Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb

Preferred Citation: Vogel, Ezra F. 
Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb, Second edition. 
Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1971 [c1963] 1971 1963. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8z09p23r/

Preferred Citation: Vogel, Ezra F. 
Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb, Second edition. 
Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1971 [c1963] 1971 1963. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8z09p23r/

TO OUR FAMILIES:
Joe Vogels, C. W. Halls, and The Six Families of Mamachi

We have kept up contact with our Mamachi families over the years, and in the summer of 1969, precisely ten years after we began our original study, we returned to visit the families we had known. The results of our ten year follow-up are presented in a new chapter, "Mamachi Revistited."

E.F.V.

This study, based on field work which my wife and I conducted in Japan from 1958 to 1960, is an attempt to describe the life of the salary man and his family. In our field work, in order to penetrate beyond superficial appearances and to develop an intimate familiarity with a number of families, we focused particularly on one community where we lived for the last year of our study. We shall call our community Mamachi. Such an intensive study has required the closest co-operation of many Mamachi families. The residents of Mamachi do not take obligations lightly, and we, too, cannot take lightly the fact that we can never repay adequately their kindness and the inconveniences we caused them. We can only hope to prove worthy of their time and effort by portraying their lives as accurately as we know how without sacrificing their anonymity. To these unnamed families, then, we express our deepest thanks.

During the period of field work, the Japanese National Institute of Mental Health provided office space, made arrangements for our field work, made available their case materials, permitted my wife to be the psychiatric social worker for a patient on a regular basis, and accorded us the full privileges of regular staff members. Various members of the staff explained intricacies of their cases, gave and interpreted projective tests to families in our study, and patiently answered an endless number of questions.

I have benefited from the guidance of members of the Sociology Department of the University of Tokyo, the Japanese Psychoanalytic Association, the Group for the Study of the Family directed by Professor Takashi Koyama, and an informal seminar on family studies directed by Professor Yuzuru Okada. Dr. Takeo Doi, a psychia-

trist who has practiced in Japan and the United States, generously shared many facets of his deep understanding of Japanese behavior. Professor Tokusaburo Abe of Yamagata University, Professor Tetsuro Sasaki of Tohoku University, and Professor Kenneth Morioka of International Christian University and their staffs and students assisted in the development, distribution, and coding of questionnaires. Professor Tadashi Fukutake and Professor Takeyoshi Kawashima of Tokyo University kindly let me join them on field trips to the country.

At various stages in the work, I have been ably assisted by Hiroshi Satake, Mitsuko Minowa, Michiko Kiuchi, Fumiko Kamiyama Sasaki, Miyoko Sasaki, Hisa Hirada, Yaeko Sato, Sumiko Embutsu, Sumiko Iwao, Tomoko Yagai, Emily Cohen, and Marie Wilson.

Dr. William Caudill first interested me in going to Japan and has been a constant source of support and counsel in all stages of the work. Dr. John Spiegel and Dr. Florence Kluckhohn gave me several years of training in field work and in the analysis of value-orientations and implicit roles, and their study was the model on which I based my research design. Both before and after the field work, I profited from discussions with Professor John Pelzel, who has a uniquely broad perspective on Japan, combining behavioral science theory and methods with an intimate knowledge of Japanese society and history. Professor Ronald Dore's excellent work,
City Life in Japan,
appeared just before the beginning of our field work and provided an invaluable background for the present study.

I have benefited from the stimulation and unselfish guidance of other teachers, particularly Professor Hubert Bonner of Ohio Wesleyan University, Dr. Aaron Beck of Philadelphia, and Professor Talcott Parsons, Professor Robert Bales, and Professor George Homans of Harvard University. The analytic framework for the present study owes much to Dr. Norman Bell and follows closely the outline which he and I developed.
^[*]
Members of an informal seminar under the direction of Dr. Theodore Lidz of the Yale Psychiatry Department and a seminar in the Harvard Medical School directed by Dr. John Spiegel, Dr. Florence Kluckhohn, and myself gave valuable insight into clinical aspects of the case materials I collected in Japan.

