REGION Japan

TEAM Bruce White

PARTNERS N/A

DISSEMINATION Yale conference panel 5/2002. Book: Japan's Changing Generations. This internet site.

This five-year OICD project is now completed and can be read in summarised form in a chapter in a co-edited book by Gordon Mathews and Bruce White (see below). The book-length thesis on which this chapter is based (forthcoming as a book in late 2004) examines how experience within our families, communities, cultures and nations combine to create our conceptions of the world and our place within it. Focusing upon generational change in Japan, the study hopes to illustrate how global citizenship is generated from the 'bottom-up' rather than the 'top-down' - how our grass-roots experience with like others, rather than our encounters with foreign or 'globalising' factors, shape our identities.

The project was conceived in order to expand the understanding of how identities "open-up" over time--how once nationalist and isolationalist societies begin to produce young generations who are open to, and citizens of, a wider and more diversly conceived world. The thesis puts forward two complementary theories: that we are the products of a generational adaptation to modernity, and that we constantly seek-out an increased sense of our imaginative and social mobility.

Gordon Mathews and Bruce White (eds.)
Japan's Changing Generations: Are Young People Creating a New Society?

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Contents:
--Introduction: Changing Generations in Japan Today Gordon Mathews and Bruce White

Part One: The Japanese Generational Divide
1. The Generation Gap in Japanese Society since the 1960s Tetsuo Sakurai
2. Why are Japanese Youth Today so Passive? Satoshi Kotani
3. The Local Roots of Global Citizenship: Generational Change in a Kyushu Hamlet Bruce White

Part Two: How Teenagers Cope With the Adult World
4. How Japanese Teenagers Cope: Social Pressures and Personal Responses Peter Ackermann
5. Youth Fashion and Changing Beautification Practices Laura Miller
6. 'Guiding' Japan's University Students through the Generation Gap Brian McVeigh

Part Three: How Young Adults Challenge the Social Order
7. Seeking a Career, Finding a Job: How Young People Enter and Resist the Japanese World of Work Gordon Mathews
8. Mothers and Their Unmarried Daughters: An Intimate Look at Generational Change Lynne Nakano and Moeko Wagatsuma
9. What Happens When They Come Back: How Japanese Young People with Foreign University Degrees Experience the Japanese Workplace Shunta Mori
10. Centered Selves and Life Choices: Changing Attitudes of Young Educated Mothers Ayumi Sasagawa

--Epilogue: Are Japanese Young People Creating a New Society? (Bruce White and Gordon Mathews)

The Organisation for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD)