Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

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x Contributors

Anzai Fuyue’s poetry’, Comparative Literature Studies,Special

Issue: East-West, Penn State University Press, 41(4), 2004,

pp. 482–500.

anne e imamura, Georgetown University, specialises in urban

community, gender and family in Japan. She has published Urban

Japanese Housewives: At Home and in the Community (University

of Hawai’i Press 1987) and edited Re-imaging Japanese Women

(University of California Press 1996).

takashi inoguchi, President, University of Niigata Prefecture, and a

political scientist formerly with the University of Tokyo, has

authored, among other titles, Japanese Politics: An Introduction

(Trans Paciﬁc Press 2005), and co-authored Citizens and the State:

Attitudes in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia

(Routledge 2008) and co-edited Globalization, Public Opinion, and

the State (Routledge 2008).

naomichi ishige, National Museum of Ethnology, Japan, is an expert

on comparative studies of food culture and has published The

History and Culture of Japanese Food (Kegan Paul International

2001) and co-authored Fermented Fish Products in East Asia

(International Resources Management Institute 2005).

junko kitagawa, Osaka Kyoiku University, is an expert in the

sociology of music and has published OtonoUchiSoto(Inside and

Outside of Sound)(Keis

o Shob

o 1993) and ‘Some aspects of

Japanese popular music,’ Popular Music, 10(3), 1991, pp. 317–26,

and co-edited Gendai Nihon Shakai ni Okeru Ongaku (Music in

Modern Japanese Society)(H

o Daigaku Ky

oiku Shink

okai 2008).

miho koishihara, Kokushikan University, specialises in historical

studies of sports and the literature on sports. She authored

Coubertin

to Montherlant: 20-Seiki Shot

o ni Okeru France no Sports

Shis

o (Coubertin and Montherlant: The French Philosophy of Sports

in the Early Twentieth Century) (Fumaid

o 1995).

takami kuwayama, Hokkaid

o University, Japan, is a cultural

anthropologist who has authored Native Anthropology: The

Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony (Trans Paciﬁc

Press 2004) and co-edited Yokuwakaru Bunka Jinruigaku

(Accessible Cultural Anthropology) (Minerva Shob

o 2006).

sepp linhart, University of Vienna, a sociologist who specialises in

work and leisure, old age and popular culture in Japan, has

co-edited The Culture of Japan as Seen through its Leisure (State

University of New York Press 1998)andWritten Texts – Visual

Contributors xi

Texts: Woodblock-printed Media in Early Modern Japan (Hotei

Publishing 2005).

morris low, University of Queensland and Johns Hopkins University,

researches the history of Japanese science and technology and

Japanese visual culture. He has authored Japan on Display:

Photography and the Emperor (Routledge 2006)andScience and the

Building of a New Japan (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) and edited

Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the

Meiji Era and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan 2005).

ross mouer, Monash University, is a comparative sociologist who

specialises in the sociology of work in Japan. He co-authored A

Sociology of Work in Japan (Cambridge University Press 2006)and

Images of Japanese Society (Kegan Paul International 1986).

craig norris, University of Tasmania, specialises in new media and

new knowledge economies and has published ‘Girl power: the

female cyborg in Japanese anime,’ in Haslem, Ndalianis and Mackie

(eds), Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman, (New Academia

Publishing 2007), pp. 347–61 and ‘Australian fandom of Japanese

anime (Animation),’ in Ang (ed.), Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian

Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture (Pluto Press 2000),

pp. 218–31.

kaori h okano, La Trobe University, specialises in studies of

education and social inequality and researches minorities and

ethnicity in Japan and Asia. Her publications include Education in

Contemporary Japan (co-author, Cambridge University Press 1999)

and she has edited Language and Schools in Asia: Globalization and

Local Forces (Multilingual Matters 2006).

