Rethinking Japan’s Lost Decades

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Much news reporting and scholarly analysis have characterized Japan’s “post-bubble” years as a period of loss and decline in contrast to an idealized postwar period of security, equality, and harmony. This interdisciplinary panel aims to challenge this taken-for-granted understanding of Japan as a selective portrait of a social formation that is both unraveling and transforming into something new. Rather than focusing on the breakdown of social institutions, we ask how new social ideologies, practices, networks, organizational forms, and political spaces are emerging. This is not the first attempt to move beyond questions of “failure” or “decline,” but our panel takes a fresh analytical approach by rethinking post-bubble shifts in two ways. First, while most recent accounts of Japan tend to examine social and cultural change in terms of responses to post-bubble conditions, and to construct a radical break between postwar and post-bubble Japan, we situate our topics within a deeper historical context to understand how they both grow out of and depart from postwar conditions. Second, we seek to problematize neoliberal globalization as a master frame for understanding post-bubble changes by placing our subjects within other contexts. By addressing some of the myriad forms Japan’s reinvention is taking, we hope to take a step towards identifying central themes—beyond social and economic uncertainty, or the contradiction between postwar ideologies and new economic conditions—of post-bubble Japan in order to improve our understanding of the social formation that is emerging.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Colin Smith, University of Hong Kong

Chair

• Lynne Nakano, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Individual Presentations

• Rethinking Japan’s Lost Generations: New Actors in the New Economy - Colin Smith, University of Hong Kong

• Reinventing Japanese Business: The Case of Uniqlo - Yi Zhu, Kyushu University

• Single Women and New Social Formations in Japan - Lynne Nakano, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Discussant

• Colin Smith, University of Hong Kong