An Introduction to Japanese Society 5th Edition PDF

A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O J A PA N E S E S O C I E T Y Fifth edition Now in its fifth edition, An Introduction to Japanese Society provides a sophisticated, highly readable introduction to Japanese society by internationally renowned scholar Yoshio Sugimoto. Taking a sociological approach, the text examines the diverse and multifaceted nature of contemporary Japanese society with chapters covering class, geographical and generational variation, work, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, popular culture, and the establishment. This edition begins with a new historical introduction placing the sociological analysis of contemporary Japan in context, and includes a new chapter on religion and belief systems. Comprehensively revised to include current research and statistics and to address in detail contemporary changes within Japanese society, the text covers changes to the labor market, evolving conceptions of family and gender, demographic shifts in an aging society, and the emergence of new social movements. Each chapter now contains illustrative theme boxes, which provide contemporary perspectives on each topic, as well as research questions, recommended further readings and online resources to consolidate student understanding and guide further exploration. Written in a lively and engaging style, An Introduction to Japanese Society remains essential reading for all students of Japanese society. Yoshio Sugimoto is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. AN INTRODUCTI ON TO JAPANESE S OCIETY Fifth edition Yoshio Sugimoto University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108724746 © Yoshio Sugimoto 1997, 2003, 2010, 2014, 2021 This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 Second edition 2003 Third edition 2010 Fourth edition 2014 Fifth edition 2021 Cover designed by Cate Furey Typeset by SPi Global Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International, September 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia ISBN 978-1-108-72474-6 Paperback Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.edu.au/academic/japanesesociety Reproduction and communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. 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Contents List of figures, tables, and theme boxes Preface to the fifth edition Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Historical backdrop: disintegration and restoration I Introduction II Japan as a variable 1 Japan’s external boundaries 2 Internal rivalry III Ancient times up to the Nara period IV Heian period: rise and fall of the nobility V The ascent of the samurai class and the duality of power VI Disintegration: the Warring States period 1 The ascendancy of daimyō 2 Recentralization and external expansionism VII Tokugawa: sweeping centralization and national closure 1 Centralization 2 National seclusion 3 Demography and status classification 4 Commoners’ culture 5 Modernity in late Tokugawa Japan VIII The Meiji Restoration 1 Alliance of strong peripheral domains in the west and the south 2 The end of power duality: the establishment of Tokyo as the capital 3 Rapid catch-up programs from above 4 Land tax reform and the ‘parasite’ landlord class 5 Expansionism and colonization IX Taishō democracy X The Fifteen Years’ War 1 The Manchurian Incident 2 The Second Sino-Japanese War 3 The Pacific War XI Looking ahead XII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Chapter 2 The Japan phenomenon: analysis and understanding I Introduction II Sampling and visibility III Four models for understanding Japan 1 Monocultural model: group orientation and homogeneity 2 Multiethnic model: minority issues 3 Multiclass model: social stratification and inequality 4 Multicultural model IV Control of ideological capital V Seven phases of Japan analysis VI Three areas of deliberation 1 Convergence debate 2 Cultural relativism 3 Legitimation of dual codes VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 3 Class: stratification and disparity I Introduction II From middle-class society to disparity society III Classification of classes and segments 1 Hashimoto’s model 2 Kikkawa’s model: eight-segment analysis 3 Status inconsistency 4 Postmodernity and upper goods IV Reproduction of inequality 1 Inheritance of financial and property assets 2 Socialization and marriage V Debate and caution about the kakusa shakai thesis VI Japanese emic concepts of class VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 4 Generations and geography: variations in an aging society I Introduction II A rapidly aging society 1 Prolonged life expectancy 2 Declining birth rate 3 Pressure on the welfare structure III Generational variations 1 The wartime generation 2 The postwar generation 3 The prosperity generation 4 The global generation IV Geographical variations 1 Japan as a conglomerate of subnations 2 Eastern versus western Japan 3 Center versus periphery 4 Ideological centralization V Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 5 Work: ‘Japanese-style’ management and cultural capitalism I Introduction II Small businesses: evolving bedrock of the economy 1 Small businesses as numerical majority 2 Plurality of small businesses III Large companies: ‘Japanese-style’ management in transition 1 Firm-based internal labor markets 2 Manipulative definition of employee ability 3 The family metaphor as a socialization device IV Social costs of ‘Japanese’ work style 1 Excessive hours of work 2 Karoshi 3 Tanshin funin V Job market rationalization 1 Casualization of labor 2 Performance-based model VI Cultural capitalism: an emerging megatrend VII Enterprise unionism and labor movements 1 Decline and skewing in union membership 2 Capital–labor cooperation VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 6 Education: diversity and unity I Introduction II Demography and stratification 1 Two paths of schooling: academic and vocational 2 The ideology of educational credentialism 3 The commercialization of education 4 School–business interactions 5 Articulation of class lines III State control of education 1 Textbook authorization 2 Curriculum guidelines 3 Conformist patterns of socialization IV Regimentation and its costs 1 Excessive teacher control 2 Costs of regulatory education V Continuity and change in university life VI English: means of status attainment? VII Competing educational orientations 1 Market-oriented neoliberals 2 Regulatory pluralists 3 Anti-government democrats 4 Developmental conservatives VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 7 Gender and family: challenges to ideology I Introduction II The household registration system and ie ideology 1 Household head 2 Children born out of wedlock 3 Deterrence to divorce 4 Surname after marriage 5 Family tomb 6 Seki and ie III The labor market and women’s employment profiles 1 The flattening M-shaped curve 2 The two-tier structure of the internal market 3 Four types of married women IV Control of the female body 1 Contraception and abortion 2 Domestic violence 3 Sexual harassment V Marriage and divorce VI Types of households 1 Spread of single-person households 2 Nuclear family patterns 3 Decline in extended families 4 Schematic summary of the family VII Gender and sexual diversity VIII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 8 Ethnicity and Japaneseness: defining the nation I Introduction II Japanese ethnocentrism III Indigenous Ainu IV Buraku liberation issues V Zainichi Koreans 1 Nationality and name issues 2 Generational change and internal diversity 3 Advancement and backlash VI Immigrant workers VII Deconstructing the Japanese VIII Problems and pitfalls IX Japan beyond Japan X Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 9 The establishment: competition and collusion I Introduction II The three-way deadlock III The dominance of the public bureaucracy 1 Regulatory control 2 Amakudari 3 Administrative guidance IV Two competing political economies 1 The business community’s push for deregulation 2 Privatization of public enterprises 3 Globalism versus nationalism V Interest groups in support of the LDP VI The challenges of reforming political culture 1 Heavy reliance on the bureaucracy 2 Money politics and its social basis 3 Local politics against the national bureaucracy VII The case of Fukushima: collusive center and civil defiance 1 TEPCO and the nuclear village 2 Manipulation of hardship on the periphery 3 Division in the business and civil communities VIII The history war IX The media establishment 1 A high degree of centralization 2 Similarities with other large corporations 3 Institutional linkage with the establishment X Five rifts in the elite structure XI Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 10 Religion: belief and secularization I Introduction II Traditional religions 1 Shinto 2 Buddhism 3 Christianity III New religions 1 The expansion of new religions 2 Spirituality movements IV Aspects of this-worldliness 1 Worshippers’ earthly expectations 2 Religion as business 3 Religion and the state V Revitalization amid secularization VI Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 11 Culture: the popular and the cool I Introduction II The two dualities of Japanese culture 1 Elite versus popular culture 2 Traditional versus imported culture III Mass culture 1 Entertainment media 2 Cost-effective diversions 3 Cross-status cultural consumption IV Folk culture 1 Local festivals as occasions of hare 2 Regional variation of folk culture 3 Marginal art V Alternative culture 1 Mini-communication media and online papers 2 Countercultural events and performances 3 Communes and the natural economy VI The political economy of Cool Japan 1 Manga: groundwork for Cool Japan 2 Cool Japan as commercial market 3 Cool Japan abroad 4 Producers and consumers 5 Promise or illusion? 6 Counterculture or postmodern Nihonjinron? VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources Chapter 12 Civil society: activism and friendly authoritarianism I Introduction II The fragmentation of social relations III Post-Fukushima protest movements 1 Demonstrations on the streets 2 Characteristics of participants 3 Social segment effects IV Volunteers, NPOs, NGOs, and resident movements 1 Volunteers 2 NPOs and NGOs 3 The prevalence of resident movements 4 Three-dimensional typology 5 Interest groups V Seikatsusha as an emic concept of citizens VI Friendly authoritarianism 1 Mutual surveillance within small groups 2 Visible and tangible power 3 Manipulation of ambiguity 4 Moralizing and mind correctness VII Conclusion Research questions Further readings Online resources References Index Figures, tables, and theme boxes Figures 1.1 Map of Japan 1.2 Hiroshima Castle 2.1 Takeshita Dōri Street, Tokyo 3.1 Factory worker 3.2 Status-consistent and status-inconsistent clusters 3.3 Changes in the Gini indices over time 4.1 Senior citizens jogging together 4.2 Adults and children in an air-raid shelter, 1943 5.1 Commuters at Umeda Subway Station in Osaka 5.2 Skilled blue-collar worker 5.3 Changes in the unionization rate and strike numbers, 1947–2018 6.1 Disparities of age-based wages among male and female employees, 2018 6.2 High-school students taking an examination 6.3 Schoolchildren doing radio calisthenics 7.1 Workforce participation is growing across a range of industries 7.2 Age-based female labor participation rates, 1985–2017 7.3 Businesswomen exchanging business cards 7.4 Numbers of households with a full-time housewife and two- income households, 1980–2018 8.1 Popo dolls 8.2 Pyramid showing definitions of ‘the Japanese’ 9.1 Three-way rivalry among power centers 9.2 National Diet Building, Tokyo 9.3 Bullet train 9.4 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station 10.1 Traditional Bon dancing 10.2 Stone statues of jizō 10.3 Child on Shichi-go-san 11.1 Akihabara, Tokyo 12.1 Anti-government demonstration, 2015 Tables 1.1 Condensed chronology of historical turning points 1.2 Changing geopolitical centers 1.3 Snapshot of expansionary attempts 2.1 Population distribution, 2010–20 2.2 Relative sizes of ethnic and pseudo-ethnic minorities in Japan and selected countries 2.3 Relative Gini indices of Japan and selected OECD countries, 2015–16 2.4 Relative poverty rates in Japan and selected OECD countries, 2016 2.5 Comparison of societal models 2.6 ‘Which words represent the characteristics of the Japanese?’ Survey responses, 1958–2013 2.7 Japanese studies in English-language publications: fluctuations in frameworks and analytical tools, 1945–2020 2.8 Comparison of convergence debate theses 2.9 Comparison of subcultural dimensions: Japan and Germany 3.1 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Japanese survey responses, 1965–2018 3.2 ‘To which social class do you belong?’ Relative survey responses for Japan and selected other countries, 2005–6 3.3 Class distribution, based on Hashimoto’s model of Marxian categories, 2012 3.4 Comparison of major classes 3.5 Population composition, based on Kikkawa’s eight segments, 2015 3.6 Comparison of status-consistent and status-inconsistent classes, 2010 3.7 Distribution of financial assets, 2017 3.8 Intraclass and interclass marriages, 2015 3.9 Marriages in terms of partner’s educational background, 2005 4.1 Comparison of four generations born in the twentieth century 4.2 ‘Which is the most congenial lifestyle?’ Survey responses, 1930– 2013 4.3 Comparison of village structures in eastern and western Japan 5.1 Distribution of private sector firms and employees, by firm size, 2016 5.2 Comparison of large and small firms 5.3 Comparison of small-business types 5.4 Comparison of management models 5.5 Comparison of types of capitalism 5.6 Distribution of employees in private sphere megasectors, 2016 5.7 Unionization rates, by firm size, 2018 6.1 Distribution of final education levels, 2010 6.2 Distribution of high-school student population after graduation, 2018 6.3 Participation rates in learning English as self-education, 2016 6.4 Comparison of educational orientations 7.1 Positions of power held by women, 2016–19 7.2 Comparison of permeations into the lives of married women 7.3 Distribution of household types, 1980–2015 7.4 Comparison of family types 8.1 ‘Do you think the Japanese are superior or inferior to Westerners?’ Survey responses, 1953–2013 8.2 Comparison of minority groups 8.3 Comparison of types of buraku communities 8.4 Comparison of identity orientations of zainichi Korean youth 8.5 Distribution of class positions of Japanese nationals and of zainichi Koreans, 1995 8.6 Comparison of Japaneseness markers 8.7 ‘How important are certain criteria for determining “Japaneseness”?’ Survey responses, 2003 8.8 Comparison of types of national identities, 2003 9.1 Comparison of political economies 9.2 Comparison of major power players’ orientations 11.1 ‘Of which Japanese cultures can Japan be proud?’ Survey responses, 2009 11.2 ‘Which categories of cultural or artistic activities did you appreciate in the past year?’ Survey responses, 2019 11.3 Comparison of types of cultures 11.4 Comparison of types of popular culture 11.5 Types of marginal arts 11.6 Comparison of three phases in popular images of Japan abroad and predominant paradigms of Japanese studies 12.1 Changes in affiliations to voluntary associations, 1986–2017 12.2 Comparison between contemporary social movements and the Ampo struggle in 1960 12.3 Comparison of types of voluntary organizations 12.4 Comparison of types of interest groups 12.5 Comparison of emic conceptions of social relations 12.6 Comparison of strategies for moral indoctrination 12.7 Comparison of types of friendly authoritarianism Theme boxes Chinese influence on early Japan Samurai loyalty to feudal lords Life in Edo Challenges of introductory images Class impact on socialization Homelessness The advent of aging society Memories of the wartime generation Young generation’s choices Towards work-style reform Long working hours Emphasis on collective integration School lunch as part of education Hikikomori sufferers Career women Variations in gender identity The Sayama case Exploitation of foreign workers Three ‘non-Japanese’ Japanese Nippon Kaigi Reiwa Shinsengumi Okinawa and the US military bases In the wake of Fukushima The royal family Different but coexistent: Shinto and Buddhism ‘Where should my ashes go after death?’ Diversity in Japan’s popular culture Land of manga Enduring demonstrations in Tokyo Equality of opportunity and institutional sexism Preface to the ﬁfth edition It is now nearly a quarter of a century since the first edition of this book was published, in 1997. I initially wrote it less as a primer for students beginning Japanese studies than as a scholarly challenge to the prevailing discourse that defined Japanese society as uniquely monocultural. With the passing of time, Japanese society is increasingly regarded as multicultural, fraught with cultural diversity and class competition, and I am pleased to see that the book has not only stood the test of time but also contributed in a small way to the ongoing paradigm shift. I felt that it was time for the book to be thoroughly refurbished for use as a textbook by a broader readership, including those new to studying Japanese society in higher education and beyond. Readers of the last four editions will notice that the fifth edition is more user-friendly and multidimensional. It has links to videos and websites, lists of questions for research and discussion, and photos and case studies, features which the previous versions did not have. To extend the coverage of the book, I have introduced two new chapters, on history and religion, in addition to comprehensively updating the narratives, tables, and figures of the preexisting chapters. The COVID-19 crisis emerged as the book was being prepared for press. Should another edition be available in the future, it will fully discuss the impact of the 2020 pandemic on Japanese society, as by then social science data and studies about its repercussions will be available. This is not a book which I could produce single-handedly. I am immensely grateful to Tanya Bastrakova and Penny Mansley for their outstanding editorial assistance at different phases of the revision. Their judicious, constructive, and professional advice helped me improve the book greatly. I would also like to note that I have drawn inspiration from countless daily conversations I have had for decades with my partner, Machiko Sato, at the dinner table, while driving our car, and while taking walks together. Some of my old friends will observe her intellectual influence on this work. Completing the fifth edition, I again feel a sense of liberation and hope that readers will share some of my delight in analyzing and reanalyzing the unresolved debates and pending issues raised in this book. Yoshio Sugimoto Melbourne May 2020 Acknowledgements The author and Cambridge University Press would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce material in this book. Figure 1.2: © Getty Images/moaan; 2.1: © Getty Images/Pola Damonte via Getty Images; 3.1: © Getty Images/Michael H; 4.1: © Getty Images/Taiyou Nomachi; 4.2: Wikimedia Commons/Shigeru Tamura; 5.1: © Getty Images/Robert Essel; 5.2: © Getty Images/Trevor Williams; 6.2: © Getty Images/ferrantraite; 6.3: © Getty Images/Kasei; 7.1 (left): © Getty Images/Taiyou Nomachi; 7.1 (right): © Getty Images/iryouchin; 7.3: © Getty Images/SetsukoN; 8.1: © Getty Images/electravk; 9.2: © Getty Images/fotoVoyager; 9.3: © Getty Images/sot; 9.4: © Getty Images/Taro Hama @ e-kamakura; 10.1: By Flickr user Guilhem Vellut, ‘Tsukiji Honganju Bon Dance Festival’, www.flickr.com/photos/o_0/9434414142/, licensed under CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/; 10.2: © Getty Images/I am happy taking photographs.; 10.3: © Getty Images/kohei_hara; 11.1: © Getty Images/Marco Bottigelli. Chapter 9: Discussion adapted from Sugimoto 2011 licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nd/4.0/. Available from The Conversation at https://theconversation.com/japans-fatigued-corporate-culture-414. All videos cited in the theme boxes are hosted on YouTube; these and websites cited in ‘Online resources’ sections were accessed on 30 April 2020. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright. The publisher apologizes for any accidental infringement and welcomes information that would redress this situation. Chapter 1 Historical backdrop: disintegration and restoration ◈ The flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same. Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long. So it is with man and all his dwelling places here on earth.1 I Introduction Kamo no Chōmei, the thirteenth-century Japanese intellectual quoted above, wrote with a sense of the transience of the world: ‘Days constantly come and go, yet change is incessant.’ From such perspective, an infinite number of histories can exist, like the countless bubbles that foam and burst on the surface of a river. As a prelude to the analysis of contemporary Japan that this book undertakes, this opening chapter tries to scoop up just a few of these bubbles to position present-day circumstances in historical perspective, bringing them into relief against the past. This chapter also traces the historical transformations in the patterns of landownership and tax collection which conditioned class formation and disintegration at different times. Table 1.1 provides a highly condensed chronological table to pinpoint some key moments of Japan’s history. Table 1.1 Condensed chronology of historical turning points Century / year Event 3rd century Yamataikoku recorded 710 Nara established as the capital 720 Hayato clan in southern Kyūshū revolt 794 Capital moved to Kyoto Century / year Event 801 Expedition sent to subjugate inhabitants in the north 1192 Kamakura Shogunate formally established 1274 & 1281 Attempts by the Mongol Empire to invade Japan 1336 Ashikaga Shogunate established 1429 Ryūkyū Kingdom established 1467 Warring states begin hostilities 1573 Oda Nobunaga obtains hegemony 1590 Toyotomi Hideyoshi achieves national unification 1592 & 1597 Hideyoshi invades Korea 1600 Battle of Sekigahara 1603 Tokugawa Shogunate established 1639 National isolation policy put in force 1854 Japan–US Treaty of Peace and Amity concluded 1868 Meiji Restoration completed 1875 Farmer-soldiers dispatched to Hokkaidō 1879 Okinawa incorporated Century / year Event 1894 Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin Sensō) breaks out 1904 Russo-Japanese War breaks out 1910 Korea annexed 1931 Manchurian Incident erupts 1937 Second Sino-Japanese War (Nicchū Sensō) breaks out 1941 Pacific War begins 1945 Defeat in World War II II Japan as a variable Although Japan is often described as an internally homogeneous island nation, it has never been a stable territorial unit with consistent cultural uniformity. In reality, Japan has had fluctuating national boundaries and changing constituent regions. 