Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

and supporting the political ambitions of their local lords. This posed a real threat to

the centralizing Tokugawa rulers and for that reason after 1638 Japan’s merchant

class was forced to direct their attention inside the country. Moreover, the Neo-

Confucian orthodoxy adopted by the Tokugawa family suggested that merchants

were unproductive members of society who deserved their place on the lowest rung

of the social structure. Nevertheless, the rapid development of urban areas from the

late seventeenth century and the commercialization of the economy led to an alliance

between ‘‘the urban bourgeoisie, almost wholly dependent on domestic trade and

finance and . . . a parasi tic aristocracy split from the land.’’

Rural industry was unable

to develop independent of the ‘‘urban bourgeois aristocracy bloc,’’

and this for

Halliday provides an explanation of the disposition of class forces on the eve of the

Meiji Restoration which set the parameters for the development of capitalism in the

later nineteenth century.

As a Marxist, Halliday begins with a class analysis but he succeeds in demonstrating

how the ruling class, the ‘‘samurai aristocracy’’ as he calls them, had only an indirect

relationship to the means of production, land. Conrad Totman, in a more recent

history of Japan, begins his discussion of the social structure of the Tokugawa period

by noting that the shi-no

-ko

-sho

model ‘‘creates a misleading sense of hierarchical

relationships, implies clear division where only vague ones exist, obscures economic

disparities, and omits important segments of society.’’

Instead he identifies an

elite, the official others, and the unofficial others. The elite he regards as having

been composed of the imperial aristocracy, the higher status samurai and affiliated

merchants and literati. This alliance was different to previous ruling coalitions only in

that the samurai elite was more firmly entrenched than before and based in Edo or

their castle towns, while the imperial aristocracy was reconstituted in Kyoto and

bound by rules of conduct imposed by Edo. This elite cut across the four major

classes but was composed of no more than a few thousand people. Among the

samurai there were a few who performed well-paid and important administrative

jobs, but the overwhelming major ity were engaged in ill-paid, inconsequential, and

routine tasks.

Merchants and artisans formed the basis of the urban economy. As the boundaries

of the status system were strengthened in the late seventeenth century, merchants

were exclude d from privileged society but were nevertheless able to retain a de

facto position as dominant within the urban economy. Less prominent socially but

equally important economically were the artisans. The new Tokugawa government

destroyed their craft guilds and so they were forced to work as independent profes-

sionals. Some found themselves elite patrons but the majority sold their goods and

services to fellow urban residents as the opportunities arose. The biggest group, the

peasantry, was both large – 80 percent of the entire population – and diverse. A few

were literate wealthy landowners, some were unschooled small-scale cultivators but

most were subordinate members of large households or indentured farm laborers.

They lived in villages controlled by o fficials who represented the village to higher

authority, usually the local lord who collected taxes, organized forced labor, and

enforced peace.

Outside the four-class structure in rural areas there were thousands of lesser clerics

who officiated at shrines and temples, and in urban areas there were a vast number

of shop assistants and household servants; 10 percent of the population of Edo

390 IAN NEARY

were servants of samurai households. Part of the urban population was made up of day

laborers, some of whom were poor villagers who were working away from home

during the quiet season, but some of them settled in the cities. Another element was

the outcaste population – eta, kawata,orhinin – about which more later, and on the

edge of the traditional outcaste co mmunities were groups of entertainers, singers,

dancers, and actors who gathered within or on the edg es of the licensed quarters.

Thus Totman sketches a social structure within which stratification was much more

complex than the simple model advocated by contemporary Confucian theorists and

projected in many histories. Irrespective of their formal status some well-to-do

samurai, merchants, and village leaders lived comfortable lives with servants, school-

ing, and luxury. Those who earned middling incomes had lives of modest comfort

‘‘while the poor, whether samurai , shopkeeper, craftsman or villager, struggled to get

by with wretched housing, poor nutrition, scraps of well worn possessions, and

chronic uncertainty about the future.’’

Neither class nor status position by them-

selves could tell us much about an individual’s life chance s.

