London and New York: Routledge, 2022. 186 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$49.00, ebook. ISBN 9780429331077.
The Heisei era, 1989–2019, saw Japan experience many social, political, and economic changes which have been documented by both Japanese and foreign analysts in the past few years. This group of Japan-based sociologists set themselves the task of analyzing how these changes have affected the way Japanese people perceive their own society, mainly focusing on status identification and social consciousness. They address multiple facets of this concern using a common method. Having defined the topic to be addressed they devise a set of hypotheses that may explain it and test them using empirical data. That data comes from either the National Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) surveys hosted at the University of Tokyo or the Social Stratification and Social Psychology survey series (SSP) based at Osaka University.
So what questions do they pose and what are their conclusions?
Hiroshi Kanbayashi looks at how people’s images of the “shape of society” in Japan changed between 1985 and 2015. He shows that an increasing number of people consider society to be less equal and less “middle class.” More interestingly, he suggests that “people experience different realities depending on the type of societal model they are imagining” (9). Ken Tanioka then looks at the complex relationship between objective and subjective status identification, concluding that “in 2015, the consciousness of class hierarchies seems to have strengthened” (47). Next Ryotaro Hazama looks at the status identification of young people, differentiating between groups on the basis of their educational experience. For the group consisting mainly of university graduates, such determinants as occupation, income, and marital status remain clearly connected to status identification. However, over the past 20 years, the number of young people who position themselves in the lower strata has increased and “for them a strong focus on the present seems to function as a buffer against this subjective status loss” (67).
Voluntary activity in the aftermath of the major earthquakes of 1995 and 2011 changed the image of “volunteers” within Japanese society. Haruyo Mitani and Makoto Hiramatsu explore some aspects of this phenomenon, identifying the characteristics of the individuals and communities who volunteer. They find those communities with a “higher aging rate” are likely to have higher participation rates. This is perhaps not too surprising since aging tends to coincide with liberation from childcare duties and, a little later, from full-time work. More surprising is the conclusion of the following chapter by Kikuko Nagayoshi, who examines changing attitudes to redistribution policies. One might expect that non-regular workers who are more at risk of unemployment and poverty would be more likely to support governmental redistribution policies. This turns out not to be the case. She argues that the government can get away with this “as far as no political parties manage to mobilize non-regular workers and workers in small/medium-sized firms as potential beneficiaries of governmental redistribution” (109). Meanwhile, Yuto Hashizume finds a widening gap in life satisfaction between regular and non-regular workers between 1995 and 2015. Those in regular work report greater satisfaction than before while for non-regular workers, life satisfaction levels remain unchanged. Mitsuru Matsutani looks at the political orientations of young people (i.e., aged 20–34). He finds that overall they were more likely to support the conservative LDP in 2015 than in the early 1990s with this change being particularly evident among “young men with a university degree and a white-collar job at a big firm” (143). He suggests that their experience of economic stagnation has increased their anxiety levels, causing them to be more materialistic and sympathetic to neo-liberalism. In the final substantive chapter Mari Higuchi addresses the puzzle of why so many working women support a model of “working and caring” in which the wife not only works full time but also accepts the major part of the burden of housework. She concludes that “accepting the ‘working and caring’ role seems to be the only feasible strategy to gain valid social acknowledgement” (162). Finally, the editors attempt a summary of the various case studies and consider the prospects for the Reiwa era (2018 onwards).
The data sets used by these authors are not easy for foreign researchers to access directly so there is a great deal that non-Japanese social scientists can learn from these studies, especially those with the highly developed quantitative skills that these authors clearly possess. For this reviewer, who lacks those skills and does not identify as a sociologist, I felt that a final chapter drawing together some of the strands of argument suggested in the substantive chapters could have been helpful. For example, both Masutani and Hazama write about the changes in the attitudes of young people. Hazama notes inter alia their stronger focus on the present, ignoring future problems while Masutani notes their increased “materialism,” which he defines as favouring economic growth over environmental protection. Are these different facets of a similar attitude? Are they in some way interrelated? Do they also partially explain Nagayoshi’s finding that they are less likely to support welfare programs, at least those in the non-regular sector who are in employment? And on a slightly different tack, Nagayoshi suggests that even vulnerable populations buy into the argument that effective welfare programs are too costly to be sustained due to the “political framing” of that policy by the government/LDP. Does this suggest a failure of the opposition parties to reframe the debate and challenge that discourse?
This is a fascinating collection of individual studies with some important conclusions but I would have appreciated more information from the editors and authors about how they interpret their collective insights.
Ian Neary
Oxford University, Oxford