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Class and Stratification: An Overview
The public discourse on class and stratification in Japan experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. While widely portrayed as an egalitarian and predominantly middle class society during the period of high economic growth until the early 1990s, Japan has suddenly been deemed a society divided along class lines under the prolonged stagnation that has characterized the Japanese economy for a couple of decades. In the heyday of 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 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 Often-publicized 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 the 2000s, the public perception has shifted to emphasize the advent of ‘disparity society’ with marked divisions between classes with rival interests.4 Sato¯ maintains that due to the sharp decline of social mobility to the privileged upper middle white-collar sector Japan cannot be characterized as an egalitarian society.5 Tachibanaki argues that the level of social inequality in Japanese society has increased so much that it ranks among the most
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The most influential books which take this line are Nakane 1967, 1970, and 1978. 3 Reischauer 1977, pp. 161–2. Nakane 1970, p. 87. 5 Sato ¯ 2000. For a good analysis of the paradigm change, see Chiavacci 2008.
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