The Prewar Origins of Japan's 'Middle Class Myth'
A Lecture by Professor Louise Young, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 | 5:30pm
Smith Memorial Student Union Room 327/8/9
The Portland State University Center for Japanese Studies presents a free talk by Professor Louise Young of University of Wisconsin-Madison. The presentation will take place Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 5:30 p.m. in the Smith Memorial Student Union (SMSU), room 327/8/9 on the PSU campus. SMSU is located at 1825 SW Broadway.
Class talk is a ubiquitous part of contemporary public debate in Japan and elsewhere. The “middle class” has become a master signifier, standing for a multiplicity of social and political ills and their solutions. Behind this freight of hopes trails a long and mercurial history. As a social formation linked to particular occupational categories, the middle class constituted a small fraction of the population, yet the figure of the salary man and his middle-class family became the ubiquitous symbols of mass culture and modern life. Why is the salaryman Mr. Everyman? How did “my homeism” become the opiate of the masses?
This presentation traces these ideas back to the transition to capitalism in the late nineteenth century and asks how this transition became internalized in thought through the development of a language of class. In this lecture, Professor Young will track the reorganization of social hierarchy from one centered on status, rank, and occupation on the eve of the Meiji Restoration, to the interwar period when coherent class divisions between upper, middle, and lower strata settled around cultural distinctions and social segregation. By the 1920s, class had become both a material and an ideological social category. She will explore ways the discourse on the old and the new helped infuse the idea of “middle class” with an ideology of progress, plenty, and democratization: in short, the “Japanese dream.”
For more information contact the PSU Center for Japanese Studies at cjs@pdx.edu or 503-725-8577.