The essays in The Cambridge History of Japan provide more nuanced discussions of

the status structure from its formation to the period of its disintegration and trans-

formation. Wakita Osamu argues for example, that there was little the chu

sei (medi-

eval) and kinsei (early modern) periods had in common. Whereas previously there was

the idea that land belonged in some sense to the local lord, Hideyoshi insisted that

land was only eve r held in trust for the present and that it was open to the overlord to

reallocate it as appropriate. During the early 1590s a village census was carried out as a

way to prevent peasants from absconding from the land at the same time as edicts

were introduced that prevented changes of status from samurai to merchant or farmer

to merchant. ‘‘Sword hunts’’ disarmed the peasantry, which both tightened Hide-

yoshi’s military control and establishe d clear distinctions between the peasants and

samurai classes. Moreover, Hideyoshi was ruthless in carrying out a survey of tilled

land so that the agricultural wealth of each region could be calculated. Taxes on land

were calculated on the basis of productivity and paid in rice, whether or not the land

was used to grow rice.

Implementing his ideas about the tenant nature of lordship, Hideyoshi forced

several daimyo

to relocate, taking all their followers with them. Moreover he and

the Tokugawa rulers who followed him reserved the right to relocate others. After

1651 very few fief transfers took place, although the threat still remained. By 1690

the enforced residence system (sankin ko

tai) meant that five out of six daimyo

had

been born in Edo and could expect to spend at least half their lives there. Their han

(domains) remained their sources of wealth and prestige but they were not home.

Meanwhile many samurai were decisively separated from the land and forced to move

into castle towns. It is reported that 50,000 samurai plus their families moved into

Kanazawa city from the surrounding area between the 1580s and the 1650s.

Thus not only were daimyo

separated from their domains but the samurai were

separated from the landholding peasantry. In Tosa, Satsuma, and a few other regions,

samurai remained based in the villages. Where samurai were rarely, if ever, present,

villagers were free to engage in cash cropping, tax evasion, unr eported land reclama-

tions, and land sale and purchase.

Villages where they remained rarely developed

economically. The populations of big cities grew rapidly as tax concessions were used

to attract merchants and artisans from the villages and market towns. A secondary

CLASS AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 391

migration of rural villagers took place as peasants went to work in construction or as

servants.

Confucian officials aimed to prevent the development of commer cial commodity

production and rulers from Hideyoshi onwards sought to tax the peasantry so as ‘‘to

keep them at the far edge of existence.’’

But especially where the samurai had

been withdrawn, elites emerged within peasant villages who were able to accumulate

surpluses. By 1770 all peasants in Kinki were growing commercial crops, and fifty

years later they were being widely raised in the Kanto

area too. A vast web developed

to distribute agricultural and craft products to and between the urban centers; by

the mid eighteenth century there were 5,000 wholesalers in 400 different kinds

of business in Osaka alone.

Urban merchant wealth was inconsistent with

their lowly social status and worried the political elite. By the 1830s there were

complaints about their business ethics and scorn for their social behavior.

By the

nineteenth century, social class may have det ermined occupation, but it said little

about income.

Essays by Donald Shively and John Whitney Hall from the 1960s and 1970s

respectively focus explicitly on the nature of status and how this affected everyday

life. Shively describes aspects of the vast hierarchy of sumptuary regulations that

sought to prescribe in detail the clothing to be worn by members of each class

from daimyo

’s wives to the peasantry. The fundamental principle was that ‘‘there

must be orderly classification of the population by function on an hierarchical

scale.’’

First rounds of these regulations were produced in the 1630s but they

became increasingly elaborate from the early eight eenth century, extending even to

underclothes. There were some subtle differences of purpose of these sumptuary

regulations. The rules for the samurai were intended to insist on the need for a

balance between extravagance and parsimony, while the regulations for the merchants

and peasants were used as a way to reinforce status inferiority, ‘‘rule by status,’’ as Hall

puts it.

Very little in the English-language scholarship explores what it was like to live in

such a society. Herman Ooms’s Tokugawa Village Practice is possibly the only

exception. He focuses on the experiences of a few people in a village in what is

now Nagano prefecture. Using a class framework not dissimilar to Scott’s, he de-

scribes the formation of the village from the start of the Tokugawa period. His central

point is that villages were not stable entities that existed at the start of the per iod

and were subject to economic and social pressures that caused change thereafter.

