political dimensions of NHK’s news coverage. 37 Kuga 2016; De Lange 1997. 38 AM, 19 April 2019, p. 3.

Chapter 10

Religion: belief and secularization ◈

I Introduction The Japanese are multireligious, nonreligious, or neither, depending upon how religiosity is defined. Most do not find a contradiction in visiting Shinto shrines on New Year’s Day, being married in a Christian church, and being buried in a grave in a Buddhist temple precinct. Japan is a society in which multiple religious beliefs and practices coexist and coalesce. In a particular way, religion in Japanese society is multicultural, and the analytical framework used to discuss Western religious systems cannot be applied in a straightforward manner. Shinto and Buddhism are the two major traditional religions in Japan, with some 30 and 40 percent of the Japanese estimated to believe in them respectively in 2013,1 although these figures should be assessed with caution because of the nebulous concept of religion in Japan. Intriguingly, time-series surveys conducted over half a century consistently show that only about one-third of the Japanese believe in a religion, while more than two-thirds find that being religious is important.2 Oddly, the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ annual statistical survey of religion in Japan, whose respondents are religious institutions, each of which reports the number of its followers, showed in 2016 the number of Shinto believers to be 85 million, Buddhists 88 million, Christians 2 million, and others 8 million, amounting to a total exceeding 182 million,3 far more than the total population of Japan, which was 126 million. This is clearly a

reflection of the fact that many individuals are counted twice or even three times, highlighting the extent to which Japanese identify with multiple religious beliefs and practices. This chapter endeavors to make sense of Japanese religiosity and to unravel the ways in which it has formed an undercurrent in Japanese society. First, it focuses on the characteristics of traditional religions which took hold in premodern Japan: Shinto, Japan’s native religion; and two imported religions: Buddhism and Christianity. The chapter then analyzes newer religions, founded in the twentieth century, and scrutinizes the more recent emergence of a cultural trend in which individuals seek forms of spirituality outside of established religious spheres. The next section looks at this-worldly financial and political activities of these old and new religions, and the chapter finally sketches how the general trend of secularization faces the revitalization of religious practices.

II Traditional religions

1 Shinto Shinto (literally, ‘ways of gods’) is the indigenous religion in Japan. Well before the establishment of Nara as Japan’s capital, in the late eighth century, Shinto had put down its deep roots as the prevalent belief system among powerful regional clans in and near the center and, to this day, has proven to be an important force in Japanese everyday life. As a folk religion, the initial form of Shinto manifested itself in ancestor veneration, in which people worshipped their ancestors, from whom they expected to receive happiness and protection from curses and evil. Such practices, which existed in Japan prior to the arrival of Buddhism, were analogous to some performed in China and Korea. Shinto has neither a founder, like Christ or Buddha, nor scriptures, like the Bible or sutras, and evolved in close association with oral tradition. Shinto is characterized by three main features: animism, polytheism and syncretism. Animism is the veneration of the supernatural or mystical power that is thought to reside not only in human beings but also in animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and other natural things. While animism is not unique to Japan, Shinto belief has it, for example, that large towering trees form links between heaven and earth through which a god descends to the ground. In some Shinto shrines one can see gigantic rocks bound with long, thick sacred straw rope, indicating that megaliths are also an object of worship. Unlike monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam, which worship a single God, Shinto is polytheistic, featuring myriads of

kami, whose meaning corresponds to ‘god’ in English but originally meant ‘that which excels in its act, be it good or bad’. Indeed, most Shinto shrines deify human figures who have been outstanding in some capacity. Thus, for example, Izumo Shrine, in Shimane prefecture, is well known as a shrine dedicated to a mythological character called Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, a figure believed to have excelled in medical and magical matters and worshipped as a god who presides over marriage, while in the heart of Tokyo, Meiji Shrine enshrines Emperor Meiji, the first emperor of modern Japan. Shinto has neither fundamentalist doctrines nor uncompromising theology. With no mission to proselytize, the religion is syncretic, in that it combines its teaching and practice with other belief systems, liberally accepting the coexistence of multiple religions. Its fusion with Buddhism, for example, is evident at the everyday level even today. Many households have both a Buddhist altar and a Shinto shrine, usually set on a shelf over a lintel and sometimes positioned next to each other. Inhabitants pray in front of one then the other. In this sense, many Japanese practice syncretism in their everyday lives. Although Shinto has retained these three characteristics, there were times in its long history when the pendulum swung in a different direction. For instance, Shinto believers turned violent towards Buddhists in certain periods. A well-known case in point is the eruption of the movements to ‘abolish Buddhism and destroy temples’ (haibutsu kishaku undō) following the government’s announcement of its separation from Shinto at the Meiji Restoration. Shinto believers were in part angry with what they saw as the

relatively superior position occupied by Buddhists in the syncretic system in pre-Meiji Japan and in part stimulated by the nationalist version of Shinto which dismissed Buddhism as an alien religion imported from abroad. They ruined and burned Buddhist temple buildings, statues, scrolls, and other relics. It is important to note that Shinto has been closely associated with the state. Without having religious scriptures, Shinto has attempted to build its foundations upon two ancient texts: Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan) and Kojiki (Records of ancient matters). These were imperially approved historical documents prepared in the formative period of imperial rule, during the seventh and eighth centuries, to justify the authority of the emperor. Mostly based on a variety of mythologies, the narratives include the fictional origin of the nation, which claims that the Japanese nation was created by the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu Ōmikami, as described in Chapter 1. Ise Shrine, the highest-ranking Shinto shrine, is sacred to the goddess and symbolizes the type of Shinto promoted by the state. State-managed Shinto is distinguishable from community-based folk Shinto, though the two forms interacted over the centuries. The state has made use of Shinto as an ideological and material apparatus to control the populace. In this regard the state has been closely supported by imperial authority, as it propagated the mythologies of the beginning of the nation, initiated the construction of shrines across the country, and made many attempts to make Shinto the national religion. In pre-Meiji Japan, the nobility and the samurai classes also played significant roles in protecting and spreading Shinto from above. These undertakings paved the way for

the state’s use of Shinto as moral support for nationalism and even militarism in modern Japan. Though the principle of secularism is ensured in the present constitution, it is often alleged that some Shinto activities border on involvement in national politics (for instance, the case of Yasukuni Shrine, discussed in Chapter 9). As a widespread indigenous religion, Shinto has influenced Japanese popular thinking over centuries in many respects. It does not submit to modern scientism, nor does it comply with strict logicality. At one end of the spectrum, the notions of purity versus pollution have justified the continuation of discrimination. In particular, the residents of buraku communities are subject to prejudice because of the unfounded belief that they have polluted bloodlines (see Chapters 1, 2 and 8). At the other end, the animistic tendency in Japanese thinking reveals itself on ceremonial occasions. At the commencement of construction work, for example, some megascale multinational corporations will organize a ceremony to appease the god of earth. While animism is often accompanied by superstition, ecologists and environmentalists in Japan have observed that the animistic tradition must be seriously studied and selectively revitalized as a system of values that protects nature in order to counter the scientific industrialism that has brought about the worldwide environmental crisis.4 Animistic, polytheistic, and syncretic, Shinto has injected into the populace the belief that contradictory ideas and practices are not entirely inconsistent, enabling them to embrace lives of seemingly incompatible compatibility.

2 Buddhism Buddhism was founded by Siddhārtha Gautama in India in the fifth century BCE and has two streams: Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism arrived in Japan in the sixth century CE via China and Korea. It emphasizes that everybody – be they priest or layperson – can attain salvation. It prioritizes saving other persons’ souls over one’s own while reasoning that one can attain enlightenment in the process of spreading Buddhism among people. In contrast, Theravada, which prevails in Southeast Asia and has very limited presence in Japan, claims that only the monks who have renounced secular life and trained themselves in ascetic practices can find salvation. Simply put, Mahayana is mass oriented and interactive, while Theravada concentrates on individual, selfsufficient salvation. Buddhism introduced new metaphysical theses into the Japanese indigenous religion. Moreover, unlike Shinto, Buddhism articulated a notion of life after death in which paradise and hell are distinguished and one’s deeds in this world determine one’s destination in the afterlife. The Buddhist notions of salvation in the afterlife and reincarnation contrasted with the Shinto-based popular belief that people’s souls do not go to a distant land after death but remain in a mountain, forest, or grove near their village, where, as kami, they watch over their descendants and return to them from time to time to bring about a good harvest.

Initially, Buddhism in Japan was a religion for the imperial household and the nobility class, which sought to keep the nation tranquil by reciting Buddhist prayers and performing Buddhist ceremonies. Most Buddhist sects prevalent today originated in the thirteenth century (the Kamakura period), when the country was in military turmoil, with the rising samurai class and the masses in pursuit of spiritual solutions. As Japanized versions, two lineages of faith are distinguishable from this period: one, other reliance, seeks to attain eternal salvation by placing full reliance on the benevolence of the Buddha, while the other, self-reliance, does so by upholding the principle of spiritual awakening through one’s exertions. These lineages can be characterized as partially overlapping analytic categories rather than distinct doctrinal groups. In the first, other-reliance school, it is believed that everybody has an equal chance to be reborn in Jōdo (the Pure Land) by chanting the oath of Amida Buddha, who has the power to save humankind. One can potentially obtain salvation via total devotion to, and complete trust in, Amida. The two leading sects, Jōdo Shinshū (founded by Shinran, a priest, in the thirteenth century) and Jōdoshū (founded by Hōnen, Shinran’s teacher), embrace this line of belief, attracting the largest Buddhist following in the country. Hōnen taught that people could find salvation by continuously reciting ‘Namu Amidabutsu’ (Hail Amida Buddha). Shinran went further, stating, ‘If even good people can be reborn in the Pure Land, how much more so for evil people,’ according to Tannishō (Notes lamenting deviations), a document believed to have recorded his teachings after his death.

In the second, self-reliance school, one is thought to be able to achieve salvation through one’s own efforts. A case in point is Zen Buddhism, in which practitioners are expected to discover their immanent Buddhahood in meditation by completely emptying their self and attaining a transcendent state of perfect selflessness. They sit in contemplation in order to achieve spiritual awakening, called satori, a state of profound enlightenment which they believe jettisons and transcends daily fixations, attachments, and obsessions. Liberating themselves from their preoccupations, anybody can arrive at total emancipation, not by accepting logical explanation or persuasion but by experiencing a self-driven and inspirational revelation at the nonverbal level. Seekers of enlightenment usually sit in a hall in a Zen temple and are given a koan, a conundrum for meditation, which defies a scientific or logical answer. For instance, Which hand makes noise when one is clapping? When a flag flaps, what does the flapping: the flag, one’s mind, or nothing? While Shinto has been instrumental in elevating community cohesion, Buddhism has contributed to the individual cultivation of inner self and sensitized the populace to the question of death. Because of such complementarity, Shinto and Buddhism generally coexisted in a state of harmony in Japan for more than ten centuries, until the Meiji government tried to separate them in 1868.

Different but coexistent: Shinto and Buddhism Over time, Buddhism and Shinto were integrated in many regions. Chanting Buddhist sutras at Shinto shrines, for instance, was a widely recognized practice. A Shinto shrine was often established on the premises of a Buddhist temple, and vice versa. From the tenth century onwards, a theory gained ground that Shinto gods were temporary appearances of the Buddha in the land of Japan, an attempt to seamlessly combine both religions. Further information about the religions is provided in the videos Religion in Japan, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWRSjieo0CY (Global Nomads Group,

25

March

2009),

and

Shinto,

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgQ4eCc38dM

(Asian

Art

Museum, 18 May 2009).

At another level, Shinto and Buddhism – the two separate systems of belief – sometimes syncretized into a single religion. A case in point is Shugendō, which is based on both ancient Shinto and esoteric Buddhism. The followers of a version of ancient Shinto worshipped mountain gods that they believed resided deep within holy mountains, and it required them to undergo harsh mental and physical training there in order to acquire various levels of empowerment and enlightenment. Esoteric Buddhism, which had abstruse and mystical teachings, also mandated adherents to practice severe ascetic exercises in mountains. Over time, these two

streams of belief and practice converged into the single religion Shugendō, forming a particular case of the synthesis of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan. Despite its reputation as being peaceful and compromising, Buddhism also has a combative face. In premodern Japan, major temples housed a large number of powerful sōhei (priest-soldiers) armed with martial devices, who exercised military power against other temples as well as the authorities. Backed by religious authority, they often engaged in warfare, and, from time to time, even the imperial authority was forced to succumb to their demands. Uprisings of Buddhist believers also broke out in medieval Japan. For example, for a century during the Warring States period, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jōdo Shinshū followers caused violent disturbances against powerful feudal lords in the Kinai area and its adjacent regions. More recently, in the 1980s, Buddhist temples in Kyoto were involved in a protracted conflict with Kyoto City. They opposed the city’s introduction of a new tax on admission fees paid by tourists and refused their entry into the temple precincts. In the end, the city succumbed to the Buddhists’ demands, showing the persistence of the religion’s political power in the ancient capital.

Figure 10.1 Traditional Bon dancing in the heart of Tokyo However, Buddhism has largely steered clear of open conflict in Japanese society, retreating to the background of the everyday lives of the Japanese. Japan’s Buddhist heritage is evident each year in the short period in August during which ancestors’ souls supposedly return to their native localities – a tradition similar to those that exist across Asia. In this midsummer interval, known as Bon, many city dwellers take holidays to visit their home villages and towns where their relatives reside. This is also the season when many communities organize various kinds of Bon dances: communal dances that local residents perform in streets, playgrounds, and other public areas to the accompaniment of traditional folksongs. Like other Japanese folk dances, Bon dancing involves no physical contact; participants dance in a circle or advance in rows. Each locality has its own style, perhaps the most famous being the Awa dance in Tokushima prefecture, in which people dance down one street after another. Even in some housing complexes in Tokyo,

children and adults dance to the tune of the ‘Tokyo ondo’ (a folk song of Tokyo for a dance). On the last day of the Bon festival, some communities organize a colorful event at which drawings are made on paper lanterns that are floated on a river to carry away the spirits of the dead. In Kyoto, on the night of 16 August every year, large bonfires are lit on five mountains surrounding the city, bidding farewell to the departing ancestral souls that visited their descendants during the Bon season.

Figure 10.2 Stone statues of jizō, popular images of the Buddhist guardian deity of children and travelers, at Hase Temple in Kamakura In the daily life of most Japanese, Buddhism has almost lost visible significance except at funerals, in which Buddhist priests continue to play a major role. Buddhist temples maintain family graves and tombs and still have some relevance in the area of popularized

elite

culture,

providing

sites

for

traditional

ceremonies, flower arrangements, and calligraphic studies.

tea

3 Christianity Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549, when Francis Xavier, a Spanish Jesuit priest, landed in southern Kyūshū to start missionary work in the middle of internal civil war. Initially, feudal lords in Kyūshū and the central government in Kyoto showed some interest in the new religion and favored Xavier’s activity in Japan. Baptized into the Christian faith, some feudal lords were particularly eager to explore trade relations with Europe. After a period that fluctuated between suspicion and tolerance at the shogunate level, however, in the end the Tokugawa regime came to regard the spread of Christianity as a threat to its authority and proscribed it in 1612, making a series of attempts to wipe it out. The policy was strengthened after the outbreak of Christian peasants’ disturbances in northern Kyūshū in 1637. Christianity faced further difficulties with the implementation of a national seclusion order by the shogunate in 1639. In some areas, the authorities forced everyone to tread on a plate containing a crucifix or another Christian symbol to prove they were nonChristian. Though some Christians maintained their faith in a clandestine way, the ban was not officially lifted until 1873, a few years after the Meiji Restoration, under heavy pressure from Western powers. After liberation, Christianity mainly attracted members of the upper class while embracing Western civilization as the source of progressive thinking and lifestyles. However, the Meiji government kept its distance, treating Christianity as one of the religions other

than Shinto and Buddhism. During World War II, the ultranationalist and totalitarian regime framed Shinto as the national religion, defined the emperor as the living god, and compelled Christian churches to toe the line, which most of them reluctantly did. Christians in Japan today remain small in number, hovering at around 1 percent of all the nation’s religious believers. This is partly due to the long history of state suppression and partly because Christianity spread primarily in the intellectual strata only, a development that contrasts sharply with that in adjacent South Korea, where it penetrated widely into the masses. Yet, Christianity is quite visible in the educational sphere, as both Catholic and Protestant schools and universities operate as successful institutions, Jōchi, Rikkyō, Aoyama Gakuin, Dōshisha, and Kwansei Gakuin universities among them. A number of the sons and daughters of Shinto and Buddhist families study in Christian schools, and many Japanese elite graduate from Christian universities. Christianity also has a long history of charitable work and welfare schemes in Japan, having established sanatoriums, orphanages, and nursing homes while protecting prostitutes and helping the poor in impoverished areas. Christianity is extensively commodified in contemporary Japan. Christian churches are the sites of many marriage ceremonies, not because betrothed couples are believers in the faith but because they find Christian weddings more stylish, refined, and exotic than Shinto or Buddhist versions. In a Japanized way, Christmas is a big occasion for many non-Christian families who exchange presents and eat Christmas cake on 24 (rather than 25) December. As in

countries that were originally Christian, for most of December, Christmas trees are on display and Christmas carols can be heard in major department stores and shopping centers to promote end-ofyear sales. Christmas Eve has become lovers’ dating night for some young couples. Thus, while Christianity is a very minor religion in contemporary Japan in terms of the number of its believers, it occasionally makes its existence known in the landscape of the everyday life of many Japanese.

III New religions

1 The expansion of new religions While conventional religions endure, new religions have thrived in response to the spiritual demands of various sectors of Japanese society. Seekers of new faiths have sprung mainly from conditions of poverty, illness, loneliness, family separation, and other desperate circumstances. New religions captured marginalized individuals and provided them with spiritual inspiration and encouragement, especially during the immediate postwar decades, when Japan was in turmoil. Particularly noticeable are the three major new religious groups – Soka Gakkai, Risshō-Kōsei-kai and Shinnyo-en – which were established in the 1930s. They all derive from Buddhism and attract followers from different demographic bases.5 Soka Gakkai advances the proposition that the benefits that one draws in this world are indicative of attaining the life force of the universe, the ultimate reality, which gives birth to and unifies all beings. Life force manifests itself in one’s practical daily life, and one’s happiness in this world also reflects the extent of one’s connection with it. Based on a vitalistic but this-worldly perspective, Soka Gakkai organized the Human Revolution movement and achieved massive membership expansion from the 1960s onwards with its aggressive recruitment methods, attracting blue-collar workers who had been uprooted from village communities to live in urban areas. Subjected to the process of the nation’s rapid economic growth and urbanization, they formed a working-class foundation for the largest new religious organization, amounting to a membership of 8.27 million households.6

Risshō-Kōsei-kai (with 2.7 million members in 20177) is based on the Lotus Sutra doctrine that one can eventually become a Buddha by developing as a human being and attaining one’s full growth. The group attracted many housewives living in conventional three-generation households. Because this category of women has recently decreased in number, the organization has suffered a substantial decline in devotees. With

900,000

members

in

2017,8

Shinnyo-en,

which

emphasizes training to acquire supernatural psychic powers, has more female followers than male, appealing to young women in particular. It has enthusiasts in the entertainment business, including some well-known actresses and personalities, and has drastically increased its adherents in the twenty-first century, arguably thanks to the expanding subculture proliferating around the country that seeks individual spiritual attainment, discussed in Section IV of this chapter. In various ways, religious groups reflect the trends in Japanese society at large and, in that sense, represent its microcosms. While these new religious organizations have lost their initial populist fervor, they continue to retain enthusiastic layperson involvement compared to institutional Buddhism and Shinto. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, small but rapidly expanding new religious groups came to the fore after the nation gained stability and affluence in the 1970s. Though comparatively small in membership, they make their presence felt via energetic campaigns and form subcultures which differentiate them from the prevailing patterns of life in contemporary Japan. These newer religious subcultures display a number of characteristics,9 some of

which are common in other cults around the world as well as in varieties of established religions. First, most of the newer religions engage in occultism and mysticism, at times using healing and channeling, a practice based on the belief that a person’s body can be taken over by a spirit for the purpose of communication. Shinreikyō (God-Soul sect), Sekai Mihikari Bunmei Kyōdan (World Divine Light Organization), and Agon-shū (Agon sect) fall into this category. They each set forth a doctrine including various types and worlds of souls that exist in an invisible space, detailing the ways in which both good and bad souls govern the happiness, health, and life of each individual. Second, believers in these religions take much interest in developing what they regard as supernatural capacities, such as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, which has been present in traditional sects like the abovementioned Shugendō. Followers engage in ascetic practices in an attempt to acquire these abilities. Finally, newer religious groups tend to present the grandiose visions that appear to captivate those who feel profoundly alienated in the automated, predictable, and regulated environment of the modern world. Some groups evoke spectacular images of the cosmos and preach that the apocalyptic dramas that unfold in such a vast universe – with souls, angels, and demons as the main actors – influence the everyday lives of individuals in this world. Others are more orientated towards eschatological fundamentalism, which teaches that the end of the earth is nigh. The leaders of Aum cult (later reorganized and renamed as Aleph), one of these groups, which in 1995 released the deadly nerve agent sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, gave devotees

chemical drinks and injected them with dangerous doses of psychedelic drugs, allegedly to induce a high level of enlightenment. On the pretext of enabling followers to elevate their spiritual capacities, the group confined them to its precincts, arrested deserters by force, and compelled new participants to offer all their personal assets and belongings to the sect. In these ways, enthusiasts were forced to give total loyalty to the guru in return for the supposed acquisition of supernatural powers. As is discussed at the beginning of Chapter 12, living conditions have become increasingly fragmented in urban Japan. These newer religions have expanded in response to isolated individuals’ longing for an emotionally and cognitively gratifying life and their search for spiritual alternatives. They overlap with more individualized forms of the pursuit of spirituality, which the next subsection examines.

2 Spirituality movements Japan has witnessed a rise of spirituality culture and movements since the 1970s. Independently of established religions, some Japanese have pursued their individual interests in the spiritual spheres of life, involving sacred, mystical, supernatural, and paranormal dimensions. They inquire into or are involved in a variety of areas: holistic healing, Qigong therapy, yoga, faith healing, fortune-telling, reincarnation, astrology, aura detection, pilgrimage, near-death experiences, and many other analogous unsecular adherences. Attracting young, well-educated, and intellectual youth, the new trend displays a few particular characteristics, which Susumu Shimazono identifies as follows.10 First, spiritualists search for transcendental experiences individually, without getting involved in established religious organizations. They form loose networks of like-minded people, showing little interest in participating in organizational activities or practices. The cyber world is an important site for their communications; these sometimes go global, allowing sharing of ideas and experiences beyond national boundaries. Second, spiritualists do not believe in personified gods but assume the presence of nonpersonified transcendental beings beyond this world – such as the Cosmic Soul, the Great Soul, Gaia, and Great Nature – and try to communicate with these entities.11 They differ from followers of established religions in that they do not presume personified agents with holy attributes. In interacting with

the nonpersonified sacred other, believers aim towards selftranscendence. Third, spiritualism focuses upon self-transformation as one of the ultimate goals for the individual rather than salvation from the human evils and sufferings that existing religions tend to emphasize. It posits that the existing immorality and hardship are not inherent to human nature but are instead products of contemporary and past civilization. Spirituality in this sense resonates with Zen Buddhism in its pursuit of spiritual enlightenment through self-transformation. Fourth, spirituality culture stands at variance with contemporary scientism and more in harmony with indigenous knowledge prevalent before the arrival and spread of Western-style learning. While premodern in many ways, spiritualists’ naturalistic perspective is postmaterialistic in the sense that it seeks a balance between the spiritual and the physical and attempts to go beyond exclusively materialistic pursuits. Finally, spiritualists tend to be countercultural, challenging organizational religions, personified gods, the concept of salvation, and modern scientism. Yet, their potential is mixed. As a product of cultural capitalism, participants tend to experience one type of spirituality before moving on to the next, in a way that is analogous to commercial consumers leaping from one commodity to another in constant pursuit of fulfillment. Further, some spirituality activities capitalize on this tendency and are unquestionably fraudulent businesses. Nonetheless, similarly but not identically to the New Age movements in the West, the emerging spirituality cultures represent fresh elements in the landscape of Japan’s religiosity, some

overlapping with existing religions and others sharply diverging from them.

IV Aspects of this-worldliness Religious organizations cannot operate in a material vacuum. They have to manage their financial, political, and other worldly affairs. Japan’s religions are no exception.

1 Worshippers’ earthly expectations Japan’s religions, both old and new, tend to be openly this-worldly in the sense that believers can expect to receive earthly returns for worshipping at shrines and temples as well as at home. Most of the religions known for the alleged power of answering prayers in particular areas – family wellbeing and welfare, matchmaking, pregnancy and safe delivery, warding off misfortune, protection from fire, better financial circumstances, road safety, long lifespan, and so on.12 It is difficult to estimate the extent to which worshippers really believe that their prayers will result in the hoped-for outcomes. In most cases, believers visit shrines and temples to allay their anxiety, comfort their mind, or simply feel good. These folk habits are embedded into the everyday life of the Japanese. For example, Japan has more than 10,000 Tenmangū shrines (otherwise called Tenjin), which enshrine Sugawara Michizane, a ninth-century politician and scholar, as the kami of scholarship. They are popular among students preparing for success in university- and high-schoolentrance examinations. There are also some 3,000 Inari shrines across the nation, at which worshippers pray to gods of rice and grain as well as gods of good business. They also venerate foxes, which are regarded as the messengers of kami and thought to promote prosperity and bring about other practical benefits in this world. In most Shinto shrines, there is a corner where, from a box, one can draw a fortune-telling paper strip on which an oracle is written,

such as great blessing, middle blessing, or bad fortune, resembling the fortune cookies given at Chinese restaurants after meals. Visitors to shrines on New Year’s Day enjoy reading their fortunes for the coming year. Shrines and temples also sell amulets, talismans, and good-luck charms, taking advantage of worshippers’ hopes and dreams in this world.

2 Religion as business According to statistics collected by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, there are approximately 81,000 Shinto shrines and 75,000 Buddhist temples around the country.13 Most of these are individual organizations with the status of a religious juridical person, and their religious activities are legally tax free despite attempts by Kyoto City to change this, as discussed earlier. The tax-free status applies to admission fees to shrines and temples in popular tourist spots, performance of marriage ceremonies and funerals, and the organizations’ real estate. These and other quasi-religious gray areas reflect the ascendancy that religious groups hold in the mundane world. Both Buddhism and Shinto respectively have their local financial support structures: the danka system and the ujiko system. For the duration of a few centuries, village leaders were required to record the Buddhist temple to which every household belonged. The scheme dates back to the feudal period, in which the Tokugawa Shogunate repressed Christianity and in the seventeenth century made it mandatory for all temples in Japan to list their followers. Over time, every temple was obliged to compile a register periodically, which each feudal domain administration used for the dual purposes of religious control and census taking. Based on the exhaustive lists thus drawn up, each temple had a following called danka, who were its supporters and patrons. The danka system has gradually declined but still operates in weakened form in many parts

of the country, as most households continue to have an ancestral temple where their family grave is retained. For many Buddhist temples, funerals provide an important source of income. Some charge nontransparent, exorbitant fees to bereaved families, taking advantage of their difficult situation.14 Another fee is conventionally payable to the priest who gives the deceased a posthumous Buddhist name: the price differs depending on its symbolic rank. Shinto’s ujiko system is similar. The traditional custom prevails of taking one’s baby to a shrine one month after birth and praying for blessing to let the baby become ujiko, a protégé of its tutelary deity. At the ceremony, the child is accepted as a member of the local community and given an ujiko certificate. Ujiko are expected to make regular financial contributions to their shrine. They are also supposed to be involved in the organization of community festivals, which provide them with the opportunity to energize themselves by happily abandoning their daily routines. They shoulder portable shrines together, dance in the streets, and enjoy a sense of liberation and rapture. In agrarian Japan, community festivals have been connected with the timing of harvest. Thus, the ujiko network has formed the bedrock of emotional and financial support to Shinto.

Figure 10.3 Child on Shichi-go-san (literally, seven, five, three), a festival held on 15 November each year for three- and seven-yearold girls and five-year-old boys. During this festival, parents dress their children in traditional kimono and take them to a local Shinto shrine to pray for their wellbeing One can easily be both a danka of a temple and an ujiko of a shrine,

because

neither

system

prohibits

dual

membership.

However, the systems have been weakened as a consequence of the combined forces of urbanization and economic stagnation. The migration trend from rural to urban areas is apparently unstoppable, with the result that new, displaced city residents no longer belong to these locally rooted structures. The economic slowdown has also forced many into frugality. The incomes of large-scale religious institutions from donations, offerings, and subscriptions, which used to be the biggest source of their earnings, steeply declined by some 70 percent between 2001 and 2016.15 In response to this crisis, most religious organizations have attempted to expand their profit-making business activities. For some

entrepreneurial temples, the real estate business is lucrative. Leasing, selling, and managing graveyards, for example, are veritable money trees (although it should be noted that non-temple funeral companies and memorial gardens are also encroaching on this market). Others run pay parking lots for nearby households and visitors. Some enterprising Buddhist temples have registered with Amazon and other internet-based companies to facilitate the dispatch of priests to funeral and memorial services. The financial survival of religious organizations is likely to hinge on their resourcefulness in the face of the changing structures of Japanese society at large. Ahead of the curve, several new religions have developed big business empires. For example, Soka Gakkai is not only the largest new religion in terms of membership but also runs a conglomerate of business organizations, including cultural centers, funeral and cemetery companies, and transport enterprises. It manages a university, high schools, and other educational institutions, and publishes books, magazines, and a daily newspaper with nationwide circulation. Many other new religions own incomegenerating properties, organize religious events, publish magazines, and sell religious goods in addition to securing membership subscriptions and contributions.

3 Religion and the state The separation of religion and state is a declared principle in the current constitution, but it has become a serious issue in modern Japan, because some religious organizations have attempted to put themselves in the center of politics to influence national and local political

processes

in

their

favor.

Specifically,

the

Shinto

establishment has sought to cultivate links with rightist politicians, while some new religions have tried to field many candidates for elections at various levels. The syncretic fusion of Shinto and Buddhism ended in 1868, when the Meiji government issued an edict for their separation. It chose to elevate Shinto to the status of the single national religion, making the emperor a god figure and establishing the religion as the state instrument of national integration. To buttress the state-religion complex, the Meiji government produced a mythology that Japan has an imperial family line allegedly unbroken since the seventh century BCE, starting with Emperor Jimmu as the founder of the Japanese nation in the age of the gods, and promoted the notion of the family nation, in which the Japanese people are metaphorically the sons and daughters of successive emperors. There was no separation of power between state and religion in prewar Japan. Furthermore, the Meiji regime made use of the community Shinto system (based on the ujiko network) as an ideological device to establish Japan’s nationhood. When the Japanese military mobilized the population to wage the Pacific War, Shinto shrines

were sites for disseminating state propaganda, praying for victory, and sending conscripted soldiers to the front. Exploiting the widespread ie concept, authorities attempted to equate family loyalty with national allegiance, and obedience to the household head with dedication to the emperor, seeking to model the family as the microcosm and the nation as the macrocosm, linked concentrically. Occupying the space in between, local Shinto shrines were expected to connect the two levels. After the war ended, the occupation authorities regarded Shinto as an ideological backbone of Japan’s nationalism and militarism and implemented the principle of the separation of religion and state. However, Jinja Honchō (the Association of Shinto Shrines), a private national organization which serves as the central headquarters of almost all shrines across Japan, survived and continues to maintain right-wing political views. It supports conservative political parties and encourages politicians to pay homage to Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead are enshrined, including class-A war criminals executed after the war (see Chapter 9, Section VIII). Thus, state Shinto is involved in the highest levels of Japan’s political arena. Even today, imperial ceremonies, protocols, and formalities are closely associated with Shinto. A controversy emerged over whether the state was allowed to fund the Shinto-run segment of a series of enthronement ceremonies held in 2019. Though the government fully funded the religious observance, the argument lingered that the religious part of the ceremonies was a private matter and state funding was thus in violation of the constitution. Significantly, Imperial Prince Akishino, the emperor’s younger brother and first in

line to the throne, raised the issue in 2018, expressing discomfort with the government’s position on state funding.16 Shinto symbols are also linked with other constructed representations of national integration: rituals for sumo wrestling as the native sport, images of rice as the blessed diet, and portrayals of sake as the sacred drink. Among new religions, Soka Gakkai made deep inroads into national politics after the formal establishment of its centrist political arm, Komeito, in 1964. A tight-knit organization, Soka Gakkai runs a highly disciplined and effective vote-gathering machine throughout Japan. At the grassroots level, it has a network of dedicated campaigners who see their electioneering activities as an important part of their religious commitments. In 1999, Komeito, as a junior partner, formed a coalition with the ruling LDP and has since exercised political might from the core of state power. Though Komeito initially started as a middle-of-the-road party, it made a gradual rightward shift in the 2010s in support of the government party, making compromises to keep a tight hold on its status as an alliance partner. Consequently, the rock-solid consensus within Soka Gakkai showed cracks in its rank and file. A case in point is the favorable stance Komeito took regarding legislation to enable Japan to engage in collective self-defense and expand the scope of activity of its SelfDefense Forces. The move made a considerable number of Soka Gakkai members uncomfortable, with some participating in street demonstrations against the legislation, despite Komeito’s support. Some dissidents felt that the new laws would pave the way for revision of the existing constitution. Other dissenters took the view

that Soka Gakkai members should remember that Tsunesaburō Makiguchi, the founder of Soka Gakkai, was arrested in violation of the Security Maintenance Law (in force 1925–45) during the war years and died in prison for his pacifist cause. In contrast, Seichō no Ie (House of Growth), another new religion, formed in 1930, took an opposite turn. While its founder was an ultranationalist and the organization was used to promote rightwing ideology, since the 1980s it has refrained from involvement in politics altogether, becoming an environmentalist, ecological, and liberal religion in support of harmony between nature and human beings. Its headquarters is located in a forest at the foot of Japan’s Alps and the community there is equipped with solar panels, electric vehicles, lithium batteries, organic gardens, and so forth. Other new religions field candidates in national and local elections. Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science), established in 1986, for example, formed the Happiness Realization Party in 2009 and endorsed a number of its members for candidacy for elections at all levels of government across Japan. Electioneering increased this group’s visibility, though none of its candidates succeeded in securing a seat in the National Diet. As long as religious organizations continue to seek to expand their this-worldly power, the distance between religion and the state will remain contentious.

