Class Structure in Contemporary Japan.

CLASS STRUCTURE IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN. By Kenji Hashimoto. Melbourne (Australia): Trans Pacific Press. 2003. xi, 254 pp. (Tables, figures, graphs, charts.) US$69.95, cloth, ISBN 1-8768-43-659; US$29.95, paper, ISBN 1-876-843-713.

Over the past few decades, casual observers have come to regard Japan as a society largely devoid of the socio-economic divisions that characterize other industrial societies, in which a comfortably affluent "middle-class" lifestyle has obliterated class divisions. Kenji Hashimoto challenges this view by bringing class back into the analysis to reveal the extent to which inequality pervades Japan today.

While he draws inspiration mainly from Marx, Hashimoto chooses to distance himself from what he sees as the chiliastic aspects of Marx's ideology, such as the inevitability of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the realization of a classless society. His reasons for this stem from more than the global collapse of socialist governments in the 1990s. In an informative historiographic chapter on social analysis in postwar Japan, he emphasizes the stultifying influence that such ideology, wedded as it was to the platforms of the Japanese Communist Party, had for class analysis. Declaring his ideas "Marxian" rather than "Marxist," his project is thus to rescue class from such political and ideological encumbrances.

Following the contributions of theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas, Harry Braverman, John Roemer and Erik Olin Wright, Hashimoto proposes a four-class paradigm, in which an "old middle class" of small-scale business owners stands outside the modern, capitalist mode of production consisting of "capitalists" (owners of large businesses), the "new middle class" (salaried managerial and technical workers), and the "working class" (manual and semi-skilled workers, and female clerical staff). Using the rich statistical data of the Social Stratification and Mobility Survey-conducted every ten years since 1955--Hashimoto explores education levels, intra-generational and intergenerational class mobility rates, and even, to a lesser extent, political sentiments and views of society among each of these classes. While many of his observations may not surprise close observers of contemporary Japanese society, Hashimoto provides clear, statistical evidence that the capitalist and new middle classes have become increasingly closed to those from other classes. This holds true for both males, for whom upward class mobility was typically a result of educational advancement or success in climbing the corporate ladder, and for women, for whom marriage more than career advancement has supplied the means to upward class mobility.

Despite Hashimoto's often innovative use of abundant statistical data, his characterizations of the four classes he posits, their lifestyles and values leave the reader wanting more details. Aside from statistics on levels of education achieved, political parties supported, and general outlook on society and one's future, Hashimoto's reliance on the data contained in the Social Stratification and Mobility surveys leaves him with little material with which to provide insights into the lives and attitudes of individuals in these classes. The closest he comes to a case study is an analysis of the orientations toward life and work observed among the characters in a comic book series about the lives of workers at a medium-sized furniture factory. Although Hashimoto justifies this approach by claiming that the characters in "Tsurumoku Bachelor Dormitory" are representative of real-life factory operatives in similarly-sized enterprises, one wonders if interviews with actual workers might have revealed attitudes that were more ambiguous in relation to his arguments than those of the fictional characters. Finally, while Hashimoto distances himself from Marx's chiliasm, he devotes a final chapter to his own prescriptions for the problems of socio-economic inequality, based largely on the ideas of the economist Amartya Sen. This is a lot to attempt in only 19 pages, and the result is a rather unclear, hurried summary of what must be done to realize what Hashimoto calls a "new egalitarian society."

JEFFREY P. BAYLISS 

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.