The surveys of the 1590s and thereafter did not simply record pre-existing commu-

nities; rather the process often created them or at least designated them for particu lar

purposes: to farm newly developed land, to serve as way stations on highways,

or simply for administrative convenience.

Within these communities, some – mainly

those with a claim to a warrior background – were accountable for the tribute,

others not. He characterizes the control system as ‘‘colonial’’: the military authority

based in towns used coercive force to exact tribute from the villages through a co-

opted elite. Moreover, because the military authorities in the towns also had obliga-

tions to the Tokugawa government in Edo, the whole country was a latent garrison

which in theory could be mobilized by the sho

gun. It never happened, but

the existence of this notional power provided additional ‘‘symbolic capital’’ to the

local elite.

392 IAN NEARY

A ladder of prestige stretched down from the titled peasants to lesser peasants to

lifelong servants to bonded servants, with movement along this spectrum being

linked to economic and political power. Broadly speaking, at this level social status

was linked to economic well-being: do well and people would respect you. Status

regulations were issued from the towns but there were also village codes on dress,

greetings, and behavior. Regulations, which did not go unchallenged, were period-

ically reimposed as commercialization of the economy improved the circumstances of

some and worsened those of others.

Status was the ostensible principle of social stratification and there is no doubt that

status regulation was intensified over the 250 years of Tokugawa rule in efforts to

enhance status awareness. However, in parallel with this, the development of a

commodity economy was undermining the foundations of the status str ucture, not

only in the villages but also in the towns. Complex distribution systems and accom-

panying financial institutions created an economic structure that the military rulers in

Edo and the castle towns could neither understand nor control. Ooms describes the

Tokugawa government as holding this in place by a regime of conquest. The samurai

class was able to use command power to extract the agricultural surplus out of the

peasantry and maintain itself in control. Insistence on strict status distinctions at

macro and micro social levels was one way it sought to keep its social bloc in control

and disguise the military base of its power.

Although a skeletal structure of the four-caste hierarchy was maintained into

the nineteenth century, it was clear that one’s life chances depended much less on

which of them one belonged to than what economic power one had access to within

the local community. The more economic power subverted the significance of com-

mand powe r the more difficult it was for the samurai to maintain itself as

the dominant social bloc. In this sense we can regard the Meiji Restoration as a

‘‘readjustment’’ (as economists sometimes describe collapses of stock market prices)

in which there was a drastic reduction in the power of the samurai social bloc

while that of the merchant class significantly increased. The next eighty years –

which separate early Meiji from the end of the war in the Pacific – were a period

of transition during which the stratification system based on command power grad-

ually dwindled and economic power became the most salient element in social

stratification. We will return to the mainstream class structure shortly, but will first

look at the groups that lay outside the class system in early moder n and twentieth-

century Japan.

Outcaste Japan

Status was clearly one element of the stratification system of Tokugawa Japan, even if

it was not the only criterion applied. An extreme version of a status society would be a

caste society composed of ‘‘closed social groups based on ascribed status character-

istics from which systematic advantages and disadvantages flow.’’

As we have seen,

the four-class description of Tokugawa society did not encompass everyone and, in

additional to those of indeterminate status, in town and countryside there were those

who were defined as beyond the realm of accepted society to the extent of being

regarded as barely human at all.

CLASS AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 393

Apart from passing references to eta or chori in the works of such writers as Basil

Hall Chamberlain and Lafcadio Hearn, the first serious writing about burakumin in

English was a master’s thesis by Ninomiya Shigeaki published in 1933. Ninomiya

eloquently summarizes the meager amou nt of research that existed in Japan at that

time.

Occupation authorities knew little about the issue; their only sources apart

from Ninomiya were a couple of briefing papers. Serious historical and sociological

research by Japanese scholars did not begin until the late 1940s and the few Ameri-

cans who took an interest in the problem were anthropologists. John Cornell and

John Donoghue published ethnographical accounts of buraku in Okayama and

Aomori following visits during the 1950s. However, the work which placed buraku-

min firmly on the academic agenda was Japan’s Invisible Race, edited by George

DeVos and Wagatsuma Hiroshi, published first in 1966 and revised in 1972. This

brought together histo rical studies, six ethnographies including chapters by Cornell

and Donoghue, plus chapters on the social and psychological dimensio ns of caste.

