There is a considerable amount of literature which suggests that the basic cleavages in Japan are not those between social classes but between corporate groups. It has been argued that in Japan “it is not really a matter of workers struggling against capitalists or managers but of Company A ranged against Company B.” Some go so far as to claim that the Western notions of class and stratification do not find expression in the daily realities of the Japanese. Others contend that class-consciousness is weaker in Japan than in Western countries. Often-publicized government statistics which show that some 90 percent of Japanese regard themselves as belonging to the “middle class” appear to bear out this line of thinking.

However, an increasing number of studies appear to demonstrate that these claims may represent only the tatemae side of Japanese society. Some comparative quantitative studies suggest that Japanese patterns of socioeconomic inequality show no systematic deviance from those of other countries of advanced capitalism. Income inequality is higher in Japan than in Western countries (see Table 1.3). The overall social mobility rate in Japan is basically similar to patterns observed in other industrialized societies, as Table 2.1 shows. Stratification analysts break the observed gross mobility from one generation to another into two parts: forced mobility, which is engendered by changes in the structural distributions of occupational positions, and pure or net mobility, which reflects the degree to which individuals are able to move from one occupational category to another, independently of structural changes.