ABSTRACT
The social stratification and social mobility survey (SSM), the main source of our data, was first conducted in 1955, and since then has been repeated every ten years. In 1952, the Occupation following World War II officially ceased,l and in 1955, when the first SSM survey was implemented, the present political system of Japan, known as 'the '55 regime', was established. The data collected in the SSM survey allow us to cover the sequential changes in Japanese political attitudes from the very inception of the current system. Although Japanese society has experienced drastic changes in politics since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the modern Japanese state emerged, we can use the SSM data to investigate the political attitudes of the Japanese only in the last phase of this period. But the advantage of the SSM survey is that it enables us to examine the development of political attitudes over the entire post-war period using data gathered under an identical analytical framework.