V Revitalization amid secularization The previous sections have pointed to a number of signs of secularization in Japanese society today, including the partial collapse of the ujiko and danka systems. In more extreme cases, some people prefer not to have their own grave, let alone an ancestral tomb, and to instead have their ashes scattered after death. Others do not wish to have formal funerals at all and would rather have their friends organize a posthumous farewell gathering if they so desire. Still others find it completely superstitious to visit shrines, offer a prayer, and throw money into an offertory box, as many Japanese continue to do. Nonetheless, in spite of the general decline of conventional, agrarian religious activities, the proportion of the populace not engaged in any form of religious pursuit remains small and even shows signs of decreasing. For instance, a study published in 2015 suggested that the proportion of the population who did not ‘perform any activity related to religion or faith’ was 15.4 percent in 1973 and 7.5 percent in 2013.17 The religiosity of the Japanese appears to be robust in at least two areas: the endurance of multigenerational family tombs in home towns and the survival of traditional rural religious practices in cities.

‘Where should my ashes go after death?’ Letter to newspaper advice column from female in her sixties, resident in Tokyo I had a serious medical issue three years ago, and my end appears to be approaching. Since I have worked in a hospital for nearly forty years and witnessed many cases of death at work, I strongly feel that I need neither a funeral nor a tomb after I have passed away and would like to have my ashes scattered in the sea. However, some years back, my husband and I purchased a burial plot at a considerable price at the strong request of our daughter that we should have one, as the source of family identity and emotional support. At the time, I went along with her wishes with some reluctance. My husband is a gentle and old-fashioned person. However, while he understands my real feelings, he strenuously insists that a married couple should be in the same grave. Should I leave the decision to the surviving members? How should I sort this out?18

On the one hand, migrants to urban centers from the countryside have maintained ties with the village communities which they or their ancestors left. Significantly, some three-quarters of the Japanese return to their home town to pray in front of their family

tomb, in which the ashes of their ancestors over a few generations are buried (discussed in Chapter 7). Many Japanese consider it a duty as well as a source of gratification to visit what they regard as their local religious base. They do so particularly in the abovementioned Bon season, in August, when the souls of their ancestors are believed to return for a few days to the locality of their family tomb. In addition to funerals, many households regularly hold anniversary memorial services for deceased persons – for example, three, seven, or thirteen years after their death. Although a considerable number of the Japanese ignore or resist these practices, ancestor worship remains a strong force in contemporary Japanese society. On the other hand, even in city life, traditional religious custom is rife, taking modified forms. Distant from their home village, many Japanese visit their nearby temples and shrines to pray for prosperous business and many other earthly returns. In a continuation of the village lifestyle, many Japanese in the urban environment carry good-luck charms and keep in their houses strips of paper or small wooden tablets, usually considered talismanic, featuring handwritten words of religious significance. They obtain these religious goods from shrines and temples close to their current residence in the hope that they will bring about worldly fortune. Reproducing the rural way of life, some city community groups organize village-style Bon-dancing festivals to promote the sense of collective spirit in fragmented urban life. Separately from these two trends, there are indications that the young religious faithful are expanding their commitments by

selflessly participating in the public domain. Since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, in particular, many of them have taken part in volunteer activities, clearing up debris, cleaning houses, and helping the elderly in the affected areas. Believers in new religions are noticeably active on this front, although disaster victims initially viewed them with suspicion. The believers consider that they engage in the self-sacrificing and altruistic hard work as an expression of their religious devotion.19 Also, with the aging of Japanese society, religious groups are increasingly involved in eldercare. Thus, the secularization process is not a one-way progression and appears to meet the forces of devotional reformulation and reinvigoration at various levels.

VI Conclusion This chapter has sketched a few key features of Japan’s religions, which have an array of orientations and structures. While influenced in varying intensities by native Shinto’s animism, polytheism, and syncretism, many of them have this-worldly dispositions and their own political economy. Amid the general trend of secularization, the forces of desecularization remain persistent, keeping religious engagements alive. With the disintegration of tight institutional networks in the urban environment, seekers of devotional life tend to move away from the pursuit of salvation through organized religions to instead find satisfaction in individual and personal quests for spirituality. Religions pose fundamental questions: Why does humanity exist? Why do our planet and the cosmos exist? What is the meaning of life? What happens to us after death? Some Japanese ignore these issues completely, while others try to address them seriously. In between, a majority occasionally think about them with a mixture of awe and sarcasm, as the popular sayings go: ‘Kurushii toki no kami danomi’ (Man turns to the divine for help only in time of distress), ‘Jigoku no sata mo kane shidai’ (How you are treated in hell depends upon how much money you have), and ‘Iwashi no atama mo shinjin kara’ (Even sardine heads have value to people who have faith in them).

Research questions 1. To what extent has Shinto shaped the nonreligious aspects of contemporary Japanese society? 2. Do the doctrines of some contemporary religions in Japan appeal to particular demographics? If so, why? 3. In comparing Japanese and global religions, are some religions more this-worldly than others? 4. Are certain forces of secularization strong enough to make religion decline overall in Japan? 5. What are the similarities and differences between Japanese spirituality culture and movements and their counterparts in other Asian societies?

Further readings Earhart, H. Byron 2013, Religion in Japan: Unity and Diversity, 5th edn. Boston: Cengage Learning. Hardacre, Helen 2016, Shinto: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reader, Ian and Tanabe, George J., Jr. 1998, Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Shimazono, Susumu 2004, From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Yoneyama, Shoko 2018, Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan. London: Routledge.

Online resources Adler, Joseph 2016, Links for Japanese Religions. Kenyon College (last updated 24 June), www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln275/links275.htm. BBC 2014, Shinto. BBC, www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/shinto/. Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture 2020, website. Nanzan University, https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/. Victoria, Brian 2018, Breath of Life. Aeon (20 December), https://aeon.co/essays/shinto-shows-the-debt-to-animism-oforganised-religions-today. Watt, Paul 2003, ‘Japanese religions’. Japan Digest (National Clearinghouse for United States–Japan Studies) (October), https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/religion.pdf. 1 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2014, Question 28. 2 Institute of Statistical Mathematics 2016, Tables 3.1, 3.2b. 3 Agency for Cultural Affairs 2018. 4 Yoneyama 2018. 5 Shūkan Daiamondo, 13 October 2018, p. 35.

6 Soka Gakkai has not publicly announced the total number of its members, except the household figures proclaimed in 2007. 7 Agency for Cultural Affairs 2018. 8 Agency for Cultural Affairs 2018. 9 Shimazono 2004; Nishiyama 1979. 10 Shimazono 2004, pp. 293–305. 11 Shimazono 2004, p. 302. 12 See Reader and Tanabe 1998 for details. 13 Agency for Cultural Affairs 2018. 14 Shūkan Asahi, 13 December 2013, p. 34. 15 Shūkan Daiamondo, 13 October 2018, p. 33. 16 AM, 18 November 2018, p. 2; 25 December 2018, p. 1. 17 NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūsho 2014, Questions 27, 28. 18 Sankei Shimbun 2017, abbreviated and adapted. 19 AM, 13 November 2018, p. 30.

Chapter 11

Culture: the popular and the cool ◈

I Introduction Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming the culture’s plurality, the end of the chapter turns to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.

II The two dualities of Japanese culture Broadly, two types of dualities cut across the whole landscape of Japanese culture. One pertains to a contrast between elite and popular cultures, and the other concerns a disparity between traditional and imported cultures.

1 Elite versus popular culture In Japan, as in any society, the primary bearers of high and popular forms of national culture can be differentiated along class lines. In the main, a small number of elites relish such traditional cultural styles as classic literature, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, Noh and kyogen plays, koto music, Bunraku puppet shows, and classic Japanese buyō dancing. They also enjoy Western classical music, opera, art exhibitions, and theatrical performances. Golf is regarded as an elite sport. These trends tend to belong to the elite culture, not to that of most Japanese. Ordinary citizens of Japan adopt much more informal, unpretentious, unassuming, and down-to-earth cultural styles. The Japanese also enjoy various forms of traditional grassroots cultures, ranging from colorful agrarian festivals to local folk dances. Further, Japan has a range of countercultural groups even though their public visibility may be limited.

2 Traditional versus imported culture In the depths of the Japanese cultural configuration lies a profound division between traditional native culture and imported Western culture, a dichotomy that is evident in almost every sphere of cultural life in Japan today. In the world of painting, Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and yōga (Western oil painting) form two distinct styles. In popular music, min’yō (locally developed folk songs) and enka (popular ballads) represent native songs with traditional Japanesestyle lyrics and melodies, as distinct from the genre of Western popular music, which ranges from rock to folk songs. (Enka initially designated songs that street singers performed to musical accompaniment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but now stands for the style of tunes which follow this tradition.) To many Japanese, sumo, judo, karate, and other traditional sports of Japan have appeals different from domesticated popular sports like baseball and soccer. The duality of culture in Japan between traditional and imported reflects the nation’s late-developer status (discussed in Chapter 2) and culturally peripheral position, in which it has had to learn from early developers that have enjoyed cultural supremacy internationally. Studies of cultural consumption in Japan, therefore, should bear this historical context in mind and refrain from the unqualified application of Western models to the country’s contemporary cultural circumstances. The term ‘culture’ is notoriously elusive, ambiguous, and multifaceted. Independent of academic debate about what it means,

the Japanese are generally tradition oriented in assessing what they regard as ‘proudly Japanese cultures’, according to a national survey (Table 11.1) in which a majority listed as examples of such cultures ‘traditional performing arts’ (dentō geinō) and ‘historical buildings and remains’. They also included various forms of the native art of public entertainment, ranging from Kabuki to local festivals. In comparison, food culture, media art, and popular music, which have attracted global attention and interest, ranked relatively low in the mass evaluations of Japanese culture. Table 11.1 ‘Of which Japanese cultures can Japan be proud?’ Survey responses (%), 2009 Culture

Response

Traditional performing arts

64.7

Historical buildings and remains

56.4

Food

31.5

Dramas, dances, and public entertainment

28.8

Media art

25.3

Everyday life (seikatsu)

25.3

Fine arts

24.7

Literature

18.0

Musica

13.5

Culture

Response

Popular music

6.2

Other

0.2 Source: Cabinet Office 2009.

Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed Japanese people who chose each culture in the survey year. Multiple responses were permitted; therefore, the total exceeds 100 percent. For seikatsu, see Chapter 12, Section V. a

Excludes popular music. In terms of cultural activities actually performed by the

Japanese, art, movies, and music top the list, as Table 11.2 shows. Their participation covers widespread and diverse areas, involving both traditional and contemporary genres, both elite and popular categories, and both individualistic and collective activities. The Japanese are engaged in a variety of cultural spheres, a pattern which makes it impossible to define ‘Japanese culture’ in simple terms. Table 11.2 ‘Which categories of cultural or artistic activities did you appreciate in the past year?’ Survey responses (%), 2019 Activity Arta

Response 45.3

Activity

Response

Moviesb

43.6

Musicc

31.5

Historical buildings, relics, gardens, scenic beauty

29.6

Orchestra, opera, chorus, brass band

25.2

Historical and ethnic museums

22.7

Animations and media art based on computerized images

13.3

Musicals

12.5

Local folk activitiesd

9.4

Exhibitions and eventse

9.2

Source: Adapted from Agency for Cultural Affairs 2019. Notes: The figures are the percentages of surveyed people who chose each activity in the survey year. Multiple responses were permitted; therefore, the total exceeds 100 percent. Only the top ten categories are listed. a

Includes painting, block printing, sculpture, industrial art,

ceramic art, calligraphy, photography, design, architecture, and fashion. b

Excludes animations.

c

Includes popular, rock, jazz, enka, and ethnic music and

popular songs. d

Includes local performing arts and festivals.

e

Includes floral arrangements, bonsai displays, tea ceremonies, and food tasting. For analytical purposes, this chapter divides popular culture into three categories: mass culture, which has spread with the expansion of

the

consumer

market

and

the

development

of

mass

communication; folk culture, which is based upon conventions, mores, and customs of the indigenous tradition; and alternative culture, which a small number of ordinary citizens generate spontaneously as a counterculture challenge to the cultural status quo. Looking at the entire cultural scene at a macro level, one might be able to classify elite culture and popular culture in terms of the magnitude of the economic resources that producers of culture require and possess, and the proportion of the population that appreciates them, as Table 11.3 formulates. Elite culture is appreciated

by

comparatively

few

but

is

amply

supported

economically, while alternative culture tends to be both small and in economic terms relatively deprived. The four types are respectively majority and minority cultures, depending upon the criteria used. Table 11.3 Comparison of types of cultures

Economic resources of producers

Population size of appreciators

Plentiful

Limited

Small

Elite

Alternative

Large

Mass

Folk

Quantitatively, of course, consumers of popular culture dominate the nation’s cultural panorama. Although Japan’s popular culture is multifarious, it represents the ways of life that the common people enjoy and share. Table 11.4 provides a conceptual map of the three classes of popular culture and their characteristics. The brief descriptions that follow sketch something of their diversity. Table 11.4 Comparison of types of popular culture Popular culture Characteristic

Mass

Folk

Alternative

Historical origin

Recent / contemporary

Traditional

Contemporary / traditional

Mass means of communication

Essential

Minimal / absent

Minimal / absent

Considerations of marketability

Imperative

Peripheral

Minimal

Popular culture Characteristic

Mass

Folk

Alternative

Consumption orientation

High

Limited

Low

Durability of contents

Subject to consumer popularity

Relatively durable

Subject to internal group cohesion

Geographic basis

Diffusion from urban areas

Both rural and urban

Variable

Concentration pattern

Tendency towards centralization

Regionally diversified

Tendency towards decentralization

Producers

Mostly specialists

Some specialists, mostly amateurs

Mostly amateurs, some specialists

Basis of sharedness

Shared media information

Shared historical memories

Shared defiance against established order

Size of population involved

Large

Large

Smalla

Popular culture Characteristic

Mass

Folk

Alternative

Emic category of people

Taishū, shōshū, or bunshū

Jōmin

Seikatsusha or jinmin

a

Though many people may be attracted, they have no means to practice. The three types of popular culture derive from different social formations. Mass culture is constantly produced as a process of modern society in which the populace is atomized and susceptible to mass-produced merchandise and information propagated by mass media. The Japanese analytical category for this type of mass is taishū (uniform, large-scale mass), although it is increasingly segmented into small units, such as bunshū (segmented mass) and shōshū (individualized, small-scale mass) – masses which have particular requirements for certain goods, services, and information, as discussed in Chapter 5. Folk culture has been nurtured in the soil of what Japanese ethnographers call jōmin, those ordinary persons who may not engage in the production of pure or mass art but who express themselves in various forms of marginal arts. Folk culture has its origin mostly in the nonliterary world, having little to do with written forms of communication.

Alternative culture mirrors the dissatisfaction, grievances, and disenchantment of some sections of the community but remains small and marginal. Located at the fringe of Japanese society, alternative culture groups present images and worldviews that are discordant with, or go beyond, the frameworks of both mass and folk cultures. As such, they are invariably exposed to the danger of being extinguished or assimilated into mass or folk culture. Each person embodies all three cultural elements. A committed commune activist may enjoy reading manga magazines and singing traditional folk songs. An avid Shinto believer may participate in countercultural mini-komi (mini-communication) publications and spend a few hours playing pachinko every week.

III Mass culture Mass culture in contemporary Japan is a lively and potent force that engages everyone through mass media. It relies on its marketability, because it cannot survive unless it is consumed by a large number of people; it is consumer oriented, because the size of the market determines its viability. Japan’s mass culture today includes the following elements: television and radio entertainment culture, the most pervasive vehicle of mass entertainment the popular press, which appeases the mass appetite for gossip, scandals, and other grubby realities of life fashion and trend culture, in which mass-produced and massdistributed goods are accepted and rejected entertainment culture that develops around theaters, restaurants, amusement facilities, and sex shops high-tech culture, in which computers and computer-based information networks serve as the major intermediaries commercialized traditional elite culture, in which masters of flower arranging, tea ceremonies, and the like instruct in traditional cultural practices for high fees. With these dimensions overlapping, Japan’s mass culture flourishes in diverse forms and styles, all of which use channels of mass

information

distribution,

such

as

television,

advertisements,

computers, and other forms of large-scale publicity to generate a sense of doing things together. This section surveys Japan’s mass culture by first browsing the world of entertainment media and then scanning two phenomena which are popular, cost-effective diversions for many Japanese: pachinko and karaoke. Finally, the section takes a brief look at the ways in which traditional elite culture is commercialized and popularized at the community level by masters of various schools of traditional art. A form of mass culture that has achieved widespread international popularity will be analyzed separately, in Section VI of this chapter.

1 Entertainment media (a) Television and radio Approximately 85 percent of Japanese watch television every day, for about three hours and eighteen minutes on average on weekdays.1 By distributing the same visual information across the country, the television industry therefore has the most powerful homogenizing effect on the public. Many Japanese television programs, like television programs elsewhere, are designed to sway public opinion in moral, social, and political matters. For instance, most major commercial stations televise morning entertainment shows filled with scandal, gossip, and sensational stories, about which a panel of self-styled, complacent social commentators makes moralizing

comments.

Many

afternoon

programs

targeting

housewives have a similar format. Even newscasters openly make evaluative comments between news stories, taking one side and critiquing the other. With high ratings, these shows contribute greatly to the formation of homogeneous social views. As is the case in many other societies, Japan’s prime-time television is filled with nonsense and funny programs, because television stations’ ratings determine their annual profits. In a bid to win the largest slice of the audience, major commercial stations’ programs are full of slapstick comedies, knockabout competition games, and voyeuristic shows. Many families have developed the habit of watching television during dinner, losing the sphere of family

conversation and subjecting themselves nearly exclusively to what television programs feed them. The centralized organization of mass media in general, and television and the internet in particular, makes it easy for central image-makers to capture the nation’s curiosity. This contributes to Japan’s frequent nationwide crazes, including those for UFO searching in 1978, Rubik’s Cubes in 1980–1, and family computers in 1985–6. In the middle of the oil crisis in 1973, caused by an international shortage of crude oil and an upsurge in its price, toilet paper sold out in supermarkets around the country because of the unfounded but widely circulated rumor that Japan might face a paper shortage. In 1994, when the government imported rice because of a poor rice crop the previous year, some sections of the nation went into near hysteria and attempted to buy up domestic rice from rice dealers. In 1995, the discovery of a number of poisonous redback spiders in the Osaka area led to a nationwide search for them, with rumors of venomous spiders hiding in every community. Even in the 2000s, booms in herbal remedies came and went, so that a fad for eating certain vegetable roots was quickly replaced by one for eating special kinds of seaweed, which is in turn replaced by a fashion for certain herbal decoctions. In the 2010s, with the expansion of the elderly population, medical supplement booms were incessant. Tapioca drinks – various versions of bubble tea – which originated in Taiwan suddenly gripped Japan in a new fervor, and spellbound youngsters formed long queues at shops selling them. In all of these cases of fads and mass hysteria, the media, especially television

and the internet, have played a major role in stirring up feelings of insecurity and sometimes inciting a sense of national panic. Radio listeners declined in number with the arrival of television and the emergence of the internet. On weekdays, only about 12 percent of Japanese tune in to radio, yet those who do listen spend more than two hours and forty-four minutes a day doing so.2 Among occupational groups, a markedly high proportion of self-employed persons listen to radio while doing their work. For carpenters, noodle-shop owners, and hairdressers, radio is an important source of information and entertainment during work. More than a dozen radio stations operate in major metropolises, and each has a different cohort of listeners. While young fans tune in to FM music stations, internet radio and podcasts, some all-night radio broadcasts are popular among older people who enjoy listening to programs in their wakeful slumber. Unlike television, radio thus caters for segmented audiences with differing needs and requirements. (b) The tabloid press and weekly magazines Japan has many sensationalist, scandal-hungry, and exposéoriented

tabloid

newspapers

and

weekly

magazines

whose

approaches contrast sharply with those of the established and sanitized broadsheet newspapers. Fuji and Nikkan Gendai are the two leading tabloids. This category of publications also includes scandalous photographic weeklies, such as Friday. In addition, twelve sports newspapers cover mainly baseball, sumo wrestling, soccer, and general entertainment news, selling a total of some 3

million copies per day.3 All major newspapers and established publishing houses produce these tabloid papers and magazines, cashing in on the public’s desire for non-sterilized stories. In contrast to the sanitized and balanced major newspapers and television networks, the popular press is highly differentiated and served by a wide variety of magazines, many of which unashamedly publish muckraking stories, sex scandals, and revelations of trickery, often at the risk of being sued for defamation. Because mainstream media produce stories only in socially correct ways, readers who are interested in dirty honne and ura realities turn to these magazines, which are issued by established mainstream publishing houses. Shūkan Bunshun, Shūkan Shinchō, Shūkan Posuto, Shūkan Gendai, and many others compete in the weekly magazine market. From time to time, their revelations and scoops lead to the resignations of leading politicians and top bureaucrats. The vitality of these publications suggests that a large proportion of the Japanese public identifies with popular culture at this level. Their contents differ depending on their readership. A majority of the weeklies target salarymen, running sexist, nationalist, and anti-government stories. Some weeklies regularly feature color pictures of nude women and sex life confessions of movie stars and television personalities. Various women’s weeklies, such as Josei Seven, Josei Jishin, and Shūkan Josei, focus on stardom, royal families, and female sexuality, while Fujin Kōron is largely read by educated women in pursuit of liberal lifestyles. To attract fashion-conscious young men, such monthly magazines as smart, MonoMax, and FINEBOYS are published. Other magazines include those for career women,

established businessmen, teenage girls, leisure-oriented men, and housewives. Now in intense competition with the internet, and facing a gradual decline of readership, these publications reflect both the variations in overt and covert desires and, through the types of aspirations, frustrations, and grievances they publish, the diverse social milieus of Japan’s reading public.

2 Cost-effective diversions Even casual observers of Japan’s city life will notice two kinds of lively entertainment halls: pachinko parlors and karaoke boxes. Pachinko, a particular type of pinball game, never became popular overseas, while karaoke is an established entertainment around the world. Both of them are cost-effective diversions for many Japanese, constituting gaming and musical components of Japan’s mass culture. (a) Pachinko Pachinko is a nationwide pastime enjoyed by nearly 10 percent of the adult population, with some 9 million people throughout Japan enjoying the game in 2017.4 In pachinko parlors filled with hundreds of computer-operated pinball machines and resounding with popular music, many people spend hours attempting to get pinballs into holes on a board. When a ball goes into a hole, the pachinko machine pays out a large number of balls to the player, who can exchange them for such prizes as chocolates and cigarettes. Cash prizes are prohibited, but an overwhelming majority of winners cash their acquired pinballs at backstreet cashing shops. In this sense, pachinko is a very accessible form of gambling; the annual sales figures of the pachinko industry far exceed the yearly total turnovers of the more visible forms of gambling, such as horse, bicycle, speedboat, and car races. The number of pachinko parlors in Japan exceeded 9,000 in 2018,5 twice that of high schools.

Although there is controversy over the international birthplace of pachinko,6 there is little dispute that in Japan it began immediately after World War II in Nagoya, where many firms manufacturing military aircraft were clustered and had to find a profitable way of using countless surplus ball bearings. Resourceful entrepreneurs devised a simple pachinko machine, which provided the masses with cheap amusement and spread across the country. The machine became more sophisticated as technological innovations were added. Some mass culture observers attribute the popularity of pachinko in Japan, particularly among blue-collar workers, to its affinity with the pattern of their work, in which they compete with each other in finger dexterity on assembly lines in similarly noisy surroundings.7 These workers entertain themselves in an extension of their work environment. This is why the number of pachinko parlors increased most rapidly during Japan’s economic growth in the areas where the working environment became quickly mechanized. One may also argue that pachinko attracts so many Japanese partly because it is essentially detached from direct human interaction. Playing pachinko does not require players to interact face-to-face with others and so enables them to evade daily realities.8 Arguably, the noninteractive quality of pachinko indirectly testifies to the intensity of group pressures and constraints on the working and community lives of the Japanese. (b) Karaoke

Karaoke is a popular form of mass entertainment in Japan and worldwide. It is believed to have originated in the 1970s in a snack bar in Kobe, where the management recorded a tape for use at practice sessions for professional singers.9 In 1976 an electronics company commenced selling a machine called Karaoke 8, which selected an eight-track cartridge tape containing four tunes. This prototype developed into laser-disk karaoke, VHD karaoke, CD karaoke, and so on, as this sort of equipment became standard in entertainment

establishments

popular

with

salarymen.

Many

customers had a good time diverting their minds from their cares by drinking and singing with a microphone in hand. The taped accompaniment of karaoke gave them the fantasy of singing like professional singers on stage. As various types of family karaoke equipment appeared on the market, the vogue that started in amusement venues spread to some well-to-do households. More than one-third of Japanese are estimated to have participated in karaoke in 2018, and it is now established as the most popular pastime in Japan, enjoyed by all generations.10 Although karaoke takes place in the apparently collective environment of bars and pubs, singers face a television screen which displays lyrics and song-related pictures, while those who are waiting to sing are busily scanning the song list in order to choose a song, without listening to the person singing. The singer’s coworkers usually clap loudly in appreciation, but in this environment, meaningful conversation is impossible, and this appears to give a sense of relaxation to Japanese karaoke participants.11 It is no wonder that karaoke boxes – small, self-contained soundproofed

rooms in which anybody can sing karaoke and in which singers can behave more audaciously – are widespread in Japan, proliferating in the streets of busy quarters. They enable song lovers to give vent to their emotions and have gained popularity among housewives, young women workers, and students. It may not be wide of the mark to speculate that the mass culture of karaoke has established itself, like pachinko, as an avenue by which ordinary people can escape the stringent realities of Japanese work and community life.12

Mass culture depends on its market. Once the consumers of mass culture weary of it, it must change to maintain its appeal. Thus, popular songs come and go. Fashion is by definition temporary and changing. The pachinko industry changes its machine format to satisfy players’ appetite for change and high technology. Fluidity, variability, and transformability characterize contemporary mass culture.

3 Cross-status cultural consumption Japan’s pattern of cultural consumption shows that many people relish both elite culture and popular culture at the same time. Two discernible trends cutting across class lines might be labeled ‘omnivorous consumption’.13 One is a downward move in which high-status individuals come to enjoy popular culture in addition to elite culture, a pattern that reflects an elite strategy to blur status lines by sharing the same conditions and appearances with subordinates. In many Japanese factories, middle managers wear the same work clothes and have lunch in the same dining room as blue-collar

workers.

Enterprise

unions,

prevalent

in

large

corporations, are formed by all nonexecutive employees and make little distinction based on occupational classification. As an extension of this ostensibly inclusive approach, it is not uncommon for business managers to enjoy singing in karaoke bars with workers or drinking and eating in inexpensive taverns. The other trend is an upward process in which the masses go beyond their popular culture sphere to familiarize themselves with elite culture. The popularization of high culture has led to a sphere of activities which can be labeled ‘popular elite culture’. Although emanating from the elite sector, this culture has many followers. Three avenues to facilitation of this process are noticeable. First, and most importantly, educational institutions play significant roles in popularizing elite culture through their formal curricula. Most Japanese pupils learn about high culture at school by

studying Chinese classical literature (kanbun), practicing calligraphy, and playing such Western musical instruments as the piano, violin, and flute. Many schools have extracurricular club activities called bukatsu (as discussed in Chapter 6), in which students engage in artistic activities such as literary writing, drama, kyūdō (Japanese archery), igo (Chinese chess), and flower arrangement. Students are trained to appreciate these cultural forms and to acquire the skills associated with them as necessary conditions of being culturally educated individuals. In particular, many of them obtain the artistry of Western classical music, Western-style painting, and Western literature through school structures. In this sense, most Japanese acquirers of Western high culture are school-based cultural climbers who familiarize themselves with high cultural activities, but only a small segment of the population regularly practices them after leaving school. The second avenue is social education, a sphere of cultural learning mainly for adults who have completed formal education and desire to study high culture. Notably, culture centers of various kinds operate in urban areas, mostly under the management of mass media organizations, and attract millions of avid learners. The courses offered cover a wide range of subjects, including traditional Japanese poetry writing, shigin (recitation of Chinese poems), calligraphy,

English

conversation,

bonsai

gardening,

and

professional photography. Students are predominantly female, and women in the age group of the fifties and above comprise more than half of all students.14 Their appetite for artistic learning exceeds that of men and beats a path towards significant cultural attainment.

The third avenue is home-based private lessons. Most notably in the sphere of traditional elite culture, this has been institutionalized by the iemoto system, in which iemoto, the head family of a school of an established art form, oversees nationwide hierarchical networks of followers with various levels of teachers as middle managers. In the case of tea ceremonies, two major schools exist, each having its iemoto. In flower arranging, several schools compete with each other with similar iemoto structures. Under the authorization of iemoto, most teachers in these disciplines run teaching sessions at their homes and receive tuition fees from students. When students finish a course, they can acquire certificates from the iemoto to certify that they have the required skills, but they must pay considerable sums to the iemoto through their teacher, who retains some of the money. After arriving at a certain level, students can become qualified teachers. This licensing system ensures the iemoto households receive not only social prestige but also material gains, with some managing vocational schools and junior colleges of their own. They prosper from the successful proliferation of the notion that middleclass women must have some knowledge of tea ceremonies and flower arranging before marriage. On the whole, the home-based mode of cultural capital reproduction appears to be closely associated with Japan’s traditional high culture. Less

structured

civic

cultural

groups

also

operate

in

communities. Lovers of Japanese, Western, and Chinese painting and woodblock printing pay to attend private tutorial sessions conducted by experts, with some devotees forming clubs with regional and national networks. At many Buddhist temples, priests

teach brush calligraphy to children. Thus, high culture is popularized through these home-based teaching routes. Numerous literary coterie magazines exist around the nation, and they are edited, distributed, and read by avid authors of poems and novels. Many contributors to these magazines are amateur writers from various walks of life who find satisfaction in creative writing. Kanshi (classic Chinese poetry) has its own established national association in Japan, and around the country amateur learners who enjoy composing this poetry, in accordance with the rules of rhyming and writing established in China in the eighth century, number nearly 2,000, an amazing figure considering the poems’ complexity. Chinese chess, igo is also so popular that some communities have parlors where enthusiasts play against each other. Popularized elite culture does not really reach the bottom of the social scale and remains the pastime of the relatively well off, if not the very rich. Yet, contemporary Japanese society has solid layers of local

intelligentsia

and

practitioners of high culture.

grassroots

artists

who

are

popular

IV Folk culture Folk culture, having taken root over decades and sometimes centuries, has been conventionalized in the everyday life of the Japanese. It includes local festivals, seasonal holidays, and traditional playful art. Its content differs from place to place and relies on the historical memories of people in a region. Folk culture requires neither mass products nor mass media, and, while it does not have to be mass consumed, it normally involves a large number of people in a locality or region, or even throughout Japan.