yoshio sugimoto, La Trobe University, studies Japanese society and

comparative sociology. His books include An Introduction to

Japanese Society, second edition (Cambridge University Press 2003),

Images of Japanese Society (co-authored, Kegan Paul International

1986)andJapanese Encounters with Postmodernity (co-edited,

Kegan Paul International 1995).

ann waswo, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and St Antony’s

College, Oxford, specialises in social change in modern Japan and

has published Housing in Postwar Japan: A Social History

(RoutledgeCurzon 2002)andModern Japanese Society (Oxford

University Press 1996

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all the contributors for their cooper-

ation throughout the project in response to my persistent suggestions and

queries. My foremost thanks are due to Helena Bond and Miriam Riley who

assisted me at different stages in editing the volume – a multicultural work

that involved eighteen authors from ﬁve countries with different language

backgrounds. Without their thorough, intelligent and perceptive work in

text editing, we would not have been able to bring the book to the present

level.

Yoshio Sugimoto

October 2008

Chronology

1868 Meiji Restoration, the collapse of the feudal system and the

establishment of the imperial system.

1870 The government allows commoners to assume surnames.

1871 The Ministry of Education is established.

1872 The Solar calendar system is adopted.

1874–90 Movements for civil rights and freedom gather strength in

opposition to the Meiji regime.

1877 Tokyo Imperial University is established.

1879 The Asahi Shimbun starts publication in Osaka.

1879 The Okinawa Kingdom is incorporated as Japan’s Okinawa

prefecture.

1889 The Imperial Constitution is promulgated.

1894–5 The Sino-Japanese War. China surrenders.

1895 Colonisation of Taiwan. The Government-General of Taiwan

is established.

1899 The Law to Protect the Former Savage in Hokkaid

o is

promulgated to deal with the Ainu.

1902 The Anglo-Japanese Alliance Agreement is concluded.

1903 The system of government-approved school textbooks begins.

1904–05 The Russo-Japanese War.

1910–45 Annexation of Korea.

1915 The ﬁrst national middle-school baseball championship is

held.

1918 Rice riots spread throughout the nation.

1925 Public radio broadcasting commences in Tokyo, Osaka and

Nagoya.

xiv Chronology

1931 The Mukden incident marks the beginning of Japan’s invasion

of Manchuria and the start of the Fifteen Year War, which

ends in 1945.

1932 The state of Manchukuo is established in Manchuria under

Japan’s puppet government.

1936 The Japan Professional Baseball League is established.

1937 The Japanese military occupies the Chinese city of Nanking

and carries out the Nanking massacre.

1940 The Imperial Rule Association is established to organise the

entire nation to support the government’s war policies.

1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The Paciﬁc War begins.

1945 Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1945 Japan surrenders to the Allied Forces.

1945–52 The Occupation by the Allied Forces. Labour, land and

educational reforms are implemented.

1946 The ﬁrst national elections held with universal suffrage.

1946–48 The Tokyo War Tribunal.

1946 Japan’s new Constitution is promulgated.

1947 The new compulsory education system is introduced, with six

years at primary school and three at middle school.

1949 Professor Hideki Yukawa of Kyoto University is awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physics and becomes Japan’s ﬁrst Nobel

Laureate.

1951 Commercial radio stations start broadcasting.

1952 The Peace Treaty comes into effect. Japan regains

independence.

1952–68 Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) is published

as a serial in the magazine Sh

onen.

1953 Public and commercial TV networks commence transmission.

1960 Social movements against the ratiﬁcation of the US–Japan

Security Treaty sweep the nation.

1960 The Mitsui Coal miners’ strike in Ky

ush

u, the largest

industrial action in postwar Japan.

1964 The Tokyo Olympics.

1964 The Shinkansen Bullet Train system starts operation between

Tokyo and Osaka.

1965 Ratiﬁcation of the Basic Treaty between Japan and South

Korea.

1968–70 New Left student movements spread on university campuses.

Chronology xv

1970s The heyday of Nihonjinron (theories on the Japanese) and the

rise of cultural nationalism.

