Aware that studies of gender relations include both the world of women and that of men, this chapter examines them primarily from women’s perspective, as they command a numerical majority of the Japanese population while forming a sociological minority subject to various forms of gender discrimination. In international comparison, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap in Japan is exceptionally vast, ranking one hundred twenty-first out of one hundred fifty-three countries, well behind the Philippines, China, and South Korea, and in last place among major advanced economies. To understand Japanese society, women’s situations and voices must be given priority and studied in depth with a critical eye.

Contemporary Japan faces a serious dual demographic crisis with a fast-aging population and a birthrate in rapid decline. As the active laborforce diminishes in comparison with the swelling number of retirees, Japan is at the forefront of many advanced economies in confronting this problem, raising the fundamental issue of the redistribution of economic and social resources across different generations. More broadly, age-based variations are stark, with the young, the middle aged and the elderly exhibiting dissimilar attitudes and behaviors. The country is also divided geographically: the Japanese have different lifestyles depending on their place of residence. Their eating habits, type of housing, language, style of thinking, and many other aspects of their everyday life hinge upon where they live. This chapter first focuses on the dynamics of an aging society, presenting the most crucial issues in Japan’s demographic change today, and then more broadly examines both generational and geographical variations with a view to assessing the ways in which these primary demographic characteristics condition the options and preferences of various Japanese persons.

This chapter investigates issues of class and stratification in Japan, which experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. Although 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 three decades. Based on macrosociological data, this chapter delineates the focal points of debate on the analysis of class and stratification in Japan as a general prelude to specific spheres covered from Chapter 4 onward: cultural diversity and class competition in relation to, for example, generation, region, labor, education, gender, and ethnicity.

Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming its plurality, we turn at the end to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.

This chapter introduces the historical backdrop of contemporary Japan. It positions present-day circumstances in historical perspective, bringing them into relief against the past. The chapter also traces the historical transformations in the patterns of land ownership and tax collection which condition class formation and disintegration at different time points.

Which groups and organizations govern Japan? How do they cooperate and compete with each other? To what extent is the Japanese establishment connected with voluntary associations at popular levels? What are the characteristics of Japanese democracy? This chapter attempts to address these and other questions with a focus on the top layers of Japanese society. It is widely acknowledged that Japan’s establishment comprises three sectors – big business, parliament, and the public bureaucracy (ministries and agencies at the national level) – which are often referred to as a 'three-way deadlock'. In view of this, this chapter examines Japan's three-way deadlock, the emerging free-market political economy, community-level interest groups, political culture, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, relations with Korea and China, major media organizations, and deep-seated rifts that have opened up within elite structure.

Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally despite the firm reality that it has many social groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism and then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis by delineating four ‘minority groups’ in Japan: the indigenous Ainu, burakumin, resident Koreans, and foreign workers. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.

This chapter surveys Japanese education by first inspecting its demography and stratification in detail and scrutinizing how class variables play out throughout the educational process. The second section investigates how the state attempts to control the substance of education at primary and secondary levels, while the third section focuses on some of the costs of the regimented style of teaching. The fourth section examines continuity and change in university student life, and the fifth section looks at how Japanese education is facing the rising tide of globalization, with particular attention paid to English-language teaching. The final section describes four competing educational orientations.

The preceding chapter touched on three critical events in the Pentekontaetia, the period of nearly fifty years between the defeat of the Persians in 479 BC and the beginning of Peloponnesian War in 431. These were the revolts, first, of Naxos around the year 470, the second of Thasos in the mid-460s, and, finally, that of Samos in 441–440. Athens’ suppression of each of these uprisings left its mark in the cities’ coinages – at Naxos minting ceased; at Thasos and Samos it was halted, only to resume later. The linkage between these political events and breaks in the coins’ chronologies is derived from various numismatic factors, including the evidence of hoards. In this chapter we turn to five other developments in this period in which coins enhance the written historical sources with substantial detail.