Japanese Journal of Sociology最新文献

In this article, we first review current Japanese urban and regional sociological literature on the COVID-19 pandemic. Some empirical studies of the current conditions, challenges, and difficulties faced by urban communities with the pandemic have loomed large. Although urban governance of infectious disease control has been generally an important research topic in urban studies, there is limited research on this aspect, particularly in Japan. Then, we briefly examine the urban governance of the pandemic in Japan, with a focus on the case of Osaka. Specifically, by analyzing the meeting minutes of Osaka Prefectural Government's countermeasure headquarters, we shed light on what issues were mainly dealt with and what main organizational actors were involved. The results indicate that, in addition to the administrative and political collaboration between central, prefectural, and municipal governments, the involvement of industrial and professional organizations (e.g., medical and economic associations) is particularly salient. This is because the governmental sector in Japan lacks a strong legal framework and a policy implementation capacity for infectious disease control. Consequently, it has requested (through intermediary associations) that residents, businesses, and hospitals cooperate with the government to control the spread of the virus. With regard to the characteristics of the Japanese urban governance of the pandemic, more comparative research between cities and regions in the country and those in other countries will be one of the important issues for future Japanese urban and regional sociology.

This article aims to grasp the influence of the pandemic on standard and non-standard employees in Japan and clarify its disparity between them. In 2020, there was an imbalance between the slight increase in standard employees and the massive loss of non-standard employees in the labour market. Non-standard employees' working hours were greatly reduced, often without allowances for absence, and hence their monthly income considerably diminished. As a result, their well-being also declined. Thus, the pandemic has affected employment, and its impact has been felt most strongly by non-standard employees. This does not mean that there is no discriminatory treatment of non-standard employees in firms. However, a closer look at the real picture reveals a variety of factors. In addition to the discriminatory treatment that is related to the Japanese employment system, a combination of managerial factors such as the shortage of standard employees, practical factors such as differences in wage systems, and the lack of sufficient information about the expansion of the coverage of the Employment Adjustment Subsidy, have placed non-standard employees at a huge disadvantage.

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the way of life of communities in Japan. This study examines the pandemic's impact by focusing on a popular activity in Japanese townships: participation in traditional festivals with roots dating back to before the Edo period. These festivals display the social customs of each community and their prosperity from the past to the present. Residents participating in local festivals gain a deep understanding of their personal importance within the community. However, many communities were forced to cancel their festivals in 2020 because of the pandemic. In 2021, many communities attempted to reinstate their traditional festivals, and some of them resumed the festivities with infection control measures in place. This case study examines how people resumed festivals in their communities and the conditions needed for them to reengage with their traditions. Focusing on the Nagahama Hikiyama Festival in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, we demonstrate the resilience of traditional communities in Japan. This study analyzes the reasons for and process of reviving and subsequently implementing traditional festivals and clarifies the positive factors contributing to the resumption of festivals in local communities. It examines the sources of resilience that have been cultivated in these communities and explains how their social capital bridges the gaps between local governments, schools, and broadcasters.

The last three decades have witnessed major institutional and structural transformations across both economically developed and developing countries. While many individuals and groups have benefited from these changes, they have simultaneously resulted in growing disparities between the haves and have-nots. The growing socioeconomic inequalities, however, have not been met with significant resistance and it has been even observed that people have become more tolerant of inequalities. This article explores the motivations behind tolerating socioeconomic inequality, and investigates how the tolerance of socioeconomic inequality has changed over the past 25 years, while also comparing it across very distinctive political and socioeconomic regimes. This study overcomes a gap in research by employing longitudinal, cross-sectional survey data to analyze temporal change in attitudes towards inequality. Fixed effects models are applied on five waves of World Values Survey data (1994–2020) on four distinctly different post-industrial countries: Japan, the People's Republic of China, South Korea, and the United States. The paper argues that, on an individual level, there is a tendency to accept inequality normalizing narratives and defend one's own self-interest, derived from one's structural position. This accounts for a considerable part of the variation in tolerance for socioeconomic inequality across these nations. The article concludes that trends in tolerating socioeconomic inequality have over time become more similar across these four countries with distinctly different political–economic regimes.

