ABSTRACT
With the abdication of Emperor Akihito, the Heisei period ended in April 2019. With its era name meaning “peace everywhere”, the Heisei period started out bright and optimistic in 1989, at the peak of economic growth and a shared consciousness of Japan as an equalitarian mass middle-class society. Economic stagnation and demographic aging have triggered – but were also caused by – tremendous transformations that the Japanese society underwent throughout various societal dimensions over the past 30 years. The Heisei period was not only an era of transformation. After the dramatic upward shift in social status from the 1950s to the late 1980s, when high economic growth as well as educational expansion led Japan to transform itself from an agricultural to a more service-oriented society, the three decades of Heisei are a period throughout which the occupational structure of Japanese society became stabilized to some extent.
