Japan is not only the oldest society in the world today, but also the oldest society to have ever existed. This aging trend, however, presents many challenges to contemporary Japan, as it permeates all areas of life, from the economy and welfare to social cohesion and population decline. Nobody is more affected by these changes than the young generation. This book studies Japanese youth in the aging society in detail. It analyses formative events and cultural reactions. Themes include employment, parenthood, sexuality, but also art, literature and language, thus demonstrating how the younger generation can provide insights into the future of Japanese society more generally. This book argues that the prolonged crisis resulted in a commonly shared destabilization of thoughts and attitudes and that this has shaped a new generation that is unlike any other in post-war Japan. Presenting an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of the aging trend and what it implies for young Japanese, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well cultural anthropology and demography.

Based on extensive survey data, this book examines how the population of Japan has experienced and processed three decades of rapid social change from the highly egalitarian high growth economy of the 1980s to the economically stagnating and demographically shrinking gap society of the 2010s. It discusses social attitudes and values towards, for example, work, gender roles, family, welfare and politics, highlighting certain subgroups which have been particularly affected by societal changes. It explores social consciousness and concludes that although many Japanese people identify as middle class, their reasons for doing so have changed over time, with the result that the optimistic view prevailing in the 1980s, confident of upward mobility, has been replaced by people having a much more realistic view of their social status.

Globally, private universities enrol one in three of all higher education students. In Japan, which has the second largest higher education system in the world in terms of overall expenditure, almost 80% of all university students attend private institutions. According to some estimates up to 40% of these institutions are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This book offers a detailed historical, sociological, and ethnographic analysis of this important, but largely under-studied, category of private universities as family business. It examines how such universities in Japan have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of 'inbuilt' strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education systems and in predictions regarding the capacity of universities to cope with dramatic changes in their operating environment. This book offers a new perspective on recent changes in the Japanese higher education sector and contributes to an emerging literature on private higher education and family business across the world.

This book bridges the gap between historical research on Japan and the field of childhood history by writing children and childhood into the general historical record of the Meiji period. To explore the widely varying circumstances of childhood during the Japanese transition to modernity, the volume presents survey studies and “snapshots” of historical moments by authors from Europe, Japan, and North America. These histories of children and childhood address various thematic aspects, from birth and child-rearing to the representation of childhood in literary works, and these are approached from differing angles, in terms of theoretical perspectives and methodology. The contributions display a particular awareness for the problem of sources in writing the history of childhood and youth. In doing so, they provide precious insights into children’s living circumstances and notions of childhood, also beyond the urban centres of evolving modern Japan. Exploring a wealth of sources including autobiographies, educational essays, government documents, children’s literature, youth journals and medical manuals, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese history, children's studies, the history of education, and social policy more broadly.

Presenting new approaches and results previously inaccessible in English, the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics provides an insight into the language and society of contemporary Japan from a fresh perspective. While it was once believed that Japan was a linguistically homogenous country, research over the past two decades has shown Japan to be a multilingual and sociolinguistically diversifying country. Building on this approach, the contributors to this handbook take this further, combining Japanese and western approaches alike and producing research which is relevant to twenty-first century societies. Organised into five parts, the sections covered include: The languages and language varieties of Japan. The multilingual ecology. Variation, style and interaction. Language problems and language planning. Research overviews. With contributions from across the field of Japanese sociolinguistics, this handbook will prove very useful for students and scholars of Japanese Studies, as well as sociolinguists more generally.