1 Japan’s external boundaries The territorial boundary of Japan that exists today is a post–World War II concept. Even in the early twentieth century, Japan colonized Korea, Taiwan, northeast China, and Karafuto (Sakhalin), with their populations constituting about 30 percent of ‘imperial Japan’.2 Figure 1.1 Map of Japan The independent Ryūkyū Kingdom endured in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan today, for about four centuries during Japan’s feudal period, until the central government formally absorbed it as a prefecture in 1879. Before its full incorporation into Japan, Ryūkyū enjoyed close trade relationships with China and other Southeast Asian polities, maintained its own autonomous culture, and identified only to a limited extent with main-island Japan. After the end of the Allied occupation of Japan, which followed its defeat in World War II, Okinawa remained under US occupation to serve as the American bulwark against communist nations and did not return to Japanese rule until 1972, when the United States gave it back to Japan. Hokkaidō, today Japan’s northernmost island, was long inhabited by the Ainu, the island’s indigenous people. In the late feudal era, the Tokyo-based government firmed up its control over this territory in the face of possible Russian advancement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, colonial militiamen were sent to Hokkaidō from Honshū, Japan’s main island, to work as farmers in peacetime and as soldiers in wartime to territorialize it securely. Karafuto, a long and narrow island situated further north, was a contentious terrain claimed by both the Japanese and the Russian authorities in a lengthy conflict. This intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century when those involved attempted to fulfill their respective imperial geopolitical ambitions at the expense of the indigenous Ainu. Japan obtained the southern half of the island in 1905 after winning the Russo-Japanese War, though it has been occupied by Russia since the end of World War II. Other territorial disputes abound between Japan and neighboring states today, as discussed in Chapter 8. All of these cases concern the territorialization of the peripheral islands – reflecting the fact that Japan is surrounded by the sea – which are sites of dissonant culture and practice. 2 Internal rivalry Throughout Japanese history, many people living in the area now known as ‘Japan’ were not conscious of being Nihonjin (Japanese). Even in Honshū, Japan’s largest island and its most vital and powerful region, this consciousness has fluctuated. The term Nihon (Japan) emerged at the time of the establishment of the Japanese state in the late seventh century. At that point the concept mainly referred to the Kinai region – the area covering present-day Nara, Osaka, southern Kyoto, and southeastern Hyōgo prefectures – evident in the fact that nobles and officials sent outside it regarded their assignments as postings to a foreign area or a ‘land of foreigners’.3 At the time, ordinary people dwelling outside the Kinai region did not think of themselves as belonging to the nation of Japan. Several territorial blocs, which initially were almost nations in themselves,4 were identifiable during the formation of the Japanese state. Far from being a uniform nation, Japan has developed as one with multiple internal subnations. From the establishment of imperial rule, based in Nara and Kyoto in the seventh century, until the Meiji period, in the nineteenth century, these subnations engaged in bitter warfare in a bid to defend or expand their respective hegemony. In the initial phase, the Kinai subnation gradually conquered other blocs, placing them under its control. The feudal period, from the end of the twelfth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, eventually shifted the seat of real power to the samurai class of the Kantō subnation, but the Kinai area remained the locus of imperial power and the most dynamic hub of Japan’s commercial activity. As a geographical and cultural unit, Japan should thus be seen as a variable rather than a constant, changing its external contours and shifting the balance of internal power between rival regions over time. Setting up the signposts that direct this brief historical journey, Tables 1.2 and 1.3 provide simplified portrayals of these and other variations. Table 1.2 focuses on changes in the locations of the center of power in Japan, while Table 1.3 describes the country’s fluctuating external boundaries. Table 1.2 Changing geopolitical centers Regional Dominant Economic center of Ruling political power- Period power institution class holders Yamato & Kinai Imperial Provincial Administrators Nara, 4th court clans of state- century – owned land 794 Heian, 794– Kinai Imperial Nobility Holders of 1192 court private shōen estates Kamakura, Kantō Shogunate Samurai Holders of 1192–1333 (Kamakura) private shōen estates Regional Dominant Economic center of Ruling political power- Period power institution class holders Muromachi, Kinai and Shogunate Samurai Warlords in Warring others (imperial gekokujō States, court for a 1336–1603a short period) Tokugawa, Kantō Shogunate Samurai Feudal lords, 1603–1868 (Edo) emerging merchant class Meiji, 1868– Kantō Imperial Ex- ‘Parasite’ 1912 (Tokyo) court samurai, landlords, Satsuma- zaibatsu Chōshū clique Notes: Shōen – privately owned estates; gekokujō – political turbulence in which the low dominated the high and mighty; zaibatsu – giant family conglomerates. aThis time span includes the Northern and Southern courts period, 1336–92, when the imperial household was split, and the so-called Azuchi–Momoyama period, 1573–1603, when the warlords Oda Nobunaga, his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and their followers unified and ruled Japan. Table 1.3 Snapshot of expansionary attempts Period / Targeted Major year region consequence Context 369–401 Korea Temporary Influence over occupation and Imnaa withdrawal 663 Korea Defeat Battle of Hakusukinoeb 712–24 Northern Expulsion of the Establishment of periphery Emishic Kinai as the center 720–800 Southern Incorporation of Establishment of Kyūshū the Hayato group Kinai as the center 1592 & Korean Withdrawal Hideyoshi’s 1597 Peninsula undertaking 1583– Hokkaidō Incorporation Since the rule of Matsumae-han 1879– Okinawa Incorporation Abolition of the Ryūkyū Kingdom 1894–5 Taiwan Cession Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin Sensō) 1910–45 Korea Annexation Russia’s southward advance 1905–45 Southern Cession Russo-Japanese Karafuto War Period / Targeted Major year region consequence Context 1931–45 Northeast Establishment of Manchurian China Manchukuo Incident 1937–45 China and Temporary Second Sino- Southeast occupation Japanese War Asia (Nicchū Sensō), Pacific War a A region in southern Korea. b An area in northern Korea. cThe term used to refer to the inhabitants of the northern tip of Honshū and Hokkaidō, including the Ainu, the indigenous people of this area. See Chapter 8 for further details. III Ancient times up to the Nara period The Japanese mythology of the origin of Japan claims that the country was created by the goddess of the sun (Amaterasu Ōmikami), who resided in the abode of gods and goddesses.5 According to the myth, when Amaterasu hid herself behind the Gate of the Celestial Rock Cave, the whole world was left in total darkness. Unnerved, the pantheon got together to discuss various ways of luring her out. As one goddess (Ame no Uzume) performed an erotic strip dance, all the others burst into laughter.6 Curious, Amaterasu opened the gate slightly to see what was happening and was then pulled out of the cave. Immediately, the entire world brightened up, with some gods and goddesses leaving heaven to live on the earth, marking the beginning of the nation. In this ancient myth, Amaterasu, the deity of the sun, representing splendor, brightness, and warmth, was symbolized in female form. This is a notable exception in the mythology of most world cultures, where the powerful sun god was generally male. The earliest description of the situation in the Japanese archipelago appears in third-century Chinese documents portraying the politics and customs of a state known as Yamataikoku, headed by a female leader by the name of Himiko, most likely a shaman. After winning intertribal wars, the state was said to have controlled some thirty provinces in the archipelago and to have brought tribute to China on a few occasions. The Chinese Wei Dynasty was recorded as having given Himiko a golden seal as the ruler of Japan, which was then called Wa. A long-running debate remains as to the exact location of Yamataikoku. Some argue that it was situated in northern Kyūshū close to continental Asia, while others maintain that it prevailed in the Kinai region in central Japan. After the collapse of Yamataikoku,7 numerous powerful clans in the Japanese archipelago engaged in warfare, which culminated in the gradual establishment of the Yamato nation from the fourth to the seventh century. This polity was based on a coalition of victorious regional clans in central and western Japan with the imperial family at the helm. The Yamato government progressively succeeded in the formation of the power center in the Kinai district. Maintaining the momentum, it also made several attempts to invade deep into the Korean Peninsula in the mid-seventh century, though it failed in the end. Within the archipelago, the Yamato armed forces overcame the resistance of the Hayato clan in Kyūshū in the early eighth century. Furthermore, the imperial navy attacked the northern end of Honshū throughout the seventh century to repel the clans of the area, including the ancestors of the Ainu, in an attempt to expand the Japanese territory to the north. During this period Japan was extremely fluid both externally and internally. While imposing tax and forced labor on dominant local clans, the Yamato court gave them hereditary status titles and occupational roles and afforded them a degree of autonomy, including in terms of possessing land and slaves. After a spate of intra-court conflicts and coups, the nation’s capital was established in Nara in 710, at which point the government began to model its administrative system after the codes of the Chinese Tang Dynasty and developed the first centralized regime based on complex laws and regulations. In principle, under this system all farmland was state owned and lent to members of the public on a periodic basis in return for the payment of tax in rice administered through local government offices. The conversion of all privately owned land to public land under the control of the imperial family was indicative of the expansion of centralized power. Chinese influence on early Japan Despite the prevailing notion that Japan has been an isolated and solitary island nation, throughout its history it has in fact been heavily reliant on the surrounding sea, which forms a variety of corridors through which people, goods, and information have traveled back and forth. Japan has been a sea-dependent society which enriched itself through maritime and mercantile activities.8 Early in its