Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting, and Strategies

Once in a while, a new book helps to shift the way we look at Japanese society and has a broad impact on subsequent research. Chie Nakane's concept of vertical society (Nakane 1970) had that sort of an impact, leading many subsequent researchers to look for vertical relationships to explain Japanese behavior. Fifteen years later, Conflict in Japan (Krauss, Rohlen and Steinhoff 1984) called harmony models into question and sensitized scholars to ask questions about conflict. Yet, both books avoided the issue of class. After the publication of this volume, studies of contemporary Japan can no longer ignore social class. Any analytical model points to certain questions and ignores others, but from the late 1960s on, the issue of class did not fit with dominant western views of Japanese society. The one book in English that dealt explicitly with class during this period was Steven’s Classes in Contemporary Japan (Steven 1983), an explicitly Marxist analysis that tried to assess the possibilities for socialist transformation in Japan based on the conditions of the mid-1970s. Although much of Steven’s analysis of what was happening to women and workers in smaller companies was insightful, it was lost in the stampede to learn from Japan’s capitalist success in the late 1980s. Studies of minorities and foreign workers, while raising the issue of inequality, located it in specific groups marked by their difference from mainstream Japanese society. Solid statistical research was being done on social stratification and social mobility, including work by Hiroshi Ishida (1993) that utilized the concept of class to examine inter-generational mobility. Yet, the image of a predominantly middle class society with substantial upward social mobility overshadowed the evidence of persistent class differentials. The rapid rise in Japanese affluence and absence of strong class consciousness made it easy to assume that class differences were disappearing.