1 Local festivals as occasions of hare Japan’s ethnographers and ethnologists have long regarded three Japanese emic concepts – hare, ke, and kegare – as fundamental categories for understanding Japanese folk culture. Hare represents situations in which formal, ceremonial, and festive sentiments prevail. On these occasions (hare no hi), people dress in their best clothes (haregi) and eat gala meals (hare no shokuji). In contrast, ke stands for routine life, in which people do things habitually, conventionally, and predictably. As people use up energy in kebased daily activities, they arrive at a condition of kegare, in which their vitality withers. Hare occasions are organized to animate, invigorate,

and

restore

vivacity.15

In

another

account,

the

characteristics of a given folk society are determined by how it juxtaposes opposite conditions: hare versus ke or hare versus kegare.16 Japanese folk culture researchers also debate the extent to which these concepts correspond to the conventional sociological distinction between the sacred and the profane. Local festivals which represent important hare affairs are closely linked with the tradition of community Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion,

whose

characteristics

are

detailed

in

Chapter

10.

Traditionally, those who live near a Shinto shrine are called ‘ujiko’, children under the protection of the community deity, and contribute to the organization and proceedings of their community festivals as the most momentous hare occasions.

Many Japanese families celebrate festival days that reflect the rhythm of the changing seasons. On New Year’s Day, arguably the most significant national holiday, most households enjoy eating zōni (rice cakes boiled with vegetables), herring roe, dried young anchovies, and other festive delicacies. During the New Year season, people fly kites on which they have painted unique pictures. On the day before the beginning of spring, in February, some families scatter parched beans to drive evil spirits out of their houses. On 3 March, when peach blossoms are at their best, the Girls’ Festival (Hina Matsuri) is held, and girls and their parents display dolls on tiered stands. In April, in various parts of the country, people fill large parks to enjoy picnics under the cherry blossoms (hanami), drinking, eating, and singing on mats spread on the ground under cherry trees in full bloom. Many Japanese write wishes on strips of paper that they hang on bamboo trees on 7 July, the day of the Festival of the Weaver (Tanabata), when two lover stars, Altair and the Weaver, are believed to meet by crossing the Milky Way from its opposite sides. On the spring and fall equinoxes, people follow the custom of visiting their family tomb, cleaning and washing it, and dedicating flowers to it. They fold their hands in front of the tomb to pray that the departed souls of their ancestors will protect them from misfortune and lead them to prosperity. Most Japanese engage in some form of prayer at least once a year, visits to the family tomb ranking highest among the religious and quasi-religious activities of the Japanese.17

2 Regional variation of folk culture Folk culture exhibits much regional diversity. As discussed in Chapter 4, different areas have different folk songs, folk dances, and folk crafts. The plurality of folk culture across Japan can be seen in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture, and in Hokkaidō, the northernmost major island. In Okinawa, neither Shinto nor Buddhism has been influential. Across the Ryūkyū Islands, each village has an utaki shrine, where the souls of village ancestors are worshipped and gods descend from heaven. The prevailing belief is that the gods who bring happiness to people visit on festive occasions from utopias that exist beyond the ocean. Many annual festivals on these islands are related to the sea. Ryūkyū dance, which is performed on festive occasions, is well known for the wave-like movement of the dancers’ fingers, similar to that found in dances in Southeast Asia. The Okinawan system of musical scales differs from that in other parts of Japan, resembling instead those of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Since Okinawa was occupied by the United States until 1972, the American influence is more pervasive there than in other parts of Japan. Folk culture in some areas of Japan is on the verge of extinction because of the penetration of more dominant cultural forms. Ainu folk culture is a conspicuous example. Before the invasion of the Japanese pushed them from the northern parts of Honshū island into a small corner of Hokkaidō (see Chapter 8), Ainu communities had a

different language, a distinct tradition of festivals, and a separate belief system. Traditional Ainu clothes are furs or dresses made of linens with special embroidery. Ainu used to engage in hunting and fishing and have special techniques of carving, tattooing, and extrasensory perception. Ainu hold highly animistic beliefs, deeming every physical object to contain a kind of spiritual being which puts it in motion. According to Ainu folk belief, good and bad supernatural beings exist and positively or negatively influence the object which they inhabit. Hence, the everyday life of the Ainu community includes a variety of religious ceremonies and practices which are presumed to propitiate these invisible divine forces. In the house, various gods are supposed to reside underneath a fireplace, at its rear, and near the entrance. Ianu, pieces of shaved wood, are put in appropriate places to serve as intermediaries with gods. The Bear Festivals, regarded by Ainu as the most important ceremony for praying for a successful hunting season, were long observed, with ceremonies in which bears were put down to be offered to the gods. However, the governor of Hokkaidō prohibited them as acts of cruelty in 1955, and the festivals faded away over time, though the order was retracted in 2007. Some Ainu communities are making attempts to preserve their folk yukar – lyric poems which will otherwise sink into oblivion. These cultural practices are all parts of Japan’s folk culture, although some are less visible or are dying out. It would be erroneous to assume that all grassroots cultural traditions have been cast in the same mold. Furthermore, commercially organized events have, to a large extent, supplanted folk festivals. At the community level, local shopping areas stage parades, fairs, and galas with the

explicit aim of improving business turnover. City and prefectural governments hold one exhibition after another and are often involved in musical, sporting, and other planned events. In collaboration with the mass media, large corporations sponsor such festival-like events as ladies’ marathons, music concerts, and trade fairs. On the whole, these manufactured events acquire the characteristics of mass culture and fail to inherit those of folk culture.

3 Marginal art Many time-honored activities and practices that the Japanese engage in today bring to the surface the underlying world of their folk culture. Shunsuke Tsurumi, a philosopher and analyst of popular culture, proposes that what he calls ‘marginal art’ be recognized as a form of folk culture.18 It is a domain at the intersection between everyday life and artistic expression, whose examples are listed in Table 11.5 and range from graffiti to gestures in daily interaction, New Year’s cards, song variations, building blocks, and room decorations. Even the ways in which people interact in communal baths (sentō) and hot springs are kinds of marginal art; people of different backgrounds meet naked, engage in unpretentious conversation,

and

thereby

generate

an

artistic

form

of

communication in the space of a mini-democracy. Marginal art is based on amateur activities to the extent that both its producers and its consumers are laypersons without specialist or professional expertise. Although such art forms have existed since ancient times, the development of mass media and modern systems has paved the way for the dichotomy between pure and mass art and has removed marginal art from the sphere of legitimately recognized art. Once one accepts the realm of marginal art thus conceptualized, one can see many daily popular activities today as reflections of Japan’s folk culture. Table 11.5 Types of marginal arts

Art

Examples

Moving one’s body

Gesture in everyday life, rhythm in work, New Year’s parade of fire brigades, play, courting, applause, Bon festival dance, walking on stilts, bouncing a ball, sumo wrestling, shishimai (ritual dance with a lion’s mask)

Constructing, making, living, using, and watching

Housing, the appearance of houses lining the street, miniature gardens, bonsai, straps of a geta thong, paper flowers that open when placed in a glass of water, knot making, building blocks, cocoon balls, tombs

Singing, talking, and listening

Calls used to enliven physical labor, speaking in a singsong tone, tongue twisters, song variations, humming a tune, nicknaming, dodoitsu (Japanese limerick), two-person manzai comic acts, mimicry

Painting and drawing

Graffiti, votive wooden tablets, battledores, picture painting on kites, New Year’s cards, picture drawing on paper lanterns floated on a river

Writing and reading

Letters, gossip, calligraphy, conventional haiku poem writing, decorations on Tanabata (Festival of the Weaver)

Art

Examples

Performing

Festivals, funerals, arranged-marriage meetings, family albums, family videos, karuta (Japanese playing cards), sugoroku (a Japanese variety of pachisi), fukubiki lotteries, visits to a family tomb, political demonstrations Source: Adapted from Tsurumi 1967, p. 70.

V Alternative culture Alternative culture is composed of indirect, devious, and political (though not necessarily overtly) forms of mass dissent against the institutionalized order. Some are reformist or even radical, while others are simply troublesome and threatening. All are located at the margin of Japanese society and challenge the patterns of the routine lives of ordinary citizens in various ways. Japanese history abounds with many activities of these types. Many Buddhist sects which enjoy established status initially started as alternative culture with charismatic leaders who had enthusiastic followers ready to defy the social order of the day. This is true, for example, of Shinran, the priest who established the Jōdo Shinshū sect in the thirteenth century as a kind of protestant movement in defiance of established Buddhist sects. He converted peasants and the urban populace to fervent belief. The same is true of Saint Nichiren, who started the Nichiren sect in the thirteenth century, vigorously attacked other Buddhist groups, and was condemned by the government to exile on Sado Island (in today’s Niigata prefecture). Many newer religions in modern Japan, including Soka Gakkai,

Ōmotokyō,

and

Konkōkyō,

resisted

the

military

government’s attempts to unite the public in support of Japan’s war activities during World War II. In the area of literature, Bashō, a seventeenth-century poet who elevated haiku to a respected literary field, challenged the existing circles of haiku poets with serious

alternative artistic styles, traveled extensively around the nation in solitude, and won the admiration of devoted followers who were dissatisfied with the literary status quo. At a more popular level, as mentioned in Chapter 1, urban residents in feudal Japan enjoyed writing poems called senryū, which are similar to haiku in style but more sarcastic and wittier in substance, mocking the ways of the world and the rulers of the day. Even today, most newspapers have senryū sections to which avid amateurs contribute satirical observations on world affairs in the form of short poems. Contemporary Japan is full of alternative culture. The following sections delineate only a few aspects of it.

1 Mini-communication media and online papers Despite the immense power of mass media, small-scale publications flourish in grassroots Japan. Community newsletters, consumer group pamphlets, voluntary association magazines, ecological newspapers, and many other types of mini-communication (minikomi) publications thrive throughout the country. These publications proliferated especially from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s in the context of the collapse of social movements opposing the United States–Japan Security Treaty and the rise of those against the Vietnam War and university authorities. This was a time when politically committed citizens consciously developed a counterculture with networks of small groups in deliberate opposition to the mass media’s depictions of the world. The waves of small-communication media subsided with the good performance of the Japanese economy

and

the

decline

in

open

political

confrontations.

Nonetheless, mini-komi media play significant roles in environmental movements, notably those against nuclear power plants. Groups concerned about the safety of food are active in the publication of newsletters, pamphlets, and mini-magazines. Other alternative groups question in their mini-komi the Japanese quality of life, which does not seem to reflect the nation’s apparent material wealth. In addition, free newspapers and community journals, which are more informational than countercultural, are thriving with the increasing ease of editing techniques, publication methods, and online technology.

Many

small

commercial

local

newspapers

with

circulations ranging from a few thousand to 100,000 copies are published online by a variety of peripheral communities, meeting residents’ demand for local news and information.19 Independently of the established media, a few online citizens’ newspapers are in operation, most notably Nikkan Berita. Ordinary citizens and freelance writers contribute to these newspapers as correspondents. Although journalists working for the established press tend to be suspicious of the quality control of articles that appear in online newspapers, some of these sites attract several hundred thousand hits per day and provide reports and commentary that are alternative to those published by the mainstream media. Although they struggle financially, the potential of online newspapers to be economically viable engines of civil society in Japan cannot be underestimated. The development of high technology by the Japanese and the international corporate world has provided these small groups with efficient modes of communication. With the advent of online networking, alternative group activists are able to exchange and disseminate information about their movements. With the expansion of

online-communication

systems,

an

increasing

number

of

youngsters participate in discussions on various issues. This type of high-tech conversation provides a new mode of social intercourse which enables people to have democratic access to electronically controlled but open conversations with strangers, often cutting across spatial boundaries. As discussed in Chapter 12, a series of antinuclear demonstrations after the explosions at the nuclear power plants in Fukushima in 2011 were spontaneously and efficiently

organized by means of online information dissemination. Relying on similar communication networks, volunteer workers emerged at the same time from various parts of the nation to help rescue the tsunami victims.

2 Countercultural events and performances Various

events

and

performances

draw

audiences

in

the

countercultural scenery in urban Japan. At a spontaneous level, new waves of pop art, street performance, and stylish fashion come and go in city centers, where lavish shops and postmodern buildings abound. In Tokyo, for instance, railway terminals such as Shinjuku and Shibuya and entertainment districts such as Harajuku and Roppongi provide milieus where trendy youth culture bubbles and talk-of-the-town social cliques flourish. One of the earlier prototypes of these performative events was the bamboo-shoot tribe, teenagers who in the 1980s regularly appeared in unconventional clothes in the areas around Tokyo’s Harajuku and Yoyogi on Sundays, when the streets were closed to vehicular traffic. The youngsters danced in the streets, wearing a variety of richly colored and eye-catching clothes, including Japanese happi coats, Chinese dresses, and Hawaiian muumuus. The term ‘bamboo-shoot tribe’ is attributable to the fact that they bought these clothes in the boutique Takenoko, whose name means ‘bamboo shoots’. With the spread of cyberspace culture, costume play, often referred to as ‘cosplay’, or kosupure, has become a part of urban youth leisure activity. In attempts to liberate themselves from daily routine, enthusiastic youths dress up, mainly as manga and anime characters, and show off their elaborate costumes and makeup, worn in a playful fashion, at indoor and outdoor gatherings. They use the striking costumes as a means of self-expression and self-

actualization. Cosplay events have spread internationally with the global popularity of Japanese popular culture, enabling its young overseas audience to enjoy momentary emancipation and fun by assuming imaginary identities in a festive atmosphere.

3 Communes and the natural economy Alternative culture finds radical expression in communes based on the natural economy and the abolition of private ownership. Cases in point include Atarashii Mura (New Villages) in Saitama and Miyazaki prefectures, Shinkyō commune in Nara, and Ittō-en in Kyoto. Yamagishi-kai, founded by Miyozō Yamagishi in the 1950s, is arguably the best known and largest in Japan. Originating with a small group of mainly farmers in Mie prefecture, it is a nationwide network of small-scale communes espousing a philosophy of symbiosis with nature and total pacifism. Renouncing private property

and

income,

commune

dwellers

make

a

lifetime

commitment to the movement, adopt simple lifestyles, and remain entirely nonreligious, though their radical approach has occasionally caused conflict with their relatives outside the commune as well as with neighboring communities. While many of its communes manage poultry

farms

and

engage

in

agricultural

production,

the

organization’s headquarters publishes newsletters, runs schools, and organizes special courses at which outsiders lodge together for a week to engage in introspection in interactive group discussion. Yamagishi-kai

has

attracted

ex-student

political

activists,

environmentalists, and other disenchanted reformist types. In a broader context, networks of ecologists are formed across the country to provide organically produced agricultural goods to the public, using the symbols of cooperation and coexistence with nature. In rural communities, they challenge mechanized mass

production of food contaminated by agricultural chemicals and turn their attention to the traditional wisdom of environmentally sound methods. In distribution processes, the life club cooperatives based in urban communities collectively purchase organic foods directly from growers. A few take the form of workers’ collectives in which participating members promote the establishment of distribution networks based on principles of direct democracy and flexible organization.20 They look for ways of recycling and exchanging unwanted goods, establishing children’s nurseries, and developing a kind of counter-economy among themselves. The groups that are members of the Workers’ Collective Network Japan form a chain that extends across the nation, including such locations as Tokyo, Kanagawa, Kumamoto.

Chiba,

Saitama,

Hokkaidō,

Aichi,

Kansai,

and

VI The political economy of Cool Japan

1 Manga: groundwork for Cool Japan Japanese cultural products are increasingly visible around the world. They range from anime, manga, and computer games to martial arts, karaoke, sushi, and fashion and include knowledge commodities such as Sudoku games, Kumon education, and the Suzuki method of teaching music. Pokémon, Ninja, and Hello Kitty are international icons. These cultural goods are as important to trade as industrial commodities like cars and electronic appliances. In the context of the rise of cultural capitalism (as discussed in Chapter 5), McGray created a sensation in 2002 with the thesis that although Japan may no longer be an industrial superpower in terms of gross national product, it has developed into a powerhouse in terms of what he called Gross National Cool.21

Figure 11.1 Akihabara, Tokyo’s shopping hub for electronic goods and the center of Japan’s otaku culture In the educational sphere, many students who study Japanese language at universities and high schools outside Japan are

motivated by the desire to read and understand Japanese manga in Japanese. Departments of Japanese in educational institutions around the world promote the Cool Japan vision to attract, maintain, and expand student engagement with Japanese studies. Long before the spread of international popularity of Japan’s cultural goods, Japan’s consumers enjoyed them and continue to do so. Manga (literally, ‘funny pictures’) best represents the field of visual mass culture. Manga is a generic term that covers cartoons, comic strips, and caricatures. In 2018, the sales value of manga books and magazines comprised some 22 percent of all published titles in Japan,22 a pattern that does not exist in any other industrialized society. The leading weekly manga magazine for young boys, Shūkan Shōnen Jump, sold approximately 1.6 million copies per week and was the bestselling magazine in Japan early in 2019.23 More than 2,000 comic books are published every year. Many of these manga, both printed and digital, are story manga that have clear themes and narratives. Further, amateur manga writers publish their own magazines, often with a small coterie of enthusiasts, and sell them through private channels or at comic markets (abbreviated as comike), where like-minded manga lovers exchange information and sell their products. Japan’s manga industry initially enjoyed great commercial success domestically, from the 1960s onwards, thanks to the contributions of talented creators, resourceful producers and distributors, and, most importantly, large internal markets. In the world of books and magazines, for instance, Japanese authors wrote for a domestic readership market, closed but large enough to be self-

sufficient. The publication industry had sophisticated and highly advanced

networks

of

editors,

promoters,

advertisers,

and

bookshops. Within this structure, manga books and magazines were commodified and distributed in an efficient fashion. Manga laid the groundwork for the Cool Japan perspective. Immediately after the defeat in World War II and the United States’ occupation of Japan, the nation’s cultural other was almost exclusively American culture, in the context of the United States’ dominance in many spheres of Japanese life. Osamu Tezuka, the founding father of Japan’s breed of manga and animation, attempted to absorb and compete with the techniques developed by Walt Disney. Tezuka was the author of Astro Boy, a story of the lively activities of a robot boy with superhuman abilities and human feelings. Tezuka first published its Japanese predecessor under the title Atomu taishi (Ambassador Atom) in 1951, during the Allied occupation period, while emulating American animation. Featuring main characters with big eyes, and story lines full of high-tech devices, Tezuka’s style became the modus operandi of Japan’s manga and animation writers.24 In 2009, the Astro Boy movie was released globally, highlighting the contemporary relevance of Tezuka’s original work and the international popularity of this genre. A manga genre known as gekiga (dramatized pictorial stories) depicts the dark side of human existence. Like long novels, gekiga have complex story lines, mostly with undertones of malice, hostility, and bitter sarcasm towards the established order. Gekiga initially won popularity in the 1960s among youngsters uprooted from rural areas to become blue-collar workers in factories in large cities.

Uneducated and exploited, at the bottom of Japan’s high-growth economy, these young workers empathized with the gekiga figures who resisted and challenged their powerful rulers and moral authorities, often through illegitimate and unconventional means. A series of peasant uprisings during the feudal period formed the central theme of seventeen volumes of Ninja bugei-chō (Ninjas’ martial arts notebooks), the landmark gekiga that established the genre and whose animation version was released in 2009 as Kamui gaiden. The solidarity of dissident groups also provided a theme for some gekiga, which had a wide readership among student rebels during campus turmoils in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Women cartoonists have played significant roles in manga production. The best-known postwar Japanese cartoonist, Machiko Hasegawa, penned the comic strips that centered on the everyday life of a housewife named Sazae-san and her family members. Serialized in the morning edition of the Asahi newspaper for more than three decades from the early 1950s, Sazae-san became a household name and popularized a housewife’s perspective on Japanese society throughout the postwar period. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of talented women cartoonists have published manga specifically addressed to teenage girls. Attracting a wide range of followers, some of these authors have moved beyond the genre of girls’ manga and have driven the engine of contemporary manga culture. The manga industry is an example of the mass customization of Japan’s cultural capitalism (see Chapter 5), as it targets a large variety of sociocultural groups with different interests, identities, and

curiosities – for example, kodomo manga for children, shōjo manga for girls, shōnen manga for boys, salaryman manga for office employees, family manga for middle-class households, supōtsu manga for sports fans, gourmet manga for epicureans, and gekiga for social dissidents.25 It is notable that shōjo manga established itself as a distinguished mainstream genre in which almost all artists and readers are females – a field promoted largely by and for women, reflecting their creative and consumer power. Rich in psychological description and affectionate expression, the genre’s themes range from romance and female identity to feminism, with its market segmented into a variety of age groups, from elementaryschool children to young adults. After growing up, both the prosperity and the global generation (described in Chapter 4) continued to be hooked into the cultural environment expanding from the world of manga into that of animation movies, internet-based illustrated characters, doll-like or life-sized figures, and other assorted manga-related products. These cultural goods are often interactively produced and packaged. Animation heroine and hero dolls, for example, are marketed after the popularity of their anime movie counterparts is established, as is the case with Pokémon and the marketing of its figurines. The manga industry pioneered such linking strategies. At the beginning of the 2020s, manga producers stand at a crossroads. Although Japan’s manga have increased their presence internationally, the domestic consumption of printed manga has declined over time. For instance, the bestselling magazine Shūkan Shōnen Jump, which sold more than 6 million copies per week at its

peak in 1995, published only about a quarter of this number in 2018, a downturn that reflects a similar trend across the domestic manga magazine industry. The trend is attributable to the changing consumption patterns of members of the younger generation, choosing to spend their money primarily on mobile phones, the internet, and other forms of technology and only secondarily on the products of print media. Consequently, while the market of printed manga books and magazines shrank, that of their digital versions expanded its share in the late 2010s, comprising more than 80 percent of all digital publications in Japan.26 The digitalization of the lifestyles of Japanese youth makes it inevitable for manga contents to be increasingly consumed through virtual media. Futuristic and technologically refined, Japanese visual culture continues to be a core ingredient of the nation’s cultural capitalism. Against this background, the Cool Japan vision has taken hold.

2 Cool Japan as commercial market The Japanese cultural industry, government, and mass media have been eager to promote representations of Cool Japan domestically and internationally. They are encouraged and even flattered by the view that the expansion of Cool Japan has catapulted the nation into a position as a leading soft power. Shinzō Abe’s government established the post of minister in charge of Cool Japan strategy in 2013; the Cool Japan Promotion Council was set up within the Prime Minister’s Office; and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry runs the Creative Industries Promotion Office. These measures are reminiscent of the now-defunct Cool Britannia program championed by Tony Blair’s government in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. The Cool Japan market extends into the contents and media industries, which produce a wide range of software programs and digital information. Market analysts organize the industry into four categories: package software, including visual, audio, and game software as well as newspapers and books; broadcasting software, including television and radio programs; software for such entertainment facilities as movie theaters, karaoke boxes, and gaming centers; and internet-based contents for personal computers and mobile phones, including online visual content and music, games,

electronic

dictionaries,

e-books,

and

digital

advertisements.27 The total domestic market size of all these contents and media is estimated to have exceeded ¥12.77 trillion in

2017, with a rapid increase in the online market (the fourth category above). Diversity in Japan’s popular culture The contents and media industry is linked with associated industries that target similar markets. For example, trademarked character-themed goods are produced as spin-off products based on popular manga and animation figures. Hardware equipment like computers, mobile phones, and gaming consoles are marketed in close association with their software counterparts. Idol fashion producers rely on the popularity of particular media personalities. If one includes these associated industries, the total market size is estimated to be ¥52.5 trillion, amounting to approximately 10 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. It is no wonder that not only the business world but also the government vigorously promotes the Cool Japan campaign. The popular culture of Japan is further explored in the video Japan: Fascinating Diversity

(Kawaii!

Inside

Japan’s

Pop

Culture),

at

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfWP96bIV4 (MOFA, 5 March 2012).

Internationally, Japan ranks third – behind the United States and China – in the worldwide contents market, occupying some 10 percent. The market is a highly significant sphere of the nation’s

cultural capitalism. In the context of the general decline of Japan’s industrial economy, it is no surprise that the country’s businesses have attempted to find a way forward in the export of cultural goods.

3 Cool Japan abroad Cool Japan is now a symbol around which a variety of interests compete and to which multiple interpretations are attached. Table 11.6 summarizes the three phases of popular images of Japan abroad in conjunction with the predominant models of Japanese studies, as well as the changing structural conditions that influenced them. The current images of Cool Japan constitute the third phase, which has surged in the wake of the preceding two. Table 11.6 Comparison of three phases in popular images of Japan abroad and predominant paradigms of Japanese studies Phase

Criterion

1 (1950s– 60s)

2 (1970s–80s)

3 (1990s–2020s)

Popular image abroad Descriptive theme

Mysterious Japan

Groupist Japan

Cool Japan

Concrete symbols

Bushido, judo, Kabuki, Noh, tea ceremony, geisha

Lifetime employment, enterprise unions, quality control, kanban, bureaucracy

Manga, anime, sushi, karaoke, J-pop, fashion, cuisine, tourism, hospitality

Phase

Criterion

1 (1950s– 60s)

2 (1970s–80s)

3 (1990s–2020s)

Prevailing impressions

Inscrutable, enigmatic, highly exotic

Serious, patient, industrious, persevering, consensual

Playful, hilarious, unpredictable, sexy, fun loving

Consumers

Avid Japanophiles

Businessmen, government officials

Non-elite, young, urban

Japanese studies paradigm Neustupný 1980

Japanology

Area studies

Contemporaneity

Steinhoff 2007

Language and area studies

Economic competition

Cultural studies

Chiavacci 2008

Class struggle

General middleclass society

Social division

Monocultural

Multicultural

General orientation Domestic culture

Monocultural

Phase

Criterion

1 (1950s– 60s)

2 (1970s–80s)

3 (1990s–2020s)

Emphasized attributes

Paradoxical, samurai culture

Uniquely group oriented, classless, highly integrated

Class differentiated, demographically diverse, competitive

Cultural relativism

Interethnic

Interethnic

Interethnic and interclass

Contour of Japan’s nationhood

Given

Taken for granted

Blurred, problematized

Definition of ‘the Japanese’

Exclusive

Exclusive

Increasingly inclusive

Japanese studies in the world knowledge system

Based on Eurocentric criteria

Nihonjinron as cultural relativism

Part of flows of non-European ideas

English translations of Japanese scholarly works

Very few

Few

Still limited

Phase

Criterion Japan as a case in explicitly comparative studies

1 (1950s– 60s)

2 (1970s–80s)

3 (1990s–2020s)

Few

Some

Increasing

Underlying megastructure Dominant social formation

Agrarian society

Industrial capitalism

Cultural capitalism

Dominant sector

Primary

Manufacturing

Quaternary

Japan’s position in the international context

US occupation and recovery from World War II

Trade surplus, bubble economy, vertical integration

Globalization, cross-border migration, aging, deflation, civil society

Immediately after the end of World War II, Japan was seen as culturally obscure and mysterious. The role of Japan specialists was to unravel its inscrutable and enigmatic peculiarities by focusing on traditional aspects of the country, such as Bushido, judo, Noh, Kabuki, and flower arranging. Except for Japanophiles, who were attracted by Japan’s ‘exoticism’, there was little interest in Japan

internationally. The nation was predominantly agrarian, with a majority of the workforce in the primary sector of the economy. With the ostensibly sudden rise of the Japanese economy in the 1970s and its global expansion in the 1980s, the international community began to pay attention to aspects deemed to be unique to Japanese culture, especially the various practices that were applicable to the elite sector of Japanese company structures. Practices like lifetime employment, seniority-based wage structure, and enterprise unionism were thought to be the driving forces of Japanese economic ascendancy. It was widely believed that the Japanese orientation to groupism – as distinct from Western individualism – accounted for the phenomena that were allegedly peculiar to Japan. This was a time when the world watched the rise of Japan’s industrial capitalism, particularly its manufacturing sector, with admiration, fear, and envy, and when Toyota, Nissan, Sony, and Panasonic became global household names. The third phase of Japanese popular images emerged after the stagnation of the country’s economy in the 1990s. Success stories were things of the past. This, however, was followed by the international popularization of Japan’s popular culture – mostly manga, anime, sushi, and karaoke (which are sometimes referred to by the acronym MASK, which Roger Pulvers coined28). Within Japan, expectations are high that an exportable Japanese culture might help lift not only the nation’s prestige symbolically but its business and political interests materially. Fun-loving, funny, entertaining, hilarious, sexy, and playful aspects of life are, on the whole, manifest in third-phase Japanese

cultural products. Here, postmodern rather than modern descriptors are increasingly championed. A fresh emphasis is placed on new orientations – fluidity rather than predictability, amorphousness rather than rationality, conviviality rather than seriousness, and ecology consciousness rather than developmentalism – paving the way for what may be called ‘postmodern exoticism’. This contrasts sharply with earlier portrayals of the Japanese as serious, persevering, workaholic, loyal, patient, and stoic, although the new images coexist with the old. The three-phase image transformations correspond to other observations,

notably

those

regarding

Japanese

studies.

In

summarizing such studies in the United States over the past several decades, Patricia Steinhoff identifies three paradigms in Japanese studies: language and area studies (1950s–70s),

economic

competition (1980s–90s), and cultural studies (1990s–2010s).29 Covering a longer time span, Steffi Richter also presents a threephase model in which the latest stage began in the 1990s, with the focus on a Cool Japan built on the postmodern information service society.30 In addition, as early as 1980, Australia-based J. V. Neustupný distinguished three analogous patterns in these studies: Japanology, area studies, and contemporaneity.31 As discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3, David Chiavacci presents three dominant models of class analysis in postwar Japan, from the class struggle model through the general middle-class model to the divided-society model, each more or less corresponding to the above periodization.32

All in all, one might venture to say that these trichotomous phases observed by scholars in Japanese studies, cultural studies, and class analysis point to the interaction between popular images and scholarly models. The underlying megastructural trends – the decline of agrarian society to the rise of cultural capitalism – have also exercised fundamental influences.