[*] Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel, eds.,
A Modern Introduction to the Family
(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960).

After I returned from Japan, discussions with Professors Masao Maruyama and Takeshi Ishida of Tokyo University on political thought and with Professor Kazuo Noda of Rikkyo University on the structure of the business firm have been particularly enlightening.

The final version of the manuscript reflects my indebtedness for the careful reading and thoughtful criticism of an earlier draft by Norman Bell, Robert Bellah, Vin Brandt, William Caudill, Al Craig, George De Vos, Peter Dodd, Takeo Doi, Ronald Dore, Samuel M. Eisenstadt, Sumiko and Coe Embutsu, Takeshi Ishida, Jack Knowles, Victor Lidz, Kenneth Morioka, Yonosuke Nagai, Kazuo Noda, John Pelzel, David Plath, David Riesman, Robert J. Smith, Yonina Talmon, and Kenichi Tominaga. Max Knight of the University of California Press has made preparation for publication painless and even pleasant by being careful in his editing, gentle in his reproach, and expeditious in moving the manuscript through to final form.

The field work was financed by a grant from the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry, under arrangements with the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard. Small grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the support of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale and the East Asian Research Center at Harvard greatly facilitated the analysis of data.

In many ways my wife Suzanne should be coauthor. She fully shared the problems of planning and carrying out the field work, and the life of a wife-mother-interviewer in another culture was more demanding than either of us might have imagined. Although she did not take part in the actual writing, she has been a patient sounding board, and her concern with individual cases provided a needed balance to my irrepressible desire to paint the broad picture.

E. F. V.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS JANUARY, 1963

Among the non-Western nations, only Japan has reached a level of industrialization and urbanization comparable to the advanced countries of Europe and America. From a nation that only one hundred years ago was voluntarily isolated from the developments of the rest of the world, Japan has become an important member of the international community. In a single century, Japan has not only introduced modern technology but kept pace with continuing Western progress. At the same time, modern systems of education, government, business, transportation, and communication have become firmly implanted in Japanese society.

The Japanese people in this century have adjusted not only to these fundamental changes, but to a series of natural disasters and national crises. The contemporary Japanese adult has faced a staggering number of difficulties. The standard of living which was rising in the 1920's was disrupted first by a terrible earthquake and later by the devastating effects of a world depression. The increasing political freedom in the 1920's was gradually stifled by an oppressive military rule which required increasingly severe sacrifices until the end of World War II. During the war, many small children were separated from their parents and sent to rural areas to escape air raids, and many families had their only wage earner killed. After the fighting, many families, already undernourished and short of funds, provided for relatives, friends, and even strangers who returned from the military or the overseas colonies. Not only did they live with severe shortages of food, clothing, and shelter, but they had to renounce their former leaders and traditions and accept new patterns of life imposed by the victors.

In the face of these crises and the rapid social change, it is surprising how successfully the average Japanese has been able to maintain an orderly life free from despair and disorder. In spite of these problems, much publicized by the press, the Japanese have made a successful adjustment, economically, socially, and psychologically. The period of peace and prosperity since World War II has made it possible to consolidate many of the social changes, and for the newly emerging social order to achieve some degree of stability.

An important element in the new social order is the emergence of a large "new middle class." The "old middle class" (the small independent businessman and landowner) has been declining in power and influence and is gradually being replaced by this "new middle class," the white-collar employees of the large business corporations and government bureaucracies.
^[1]
The small independent entrepreneurs who comprise the old middle class have generally played a central role in small local communities because of their influence and power, but their perspective has remained focused within this narrow social microcosm. Although some have profited indirectly from Japan's economic prosperity since 1955, few members of the old middle class have had the motivation, ability, and resources to expand their enterprises to take advantage of Japan's rapid economic growth.
^[2]
They are, rather, being superseded by, or affiliated with and subordinated to large business corporations which have the resources and entrepreneurial skill to play the key role in the recent economic growth. The old middle class has not yet died out by any means, but the trend of the times has been obvious, and many have urged their children to become white-collar workers in the large bureaucratic organizations in the cities. The income of the white-collar worker is less affected by economic fluctuations or by

[1] For a brief account of the distinction between the Japanese "new middle class" and "old middle class" see Tadashi Fukutake,
Man and Society in Japan
. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1962.

