Ruszel, Julian

Project title: The Neoliberalization of Collectivist Family Structures in Japan

Department: Pacific and Asian Studies

Faculty supervisor: Dr. Andrew Marton and Dr. Hiroko Noro

"Contemporary Japanese society has its roots in a collectivist, neo-Confucian social order that prevailed in Japan from the Edo Period (1603-1868) until the end of the Second World War. While postwar Japan saw an intersection of Japan's traditional social structures and western Keynesian capitalism that preserved important aspects of Japanese collectivist society—in particular its collectivist family structures and values—the rise of neoliberal capitalism since the beginning of the 1980s implies a fundamental societal reorientation that threatens enduring features of Japanese collectivist culture and identities.
Working from the premise that family is central to both social order (collectivist or otherwise) and capitalist social formations, this project will incorporate previous sociological and anthropological research to examine changing family structures in Japan since the Edo Period, and employ these models as a basis for clarifying the ongoing dialectic between the stark individualism of neoliberalism and the collectivist social structures and identities of traditional Japanese society."