4 Producers and consumers The analysis is complicated by ambiguity about how the Cool Japan phenomena should be defined. Some concentrate on manga and anime, while others focus on music and fashion. Still others are primarily interested in cuisine and hospitality. The field is equivocal, elusive, and often unquantifiable. For its balanced analysis, both the production and the consumption sides of the equation must be studied. (a) Labor conditions of production The Cool Japan phenomena have produced enthusiasts primarily engaged in analyzing, interpreting, and decoding the symbolic, pictorial, and auditory representations of popular culture products. In comparison, little attention has been paid to their production processes, where working conditions are sometimes harsh and unstable. Animators present a case in point: they are paid poorly and subjected to long working hours, at odds with the colorful and cool imagery of their industry.33 Japanese animations are acclaimed for their refined, subtle, and delicate quality, and animator’s techniques are internationally praised. But their dedication to finesse is time consuming, as they draw by hand each series of images that incrementally shift the characters on screen. Animators

are

positioned

on

the

bottom

rung

of

the

subcontracting ladder. An animation project usually starts with the formation of a production committee made up of a television station,

a publishing house, and other media organizations. Equipped with overall authority and copyrights, the committee subcontracts the project to a manufacturing company which, in many cases, further subcontracts artwork to smaller firms. They undertake practical work and hire animators, many of whom are freelance, work on a piecerate basis, and do not have an established minimum wage. While the production committee at the top of the structure reaps major profits, these hardly trickle down to the levels where the material work is carried out.34 More broadly, relatively petty capital and limited operational expenditure are needed to start and manage Cool Japan businesses in comparison with the costs involved in manufacturing firms. In general, publishing manga, running a sushi shop, and managing a tourist inn are smaller operations involving smaller returns and do not require the stable, long-term employees needed by companies that produce cars or electric appliances. The expansion of cultural industries has thus been correlated with the casualization of the workforce. (b) Otaku: significant consumers On the consumers’ side of the equation, otaku, the category of young Japanese who are deeply absorbed in some aspects of popular culture, are regarded as significant players. Highly visible influencers for consumers of cultural commodities, otaku are those individuals who either psychologically get hooked on particular goods or purchase them without self-constraint. Overall, they are

eager to collect the commodities with which they are obsessed, to share their interests with others, to use their own judgment criteria for the goods, to belong to the same collection group, to show off their collections, and to create original goods. These six types of desires – collecting, sharing, self-controlling, belonging, showing, and creating – are the defining characteristics of otaku.35 The specific commodities of their interests and obsessions are wideranging and include comics, anime, computer games, computers, audiovisual equipment, plastic models, cars, information technology gadgets, travel, fashion, cameras, airplane- or railway-related goods, postage stamps, and stationery. Some male otaku youths hold the erotic orientation known as moe, a strong fetish obsession for the characters of computer games and animation stories.36 These characters are generally young, good looking, and cute girls with big eyes, images born of a virtual world. Life-sized figures, large dolls, and other character goods fill the floors of computer shops in Akihabara, a quarter in Tokyo lined with electronic stores and known as the epicenter of otaku culture. For the producers and sellers of cultural commodities, a variety of otaku groups form a significant target market. They overlap with such groups as nerds and geeks in other countries but cover a much wider variety. Nearly 20 million Japanese, mainly in their twenties and thirties, are estimated to deem themselves part of otaku culture.37 Although the phrase Cool Japan has a ring of grace and elegance, it is double edged when it comes to its demographic base. The bearers of cool culture are stratified into affluent and

marginalized groups.38 The otaku phenomenon was initially prevalent in the late twentieth century among youth brought up in a privileged environment in Tokyo who had both intellectual and financial resources to form subcultural groups committed to cool culture. Then, the pattern manifested itself at the higher echelon of Japan’s class structure; one can observe the rise of a new uppermiddle class that works in the globally connected contents industries involving

information

technology,

media,

art,

design,

and

management and finds satisfaction in engaging in flexible, mobile, and creative work. Members of this class are highly competitive and champion the neoliberal ideology of the survival of the fittest. Successful and upwardly mobile in their work, they enjoy expensive, pleasurable, and urban lifestyles. The residents of Roppongi Hills, an extravagant high-rise building in the heart of Tokyo, exemplify this class. Although extremely few in number, they are visible in the media and present themselves as role models of cool aspirants. On the lower stratum exists a mass of otaku individuals who have not made it in the neoliberal competitive environment, with some struggling to maintain their livelihoods. These otaku find refuge, escape, or even silent defiance in such cool activities as online social networking, collecting cool products, reading manga, and admiring idols. The extreme models of cool-seeking otaku at this level are city-based youngsters who spend much of their time in internet cafés reading comics and sending and receiving messages on social media with strangers, and who regard their mobile phones as their most important possessions.

Though the presence of Japan’s popular culture abroad is most conspicuous in East Asia, its consumers are also confined to a particular category: urban youngsters, who increasingly have the same values, lifestyles, tastes, and sensibilities as their Japanese counterparts. This points to the possibility that class similarities across national boundaries may be more significant than national characters across demographic boundaries, as discussed in relation to Table 2.9.

Land of manga Japanese newspapers carried an intriguing story in early July 2006.39 Two French girls, both aged sixteen, who lived in the suburbs of Paris, had been taken into police custody in Poland. They had traveled there by train, a trip that had taken them through Belgium and Germany, and their final destination had been Japan, where they longed to live. They were good school friends fascinated by Japanese visual rock music and manga, including the ninja manga series Naruto and the girls’ manga series Peach Girl. They had planned to make train connections across Europe and Russia to the Korean Peninsula and then travel by ship to Japan, about which they fantasized as the land of manga and a dreamlike lifestyle. However, the girls had left home without letting their parents know and unaware that visas were required to cross national borders. After leaving France with only a small amount of money, a mobile phone, a portable audio-player, and manga books, they had been detained by border police when they attempted to enter Belarus. The episode itself could constitute a comical manga story, and one can laugh at the girls as naive and gullible. Yet, although extreme, eccentric, and far-fetched, their ideas of Japan resonate with the predominating representations of the nation abroad, which are influenced by the global explosion of Japanese popular culture. Although elements such as

manga, anime, fashion, and television dramas do represent aspects

of

Japanese

society,

interpretations

based

excessively or merely on these aspects lose sight of Japan’s variegation and heterogeneity and verge on a new kind of stereotyping.

5 Promise or illusion? The vision of Cool Japan has kindled some controversy in at least two areas, regarding whether it contributes to a better understanding of Japanese society and whether it opens the way for Japan to become a soft power. These issues have attracted arguments from both enthusiasts and skeptics. (a) Japan literacy The first point concerns the relationship between the Cool Japan project and Japan literacy, over which two rival observations prevail. On the one hand, the spread of Cool Japan products is welcome, because they provide good points of entry into a better understanding of Japanese society more broadly, aiming to engender interest and curiosity. Many overseas students who take Japanese courses at universities and high schools are motivated to learn the language in order to read and understand Japanese manga in Japanese. Manga conversations are usually highly colloquial and informal, and foreign learners can study the language naturally while getting visual cues from pictorial story lines. Many creative teaching methods that exploit Japan’s popular culture have been developed along these lines. Some anime allow the audience a glimpse into Japanese behavior patterns and lifestyles, while Japanese dramas televised in Asia and beyond and various manga series, such as Sazae-san and Doraemon, provide insights into aspects of Japanese family life.

On the other hand, the issue remains about how sophisticated an understanding of Japanese society can be acquired through Cool Japan items. It is questionable, or at least inconclusive, whether they enhance the level of Japan literacy abroad. Some simple comparisons are useful. Spiderman and Snow White arguably contribute little to a thorough comprehension abroad of American society. Similarly, there is no reason to believe that Akira, Sailor Moon, or Dragon Ball provide their overseas fans with a better grasp of Japanese society. Equally, to the extent that eating spaghetti provides almost no insight into Italian society, dining on sushi does little to enhance knowledge of Japanese society. From the skeptics’ perspective, the extent to which Cool Japan projects help to raise the level of their consumers’ Japan literacy depends on their contents. Furthermore, the themes of Cool Japan involve an apparent paradox: the more one studies Cool Japan products in reality, the more likely one is to find one’s initial fantasies mundane. The cool objects are cool not because they are simply beautiful and appealing but because they are somehow incomprehensible, enigmatic, or unfathomable. The elements of inscrutability, unintelligibility, and mysteriousness must be present in cool entities, be they mascots, Jpop or idols. Sober and rational investigations into these objects, however, tend to diminish their cool luster, and they cease to be cool objects with which one wishes to be fanatically involved. One cannot be unreservedly excited about Ainu artistic goods after studying the associated production and distribution structure of exploitation. One might find the big-eyed kawaii girl dolls cool, so long as one ignores the fact that they have little to do with real Japanese girls. In this

sense, it might well be the case that coolness is built upon ignorance as a mirage and disappears when illuminated by the light of levelheaded understanding. (b) Soft power The second area of divided views is about whether the spread of Cool Japan is conducive to Japan acquiring soft power in the international context. In pointing to this new form of power in world politics, Joseph Nye, who coined the phrase ‘soft power’, argues that the sources of power are increasingly cultural, psychological, and ideological rather than coercive and militaristic. Soft power is the intangible capacity of a country to influence preferences of other countries and to achieve its political and economic goals by soft means: those which co-opt people instead of coercing them.40 McGray develops his argument about Cool Japan with this thesis in mind. His notion of Gross National Cool is not simply of an index of the number of popular culture goods; it is also an indicator of the degree to which the goods should translate into wealth accumulation in business transactions and diplomatic advantages in international politics.41 However, demographically, the main consumers of Cool Japan (in the 1990s–2020s, Phase 3 of Table 11.6) differ from those of previous

periods.

When

representations

of

‘Japanese-style’

management prevailed (in the 1970s–80s, Phase 2 of the same table), the main audience was the overseas business and government elite. In contrast, contemporary overseas fans of manga

and anime are mainly non-elite, existing outside mainstream society. Young girls in Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian countries who are avid followers of Japanese fashion, food, and books have little to do with the national decision-making processes of those nations. On the whole, political and diplomatic international relations are not closely connected with grassroots culture. A Korean girl who enjoys Japanese manga, for example, would feel no contradiction, during classroom discussions, in accusing the Japanese of wartime wrongdoings. She would dissociate one issue from the other, a process

that

Befu

calls

‘value

compartmentalization’.42

The

popularity of Japanese popular culture commodities in China and Korea has not helped to solve either historical animosity or current territorial disputes between those countries and Japan. For skeptics, there appears to be little evidence to support the core of the Cool Japan thesis, that the global spread of Japan’s cultural products will increase the nation’s influence as a soft power as defined by Nye.

6 Counterculture or postmodern Nihonjinron? At a more general level, the question remains as to the extent to which the Cool Japan discourse reflects advanced postmodern values and lifestyles or represents the formation of a new kind of stereotype that promotes Japanese cultural essentialism. It is true that the fresh focus from the 1990s onward on Japan’s popular culture gave rise to a perspective which liberated Japan observers from hackneyed images based on national traditional conventions or corporate culture. Cool enthusiasts focus on the contemporary Japanese lifestyle, which received little attention in the past, and extol its emancipatory potential. Cosplay participants embark on their ostensibly childlike pursuit in defiance of the established values and norms of the world of adults. Elite university students and careertrack employees enjoy reading manga and immerse themselves in the space of fictional immaturity and imagined juvenility, thereby freeing themselves from the stifling routines of their everyday lives. Making sushi or washoku (Japanese-style food) can be a selftranscending experience for those who are fed up with fast food, mundane cookery, and ordinary recipes. These cool undertakings often give rise to small communities and networks in which participants exchange information and ideas in shared defiance of conventional structures and values. To that extent, the Cool Japan discourse, in support of such activities, is either explicitly or implicitly countercultural and therefore challenges the old images of Japan as a highly bureaucratized society composed of obedient individuals.

Furthermore, the Cool Japan discourse highlights a postmodern paradigm43: the virtual world in which fictions and realities are entangled and inseparable, in which fictions are real and realities are fictitious. Entertainers, idols, and anime characters – never met, but watched on television every day – become their fans’ virtual family members. Fictitious heroes and heroines of manga penetrate into viewers’ lives so much that they form part of their real environment. Fans might want to take part in a cosplay and dress up as characters from the imaginary world because to them it is real. Some indulge in collecting cool character dolls and even feel emotional and erotic attachments towards them as sexual objects, as they are better looking, better shaped, and better dressed than real people. As people spend more time interacting with the virtual world than with their family and friends, the virtual world forms a universe that can appear more alive than it really is. Objects of adoration are anthropomorphized. Bishōjo (beautiful girl character figures), for instance, which have no material existence, become more real than actual humans to their devotees.44 Thus, the indivisibility of the fictitious and the real enables the person to relish a form of sensitivity that is not subject to the actual context in which they find themselves. This postmodern transcendentalism appears to account for the phenomena of otaku and hikikomori (discussed in Chapter 6) and helps to draw focus on groups that rarely received attention in Japan or abroad in the past. Against this backdrop, some analysts have proposed undertaking otaku studies,45 while others have argued for the potential of what they call Cool Japanology.46 Kyoto Seika

University established the Faculty of Manga in 2006, the first of its kind in the world, and runs the International Manga Research Center as well as the Kyoto International Manga Museum. At the same time, while countercultural and postmodern in many respects, the Cool Japan discourse not only contains very limited orientations to structural social reform but often comes close to cultural essentialism. The very fact that Cool Japan is approved by Japanese government and business indicates that Cool Japan culture is not a threat to the nation’s sociopolitical system at all and is conceivably countercultural in form only. It arguably expands political and economic interests while allowing the masses to engage in acceptable diversions. In tune with Shinzō Abe’s 2006 slogan Utsukushii kuni Nippon (Japan as a beautiful nation), one may even suggest that the Cool Japan campaign tacitly fosters cultural nationalism. Underneath the Cool Japan model lies the assumption that Japanese culture encapsulates exceptionally unique characteristics that no other culture has. Here, to focus primarily on manga and anime,

a

new

depiction

of

Japanese

culture

emerged:

pictocentrism.47 The argument is that Japanese are deemed visually oriented in contrast with logocentric and phonocentric Westerners. As discussed in Chapter 2, the first Japanese manga is said to have been the chōjū giga scrolls, produced around the twelfth century, in which a variety of birds and animals are comically illustrated. Ezōshi, picture books sold and read in the Edo period, are often cited as the precursors of Japan’s manga culture. Kanji characters, originally imported from China, are ideographic rather than phonetic, each

representing an image of something, and therefore were presumed to have nurtured the visually oriented culture of Japan. Furthermore, as Laura Miller points out, Cool Japan ideology tends to promote gender stratification, by marginalizing women and girls who do not conform to images of cute femininity – the representations ‘produced,

critiqued,

imagined

and

endorsed

primarily by male elites in Japan and internationally’.48 Generally, even Cool Japan critics tend to lose sight of its gendered aspects. Based on an Orientalist polarity of the East and the West, these observations and arguments tend to single out a limited sector of Japanese society and expand it disproportionately to build an image of national culture at large. In the abovementioned third phase of overseas representations of Japan, an emphasis is placed on playfulness, flexibility, urbanity, and mobility. While departing from the conventional form of exoticism, the Cool Japan scheme embraces what might be regarded as postmodern Orientalism.49 It is merely a slight leap from here to argue, as many of the Cool Japan advocates have, that pictocentric Japan is postmodern and thus ahead of the logocentric and phonocentric West, which is stuck with logical, coherent, and rational modernity. In this sense, then, the Cool Japan discourse can be positioned as a new stereotype formation, possibly called ‘postmodern Nihonjinron’.

VII Conclusion Over the past three decades or so, Japanese culture has become a focus of global attention. It is now selectively stereotyped, packaged, and exported around the world, but its representation does not necessarily reflect its rich and diverse varieties. This chapter has contrasted its mass, folk, and alternative forms, has sought to view the Cool Japan phenomena from the perspectives of sociology of knowledge and political economy, and has attempted to examine ‘Japanese culture’ as a plural noun. From the viewpoint of the social sciences, the challenge is how to scrutinize the social foundations of ideational, aesthetic, and attitudinal orientations. It might be time for both enthusiasts and skeptics to look at the Cool Japan phenomenon with cool heads.

Research questions 1. How have premodern forms of Japanese culture influenced its postmodern forms? 2. To what extent does Japan’s alternative culture reflect its mainstream culture? 3. To what degree do Cool Japan projects result in material returns to Japan? Are their profits hefty or limited in comparison with other export industries? 4. Has the expansion of Japan’s popular culture in East Asia contributed to the formation of shared identity in the region? 5. How do Asian societies shape their own cultural patterns against the images of Japanese culture as their other?

Further readings Bestor, Victoria Lyon, Bestor, Theodore C., and Yamagata, Akiko (eds) 2011, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Society and Culture. London: Routledge. Iwabuchi, Koichi 2002, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Morris, Paul, Shimazu, Naoko, and Vickers, Edward (eds) 2014, Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Otmazgin, Nissim Kadosh 2013, Regionalizing Culture: The Political Economy of Japanese Popular Culture in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Sugimoto, Yoshio (ed.) 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Online resources About Japan editors 2020, Popular Culture and Japan’s Gross National Cool. About Japan: A Teacher’s Resource, Japan Society, https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/popular_culture_and_japans_gro ss_national_cool. Atkins, E. Taylor 2020, A History of Popular Culture in Japan, from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Northern Illinois University, www.niu.edu/etatkins/interviews-initiatives/hpcj.shtml. Cabinet Office 2020, website. Cabinet Office, https://www.cao.go.jp/index-e.html. Kazuaki, Nagata 2017, ‘As manga goes digital via smartphone apps, do comics still have a place?’. Japan Times (2 August), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/08/02/business/manga-goesdigital-via-smartphone-apps-paper-comics-still-place/#.XlT7oC2caIE (may require registration or subscription). Margolis, Eric 2019, The Dark Side of Japan’s Anime Industry. Vox (2 July), www.vox.com/culture/2019/7/2/20677237/anime-industryjapan-artists-pay-labor-abuse-neon-genesis-evangelion-netflix. 1 Sekine, Watanabe, and Hayashida 2016, p. 11. 2 Sekine, Watanabe, and Hayashida 2016, p. 14.

3 Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association 2018b. For a brief survey of sports journalism in Japan, see Okazaki 2001. 4 Japan Productivity Center 2018. 5 Zen Nihon Yūgi Jigyō Kyōdō Kumiai Rengōkai 2018. 6 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, morning edition, 13 December 1994, p. 36. 7 Tada 1978, pp. 42–51. See also Maida 2017, which demonstrates pachinko is a hobby enjoyed by blue-collar workers. 8 AM, 25 October 2017, p. 31. 9 AE, 25 July 1992, p. 5. 10 Japan Productivity Center 2018. 11 Satō 1994, p. 114. 12 See Mitsui and Hosokawa 2001 for the influence of karaoke in different parts of the world. 13 See Kataoka 2000, although it focuses primarily on the downward process discussed below. 14 PRTimes 2017. 15 Sakurai 1982. 16 Namihira 1979.

17 Kobayashi 2019, pp. 55, 71; Nishi 2009, p. 70. 18 Tsurumi 1967, chap. 1. See also Sugimoto 2008. 19 Shikata 2015. 20 M. Amano 2011; Maclachlan 2003. 21 McGray 2002. 22 Shuppan Kagaku Kenkyūsho 2019. 23 Japan Magazine Publishers Association 2019. 24 Schodt 2007. 25 See Norris 2009, pp. 238–40. 26 Inpuresu Sōgō Kenkyūsho 2019. 27 This and the following paragraph are based on HumanMedia 2019. 28 Pulvers 2006. 29 Steinhoff 2007, 2013. 30 Richter 2010, pp. 173–5. 31 Neustupný 1980. 32 Chiavacci 2008. 33 NHK Kurōzuappu Gendai Purasu 2017.

34 Nihon Animator Enshutsu Kyōkai 2019. 35 Nomura Research Institute 2005, pp. 15–17. 36 Kijima 2012. 37 Yano Research Institute of Economics 2019. 38 Richter 2010, pp. 181–3. 39 See, for example, AM, 5 July 2006, p. 6. The story was based on an article in a French newspaper, Libération, on 1 July 2006 (Tourancheau 2006). The factual detail and accuracy of the report are not the focus of analysis here. 40 Nye 2005. 41 McGray 2002. 42 Befu 2003, p. 17. 43 Azuma 2009. 44 Kijima 2012. 45 Okada 2000. 46 Azuma 2010. 47 See Inouye 1996; Napier 2005; Berndt 2007, pp. 137–40. 48 Miller 2011, p. 18.

49 Sanders 2008.

Chapter 12

Civil society: activism and friendly authoritarianism ◈

I Introduction Two ostensibly contradictory forces operate in Japanese society, as is the case in other industrialized societies. On the one hand, it is subject to many centrifugal forces that tend to diversify its structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations. On the other hand, a range of centripetal forces drive Japanese society towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society. First, it examines the fragmentation of social relations, the most significant development that has affected the foundations of Japanese society. The chapter then scrutinizes the rise of social movements in the 2010s in spite of such tendency and addresses an apparent paradox: the formation of solidarity amid fragmentation. The next section delves into the quiet spread of volunteer activities and NPOs and NGOs as the backdrop of the dissenting protests and the changing configuration of interest groups at large. The chapter then examines the viability of the emic notion analogous to citizenship in the analysis of the Japanese context. The final section attempts to locate a variety of forms of control in an analytical framework and to summarize their features as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ diffused across the wide spectrum of Japanese society.

II The fragmentation of social relations In Japan’s civil society today, many indicators point to the fragmentation of its fabric. The trend is most discernible in the shrinking numbers of members who belong to voluntary organizations – associations which sit between the state machinery and the masses. Table 12.1 shows the changing proportions of people who were affiliated with voluntary associations between 1986 and 2017. Table 12.1 Changes in affiliations to voluntary associations, 1986–2017 Affiliation (%) Voluntary association

1986

2017

Change

None

17.0

44.3

Up

Neighborhood

69.7

24.8

Down

Hobby

11.7

13.8

Up

Parent–teacher

16.5

7.2

Down

Labor unions

11.0

6.0

Down

Religious

4.3

3.8

Down

Agricultural and fishery

9.4

2.8

Down

Commercial and industrial

5.1

1.3

Down

Senior citizensa

–

5.2

–

NPO and community-buildinga

–

1.5

–

Resident, consumer, and other civila

–

0.7

–

Source: Adapted from Akarui Senkyo Suishin Kyōkai 2018, Question F; Mori and Kubo 2014, p. 203; Nakakita 2017, p. 196. Notes: The figures are the percentages of survey respondents who were affiliated with each organization in the survey year. a

Included in the surveys only since 1993; therefore, 1986 figures are unavailable. The table indicates, above all, that the sphere of voluntary associations declined appreciably over

the three decades. While only 17.0 percent of citizens did not belong to any in 1986, the ratio increased 2.6 times, to 44.3 percent, by 2017. Notably, the members of neighborhood associations, which used to be widespread and powerful in every community, contracted to more than one-third of their earlier number during the period under consideration. Both urban and rural interest groups, including

agricultural, commercial, and industrial associations (discussed in Chapter 9), also experienced downturns. The membership of labor unions – the collective basis to unite workers – was almost halved: a strong indication that a de-organization slide was underway throughout contemporary Japan. The only groups which showed little change related to religion or hobby, relatively personal and private areas. Transformative and reformist civil associations, such as volunteer groups, environmental groups, NPOs, and NGOs, have emerged afresh in recent decades, showing more global and informational orientations; but their numbers are still small and limited. In other spheres of everyday life, the severance of social relations abounds. Earlier chapters discussed aspects of fragmentation of contemporary Japan. For example, Chapter 6 considered the way in which sufferers of hikikomori stay in their rooms and do not leave their houses for many years, which poses a serious social issue. In addition, as Chapter 7 demonstrated, many Japanese cannot, or do not, choose marriage. The 2015 census showed that 23 percent of men and 14 percent of women never married throughout their lifetime.1 In 1985, the proportion was less than 5 percent for both. Japan is rapidly becoming a country of singles, in which one-person households occupied by a single old person are also on the increase (see Chapter 7). Lonely, unattended death (kodokushi) is a subject of public concern. In terms of voting behavior, more than half of the national electorates are the swing voters, those who do not have structured party loyalty. Most significantly, as examined in Chapters 3, 5, and 7, Japan has witnessed the widespread casualization of labor, a structural change, with non-regular employees occupying nearly 40 percent of the entire labor force in 2018.2 Hired and fired easily, these temporary employees are internally heterogeneous, unorganized, and disconnected from each other. Consequently, the privatization of individuals has taken hold in many parts of Japanese society. Significant portions of the populace pursue private interests rather than collective gains. Privacy and anonymity are extensively cherished as important social values.

III Post-Fukushima protest movements

1 Demonstrations on the streets Despite fragmentation of social relations, across the nation in the 2010s Japan witnessed the sudden emergence of social movements, which had lain dormant for several decades. The triple disasters of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the tidal surges of tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear explosion triggered new forms of social movements, mainly in urban Japan. A few months after the tragedy, a network of citizens who opposed the existing nuclear programs of the nation and demanded the abolition of all the nuclear power plants around the country formed the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes. On 29 March 2012, they staged a small demonstration in front of the prime minister’s office at the heart of the capital. The protest laid the foundation for subsequent demonstrations; these occurred in the same place every Friday evening, becoming a visible fixture of central Tokyo, and the front gate area of the Diet Building formed another protest space. Although the number of participants waxed and waned, and was always a matter of guesswork, demonstration organizers estimated that 200,000 were present at the peak, on 29 June 2012, and less than 1,000 gathered on scanty weeks. Despite this fluctuation, the action remained resilient and durable, and it triggered another set of social movements. After the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes, youth dissenters were the first to present themselves as visible forces. In 2014, a group of students who formed Students Against Secret Protection Law emerged in protest against the government’s attempt to legislate increased state protection of secret information (formally, the Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets). They reconstituted themselves to establish the Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy in 2015, a highly visible youth group which took to the streets of the metropolitan areas with broad calls for protection of the present constitution, safeguarding of constitutional democracy, prevention of abuse of state power, and many other wide-ranging slogans. Some demonstrators were part of transnational movements, including those targeting climate awareness, anti-globalization, and even anti-sexism. Collective solidarity as observed in the rising urban social movements appeared to contradict the split and partitioned existence of individuals around the country. Japan’s civil society embraced a paradox in which group solidarity was heightened amid social fragmentation.

2 Characteristics of participants Who were the participants in the post-Fukushima demonstrations? With regard to the movements’ core activists, Eiji Oguma’s interviews with fifty-five participants show that the most predominant were those engaged in artistic or intellectual work, including music, information technology, design, architecture, editing, and translation. He regards them as a ‘cognitive precariat’, status-inconsistent, well-educated professionals with precarious, non-regular employment.3 Other studies also suggest that the cognitive precariat were at the forefront of the movements.4 As to participants in general, a massive quantitative study conducted by Naoto Higuchi and his associates was most conclusive and in some respects incompatible with the abovementioned study about the core activists. It involved an internet survey of over 77,000 respondents and a postal survey of more than 11,000. The findings encompassed many intriguing points.5 The study revealed, first and foremost, the members of older generations proved vital in the formation of the social movements after Fukushima. Though media reports and academic publications tended to put a spotlight on young organizers and activists, most participants were in fact in their sixties and seventies. Some of them were ex-radicals and former dissenters who in their youth witnessed or participated in the political turmoil on the streets, notably the Ampo struggle in the early 1960s, the largest social movement in postwar Japan, which protested against the ratification of the United States–Japan Security Treaty. Also, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical and violent student movements swept the campuses of tertiary institutions across the nation in criticism of the university establishment, demanding its total reformation and demolition. Most activists exited the political scene and over time turned out to be docile corporate employees, though many in this generation retained their support of the political left, with the undercurrent of resistance quietly running through Japan’s social system. The upsurge of political activism in the 2010s sharpened the memories of their youth and once again brought them out onto the streets to air their dissent. The ‘senior left’, who had past and present commitments to progressive ideas and organizations, enlivened the landscape of political demonstrations. Second, occupationally, most participants were those who could arrange their work hours flexibly: the self-employed, independent professionals, and specialist workers with stable jobs. Retirees, academics, students, housewives, and other time-rich groups also figured conspicuously in the protests. In contrast, white-collar employees of large corporations were markedly absent. More importantly, nonregular workers showed a lower participation rate than job-secure groups,6 a pattern which seems to differ from the makeup of the core activists at the leadership level. At the level of participants in general, the precariat thesis outlined above appears to be precarious. Third, a large proportion of participants were involved in voluntary associations. Although political turbulence subsided in the 1980s, activists took part in volunteer activities on a massive scale, especially after major natural disasters in the 1990s. NPOs and NGOs formed the sites for their participation in progressive causes in such areas as ecology, poverty, education, and community development. Labor unions and interest groups also provided the bases which encouraged their members to participate in street demonstrations. The new and old organizational foundations thus contributed to the mobilization process.

These observations suggest that the post-Fukushima protests in the 2010s were primarily mounted by those who had accumulated political capital: the ‘senior left’, liberal professionals, and members of voluntary associations who had historical continuity, time assets, and organizational footing prior to their participation. Most protesters were not nonintegrated individuals who suddenly wanted to vent their private dissatisfaction by engaging in public action.

Figure 12.1 Anti-government demonstration against national security legislation in front of the Diet Building, 15 July 2015. Source: Courtesy of Chigaya Kinoshita. Reproduced with permission.

3 Social segment effects The post-Fukushima social movements reflected the fragmented social relations in Japan at large. Their participants were the consumers of Japan’s popular culture and the users of online communication across the country and beyond. To that extent, the world of protesters was the microcosm of Japanese society in general. (a) Unstructured organization The post-Fukushima social movements differed from the movements of the second half of the twentieth century in their organizational structure. They reflected the broad process of privatization of Japanese society at large. Though many of them were linked with various voluntary associations, they were also individualists who tended to fend off top-down impositions. The new movements of the 2010s were inclined to be organizationally unstructured, unmethodical, and unsystematic.7 There was no clear fixed leadership structure, and, to that degree, they were democratic or even anarchistic. These features sharply contrasted with the attributes of the preceding leftist movements. Student unions on campuses, which formed the bastion of street demonstrations in the old movements, virtually vanished in the late twentieth century and played no role in the new movements. Student participants in the 2010s partook individually, without the support of large and solid on-campus structures.8 Many participants find it uncomfortable to think that they have analogous ideas and beliefs in every aspect of their everyday life. Japan’s contemporary social movements are propelled by heterogeneous individuals who regard themselves as mutually dissimilar but happen to pursue similar collective goals.9 Thus, their movements are inclined to be spontaneous, free thinking, eclectic, and amorphous. ‘Iron solidarity’, which used to be the catchphrase of student and labor movements in the past, is now dead and passé, an expression that has almost totally disappeared from protest scenes. Disciplined class camaraderie is a thing of the past, and fundamentalist unity proves to be the antithesis of the post-Fukushima movements, which are apt to be indeterminate, liberal, and inclusive. (b) Empowerment: process over outcomes Resonant with popular culture vibrant among Japan’s youth, the post-Fukushima movements were visibly countercultural as well as politically defiant. In stark contrast with the serious and unsmiling tones of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary popular culture influenced the styles of social dissent in the 2010s.10 Often playful, humorous, and even comical, the banners, placards, posters, and bands in street demonstrations reflected the way in which the younger generation grew up with manga, anime, J-pop, and other elements of Japan’s popular culture. The post-Fukushima demonstrations also captured the broad social issues which predominated in the national debate: gender inequality and ethnic discrimination. Calls for accepting variations in sexual orientations also figured prominently in some demonstrator segments. For many protesters, the process of their involvement was often more important than the outcomes of their actions; demonstrations were the occasions of self-expression, self-articulation, and self-

liberation. Though they were hopeful that their demands would be met and implemented, so were they desirous that the process of walking together with other participants, hoisting banners aloft, and chanting slogans loudly would enhance their identity formation. In this context, the likelihood of successfully achieving the goals of their movements tended to be secondary to their countercultural commitment and empowerment. (c) Expansion of internet-based social capital The expansion of internet technology is often seen as the force to disrupt face-to-face intimate conversations and interactions, thereby disuniting individuals and facilitating the process of deorganization. In the meantime, however, the new technology has made it easy for dissent mobilization messages to be spread widely and instantaneously and for fresh types of communication and camaraderie to be shaped. Unlike bills, posters, and direct peer group contacts in the old days, the new means of information dissemination plays an essential role in calling separate individuals into political action. This applied to younger participants in post-Fukushima social movements in particular. Though protest groups formed in this way were often short lived, subsiding soon after attracting large numbers for a brief period of time, email, SMS, and other means of message transmission in cyberspace enabled social movement participants to develop internet-based social capital. Technological capitalism provided the tools of opposition and resistance. Enduring demonstrations in Tokyo In summer 2012, demonstrators gathered in front of the prime minister’s office in Tokyo to protest Japan’s nuclear energy policy, following the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011. Tokyo continued to be the site of major street demonstrations for several years. These videos capture the many faces of the demonstrators involved: ‘Tell the Prime Minister’ Trailer (International Version), at www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8k1G6HQtgc (UPLINK, 14 July 2015), and Japan: Antinuclear Protest Seven Years after Fukushima, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdYPjgeNwlo (Ruptly, 11 March 2018).

(d) Tabular recapitulation To summarize the major points of discussion of Japan’s social movements in the 2010s, Table 12.2 juxtaposes the features of the post-Fukushima dissent with those of the Ampo struggle, protests which spread across the country in 1960 against the ratification of the United States–Japan Security Treaty. The table highlights the salient descriptive features of the former against the background of the latter. Table 12.2 Comparison between contemporary social movements and the Ampo struggle in 1960 Event Criterion

Post-Fukushima

Ampo

Event Criterion

Post-Fukushima

Ampo

Main participants

Multiple groups equipped with political resources

Organized labor and students, citizens’ groups

Internal organization

Unstructured, amorphous

Structured, determinate

Leadership structure

Loose, circular

Established

Predominant method of information circulation

Internet, SMS, online social capital

Face-to-face, peer groups, pamphlets, posters

Protection of private spheres

Important

Insignificant

Influence of popular culture

Extensive

Minimal

Identity formation

Countercultural empowerment

Revolutionary class consciousness

Intergenerational alliance

Considerable

Limited

IV Volunteers, NPOs, NGOs, and resident movements In parallel with the upsurge in civil protests on the streets, the strength of civil society manifested itself in different forms immediately after the Fukushima meltdown. An aggregate total of 1.3 million volunteers worked at the disaster sites, mainly in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures, for three and a half years after the calamity.11 To alleviate the dire circumstances, they endeavored to help professionals and government workers in clearing up debris, sorting and distributing donated goods, running evacuation sites and emergency shelters, caring for the elderly and children, cleaning, and even reconstructing some damaged houses. The speed with which civil NPOs mounted quick and effective action contrasted sharply with the slow and ineffective responses of government bureaucracies which had been lauded as the efficacious engine of the ‘Japanese miracle’ during the nation’s high-growth period. The web of established neighborhood associations, the primary disaster-damage-prevention organizations on which disaster victims were supposed to rely, functioned only in a limited way. As discussed in Section VI of this chapter, these associations had justified their existence as community networks for mutual assistance in disaster situations and frequently engaged in emergency drills. In place of the conventional and old-style community networks, the new civil groups were both effective and efficient in coping with the situation. The volunteer system that assisted disaster victims was better established in 2011 than in 1995 when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake hit central Japan. In 1995, new civil groups were underprepared, while it was almost taken for granted in 2011 that volunteers would arrive at the Fukushima disaster sites, as they had acquired considerable experience since 1995. Immediately after the catastrophe, an extensive support network initiated by various NPOs, charity groups, student organizations, and other private associations sprang up – a sign that the volunteer movement had been well prepared for calamities of this scale.

