Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In contemporary Japanese society the term salary men refers mainly to white-collar elites in multinational corporations (who represent approximately 20 percent of the total working population). As described in Beck and Beck's A Change of a Lifetime (1994) salary men constitute a managerial class that occupies the top stratum of the business community and is accorded high status in society. Its members have almost exclusively obtained degrees from Japan's most prestigious universities. However, in practice, a wider use of and flexible self-identification with the term is common. The term can therefore refer to both non-elite white-collar and occasionally blue-collar workers. Such flexible usage is made possible by Japan's industrial structure – the keiretsu system – which links large corporations to medium-sized and small subcontracting firms. The combination of English terms is used to signify, literally, a worker whose firm guarantees him a salaried income. The reference to salary men as a category of workers in society arose in parallel with the concept of the nation-state, and industrialization and urbanization, which can be traced to the Meiji period in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, salary men are most strongly associated with the post-war economic boom. This period in Japanese history is also associated with the emergence of the nuclear family (often ... log in or subscribe to read full text