This classic study on the sociology of Japan remains the only in-depth treatment of the Japanese middle class. Now in a fiftieth-anniversary edition that includes a new foreword by William W. Kelly, this seminal work paints a rich and complex picture of the life of the salaryman and his family. Tracing the rapid postwar economic growth that led to hiring large numbers of workers who were provided lifelong employment, the authors show how this phenomenon led to a new class that set the dominant pattern of social life that influenced even those who could not share it, a pattern that remains fundamental to Japanese society today.

Foreword: Looking Backward at a Book That Looked Forward
William W. Kelly
Part I: The Significance of Salary
Chapter 1: The Problem and Its Setting
Chapter 2: The Bureaucratic Setting in Perspective
Chapter 3: The Gateway to Salary: Infernal Entrance Examinations
Part II: The Family and Other Social Systems
Chapter 4: The Consumer's "Bright New Life"
Chapter 5: Families View Their Government
Chapter 6: Community Relationships
Chapter 7: Basic Values
Part III: Internal Family Processes
Chapter 8: The Decline of the Ie Ideal
Chapter 9: The Division of Labor in the Home
Chapter 10: Authority in the Family
Chapter 11: Family Solidarity
Chapter 12: Child-Rearing
Part IV: Mamachi in Perspective
Chapter 13: Order Amidst Rapid Social Change
Part V: Mamachi Revisited
Chapter 14: Beyond Salary
Chapter 15: Beyond Success: Mamachi Thirty Years Later
Afterword
Ezra F. Vogel
Appendix: A Report on the Field Work
Selected Bibliography

By Ezra F. Vogel - Foreword by William W. Kelly - Contributions by Suzanne Hall Vogel