1 Volunteers The English term ‘volunteer’ entered wide circulation for the first time in Japanese vocabulary immediately after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake hit the heavily populated city of Kobe and its adjacent areas, killing more than 6,000 people and damaging nearly 640,000 houses, in January 1995.12 Volunteers surged into the ruined areas to render assistance, creating a spectacle that made 1995 the beginning of full-scale volunteer activities in Japan, although similar practices had occurred in a limited way during previous disaster situations. Later in 2009, when many non-regular workers lost their jobs and accommodation, a volunteer group established a tent village for them in the middle of Tokyo and demanded government assistance for those who had suddenly become homeless. Empirical evidence suggests that more than a quarter of the Japanese participate in volunteer activities, with senior citizens being involved at much higher rates.13 Although the scope for civil participation in volunteer activities has expanded, volunteers are prone not so much to press for progressive reforms as to retain a rather conservative status quo. This trend arguably reflects the class backgrounds of participants in volunteer activities: there is a correlation between household income and volunteer activity participation rate,14 with well-off families tending to engage in volunteer activities more frequently than low-income families. Accordingly, these activities are often carried out without affecting the class interests of the relatively rich or even with a view to promoting their interests. Charity activities, for example, make philanthropists feel good without challenging their comfortable lifestyles. Some observers argue that volunteer activities are not monopolized by the upper-socioeconomic groups. Research has demonstrated a bipolar pattern, with those in the higher-class bracket and those at the bottom of the scale being apt to be volunteers, while those in the middle range are the least inclined. Analysts described this configuration as a K-pattern; with classes on a vertical axis and participation rates on a horizontal axis, the empirical distribution curve describes a K shape.15 These studies suggest that upper-class groups tend to participate for ideological and compassionate reasons, while lower-class groups do so based on the convention of mutual assistance. Volunteer activities have proliferated in Japan partly because of the advent of the aging society. On the demand side, the aging of the population has necessitated medical and welfare care of the elderly. On the supply side, the increasing number of retirees in good health has provided a sizeable pool of senior citizens ready to work in a humanitarian fashion. Many of those who arrived at the retirement age at the beginning of the twenty-first century were in their youth at the time when antiestablishmentarian student revolts spread across the country. Now in control of their time, they want to make nonmonetary contributions to society after spending many years of their occupational life under profit-first economic rationalism, often in conflict with their core philosophies.

2 NPOs and NGOs If volunteer groups are generally unstructured and noninstitutionalized as business organizations, NPOs that emerged with the enactment of the law governing them in 1998 have legal personality and corporate status, although their raison d’être is not profit-making but public socioeconomic support. More than 50,000 NPO establishments were in operation in 2019.16 NPO activities cover a wide range of areas, including medical care, public health, social welfare, community planning, social education, environmental protection, childcare, and academic, cultural, and sporting endeavors. There are also many organizations that specialize in international cooperation, human rights, gender equality, and peace issues. While these social and cultural activities are predominant, a good number of organizations have more economic foci, such as business vitalization, occupational skill formation, employment assistance, and consumer protection. The development of information technology has enabled small groups with limited capital and infrastructure to start NPOs using cost-effective ways to gather information from a wide range of sources and dispatch it to large audiences. Without temporal and geographic barriers, those who wish to establish NPOs can, with relative ease and without huge initial funds, implement projects such as distance education, virtual visits to the aged, and internet-based crisis management. These developments are in tune with the growth of cultural capitalism, discussed in Chapter 5. NGOs also operate as nonprofit groups, but their areas of activity are global, with a focus on development, human rights, ecology, and disarmament. Some 430 Japanese NGOs are active,17 and thousands of Japanese men and women work mainly in developing countries in conjunction with the United Nations as well as international institutions. Although non-governmental, Japan’s NGOs often carry out their work in cooperation with the Official Development Assistance programs of the Japanese government. NGO activities overseas are indicative of the extension of Japan’s civil society beyond its national borders.

3 The prevalence of resident movements Japan has produced a variety of citizens’ movements concerned with national and international issues. Peace movements have achieved widespread support around the country. The Article 9 Association, for example, which was initially formed in 2004 to defend the peace clause of the constitution, has a network of civil movements with several thousand chapters across the nation. Meanwhile, more locally based resident movements that addressed community issues proved sturdy buffers against state power. Nationwide social movements based on clear ideological causes have waned since the 1970s, but conflicts between state development programs and tenacious local community groups have become common.18 Japan’s spectacular economic growth produced a wide range of environmental victims and triggered two types of local protests. At one end of the spectrum, community residents stood up against development projects which they regarded as detrimental to their vested interests. The construction of high-rise condominium buildings in densely populated urban centers provoked objections from neighboring residents who lost the right to enjoy sunshine. Extensions to highways and roads were opposed by residents who might suffer from noise and air pollution. By and large, these protestors enjoyed a reasonably comfortable standard of living and feared the possibility of losing what they had already gained. They were not necessarily politically radical; many in fact were conservatives who wished to maintain the status quo. Most resident movements of these types were clustered in urban areas. At the other end were a smaller number of rural resident movements which often adopted more extreme forms of dissent and focused on the basic human rights of local inhabitants. Some movements arose when residents of a particular area became ill or died as a direct consequence of water or air pollution. In Minamata, Kyūshū, for example, many members of the fishing community were crippled after eating fish poisoned by a large quantity of mercury, which a chemical company in the area had knowingly discharged into the sea in the 1950s and 1960s. The victims initially brought a case to the court in 1967 and continued to mount legal challenges for more than three decades. They were supported by political activists from city areas, who joined forces with them in demanding both apologies and material compensation from the company and the state, whose negligence had contributed to the spread of the problem.19 Another case in point is the long-lasting protest movement against the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport (named the Narita International Airport in 2004) in the rural town of Narita. Farmers in the area mounted a series of violent confrontations in the 1970s and 1980s, together with student radicals and supporters from Tokyo and other urban centers, protesting against the state’s expropriation of farmers’ land.20 In these and similar cases, fusion between local protestors and outside radicals generated a particular type of alternative culture; Daikichi Irokawa argued that a kind of ‘magnetic field’ of cultural creativity was generated when permanent local residents who constituted the ‘subjectivity of the movement’ formed a tie with volunteer support groups which drifted in to the local community from outside.21 This kind of alternative culture was characterized by a strong sense of defiance against the state which destroyed the peaceful lives of local residents and used police to protect its expansionary

programs or those of businesses. Such dissident culture has a sharp moral tone, denouncing development programs as vicious and claiming that it is essential for their promoters to engage in sincere self-criticism and to apologize. Some other rural development programs orchestrated by technocrats in government ministries in the name of national interests also triggered fierce, long-running protests. Cases include such largescale national projects as the construction of bullet-train networks and nuclear power plants across the country. Protest movements against such development often involved the participation of articulate city radicals alongside local residents. Although different in styles, both types of resident movements have taught those in power in the center a lesson; bureaucrats, politicians, and business leaders have become aware that they cannot simply impose their development projects but must first consult with the communities potentially affected. The influence of these movements has not only been felt in connection with pollution issues but has been significant in a range of urban problems, including city planning, environmental protection, and the preservation of cultural assets. Thus, policymakers now have to calculate both the benefits and the social costs of programs, making resident movements a kind of local counterweight against the central establishment. Macrosociological quantitative data confirm that, although the ‘magnitude of protest events’ has sharply declined since the 1970s, their number has not decreased to the same extent.22 In other words, radical, extreme, and violent protests have diminished, but cases of peaceful and nonviolent disobedience have continued to emerge. The protraction of these relatively inconspicuous grassroots protest activities appears to have formed the foundation for the upsurge of more visible demonstrations and confrontations on the streets in the 2010s.

4 Three-dimensional typology Apart from these developments in civil society, there are, of course, many other voluntary associations. Labor unions, as discussed in Chapter 5, defended the rights and working conditions of organized workers. Neighborhood associations provide a sphere of action in geographically defined communities, although their activities are often closely linked with local governments, as discussed later in this chapter. Parent–teacher associations are vehicles of interaction between schools and parents and represent the engine of civic life in education. Associations of commerce and industry (shōkōkai) in cities and of agricultural cooperatives (nōkyō) in rural areas form area-based interest groups that have channels of influence over state decision-making processes. Local cooperatives (chiiki seikyō), which initially emerged immediately after World War II to defend consumers’ interests against raw market forces, have a long history of keeping the state at arm’s length, although they have become increasingly accommodative and commercialized. They operate in various localities throughout the nation to cater for a wide range of consumer needs, from shopping, nursing care, and ecology to hairdressing, and they are also widespread in workplaces, universities, and medical institutions. These voluntary associations, in which citizens participate of their own volition, form the crux of civil society, as intermediary organizations sitting between sociopolitical institutions at the top and scattered, nonparticipatory individuals at the bottom. The spread of these spontaneous action groups is the best empirical index of the extent of civil society. One can examine a voluntary association in terms of three dimensions. The first pertains to the organization’s relationship to, and its autonomy from, the state. The key question is whether it tends to show confrontational or indifferent tendencies vis-à-vis the state. Citizens’ movements are generally organized in opposition to state policies, while hobby groups are mostly nonpolitical. The second dimension concerns the extent to which the organization has an institutionalized business structure – that is, whether it is consolidated as an organization that has an annual budget and paid full-time employees. Local cooperatives have such structures, whereas most volunteer groups do not. The third dimension considers the geographical base of the organization: whether it requires specific small geographical communities as a necessary condition for its existence. A cluster analysis of the 2005 SSM data shows that voluntary associations are divided into two groups: geographically based and delocalized.23 Residents’ movements are, by definition, founded on local community bases, while NPOs do not necessarily require them. Neighborhood associations, which are fully discussed later in this chapter, as groups both voluntary and linked to the state, are necessarily geographically based. One can, then, analyze how each organization operates in three-dimensional space, as shown in Table 12.3. Displaying eight analytically distinguishable types, the table offers a glimpse of the multifaceted complexity and diversity of Japan’s civil society. Table 12.3 Comparison of types of voluntary organizations Organization

Operational characteristic

Organization

Operational Institutionalized characteristic as Bound to small Confrontational business geographical with the state organization community

Confrontational with the state

Institutionalized as business organization

Bound to small geographical community

Volunteer, hobby, sports

No

No

No

Neighborhood (chōnaikai, jichikai)

No

No

Yes

Agricultural (nōkyō), local business (shōkōkai), political supporters (kōenkai)

No

Yes

Yes

NPO, religious, cultural

No

Yes

No

Labor

Yes

Yes

No

Peace movements

Yes

No

No

Residents (jūmin undō)

Yes

No

Yes

Life club (seikatsu kurabu seikyō), some local (chiiki seikyō)

Yes

Yes

Yes

5 Interest groups One can examine interest groups as a category defined in a more restricted way than voluntary associations. Narrowly focused on active NGOs with a significant degree of durability, public interest orientation, and concern with policymaking, interest groups provide an empirically verifiable index of civil society, though they do not cover more amorphous but action-oriented civil groups, such as resident movements, unorganized volunteer groups, and unregistered civil action networks. The Japan Interest Group Study, conducted by Yutaka Tsujinaka and his colleagues, produced by far the most comprehensive portrayal of what it calls ‘civil society organizations’ in Japan.24 In international comparison, Japan’s interest group structure appears to be characterized by the abundance and strength of economic interest groups, particularly producer groups closely associated with the national bureaucracy. They include, for instance, the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, the Federation of Electric Power Companies, and the Japan Road Contractors Association. These groups attempt to influence the national political process by making representations primarily to national ministry officials and secondarily to parliamentarians, mainly those of the ruling party. This pattern reflects the power that national ministries have over economic interest groups in exercising administrative guidance, granting permits and licenses, framing legal regulations, and providing subsidies (as discussed in Chapter 9). Among various ministries, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries are frequent targets of economic interest groups. The cozy relationship between officialdom and many economic civil groups manifests itself in the personnel traffic between the two, with bureaucrats occupying the top positions of interest groups after retirement and civil organization leaders sitting on governmental advisory councils and consultative committees by ministerial invitation. The ideology of each group plays a role in determining which state apparatus it approaches to petition and lobby. Not surprisingly, business interest groups rarely try to make representations to the Japanese Communist Party. Conversely, labor unions, environmentalist organizations, and left-leaning political groups differ from the mainstream producer interest groups in accessing opposition parties and mass media rather than ministries and the ruling political party. Interest groups based in rural areas are highly active and robust in providing a powerful electioneering basis for political campaigning and vote gathering for conservative party candidates. Interest groups combine various tactics to influence state policies. Some lobby inside the system in direct contact with major political parties and national ministries. Others mobilize their members from outside by organizing letter-writing campaigns, petitions, public rallies, street demonstrations, sit-ins, and other forms of direct action. They also rely on mass media to exercise external pressure on national and local governments, holding press conferences and running advertisements in newspapers and on television. Distinct from domestically oriented interest groups, globally oriented organizations – NGOs in particular – have proliferated since the 1980s, and a majority of them are based in localities outside Tokyo, a pattern that suggests the groups that ‘think globally and act locally’ are on the rise.25 On the whole, they are small in size and tend to distance themselves from the national government while

networking between themselves and making extensive use of mass media for the propagation of their perspectives. While domestically minded groups are prone to pursue their particularistic instrumental interests, international groups are inclined to press for universalistic civil objectives. Internet, mobile phone, and other communications technologies enable these small, internationally oriented organizations to act both efficiently and cost-effectively. Japan’s civil organizations appear to have been formed in three different phases.26 In the first phase, between 1945 and 1957, immediately after the end of World War II, a majority of the interest groups currently in operation were established. These are mainly producer organizations that reflect the economic and occupational configuration of Japanese society, including a variety of industrial and professional associations. The second phase, which lasted from 1957 to 1996, recorded the rise of the so-called policy beneficiary groups, whose activities are dependent on the policies of the state. Many educational and social welfare organizations fall into this category. The third phase, which surged after 1996, included the emergence of new types of civil organizations that press for fresh values ranging from environmental protection, gender equality, and eldercare to international assistance. The Japan Interest Group Study identifies three axes of differentiation in portraying the overall configuration of civil organizations in contemporary Japan. The first of these concerns the extent to which groups are actively involved in the state political process or relatively autonomous and independent of it; the second relates to the degree to which they are associated with the state bureaucracy or political parties; and the third focuses on whether they are more oriented towards the domestic distribution of material goods or the global sharing of information and civic values. As Table 12.4 shows, the combination of these three axes produces seven types of interest groups that operate in Japanese society. (The focus of Table 12.4 differs from that of Table 12.3, as it investigates interest groups in particular, whereas Table 12.3 examines voluntary organizations in general. The former is a smaller category than the latter.) Table 12.4 Comparison of types of interest groups Relationship with state

Orientation

Target

Actively engaged

Relatively independent

Bureaucracy

Parliament

Domestic

Global

Materi

Agricultural, economic, administrative (1945–74)

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

Labor, welfare, special semigovernment (1955–74)

Yes

No

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Incorporated

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

Yes

No

Political

Yes

No

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Interest group

Relationship with state

Orientation

Target

Interest group

Actively engaged

Relatively independent

Bureaucracy

Parliament

Domestic

Global

Materi

Welfare

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Foundations, educational, professional (before 1944)

No

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes

No

Unincorporated, citizens (1975–)

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

Source: Adapted from of Tsujinaka 2002, p. 335, Figure 15.1. Note: The year ranges are the periods in which the types of organizations in question were established in large numbers. The eighth, analytically possible type is not listed, because it is nonexistent in empirical reality. It is important to reiterate that interest groups with clear organizational structures and political directions are not the only ingredients of civil society. Spontaneous political demonstrations, civic rallies, charity campaigns, public debate forums, and even lively discussions at coffee shops and pubs constitute significant components. Japanese society abounds with these unstructured yet activist group pursuits. To comprehend the complexity of civil society in this context, one should be sensitized to some vernacular notions particular to Japan, one of which is discussed in the following section.

V Seikatsusha as an emic concept of citizens The Japanese word for ‘citizen’, shimin, has wide circulation in contemporary Japan but is tinged with foreign nuances and intellectual overtones as an imported concept. A more vernacular notion, seikatsusha, has perhaps a ring of familiarity and reality for many Japanese as an emic concept that overlaps with the idea of citizen. The term seikatsu means ‘livelihood’, ‘everyday life’, or a wide range of life activities, including clothing, food, housing, folk customs, language, recreation, and entertainment, not to mention work and consumption. In fact, in 1992, recognizing the popular acceptance of the concept, the Kiichi Miyazawa cabinet launched a five-year plan to make Japan a seikatsu taikoku (lifestyle superpower). Though the plan went nowhere, it reflected the widespread idea that, while Japan may be an economic superpower, there is much room for improvement in its citizens’ quality of life. Seikatsusha are agents of seikatsu; they construct a variety of autonomous areas of civic life culture and attempt to improve their standard of living and quality of life in competition as well as in cooperation with the forces of government regulation and capitalist consumerism. The notion of seikatsusha has been debated since the first half of the twentieth century.27 Kiyoshi Miki, an uncompromising liberal philosopher in wartime Japan, attempted to explore the life culture (seikatsu bunka) of common people as an analytical category distinct from national and class cultures. Based on the lives of ordinary people, life culture comprises styles of speech, cooking, customs, social interactions, pastime amusements, and other everyday activities. Seikatsusha are the active and skillful artists who struggle to carve out new lives built on their daily life conditions. The styles of participant observations of seikatsusha have become established as a genre of studies. Itaru Nii, a dissident journalist during and after World War II, wandered the streets of Tokyo witnessing and recording the lives of people buried in obscurity. He counterposed seikatsusha as people who lead autonomous lives vis-à-vis those who belong to officialdom, large corporations, and banks, whose lives are subjected to allegiance to their organizations. Discontented with literature-based research, Kunio Yanagita, the founding father of Japanese ethnology and folklore studies, also traveled around Japan to observe the unrecorded histories, oral traditions, legends, practices, and customs of ordinary people, whom he called jōmin (literally, ‘everyday life people’), a category that comes very close to seikatsusha. Immediately after World War II, Wajirō Kon was the first social scientist to propose seikatsu-gaku (life studies, lifeology) as a field that studies the lives of common people – their clothing, eating, and housing realities, as well as their entertainment, leisure, and education activities – not necessarily as the direct products of economic conditions. He later founded the Japan Association of Lifeology (Seikatsu Gakkai), which has received wide recognition. Throughout the postwar years, a journal entitled the ‘Science of thought’ (Shisō no kagaku) served as a forum for debate over seikatsusha and published a number of studies featuring the examination of popular novels, popular songs, personal advice columns in newspapers, graffiti, manga, workplace accounts, and personal diaries. The intellectual leader of these studies was Shunsuke Tsurumi, whose idea of marginal art was discussed in Chapter 11.28 The group that engaged in these studies attempted

to listen to the voices of the voiceless individuals whose philosophy was embedded in their mundane, everyday lives and enlightened by their own ‘worm’s eye views’. Seikatsushas’ ways of thinking, developed in the school of hard knocks, are not necessarily politically correct but are often egoistic, devious, and crafty. This is an intellectual current in pursuit of a vision of civil society without glorification of the masses. In the 1960s, Beheiren, the first large-scale citizens’ movement in Japan, which called for peace in Vietnam, defined seikatsusha as the key actors of political action. It used the term together with such phrases as shimin, futsū no hito (ordinary people), and tada no hito (run-of-the-mill people), in distinction from the conventional agents of anti-government movements, such as workers and students. Consciously formulating seikatsusha as weak, fragile, and inarticulate individuals, Japan’s citizens’ movements developed a style rooted in the daily lives and realities of the common folk that was not affiliated with such established political organizations as labor unions, student associations, and religious bodies. The seikatsu kurabu seikyō (life club cooperatives) that also commenced their activity in the 1960s have developed as a civic consumer movement in pursuit of alternative ways of life. Organized primarily by concerned housewives, these cooperatives initially challenged the systems of highly developed commercialism and took initiatives to develop their own food distribution networks. Over time, the participants in the movement involved themselves not only in food safety problems but also in other ecological issues, regarding synthetic detergents, waste recycling, and nuclear power generation.29 This group emphasized the fact that its members were not simply passive consumers but active participants in the equity investment, utilization, and operation of their cooperatives. These orientations articulated the notion of seikatsusha as participatory civil actors and as an antonym for submissive consumers, a perspective that formed a basis of workers’ collectives, discussed in Chapter 7.

VI Friendly authoritarianism Japanese society has various forms of regimentation that are designed to standardize the thought patterns and attitudes of the Japanese and make them toe the line in everyday life. Although these pressures exist in any society, in Japan they constitute a general pattern which one might call ‘friendly authoritarianism’, which exerts a powerful centripetal force.30 It is authoritarian to the extent that it encourages each member of society to internalize and share the value system which regards control and regimentation as natural and to accept the instructions and orders of people in superordinate positions without questioning. As a system of micromanagement, friendly authoritarianism has four key elements. First, it uses small groups as the basis of mutual surveillance and deterrence of deviant behavior. A kind of lateral control within the groups compels each member to compete with the others to comply with the expected norms and standards. Second, it institutes an extensive range of mechanisms in which power is made highly visible and tangible. Third, it legitimizes various codes in such a way that superordinates can use ambiguities to their advantage – that is, arrangements couched in vague terms allow power-holders to reinterpret them as the occasion requires. Fourth, it inculcates various forms of moralistic ideology into the psyche of every individual, with a particular stress on minute and trivial details. Spontaneous expressions and free actions of individuals are generally discouraged. These elements are explored more fully in the following sections. Japan’s authoritarianism does not normally exhibit its coercive face, generally dangling soft incentives of various kinds.31 It exhibits its ‘friendliness’ in several ways. First, it resorts, whenever possible, to positive inducements rather than negative sanctions – carrots rather than sticks – to encourage competition to conform. It also portrays individuals and groups in power positions as congenial, cordial, and benevolent and uses socialization channels for subordinates to pay voluntary respect to them. In addition, it propagates the ideology of equality and the notion of a unique national homogeneity, ensuring that images of class cleavage are as blurred as possible. Finally, it relies upon joyful, amusing, and pleasant entertainments such as songs, visual arts, and festivals to make sure that authority infiltrates without obvious pains. When ineffective, these friendly elements are abandoned, and recourse is given to more coercive controls. Although Japan’s formal institutions are no doubt organized in accordance with democratic principles, there lingers a suspicion that the Japanese system is arranged to downplay the human rights that are regarded as the cornerstone of democracy. Some who accuse the Japanese system of being undemocratic have been criticized for applying the Western yardstick of democracy to a different cultural context. Yet, unlike the leaders of some other Asian nations, most Japanese elites appear to accept democracy as a desirable goal even though they may neither articulate nor practice it.

1 Mutual surveillance within small groups The first element of Japanese friendly authoritarianism relies on the capacity of small groups to evoke from members maximum compliance with the dominant norms of society. These groups are often pitted against each other to achieve intragroup mutual surveillance by dint of intergroup competition. The most prevalent form of this is the han, a small unit composed of three to ten individuals. All children in Japan learn the han system in elementary school, though its usage differs from school to school, and from area to area. In many parts of Japan, pupils go to school together in han groups, with their members kept under mutual close watch.32 In school excursions, a class is often divided into han groups, each of which move together, with members keeping an eye on each other. In some areas, each class is subdivided into han units.33 These are expected to compete with each other in conforming to such school norms as high academic achievement and good behavior. In some schools, teachers and pupils display on classroom walls the outcomes of daily, weekly, or monthly competitions among han groups, ranging, for example, from mathematics test results to scores for tidiness. As each han is praised or blamed as a collective unit, there is constant intragroup pressure on members to comply with the expected standard. The total quality control movement, to which Japanese economic success is often attributed, perhaps best epitomizes the Japanese technology of human control through mutual surveillance. The initial version of quality control in the United States was statistical quality control, in which a random sample of commodities was checked thoroughly so as to decrease the number of defective goods shipped out by the firm. After the importation of this method from the United States, Japanese management expanded its application to the workers themselves. The basic unit of the total quality control movement in Japanese firms is a group of ten to fifteen members in the same section or division. Each group is expected to present as many proposals as possible to improve both the quality of products and the efficiency of work arrangements, in order to maximize productivity and marketing efficiency. Since the number of proposals per group is the crucial index of competition, each group member is under constant pressure to think of ways to improve their company. In this process, employees often unconsciously conceptualize their work setting not from the worker’s but from the manager’s point of view. Although the primary function of this movement is quality improvement and it does not involve physical coercion, it tends to produce employees highly devoted to the company. In some firms, the total quality control movement is called JK (jishu kanri) activity (literally, ‘voluntary control’). The phrase draws attention to the extent to which employees are controlled under the guise of voluntary commitment. The ideology that the members of a collective unit are jointly responsible for its performance places restraints on each member. When one or a few members of a unit indulge in culpable behavior, all members bear the blame collectively. When one pupil plays a mischievous trick or disobeys the rules, teachers sometimes punish the entire class by making all pupils stay late, organizing a soul-searching session, or, as in one controversial case, ordering all boys in the same group to cut their hair short.34 If a member of a promising high-school baseball team engages in delinquent behavior, the principle of

shared responsibility can force the entire team to withdraw from a national tournament. The whole group assumes collective responsibility (rentai sekinin) for the wrongdoings of each member.35 Every community has a han network. In the lowest reaches of government, Japanese communities have neighborhood associations composed of several to a few dozen households. These associations are variously called chōnaikai or chōkai (town-block associations), jichikai (self-government associations), burakukai or kukai (hamlet associations) in rural localities, or simply han. There are nearly 300,000 associations of these kinds, based in almost all municipalities around the country.36 Though they used to involve almost all households in a community in the past, the fragmentation of civil society discussed earlier in this chapter led to a gradual decline in their membership, with 73 percent of households across the country reported to belong to the associations in 2010.37 Neighborhood associations are characterized by several features, as follows.38 First, they engage in a wide range of activities and function as all-purpose organizations. At a social level, their members organize and take part in community gatherings, fetes, outings, and festival dances. Once in a while they are called upon to clean gutters, engage in activities for the prevention of crime and fire, and collect donations for community causes. Many associations manage and maintain a community hall. Almost all serve as distribution networks for circulars, flyers, and information leaflets from their municipal government. Second, the unit of association membership is the household, not the individual. This means that associations tend to be male dominated, because the head of the household, who is usually male, attends association meetings and participates in association activities as the household representative. The directory of an association’s membership normally lists the names of family heads only, a pattern that confirms that the ideology of the koseki system discussed in Chapter 7 deeply penetrates community organizations. Third, it is semi-compulsory for a household to join a neighborhood association. When a family moves into a locality, its neighborhood association often automatically enlists it as a member and requests its subscription. In many communities, association membership is not supposed to be voluntary, though some families, particularly in urban areas, choose not to join them. Furthermore, because only one neighborhood association exists per area, residents do not have alternative options. Chōnaikai associations function as the grassroots han units, and they transmit governmental and semi-governmental programs at the community level in a variety of ways. One is through the practice of vertical quota allotment typical of nationwide fundraising campaigns. A case in point is the annual community chest drive, a national charity campaign which attempts to collect donations to be distributed to local NPO groups, welfare organizations, volunteer teams, and many other community associations. The semi-governmental Central Community Chest of Japan first sets the national target of the total amount of funds to be raised and allocates an amount to each prefecture on the basis of its population. Each prefectural government then divides its allocated figure among all municipal governments in proportion to their populations, and each municipal government issues quota figures to all chōnaikai on the same basis. The leaders of each association then normally send the exact amount named to the municipal government. The donations thus raised flow to the national level after prefectural

governments have collected them through municipal governments. Because of this system, community chest drives in Japan rarely fail to achieve their targets. As community-based han units, neighborhood associations cooperate in many ways with various branches of local government and semi-governmental agencies. A section of a chōnaikai often collaborates with police in crime prevention programs in its area. Chōnaikai frequently act as the basic units in fire drills and other disaster prevention exercises organized by the local fire defense headquarters. Members of chōnaikai also come into close cooperative contact with government-backed associations concerned with local hygiene, social welfare, and compliance with tax laws. The public is divided over whether chōnaikai are necessary,39 although there is much regional variation in the grounds for this support. Residents in regional cities place the significance of neighborhood associations in their capacity to organize such social functions as local galas, entertainment gatherings, and Bon festival dances. Tokyo residents, however, who include relatively transient populations, regard crime prevention and sanitation as the prime functions of chōnaikai. To the extent that there is community support for grassroots state apparatus, the mechanism of mutual surveillance within each han group continues to operate, blurring the line between voluntary dedication and state manipulation. The prototype of han ideology is discernible in Tokugawa Japan, in the feudal regime’s implementation of a nationwide network of five-family neighborhood units, known as the go-nin gumi system. This served as a quasi-espionage organization. Families in a neighborhood were required to watch each other for any signs of deviant activities. During World War II, a similar system was devised under the name tonari-gumi (neighborhood watch) to promote conformity and solidarity at the community level in support of war activities. Even today, although this type of community network no longer serves as machinery for military propaganda, it is a significant channel through which the power of the state permeates into every part of Japanese society in the form of community voluntary cooperation. The han system is effective in ensuring attitudinal and behavioral conformity among its members precisely because it is not predicated upon the imposition of authority from above. Instead of vertical control, the system counts on a kind of horizontal control, in which the policing of people of the same status in a small unit – classmates, work colleagues, or neighborhood acquaintances – makes it difficult for them to diverge from the standard expected;40 while higher-status persons are connected to each han, those who control a person are not necessarily above but beside them.

2 Visible and tangible power The second aspect of the Japanese style of friendly authoritarianism is the way in which power and authority are made visible and tangible in everyday life rather than being abstract and conceptual; attempts are made to ensure that the dominant moral order is reproduced at the level of face-to-face existential situations. This tendency is most conspicuous in the area of law enforcement. The Japanese police system penetrates into every corner of society. Most communities have small neighborhood police boxes known as kōban or, in substations, chūzaisho. Civilian households for crime prevention operate in most neighborhoods, each one displaying a doorplate that indicates that it is closely associated with a police station. Although this system has received international attention as a way of reducing crime rates, it imposes close surveillance on the private lives of individuals. Each kōban or chūzaisho police officer routinely visits households and business establishments within their jurisdiction to obtain information about them and to inquire whether any ‘suspicious figures’ hang around the neighborhood. Although performed in the name of the maintenance of public safety, this practice, known as junkai renraku (patrol liaison), often verges upon invasion of individual privacy. As an essential part of this exercise, police provide a liaison card to each household, requesting details such as the date of residents’ settlement at the address; the identification of the household head; the telephone number; each member’s name, date of birth, occupation, and place of work or school; and the address and telephone number of a contact person in case of an emergency. For enterprises such as firms and shops, the card covers items like the type of business, the person in charge, the number of employees, the hours of opening, the days it is regularly closed, and whether the business owns a dog. Officially, the system is intended to make it easy for police officers in the community to show the way to visitors, make contact in emergencies, and facilitate other public services. Community residents are not legally required to fill out these cards and return them to the police. In reality, however, most households do so, willing to expose themselves to police data-gathering machinery. Many genuinely believe that the system prevents neighborhood crime and improves police services. Others accept it, because they fear that declining to fill out the card might incur police suspicion that they are rebels or criminals, and police might bring them under close surveillance. Only a tiny minority of civil libertarians are willing to risk the likelihood of police suspicion. Effective community control thus occurs even though its implementation takes the form of supposed individual voluntarism. The practice serves to test the level of community cooperation with police activities. The performance of police officers who are assigned to kōban, chūzaisho, and other small, community-linked police stations is evaluated in terms of the extent to which they have secured voluntary cooperation from the community under their jurisdiction. Such appraisals include the number of households about which they have acquired information through junkai renraku.41 In the area of education, teachers actively present themselves as moral authorities in their school district. At elementary-school level, home room teachers visit the home of every child in their charge at least once a year to meet their parents. Teachers are expected to discuss children’s scholastic and social development and exchange views with the parents. Although this practice allegedly facilitates

good communication between schools and homes, it is virtually compulsory, in the sense that parents do not have the option of declining these visits. Teachers frequently perform policing functions, making parents serve as quasi-agents to control children at home in line with the school’s ethos. It is not unusual for teachers, together with police and parents, to patrol amusement arcades and shopping areas to make sure pupils are not straying from the fold after school. In community life, the Japanese encounter a steady flow of verbal and visual instructions from authorities about expected behavior. On trains, Japanese train conductors constantly announce what passengers should and should not do, saying, for instance, ‘Do not stand near the door,’ ‘Hold on to a strap,’ ‘Make room for other people,’ and ‘Let us offer seats to senior citizens.’ Railway stations broadcast such announcements as ‘Please stand behind the white line as a train is approaching the station,’ ‘Stand in two rows in an orderly manner until the train arrives,’ and ‘Would you kindly not jostle one another when you step into the train.’ These techniques softly control the populace by ensuring that the dominant moral order is reproduced in face-to-face situations. The power of the authorities does not remain an abstract concept but is brought into daily experience in a moralistic fashion.

