Class and Social Consciousness in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

As the “world society” has made us feel its reality in various ways, the class structure should nowadays be grasped in the global scale rather than in domains of national societies. The class structure in contemporary Japan could be seen in this perspective to appear relatively flat and resembling to that of the ideal type of “civil society”, because the Japanese society itself has got into the “Center” of the imperialist world system and climbed up to the upper part of the global class structure through the whole processes of postwar rapid economic growth. So-called “middle class consciousness” which has been said to be spreading among the Japanese people seems to be a reflection of this “diamond type” of class structure. Class consciousness, however, should be seen and investigated not in short-term and regional perspectives but in an essentially long-term and world-wide one (even national and/or advanced societies are regional in the global perspective). Morever, if scrutinized, there are considerable differences by class and/or stratum not only of intensity but of directions in the social attitudes especially about the situations of life space outside workplace and the political world. It is true that the Japanese society today is integrated pretty well by a logic of Japanese industrialism (so-called welfare corporatism) and the most Japanese workers are almost possessed by the “ethos” of privatism and/or individualism. But, as some readiness for social activism are also observable however weak, it can be said that some conditions may exist for some part of working classes to become enough active to start new social movements if any anti-Establishment organizations exercise effective leadership from the top.