The author, Hashimoto, has been a solitary voice in the social stratification analysis of Japanese society for the last two decades presenting its class structure in Marxian terms. His models and findings have recently attracted much attention with an increasing number of sociologists demonstrating increased inequality and robust class reproduction in Japan. This study is based on the Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) survey conducted in 1995 and the previous SSM surveys dating back to 1955, massive data sets collected by teams of class and social stratification experts in Japan. The book investigates four major classes - capitalist, working, new and old middle - and their characteristics and mobility patterns in terms of income, work, social network, leisure activity, gender relations and voting behavior.

About Editors and Authors

HASHIMOTO Kenji is a Japanese sociologist whose research focuses on social hierarchy theory. He is currently Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, a position he took up in 2013. He was born in Ishikawa Prefecture and is a graduate of the Faculty of Education, University of Tokyo. He completed his PhD at the University of Tokyo, and has previously served at Shizuoka University as Professor of Sociology, and at Musashi University.