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This paper explores how the interplay between family and other social institutions shape the ideal of good enough motherhood in contemporary Japan. Special focus is placed on the structure of intersections among the family, work, and education (formal and informal) and how the social policies that overarch these institutions define the roles of mothers in society. It will first illustrate the development of recent policies related to work and family, stirred by the concerns for fertility decline. The following sections will describe the attitudinal changes of young mothers toward their roles, and how the demand for ?quality child? is imposing conflicting standards and sending contradicting messages ?with loving and nurturing stay-at-home-mom as the prototype? to individual woman. The social policies to reconcile work-and-family conflict, though they seem comprehensive and supportive, are not likely to have large effect, as they have not accompanied changes in the structure of labor market and in the gender roles within family. Also, government initiatives to support parenting in general and to restructure the school education have been yielding paradoxical outcomes because they are imposing additional agenda for the parents (mothers) to carry out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of teachers in shaping immigrants' reception into the host society, including influencing immigrants' ethnic identities and adaptation. Drawing on participant observation and intensive interviews, I analyze the relations between immigrant Japanese-Peruvian parents and Japanese teachers at an elementary school in central Japan. Japanese Peruvians have migrated to Japan seeking employment and wealth in their ethnic homeland, a prospect made possible by the Japanese state's preferential granting of visas to members of the Japanese diaspora. Despite these diasporic ties, Japanese Peruvians find themselves marked not as Japanese but as foreigners. In the school, teachers question parents' commitment to living in Japan, and challenge parents with written oaths of allegiance and questions about their future migration plans, challenges that manifest themselves as loyalty oaths and loyalty tests. This reception weakens immigrants' ties to the host society and strengthens their attachment to the homeland, which, in turn, spurs more host hostility. That Japan is both the host society and the ancestral homeland for Japanese Peruvians complicates notions of home and belonging in this case, highlighting contradictions between the Japanese state's preference for ethnic Japanese migrants and the inability of those migrants to claim a Japanese identity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The form of institutional linkages between school and employers in the youth labor market has changed over a decade-long economic recession in Japan. The current paper addresses the question of why the institutional linkages between a women's college and large Japanese firms in the secondary labor market have survived despite the long-term tightening of labor demand. From the perspective of network theory, I argue that employers value the information about applicants that is conducive to reducing personnel management costs, and which can only be reliably obtained through the linkages. Employers expect the school to use such information to screen nominees. By using the data from the applicant pool of the school nomination system, the results showed that the school tends to nominate candidates who are living with their parents (cost less for housing fringe benefit), and none of those who lived alone were actually hired. On the other hand, a candidate's academic performance and personality evaluation, which could also be obtained through the more formal recruitment process, was not a significant predictor of being hired. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new method for a statistical simulation of macrosocietal counterfactual situations In particular, the method is concerned with decomposing group differences in the mean of a variable into various within-group and between-group components with respect to group categories of intermediary variables. In modeling counterfactual situations, I juxtapose two different mechanisms, the mechanism of realizing the counterfactual state that deviates least from the existing state, and the mechanism of holding other irrelevant-to-counterfactual relations of variables unchanged, and demonstrate that despite the big difference in the mechanisms, the two counterfactual models generally yield highly consistent outcomes. As an illustrative example, the paper analyzes gender inequality in hourly wages in Japan and thereby demonstrates the usefulness of the new method for deriving policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I pose two fundamental questions about lifetime employment in Japan: How big is it? And how is it changing? I examine various concepts and methods and conclude that lifetime employment covers roughly 20 percent of the Japanese labor force: (i) The ex-ante measure of the core workforce consisting of male standard workers in large firms and in government, is 19%; (ii) The proportion of lifetime workers defined as those in the age group 50 to 54 who have never left their employers since school graduation, is 18%; (iii) The 30 year survival probability of job separations is 20%. Yet the lifetime employment rate varies considerably by gender, firm size and education level. Women do not benefit from lifetime employment while men in large firms and in government are most likely to be covered by it. At its extreme, the proportion of lifetime workers among male university graduates in large firms is 55% and the 30 year survival probability of male workers in government is 65%. The evidence is mixed regarding changes in lifetime employment. Overall, the decline in the core workforce, standard employment and full-time employment suggests a decline in lifetime employment. On the other hand, the proportion of lifetime workers and the probability of surviving job separations show an upward trend or no change. My interpretation is that although the population of workers who are ex-ante covered by lifetime employment may be shrinking, the likelihood of job separations has remained stable for those who are already in the system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of the gender equal employment opportunity policy in Japan, I intend to examine the relationship between legal reforms and attitudinal changes. Even as the low fertility rate is an urgent issue in Japan today, the state has implemented policies designed to increase women?s employment ? policies which may well fuel further fertility decline. Women?s participation in the formal labor market is becoming extremely important in Japan today. Does Japan resolve the issue of traditional gender roles which interacts with recent social challenges ? employed mothers, fertility decline, shortage of labor force, and immigration? When and how do attitudes toward women?s employment transform to international norms? There is a contradiction between legal reforms and gender role expectations in contemporary Japan. Diffusion of international legal norms explains why such a contradiction, or decoupling, is present; it is internationally normative that modern nation-states have a gender equal employment opportunity law. My research focuses on how the relationship between legal reforms and attitudinal changes shifted over time. I intend