Featuring: Dr. Norma Field
Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor
Japanese Studies
The University of Chicago

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 3rd Floor
(Michael Moskow Auditorium)
230 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60604

6:00-6:30 p.m. Registration
6:30-7:15 p.m. Presentation
7:15-7:30 p.m. Q&A

$5 Students/$15 Members/$20 Non-Members
Due to strict security measures pre-payment is required
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What is the most typical description of Japanese employment practice? It’s probably “life time employment.” The perception that nearly all Japanese work for stable, team-oriented, paternalistic employers has been spread by the media over the years. To the extent this image ever held, it is remote from reality today. A seismic change has been taking place, with nearly a third of the Japanese labor force now classified as irregularly employed. What is often reported in the Japanese press these days are stories about the “income-gap society” (kakusa shakai), “working poor” (waakingu pua), and more recently, “lost generation” (rosu jene).

In 2008, the Japanese Communist Party membership began to increase at the rate of 1,000 per month, with most of the new members coming from the younger generation. The Cannery Ship, the internationally acclaimed 1929 work of Communist writer Takiji Kobayashi, became a stunning bestseller in the past year. It’s likely that these currents contributed to the landslide victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in August, but it’s hard to grasp the nature of the change that Japan is going through from the pages of the Wall Street Journal or Business Week. This will be the subject of the talk this evening by Dr. Norma Field, Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.