The key questions for both Japanese and American scholars at the time, although they

approached it from quite different per spectives, were those of origins and character.

Was buraku discrimination a feature deeply embedded within Japan’s social structure

or was it a relatively recent social phenomenon? What was the most constructive way

to understand it: as a question of class, caste, or race? While in Japan most analysts

sought to locate the buraku issue within a Marxist class frame of reference, DeVos and

Wagatsuma adopted a socio-psychological perspective in which ‘‘racism and caste

attitudes are one and the same phenomenon.’’

The book is sometimes as much

about race in the United States as it is about buraku mondai (the ‘‘buraku prob-

lem’’).

There was dispute among historians about the extent to which the class structure of

the Tokugawa period was similar to that of earlier periods. This debate had much

greater significance for researchers on the buraku mondai . On the one hand there are

scholars such as Nagahara Keiji who argue that the problem originated in the ancient

and medieval periods, ‘‘sustained basically because of beliefs held regarding pollution

caused by death.’’

Nevertheless he makes clear that the social function of the

outcaste groups changed to better serve the contemporary social structure. Under

the sho

en system some functional specialization developed and this was reinforced by

daimyo

in the sixteenth century who organized outcaste communities ‘‘for the

purpose of obtaining military necessities.’’

The 1965 Do

wa Commission unequivo-

cally stated that burakumin are et hnically identical to mai nstream Japane se, and not

descendants of a different racial group that had somehow found its way to the islands

of Japan at some time in the past. The Buraku Liberation League (BLL) emerged as a

mass movement in the mid-1950s and was probably at the peak of its influence in the

1960s. Its preferred account of the origins and nature of the problem focused on the

way many outcaste commun ities had come into existence in the Tokugawa period,

even if there were some who were formed before 1600. Put crudely, if discrimination

could be shown to be the outcome of policies imposed by the Tokugawa regime, then

firstly there was someone who could be blamed, and secondly it was possible that a

policy designed to reverse the cycle of decline could improve buraku c onditions and

even liberate them from discrimination and prejudice.

Gerald Groemer, while acknowledging the significance of the medieval legacy,

focuses on the administrative control of outcastes, particu larly the position of Dan-

394 IAN NEARY

zaemon, hereditary leader of the Kanto

outcaste communities, both the kawata/eta

(mainly leatherworkers) and the hinin (mostly beggars and street performers). In

addition members of both of these groups undertook a variety of dirty, marginal, and

polluting tasks such as disposing of dead animals, keeping the streets clean, and

working in prisons and as executioners.

He demonstrates that what at the end of

the sixteenth century was merely customary prejudice which could be mobilized to

serve the interests of local lords, had by the later eighteenth century produced a rigid,

systematic, and state-sanctioned order of discrimination in the capital where certain

people were relegated to a position deemed outside and below commoner society.

Ooms shows that this evolution of discriminatory practice was not confined to the

capital. In Shinshu

before the 1690s, marriages between kawata and majority Jap an-

ese were not unknown and usually unproblematic. However, a hundred years later

administrative pressure ‘‘led to severe sanctions against mixed marriages, now cat-

egorized with adultery.’’

The gradual build-up in status restrictions and institu-

tionalized discriminatory practice occurred alongside the emergence of theories of

different racial origins, with some writers denying that outcastes were human at all.

However, the Tokugawa intelligentsia was by no means unanimous about this and

few, if any, of the outcastes themselves bought into these ideas. Senshu

Fujiatsu

(1815–64) produced a brief tract which concluded that kawata were not a separate

race, but a product of the status system which should be abolished. Ooms quotes

several examples from the final decades of the Tokugawa era of hinin or kawata

protesting about unjust, discriminatory treatment on the basis of their common

humanity, even if the state did not recognize their ‘‘citizenship.’’

The transition from their position as outcastes in a highly regulated feudal society

to marginal communities within a developing capitalist society has not received much

attention. Ian Neary focused on their political involvement with the liberal political

movement of the 1870s and beyond as the background to understanding the emer-

gence of the Suiheisha (Leveling Society) which sought between 1922 and 1942 to

inspire burakumin to defend themselves against prejudice and demand state aid to

remove discrimination. N. McCormack focuses more narrowly on how prejudice and

discrimination were recreated in the Meiji period in a way that kept kawata and hinin

groups marginal despite their for mal restrictions having been removed in 1871. He

notes, for example, the developm ent of the notion of an ‘‘eta’’ bloodline, despite the

fact that outcaste communities in different parts of the country had had little in

common before the 1870s. Psuedo-scientific explanations of buraku inferior ity

emerged which confirmed that mar riage with them was undesirable. This encouraged

the practice of arranged marriage and the need for detective agencies to investigate

bloodlines before marriage.

