The Japanese Middle Class - 中流階級

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The cultural observation mirrored and engendered the emergence of another important trend in the historiography of prewar Japan: the decentering of the state as a transformative force and the foregrounding of new social groups and individuals crucial to Japan’s modern social revolutions. It revealed the making of urban society, in particular the emergence of social icons, institutions, and ideologies that defined prewar Japanese society and, moreover, became enduring features of the twentieth-century Japanese social landscape. Their work centers on the emergence of a social group loosely termed the middle classes, a subject of historical inquiry that, until recently, was largely the province of scholars of postwar Japan. New modern social norms and ideals emerged, whether the twentieth-century incarnations of family and childhood, ideals of masculinity and femininity, or practices of leisure and consumerism, in the urban milieu of so-called prewar middle-class society. Their focus, temporally speaking, is the late Meiji and Taisho¯ years (1890s to 1920s) and, geographically speaking, Tokyo. Their human focus is a new group of academicians and professionals who functioned as modernity’s middlemen. Neither representatives of the state nor members of the everyday population, these people were educated elites who became spokespeople for and shapers of a new middle-class society. Whether public intellectuals, university professors, child psychologists, or magazine editors, they investigated topics ranging from domestic architecture to sexology to hygiene, often as discrete fields of study (or gaku); disseminated their opinions to a larger public, often in the pages of mass circulation magazines and books; and saw their views consumed by an emerging middle-class population. In the process, these influential figures shaped the urban imagination and transformed the way people thought, acted, and behaved.



It was characterized, for instance, by the details ‘‘the public construction of the private sphere,’’ as a cadre of early twentieth century intellectuals, architects, and reformers worked to redesign domestic interiors and, in the process, reshape the notion of family and home for a new Japan. Crucial to the influence of modernity’s middlemen were new urban institutions, sites where communities and hierarchies were (re)produced, modern forms of knowledge disseminated, and modern identities fashioned. The mass media was an institution critical to the building and bounding of a middle-class society, and scholars such as Earl Kinmonth, James Huffman, Barbara Sato, and Jordan Sand have begun to examine the role of the mass media as both mirror and maker of social change. Other urban institutions, from the cafe to the department store to higher schools, also played an important yet underexamined role in stratifying society, creating social groups, and offering individuals new sources of identity so-called - the prewar institution of elite higher schools (ko¯to¯ gakko¯) ‘‘eased the transition from government by a hereditary feudal social class to government by a new middle-class status group of academic achievers.’’





A pre-1945 middle class, while tending to focus on the words of its spokespeople, has nonetheless rendered a picture of prewar society full of heretofore unrecognized opportunities for mobility – geographic, social, economic, educational – among a widening swath of the population. This type of work broadens our understanding of modern social change, for it highlights the newfound prospects that modernity offered to the individual. By focusing on the emergence of the ideal of risshin shusse (‘‘success in life’’) and the iconic male corporate worker known as the ‘‘salaryman,’’ the prewar Japanese society was a land where meritocratic principles mixed with dreams of social mobility to produce a stratum of individuals committed to getting ahead in the world. For these types, self-centered aspiration, not nationalist fervor, was the primary motivator of individual action. The field of women’s history has also brought to light women’s place as individual opportunists within urban society.

Japan’s modern social transformation oppressed women, newer work on women’s history; ‘‘Was there not room within the confines of the nation-state for urban women to find agency – be it in the form of changing fashions; attitudes toward work, love, and sexuality; marriage and the family; communication; or personal self-fulfillment?’. Namely there are various lives of women; the era housewives, working women, and modern girls and makes clear how modernity opened new avenues for individual expression and social advancement.


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