to delve into the process of legal reforms and social norm transformation in Japan since the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether there are differences in men?s and women?s use of computers and the Internet in the U.S. and Japan and how any such gender gaps have changed over time. We focus on these two countries because information technology is widely used in both but there are substantial differences in institutions and social organizations. We use microdata from several surveys during 1997-2001 to examine differences and trends in computer and Internet usage in the two countries. Our results indicate that there were significant gender differences in computer and Internet usage in both countries during the mid 1990s. By 2001, these gender differences had disappeared or were even reversed in the U.S. but remained in Japan. People not currently working have lower levels of IT use and skills in both countries regardless of gender, but working women in Japan have lower levels of IT use and skills than working men, a difference that generally does not occur in the U.S. This suggests that employment status per se does not play a large role in the gender gap in Japan, but type of employment does. The prevalence of nonstandard employment among female workers in Japan accounts for much of the gender gap in IT use and skills in that country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the process by which a sex-segregating employment practice was institutionalized, in Japan, as a consequence of a legal intervention aimed at preventing such practices: the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985. The failure of this law to change the status quo has been attributed to its vagueness and weakness, but this does not explain why companies responded in the particular way they did. Instead of quietly and passively ignoring the toothless law, they engaged in active and public re-conceptualizing and formalizing, and created a new and ultimately controversial practice: the two-track system that assigns most female new hires to a non-promotional track and most male new hires to a promotional track. Extending a neo-institutionalist approach to the relation between the law and organizations, I propose that organizations, when their internal operation is least compatible with the goal of the law, invent a response that allows them to continue to operate as they had before. I find Japanese companies, which were constrained by sex-segregated workplaces, conceptualized the two-track system as a legitimate response to the law. Event-history analysis, using a sample of 743 Japanese companies, shows that, between the enactment of the EEO Law in 1985 and its toughened revision in 1999, Japanese companies that relied most heavily on the sex-based internal labor markets were most likely to adopt the two-track system. This shows how firms can create a new structure that is procedurally neutral but decoupled from the substantive goals of the regulation they are responding to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifetime employment and seniority system have been characterized as Japanese employment system. Some scholars (e.g., Aoki 1988 and Koike 1998) argue that the development of firm-specifick skills (e.g., intellectual skills) in Japanese corporations allow them to sustain the system. However, since Heisei Recession (the early 1990s), Japanese corporations started to abandon the employment system. In this paper, by using Working Person Survey conducted Working institute (2006), I will examine two questions: 1) What causes firm-specific skills in Japanese corporations and 2) How powerful the effects of firm specific skills on promotion speed and careers are in comparison with those of each of cultural and institutional variables on promotion speed and careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on longitudinal interview research among persons living in transitional housing programs in Tokyo and Los Angeles to explore how experiences of the stigma of homelessness are shaped culturally. I find that a stronger stigma of homelessness in Japan combines with generational factors and rigid gender norms (the "male breadwinner" role) to prevent individuals experiencing homelessness to turn to friends and family for assistance in trying to exit homelessness. Also, the stigma of place in terms of residence in a program for the homeless serves as a greater barrier to employment in Tokyo. While drawing on familial and friendship ties is a primary means to exit homelessness in Los Angeles, in Tokyo individuals most often fend for themselves in the low-wage labor market. This renders exits more tenuous there given unstable work and a lack of social support. This comparative analysis contributes to the study of culture and poverty by demonstrating how stigma attached to disadvantaged statuses can vary across cultures via how it affects access to social capital and employment. It also informs urban sociology by bringing to the fore the role of culture in shaping local manifestations of inequality amid globalization, and highlighting how the stigma of place can vary according to locale. Last, it criticizes studies of homelessness by demonstrating that efforts to exit homelessness represent the major focus in addressing stigma of the condition rather than more accommodative management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese system of school-work has been widely admired for the strong communication and recruitment relationships that exist between high schools and employers. Building on theoretical literature on employment systems and educational institutions, we develop a framework for understanding the macro-level conditions that fostered the effectiveness of Japan's high school-work system up until the early 1990s. These conditions included a stratified educational system, a large supply of high-quality high school graduates, and firm-internal labor markets for blue-collar workers in large firms. We use original data from a sample of urban high schools to analyze how employers' recruitment patterns changed in the 1990s and beyond. The results of that analysis and a counterfactual analysis suggest that recent changes in Japanese employment institutions have had a significant impact on weakening school-employer relationships. We suggest implications of the Japanese case for school-work processes in other postindustrial societies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of research have consistently identified fundamental ethical and normative concepts that are commonly deemed to be critical aspects to Japanese culture. These phenomena influence Japanese behavior in ways that have ramifications for the economy. We discuss how the traditional concepts of wa, enryo, giri, and amae affect Japanese thinking about what constitutes appropriate human relations involving work and employment. The consequences of these cultural concepts lead to greater income inequality by providing naturally occurring social constraints on unbridled market forces. While analyses of rising income inequality in the U.S. and Europe stress how government institutions may sometimes impinge on market forces in order to reduce inequality, our analysis demonstrates that culture is also an important albeit neglected factor in determining the level of income inequality. Ironically, greater status inequality in Japan also has the effect of reducing its level of income inequality especially as compared to the U.S. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]