This participant-observation study presents the practice of school to work transition at two Japanese high schools, and explains variations about the modal career trajectory of low achieving students, drawing on Bourdieu's work. It helps to explain the relationship between social values, family ethos, industry, school and economic performance, and the relatively low class consciousness in Japan. It should be of interest to educationalists, sociologists and labour relations specialists studying Japan.

This book highlights recent education research on Japan based on sociological and other related approaches to historical developments and accomplishments. Written primarily by members of the Japan Society of Educational Sociology, it brings to light concerns and viewpoints that have grown out of the Japanese educational context. By focusing on uniquely Japanese educational research phenomena, the book offers international readers new insights and contributes to the international debate on education. It may help sociologists and social scientists outside Japan gain a deeper understanding of ongoing changes in education in Japan as well as its historical and structural contexts.

This book examines young women in Japan, focusing in particular on their transitions to adulthood, their conceptions of adulthood and relations with Japanese society more generally. It considers important aspects of the transition to adulthood including employment, marriage, divorce, childbirth and custody.

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.

Taking a broader view of transition outcomes than many previous comparative studies, this study reveals the complex and many-faceted national institutional arrangements that can result in successful transitions to working life.

Have Japan's relative economic decline and China's rapid ascent altered the dynamics of Asian regionalism? Peter Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, the editors of Network Power, one of the most comprehensive volumes on East Asian regionalism in the 1990s, present here an impressive new collection that brings the reader up to date. This book argues that East Asia's regional dynamics are no longer the result of a simple extension of any one national model. While Japanese institutional structures and political practices remain critically important, the new East Asia now under construction is more than, and different from, the sum of its various national parts. At the outset of a new century, the interplay of Japanese factors with Chinese, American, and other national influences is producing a distinctively new East Asian region.