ABSTRACT
Japan, at first sight at least, is an ideal version of professional society. It is on the face of it a meritocracy in which people find their way through a relentlessly competitive educational and selective system to career ladders in government and the best corporations. Vertical hierarchies in the administrative and corporate bureaucracies have replaced ‘class’—or what passed for class after the feudal castes or status groups of Tokugawa Japan-and this vertical structuring (tate shakai in Chie Nakane’s formulation)1 reaches down to the blue-collar workers. The employees of the large corporations are guaranteed lifetime employment at salaries rising with seniority and length of service. The wa or harmony arising from the resulting high-trust industrial relations has enabled Japanese industry to create an ‘economic miracle’ and make ‘Japan Number One’, if not in aggregate GNP then in national income per capita at current rates of exchange (though not, as we shall see, in purchasing power). The consequent massive trade surplus is enabling Japan, despite the world slump of the 1990s, to buy up factories, mines, forests, banks, and real estate in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australasia and build up some of the largest multinational corporations in the world.