history, Japan was subject to the influences of Chinese civilization; this was facilitated by the nautical interaction between the two regions. As a peripheral country on the Asian continent, Japan adopted technology, art, and legal practice from China, long at the center of the region politically, via trade and diplomatic sea-lanes. From the seventh to the ninth century, Japan’s government sent nearly twenty official missions to China to study its culture and institutions. As Japan had no written language, its leaders imported ideographic characters invented in China (kanji) and phoneticized some of them (hiragana and katakana) to produce the Japanese alphabet, with hiragana initially widely used by women. The Japanese elite also brought in Confucianism – the ethical teachings of governance said to have been advocated by China’s most influential philosopher, Confucius (551–479 BCE; see Chapter 10) – and it became the major doctrine learned and practiced in the country, providing the basis for the highly bureaucratic style of government that developed at the time and persists today. Traditional Chinese medicine was also brought to ancient Japan, though it underwent substantial advancements and domestic modifications from the sixteenth century onwards. Throughout premodern Japan, the elite were treated using the Japanized Chinese medicinal practices called kanpō, which have taken hold at various levels of contemporary Japanese society. Until this era, females often occupied the throne. Throughout Japanese history, eight empresses existed, and six of them reigned before or during the Nara period. The most recent female empress was Gosakuramachi Tennō, who reigned from 1762 to 1770. The rules about imperial succession around this time were relatively gender neutral in comparison with the post–World War II Imperial Household Law (enacted in 1947), according to which only males in the imperial lineage are entitled to accede to the throne. Reflecting the increasing unification of the nation, the Man’yōshū (Collection of 10,000 leaves), the earliest anthology of Japanese verse, was compiled in the second half of the eighth century. It comprised twenty volumes – some 4,500 poems – composed not only by the sophisticated literati but also by people from all walks of life, expressing their unrefined feelings in a direct manner and revealing the energy of the formation of the ancient nation. The collection provided an important model to Japanese poets in later periods. IV Heian period: rise and fall of the nobility Marking the state-building process further, in 794 the capital was moved to Kyoto, then called Heian-kyō, where it remained the seat of imperial power until 1864, well over ten and a half centuries later. The four centuries up to nearly the end of the twelfth century, when the Kamakura samurai group seized centralized power, is conventionally labelled the Heian period. During this era, the imported legal code system was refined and solidified: powerful clan heads were given occupational posts, titles, ranks, and stipends and were absorbed into the bureaucratic structure instead of directly controlling land and people. They now formed the nobility, enjoying prestige and privilege intergenerationally as high-status officials at the imperial court. Financially, the nobility regime was based upon privately owned estates called shōen, which caused the gradual collapse of the system of state-owned land. The government legalized private ownership in the mid-eighth century, a move which intensified competition among wealthy locals to acquire and expand newly developed rice fields. Analogous to manors in Britain, Grundherrschafts in Germany, and seigneuries in France, these estates spread around the country to occupy a comparable area to publicly owned land. Owners of this type of private land included officials who were initially dispatched from the central government and permanently settled down to enjoy their local advantages and benefits. Private landholders collected ground rent, mainly in the form of rice, from the farmers who worked their land, who on occasion were also forced to do service labor, unpaid work with no financial or material returns. Nobles and religious institutions in the center were immune from land levies. To avoid tax, many shōen owners donated their estates to these privileged groups, became the administrators of the land, and were rewarded with management fees. This type of tax avoidance scheme undermined the revenue sources of the Kyoto authorities and eroded the basis of the nobility rule. Nobility culture, notably literature written by female courtiers, flourished against the backdrop of the opulent lifestyles of the elite. In particular, a full-scale novel, Genji monogatari (The tale of Genji), which novelist and poet Murasaki Shikibu produced early in the eleventh century, portrayed with an elegant and sensitive touch the romantic life of a handsome noble. Long acclaimed as the most monumental work in Japanese literature, the tale has since attained an international reputation. During this period the nobility started to modify their culture by, for example, developing a Japanized dress style to replace the previous one modeled on Chinese court attire.9 V The ascent of the samurai class and the duality of power To protect their shōen estates from outside forces, landholders required and trained armed groups, as did nobles and other high- ranking officials. These military groups were known as samurai, and with mutual cooperation and intense rivalry, they developed into several large regional clans that vied to claim central political power. In the end, the Genji clan, based in eastern Japan, was victorious and established its base in Kamakura, near present-day Tokyo, and was appointed to the post of seii-tai-shōgun (shogun) by the imperial court in Kyoto. The clan formed the first long-term warrior-led shogunate regime (bakufu) in 1192, commencing the military-class rule that endured for almost seven centuries, while the emperor (tennō) continued to reside in Kyoto, backed by court nobles. This was the beginning of Japan’s dual power structure; the imperial court retained formal, cultural, and symbolic authority, while the shogunate exercised military, political, and legal power. The relative influence of the two establishments differed, depending upon the era. Japan’s feudal system began with the consolidation of the reciprocal relationship wherein the shogun granted land, through multiple steps of distribution, to his immediate vassals, who in return could be called upon at any point to go to the battlefield. The core of the bilateral connection lay in the exchange between the samurai’s remunerative indebtedness and provision of military services to the shogunate. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the Kamakura Shogunate covered mainly the shōen estates in the Kantō region and did not deviate significantly from the system of the Heian period. Yet, this was the first time that the political center emerged and solidified in eastern Japan, distant from Kinai. As a sea-girt nation, Japan was subject to foreign naval attacks. The Mongolian Empire tried to invade Japan twice in the latter half of the thirteenth century, crossing the Sea of Japan with naval forces from Korea and China. Though the shogunate weathered the attempted assaults, serious financial difficulties ensued. The samurai class was impoverished as a result, and some of them took the opportunity to form new regionally based groups to compete with the central power. Their moves led to an eventual instability involving power struggles between a variety of old and new forces, resulting in the downfall of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1333. VI Disintegration: the Warring States period 1 The ascendancy of daimyō Out of these conflicts, warlord Ashikaga Takauji achieved a final victory and established the Muromachi Shogunate in Kyoto in 1338, shifting the power center once again. Soon thereafter, however, the imperial house was split into the Southern Court and the Northern Court, though they were reunited half a century later. The Muromachi period was plagued by a number of civil wars and rebellions over the subsequent two centuries, including lengthy years of hostilities among warlords from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, an era referred to as the Warring States period. At this point the pendulum swung towards disintegration and decentralization. In these tumultuous years, feudal lords who owned large tracts of land and had numerous followers began to establish themselves as strong regional power-holders. They were called daimyō and arose from two different backgrounds. The old type consisted of those who were appointed by the shogunate as the provincial heads of law enforcement. With the erosion of centralized power, however, they gradually lost full control over their territories. New types of daimyō emerged in the mid-fifteenth century when low-ranking retainers reversed the existing order, provoked upheavals and successfully supplanted the elite in a political turbulence called gekokujō (where the low dominated the high and mighty). During this period, each daimyō consolidated their power by enforcing taxation, labor, and military services upon the populace within their territory and managed to have a high degree of local autonomy vis-à-vis the shogunate and the imperial court in Kyoto. Each daimyō territory functioned as a mini- nation in which the feudal lord exercised sole governmental authority. Japan as a centralized entity was in complete disarray during this period. The globally popular images of ninja derive from the specialist samurai capable of performing the martial art ninjutsu, which they perfected in the Warring States period, with the best-known groups based in present-day Mie and Shiga prefectures, in central Japan. They had military skills that allowed them to infiltrate into enemy camps and hostile territories either individually or collectively to conduct secret investigations for specific purposes. They often carried out assassinations, night raids, rear-guard harassments, and other surprise attacks. Ninja groups won prominence, serving warring daimyō during hostilities. However, the long, peaceful period during the later years of this period obviated the necessity for ninja, the subsequent portrayals of whom as superhuman characters capable of performing fanciful and fantastic feats were exaggerated for mass entertainment. 