1972 The US returns Okinawa to Japan, which becomes the

nation’s 47

prefecture.

1978 Narita International Airport opens.

1980s The decade of the so-called ‘bubble economy’. The peak of

the postwar economic boom.

1985 The Equal Opportunity Law comes into effect.

1990s The so-called ‘lost decade’. The Japanese economy enters into

stagnation and recession.

1991 Zainichi Korean residents given special permanent residency

status.

1993 The Liberal Democratic Party loses government after four

decades of uninterrupted reign. The coalition government of

opposition parties gains power.

1994 The ﬁrst Ainu parliamentarian attends the House of

Councillors.

1996 The Liberal Democratic Party regains power.

2000s The intensiﬁcation of the campaign to establish Japan as a ‘soft

power’ nation based on the export of manga and animation.

2001 Prime Minister Junichir

o Koizumi commences large-scale

deregulation and privatisation programs.

2002 Hayao Miyazaki’s animation Spirited Away wins the

Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Map of Japan

200km

Sea of

Japan

Pacific

Ocean

Sapporo

Sendai

Tokyo

Yokohama

Nagoya

Kyoto

Osaka

Kobe

Hiroshima

Fukuoka

Hokkaido

Honshu

Shikoku

Kyushu

To Okinawa

(see inset)

–

––

Hokkaido

Aomori

Akita

Iwate

Miyagi

Yamagata

Fukushima

Niigata

Gunma

Tochigi

Ibaraki

Chiba

Kanagawa

Tokyo

Saitama

Yamanashi

Shizuoka

Nagano

Toyama

Ishikawa

Fukui

Gifu

Aichi

Prefectures

East Japan West Japan

Shiga

Mie

Nara

Wakayama

Osaka

Kyoto

Hyogo

Tottori

Okayama

Kagawa

Tokushima

Kochi

Ehime

Hiroshima

Shimane

Yamaguchi

Fukuoka

Saga

Nagasaki

Kumamoto

Oita

Miyazaki

Kagoshima

Okinawa

–

Okinawa

yoshio sugimoto

‘Japanese culture’: An overview

Paradigm conﬂict over Japanese culture

An unacknowledged paradigm shift appears to be underway in contem-

porary Japanese culture, with public discourse suddenly focusing upon

internal divisions and variations in the population. At the beginning of the

21st century, the nation has observed a dramatic shift in its characterisation

from a unique and homogeneous society to one of domestic diversity, class

differentiation and other multidimensional forms. The view that Japan is a

monocultural society with little internal cultural divergence and stratiﬁca-

tion, which was once taken for granted, is now losing monopoly over the

way Japanese culture is portrayed. This transformation has resulted not so

much from intellectual criticisms levelled at the once dominant model as

from public perceptions of structural changes that have been in progress

since the late 20th century.

Part of the perceptual shift results from the accumulation of observations

that point to the notion that Japan is a multi-ethnic society, comprising a

considerable range of ethnic groups.

Ethnic diversity has rapidly expanded

and formed a seemingly irreversible trend, with the inﬂux of an increasing

number of foreign migrants into Japanese society. As of 2008, their ofﬁcially

documented numbers exceed two million – approximately 2 per cent of

the total population. Some 6 per cent of new marriages in Japan today

are between Japanese and non-Japanese nationals. Further, the increase in

activities and movements of minority groups such as Korean residents and

the indigenous Ainu have contributed to the articulation of the image of a

multi-ethnic Japan. The upsurge of ethnic consciousness around the world

has also sharpened the focus on ethnic diversity in Japan. The conﬂuence

2 Yoshio Sugimoto

of these factors has given rise to what one might call the ethnic turn of the

deﬁnition of Japanese culture.