[2] Cf. John C. Pelzel, "The Small Industrialist in Japan,"
Explorations in Entrepreneurial History,
1954, 7:79-93. Especially since 1955, however, the economic boom in large companies has assisted the development of certain small industries. Although the number of small enterprises has decreased compared to before World War II, the number has remained relatively constant since the war. Many of these small enterprises have been able to survive by affiliating with a large company, albeit in a subordinate position.

the whims of an arbitrary paternalistic employer than that of the employee in the smaller industries. Because the income of the new middle-class citizen is guaranteed in the form of a regular salary, he has come to be known as the "sarari man" (salary man). This word is not used in Japan to include all who receive a salary, but only white-collar workers in the large bureaucracy of a business firm or government office. Although the two words "salary" and "man" are not ordinarily used together in English, the term "salary man" will be used throughout the present work to convey the Japanese meaning of
sarari man
.

The roots of the salary man can be traced at least as far back as the Tokugawa period, for after 1600 when Japan achieved internal stability, the military functions of the samurai withered away and many samurai became, in effect, administrators working for the clan government. With the abolition of samurai class distinctions in early Meiji, many ex-samurai became white-collar workers in government offices and government-sponsored industry. The similarity between the samurai administrator and the salary man has led many Japanese to refer to the salary man as the modern samurai. His brief case is compared to the samurai's swords, his company with the feudal fief, his readiness to uphold his company's interests with the samurai's readiness to do battle for his feudal lord. But the salary man is the product of a different social setting. The concept of the samurai retained a warrior flavor, and the ideal was to be bold, courageous, and capable of independent action. The salary man, being a part of a large bureaucratic organization, is more concerned with complex administrative and technical problems, has less room for independent movement, and is likely to be more cautious and susceptible to influence.

The word "salary man" had already become popular by 1930 although the white-collar class remained relatively small until the rapid expansion of government bureaucracies and war-related industry before and during World War II. During this period, the number of white-collar workers grew rapidly, and this growth has continued with the economic prosperity after the war. Now that the social upheaval resulting from the war has passed and the patterns of the salary man have become stabilized and clearly identifiable, it

would seem to be an opportune time to examine the nature of his life.
^[3]

The salary man's pattern of life stands out in the Japanese context because of the sharp disparity between the large modern organization where he works and the more traditional small- or medium-sized enterprises.
^[4]
Japanese scholars, struck by the coexistence of the modern bureaucratic patterns of large organizations and the more traditional patterns of the small- and middle-sized enterprises have named this phenomenon the "double structure" of Japanese society.

Although some small enterprises have made technological advances and are offering high salaries because of increasing labor

[3] Although no precise statistics are available on the growth of the number of salary men, rough estimates can be obtained from the number of white-collar workers who are not self-employed since most white-collar workers (except those in very small enterprises) would be classified as salary men.

These data are cited in Solomon B. Levine, "Unionization of White-Collar Employees in Japan," unpublished manuscript.

According to the 1960 census, of the 31,549,800 males fifteen years of age and older, only 6,885,500 earned their living from farming, fishing, and lumbering. If one considers professional and technical workers, managers and officials, clerical workers, and protective-service workers as salary men, there were a total of 5,711,200 salary men.
Population Census of Japan,
1960, II, part iv, Tables 1 and 2.

[4] Although large organizations are associated with the modern sector of the economy, it does not follow that all small- and medium-sized enterprises are associated with traditional occupations. For the distinction between modern and traditional aspects of the economy, see Henry Rosovsky,
Capital Formation in Japan, 1868–1940,
Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1961. Some more modern small enterprises have already a fairly high salary scale and are competitive for labor with the larger organizations.

