Japan's New Middle Class; the Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb

Japan's New Middle Class; the Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb PDF Author: Ezra F. Vogel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520020924
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Report on a social research field study, conducted in the Tokyo urban area between 1958 and 1960, on the emergence to middle class status of the nonmanual worker and his family in Japan - covers family budget and income, the role of educational level and the examination system, child care practices, living conditions, the social status of women, the impact of social change, etc. Bibliography pp. 301 to 305 and statistical tables.

Japan's New Middle Class; the Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb

Japan's New Middle Class; the Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb PDF Author: Ezra F. Vogel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520020924
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Report on a social research field study, conducted in the Tokyo urban area between 1958 and 1960, on the emergence to middle class status of the nonmanual worker and his family in Japan - covers family budget and income, the role of educational level and the examination system, child care practices, living conditions, the social status of women, the impact of social change, etc. Bibliography pp. 301 to 305 and statistical tables.

Japan's New Middle Class

Japan's New Middle Class PDF Author: Ezra F. Vogel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This classic study on the sociology of Japan remains the only in-depth treatment of the Japanese middle class. Now in a fiftieth-anniversary edition that includes a new foreword by William W. Kelly, this seminal work paints a rich and complex picture of the life of the salaryman and his family. In 1958, Suzanne and Ezra Vogel embedded themselves in a Tokyo suburb, living among and interviewing six middle-class families regularly for a year. Tracing the rapid postwar economic growth that led to hiring large numbers of workers who were provided lifelong employment, the authors show how this phenomenon led to a new social class the salaried men and their families. It was a well-educated group that prepared their children rigorously for the same successful corporate or government jobs they held. Secure employment and a rising standard of living enabled this new middle class to set the dominant pattern of social life that influenced even those who could not share it, a pattern that remains fundamental to Japanese society today."

Japan's New Middle Class

Japan's New Middle Class PDF Author: Ezra F. Vogel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520313682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

Democratizing Luxury

Democratizing Luxury PDF Author: Annika A. Culver
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082489670X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese companies at key historical moments assigned value, or "luxury," to mass-produced products as an important business model. Japanese name-brand luxury evolved alongside a consumer society emerging in the late nineteenth century, with iconic companies whose names became associated with quality and style. At the same time, Western ideas of modernity merged with earlier artisanal ideals to create Japanese connotations of luxury for readily accessible products. Businesses manufactured items at all price points to increase consumer attainability, while starkly curtailing production for limited editions to augment desirability. Between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, control over family disposable income transformed Japanese middle-class women into an important market. Growth of purchasing power among women corresponded with Japanese goods diffusing throughout the empire, and globally after the Asia-Pacific war (1931–1945). This book offers case studies that examine affordable luxury consumer items often advertised to women, including drinks, beauty products, fashion, and timepieces. Japanese companies have capitalized on affordable luxury since a flourishing domestic mercantile economy began in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), showcasing brand-name shops, renowned artisans, and mass-produced woodblock prints by famous artists. In the late nineteenth century, personalized service expanded within department stores like Mitsukoshi, Shiseidō cosmetic counters, and designer boutiques. Shiseidō now globally markets invented traditions of omotenashi, Japanese ”values” of hospitality expressed in purchasing and consuming its products. In postwar times, when a thriving democracy and middle-class were tied to greater disposable income and consumerism, companies rebuilt a growing consumer base among cautious shoppers: democratizing luxury at reasonable prices and maintaining business patterns of accessibility, high quality, and exemplary service. Nationalism amid economic success soon blended with myths of unique Japanese identity in a mass consumer society, suffused by commodity fetishism with widely available brand names. As the first comprehensive history of iconic Japanese name brands and their unique connotations of luxury and accessibility in modern Japan and elsewhere, Democratizing Luxury explores company histories and reveals strategies that lead customers to consume these alluring commodities.

In Pursuit of Status

In Pursuit of Status PDF Author: Denise Potrzeba Lett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea’s contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status. Lett shows that Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life, and analyzes strategies for claiming high status in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage.

Salaryman Masculinity

Salaryman Masculinity PDF Author: Tomoko Hidaka
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004183035
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book of the Japanese hegemonic salaryman masculinity demonstrates the way in which the participants construct their masculinities through their life course. Their narratives reveal their contradictions, doubts, dilemmas, anxieties and resignation behind the fa ade of their confidence and pride.

Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan

Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan PDF Author: Romit Dasgupta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415683289
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book uses the figure of the salaryman to explore masculinity in Japan by examining the salaryman as a gendered construct, and is one of the first to focus on the men within Japanese corporate culture through a gendered lens. Not only does this add to the emerging literature on masculinity in Japan, but given the important role Japanese corporate culture has played in Japan's emergence as an industrial power, Romit Dasgupta's research offers a new way of looking both at Japanese business culture, and more generally at important changes in Japanese society in recent years.

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan PDF Author: Wolfram Manzenreiter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317352726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Contemporary Japan is in a state of transition, caused by the forces of globalization that are derailing its ailing economy, stalemating the political establishment and generating alternative lifestyles and possibilities of the self. Amongst this nascent change, Japanese society is confronted with new challenges to answer the fundamental question of how to live a good life of meaning, purpose and value. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and original research, considers how specific groups of Japanese people view and strive for the pursuit of happiness. It examines the importance of relationships, family, identity, community and self-fulfilment, amongst other factors. The book demonstrates how the act of balancing social norms and agency is at the root of the growing diversity of experiencing happiness in Japan today.

Reworking Japan

Reworking Japan PDF Author: Nana Okura Gagné
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes. Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

Comfort Women and Post-Occupation Corporate Japan

Comfort Women and Post-Occupation Corporate Japan PDF Author: Caroline Norma
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135118525X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book provides an overview of the Japanese sex industry in the years of Japan’s postwar economic boom. It argues that the origins of gender inequality in contemporary Japan resulted from the policies put in place during this period, when there was instituted a “sexual contract” which provided male salarymen whose work was arduous, underpaid and subject to military-like organisation with easy access to women’s bodies, through workplace getaway trips to hot springs resorts, hostess bars, and prostitution tourism to South Korea, as sexual inducement to acquiesce to their own exploitation. Japan’s economic growth, the book thereby contends, came at the price not just of environmental and labour degradation, but also gender inequality.