The second abrupt transformation of public perceptions concerns the

way in which Japan’s class structure is deﬁned. The prevailing majority

view of Japan as an egalitarian, equitable and relatively classless society

swiftly collapsed in the early 2000s with many inﬂuential publications

asserting that Japan is now a highly stratiﬁed, inequitable and class-based

society with signiﬁcantly unequal distributions of socioeconomic resources

and rewards. The label kakusa shakai (disparate society or socially divided

society) is now frequently attached to Japanese society. The rise of such

discourse reﬂects the growing splits in the labour force between the priv-

ileged minority of full-time regular employees with occupational security

and the deprived majority of part-timers, casuals and day labourers with lit-

tle job protection.

Though applicable to only a quarter of the workforce at

its peak, the three treasures of Japan’s corporate culture – lifetime employ-

ment, seniority-based wage structure and enterprise unionism – which once

were celebrated as the cornerstone of Japan’s rise to economic superpower

status are now under threat. Organised labour based mainly on the advan-

taged sector tends to prioritise its own interests at the expense of temporary,

irregular and outsourced workers. In this milieu, the image that Japan is a

society of sharp class distinction has taken root and will not easily fade

away.

Not only have occupational classes received serious public attention

but regional, gender-based, generational and other forms of inequality are

also under the spotlight. The growing economic gap between urban and

rural areas, between the relatively prosperous metropolitan centres and the

underperforming periphery in particular, has exasperated the electorates

in the countryside and generated inter-prefectural political confrontation.

The discrepancy between the facade of gender equality and the reality of

discrimination against women is increasingly obvious. The twin trends of

the decline in birthrate and the prolongation of life expectancy have led

to a pension crisis involving a long-term public debate over the extent to

which the younger generation in the workforce should support the older

generation after retirement. To the extent that the notion of Japan as a

multidimensional class society is now acknowledged more broadly than

ever, Japan’s public opinion climate has made, as it were, a class turn,that

appears to be irreversible.

Once Japan is deﬁned as a multi-ethnic and multi-class society, Japanese

culture emerges as a mosaic of diverse beliefs, practices, artefacts and

Overview 3

Table 0.1 Two competing models of Japanese culture

Criteria Monocultural model Multicultural model

Number of Japanese

cultures

One/single Many/plural

Major theme Homogeneous, uniform Heterogeneous, hybrid

Extent of cultural

integration

Japanese culture as a

consensual and

harmonious whole

Japanese cultures deriving

from rival groups with

different demographic

characteristics

Deﬁnition of the Japanese Exclusive, restrictive Inclusive, liberal

Minority population Exceptionally small Of considerable size

Class structure Egalitarian, almost

classless

Competing class groups,

much class division

Regional differences Minimal Signiﬁcant

Holders of high literacy in

Japanese culture

Ware ware Nihonjin

(We the Japanese)

Depends upon which

Japanese culture

symbols, produced and consumed by ethnic and class groups with dif-

ferent levels of access to privilege, power and prestige. With the conver-

gence of the ethnic and class turns, Japanese public discourse has achieved a

cultural turn: a paradigm transformation that has inspired many recent stud-

ies on Japanese culture. The present volume reﬂects the new framework,

the ‘multicultural model’ of Japanese society, and highlights the ways in

which Japanese culture is diversiﬁed and stratiﬁed along class, regional,

generational and gender lines, among others. Table 0.1 contrasts the two

orientations – monocultural versus multicultural.

These developments must be observed with caution. The two models

coexist in rivalry rather than one completely overwhelming the other. The

monocultural model is still ﬁrmly entrenched and thriving in some parts of

the social science community in Japan. Moreover, whether or not Japanese

society recorded a sudden increase in social variation and stratiﬁcation is a

moot point. Some analysts argue that Japan has always been a diversiﬁed and

stratiﬁed society, that there is no evidence of abrupt mutation in this regard.

Others maintain that it is public perception rather than empirical reality

that has undergone drastic changes. Either way, the Japanese perception of

‘Japanese culture’ has lost the stability that it enjoyed during the heyday of

monoculturalism a few decades ago.

As Harumi Befu elaborates in chapter 1 of this volume, the monocul-

tural paradigm is based on the so-called Nihonjinron (the theories on the