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Women and Family in Contemporary Japan By Susan D. Holloway Cambridge University Press. 2010. 256 pages. $90 cloth, $28.99 paper. Women's employment opportunities and status in Japanese society, combined with [...]

Expansion of global production in the automotive industry has made America's local plants increasingly racially varied but also more financially pressured. However, research on global firms under financial pressure that focuses on the workplace dynamics of managers and production workers of different races and nationalities remains limited. This article examines the organizational processes of masculinity enactment of three groups of men—Japanese managers, American managers, and American production workers—in a financially pressured Japanese auto-parts company. It describes how Japanese managers rationalized account manipulation as a profit recovery scheme and American workers validated this approach as being self-sacrificing and representative of heroic leadership; white American managers asserted their authority over engineers, women, and Japanese men by using intimidation and emasculation; and a production worker displayed his compensated masculinity by forcing his team to engage in hiding defective products. This article discusses the implications of these acts and their legitimization of unethical behaviors with the goal of increasing corporate profits from the perspectives of masculinities and of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the experiences of diverse groups of migrants in a highly developed non-Western society: Japan. Using critical analysis of literature and semi-structural interview data with 50 Japanese nationals and 109 foreign migrants, it explores how Japan, which sees itself as a relatively racially homogeneous society, operates in response to increasing demands for migrants, and how the structures of the state and interactions of dominant and migrant groups affect migrants’ security. It shows the salience of glocal racial ideologies creating an uneven terrain of migration for migrants from different parts of the world. Specifically, the Japanese state grants work visas for highly-skilled and specialized labor migrants as it maintains that it only accepts highly-skilled labor migrants, while opening a side-door to recruit Japanese descendants and trainees from the Global South as low-skilled laborers. This bifurcated visa structure reinforces racial hierarchies, where those who are perceived to be from Western societies are deemed as superior foreigners, while those who are from non-Western societies are seen as strangers who are a potential threat to the country’s moral standards. This hierarchy shapes their level of human security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]