This book considers the issues facing contemporary Japan as it struggles to adapt its employment system to the global economy.

Mary C. Brinton is Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She has also held professorships at the University of Chicago and Cornell University. She is the author of Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan, the editor of Women's Working Lives in East Asia, and the co-editor of The Declining Significance of Gender? Her work has appeared frequently in journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Sociology of Education.

1. The lost generation; 2. The historical roots of Japanese school-work institutions; 3. The importance of ba, the erosion of ba; 4. Unraveling school-employer relationships; 5. Networks of advantage and disadvantage for new graduates; 6. Narratives of the new mobility; 7. The future of the lost generation.