Téma kontinuity a změn v Asii je obecně přijímané jako důležitý a složitý problém. Asie je považována za jednu z nejdynamičtěji se rozvíjejících částí světa. Rychlé proměny Asijských ekonomických, politických a sociálních či kulturních systémů poskytují řadu námětů ke zkoumání v takových oblastech, jako je antropologie, etnografie, lingvistika a literární studia, či v takových vědních oborech, jako jsou sociální, politická a ekonomická studia. Obzvláště po několika letech opatření proti šíření Covid-19 je důležité porozumět tomu, co zůstalo stejné, či co se mohlo změnit a být navždy ztraceno. The theme of ‘continuity and change’ is generally acknowledged as an important and a highly complex problem. Asia is considered as one of the most dynamically changing parts of the worlds. The quick economic, political and socio-cultural changes are generating interesting topics in those scholarly fields such as anthropology, ethnography, linguistics and literary studies, or in other fields of social, political and economic science. Especially after the years of anti-Covid 19, measures it is important to understand what remains stable or what had been changed and may be lost forever.

Mired in national crises since the early 1990s, Japan has had to respond to a rapid population decline; the Asian and global financial crises; the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; the COVID-19 pandemic; China’s economic rise; threats from North Korea; and massive public debt. In Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State, established specialists in a variety of areas use a coherent set of methodologies, aligning their sociological, public policy, and political science and international relations perspectives, to account for discrepancies between official rhetoric and policy practice and actual perceptions of decline and crisis in contemporary Japan. Each chapter focuses on a distinct policy field to gauge the effectiveness and the implications of political responses through an analysis of how crises are narrated and used to justify policy interventions. Transcending boundaries between issue areas and domestic and international politics, these essays paint a dynamic picture of the contested but changing nature of social, economic, and, ultimately political institutions as they constitute the transforming Japanese state.

Young people in East Asia are increasingly experiencing a prolonged transition to adulthood. They are spending longer in school, entering the labour market later, and getting married later still. This protracted young adulthood interacts with forces of both tradition and modernization, as social and economic changes generate profound effects on the transition from school to work, on family formation, on personal relationships, and on subjective well-being. Journey to Adulthood explores the special characteristics of young adulthood in East Asia. It uses Taiwan as illustrative example, with comparative findings from its East Asian neighbours Japan, Korea and Hong Kong. It describes the particular growth context of a millennial generation, and the challenges they face as they attempt to balance family formation, personal development and entry into a market economy. Edited by Chin-Chun Yi and Ming-Chang Tsai, this collection helps us to understand the structural configurations East Asian young adults collectively represent. Taking a cross-cultural and comparative perspective, it enables meaningful policy suggestions on family dynamics, educational strategy, and health and well-being across the globe. Dr Chin-Chun Yi and Dr Ming-Chang Tsai both work within the Institute of Sociology, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

This book examines how the young in Northeast Asia engage with the political, especially in terms of the production, reformulation, or contestation of their national identities. Through case studies covering China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Taiwan, the contributions provide a study of the online spaces where youth engage with current debates regarding national identities. The book also unpacks the distinctive forms of expression and negotiation of national identities favoured by younger generations across Northeast Asia and asks questions specifically raised by their political mobilisation. For example, how their public mobilisation for a given cause has forced them to rethink their place in national and global communities. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of East Asian culture and politics, media studies and youth studies. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

‘Postmodern animism’ first emerged in grassroots Japan in the aftermath of mercury poisoning in Minamata and the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Fusing critiques of modernity with intangible cultural heritages, it represents a philosophy of the life-world, where nature is a manifestation of a dynamic life force where all life is interconnected. This new animism, it is argued, could inspire a fundamental rethink of the human-nature relationship. The book explores this notion of animism through the lens of four prominent figures in Japan: animation film director Miyazaki Hayao, sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko, writer Ishimure Michiko, and Minamata fisherman-philosopher Ogata Masato. Taking a biographical approach, it illustrates how these individuals moved towards the conclusion that animism can help humanity survive modernity. It contributes to the Anthropocene discourse from a transcultural and transdisciplinary perspective, thus addressing themes of nature and spirituality, whilst also engaging with arguments from mainstream social sciences. Presenting a new perspective for a post-anthropocentric paradigm, Animism in Contemporary Japan will be useful to students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, philosophy and Japanese Studies.