Considering the high prestige, power, and income of salary men in government offices before the war, their position has declined since the war compared to salary men in business firms. The starting salary of salary men in government offices is generally about two-thirds of that in private corporations, but the power of salary men in government remains strong. (For this information I am indebted to Kenichi Tominaga.)

shortages, in the typical small enterprise, the worker tends to have a more diffuse relationship with his employer, a relationship that permeates all his life. The employer has some responsibility for looking after the personal needs of his employees, such as providing housing, helping arrange marriage, or giving special assistance in time of trouble. In return, the employee must be available for work at any time, and his personal life is continually subject to the employer's surveillance and approval. What security he has rests on the good will of the employer, which is not always sufficient because the small enterprises are subject to the fluctuations of the market and offer tenuous prospects for long-term security. Although smaller organizations are more paternalistic, workers are not only less satisfied, but there is a greater turnover of labor.
^[5]
At best the paternalism of the small enterprise is restricting and at worst it is a guise under which an opportunistic owner can pay lower wages and exploit his employees by offering a few personal services.

In contrast, the salary man not only receives higher pay and regular wages, but he has regular hours with time off. His promotions occur to some extent automatically on the basis of seniority and skill, and although responsive to wishes of superiors by American standards, he need not be so responsive as workers in smaller enterprises. Because he belongs to a large, stable organization and the firm is committed to him for life,
^[6]
he knows that his job will be more secure against the fluctuations of the business cycle. When he compares himself to the workers in small organizations, he feels proud and satisfied that he is a salary man.

Until recently there has been almost no movement of workers between the small and large organizations.
^[7]
Fundamental differences

[5] Kenichi Tominaga, "Occupational Mobility in Japanese Society: Analysis of the Labor Market in Japan" (mimeographed). For this reason, as Tominaga argues, it is somewhat misleading to link paternalism (which is found in the small enterprise) with the pattern of life-long commitment, a pattern more common in the large organization.

[6] The pattern of life-long commitment of the firm to the worker became prominent in large organizations in the early part of this century because of the problem of shortage of skilled workers, but the commitment did not apply to the larger group of unskilled workers. The salary man has the good fortune to have long-term security as a result of this commitment to the skilled workers. (For this background information I am indebted to Professor Kazuo Noda of Rikkyo University.)

[7] Tominaga,
op. cit.

in methods of work and the accompanying way of life have made it difficult for an employee of a traditional organization to move to a large one and unlikely for a salary man to want to move to a small one. Even within the large organization there has been a similar barrier between the permanent white-collar workers who form the core of the organization and the temporary and manual workers who may be discharged when the company has economic difficulties. Once a man becomes a manual worker in a large firm, he will not rise to become a white-collar worker. Japanese firms value loyalty and prefer to recruit and train their own white-collar workers who become skilled in the way their particular firm operates rather than to take on employees who have acquired different habits in other firms. With the exception of a few technical specialties, university training is not geared to preparation for a specific vocation. Training for work is generally acquired within a firm and is, therefore, less easily applicable to another firm. Because the supply of young workers has always been plentiful, firms have been able to recruit their employees directly from schools. Therefore, the traditional smaller businesses have been able to continue in operation without fear of losing their workers to higher-paying modern organizations, and the worker who is dissatisfied with being in a small organization concentrates his energies on making it possible for his son to become a salary man. The lack of free movement between small and large organizations has made it possible for a wide gap to exist between these two types of organization.

How long this double structure of the Japanese economy can continue to exist is an open question. In the last few years, since the labor shortage has caused some large businesses to look to the smaller enterprises for employees, there have been signs that the double structure might begin to break down. To keep their workers, the small enterprises may have to raise their salaries and improve their working conditions to match the larger enterprises. Some Japanese social scientists are beginning to talk of a second industrial revolution—one which would destroy this double structure. The first industrial revolution went relatively smoothly because it meant only that large organizations grew up alongside the small, but the second industrial revolution might prove more disruptive because it