3 Manipulation of ambiguity The third ingredient of Japan’s friendly authoritarianism relies on an ideology which encourages ambiguity in a variety of circumstances. This enables those in positions of authority to interpret various situations at their discretion. In the sphere of law, police enjoy extensive discretionary power. A case in point concerns the supplementary prison system, in which lockup cells at police stations are used as substitutes for prison. Police are supposed to send an arrested suspect to a house of detention under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice within forty-eight hours of arrest. However, in reality, a majority of suspects are kept in police detention under the Prison Law, initially enacted in 1908. Though the law was revised in 2006, an exception clause still allows police to use their lockup cells as an alternative to an official detention house. While the Ministry of Justice wishes to retain this practice, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and human rights groups oppose it as an arrangement which allows investigators to question suspects for inordinately long periods, resulting in numerous false charges based on groundless confessions wrung out of suspects under duress. A dubious exception clause of a law enacted over a century ago has thus been used as a basis for modern, general police practice simply because it suits law enforcement authorities. The interpretation of the constitution, particularly Article 9, has also been a locus of ambiguity. The article states, Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. When the constitution was promulgated, in 1946, the spirit of Article 9 was that Japan would never again possess armed forces of any kind. With the Cold War escalating in East Asia, the National Police Reserve was established in 1950 without parliamentary approval, with a claim that it did not consist of military troops. After changing its name a couple of times, it became the Self-Defense Forces in 1954 and has since developed into armed forces of nearly a quarter of a million troops equipped with sophisticated weaponry. While the Self-Defense Forces are organized to defend the country against acts of aggression from outside, some members have served as part of United Nations peacekeeping operations abroad and as disaster relief units domestically. These step-by-step shifts in the interpretation of the same text reflect what Japanese call nashikuzushi, the pragmatic strategy that many Japanese power-holders at various levels use to adapt gradually to changing circumstances. The term nashikuzushi originally meant ‘payments by installment’, but in this context it implies that those involved achieve their final goal by making a series of small changes in the meaning of key terms in a document. The technique does not call for alteration of the

text itself. The point is not so much the validity of the changing interpretations as the almostimperceptible way in which they have been brought about, little by little. In all these circumstances, equivocation rather than articulation is promoted, allowing those in dominant positions to manipulate what is meant, what is right, and what should be done. In many companies, as suggested in Chapter 5, new employees are not given formal contracts or job specifications, and their supervisors can use their discretion in defining the tasks which subordinate employees should perform, a convention which partly accounts for the long working hours in Japan. As explained in Chapter 2, in business transactions, companies use the category of ‘expenses unaccounted for’ to hide the identity of the recipients of expenditure. The construction industry often uses this method to conceal secret payoffs, kickbacks, and political donations. As discussed in Chapter 9, the practice of administrative guidance (gyōsei shidō) enables public bureaucrats to maneuver the private sector without clear statutory basis, because the representatives of companies are aware that the bureaucrats have the power to apply implicit sanctions against those who do not follow their instructions. The school textbook authorization system, described in Chapter 6, gives the Ministry of Education censors broad scope for subjective revisions of submitted manuscripts, enabling them to exercise unspecified control over textbook writers. In effect, ambiguity offers advantages to powerholders, as they can use it to enforce their will on subordinates at their discretion, in the absence of clearly documented rules and regulations.

4 Moralizing and mind correctness The fourth element of Japan’s friendly authoritarianism is the extent to which various moralizing techniques are used to appeal deeply to the psyche of individuals. An example is the way in which Japanese authorities require offenders against laws and rules to express total contrition for their wrongdoing. For even minor offenses, such as traffic violations and unintended trespassing, the authorities regard it as insufficient for an offender to lose a license or pay a fine; they also demand that the offender write or sign a letter of apology (shimatsusho). It is usually a form letter containing such sentences as ‘I am very sorry for breaching a public regulation’ and ‘I endeavor never to repeat the same error.’ The letter is normally addressed to the holder of a public office, such as the head of district police or the mayor of the municipality where the offense occurred. This practice has no statutory basis but is enforced with the reasoning that offenders need to cleanse their spirits completely to conform to social norms in the future. At work, similar arrangements are imposed on employees as well as managers who commit a blunder or violate rules. At school, students who have exhibited untoward behavior are dealt with similarly. Depending on the circumstances, even work supervisors and parents must show their remorse by writing letters of apology for their supervision failures. The thinking behind this is that simple punishment is insufficient and ‘mind correctness’ of citizens is essential. Various means are supposed to achieve such attitudinal conformity. (a) Physical correctness Japanese schools make it a rule for pupils to clean their classrooms each day after school. At every Japanese school, pupils do keep-fit exercises to the well-known tunes of a radio program broadcast through a national public radio network on a variety of occasions, as mentioned in Chapter 6. At school, each Japanese child is taught how to bow correctly, how to stand correctly, how to sit correctly, how to walk correctly, and so on. At work, many companies train employees how to greet customers, how to address superiors, and how to exchange name cards in an appropriate fashion. With this type of repeated training, many Japanese acquire a disposition to attend to details. In controlled situations, they tend to give heed to such matters as how to wrap gifts, how to present meals, and how to blow their nose. (b) Emotive moralizing The second focus is the notion that people should learn conformity through emotive means. In this respect, collective singing plays an important role in generating a sense of group solidarity. Virtually all schools, including elementary schools, have their own songs, which contain many moralistic lines, and pupils sing them on such occasions as morning assemblies, athletic meets, and entrance and graduation ceremonies. Many companies also have their own enterprise songs which exalt the virtues of hard work and job commitment. Employees in these companies are expected to sing them on ceremonial occasions as well as at morning assemblies and other gatherings. Cities and other

municipalities have songs that, in most cases, glorify the natural beauty and historical traditions of their localities. Given that singing is generally fun blended with sentimental emotion, the Japanese method of enhancing solidarity combines such gaiety with the inculcation of values that praise organizational dedication. This technique strikes a responsive chord in participants and so tends not to give them the impression that they are being psychologically steered in a certain direction. Conscious of the power of collective singing for mass mobilization, Ikuo Hirade, a navy captain of the Cabinet Information Bureau, observed in 1942, during World War II, that popular songs were ‘military commodities’.42 With this background of the widespread practice of collective singing, it is not surprising that karaoke singing became common in Japan’s entertainment quarters from the late 1970s. As a combination of merriment and tension management, it reflected the extent to which emotive conformity and collective singing interact in Japanese society. (c) A community of sanctions Socially constructed images of a community exercise sanctions against acts of deviance. For this purpose, emic notions are often invoked as those which penetrate into the souls of the Japanese, an example being the concept of seken, an imagined community that has the normative power of approving or disapproving of and sanctioning individual behavior. Seken extends beyond primary groups, such as immediate kin, workmates, and neighbors, but does not encompass the entire society of Japan, and still less overseas societies. As an intermediate network, seken makes its presence felt in the minds of many Japanese as the largest unit of social interaction not implying blood relations43 (see Table 12.5). Table 12.5 Comparison of emic conceptions of social relations Kinship relationship (real or symbolic) Group size

Absent

Present

Large

Seken (society, world, public)

Harakaraa (fraternity)

Small

Nakama (mates, fellows)

Miuchib (relatives or comrades) Source: Adapted from Yoneyama 1990, p. 98.

a

This concept is often used to describe ‘we, the Japanese’ (ware ware Nihonjin) as the largest

imagined kinship unit. b

This notion refers to a small, fictitious kinship unit in which an oyabun (patriarchal godfather figure) and his kobun (devoted followers) form family-like relationships. In reference to seken’s censuring functions, it is often said that if one deviates from social norms, seken will not accept one. If one does something shameful, one will not be able to face seken. One should not expect seken to be lenient and permissive. When an organization is found to be involved in an unacceptable practice, its leaders often make public apologies for disturbing seken. When one refers to seken accepting or renouncing a certain choice or behavior, one envisages seken not only as the

standard gauge or rule but as a massive collection of individuals who compel it. As an imagined but realistic entity, seken presents itself as a web of people who provide the moral yardsticks that favor the status quo and traditional practices. (d) Ideology of egalitarian competition Finally, the Japanese establishment promotes an ideology of equality of opportunity and generally discourages ascriptive inequality based on family origin. On the whole, it has championed the meritocratic doctrine that every Japanese has an equal chance of achieving high status through persistent effort. In the world of secular symbols, this notion is translated into the phrase risshin shusse, the ‘careerism’ in which one can get ahead in life and rise in the world through arduous endeavor and perseverance. Even if born in a deprived peasant family, a bright boy who studies hard is legitimately expected to get into a top university and eventually attain a high-ranking position in an important organization. Prewar textbooks abounded with legends of self-made men of this sort. Popular writings argue that one’s success in life depends solely on the extent to which one mobilizes the spirit of ganbari (endurance and persistence), which everyone possesses intrinsically and equally. Invoking the principle of fairness to all, most public and private universities in Japan accept or reject students exclusively on the basis of their scores at entrance examinations, without considering their other attributes. In this limited sense, Japan is an egalitarian, achievement-oriented society. In reality, however, those who have risen to the higher echelons of society from lower family backgrounds comprise only a small portion of the total population, as shown in Chapter 3. Therefore, Japan is, on a mass basis, a pseudo-egalitarian society. Nevertheless, the illusion, and occasional reality, that everybody is given equal opportunities to succeed is sufficiently prevalent to drive many Japanese in a quest for educational, occupational, and material achievements. This fantasy obscures the facts that opportunities are unevenly distributed across different social groups and strata. More importantly, it enables status-holders to defend themselves as rightful winners of contests which have supposedly given everybody equal chances. Also, the dominant myth that losers had an equitable opportunity but simply could not make it means it is difficult for status-losers to hold grievances against successful achievers. Losers take the blame on themselves and accept the supremacy and authority of those who have succeeded in climbing the ladder. Thus, the ideology of equality of opportunity leads to individualized and fragmented self-blame on the part of those who have failed and blinds them to the structural inequalities to which they are subject. Some respond by becoming hikikomori. In this sense, the Japanese experience appears to demonstrate that the ideology of equality of opportunity justifies the reality of the inequality of outcomes more plausibly than does the doctrine which rationalizes inequality of opportunity.44

Equality of opportunity and institutional sexism On the whole, the principle of meritocratic assessment is applied to Japanese university-entrance examinations.45 The examination scores that a student achieves are the sole criteria for evaluation at most institutions. In 2018, however, it was revealed that the medical profession had long violated this rule on gender grounds. Tokyo Medical University, one of the best medical schools in the country, had manipulated the examination results of female applicants at least since 2006, intentionally skewing its intake towards male applicants. Female applicants were able to attain a maximum of only 80 points out of 100 even if they answered all questions correctly. The university engaged in the discriminatory practice on the pretext that female doctors tend to resign or take a leave of absence after marriage or childbirth. The university justified its use of the score reduction system by claiming that it had to prevent a shortage of doctors at affiliated hospitals. Though the practice was terminated from 2019, the Ministry of Education identified nine other universities which engaged in similar nontransparent practices. The case revealed that institutional sexism was rampant at the highest level of education, and the principle of the equality of opportunity was contravened to the disadvantage of female students and in defense of economic efficiency.

The four aspects of moral indoctrination in Japan discussed above can be summarized schematically. Table 12.6 combines the two dimensions of inculcation. The first is whether the method in question emphasizes negative sanctions or positive inducements. For example, while seken imposes negative constraints, singing songs relies on the positive sense of releasing one’s feelings. The second concerns whether mind correctness is achieved behaviorally or ideationally. For instance, while training through physical learning requires behavioral rectification (Cell A), the ideology of equality of opportunity is propagated in the ideational sphere (Cell D). The other combinations are self-explanatory. The Japanese system compounds these elements to ensure behavioral and ideational compliance through both negative and positive pressures. Table 12.6 Comparison of strategies for moral indoctrination Sanction Manipulation

Negative moral punishments

Positive moral inducements

Behavioral

(A) Physical correctness

(C) Collective singing

Ideational

(B) Seken

(D) Equality of opportunity

The moral order of Japanese society is maintained by both institutional and ideological systems that manipulate the everyday life of the Japanese from a variety of angles in a wide range of spheres. Table

12.7 shows some examples of the control mechanisms discussed in this book. Table 12.7 Comparison of types of friendly authoritarianism Sphere of control Type of control

Law

Community

Business

Education

Mutual surveillance within small groups

Household registration, resident card system

Neighborhood associations

Total quality control movement

Han groups at school

Visible and tangible power

Kōban (police box)

Police household checks

Long working hours, service overtime

Corporal punishment

Manipulative ambiguity

Constitution, supplementary prison system

Extensive giftgiving practices

Unaccounted expenses, dangō

School textbook authorization system

Moralizing and mind correctness

Shimatsusho (apology letters)

Sanction of seken

Company songs, company mottoes

Classroom cleaning, militaristic ethics

A finely blended combination of these control pressures in Japanese daily life has yielded the friendly authoritarianism which counteracts the diversified and stratified realities of society. Interaction between centripetal and centrifugal forces remains an ongoing process which produces dissimilar outcomes at different times.

VII Conclusion Japanese society has been subject to diversifying dynamism and control mechanisms, variegating forces and unifying pressures. They meet, mix, burst, and reshape like foam bubbles coalescing on a river. The process is not only multidimensional but also international and interactive. Cutting across national boundaries, dissenting activities in Japan increasingly resonate with similar protests overseas: the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, the sunflower movement in Taiwan, and the anti-globalization movements around the world. The Me Too movement impacted feminist protests in Japan. While at times political tensions run high between national governments in East Asia, civil groups in the region maintain mutually supportive relations at grassroots levels, including a number of sister cities exchanges, school excursions, citizens’ tours, homestays, and so on. Civil groups have been at the forefront of defending foreign workers’ rights. The process is interactive. To counter civil society, the Japanese establishment constantly repositions itself in order to produce its own take on fresh conformity and order. To meet the demands of emerging cultural capitalism, the business establishment has introduced new forms of work practice. At a microscopic level, as a result of community protest, some chōnaikai are now more democratically managed than before. Rules are more relaxed and less restrictive in some schools as a consequence of external and internal pressures. As diversity counteracts uniformity and subculture formation countervails control and regimentation, Japan literacy requires an in-depth understanding of the ways in which a shifting balance is struck in Japan between economic efficiency and political equity, between social stability and cultural reform, and between collective integration and individual dignity.

Research questions 1. Did the fragmentation of social relations in recent decades contribute to the rise of social movements in the 2010s? Or did these two processes emerge in different spheres of Japanese society? 2. To what degree do the images of the ‘obedient and docile Japanese’ reflect the reality of Japan’s civil society? 3. To what extent has Japan’s civil society gone through different levels of development over time? 4. Although the thirty years from 1990 to 2020 are often labelled as ‘lost decades’ economically, have they been ‘civilizing decades’ in social and cultural terms? 5. Compare Japan’s friendly authoritarianism with its counterparts in other countries.

Further readings Avenell, Simon Andrew 2010, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of Shimin in Postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Alexander 2018, Anti-nuclear Protest in Post-Fukushima Tokyo: Power Struggles. London: Routledge. Chiavacci, David and Obinger, Julia (eds) 2018, Social Movements and Political Activism in Contemporary Japan: Re-emerging from Invisibility. London: Routledge. Kingston, Jeff (ed.) 2019, Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Pekkanen, Robert J., Tsujinaka, Yutaka, and Yamamoto, Hidehiro 2017, Neighborhood Associations and Local Governance in Japan. London: Routledge.

Online resources Brown, Alexander 2018, The Anti-nuclear Movement and Street Politics in Japan after Fukushima. Asian Studies Association of Australia (25 June), http://asaa.asn.au/anti-nuclear-movement-streetpolitics-japan-fukushima/. Johnston, Eric 2007, ‘Prison reforms seen as too little, and way too late’. Japan Times (26 June), www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2007/06/26/reference/prison-reforms-seen-as-too-little-and-way-toolate/#.Xs3UFi-caIF (may require registration or subscription). Kingston, Jeff 2017, ‘Civil society across Asia is flowering but fragile’. Japan Times (29 April), www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/04/29/commentary/civil-society-across-asia-floweringfragile/#.XlcdmC2caIE (may require registration or subscription). Lufkin, Bryan 2020, How ‘Reading the Air’ Keeps Japan Running. BBC (30 January), www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200129-what-is-reading-the-air-in-japan. Takahashi, Saul 2016, Japan’s Descent into Authoritarianism. Global Research (14 August), www.globalresearch.ca/japans-descent-into-authoritarianism/5540977. Tsujinaka, Yutaka 2010, ‘Civil society in Japan’. Inter Faculty (University of Tsukuba), vol. 1, pp. 65–84, https://journal.hass.tsukuba.ac.jp/interfaculty/article/view/6/22. 1 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2015. 2 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2018a. 3 Oguma 2017b, pp. 146–56. 4 Brown 2018; Ogawa 2013. 5 Higuchi et al. 2018. 6 Higuchi et al. 2018, Table 12.3. 7 Tominaga 2017, pp. 116–25. 8 Kinoshita 2017, pp. 159–66. 9 Tominaga 2017, pp. 219–26. 10 Tominaga 2017, pp. 126–37. 11 Zen Nihon Shakai Fukushi Kyōgikai 2018. 12 Hyōgo Prefecture 2006.

13 The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2017a) reports that 26 percent of the population participates in volunteer activities. The SSM 2005 data show a similar pattern (SSM 2005a, 2005b). See Nihei 2008, p. 197. 14 Toyoshima 2000; Nihei 2008. Regarding the elderly, see Yoshikawa 2010. 15 See Suzuki 1987; Inazuki 1994; Economic Planning Agency 1999. 16 Cabinet Office 2019c. 17 Ministry of Foreign Affairs and JAMIC 2016. 18 See, for example, Broadbent 1998; Hasegawa 2004. 19 See Huddle and Reich 1987. 20 See Apter and Sawa 1984. 21 Irokawa 1989, pp. 80–1. 22 Nishikido 2012, Figure 1. 23 SSM 2005b. See Nihei 2008, p. 201. 24 See Tsujinaka 2002; Tsujinaka and Choe 2002; Tsujinaka and Mori 2010. 25 Adachi 2002, pp. 195–7. 26 Tsujinaka and Choe 2002, pp. 284–5. 27 For a full English discussion of the seikatsusha concept, see M. Amano 2011. For a succinct and excellent discussion of the idea, see Seifert 2007. 28 See Sugimoto 2008. 29 See Gelb and Estevez-Abe 1998. 30 Davidson (2013) invokes the concept for his study of a Japanese suburb. 31 Soft control in Japanese society has been discussed earlier by such writers as Broadbent (1998), Pharr (1989), and Garon (1997). 32 See Singleton 2015. 33 Lewis 1988, particularly pp. 168–70. 34 AM, Yamanashi edition, 27 October 2016, p. 31; AE, 3 March 1995, p. 15. 35 AM, 31 October 2018, p. 15.

36 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2018b, pp. 11–12. See also Tsujinaka, Pekkanen, and Yamamoto 2009. 37 Cabinet Office 2010. 38 Kurasawa and Akimoto 1990; Nakata 2007. 39 AM, 25 October 2015, p. 11; Tsujinaka, Pekkanen, and Yamamoto 2009; Iwasaki et al. 1989. 40 See Ashkenazi 1991 for a different interpretation of traditional small group organizations and their functions in Japan. 41 AM, 8 February 2018, p. 14; 19 November 2004, p. 14; 3 June 1989, p. 30. 42 Hirade 1942. 43 See Yoneyama 1971; 1990, pp. 98–9. 44 Kumazawa (1993, pp. 105–20) shows how this process operates in workplaces. 45 This section draws on Sakuta, Kumazawa, and Kawaguchi 2019; and Tanaka 2019.

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Index Abe, Shinzō, 236, 303, 312 abilities, of employees, 116–117 abortion, 186–188 academic world system, 52–53 achieved status, 73–74, 81 Act on Land and Building Leases (1991), 122 Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace (2016), 182 activism, see resident movements; social movements administrative guidance (gyōsei shidō), 232, 235–236, 338 administrative systems during Heian period, 9 during Kamakura period, 10 during Yamato period, 7 adoption, 196 AEON, 110 aging society, 47–48 declining birth rate and, 86–87 life expectancy in, 84–86 rise in volunteering and, 323 woman’s role as caregiver in, 181 Agon-shū (Agon sect), 273 agricultural cooperatives, 326 agricultural organizations, 239 Ainu people, 4, 201 autonomous lifestyle of, 97

employment, 202–203 folk culture, 203, 295 formal recognition, 202–204 government treatment of, 202–204 historical circumstances, 201 in Karafuto, 4 land taken from, 202 population, 32, 202 Ainu Recognition Law, 203 Akihito (emperor), 261 Akishino (imperial prince), 279 Akita prefecture, 99 Aleph cult, 274 Alien Registration Ordinance (1947), 210 Allied countries (Pacific War), 21 alphabet, Japanese, 8 alternative culture, 285 characteristics, 287 communes and the natural economy, 299–300 Cool Japan as, 311 countercultural events and performances, 298–299 historical examples, 297 local resident–volunteer support movements as, 325 mini-communication media and online papers, 297–298 nature of, 297 social formations producing, 286 amae (active dependency), 29, 43, 51 amakudari (descending from heaven), 232–235, 251

Amaterasu Ōmikami, 6–7, 267 ambiguity, manipulation of, 337–338 Ame no Uzume, 6 Ampo struggle, 318, 321 ancestor worship, 266, 281, 295 animators, working conditions, 307 anime, 27–28, 46–47, 302, 311 animism, 203, 266–267 annual leave, 120 anomie (normlessness), 48 anti-development protests, 324–325 anti-nuclear demonstrations, 92, 317–321 anti-pollution protests, 325 apology, letters of, 338–339 apprenticeships, 113 armed forces, 338, see also Self-Defense Forces art forms, 296 Article 9 Association, 324 arubaito (side jobs), 123, 159 Asahi Shimbun (newspaper), 30, 255, 258–259, 302 Asano Takuminokami, 13 Ashikaga Takauji, 10 Ashio Copper Mine, 18 Asia Barometer survey, 162 Asia-oriented capitalists, 262 ‘Asian values’, 44–45 Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (Dore), 42 asset inheritance, 75–77

Astro Boy, 301 Atarashii Mura (New Villages), 299 athletics international competitions in, 32 school clubs, 152 Atomu taishi (Ambassador Atom), 301 attitudinal ‘correctness’, 152 Aum cult, 274 authoritarian vertical relationships, 100 authoritarianism, see friendly authoritarianism bakufu (shogunate regime), 9 bamboo-shoot tribe, 299 banking sector, 110 baseball, 32, 99 Bashō, 297 ‘basic goods’, 74, 76 Basic Law on Dietary Education (2005), 153 Basic Law on Intellectual Property (2002), 130 Bear Festivals, 295 Beheiren (citizens’ movement against Vietnam War), 331 bills, drafting of, 245 birth rate, declining, 86–87 bishōjo (beautiful girl character figures), 312 ‘black enterprises’, 121 blue-collar workers, 65, 67–68 attitudes towards foreign workers, 218 English proficiency among, 163 new management system for, 133–134

Bon season (Buddhism), 270–271 book industry, 258–259 boys, school uniforms for, 155 Buddhism believers, number of, 265 Bon season, 270–271 combative side of, 270 in daily life, 271 life after death beliefs, 268 lineages, 268–269 new religions derived from, 273 origins, 268 sects, 268, 297 Shinto and, 267, 269 streams, 268 temples, 247, 276 ‘Build nuclear power plants in Tokyo’ (book), 253 bukatsu (extracurricular activities), 152, 292 bullet train, 102 bullying (ijime), in schools, 155–156 bunshū (segmented masses), 126, 286 buraku (settlement), 204 buraku communities, 14 blacklists of, 206 geographical distribution, 101 history, 205 human rights demanded by, 20 number of, 204–205

outcast types in, 205 in Tokugawa period, 14 types, 208 Buraku Kaihō Dōmei (Buraku Liberation League), 207 buraku liberation movements, 207, 224 burakukai (hamlet associations), 334 burakumin, 14, 201 antidiscrimination legislation for, 206–207 discrimination and prejudice against, 32, 171, 204–207, 224 employment patterns, 206 historical circumstances, 201 marriage patterns, 205–206 population, 204–205 reclassification of, 205 bureaucracy national, see public bureaucracy during Tokugawa period, 16 Western theories of, 52 business community administrative guidance and, 232, 235–236, 338 collusion with public bureaucracy, 233–236 deregulation push by, 238–239 media’s relationship to, 260 public officials’ relationships with, 232–236 school-based recruitement by, 144–146 in three-way deadlock, 230–232 see also large corporations; small businesses (chūshō kigyō) business transactions, legitimation of duality in, 55–56

Cabinet Office, 245 Cabinet Personnel Management Bureau, 236 Camp Schwab, 248 capital–labor cooperation, 133–134 capitalism adaptation of Anglo-American, 49–50 adoption of, during Meiji period, 18 Confucian, 50 corporate capitalism, 116 ie civilization and Japanese-style, 50 in Japan, 43, 116, 126–130 stockholder capitalism, 116 tennō vs shōsha, 261–262 US-oriented vs. Asia-oriented, 262 women’s lives and, 182 see also cultural capitalism; industrial capitalism capitalist class, 20, 62–63, 66, 78 car industry, 253 casual workers, 123–124, 126 casualization, of the workforce, 123–124, 317 Central Community Chest of Japan, 334 Central Pharmaceutical Affairs Council, 187 centralization, during Tokugawa period, 12–13 charitable works, 281 cherry blossoms, 294 chii (achieved status), 81 chiiki seikyō (local cooperatives), 326 chijimi shikō (miniaturizing orientation), 30

Child Abuse Prevention Law (2000), 189 Child Care and Family Care Leave Law (1992), 181 childcare, availability of, 86 child-rearing, workforce participation and, 177–178 children abuse of, 189 born out of wedlock, 173 divorce and, 191–192 of migrant workers, 218 violence towards parents by, 189 China ‘history war’ with, 256 territorial disputes with, 257 trade relations with, 13, 262 wars with, 21–22 Chinese civilization, influence on Japan by, 8 Chinese residents (of Japan), 32 chōjū giga (frolicking animals and humans) scrolls, 46, 312 chōkai (town block associations), 334 chōnaikai (town block associations), 334–335 Chongryun (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), 209, 213 Chōshū region, 17, 19 Christianity banning of, 271–272 believers, number of, 265, 272 charity work, 272 commodification of, 272

in educational sphere, 272 history, 271–272 Christmas, 272 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict), 40 chūgen (mid-year gifts), 247 chūkan (middle class), 82 Chūkyō metropolitan area, 102 chūryū (middle class), 82 chūsan (middle class), 82 chūsan kaikyū (middle class), 81 ‘Chūshingura’ (The treasury of loyal retainers), 13 chūshō kigyō (small businesses), 108 chūzaisho (police substations), 336 citizens’ movements, see resident movements citizenship, 209–211, 219 civic cultural groups, 293 Civil Code (1896), 17, 172–173, 189 civil society fragmentation of, 315–317, 319–321 interest groups, see interest groups non-government organizations, 319, 324, 328 non-profit organizations, 319, 322–324 resident movements, 324–326 seikatsusha, 330–331 social movements and solidarity in, 317–321 volunteer activities and, 315–316, 319, 322–323 clans, 7, 9–10 class

analysis of, 59, 81 capitalist class, 20, 62–63, 66, 78 ‘class of privilege’, 79 classification, 62–74 commoners’ class, 14–16 cultural trends and, 283, 292–293 data on, 61–62 distribution, 63 education and, 61, 146–148 English-language learning and, 162–164 ideology of equal opportunity and, 341 Japanese emic concepts of, 81–82 karyū shakai, 59 Korean residents vs Japanese nationals, 214 labor force classification and, 66–69 land ownership and, 36 life trajectory and early locations of, 62 middle class, see middle class multiclass model of society, 35–37 new middle class, 62–64, 78 old middle class, 63–65, 78 otaku culture and, 308 physical characteristics associated with, 66 privileged class, 20 reproduction of, 36–37, 68, 74–79 shifting public discourse on, 58, 80 social mobility and, 66, 80 status inconsistency, 69–73

underclass, 63–64, 66, 68 volunteering and, 323 working class, 63–64, 78 working poor class, 123 class affiliation, 31, 59–61 class struggle model, 59 class transcendentalists, 73–74 cleaning, of classrooms, 153 climate, 98 Cold War, 210, 338 collective responsibility (rentai sekinin), 334 collective singing, 339 collectivism in schools, 151–152 shift from individualism to, 48 colonization, 2, 19 comedy, 102 comfort women (ianfu), 255–256 comike (comic markets), 301 commerce associations, 326 commodities ‘basic goods’, 74, 76 cultural capitalism and, 126–130 from local industries, 98–99 ‘upper goods’, 74 commoners’ class, 14–16 communes, 299 Communist Party, see Japanese Communist Party

community activists, female, 184–186 community-based organizations, 185 community chest drives, 334 companies, see large corporations; small businesses (chūshō kigyō) Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, 239 conformity, see friendly authoritarianism Confucian capitalism, 50 Confucianism, 8 Confucius, 8 conscription, 18, 22 consensus society, Japan as, 29 constitution (1946), 23 Article 9, 324, 337–338 Article 14, 173 Article 24, 175, 195 interpretation of, 337–338 proposed revising of, 238, 242–243 constitution, Meiji (1889), 17–18, 20 Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, 231, 238 constitutional government, 20 construction industry daily laborers in, 111 on deregulation, 239 duality and corruption in, 55–56, 338 foreign workers in, 217 small businesses in, 108 consumer behavior patterns, 126–128

consumer-oriented society, 93 consumption taxation scheme, 80 contents industry, 303–304 contraception, 186–187 contract employees, 124 contrition, for wrongdoing, 338–339 control, in Japanese society, see friendly authoritarianism control-oriented education (kanri kyōiku), 154–158 Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (1980), 192 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (UN) (1981), 200 convergence debate, 47–50 convoy system, 252–253 Cool Japan, 45–46 as commercial market, 303–304 Gross National Cool index, 45, 300, 310 in image market abroad, 304–306, 309 Japan literacy and, 309–310 labor conditions of production, 307 main consumers, 310 otaku culture and, 307–308 paradoxical nature of, 310 as part of contents and media industries, 303 political economy of, 300–313 soft power and, 310–311 Cool Japan Promotion Council, 303 cooperatives, 299–300, 326, 331 core group, in academic systems, 52

core subcultures, 39–40 corporate capitalism (hōjin shihonshugi), 116 corporate welfare arrangements, 115 corporationism (kaishashugi/kigyōshugi), 116 corporations, see large corporations correspondence high schools, 147 cosplay events, 299 cottage industries, 15 counterculture, see alternative culture Creative Industries Promotion Office, 303 cults, 273–274 cultural capital, 77, 293 cultural capitalism industrial capitalism vs, 45, 127 information revolution and, 129–130 labor union decline and, 132–133 mass customization, 302 rise in, 126–130 see also Cool Japan; cultural export industry cultural consumption, pattern of, 292–293 cultural essentialism, 54, 312–313, see also Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness) cultural exchange programs, 40 cultural export industry, 45–46, 128, see also Cool Japan cultural literacy, 221 cultural nationalism, 45, 312 cultural products, 300, 303 cultural relativism debate, 50–54

cultural uniqueness, 46 cultural workers, 128–130 culture of Ainu people, 203 of commoners in Tokugawa period, 15 defining, 284 elite vs popular, 283, 286 food culture, 46, 99, 101 homogeneity assumptions, 28–31 Japanese, dualities of, 283–286 life culture, 330 national ethos glorified through, 46 Nihonjinron-style stereotyping’s influence on, 44 nobility culture, 9 orthodox culture, 77 patterns-of-culture approach, 41 political culture, 245–250 sports, 99 traditional vs imported, 284–285 visually oriented, 312 see also folk culture; mass culture; popular culture customs, traditional religious, 281 cyberbullying, 156 cyberspace, worker delocalization and, 129–130 daily laborers, 111 daimyō (feudal lords), 10–13 dance, 270, 295 dangō (bid-rigging), 55–56

danka (Buddhist parishioner) system, 276 dankai no sedai (clod and lump generation), 91 Datsu-a Nyūō (Quit Asia and join Europe), 201 de facto relationships (jijitsu-kon), 173, 176, 196 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN) (2007), 203 democratic model of education, 167 Democratic Party for the People, 231, 238 democratic principles, 20, 332 demography aging population, 47–48, 84–88 declining birth rate, 86–87 population distribution, 25–26 dentō geinō (traditional performing arts), 285 deregulation business community push for, 238–239 neoliberal expansion and, 233 as political orientation, 250 political parties on, 237–238 union decline and, 132 detention, police, 337 development projects, protests against, 324–325 developmental conservative approach to education, 167–168 developmental-state model (political economy), 236–237, 241 dialects, 34, 104–105 discipline, in schools, 150–151 discrimination against Ainu people, 32 against burakumin, 32, 204–207, 224

intersectional, 225 against Korean residents, 209–210, 214 against Okinawans, 32 divided-society model, 59 divorce arbitration, 191 barriers to, for women, 173–174, 191 domestic violence as reason for, 188 rate of, 173–174, 191 trends, 191 dokodemo door (door to wherever you like), 46 domestic violence, 188–189 domesuchikku baiorensu (domestic violence), 188 donations, political, 246–247 Doraemon (anime character), 46 double codes, legitimation of, 54–56 earthquakes Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), 92, 250 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (1995), 322 Great Kantō Earthquake (1923), 21 East Asian model (capitalism), 50 eastern Japan, 34 economic competition vs social justice, 263 economic recession, 35, 44, 58, 80, 118 economic sectors, 128–129 economic structures, see capitalism; industrialization economic-superpower expansionists, 262 economics, Nihonjinron-style stereotyping and, 44

