Kosaka - Social Stratification In Japan

SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN CONTEMPORARY
JAPAN

Japanese Studies
General Editor: Yoshio Sugimoto

Images of Japanese Society: Ross E. Mouer
and Yoshio Sugimoto

An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan:

Shunsuke Tsurumi

A Cultural History of Postwar Japan:

Shunsuke Tsurumi

Beyond Computopia: Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Constructs for Understanding Japan:

Yoshio Sugimoto and Ross E. Mouer

Japanese Models of Conflict Resolution:

S. N. Eisenstadt and Eyal Ben-Ari

Changing Japanese Suburbia: Eyal Ben-Ari

The Rise of the Japanese Corporate System:

Koji Matsumoto

Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan:

Shigeru Nakayama

Group Psychology of the Japanese in Wartime:

Toshio Iritani

Enterprise Unionism in Japan:

Hirosuke Kawanishi

Social Psychology of Modern Japan:

Munesuke Mita

The Origin of Ethnography in Japan:

Minoru Kawada

Social Stratification in Contemporary Japan:

edited by Kenji Kosaka

SOCIAL
STRATIFICATION
IN CONTEMPORARY
JAPAN

Edited by
Kenji Kosaka

First published in 1994 by

Kegan Paul International

This edition first published in 2011 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Kegan Paul International 1994

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-7103-0467-6 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-7103-0467-4 (hbk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to contact original copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Contents

Kenji Kosaka

Kenji Kosaka

Kenji Kosaka

Kazuo Seiyama

Kazuo Seiyama

Kenji Kosaka

Junsuke Hara

Michiko Naoi

Kenji Kosaka

Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

Preface

For the last decade, an increasing amount of literature on Japanese society has been published in English. This reflects an increasing interest in Japanese society not only among academics but also among business people and general readers. However, most of this literature concerns economic spheres of life, Japanese forms of management, and power structure in Japanese society. Books on class and stratification in contemporary Japan have been very few.

Rob Stevens Classes in Contemporary Japan (1983), which dealt with class and the capitalist mode of production in Japan, is perhaps the only such work. This book, with its emphasis on the 1970s, succeeds in providing a comprehensive picture of Japans class structure during that period, drawing mainly on statistical information released by the Japanese government. We do not know what impression the book made upon those who read it; but we fear it gave a biased and misleading picture of class and stratification in Japan. Steven is a Marxist, and is therefore strongly attached to a Marxist framework of analysis. This is not, however, a problem. Our main concern is that he has ignored studies such as that on Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) one of the most exhaustive and comprehensive recent studies, which has accumulated data over a thirty year period through nation-wide sampling. We wish to introduce the reader to some of the findings of the SSM survey and to provide some theoretical discussion of problems it raises.

There are a few papers on social stratification in Japan that are written in English and make use of the SSM research. Ishidas (1989; 1992) is one such study. However, it is limited to data collected in 1975. The present study uses the latest SSM data. These were collected in 1985, and are themselves becoming out of date, given that Japanese society has been experiencing rapid and radical change, though they remain among the most recent available.

We, the authors, are all sociologists, and the present volume reflects this. Nonetheless, it is intended for a general readership. We have made use of some statistical methods, but have tried our best to make them as elementary as possible so that the general reader will not find the discussion terribly esoteric, and we have endeavoured to explain the methodologies used. The methodological discussion, explanation, and mathematical notes are included in appendices, so that readers who are not interested in methodology can easily skip them. Although the methodological notes are brief, they are thorough and are meant to be ambitious. We hope that the discussion will satisfy even professional scholars of class and stratification. We believe in promoting communication between specialists and non-specialists and have given equal weight to the requirements of each. Whilst the book is intended to be general, this does not mean that its findings are broad, unclear, or fuzzy. We have tried to be as clear and specific as possible.

The focus of this study is class and stratification in Japan. We have therefore skipped the work of Marx and Weber (and some others), as discussions of their ideas are easily found in the sociological literature. Classical works and their recent versions are discussed only in setting the formal framework of the study in .

The plan of the book originated in discussions between Professor Yoshio Sugimoto, of La Trobe University, Australia, and myself. The present authors are all grateful to him for his generosity, prompt assistance, and encouragement during the last three years of the books preparation.

Although the following chapters depend heavily on the SSM data up to and including 1985, we wish to emphasize that our work does not represent the views of the research team headed by Atsushi Naoi of Osaka University, for the 1985 SSM (or of the teams headed by Kenichi Tominaga, Tokyo University, for the 1975 SSM, or Kunio Odaka for the 1965 and 1955 studies). Nor is it meant to be an official report of the SSM study. The 1985 SSM study was published in four volumes by Tokyo University Press but unfortunately these have not been translated into English.

The present authors (all of whom, except for myself, are editors of volumes in the 1985 SSM study) have contributed their chapters in Japanese. However, each chapter has been completely re-written and translated for the English edition. We collaborated by circulating our drafts and swapping comments and criticism but finally retained our dissenting opinions.

We are particularly grateful for the generosity of Atushi Naoi and our research team-mates in making the data available to us. Many thanks also go to an anonymous referee who read an earlier draft of the present book and gave us constructive comments and helpful suggestions.