McCormack’s central argument is that the construc-

tion of a sense of nationhood required, or at least encouraged, the continued

existence of marginal groups as Others against whom the identity of ‘‘We Japanese’’

could be defined.

There was something of a hiatus in the development of what we might call

burakumin studies following the publication of Japan’s Invisible Race. Significant

work was produced in the 1970s and 1980s by established scholars who ‘‘branched

out’’ to work on buraku issues. Thus in 1976 Thomas Rohlen, who had previously

worked on high school education, produced an article on the serious confrontation

that broke out between supporters of the Japan Communist Party and the BLL

CLASS AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 395

following an incident of alleged discrimination in Yoka High School. In 1980 Frank

Upham, a legal scholar, published the first of what would develop into a series of

analyses of the implementation of Do

wa projects which were financed by the Special

Measures Legislation which was the main outcome of the Do

wa Commission,

whose report had been published in 1965. And, in 1990, Susan Pharr re-examined

the Yoka High School case as an exam ple of a Japanese approac h to handling social

conflict.

The quality and quantity of Japanese studies in North America and Australasia

expanded after the 1980s and began to embrace the study of buraku . We may be able

to identify a new generation working in the area. A lready we have noted the work of

McCormack on the role played by buraku in the transition from a politically frag-

mented and socially divided state structure to a modern unitary state in the early

twentieth century. Alastair McLauchlan in New Zealand has not only translated one

of the most widely distributed introductions to buraku mondai

but has also started

to publish his own work on the impact of the Do

wa programs on living standards in

buraku communities. He concludes that, although there has sometimes been spec-

tacular progress in reducing discrimination, there is evidenc e that these gains are not

secure and, after ten years of national economic stagnation, buraku living standards

may be falling and significant differential s re-emerging. Emily Reber produced an

ambitious synoptic overview of the position of burakumin in the 1990s. Illustrating

her generalities with examples from the Asaka buraku in Osaka, her essay concludes

with a series of policy recommendations for the Japanese government to prohibit

discriminatory practices and to create a central agency to provide redress for all kinds

of discrimination. On a completely different theme, William Bodiford analyzes the

role played by So

Zen Buddhism in sustaining some of the prejudices that are held

by mainstream Japanese about burakumin. It was only in the 1980s that So

leaders

started to do anything to eliminate discriminatory practices, a process still incomplete

in the 1990s.

Important issues remain unaddressed. Firstly, in emphasizing the sameness of

burakumin, in attempts to overcome their image as Other, there is a danger of

perpetuating notions of Japan as a homogeneous society. It is important to demon-

strate the ambiguity of the boundaries believed to separate burakumin from other

Japanese in a way that does not create or reinforce boundaries which further separate

them from either the well-established Korean community or the newly arrived

migrant workers from Asia or Latin America.

Secondly, Western critics especially

need to be sensitive to the fact that solutions to the buraku problem may turn out not

to be the same as apparently similar problems elsewhere. We need to look beyond the

policy prescriptions based on ideas of race, et hnicity, or caste which derive from

North American or Western European analyses.

Finally, it is important to combine

our knowledge of class with our analysis of caste to gain a rounded understanding of

what is happening. John Davis, for example, suggests that the fact that only 24.3

percent of children from buraku communities go into higher education compared to

36 percent nationally is prima facie evidence of continued discrimination.

However,

this assumes that the class structure of buraku communities mirrors that of the nation

as a whole when it probably does not. Meanwhile, we know that class background is

closely related to access to higher education, particularly for children of lower

ability.

It is the refore not obvious that the figures quoted by Davis are evidence

396 IAN NEARY

of discrimination (which I do not deny still exists) rather than evidence that these

children, or their parents, share the same lack of ability or desire to go to university as

others who occupy similar positions within the labor market. While there is ample and

welcome evidence that the caste elements of social stratification are weakening,

evidence of the existence of class structures remains strong.