Edo, 12–13, 15–16, 100 Edo period, see Tokugawa period education attitudinal ‘correctness’, 152 commercialization of, 142–144 competing orientations, 164–168 conformist socialization patterns in, 150–153 curriculum guidelines, 149–150 democratic model, 167 demography and stratification, 137–148 developmental conservative approach to, 167–168 dietary education, 153 disciplinarian ethics in, 150–151 double-schooling, 138 English language learning, see English-language learning examination-oriented culture of, 141–144 extra-school education, 143 family socialization and, 146–147 five-day week in schools, 143 formal level of, 137–138 juku schools, 143 Kumon method, 128 league type, 139 ‘liberalization of’, calls for, 165 literacy and numeracy standards, 158 during Meiji period, 18 mode of teaching, global adoption of, 49 moral, 149, 153

nationwide achievement test, 168 neoliberal approach to, 165–166 parental investment in, 143 phases, 137 physical, 153 regimentation and its costs in, 153–158 regulatory pluralist approach to, 166 school–business interactions in, 144–146 social class lines and, 146–148 state control of, 148–153 successes of Japanese, 158 textbook authorization system, 149, 338 during Tokugawa period, 16 tournament type, 139 yutori kyōiku, 166 see also teachers; specific educational institutions educational backgrounds intergenerational reproduction of, 36, 69, 147 labor force classification by, 66–69 marriage and, 78–79 social stratification and, 61 status inconsistency and, 70–73 educational credentialism, 136, 142 egalitarian horizontal networks, 100 egalitarianism, 30–31, 80, 165, 340–342 ‘8050’ quandary, 157 ekiben (boxed lunches), 99 elections, 79

electoral system, 231–232 electronic media, 104, 259 elementary schools, 137, 146, 150–151, 336 elite culture civic cultural groups, 293 popular culture and, 283, 286, 292–293 school curricula’s popularization of, 292 social education and, 292–293 elite structure of society, rifts in, 261–263 emic concepts, 51 of class, 81–82 Japanese, cross-cultural study of, 51 seikatsusha, 330–331 of social relations, 340 subcultural relativism using, 53–54 for understanding folk culture, 294 emotive moralizing, 339 emperor, as organ of the state, 20, 261 employee evaluation, 116–117, 124–126 Employees’ Pension Insurance, 87–88 employment, 63–64 Ainu patterns of, 202–203 arubaito, 123, 159 burakumin patterns of, 206 casual workers, 123–124, 126 changes in traditional structure, 48 by firm size, 26 of foreign workers, 216–217

freeter workers, 124 of the global generation, 94–95 graduates recruited for, 144–146 haken workers, 183 after high school, 140 koseki papers and, 174 labor force classification and analysis, 66–69 life expectancy’s impact on, 86 lifetime employment system, 35, 109, 118 as networkers, 184–186 non-regular workers, see non-regular workers part-time workers, see part-time workers precariousness of, 35 regular workers, see regular workers by sector, 128 tanshin funin, 122 Employment Security Law (Shokugyō antei-hō) (1949), 145 empresses, 8 English language global dominance of, 160–164 name order conventions, 161 proficiency, 161–164 English-language learning debates around, 160–161 as an economic commodity, 162, 164 regional and class divide in, 162–163 in schools, 161–162 at universities, 160

enka (popular ballads), 284 enrollment rate (schools), during Meiji period, 18 enterprise pension schemes, 87 enterprise songs, 339 enterprise unionism, 130, 132–133 entertainment media, 288–290 environmental disasters, 18 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1985), 181 equality of opportunity, 340–342 establishment, 229–230, 261–263, see also business community; parliament; public bureaucracy eta (amply polluted/highly contaminated) caste, 205 ethnic minority groups, see minority groups, see also specific minority groups ethnocentrism, Japanese, 199–201 etic concepts, 51 examination hell, 141 examination-oriented education culture, 141–144, 341–342 exoticism, 45 expansionism, during Meiji period, 19 extended families, 194–195 extracurricular activites (bukatsu), 152 ezōshi (ancient picture books), 312 fads, mass media and, 288–289 families corporations’ impacts on, 119 education and socialization processes of, 146–147 extended families, 194–195

nuclear families, 193–195 registration framework, see household registration system (koseki) residential arrangements and family norms, 194–195 structure of, 48, 100 family metaphor, used by corporations, 118–119 family tombs, 175, 294 farmers, 14, 20, 64–65, 103 farmland ownership, 7 Federation of Electric Power Companies, 327 feminism, 37, 51 Festival of the Weaver (Tanabata), 294 festivals, 99, 294–295 feudal domain (han), 12, 18 feudal lords (daimyō), 10–13 feudal period, 5, 10–12, 100, 335, see also specific periods Fifteen Years’ War (1931–45), 21–23 financial assets, 75–77 financial groups, 110 Fiscal Investment and Loan Program (Zaisei Tōyūshi Keikaku), 240– 241 folk culture, 285 of the Ainu people, 295 characteristics, 287 dances, 270 emic concepts for understanding, 294 local festivals, 294–295 marginal art, 296 nature of, 294

in Okinawa, 295 regional variation of, 99, 295–296 social formations producing, 286 songs, 99, 271 food culture, 46, 99, 101 foreign residents cultural background, 215 koseki system and, 175 population, 32, 215 foreign visitors, cultural perceptions of, 40 foreign workers, 31–32, 201 attitudes towards, 218 categories, 216–217 employers of, 216–217 exploitation of, 218 historical circumstances, 201 of Japanese descent, 216 labor market conditions attracting, 216 population, 215 skilled professionals, 218–219 students as, 217 trainee program, 217–218 undocumented, 218 unskilled workers, 217, 219 visa categories, 219 foxes, 276 free-market model (political economy), 237, 241, see also deregulation; privatization

Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, 20 freeter (job-hopping) workers, 124 Friday (magazine), 289 friendly authoritarianism comparison of types, 343 manipulation of ambiguity, 337–338 moralizing and ‘mind correctness’, 338–342 mutual surveillance within small groups, 332–335 nature of, 332 power as visible and tangible in, 336–337 soft coercion of, 332 fūfu bessei (different surnames despite formal marriage), 174 Fuji (tabloid newspaper), 289 Fujin Kōron (magazine), 290 Fujiwara, Masahiko, 46 fūki iin (students in charge of discipline), 152 fukoku kyōhei (‘Enrich the nation and strengthen the armed forces’), 18 Fukuoka prefecture, 99 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster aftermath, 255 anti-nuclear demonstrations, 92, 317–321 cause and consequences, 250–251 hardship on the periphery revealed by, 253–254 TEPCO and the nuclear village, 251–253 views on nuclear power after, 254 volunteer help after, 322 funerals, 174–175, 247

futōkō (school nonattendance), 156 gakureki shakai (society oriented inordinately to educational credentialism), 61 gakuseki (school registry), 175 gakushū shidō yōryō (official guidelines for school teaching), 149 ganbari (endurance and persistence), 30, 341 Gautama, Siddhārtha, 268 gekiga (manga genre), 301–302 gekokujō (where the low dominated the high and mighty), 10 gemeinschafts (communities), 119 gender Cool Japan and stratification of, 312 distribution, 25 equality and, 172, 184–186 household registration system and, 171 inequality and, 179–180, 184 labor force classification by, 66–69 value orientation and, 37 gender gap, 170, 181 gender identities, diverse, 195–196 General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sōhyō), 132 general middle-class model, 59 generational subcultural groupings characteristics, 89 global generation, 89, 94–95 postwar generation, 88–89, 91–92, 95 prosperity generation, 88–89, 92–95 recent history’s phases relative to, 88–89

socialization experiences, 89 value orientation shift between, 95–96 wartime generation, 88–91, 95 workforce composition and, 66–69 Genji clan, 9–10 Genji monogatari (The tale of Genji) (Murasaki), 9 geographical variation, see regional variation geography of Japan, 97–98 geopolitical centers, 5 gesellschafts (associations), 119 gift-giving, 247 Gini index, 35, 75 girls, school uniforms for, 155 Girls’ Festival (Hina Matsuri), 294 Global Gender Gap index, 181 global generation, 89, 94–95 globalization deregulation and, 239 of Japanese society, 44, 225–227 nationalism vs, 241–243 shōsha capitalism and, 261 go-nin gumi (five-household) system, 335 Gosakuramachi Tennō (empress), 8 government branches of, 232 bureaucracy, see public bureaucracy duality and corruption in, 56 education controlled by, 148–153

local, 248–250 media’s relationship to, 260 municipal, 233, 248–250 neighborhood associations and, 334–335 prefectural, 233, 235, 248–250 in three-way deadlock, 230–232 see also parliament Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), 92, 250 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (1995), 322 Great Kantō Earthquake (1923), 21 Gross National Cool index, 45, 300, 310 group model (Japanese society), 29–31 gymnastics exercises, 151 gyōsei shidō (administrative guidance), 232, 235–236, 338 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (1980), 192 haibutsu kishaku undō (abolish Buddhism and destroy temples) movement, 267 haiku, 15, 297 hairstyles, student, 150 haka mairi (visiting a grave), 175 Hakata textiles, 99 haken (temporary) workers, 183 haken shain (temporary workers), 124 han (feudal domain), 12, 18 han (small-group) system, 333–335 han-kō (domain schools), 16 hanami (cherry blossoms), 294

Hansen’s disease, stigmatization of, 225 Happiness Realization Party, 280 harakara (fraternity), 340 hare (gala), 294–295 harmony, 29 Hasegawa, Machiko, 302 Hashimoto’s model (class), 62–66 Hayato clan, 7 Heian-kyō, see Kyoto Heian period, 8–9 Henoko, 248 hensachi (deviation score), 143–145 high schools, 137 elite academic, 141 options for graduates, 139–140 population distribution after graduation, 139 tuition fees, 142 variation between, 138, 147 higher education institutions cost of, 142–143 enrollment in, 137 junior colleges, 140 tiers of, 160 variation in, 140 see also universities hikikomori (social withdrawal), 156–158, 316, 341 Himiko (Yamataikoku leader), 7 himin, futsū no hito (ordinary people), 331

Hina Matsuri (Girls’ Festival), 294 hinin (nonhuman people) caste, 205 Hirade, Ikuo, 339 hiragana (writing system), 8 Hiroshima, 23 hi-seiki shain (non-regular workers), 63–66, 123 ‘history war’ comfort women issue, 255–256 over military past, 255–258 Nanjing Massacre, 256 South Korean laborers, 256 territorial disputes, 257 transnational approach to, 257 Yasukuni Shrine and war criminals, 256 hitogara (human quality), 116 Hizen-han, 17 hōjin shihonshugi (corporate capitalism), 116 Hokkaidō, 4, 97 Ainu population, 4, 32, 97, 202 character of residents, 98 Nibutani dam construction in, 202 home-based private lessons, 293 homelessness, 69 homogeneity, 28–31, 33–34 Honda, 112 Hōnen (Buddhist teacher), 268 honne (true feelings), 54–55, 117, 119 honseki (permanent address), 172

Honshū, 97 Ainu population, 97, 202 attacks on, 7 colonial militiamen in, 4 Japanese identity in, 4 horizontal egalitarian networks, 100 hours of work, 120–121, 133 House of Councillors, 231–232 House of Peers, 19 House of Representatives, 19, 79, 231–232 household registration system (koseki), 171–176 children born out of wedlock and, 173 divorce deterred by, 173–174 family tombs, 175 head of household in, 172–173 ie ideology and, 172, 175–176 marriages to non-Japanese and, 190 minority group discrimination by, 171, 206 operation of, 171–172 resident card system, 171–172 same-sex marriages and, 195–196 seki and, 175 surname after marriage in, 174 household types distribution, 192 extended families, 194–195 nuclear families, 193–195 single-person, 192–193, 317

households asset holdings of, 75–76 independance of, 100 in neighborhood associations, 334 police-associated, 336 power in, 17 size of average, 86 tasks, gender inequality and, 184 housewives, 63, 66, 178, 183–185 Human Revolution movement, 273 hyakushō (farmers), 14 hyōjun-go (standardized Japanese language), 105 hyōsatsu (nameplate), 175 ianfu (comfort women), 255–256 ianu (pieces of shaved wood), 295 identity deconstructing Japanese, 219–224 ethnic identities, 34 regional identities, 34, 98–99 relative to Westerners, 199–201 self-image, 40–41 types of national, 223–224 ideological capital, control of, 39–40 ideological centralization, 104–105 ie civilization, 50 ie system, 17, 172, 175–176 iemoto system, 293 Ienaga, Saburō, 149

igo (Chinese chess), 292–293 ijime (bullying), 155–156 ikigai, 30, 51 illegitimate births, 173 image(s) associated with Japan, 38 cultural export industry and rival, 45–46 of Japan abroad, 304–306, 309 Japanese self-image, 40–41 immigrant workers, see foreign workers Immigration Control Law, 219 Imperial Covenant (1868), 17 Imperial Household Law (1947), 8, 261 imperial Japan, 5 colonies, 2 court, during Kamakura period, 10 diet (1889), 19 Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusan-kai), 22 imperial succession, 8 imported culture, 284 Inari shrines, 276 income, 35, 70–73, 77 independent small proprietors (jieigyō), 64–65, 112–113 indigenous people, see Ainu people individualism, shift from collectivism to, 48 industrial capitalism, 45, 127 Industrial Patriotic Society (Sangyō Hōkoku-kai), 22 industrial policy, 49

industrial sector, 110, 132, 326 industrial strikes, 133–134 industrialization convergence debate and, 47–50 during Meiji period, 18 during Tokugawa period, 15 inequality absence of, 74 educational, 146–148 extent vs Western countries, 80 free-market paradigm and, 241 gender, 179–180, 184 increase in, 59–62 in Japanese society, 35–37 kakusa shakai thesis, 35–37, 59–62, 79–81 reproduction of, 74–79 information revolution, 92–93, 129–130, 298 information technology, social movements’ use of, 320–321 infrastructure programs, during Meiji period, 18 inheritance of assets, 75–77 for illegitimate children, 173 primogeniture and, 16, 172 of social and cultural resources, 36–37 tax on, 76, 81 Inland Sea, isles, 98 interest groups affiliation changes in, 316

defined, 327 economic interest groups, 327–328 formation of, 328 LDP backing by, 243–244 public bureaucracy lobbying by, 245 strategies of, 328 targets, 327 types, 329 zoku parliamentarians and, 245 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (UN) (1969), 224 International Manga Research Center, 312 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial), 256 international relations, 238 internet, 129–130, 320 Inter-Parliamentary Union, 181 inter-personal relationships among women, 51 as basic unit of action, 30 in bureaucratic organizations, 52 extent of, in Japan, 51 group orientation of, 29 in Kyoto, 101–102 intersectionality, 225 intersocietal relativism, 54 intrasocietal relativism, 54 ippan-shoku (ordinary employees), 178–179 ‘iron solidarity’, 320

Ise Shrine, 267 Ishihara, Shintarō, 45 islands major, 97–98 small isles, 98 territorial disputes over, 257 Ittō-en (Social Welfare Corporation) commune, 299 Izumo Shrine, 266 jabisen (long lute), 99 Japan attacks on, 10 changing image overseas, 40–47, 304–306, 309 Chinese influences on early, 8 as a conglomerate of subnations, 97–99 eastern vs western, 34, 100–102 expansionary attempts by, 6 geography, 97–98 geopolitical centers, 5 history, 2, 88 map of, 3 national boundaries, 1–6 population, see population as a sea-dependent society, 8 ‘third opening’ of, 242 Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, 262, 327 Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai Dōyūkai), 239 Japan Association of Lifeology (Seikatsu Gakkai), 331 Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), 27, 151, 259

Japan Business Federation (Keidanren), 239 Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Nisshō), 239 Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), 242–243 Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, 162 Japan Federation of Bar Associations, 337 Japan Interest Group Study, 327–328 Japan literacy, 309–310 Japan Medical Association, 243 Japan as Number One (Vogel), 43 Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, 234 Japan Post Group, 241 Japan Post Holdings, 235 Japan Postal Workers’ Union (Nihon Yūsei Kōsha Rōdō Kumiai), 132 Japan Restoration Party, 231 Japan Road Contractors Association, 327 Japan Teachers’ Union, 154, 167 Japan Trade Union Confederation (Rengō), 132, 134, 230, 238 Japan Trucking Association, 234 Japanese Brazilians, 31, 216 Japanese civilization, 50 Japanese Communist Party, 167 emergence of, 20 on militarization, 238 parliamentary seats held by, 231 strength of, 61 Japanese culture, dualities, 283–286 Japanese language, see language, Japanese

Japanese model, 43–44 Japanese people by generation, see generational subcultural groupings demographics, see demography identity of, see identity living overseas, 216–217, 225–226 mythological origins of, 6–7 self-image, 40–41 stereotypes, 27–28, 40 types, 219–220 Japanese society age structure’s impacts on, 85 Cool Japan discourse and, 309–310 cultural export industry and representations of, 45–46 dual codes in, 54–56 generalisations about, 26–28 globalization and, 44, 225–227 homogeneity assumptions about, 28–31, 33–34 monocultural model, 28–31 multiclass model, 35–37 multicultural model, 37–39 multiethnic model, 31–34 patterns of transformation, 47–48 prejudice embedded in, 224 rifts in elite structure of, 261–263 soft control in, see friendly authoritarianism see also civil society Japanese state, formation of, 4–5

Japanese studies calls for globalization in, 44 Cool Japan discourse, 45–46, 304, 306 Eurocentric tendencies in, 53 frameworks in, 42 groupist Japan, 304–305 key influences on, 41, 47 learn-from-Japan campaigns, 43 modernization theory, 41–43 monocultural model in, 28 mysterious Japan, 304–305 particularistic approach to, 43 patterns-of-culture approach, 41 popular images of Japan and paradigms in, 304–305 revisionist analysis, 43 trichotomous phases, 306 universalistic approach to, 42 ‘Japanese-style’ management changes in styles of, 48 as dominant work model, 113 employee ability defined in, 116–118 family metaphor as socialization device in, 118–119 global proliferation of, 49 key features, 114–116 performance-oriented management vs, 114 small businesses and, 109 superior–subordinate relationship in, 117–118 worker support for, 118, 125

Japaneseness aspects, 219–220 at the individual, psychological level, 29 at the intergroup level, 29 criteria for determining, 221–224 defining, 219–224 theories of, see Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness) Japan’s Maternal Protection Law (1996), 188 jiba sangyō (local industries), 98–99 jiban (solid blocs of voters), 245 jichikai (self-government associations), 334 jieigyō (small-business proprietors), 64–65, 112 jijitsu-kon (de facto relationships), 173 jima (island), 98 Jinja Honchō (Association of Shinto Shrines), 279 jinkaku (personhood), 116 jishu kanri (voluntary control), 333 jitsuryoku (manifest ability), 116 jizake (sake rice wines), 99 JK (jishu kanri) activity (total quality control movement), 333 job market, see labor market job mobility, 109 job rotation, 122 Jōdo (Pure Land), 268 Jōdo Shinshū (Buddhist sect), 268, 270, 297 Jōdoshū (Buddhist sect), 268 jōmin (everyday life people), 286, 331 jōruri (puppet theatre), 15

jōryū kaikyū (upper class), 81 joseki (exit from a register), 175 journalists, 258, 260 juku schools (after-school coaching), 143 jūmin-hyō (resident card) system, 171–172 junior colleges, 140 junior students (kōhai), 150 junkai renraku (patrol liaison), 336 jurisdictional sectionalism, between ministries, 233 Kabuki theater, 15 Kadokawa Corporation, 27 Kaifu, Toshiki, 246 kaikyū (class), 81 kaishashugi (corporationism), 116 kaisō (stratum), 81 kakei (family line), 81 kaku (series of ranks), 81 kakusa shakai (disparity society), 35–37, 59–62, 79–81 Kamakura period, 9–10 kami (object of Shinto worship), 266, 268 Kamo no Chōmei, 1 Kamui gaiden, 302 Kanagawa prefecture, 103 kanbun (Chinese classical literature), 292 kanji (Chinese characters), 8, 312 kanjin (inter-personal relationship), 30, 51, see also inter-personal relationships Kankokujinron (theories of Koreanness), 225

kankon sōsai (cash contributions), 247 kanpō (traditional medicine), 8 kanri kyōiku (control-oriented education), 154–158 Kansai Electric Power Company, 254 Kansai region, 33, 100–102, 105 kanshi (classic Chinese poetry), 293 Kantō region, 100–102 Kantō subnation, 5 Karafuto, 4 karaoke, 102, 291–292 karōshi (death caused by excessive work), 120–121 karyū shakai (lower-stratum society), 35, 59 kasō shakai (lower-stratum society), 81 kasochi (depopulated areas), 103 katakana (writing system), 8 kateinai bōryoku (intra-family violence), 188–189 kateinai rikon (divorce within marriage), 191 ke (routine life), 294 kegare (impurity), 294 Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), 118, 239, 254 keiretsu (enterprise grouping) system business conglomerates and, 20 function of, 110 in media organizations, 259–260 small businesses in, 110–111 university hierarchy akin to, 159–160 keiyaku shain (contract employees), 124 Keizai Dōyūkai (Japan Association of Corporate Executives), 239

kenjin-kai (prefectural associations), 98 kenmin-sei (prefectural character), 98 kenmin-shotoku (prefectural income), 104 kigyōshugi (corporationism), 116 kiken (dangerous), 216 Kikkawa’s model, 66–69 kimonos, 99 Kinai (Kinki) region, 4, 7, 16, 205 Kinai (Kinki) subnation, 5 kinship networks, 48, 100, 214, 340 Kintetsu, 110 Kira Kōzukenosuke, 13 kiseki (registry of those in posthumous world), 175 kisha kurabu (reporters’ clubs), 258, 260 Kishi, Nobusuke, 246 kitanai (dirty), 216 kitsui (difficult), 216 kōban (police box) system, 49, 336 kobun (devoted followers), 340 kodokushi (lonely, unattended death), 317 kōenkai (supporters’ associations), 245 Kōfuku no Kagaku (Happy Science), 280 kōhai (junior students), 150 Koizumi, Shinichirō, 240 Koizumi reform, 240–241 Kojiki (Records of ancient matters), 6, 267 kojin shihonshugi (stockholder capitalism), 116 kokkei-bon (comical novels), 15

Kokutetsu Rōdō Kumiai (National Japan Railway Workers’ Union), 132 Komeito, 231, 238, 279 Kon, Wajirō, 331 konjō (determination), 154 Konkōkyō, 297 Korea ‘history war’ with, 255–256 invasion attempts on, 7, 12 Japan’s colonization of, 19 territorial disputes with, 257 Korean residents (zainichi), 201 advancement of, 214–215 assimilationist orientation, 213 communities, tensions within, 209 comparative class distribution, 214 discrimination and prejudice against, 209–210, 214–215 generation gap, 211 geographical distribution, 101 historical circumstances, 201, 209 identity orientations of young, 212–213 individualistic orientation, 213 killing of, in Tokyo, 21 loyal to their home country, 212–213 marriage patterns, 211–212 multicultural orientation, 213 nationality issues, 209–210 naturalization and surname issue, 211

population, 32, 208 studies on, 34 voting rights, 210, 215 Korean War, 209–210 Koseki Law (1872), 171, 173 koseki (household registration) system, 171–176, see also household registration system (koseki) kōshinjo (private detective agencies), 206 kosupure (cosplay), 299 kōtō senmon gakkō (technical colleges), 137 kukai (hamlet associations), 334 Kumon method, 128 kuni (nations), 98 Kwantung Army, 21 kyōiku tokku (special educational zones), 166 Kyoto as capital, 8 Bon season in, 271 character of residents, 98 inter-personal relationships in, 101–102 local industries, 99 during Meiji Restoration, 17 popular culture in, 15 during Warring States period, 10, 12 Kyoto International Manga Museum, 312 Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe nexus, 98, 101 Kyoto Seika University, 312 kyōtsū-go (common Japanese), 105

kyūdan (impeachment), 207 kyūdō (Japanese archery), 292 Kyū-dojin hogohō (Law for the Protection of Former Savage Natives), 203 Kyūshū island, 7, 97 character of residents, 98 folk songs, 99 local industries, 99 missionary work on, 271 resident movement in, 325 labor force, see workforce labor market pull factors, 216 push factors, 216 rationalization in, 123–126 two-tier structure of internal, 178–182 women’s employment profiles and, 176–186 labor movements, 131–132 Labor Standards Act (1993), 120 labor unions, 326 capital–labor cooperation, 133–134 enterprise unionism, 130, 132–133 loss of power, 130 membership decline in, 130–133, 316 membership statistics, 26 new-type, 131 non-regular workers’, 130 plural-type, 130

policymaking processes and absence of, 230 shuntō, 134 types, 130–131 Labour Standards Inspection Office, 121 Land Development Bureau, 202 land-improvement associations, 243–244 land ownership Ainu dispossessed of, 202 class and, 36 during Heian period, 9 primogeniture and inheritance of, 16 during Tokugawa period, 12 urbanization and, 103–104 during Yamato period, 7 land registers, 11 land tax, 9, 14, 18–19 landlords, 19, 21, 122 language, Japanese Chinese influence on, 8 dialects, 34, 104–105 Japanese alphabet, 8 legitimation of duality underlying, 54–56 name order in, 161 ‘standard Japanese’, 105 large corporations amakudari appointments, 233–235 blue-collar workers in, 133–134 convoy system and, 252–253

discrimination against women in, 179 employee evaluation by, 116–118 English communication in, 161 family metaphor as socialization device in, 118–119 gender equality in, 182 gift-giving in, 247 inter-personal relationships in, 52 ‘Japanese-style’ management and, 114–116 manipulation of ambiguity in, 338 as minority of businesses, 108 multinationalization of, 239 paternalistic arrangements in, 52 percentage employed by, 26, 108 small firms vs, 109 songs specific to, 339 unionization rate in, 131 late-developer hypothesis (multiple convergence model), 49 law enforcement, 49, 336–337 Law for the Protection of Former Savage Natives (Kyū-dojin hogohō), 203 Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (2016), 207 laws during Heian period, 9 during Yamato period, 7 learn-from-Japan campaigns, 43 Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore’s PM), 44 Legislation for Peace and Security (2015), 238

