AN INTRODUCTION TO JAPANESE SOCIETY, 3rd ed.

AN INTRODUCTION TO JAPANESE SOCIETY, 3rd ed. By Yoshio Sugimoto. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi, 345 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-0-521-70519-6.

This is a remarkable book. Yoshio Sugimoto has expanded on previous editions of this work, insisting more than before on internal variations in Japanese society and culture and bringing his data up to date, to 2010. The main theme is the mix of centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in contemporary Japanese society.

After an introduction entitled The Japan Phenomenon in the Social Sciences, in which he defends the position that indigenous categories must be taken into account within a scientific framework in order to avoid Western cultural imperialism, he proceeds to analyze Japanese society in eight chapters dealing with class and stratification, geographical and generational variations, work in what he calls cultural capitalism, education, gender stratification and the family, ethnicity and minorities, collusion and competition in the establishment, and popular culture and everyday life, followed by a concluding chapter on civil society and what he calls friendly authoritarianism.

The...