From Restoration to Defeat

Between the late 1860s and mid 1930s the statu s system was transformed even

though elements of the elite retained political and economic power. Restrictions on

dress, occupations, and intercourse between members of the main status groups were

abolished and, probably because they were only poorly supported by the economic

structures, they soon ceased to have much relevance for daily life. However, the core

people who had orchestrated the Meiji Restoration were keen to consolidate their

hold on power, and when a kazoku (peerage) was created in 1884 it included most of

them.

The merchant class divided into two. Some worked in close cooperation with the

government to develop manufacturing industry and infrastructural services such as

railways and shipping lines. They formed the core of the capitalist class and their

importance was formally recognized when the most successf ul entrepreneurs were

ennobled from the 1890s onwards. Not all merchants and artisans prospered in the

new era, and some were unable to compete in the more open markets and fell into the

working class. Others continued to trade through their shops and survived into the

twentieth century as the ‘‘old middle class.’’

The government created a bureaucracy at the same time as assisting with the

creation of large companies. Both required a new kind of white collar worker. At

first they came from the old elite but, as the university system developed, a more

meritocratic system emerged. Office workers in the public and private bureaucracies

formed a new middle class and, once again, the most successful of these had their

achievement recognized by the grant of a peerage.

A landowning class had developed within the villages desp ite Tokugawa regula-

tions, and the land settlement of the 1870s confirmed its position and forced the

large majority of rural residents into the role of tenant farmers. Meanwhile, economic

policies successfully promoted the development of modern industry. By 1900 there

were half a million employed in factories, although over half of them were women

working on short contracts in small textile factories. Even in 1935, when there were

5.9 million industrial workers, most of them, about 95 percent, were employed in

enterprises of fewer than thirty workers.

This is not the place to discuss the prewar class structure in any detail. What is

significant for our purposes is to point out firstly that a new class structure evolved

between the 1870s and the 1940s whose contours were evident in daily life. People

were strongly aware of the differences in mores and life chances that related to class

origin: landlord/tenant, capitalist/worker, new/old middle class. Secondly, this new

class structure was integrated at the higher level into a status hierarchy, at the pinnacle

of which was the emperor. Finally, although the command elite had been reduced in

power in society as a whole, the reconstructed military system reserved a special role

CLASS AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 397

for the members of the elite group who had engineered the Meiji Restoration and

who served in the armed forces. Their special right of access to the emperor was

written into the Meiji constitution which gave them a degree of command power not

available to the new elites, for example those created within representative institu-

tions. Thus command power, though apparently eclipsed by the events of the 1920s,

was to re-emerge in the later 1930s and dominated Japan at war.

Class and Social Stratification in Postwar Japan

Much of the writing about class and social status in postwar Japan has been descrip-

tive, often written by anthropologists using some form of participant observation.

For example in the 1960s Ezra Vogel and Robert Cole prod uced studies of the new

middle class and blue collar workers. Since the 1990s, Edward Fowler, Carolyn

Stevens, and Tom Gill have written accounts of the ‘‘underclass’’ in Tokyo, Yoko-

hama, and Osaka, and there have been more studies of working-class lives in the work

of James Roberson, Christena Turner, and Glenda Roberts. In complete contrast,

Takie Lebra wrote a study of the surviving though dispossessed aristoc racy. However

important these are in extending our knowledge of the texture of the lives of Japanese

people and in c hallenging stereotypes of Japanese behavior, it seems to me that in the

end they do not have much to say about the central theme of class and social

stratification in late twentieth-century Japan. Or, to the extent that they do, it

would take much more than a few thousand words to encompass their contribution.

For this reason I will maintain a fairly narrow focus on the sociological debate about

class as it has developed since the early 1960s.

The occupation disrupted the prewar class system. It was meant to. Land reform

eliminated the basis of the landlord–tenant relationship. The rapid postwar inflation

destroyed much of the wealth of the old middle class. The new constitution com-

mitted the government to the abolition of the aristocracy, caste discrimination, and

the command power of the military. Within academia Marxism became the ortho-

doxy and for a time few disputed that class struggle provided the best explanation of

social phenomena. Given the extent of strikes and other forms of working-class

struggle at the time, it was hard to deny that class was one, perhaps the only,

explanator of social action and life chances. How ever, by the 1960s, after a period

of sustained economic growth, strikes became less frequent and the voices of those

who had doubts about the appropriateness of class analyses of Japanese society started

to be heard.