‘LEGs’ (‘Lightly Educated Guys’), 68 leprosy, stigmatization of, 225 LGBT communities, 195–196 liaison cards, 336 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 231 inherited constituencies in, 79 interest groups supporting, 243–244 nationalistic principles supported by, 242 on militarization, 238 policy formation reforms under, 245 power base, 237–238 privatization reform agenda, 240–241 rural support of, 262 on state-led education, 167 young members of, 95 zoku parliamentarians and, 245–246 life club cooperatives, 299, 331 life culture, 330 life expectancy, 84–86 lifestyle population density and, 97 shifting values and, 73–74, 96 lifetime employment system, 35, 109, 118 lifetime single ratio, 193 ‘Lightly Educated Guys’ (‘LEGs’), 68 literacy, 16, 158 literary coterie magazines, 293 literature, 9, 15

local cooperatives, 326 local festivals, 99, 294–295 local governments interregional competition, 249–250 lobbying by, 249 national bureaucracy and, 248–250 neighborhood associations and, 334–335 project implementation by, 249 see also municipal governments; prefectural governments local industries, 98–99 lost decades, 35 loyalty, 29 magazines, 196, 289–290, 293, see also manga Mahathir Bin Mohamad (Malaysia’s PM), 44 Mahayana Buddhism, 268 Mainichi (newspaper), 258–259 Makiguchi, Tsunesaburō, 279 management models, comparison, 114 managers, subordinates’ relationship with, 52, 117–118 Manchukuo nation, 22 Manchurian Incident (1931–3), 21–22 manga, 300 American animation’s influence, 301 as cultural export, 46 commodification and distribution of, 301 gay, 196 history, 46, 301, 312 learning Japanese language using, 309

mass customization, 302 overseas fans of, 311 printed vs digital, 302–303 readership, 27–28 related products, 302 salaryman, 63 sales, 301 shojo, 302 study of, 312 women cartoonists, 302 manufacturing sector, 108, 132, 176, 217 Man’yōshū (Collection of 10,000 leaves), 8 manzai (dialogue shows), 102 marginal art, 296 Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, 248 marriage(s) arranged, 190 attitudes towards, 193, 316 average age of, 87 burakumin to non-burakumin, 205–206 ceremonies, 190 in Christian churches, 272 educational backgrounds and, 78–79 gift-giving at, 247 interclass, 78 intraclass, 78 between Koreans and Japanese, 211–212 koseki system and, 173

love marriages, 190 same-sex, 175, 195 socialization and, 77–79 surname after, 174 to non-Japanese nationals, 32, 190–191 women’s views on, 37, 87 mass culture, 77, 285 characteristics, 287 consumer orientation aspect of, 292 cost-effective diversions, 290–292 cross-status consumption and, 292–293 entertainment media, 288–290 home-based private lessons, 293 karaoke, 291–292 nature of, 77, 287–288 pachinko pinball, 290–291 racism in, 201 radio, 289 social formations producing, 286 tabloid press and magazines, 289–290 television, 288–289 mass customization, 127, 302 mass hysteria, 288–289 maverick businesses, 111–112 media establishment business and government connection to, 260 centralized nature of, 258–259 characteristics, 258

distribution market, 259 kisha kurabu, 258, 260 similarities to large corporations, 259–260 Tokyo-centric nature of, 104 media industry, Cool Japan market and, 303–304 medical professionals, LDP and, 243 medical schools, admissions into, 148, 342 medicine, traditional, 8 medium-sized subsidiaries, in keiretsu networks, 110 Meiji (emperor), 12, 266 Meiji constitution (1889), 17–18, 20 Meiji period, 5, 17–20 Meiji Restoration, 12, 17, 32, 202, 205, 208, 244 Meiji Shrine, 266 men average life span, 84 in capitalist class, 62 class distribution, 63 as domestic violence victims, 188 dominant male subculture, 39 household work by, 184 marriage and, 78, 87 new-middle-class, 64 number of, in Japan, 25 underclass, 66 men’s workforce participation as non-regular workers, 123 distribution, 66–68

employment stratification, 109 mental illness, 156–158 merchant class, 12, 17, 19–20 meritocratic ideology, 341–342 Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes, 317 mibun (status position), 81 middle-aged female graduates (eight segment analysis), 68 middle-aged female nongraduates (eight segment analysis), 68 middle-aged male graduates (eight segment analysis), 67 middle-aged male nongraduates (eight segment analysis), 67 middle class breakdown of, 59–62 emic conceptions of, 82 new and old, 63–65 self-identification as, 31, 59–61 during Taishō democracy, 20 middle schools, 137, 146 Miki, Kiyoshi, 330 Mikitani, Hiroshi, 254 militarization, 238 military conscription and, 18 history of, 255–258 during Meiji period, 19 military class, see samurai class military discipline, in schools, 150–151 Minamata (Kyūshū), 325 Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan), 209, 213

miniaturizing orientation, 30 mini-communication publications (mini-komi), 297–298 mini-komi (mini-communication), 297–298 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 233, 246, 327 Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 246, 251, 303, 327 Ministry of Education, 148–150, 154, 156, 166, 233, 246, 338 Ministry of Finance, 240 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 224 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 186–187, 195, 233–234, 246 Ministry of Home Affairs, 172 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 235 Ministry of International Trade and Industry, 49, 246, see also Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry of Justice, 216, 337 Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, 233–234 minority groups advocacy by, 224–225 comparison, 201 defining, 33 discrimination and prejudice against, 32–33, 224 historical circumstances, 201 invisibility of, 33 ‘Japaneseness’ of, 219–221 koseki papers and, 171, 206 multi-ethnic model of society and, 32–33 population, 33 regional distributions of, 101 see also specific minority groups

min’yō (folk songs), 99, 284 MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Johnson), 43 Mitsubishi, 110 Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, 110 Mitsui, 110 miuchi (relatives or comrades), 340 Miyazawa, Kiichi, 330 miyazukae (court service), 115 Mizuho Financial Group, 110 mizuko jizō (doll-like statues), 188 mizushōbai (hostesses), 183 modernization, during Tokugawa period, 15–16 modernization theory, 41–43 money politics, 245–247 Mongolian Empire, 10 monocultural model of society, 28–31 moral education, 149, 153 moralizing techniques community of sanctions, 340 comparison of, 342 emotive moralizing, 339 friendly authoritarianism and, 338–342 ideology of egalitarian competition, 340–342 physical correctness, 339 ‘moratorium generation’, 93, 124 multiclass model of society, 35–37 Multicultural Japan (book), 34 multicultural model of society, 37–39

multicultural paradigm convergence debate, 47–50 cultural relativism debate, 50–54 legitimation of double codes, 54–56 subcultural relativism, 53–54 temporal fluctuations in understanding Japan, 40–47 Multiethnic Japan (Lie), 34 multiethnic model of society, 31–34 multiple convergence thesis, 49–50 municipal governments, 233, 248–250 mura okoshi (village revitalization movement), 104 Murasaki Shikibu, 9 Murayama, Tomiichi, 257 Muromachi period, 10–11 music, 284, 295, 339 mutual surveillance, 332–335 mysticism, 273–274 mythology, 6–7, 267, 278 Nagano prefecture, 99 Nagasaki, 23 nakama (mates, fellows), 340 name order, in Japanese, 161 nanahikari-zoku (privileged groups), 37 Nanjing Massacre (1937), 256 Nara period, 7 Narita International Airport, 325 Naruhito (emperor), 261 nashikuzushi (gradual dismantling), 338

national boundaries, 1–6 national bureaucracy, see public bureaucracy National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenrōren), 132 National Health Insurance scheme, 218 national identity, see identity National Japan Railway Workers’ Union (Kokutetsu Rōdō Kumiai), 132 National Land Improvement Political League, 243 National Pension scheme, 87 National Police Agency, 188 National Police Reserve, 338, see also Self-Defense Forces national seclusion (sakoku), 13–14 national universities, 139 nationalism cultural, 45, 312 globalization vs, 241–243 Nationality Law, 209–210, 219 NEET (youth not in education, employment, or training), 124, 140 neighborhood associations, 326, 334–335 decline in, 316, 334 features, 334 during Pacific War, 22 post-Fukushima role of, 322 nenkō chingin (seniority-based wage), 48, 115 neoliberal approach to education, 165–166 nepotism, 52 Netherlands, trade relations with, 13 networkers, 184–186

new middle class, 62–64, 78 new rich, 35 New Tokyo International Airport, 325 new-type unions, 131 New Year’s Day, 247, 294 newspapers, 255, 258–259, 289, 298 NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), see Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) Nibutani area, 202 nicchoku (students on daily duty), 152 Nicchū Sensō (Second Sino-Japanese War) (1937–45), 21–22 Nichiren sect, 297 Nihon (Japan), 4 Nihon-rashisa (Japanese-like qualities), 29 Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), 6, 267 Nihon-teki (Japanese-style) tendencies, 29 Nihon Yūsei Kōsha Rōdō Kumiai (Japan Postal Workers’ Union), 132 Nihonga (Japanese-style painting), 284 Nihonjin (Japanese), 4 Nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness), 29–31 Cool Japan as postmodern, 313 critical analysis of, 44 cultural export industry and, 46 cultural influence of, 44 dominant male subculture and, 39 ethnic superiority and, 201 Japanese self-image and, 40

Nii, Itaru, 330 Niigata prefecture, 99 Nikkan Berita (online newspaper), 298 Nikkan Gendai (tabloid newspaper), 289 Ninja bugei-chō (Ninjas’ martial arts notebooks), 301 ninjas, 11 ninjutsu, 11 Nintendo, 112, 128 Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), 242–243 Nippon Steel, 110 Nisshō (Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry), 239 nobility culture, 9 nōkyō (agricultural cooperatives), 326 Nomura Research Institute, 75 non-government organizations (NGOs), 319, 324, 328 non-profit organizations (NPOs), 319, 322–324, 326 non-regular workers, 63–66, 68, 123–124, 126, 317 noren wake (splitting a shop sign curtain), 113 Northern and Southern Court period, 10 nōryoku (latent general ability), 116–118 Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, 251 nuclear disasters, see Fukushima nuclear plant disaster nuclear experts, government and business interdependence with, 251–252 nuclear families, 193–195 nuclear power supply anti-nuclear demonstrations, 92, 317–321 division over continuation of, 254

location of plants, 253–254 numeracy standards, 158 nyūseki (entry into a register), 175 obesity score, 86 occultism, 273–274 occupation, status inconsistency and, 70–73 Oda Nobunaga, 11 Ōishi Kuranosuke, 13 oiwake (folk song), 99 Okinawa folk culture, 295 Ryūkyū Kingdom, 3 US presence in, 4, 23, 248, 295 Okinawan people, discrimination against, 32 Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, 266 old middle class, 63–65, 78 omoiyari (sense of empathy), 196 omote (the face), 55 omotenashi bunka (hospitality culture), 30 Ōmotokyō, 297 online citzens’ newspapers, 298 organ theory of government, 20 Oriental capitalism, 50 orthodox culture, 77 Osaka commercial history of, 102 culture, 100 during feudal period, 100

food in, 101 popular culture in, 15, 102 zainichi Koreans in, 101 Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe metropolitan area, 102 otaku (geek / nerd) culture, 27 characteristics, 307 commodities of interest, 307 consumption and creation of ‘cool’ culture by, 307–308 manga and anime, 27 of the global generation, 94 stratification of, 308 other-reliance school (Buddhism), 268–269 outcast system, 205, 208 overseas Japanese, 216–217, 225–226 overtime, 120 oyabun (patriarchal godfather figure), 340 pachinko pinball, 290–291 Pacific century (capitalism), 50 Pacific War (1941–5), 21–23 painting, 284 Panasonic, 112 parasite landlord class, 19, 21 parent–teacher associations, 326 parliament culture of, 245–250 structure and composition, 231 in three-way deadlock, 230–232 women in, 181

zoku politicians in, 245–246 Parsons, Talcott, 42 part-time schools (teiji-sei kōkō), 147 part-time workers casualization of labor and, 123–124 high school students as, 147 performance-based model and, 126 women as, 63, 66, 123, 177–178, 183–184 particularistic approach to Japanese studies, 43 pāto (part-time), 123 patriarchy, 182–183 pattern variables, 42 peace movements, 324, 331 Pearl Harbor, raid on, 22 pension system, 87–88 performance-based wage system, 124–126 performance-oriented management, 114 performances, school, 151 ‘peripheral’ subcultures, 39 periphery group, in academic systems, 52 permanent employment (shūshin koyō), 48 permanent residents, 32 physical characteristics, social class and, 66 physical correctness, 339 physical education, 150–151, 153 pictocentrism, 312 poetry, 8, 15, 293, 295, 297 police system, 336–337, see also law enforcement

policy development, 230, 245–247 political apathy, 132 political consciousness, of the postwar generation, 92 political culture local politics against national bureaucracy, 248–250 money politics, 245–247 public bureaucracy’s power in, 245 reform challenges, 245–250 regulation vs deregulation, 250 transparency in, 245–247 political donations, 246–247 political economies, 236–243, 300–313 Political Funds Control Law (2008), 246–247 political parties, 231, 237–238, 244, 246 Political Party Subsidization Law (1994), 246 politics duality and corruption in, 56 as ex-bureaucrat career route, 235 local, 248–250 religion’s involvement in, 278–280 right-wing idealogy in, 257 in three-way deadlock, 230–232 see also government pollution, 325 polytheism, 266 popular culture anime, see anime in contemporary Japan, 15

diversity of, 303 elite culture and, 283, 286, 292–293 manga. see manga in Osaka, 15, 102 otaku and, 27 overseas student learning using, 309–310 regional, 99 social dissent influenced by, 320 types of, 285–286 see also alternative culture; folk culture; mass culture popular elite culture, 292–293 popular songs, as military commodities, 339 population density, 97 distribution, 25–26 minority group, 33 of small isles, 98 status-inconsistent individuals in the, 70, 72 Tokugawa status system for, 14–15 workforce, 67 populism, 257 pork-barreling, 245–247 postal system, 241, 244 postmasters, as LDP supporters, 244 postmodernism, 73, 306, 311–312 postwar generation, 88–89, 91–92, 95 poverty, 36, 72, 74 power companies, 251–254

prefectural character, 98 prefectural governments, 233, 235, 248–250 prefectures, 18, 98 prejudice against Ainu people, 32 against burakumin, 32, 204–207 intersectional, 225 Japanese society’s inherent, 224 against Korean residents, 215 against Okinawans, 33 primary schools, see elementary schools primary sector (economies), 128–129 primogeniture, 16, 172 print media, 104, 258–259, 289–290 Prison Law (1908), 337 prison system, 337 private lessons, 293 private pension programs, 87 private sector, see business community private universities, 139 privatization, 132, 240–241 privileged class, 20 Programme for International Student Assessment survey (OECD), 158 progressive educators, 167 progressive taxation, 80 property assets, 75–77 property ownership, see land ownership

prosperity generation, 88–89, 92–95 protest movements, see resident movements; social movements psychology, Nihonjinron-style stereotyping and, 44 public bureaucracy, 102–103 administrative guidance and, 232, 235–236, 338 amakudari, 233–235 appointments to, 236 career progression in, 234–235 convoy system and, 252–253 dominance of, 232–236 English requirements for, 161 jurisdictional sectionalism, 233 local government and, 233, 248–250 policy formation by, 245 private sector collusion with, 233–236 regulatory control by, 232–233 special-status corporations, 240 in three-way deadlock, 230–232 women in, 181 Public Offices Election Act (1994), 246 public sector unions, 132 public universities, 139 Puyi (emperor), 22 quality control, 333 quaternary sector (economies), 128–129, 176 racial purity, 34 radio, 289

railways, 18, 190 rakugo (traditional Japanese comic storyteller), 187 Rakuten, 112, 161, 254 ramen noodles, 99 recruitement, of graduates, 144–146 refugees, 200 regional blocs, 98–99 regional identities, 34, 98–99 regional variation center vs periphery, 102–104 eastern vs western Japan, 100–102 ideological centralization, 104–105 Japan as a conglomerate of subnations, 97–99 language, 104–105 in local industries, 98–99 in popular culture, 99 regular workers, 63–67, 123 regulatory control, bureaucratic, 232–233, 250 regulatory pluralist approach to education, 166 reisai kigyō (very small firms), 111 Reiwa Shinsengum (political party), 244 relational status, 73–74 relative poverty rate, 36 relativity of relativities theory, 54 religion(s) attitudes towards, 265 Buddhism, 265, 268–271 as business, 276–278

Christianity, 265, 271–272 as multicultural, 265 new religions, 272–274 revitalization of, amid secularization, 280 Shinto, 265–268 the state and, 278–280 worshipper’s earthly expectations from, 275–276 religious groups, 316 Rengō (Japan Trade Union Confederation), 132, 134, 230, 238 rentai sekinin (collective responsibility), 334 resident card system, 171–172 resident movements geographic basis of, 326 prevalence of, 324–326 relationship to the state, 326 in rural areas, 325 seikatsusha in, 331 shifting trends in, 325 retirement system, 86–88 reverse convergence hypothesis, 49 revisionist analysis of Japanese society, 43 rice riots, 21 risshin shusse (careerism), 341 Risshō-Kōsei-kai (religion), 273 rōnin (lordless samurai), 139–140 royal family, 261 ruling class, 14, 17, see also samurai class rural areas

depopulation, 103–104 interest groups in, 328 political interests, 262 resident movements, 325 Russia, territorial dispute with, 4, 98, 257 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), 4, 19 ryōtei (high-class restaurants), 56 Ryūkyū dance, 295 Ryūkyū Islands, 32, 98–99, 295 Ryūkyū Kingdom, 3 Sakai, 12 sake rice wines, 99 sakoku (national seclusion), 13–14 salaries, see wages salarymen, 20, 63, 115, 119 same-sex marriage, 175, 195 samurai class ascent of, 9–10 bureaucratization of, 16 education of, 16 land ownership by, 12 during Meiji Restoration, 17 ninjas, 11 stories about, 13 during Tokugawa period, 12–14 during Warring States period, 11–12 san (addressing others), 119 Sangyō Hōkoku-kai (Industrial Patriotic Society), 22

Sankei (newspaper), 258 Sanwa, 110 satori (enlightenment), 269 Satsuma region, 17, 19 Sayama case, 207 Sazae-san (comic strip), 302 scholarships (shōgakukin), 142 school uniforms, 155 schools achievement related to geographical distribution of, 146 attendance issues, 156 attitudinal ‘correctness’ in, 152 bullying in, 155–156 changing, 122 collective integration in, 151–152 corporal punishment in, 154–155 culture variation between, 147 curriculum guidelines, 149–150 discipline in, 150–151 egalitarianism in culture of, 165 elite culture popularized by, 292 employee recruitement from, 144–146 English teaching in, 161–162 enrollment, 18 family socialization and, 146–147 five-day week in, 143 kyōiku tokku (special educational zones), 166 lunches provided by, 153

during Meiji period, 18 moral education, 149, 153, 336–337 physical correctness in, 339 physical examination programs, 152 ranking, 145–146 regulations, 155 socialization at, 150–153 songs specific to, 339 teacher control in, 153–154 textbook authorization in, 149 during Tokugawa period, 16 violence by students in, 156 see also elementary schools; high schools; middle schools; specific types of schools Sea of Japan, isles, 98 Second Sino-Japanese War (Nicchū Sensō) (1937–45), 21–22 secondary sector (economies), 128–129 secularization, religious revitalization amid, 280 Security Maintenance Law (1925–45), 279 seibo (year-end gifts), 247 Seichō no Ie (House of Growth), 279 seii-tai-shōgun (shogun), 9 seikatsu (livelihood), 330 seikatsu bunka (life culture), 330 Seikatsu Gakkai (Japan Association of Lifeology), 331 seikatsu-gaku (life studies, lifeology), 331 seikatsu kurabu seikyō (life club cooperatives), 331 seikatsu taikoku (lifestyle superpower), 330

seikatsusha (emic concept of citizens), 330–331 seiki shain (regular workers), 63–67, 123–124 Sekai Mihikari Bunmei Kyōdan (World Divine Light Organization), 273 seken (community of sanctions), 340 seki (register), 175 Sekigahara, 12 sekuhara (sexual harassment), 189–190, 195 Self-Defense Forces, 238, 242, 262, 279, 338 self-employed workers, 67, 111–113 self-image, 40–41 self-reliance school (Buddhism), 269 sengyō-shufu (full-time housewives), 184–185 senior students (senpai), 150 seniority-based wage (nenkō chingin), 48 Senkaku island, 257 senmon gakkō (specialized vocational colleges), 137, 140 senpai (senior students), 150 senryū (poetry form), 15, 297 sentō (communal baths), 296 separation of powers (government), 232 seppuku (suicide by disembowelment), 13 service overtime, 120 service sector, 132, 217 Seto Inland Sea, isles, 98 ‘7040’ problem, 157 sex education about, 187

in mass media, 187 premarital, 187 sexual diversity, 195–196 sexual harassment (sekuhara), 189–190, 195 sexual revolution, 187 sexuality, control of the female body and, 186–188 shakai no teihen (bottom of society), 81 shigin (recitation of Chinese poems), 293 Shikoku island, 97 Shikoku islanders, character, 98 shima (island), 98 Shimane prefecture, 99 shimatsusho (letter of apology), 339 shimin (citizen), 330 shin-heimin (new commoners), 205 shin jinrui (new race), 93 Shinkansen bullet train, 102 Shinkyō commune, 299 Shinnyo-en (religion), 273 Shinran (Buddhist priest), 268, 297 Shinreikyō (God-Soul Sect), 273 shinryaku (aggression), 149 shinshutsu (advancement), 149 Shinto believers, number of, 265 Buddhism’s relationship with, 269 features, 266–267 history, 266

life after death beliefs, 268 local festivals and, 294 as national religion, 278–279 popular thinking influenced by, 267–268 shrines, 266–267, 276–277 state’s use of, 267 violence against Buddhism by, 267 Shisō no kagaku (journal), 331 shito hitoku kin (expenses unaccounted for), 55 shōen (privately owned estates), 9 shōgakukin (scholarships), 142 shogunate regimes Kamakura, 9–10 Muromachi, 10–11 Tokugawa, see Tokugawa period shōjo (manga genre), 302 shōkōkai (industry and commerce associations), 326 Shokugyō antei-hō (Employment Security Law) (1949), 145 shokuiku (dietary education), 153 shokutaku shain (part-time employees), 124 shōsha capitalism, 261–262 shōshū (individualized, divided, and small-unit masses), 126, 286 shōten-gai (stores), 64 shrines, 247, 256, 266–267, 275–277, 279 shūban (students on weekly duty), 152 Shūkan Shōnen Jump (manga magazine), 301–302 shuntō (spring offensive), 134 shūshin koyō (permanent employment), 48

shusse (social mobiliy), 81 sick leave, 120 silk production, 18 singing, collective, 339 single-person households, 192–193, 317 singles culture, 196 Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), 19 Small Business Standard Law (1963), 108 small businesses (chūshō kigyō) definition, 108 employment structure, 125 gender equality in, 182 in keiretsu network, 110–111 Korean residents’ operation of, 214 large firms vs, 109 numerical dominance, 108–109 percentage employed by, 26, 108–109 songs specific to, 339 types, 109–113 unionization rate in, 131 women-run, 183 small groups, mutual surveillance within, 332–335 small proprietors (jieigyō), 112–113 Social Democratic Party, 167, 238 social education, 292–293 social justice vs economic competition, 263 social mobility, 66, 80–81 social movements, 317–321

Ampo struggle, 318, 321 characteristics of participants, 318–319 civil fragmentation reflected in, 319–321 internet-based social capital developed by, 320–321 organizational structure, 319–320 post-Fukushima, 92, 317–321 process over outcomes, 320 student movements, 317–318 during Taishō democracy, 20–21 social relations emic concepts of, 340 fragmentation of, 315–317, 319–321 social stratification class position and sensitivity to, 81 classification, 62–74 educational achievement and, 61 eight segments of, 66–69 English proficiency and, 162–164 ideology of equal opportunity and, 341 inequality in, 59–62 Japanese emic concepts of, 81–82 life trajectory and early locations of, 62 during Meiji restoration, 17 multiclass model of society, 35–37 of otaku culture, 308 perceptions of, 74 shifting public discourse on, 58 status inconsistency, 69–73

in the Tokugawa period, 14–15, 205 Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) project, 36, 61–62, 70, 77 social withdrawal, 156–158 socialization cultural capital and, 77 family metaphor used by corporations for, 119 of generational subcultural groupings, 89 marriage and, 77–79 at school, 150–153 sociology, cultural imperialism in, 51 soft power, 310–311 SoftBank, 112, 254 sōgō-shoku (employees on managerial track), 178, 181, 184 sōhei (priest-soldiers), 270 Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan), 132 Soka Gakkai (religion), 273, 278–279, 297 Son, Masayoshi, 254 Sony, 112 sōshi kaimei (creation and revision of names), 211 soshitsu (latent specific ability), 116 soto (outside or exterior), 55 South Korean laborers, 256 special educational zones (kyōiku tokku), 166 special-status corporations (tokushu hōjin), 240–241 spiritual wealth, 61 spirituality movements, 274–275 sporting day (undō-kai), 151 sports

regional culture of, 99 student participation in, 152–153 traditional Japanese, 284 sports newspapers, 289 spring offensive (shuntō), 134 ‘standard Japanese’ language, 105 status, 69–74 stereotypes, 27–28, 40 stockholder capitalism (kojin shihonshugi), 116 stockholders, ‘Japanese-style’ management and, 115 strategic power-seekers, 262 Stratification and Social Psychology (SSP) project, 36, 62, 66 student movements, 317–318 student unions, 320 Students Against Secret Protection Law, 317 Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, 317 Studio Ghibli, 254 subcontractors, under keiretsu control, 111 subcultural regions, 34 subcultures core subcultures, 39–40 cultural relativism within, 53–54 intergenerational reproduction of, 36–37, 76 ‘peripheral’ subcultures, 39 proliferation of, 38 rank-ordering of, 38 succession, rules about, 8 sudoku puzzles, 128

Sugawara Michizane, 276 suicide, 51 Suiheisha (buraku organisation), 20, 207 Sumitomo, 110 Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, 110 sumo wrestling, 32, 99 superiors, subordinates’ relationship with, 52, 117–118 surnames after marriage, 174 after naturalization, 211 surveillance, 332–335 sushi restaurants, 128 Suzuki, Zenkō, 246 Suzuki method, 128 swing voters, 317 syncretism, 266 tabloid press, 289–290 tada no hito (run-of-the-mill people), 331 taibatsu (physical punishment), 154 taiiku (physical education), 153 Taiju (political organization), 244 Taisei Yokusan-kai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association), 22 Taishō democracy, 20–21 taishū (undifferentiated, uniform, large-scale mass), 126, 286 Taiwan, 19 Takahama town, 254 Takashi Saitō, 46 Takeshima island, 257

Tanabata (Festival of the Weaver), 294 ‘Tankō-bushi’ (Coal-miners’ song), 99 Tannishō (Notes lamenting deviations), 269 tanshin funin (single postings), 122 tatemae (façade), 54–55, 117, 119 taxation, 9, 14, 18–19, 76, 80–81 teachers excessive control by, 153–154 as moral authorities, 336–337 at universities, 159 violence against, 156 violence by, 154–155 technical colleges (kōtō senmon gakkō), 137 Technical Intern Training Program, 217–218 teiji-sei kōkō (part-time schools), 147 television, 32, 288–289 television stations, 104 temples, 247, 276 temporary workers, 124, 183 tenancy, 19–20, 122 tender system, corruption in, 55–56 Tenjin shrines, 276 Tenmangū shrines, 276 tennis, 32 tennō (emperor), 10 tennō (emperor) capitalism, 261–262 terakoya (temple schools), 16 territorial blocs, during formation of Japanese state, 4–5

territorial boundaries, 1–6 territorial disputes, 4, 98, 257 tertiary institutions, see higher education institutions tertiary sector (economies), 128–129, 176 Test of English as a Foreign Language, 161 Test of English for International Communication, 161 textbook authorization system, 149, 338 textiles, 99 Tezuka, Osamu, 301 theater performances, 15 Theravada Buddhism, 268 three-way deadlock (Japanese establishment), 229–230 tochi kairyōku (land-improvement units), 243–244 Tochigi prefecture, 18 Tōhoku region, 17, 253 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 12 Tokugawa period, 12–16, 32, 205, 271, 335 Tokushima prefecture, 271 tokushu hōjin (special-status corporations), 240–241 Tokyo as capital, 17 cultural dominance of, 104–105 culture, 100 economic power concentrated in, 102–103 food in, 101 islands, 98 see also Edo Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), 251–253

Tokyo Medical University, 341 ‘Tokyo ondo’ (folk song), 271 Tokyo Trial, 256 Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area, 102 Tominaga, Ken’ichi, 47–48 tonarigumi (neighborhood associations), 22, 335 Tosa-han, 17 Toshiba, 110 total quality control movement, 333 totalitarian rule, 22 Toyama prefecture, 21 Toyota, 110 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 11 tozama (outsider) provinces, 17 trade, national seclusion policy and, 13–14 traditional culture, 284–285 traditional medicine, 8, 101 traditional religious customs, 281 Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, 241, 263 Tsurumi, Shunsuke, 296, 331 tsūshō (popular name), 174 21 Up Japan (documentary), 62 uchi (inside or interior), 55, 119 uchi–soto (inside–outside), 119 ujiko (Shinto shrine parishioner) system, 277, 294 ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), 15, 46 underclass, 63–64, 66, 68 undō-kai (sporting day), 151

unionization rates, 130–131 UNIQLO, 161 uniqueness, promotion of, 43 United Nations, 200, 203, 224, 262, 338 United States Japan analysis frameworks and, 42, 47 Japan’s cultural export industry in, 46 military bases of, 248 in Okinawa, 4, 23, 248, 295 raids on Japan by, 23 trade relations with, 14 wars with, 21 United States–Japan Security Treaty, 297, 318 United States-Japan Status of Forces Agreement (1960), 248 United States-oriented capitalists, 262 universalistic approach to Japanese studies, 42 universities corporatization of, 159 cost of, 142–143 employee recruitement from, 145 English language learning at, 160 graduate numbers, 26, 137 hierarchical structure of, 159–160 institutional sexism in, 341–342 medical school admissions, 148 prestigious, patterns in, 148 promotions in, 159–160 social backgrounds of students in, 36

student lifestyle in, 158–159 subsidies for, 142 tiers of, 160 types, 139–140 University of Tokyo, 36, 148 ‘upper goods’, 74 ura (the back), 55 ura banashi (inside accounts), 55 ura guchi (back door), 55 Uraga, 14 urban interests, 262 urban resident movements, 324–325 urbanization, 16, 103–104 utaki shrine, 295 Utsukushii kuni Nippon (Japan as a beautiful nation), 312 value compartmentalization, 311 values ‘Asian’, 44–45 changing orientation of, 95–96 gender differences, 37 lifestyle values, 73–74 of the global generation, 94 of the postwar generation, 92 of the prosperity generation, 93 shift from collectivist to individualist, 48, 96–97 venture businesses, 111–112 vertical authoritarian relationships, 100 Viagra, 187

village structures, in eastern and western Japan, 100 vocabulary, duality underlying, 54–56 vocational training, 112, 137, 140 volunteer associations affiliation changes in, 315–316 emergence of, 322–323 groups, 326 K-shape pattern of, 323 participation in, 323 proliferation of, 323 response to Fukushima disaster, 322 social movements connected to, 319 three-dimension typology, 326–327 types, 326–327 voting behaviour, 263, 317 voting rights expansion of, 20 of Korean residents, 210, 215 during Meiji period, 19 wages education and, 138 overtime payments, 120 performance-based system and, 124–126 seniority-based structure, 114, 118 wakon yōsai (Japanese spirit and Western technology), 201 war criminals, 256 ware ware Nihonjin (we, the Japanese), 340 Warring States period, 10–12, 270

wartime generation, 88–91, 95 washoku (Japanese-style food), 311 Welcome Newly Weds (television show), 187 western Japan, 34 Western sociology, ethnocentric nature of, 51 Western theories of bureaucracy, 52 Westerners, Japanese identity relative to, 199–200 white-collar workers, 62–64, 67–68, 115, 163, 218 women abortion and, 186–188 as caregivers of elderly, 182 changing attitudes towards family life by, 86–87 childbearing average in, 86 class distribution, 63 contraception and, 186–187 control of the female body, 186–190 culture-dependant view of, 51 in de facto relationships, 176 divorce and, 173–174, 191 domestic violence and, 188–189 family tomb burials of, 175 feminist consciousness in, 37 foreign migrant, 32 full-time housewives, 184 household work by, 184 ie ideology and, 172 institutional sexism and opportunities for, 341–342 inter-personal relationships among, 51

in Kabuki theater, 15 life cycle perspective of married, 176 life expectancy, 84 manga and, 302, 312 marriage and, 78, 87, 174 married, types of, 182–186 new-middle-class, 63 in nuclear families, 193–194 number of, in Japan, 25 part-time housewives, 63, 66, 178, 183–184 in positions of power, 180 reign of, 8 sexual harassment of, 189–190 as silk spinners, 18 social movements for rights of, 20 social orders permeating lives of, 182–183 as sociological minority, 170 status, 100 values, 37 voting rights of, 19 women’s workforce participation, 67–68 age and wage differentials, 181 as career women, 184 demographics, 176 foreign workers, 217 haken workers, 183 industrial classification, 176 inequality of, in powerful positions, 179–180

as ippan-shoku, 178–179 labor participation rates, 177 legislation encouraging, 181–182 M-shaped curve of, 177–178 mizushōbai, 183 networkers, 184–186 as non-regular workers, 63, 66, 123 as part-time workers, 63, 66, 123, 177–178, 183–184 small business operators, 183 as sōgō-shoku, 178, 181, 184 two-tier structure of internal labor market, 178–182 variables affecting, 176–177 work ethic of the postwar generation, 92 of the prosperity generation, 93 work practices hours of work, 120–121, 133 international evaluation of, 107 karōshi and, 120–121 physical correctness as part of, 339 reforms to, 118, 120 social costs, 120–122 tanshin funin, 122 Workers’ Accident Compensation Insurance, 218 Workers’ Accident Compensation Insurance Act (1947), 121 Workers’ Collective Network Japan, 300 workers’ collectives, 184–185, 299 workers’ entitlements, 120

workforce aging of, 88 by sector, 128 casualization of, 123–124, 317 cultural capitalism and, 128–130 eight-segment analysis of, 66–69 labour union membership of, 130–133 rationalization of, 123–126, 132 women in, see women’s workforce participation working class, 63–64, 78 working poor class, 123 working population, 66–69 Workstyle Reform Law (2018), 120 World Economic Forum, 181 World War II, 22–23, 90–91 Xavier, Francis, 271 yakiniku (Korean-style grilled meat), 214 Yamagishi, Miyozō, 299 Yamagishi-kai commune, 299 Yamamoto, Tarō, 244 Yamataikoku state, 7 Yamato period, 7 Yanagita, Kunio, 331 Yano Research Institute, 27 ‘Yasugi-bushi’ (folk song), 99 Yasukuni Shrine, 256, 279 yōga (Western oil painting), 284

Yokohama, 103 Yomiuri (newspaper), 258–259 Yoshimoto Kōgyō, 102 young female graduates (eight segment analysis), 68 young female nongraduates (eight segment analysis), 68 young male graduates (eight segment analysis), 68 young male nongraduates (eight segment analysis), 68 yukar (lyric poems), 295 yutori kyōiku (pressure-free education), 166 yūzen-zome (silk kimonos), 99 zaibatsu (business conglomerates), 20, 22 zainichi Koreans, see Korean residents (zainichi) Zaisei Tōyūshi Keikaku (Fiscal Investment and Loan Program), 240– 241 Zaitoku-kai, 215 Zen Buddhism, 269 Zenkoku Tokutei Yūbin Kyokuchōka (National Postmasters Association), 244 Zenrōren (National Confederation of Trade Unions), 132 zoku (tribe) parliamentarians, 245–246 zōni (rice cakes boiled with vegetables), 294