This article discusses how the approach towards sexual minorities has shifted from exclusion to inclusion between the mid-1980s and the present, and explores how the view that Japan is more tolerant of sexual minorities than the USA and Europe actually limits discussions on citizenship. An examination of the AIDS crisis and the Fuchu Youth Center court case in the 1980s and 1990s shows that gay men were regarded as a threat to national identity, seen to endanger Japan and whose sexuality was deemed to be unintelligible. In a word, their citizenship was denied. In the 2010s the ruling Liberal Democratic party issued a report on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues, which examined measures aimed at achieving equality for those who suffer from SOGI discrimination. While sexual minorities became an object of inclusion, only partial and circumscribed citizenship was granted. Although the report ostensibly aims to promote SOGI diversity, it relegates the existence of minorities to the private sphere, and limits diversity by demanding the acceptance of a “tolerant culture” predicated on heterosexism and gender norms. By positioning their diversity effort in Japan's “tolerant traditional culture,” the party inadvertently incorporates nationalism and renders it central to their approach towards SOGI diversity. This article concludes that the discourse that the Japanese state is tolerant of sexual minorities undermines the recognition of sexual minorities’ citizenship.

In recent years, the presence of minorities and their ways of life have become the subject of public interest in Japan. These minorities have experienced misrecognition and denial of their rights, and have been forced to live without benefiting from social redistribution. However, the lack of acceptance of minorities or their ways of life by majorities is being challenged. These aspects of recognition and redistribution are matters of universal human dignity. They are indispensable when considering issues of security in the lives of minorities. To achieve this security it is necessary to consider social citizenship. It described the way we are treated in society. In this article I examine the current state of social citizenship for minorities in Japan. An analysis of the contents and characteristics of social policy and social security systems in which social citizenship is embodied suggests that social citizenship in Japan is still strongly based on traditional social standards. This traditional orientation constitutes an obstacle to guaranteeing social citizenship for minorities. Moreover, the more serious inherent problem is that neither the concept of citizenship nor that of rights has been adequately accepted by the people. Given these points, it is unsurprising that the majority perceives minorities as deviant, and this situation has made guarantees of social citizenship for minorities much more difficult. A full guarantee of social citizenship for minorities requires further efforts to be made in human rights education and citizenship education.

The Japanese government started to accept semi-skilled foreign workers officially under the newly established tokutei ginō status in 2019, and national policies for supporting foreign residents are gradually being developed. However, it is unclear how the principles of tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence or co-living), the official slogan for supporting foreign residents since the mid-2000s, have changed as a result of recent policy trends. In this article, I examine the transformation of logics for legitimizing policies for foreign residents using discourse analysis of the official government documents on tabunka kyōsei. Previous critical studies have revealed that tabunka kyōsei is based on the logic of a binary opposition between “Japanese” and “foreigners”. This was combined with the neoliberal logic of “supports for self-reliance”, a paternalism that sees foreigners as being in need of support if they can live "just as" Japanese. This paternalism has prevented the development of recognizing the human rights and cultural differences of foreign residents as de facto immigrants. In addition, a logic has explicitly emerged in the tabunka kyōsei discourse at the end of the 2010s that sees foreigners as a threat to national security and that their acceptance should be strictly governed by the border control policy and socially controlled from the viewpoint of national interests. To deal with this situation, tabunka kyōsei must be recreated as a principle for recognizing foreign residents as immigrants and guaranteeing their human rights and cultural differences.

Increasing numbers of people are absent from work with a diagnosis of depression, and this has become a social problem in Japan. This study examines the hypothesis that this rise of depression-related absenteeism in Japan is influenced by social factors that contribute to the medicalization of social problems. Here, “social factors” are corporate systems that affect workers' psychology and mental health, media coverage and disease awareness campaigns by pharmaceutical companies, the intentions of patients' physicians, as well as psychopathological factors such as increased workplace stress. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews conducted with 50 workers who had a history of taking depression-related leaves of absence, and a re-diagnosis by six physicians of 10 representative cases derived from categorizations based on data from the interviews. The data were analyzed to identify social factors underlying the rise in depression-related absenteeism and the mechanisms of medicalization of social problems. Social factors found to affect the rise of depression-related absenteeism include mentalities whereby patients, seeking to escape from harsh work environments, may wish to receive a diagnosis of depression to take a leave of absence; and the intention of participants' physicians to provide the diagnosis out of sympathy even when official diagnostic criteria are not met. Thus, it would seem that work-related social problems that should normally be addressed by public policy measures are in fact being medicalized. Moreover, this study considers how “self-medicalization” by patients renders the solution to social problems more complex by contributing to the further medicalization of social problems.