2 Recentralization and external expansionism After a series of wars between powerful daimyō, victors Oda Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi reversed the clock and set the process of recentralization in motion. Most importantly, they conducted national cadastral surveys to establish land registers uniformly around the country. The registers were used to identify the actual cultivators and yields of each patch of land. These nationwide land censuses made it possible to measure the aggregate rice production of each fiefdom and enabled the center to control the finance of each daimyō more exactly than before, while eliminating the intermediary exploitation by local clans and wealthy farmers. At the same time, the monetary economy expanded, with many daimyō through rich merchants monetizing the rice collected as land tax, in response to escalating interregional trade that cut across fief boundaries. Figure 1.2 Hiroshima Castle, around which a castle town was developed in the feudal period Moreover, the central regime implemented the separation of warriors and peasants. The samurai groups that lived in villages were gradually moved to towns and cities and were thus unable to directly control agricultural land. Castles were constructed in these urban centers where the samurai were major residents, symbolizing each daimyō’s power. Most prefectural capitals in Japan today used to be castle towns in the feudal period. With the consolidation of the city-based samurai groups as the military ruling class, Japan’s rulers once again tried to conquer the Korean Peninsula. In the late sixteenth century, Hideyoshi’s troops waged war twice in a major attempt to subject Korea to Japanese control, at one point advancing to its northern end and gaining a temporary foothold there. In the end they were defeated by the Korean armed forces, navy, and volunteer soldiers supported by the military might of China’s Ming Dynasty. Again, Japan was far from a geographically stable entity at this time. Memories of these attacks linger on in Japanese–Korean relations even today. While the samurai class was involved in frequent domestic warfare, the merchant class steadily expanded its influence in some cities. In the sixteenth century, for instance, the port of Sakai, located near Osaka, prospered so much that wealthy merchants there assumed special prerogatives and established it as an almost independent city with exceptional status bestowed by the national regime. In Kyoto, the merchant class formed autonomous associations which managed local festivals and handled community events outside central government authority. In this environment, the tea ceremony, flower arrangements, and other classic cultural forms began to flourish. The final phase of competition between rival daimyō was the crucial battle at Sekigahara, in present-day Gifu prefecture, in 1600, which was fought between the daimyō forces of eastern Japan and those of western Japan. Warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu led the eastern group and won the battle, setting the course of modern history. VII Tokugawa: sweeping centralization and national closure 1 Centralization Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1603, setting the stage for the full-blown centralization process, which had a fundamental effect on the development of Japan’s social structure over the coming centuries. The Tokugawa Shogunate lasted for more than 260 years, until the Meiji Restoration, in 1868, when the regime came to an end and Emperor Meiji assumed the power to head the nation. Throughout the Tokugawa period, there were some 260 daimyō, each of whom controlled a feudal domain called a han. The Tokugawa Shogunate classified them into three groups: the three branch families of the Tokugawa House, the fudai daimyō in hereditary vassalage to the Tokugawa, and the tozama daimyō, who did not belong to either. While trusting the first two groups, the shogunate was always suspicious and distrustful of the third, which might have rebelled against its rule at any point. Throughout the nation, the shogunate claimed the right of possession of land but granted tenure to samurai in return for their loyalty to the shogun. Their territories were rank ordered in terms of stipends assessed by their level of rice production. Daimyō were given such areas and allowances far above other samurai and managed their allocated land and people while pledging their allegiance to the center. To control each han carefully, the shogunate occasionally moved some from one domain to another. Furthermore, each daimyō was required to go to Edo to engage in alternate-year residence, taking his family and vassalage to show his obedience to the shogunate, a program which imposed a heavy financial burden on local daimyō. Internally, the Tokugawa regime thus perfected the process of centralization, exerting heavy-handed nationwide control from Edo. Samurai loyalty to feudal lords In each han, retainers pledged and practiced their absolute loyalty to their feudal lord (daimyō). As a partially true story demonstrating such utter allegiance, ‘Chūshingura’ (The treasury of loyal retainers) has sustained enduring popularity over centuries, repeatedly shown in theatre, movies, and animation and on television. The tale begins in 1701 when a young daimyō, Asano Takuminokami of Akō-han, stationed in Edo and chosen by the shogunate to entertain an imperial envoy from Kyoto, gets the cold shoulder from an old daimyō, Kira Kōzukenosuke, who is expected to teach him the complicated rules of entertainment. Insulted and angry, Asano unsuccessfully attempts to stab Kira with a dagger in the corridor of the Edo castle. The shogun immediately commands Asano to commit seppuku (disembowel himself) as a form of honorable suicide and orders the dissolution of Akō-han. Kira is not punished. Ōishi Kuranosuke, principal retainer of Asano, tries to rebuild their han, an option rejected by the shogunate. Loyal to his lord, Ōishi then secretly plans to take vengeance on Kira, gathers together forty-seven retainers (including himself) and waits for the right moment for twenty months without showing any signs of this preparation. The opportunity comes on a night of heavy snow in December. The Akō retainers surround and invade Kira’s magnificent residence. After a lengthy fight and a frustrating search, Ōishi’s group finds Kira in his hiding place and beheads him. After wreaking bitter revenge, the men march to their lord’s graveyard in Edo and report to him that they have finally avenged him. Though Edo citizens are said to have applauded the undertaking of Akō’s samurai as a heroic and chivalrous deed, the shogunate ordered them to perform seppuku, a command which they were forced to obey. 2 National seclusion At the same time, the Tokugawa Shogunate banned Japanese from overseas travel, prohibited nationals from such ‘Christian countries’ as Portugal and Spain from entering Japan, and limited trade activities with foreign countries in the middle of the seventeenth century, establishing a range of border control policies – a scheme later called sakoku (national seclusion). Trade with China, which was a non- Christian country, was exempt, as was trade with the Netherlands, which declared it would refrain from missionary work. The Tokugawa Shogunate took great interest in maintaining ties with the Dutch to obtain information about European countries. Diplomatic relations with Korea and Ryūkyū were maintained. Yet, Japan was virtually closed to foreign countries and remained in a state of almost total isolation internationally for more than two and a half centuries, until the closing days of the Tokugawa period. As a result, in the absence of internal and external warfare, the nation relished a long period of peace and tranquility, though the domestic system of exploitation remained harsh; from 1590 to 1867, more than 2,800 peasant disturbances broke out across the country.10 In the middle of the nineteenth century, the national seclusion policy came under threat as the ships of Western colonial powers appeared on Japan’s coasts and their captains demanded the establishment of trade relations. In 1853, warships and other vessels of the United States arrived in Uraga (present-day Yokosuka, near Tokyo), pressing for Japan to open up to the outside world. The conclusion of a peace treaty between the two countries the next year ended the seclusion policy, and similar treaties with the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Netherlands were also put into effect, destabilizing the Tokugawa government. 3 Demography and status classification During the Tokugawa period the population was categorized into four groups: samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. This was a mixture of the system of social stratification and that of occupational classification, though the samurai group (which comprised some 5 percent of the population)11 undoubtedly enjoyed many special privileges and formed the ruling class. Farmers, craftsmen, and merchants constituted the commoners’ class without clear class grading. The so-called farmers in this classification (approximately 80 percent) actually included agrarian laborers, traders, handicraft manufacturers, fishermen, and many other types of inhabitants in rural communities. Though the term hyakushō has often been translated as ‘farmers’, it literally means ‘100 surnames’, indicating that rural inhabitants were engaged in a wide range of occupations.12 The countryside population was much more complex and diverse than simply agricultural. Reflecting this demography, in some villages, since earlier times, land tax had been paid in forms other than rice, such as salt, silk, cotton, clothes, gold, and iron.13 In the meantime, city residents (10 percent) comprised the so-called craftsmen and merchants, between whom there was little rank-ordering. The buraku outcast groups14 (1.73 percent) were placed below these four groups.15 In principle, each occupational status was hereditary, and no intergenerational mobility across status lines was permitted. Thus, the status system in Tokugawa Japan was based on three tiers, with the samurai class at the top, commoners including farmers, craftsmen, and merchants in the middle, and buraku groups at the bottom. After the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Meiji government set up a new status system that placed most of the ex- samurai class into a few layers of the Meiji nobility and the second and third groups into the category of commoners.16 4 Commoners’ culture Commoners’ city culture attained full maturity during the Edo period both in the Kinai area and in the capital, Edo, reflecting the material empowerment of the merchant and artisan classes. In the early Tokugawa period, Kyoto and Osaka emerged as the sites of thriving popular culture. Later, fully fledged commoners’ culture flourished in Edo in multitudinous forms. For instance, ukiyo-e (literally, ‘pictures of fleeting life’) – woodblock prints which portrayed women in pleasure districts, female beauties, stage performers, scenes from folk tales, erotica, and so on – found a large mass market with the development of printing technology. Literature which focused on the everyday life of common people broke new ground, featuring stories of amorous lifestyles and people’s obsession with lust and money. A fresh genre of Japanese poems, haiku, gained popularity among common people, describing their observations succinctly in seventeen syllables. Many ordinary people enjoyed writing sarcastic poems known as senryū, which have a similar format to haiku; these ridiculed the powerful and mocked those in authority. Commoners also enjoyed attending performances at theaters, which proliferated in urban areas. Kabuki, a form of drama and music performed by male actors,17 developed in earnest and attracted large audiences; so did jōruri, puppet theater in which dialogue and narrative are accompanied by the playing of a shamisen, a musical instrument. A range of comical novels called kokkei-bon were published and enjoyed wide popularity in Edo and beyond. In competition with stoic samurai culture, these and many other types of mass consumption cultures flowered in Tokugawa Japan, and some continue to thrive even today. Major