4th ed. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xi, 382 pp. (Figures, map, tables.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-62667-6.
This thorough and wide-ranging book comparatively explores the vast elements that make up Japanese society from what Sugimoto calls a “multicultural approach.” Its aim is to demonstrate how the internal variation within Japanese society can complicate and disavow cultural essentialisms such as the notion that there is a singular, “typical” Japan, and to cast off persistent stereotypes and generalizations about Japanese society. This fourth edition of the book builds on updates from the last, drawing significantly on newer statistical data as recent as mid-2014, and adds a welcome section on the relationship of civil society in Japan to protest movements following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in 2011.
Sugimoto takes a two-pronged multicultural approach in his study. On the one hand, he seeks to avoid the pitfalls of scholarship that insists on Japan’s particularity (being “uniquely unique” among advanced nations) such as the much-discredited Nihonjinron discourse, which would only analyze Japan through the lens of Japan-specific concepts (such as Takeo Doi’s term amae, or “dependence”). To do so, he employs a “multicultural research focus that spotlights the domestic stratification and sub-cultural differentiation of Japanese society” (36). On the other hand, so as not to merely apply the theory and concepts of Western social sciences that purport universality to the specificities of Japanese society, Sugimoto utilizes both emic concepts specific to Japanese society (such as honne/tatemae, omote/ura, soto/uchi), and etic concepts that are applicable across national and ethnic boundaries. Put another way, he explores difference and variation within Japan’s many sub-cultures within society while comparing these sub-cultures to those existing elsewhere in the world through theoretical tools that more clearly delineate what is specific to Japan and what is not. This is a compelling methodology precisely because it avoids the trap of a simple comparative study of national societies which, through the act of comparison itself, must treat each society as whole, unitary, and homogeneous.
The book moves through four major themes over the course of its ten chapters, from an overview of class and stratification in Japan, to a discussion of how occupation and education relate to this stratification, then on to stratification based on gender and ethnicity, and finally the interplay of the (political, bureaucratic, and business) establishment and its dissenters within civil society. This organization is sound and reads smoothly, even when various topics of discussion intersect in ways that do not mirror the linearity of the chapter layout.
In chapter 2, the conventional theory that Japanese society is classless and egalitarian gets contradicted by the reality of class divisions as well as the widespread acknowledgement that the predominant middle class has collapsed (if it ever existed in the first place!) and that a kakusa shakai (disparity society) has emerged. Competing methodologies for classifying classes and strata—the Marxian tradition that groups people together based on their location in the organization of economic production versus the non-Marxian (often Weberian) methodologies that classify people according to categories of income, power, and prestige—has led to differing models of classification among researchers in Japan, but Sugimoto navigates the reader through the findings of both, with the unambiguous conclusion that whatever the method employed, “a comprehensive examination of Japanese society can neither ignore nor avoid an analysis of class and stratification and the inequality and disparity of Japan’s distribution of social rewards” (50). The following chapters 3 through 7 deal with the so-called “agents of stratification” that determine an individual’s access to societal resources, such as geography, work, education, gender, and ethnicity, and the institutionalized ways that inequality is reproduced. Factors such as the structural set-up of major corporations and their hierarchical chain of subsidiaries and subcontractors in their keiretsu networks, or the patriarchal and discriminatory practices embedded into the structure of the koseki family registry, are but a few sites where Japan’s institutions reproduce this social inequality.
Sugimoto’s major achievement throughout the book is how he consistently demonstrates the internal variation among the discrete categories, a task he accomplishes through extensive research driven by statistical findings (and what appears to be encyclopedic knowledge), coupled with concise analysis and conclusions. I also found convincing the difficult questions he raises about the nature of “Japaneseness” and the multiple ways it is conceived (nationality, genetics, language competence, etc.) (201), highlighting the arbitrariness with which “Japaneseness” is socially constructed. This discussion may have benefitted from a theorization of race itself and its difference from ethnicity in the context of Japan and its colonial past. Later in the text, Sugimoto’s skepticism towards Cool Japan and its potential to resuscitate monolithic images of Japan reminiscent of Nihonjinron discourse provides an important cautionary note.
An Introduction to Japanese Society is a meticulously organized and thorough analysis of Japanese society that should be of interest to scholars and students of Japan from diverse fields, not simply the social sciences. Although the chapters may be read independently, topics such as the nuclear crisis at Fukushima, and the conditions that enabled it, from chapter 10, greatly benefit from the analysis of chapter 8, in which concepts such as amakudari and other forms of collusion between the national bureaucracy and the private sector are covered. This tendency to build on knowledge from earlier chapters yields value in a cover-to-cover read as well.
Within the past several decades, many publications have sought to address Japan’s multicultural and multiethnic nature, so much so that multicultural studies may be considered a genre within Japanese studies scholarship. Examples include Michael Weiner’s Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (1997), Eiji Oguma’s A Genealogy of Japanese Self-Images (2002), Harumi Befu’s Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (2001), and Mark Hudson’s Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern (2001). Yet, while Sugimoto may indeed be a founding member of the field, this text both fits squarely within it and is broad enough to exceed it.
Jeffrey DuBois
College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, St. Joseph, USA
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