Not all social scientists were Marxist and there were some in the early 1950s who,

influenced by American social science, began to or ganize the collection of data

about social stratification. In 1955 the first Social Stratification and Social Mobility

Survey (SSM) was conducted and it has been repeated every ten years since.

Analysis of the SSM generated the first debate about the nature of class in Japan,

particularly its ‘‘middle class.’’ Odaka Kunio argued that the survey showed that

the external differences between different classes were no longer as obvious as in

the 1930s, whether judged in terms of exter nal appearances or views, judgments, and

values.

His model of social class was one based on a combination of occupation,

status, and income, but he was well aware of the great confusion, even then, in the

398 IAN NEARY

use of the term ‘‘middle.’’ Secondly, he noted the high proportion of the

(male) sample who regard themselves as ‘‘working class’’: 74 percent in the 1955

SSM, 57–62 percent in a similar survey carried out in Tokyo in 1960. There is, he

comments, ‘‘no other economically advanced country in which so many people

regard themselves in this light.’’

Finally, he predicted for the near future ‘‘a

widening of the gaps between different classes [and] an increase in social tensions

and insecurity.’’

However, contrary to Odaka’s fears, economic growth resulted in a decrease in

social tension. By the end of the 1960s one prominent anthropologist, Nakane Chie,

was arguing that class was not a concept appropriate for describing Japanese society,

‘‘even if social classes like those in Europe can be detected in Japan . . . the point is

that in actual society this stratification is unlikely to function and that it does

not really reflect the social structure.’’

More important than horizontal stratifica-

tion by class was the vertical structuration by institution or group of institutions. As

we have seen earlier, the historical record is ambivalent about this. Society in Toku-

gawa Japan is at least as amenable to analysis by vertical structures within groups as

horizontal ones outside them. Odaka’s solution to the problem had been to propose

that the Japanese worker had a ‘‘double identity,’’ one within the company to

its vertica l structures, and one to the union with its commitment to ‘‘horizontal

solidarity.’’

The end of the 1970s saw a ‘‘second disp ute about the middle class’’ which was

triggered by a series of three articles that appeared in the Asahi shinbun in 1977.

Murakami Yasusuke noted that for the previous ten years a poll conducted by the

Prime Minister’s Office showed that 90 percent of Japanese regarded themselves as

‘‘middle class,’’ compared to only 72 percent in 1957. He suggested that this showed

the emergence of a new middle class ‘‘whose members are highly homogeneous in

style of life and attitudes’’ and that was ‘‘ex panding in size and relentlessly encroach-

ing on the strata above and below it.’’

The rapid postwar economic growth blurred

distinctions between white and blue collar, unifor m patterns of consumption brought

‘‘urbanization’’ even to rural areas, and the rise of the mass media and expansion of

higher education contributed to the standardization of information and attitudes.

This, he suggested, created a situation very different from even the recent past, a

situation ‘‘unmatched in any other industrial nation.’’

He was later to expand his

ideas and differentiate between the middle class and the ‘‘new middle mass’’ (shin

chu

kan taishu

), arguing that conditions in advanced industrial societies work against

consistent stratification. They become ‘‘destructurated’’ and a ‘‘new middle mass

emerges.’’ Japan, Murakami argued, was different from other industrial nations only

in that it happened sooner and more completely.

Kishimoto Shigenobu responded to this by pointing out the lack of clarity in the

term ‘‘middle.’’ Even if we accept that there is more homogeneity in wealth distri-

bution, this does not prove the disappearance of the structural principle of b ipolarity,

that is, that the working population remains split between the capitalist employer and

the wage laborers empl oyed by them. He proposed as a definition of ‘‘middle class’’

those who, while unlikely to become rich, did not face the prospect of desperate

poverty because they possessed sufficient assets to be able to maintain themselves

should they cease to be employed.

However, Kishimot o noted, there was no

evidence that this group was large or that their number was increasing. In fact,

CLASS AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION 399