newspapers still allocate regular space for senryū contributions from around the country, indicating that the genre has long had grassroots support. In 2005, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization proclaimed Kabuki theater to be an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In many forms and shapes, Tokugawa Japan’s rich and refined popular culture was fostered by people outside the ruling class and has reverberated in modern and postmodern eras. 5 Modernity in late Tokugawa Japan Late in the Tokugawa era, Japan was well prepared to take on the process of modernization in at least four areas: industrialization, education, urbanization, and bureaucratization. First of all, the country had already undergone a measurable degree of industrialization towards the end of the Tokugawa period. Cottage industries were in progress in many rural areas, particularly in silk and cotton production. Many homes subcontracted work from wholesale merchants in cities, negotiated a division of labor among themselves, and used simple manufacturing machinery, laying the foundation, from below, for full- blown industrialization towards the end of the nineteenth century. Second, in education, each feudal domain established han-kō (domain schools) to educate the children of the samurai class in Japanese and Chinese classics, mathematics, martial arts, and, in some cases, medical and chemical sciences. At least 255 schools of this kind were founded across the nation, making the military class highly cultured and well trained in the arts of brush and sword. Furthermore, tens of thousands of private terakoya schools (literally, ‘temple schools’), which taught reading and writing as well as basic mathematics to the children of commoners, thrived in cities and some parts of the countryside, lifting the literacy and numeracy levels of the general population. The nationwide level of literacy was similar to that in Western nations. At the start of the Meiji Restoration, some 40 to 50 percent of males and 15 percent of females are estimated to have been literate.18 Third, the property succession system in Tokugawa Japan was based on the principle of primogeniture, which allowed the first son of a family to assume its headship and inherit land, housing, and wealth (see Chapter 7). The practice left daughters and subsequent sons unrewarded and disadvantaged but provided an ample supply of labor when Japan was in the process of industrial takeoff in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many emigrated from their villages and moved to urban centers to become industrial workers, giving rise to the extensive urbanization required by Japan’s capitalism. Fourth, the bureaucratic structure of the samurai class was also beneficial to the establishment of a modern state. Since the Tokugawa era recorded virtually no internal or external warfare, the warriors were not required to perform military functions and increasingly worked as bureaucrats within the finely graded hierarchy. After the collapse of the old regime, they were able to swiftly occupy new governmental posts and effectively use their bureaucratic skills for the Meiji administration. Modernity was already in its embryonic form in Tokugawa Japan. Life in Edo The city of Edo (present-day Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate, was a metropolis of mass consumption which supported the production and distribution of goods of the Kinai area, in western Japan. A majority of Edo residents were migrants from other regions, and in the middle of the Tokugawa period, about two-thirds of its inhabitants of commoner status were men, making the capital a predominantly male city. While the Tokugawa period was the era of centralization, seclusion, and status distinction, Edo was a city of vibrant and mature culture developed by commoners. Various aspects of life in this period are illustrated in a comic fashion in the video Life in Edo Japan (1603–1868), at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIygLo_W1Sw (Simple History, 27 April 2019). VIII The Meiji Restoration 1 Alliance of strong peripheral domains in the west and the south Against the background of the weakening central regime, a series of bloody civil conflicts erupted towards the end of the Tokugawa period between those feudal daimyō who advocated the end of the feudal system and those who supported the status quo. The anti-Tokugawa group was led by the coalition of Satsuma-han (present-day Kagoshima prefecture), in the southern end of Kyūshū, and Chōshū- han (Yamaguchi prefecture), in the western end of Honshū – two powerful tozama (outsider) provinces far removed from Edo, the seat of the shogunate. The partnership was strengthened by the participation of two other strong tozama provinces, Tosa-han (Kōchi prefecture), in the Shikoku region, and Hizen-han (Saga prefecture), in northern Kyūshū, also at a distance from the center. The domains predominantly in the Tōhoku area, in northeastern Japan, fought against this alliance in defense of the existing regime but ultimately lost the struggle. 2 The end of power duality: the establishment of Tokyo as the capital In 1867, the Tokugawa shogun formally returned political power to the emperor at Nijō Castle, in Kyoto. In 1868, the emperor issued the Imperial Covenant to establish himself as the head of the nation. Soon after, the imperial era name was changed to Meiji, and it was decided that the nation’s capital be moved from Kyoto to Tokyo, where the emperor then settled. The power duality between the two cities thus came to a close, and Tokyo became the single and unrivaled center of the country. After the Restoration, the leading figures of the two revolutionary peripheral regions mentioned above – Satsuma and Chōshū – almost completely monopolized the key offices of the new government. The tables were turned to enable the peripheral provinces to form the new center in Tokyo and to push aside the old leadership to the political periphery. In terms of class analysis, the major Restoration forces were organized by the low-level samurai class with the support of the rich merchant class. The Restoration was less a revolution which completely toppled the establishment and more a transformation led by a section of the ruling class. This meant that many ingredients of the past system were retained, in spite of the radical changes of the ensuing decades. In particular, the Civil Code, which was enacted in 1896, was modeled after the patriarchal system of the feudal samurai class, in which each household had a formal head who held wide-ranging power over household members. For instance, he could exercise the right to agree or disagree to a proposed marriage in order to maintain the household lineage.19 Promulgated in 1889, the Meiji constitution decreed that sovereignty resided with the emperor, who had the unfettered power to proclaim war, conclude a treaty, command the armed forces, declare martial law, and issue extraordinary imperial ordinances. The constitution did not spell out exactly who was able to directly advise the emperor on matters pertaining to state affairs. Declaring that the unbroken imperial line continued from ancient times, the constitution assigned theocratic authority to the emperor. 3 Rapid catch-up programs from above The Restoration triggered sweeping structural transformations. The old feudal domains (han) were abolished, and the nation was divided into prefectures. Under the slogan ‘Enrich the nation and strengthen the armed forces’ (fukoku kyōhei), the nation’s leadership made all-out attempts to catch up and compete with Western countries both economically and militarily, though these programs were accompanied with harsh labor conditions and serious environmental costs. As silk constituted the most important export good in Meiji Japan, many young women, mostly teenagers, were recruited as silk spinners under stringent employment contracts. Placed in company dormitories after work, they had little free time and were compelled to labor long hours for little pay, with illness often gnawing at their bodies.20 Industrialization also produced environmental disasters, the first well-known case of which emerged at the Ashio Copper Mine, in Tochigi prefecture, around the turn of the nineteenth century.21 The nearby river was contaminated by waste fluid from the mine, severely affecting rice fields downstream. The mine also discharged poisonous fumes into the air, threatening the health of villagers in the area. Though protest movements against the mine erupted many times, the government was unresponsive, partly because the nation required copper for the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war efforts. Since Japan started to industrialize later than the United Kingdom and France, the state intervened heavily into the developmental process as a latecomer. The central regime took the lead in establishing government plants to advance its industrialization programs and facilitate the development of capitalism from above. The Tokyo government also instituted compulsory and universal male conscription, laying the foundation for the modern military system. Infrastructure programs were rapidly initiated, with Japan’s first railways in operation between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, only four years after the Restoration. In the sphere of education, formal schooling was introduced around the country, and the enrollment rate in elementary schools reached 98.1 percent in 1910,22 just four decades after its initial implementation. This was an extremely rapid spread of primary education throughout the country. These accomplishments owed much to the abovementioned pre-Meiji social conditions, conducive to modern development. 4 Land tax reform and the ‘parasite’ landlord class The new land tax system introduced by the Meiji government marked a far-reaching change in the way tax was collected. The old system – in force throughout the feudal period – had used the amount of rice production per area of land as the basic criterion, and tax was paid chiefly in rice. In contrast, the revised system assessed the value of land in monetary terms, and tax was collected in cash on the basis of a set percentage of this figure. The new taxation framework led to an absentee landlord system in which landlords did not cultivate their own land and instead were totally reliant on rent from tenancy. Most had initially been farmers who later expanded their holdings, gradually converted the acquired fields to tenant land, and finally made all of their land subject to tenancy agreements, thereby ceasing land cultivation themselves. Together with usurers, wealthy merchants, and other commercial capitalists, they formed the so-called parasite landlord class, which exploited tenants, a development that resulted in a new bifurcation of the rural population. Nearly half of Japan’s arable land was under tenancy agreements around the turn of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the imperial diet was established in 1889 to legitimize the constitutional monarchy. It was made up of two houses: the House of Peers, which comprised imperial nominees including the imperial family, the nobility, distinguished academics, high-ranking bureaucrats, and high taxpayers (primarily affluent absentee landowners); and the House of Representatives, which consisted of popularly elected members, though the eligible voters were limited to taxpayers above a certain level, mainly landowning farmers, approximately 1 percent of the entire population. The system excluded women and a vast majority of citizens until 1928, when universal male suffrage came into effect in response to the rising tide of demands for more democratic enfranchisement. 