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This book puts forth a sociology of Japanese youth problems showing that the Japanese media draw on an equally, if not more, perplexing gallery of social categories when it discusses youth than affluent Western societies such as the US or UK and that Japan is no less replete with social problems involving young people and no less capable of generating hysteria over the fate of its youth than affluent Western societies such as the US or UK.
From the 1960s onwards, Japan's rapid economic growth coincided with remarkably low youth unemployment. However, since the 1990s the ease with which young people have historically moved from education to employment has ended, and unemployment is now a real and growing problem. This book examines how the state, experts, the media as well as youth workers, have responded to the troubling rise of youth joblessness in 21st century Japan.
This book examines the little or not previously researched roles and contributions of non-legal professionals in Japanese criminal justice against the background of recent social and legal changes that either gave birth to or affected the roles played by these "outsiders". On the basis of a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including meeting records of policy makers and practitioners, surveys, interviews and court verdicts, the book zooms in on forensic psychiatrists’ role in the disappearance of criminally insane defendants from Japanese criminal courts; social workers’ new role in diverting a growing number of elderly, mentally disturbed repeat offenders from prison; the therape...
Patterns of group behavior and underlying psychological processes are shaped within specific cultural contexts, and cultures emerge in group-based interactions. Culture and Group Processes, the inaugural volume of the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series, is the first edited book on this rapidly emerging topic.
The world’s second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troubling are the more than one million young men who shut themselves in their rooms, withdrawing from society, and the growing numbers of “parasite singles,” the name given to single women who refuse to leave home, marry, or bear children. In Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger argues that J...
Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society. Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic methods are applied to issues of human development across the life span and to social problems including poverty, racial and ethnic marginality, and crime. Restoring ethnographic methods to a central place in social inquiry, these twenty-two lively essays will interest everyone concerned with the epistemological problems of context, meaning, and subjectivity in the behavioral sciences.
Lost in Transition tells the story of the 'lost generation' that came of age in Japan's deep economic recession in the 1990s. The book argues that Japan is in the midst of profound changes that have had an especially strong impact on the young generation. The country's renowned 'permanent employment system' has unraveled for young workers, only to be replaced by temporary and insecure forms of employment. The much-admired system of moving young people smoothly from school to work has frayed. The book argues that these changes in the very fabric of Japanese postwar institutions have loosened young people's attachment to school as the launching pad into the world of work and loosened their attachment to the workplace as a source of identity and security. The implications for the future of Japanese society - and the fault lines within it - loom large.
This volume presents multidisciplinary perspectives on the role of cultural values and religious beliefs in adolescent development.
This cutting-edge book brings together eminent experts from diverse disciplines and diverse parts of the world who integrate key insights and findings from cultural and developmental research on human psychology. The result is a book brimming with new and creative syntheses for theory, research and policy that are attuned to today's global world.