5 Expansionism and colonization After establishing a modern army, the Japanese state could afford to be expansionary and rival Western colonial powers in East Asia. Winning the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Japan acquired Taiwan and its adjacent areas as colonial holdings and forced their residents to be ‘Japanese’ by using a variety of means.23 In 1910, Japan colonized Korea, attaining sovereign power over the entirety of the peninsula and establishing the Government-General of Korea in Seoul, a situation that lasted for more than three decades, until Japan’s defeat in World War II. During this period, Koreans were forced to assume Japanese surnames, use the Japanese language at school, and turn themselves into subjects of the Japanese emperor. These warfare and colonization policies were overseen and promoted by the high-ranking generals and top-level politicians who had their bases in the Satsuma-Chōshū alliance at the time of the Restoration. These regions produced a dominating clique at the helm of the nation and almost totally monopolized its leadership for half a century. Domestically, in parallel, the concentration of capital intensified, as moneyed merchants who had cultivated close connections with politicians and bureaucrats accumulated their wealth. After the industrial transformation primarily in heavy industries – such as steel, shipping, and machinery – these merchants arranged to purchase large government-sponsored firms at low prices, benefited from special procurements during the two wars against China and Russia, and formed giant family conglomerates called zaibatsu, the most powerful of which were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Internally, each zaibatsu group had a stockholding company at its center. It controlled other companies in the group, which specialized in particular industries. These enormous concerns acquired overwhelming market shares in such major industries as banking, trading, mining, shipbuilding, maritime transport, electricity, and warehousing. While competing with each other in each field, zaibatsu wielded immense power in promoting corporate concentration in the war-dependent economy until the end of the Pacific War. Though they were dissolved thereafter, their structure has since revived, and they continue to retain their prewar system in contemporary Japan as part of the keiretsu (enterprise grouping) system (as discussed in Chapter 5). IX Taishō democracy The power pendulum swung in the democratic direction in the first quarter of the twentieth century, called the period of Taishō democracy, because it more or less corresponded to the time when Emperor Taishō, the successor to Emperor Meiji, sat on the throne. At the beginning of the century, the urban middle class, made up of white-collar employees and other salaried workers, expanded in size and influence. This was the time when the notion of the salaryman (a Japanese-English term discussed in Chapter 3) was constructed as Japan’s model employee.24 This cohort allied with the emerging industrial capitalist class, based in small businesses, which started to compete with the old privileged class. These groups pressed for the principle of constitutional government based on popular (male) suffrage25 and the parliamentary cabinet system. In defiance of the existing notion of the emperor as a divine existence above all institutions, the advocates of constitutionalism were equipped with the fresh thesis of emperor as organ, which claimed that sovereignty rested with the state, whose will the emperor – as an organ of the state – was compelled to exercise. As the will of the state was represented by the parliament, the theory allowed that parliamentary democracy was possible under the Meiji constitution.26 Social movements intensified during this period. The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement called for democracy and the abolition of the clique politics in which cronies connected with the old han of Satsuma and Chōshū dominated top governmental positions. Tenancy disputes arose frequently, and tenant farmers formed a national association. The buraku people, still subject to widespread discrimination, even after the dissolution of the feudal status system, established a national organization, Suihei-sha, to demand their basic human rights. The Communist Party came into existence as an underground political organization. Women’s movements were also on the rise, demanding female voting rights and increasingly influenced by socialist ideas.27 To maximize their profits, the ‘parasite’ landlords engaged in speculations in rice prices, which put pressure on household budgets around the country and often triggered rice riots, the most significant of which broke out in 1918, protesting against the high prices of rice and destroying rice merchants’ shops. Initially started by a small group of housewives in a remote town of Toyama prefecture, the protests became the largest popular disturbances in the first half of the twentieth century, spread to 369 locations, and lasted for fifty days. In excess of 1 million people demonstrated, with more than 100,000 soldiers mobilized to respond and over 25,000 participants arrested.28 The Taishō democracy era was not a period of one-way liberalization and diversification. The Great Kantō Earthquake hit the Tokyo metropolitan area in 1923. In the widespread confusion that followed, unfounded rumors flew claiming that Koreans and socialists had risen up in rebellion. Exploiting the hearsay, not only the police and the military but also bands of vigilantes murdered at least several hundred, and possibly a few thousand, Koreans,29 a tragedy which highlighted the capacity of ordinary citizens to be cruel and brutal towards ethnic and ideological minorities. X The Fifteen Years’ War After the worldwide economic depression starting in 1929, Japan plunged into a total war. This was the Fifteen Years’ War,30 which lasted from 1931 to 1945 and spanned three phases: the Manchurian Incident, which triggered hostilities in northeast China (1931–3); the Second Sino-Japanese War (Nicchū Sensō), which brought Japan into a quagmire of incessant battles in large parts of China (1937–45); and the Pacific War, in which Japan fought the United States and the Allied countries in the theater of the Pacific Ocean (1941–5). This was a period marked by an unprecedented degree of internal centralization and external belligerence. 1 The Manchurian Incident The long war started in 1931 with the Manchurian Incident, in which Japan’s Kwantung Army blasted the South Manchuria Railway in the vicinity of Mukden, China. On the pretext that the incident was carried out by the Chinese National Revolutionary Army (the Kuomintang army), the Japanese army came to occupy the whole of Manchuria in a few months, despite the Tokyo government’s unwillingness to expand the battlefield. This was the beginning of the civil government’s loss of control over the military’s unrelenting aggression. The zaibatsu groups found Manchuria’s abundant natural resources enticing and had every reason to support the military advancement into the region. In 1932, the Japanese Kwantung Army installed Puyi, the last emperor of China’s Ching Dynasty, as the head of Manchukuo, a puppet nation under Japan’s control. 2 The Second Sino-Japanese War The hostilities in China expanded in 1937 with the outbreak of all-out warfare beginning with the Japanese military’s invasion of Beijing, which led to the formation of the United Front against Japan, based on collaboration between the two major Chinese resistance groups, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. To deal with the unresolved situation in China and put the nation on a wartime footing, the Japanese establishment implemented general mobilization programs, which inspired patriotism and imposed various austerity measures on the population while weakening the diet and strengthening the monopolistic position of the government. The zaibatsu groups made maximum use of the tightened wage, price, and industrial controls, secured labor and goods to their advantage, and reinforced the state- capital complex. 3 The Pacific War While the Japanese army widened hostilities with China on the Asian continent, the theater of war moved to the Pacific, with the Japanese Air Force making a sudden air raid on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. This marked the third phase of the Fifteen Years’ War and the start of the Pacific War, which formed a part of World War II, fought between the Allied powers (including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and others31) on the one hand and the Axis powers (composed of Germany, Italy, and Japan) on the other. The Japanese war propaganda machine claimed that the military waged the war to liberate the colonized countries from the yoke of Western dominance and to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese leadership. In the 1940s, Japan shaped itself as a totalitarian society which prohibited any form of individual or collective opposition to the state and secured an extremely high degree of control over the private lives of its citizens. For the attainment of its war goals, no dissenting views were allowed. Specifically, all political parties were dissolved to establish one political organization, Taisei Yokusan-kai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association). In workplaces, all existing labor unions were abolished, and Sangyō Hōkoku-kai (Industrial Patriotic Society) was formed to compel workers to devote themselves totally to the nation’s war activities. At the community level, tonarigumi (neighborhood associations) were organized in every corner of the country to mobilize each member household to comply with the authorities’ wishes. In educational institutions, university students were conscripted to fight on the front line, with middle- and high-school students called up to do labor service. The secret police had extensive powers and operated to suppress anti-government views. At the same time, popular and voluntary support for the war was also considerable. Many intellectuals willingly made ideological conversions to countenance the ongoing war. Towards the closing days of the Pacific War, the United States carried out a series of major air raids on Tokyo, landed on Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost group of islands, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 3 million Japanese died during the war. The Pacific War ended on 15 August 1945 with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied forces, which occupied the nation for seven years, until a peace treaty was concluded in 1952. XI Looking ahead After total defeat, Japan implemented equalization reforms, some relatively thoroughly and others half-baked. A new constitution was promulgated in 1946, proclaiming that ‘sovereign power resides with the people’. Overall, compared with the numerous wars and hostilities in which it involved itself in earlier times, the nation has relished a relatively peaceful period for three-quarters of a century since 1945. XII Conclusion Scooping several bubbles of foam from the river of Japanese history, this chapter has briefly outlined some of its key narratives, showing the ways in which the compositions of, and meanings attached to, Nihon and Nihonjin have changed over time. Against this backdrop, Japanese society today faces fresh opportunities and challenges unimaginable in the past. This book attempts to unravel some of them. The ensuing chapters consist of four major themes. The first (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) presents an overview of class and stratification in Japan and of Japan’s demographic variation, preparatory to depicting other dimensions of Japanese society. The second (Chapters 5 and 6) addresses stratification based upon the achievement criteria of occupation and education and investigates the degree of class reproduction in these spheres. The third (Chapters 7 and 8) studies the ways in which Japanese society is stratified on the basis of gender and ethnicity, two ascriptive characteristics that are determined before birth and are generally, if not always, unalterable thereafter. The fourth (Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12) explores the patterns of trade-off and tug-of-war between forces of control and dissent in the Japanese social system. Research questions 1. How did the pattern of landownership change in premodern Japan and how did it determine entry into the ruling class? 2. Compare the Meiji Restoration with a major transformation in one of the Western nations in a parallel period. 3. Identify similarities between the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes. 4. Given that modernity unfolds in different societies in different ways, how is Japan’s modernity characterized in comparison with others? 5. What were the strengths and weaknesses of the Taishō democracy? Further readings Amino, Yoshihiko 2012, Rethinking Japanese History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies. Dower, John 2000, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton. Gluck, Carol 1985, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Andrew 2013, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Totman, Conrad 2014, Japan: An Environmental History. London: I. B. Tauris. 1 Kamo no Chōmei 1998, p. 31. Used by permission of Stone Bridge Press. 2 Prewar school textbooks, published by the Ministry of Education, stated unequivocally that the Japanese nation was multiethnic. Oguma 2002, pp. 133–8. 3 Ōtsu 1993. 4 Amino 1992, pp. 127–40. 5 The narratives were recorded in the documents Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan) and Kojiki (Records of ancient matters), imperially approved texts in the formative years of the nation, during the seventh and eighth centuries. 6 For the symbolic significance of Ame no Uzume, see Aoyama 2018. 7 The description of Yamataikoku disappears from Chinese imperial documents from the mid-third century to the early fifth century, and it is unknown how it collapsed. 8 Haneda and Oka 2019. 9 Morris 2013. 10 Aoki 1966, p. 13. 11 The percentage figures in this paragraph are estimated from Sekiyama 1958, pp. 310–11. 12 Amino 1996, pp. 8–47. 13 Amino 1996, pp. 106–31. 14 Buraku was a discriminated-against community in which outcast groups lived while subjected to harsh prejudice. Residents in buraku were called burakumin. See Section IV of Chapter 8 for details. 15 Sekiyama 1958, p. 310. 16 The prejudice towards the third group persisted long after the rearrangement. 17 Kabuki first appeared in the early seventeenth century with troupes of female performers playing both male and female parts. However, claiming that this would corrupt public morals, the Tokugawa Shogunate prohibited women from acting, with the consequence that Kabuki was performed only by male actors, some of whom played female roles. 18 Dore 1976. 19 These rules were based on the ie system, which is discussed in Chapter 7 in detail. 20 Hosoi 1996; Yamamoto 1968. 21 Nimura 1998. 22 The enrollment rate of boys was 98.8 percent, and that of girls was 97.4 percent. Tsuzuki 2013, p. 2. 23 Endo 2019, pp. 142–216. 24 Dasgupta 2012. 25 Popular suffrage was achieved in 1925. 26 The government excluded the organ theory by the mid-1930s. 27 Mackie 2002. 28 Watanabe and Inoue 1959–62. 29 The exact number of Korean victims remains unknown. Available estimates range from over 200 to more than 66,000. Central Disaster Management Council 2008, pp. 206, 218. 30 The phrase was coined by Shunsuke Tsurumi. See Tsurumi 1986. 31 The Soviet Union declared war against Japan on 5 August 1945, ten days before Japan’s surrender to the Allied countries. Chapter 2 The Japan phenomenon: analysis and understanding ◈ I Introduction This chapter deliberates on major conceptual and theoretical debates in the studies of Japanese society. First and foremost, the question of stereotype formation is addressed to inspect sampling issues and visibility problems and to examine why particular parts of the Japanese population tend to be highlighted to make generalizations about it. The discussion is followed by the comparison of competing frameworks for understanding Japanese society: monocultural, multiethnic, multiclass, and multicultural models. After a review of how the holders of ideological capital control the way Japanese society is characterized, the chapter looks back on a variety of studies published over the past few decades and dissects major phases of analysis, reflecting altering domestic and international contexts. The discussion then moves to focus on areas in which the particular case of Japan has something to offer to social science issues in general: the convergence debate, cultural relativism, and the distinction between ideologies and lived realities in the description of a given society. This final section also demonstrates why it is necessary to be sensitive to two types of relativism: intrasocietal and intersocietal. II Sampling and visibility Hypothetical questions sometimes inspire the sociological imagination. Suppose that a being from a different planet arrived in Japan and wanted to meet a typical Japanese person, one who epitomized the Japanese adult population. Whom should social scientists choose? To answer this question, several factors would have to be considered: gender, occupation, educational background, and so on. One might decide to choose a female, because women outnumber men in Japan; 65 million women and 61 million men live in the Japanese archipelago. With regard to occupation, she would definitely not be employed in a large corporation but would work in a small enterprise, since only one in eight workers is employed in a company with 300 or more employees. Nor would she be guaranteed lifetime employment, since those who work under this arrangement are concentrated in large companies. She would not belong to a labor union, because only one in six Japanese workers is unionized. She would not be university educated. Fewer than one in five Japanese have a university degree, even though nearly half of the younger generation gained admission to a university for a four-year degree at the beginning of the 2020s. Table 2.1 summarizes these demographic realities. Table 2.1 Population distribution, 2010–20 Majority Minority No. No. Variable Group (millions) % Group (millions) % Gendera Female 64.69 51 Male 61.33 49 Employees by firm sizeb Small firms 48.50 85 Large firms 8.30 15 Educationc Without 70.80 80 University 17.70 20 university graduates education Union membership No 48.50 83 Yes 10.00 17 Sources: Gender: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2020. Employees: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2016a. Education: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau 2010. Union membership: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2018c. a Population estimates as of 1 January 2020. bThe data cover all private sector establishments except individual proprietorship establishments in agriculture, forestry, and fishery. Small firms: fewer than 300 employees; large firms: 300 or more employees. c University graduates do not include those who have completed junior college and technical college. Figures do not include students currently enrolled in schools and preschoolers. The identification of the average Japanese would certainly involve much more complicated quantitative analysis. But the alien would come closer to the ‘center’ of the Japanese population by choosing a female, nonunionized, and nonpermanent employee in a small business without university education than by choosing a male, unionized, permanent employee with a university degree working for a large company. In imagining Japanese society, however, casual observers tend to focus on numerical minorities – men rather than women, career employees in large companies rather than nonpermanent workers in small firms, and university graduates rather than high-school leavers – because they have higher levels of visibility on television and in newspaper and magazine articles. They also form the immediate demographic environment which surrounds most academics, journalists, and communicators. Some scholarly writings have attempted to generalize about Japanese society on the basis of observations of its male elite sector and have thereby helped to reinforce this sampling bias.1 Moreover, because a particular cluster of individuals who occupy high positions in large companies have greater access to mass media and publicity, the lifestyles and value orientations of those in that cluster have enjoyed a disproportionately high level of presence in the analysis of Japanese society at the expense of the wider cross-section of its population. Since the 1990s, a fresh trend – possibly a new stereotype – has spread, with images of Japanese obsessed with manga and anime and their associated merchandise, and with the portrayal of Japan as the land of fanatic consumers of popular culture. Several nationwide studies demonstrate that it is far from the case that such people can be classified as a representative majority of the Japanese at large, let alone as typical: 1. NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Japan’s public broadcaster, conducts a large-scale national survey on Japanese perceptions of many aspects of life every five years. The survey carried out in 2018 found that only 9.9 percent of the Japanese regarded manga reading as one of their many choices of indispensable activities.2 2. NHK also carries out a national survey on the time-use patterns of the Japanese every five years. The survey conducted in 2015 observed that only about 16 percent of the Japanese read ‘magazines, manga or books (including e-books)’ on weekdays.3 Those who only read manga would account for a much lower percentage. 3. The Marketing Section of Kadokawa Corporation conducted a national internet survey of more than 10,000 persons from five to sixty-nine years of age in 2016 and estimated that approximately 32 percent of the relevant population were anime viewers – less than a third. Their ‘core group’ members, who watched six pieces or more per week and most likely purchased anime-related goods, formed merely 15.9 percent of all the anime viewers.4 4. Otaku is a notion which ori

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