08/06/2026
Seminar "Fraying pathways: labour market liberalization, inequality, and social isolation in contemporary Japan" 📅June 22nd 🕧6:00-8:00 pm(JST) 📍room 601 & online
English
🗣️Speaker: ARITA Shin, ISHIDA Kenji
Partner: Economic department, La France au Japon - Ambassade de France au Japon
For more information and to register for the seminar, please visit the IFRJ website.
Drawing on microdata from the Employment Status Survey and the Japanese Life Course Panel Surveys (JLPS), these two presentations examine how shifts in Japan’s labour market structure since the 1990s have reshaped individual life chances along intersecting lines of education, gender, and social connectivity. The first presentation profiles high-earning workers without a university degree, showing that their success has historically depended on Japan’s company-based skill formation system — particularly long-term regular employment in large companies — a pathway now eroding for younger cohorts as non-regular work expands. The second presentation traces trajectories of social connectivity across the life course, revealing that labour market precarization coincides with growing personal isolation, especially among men, with cumulative disconnection linked to lower life satisfaction and diminished hopes for the future. Together, the two studies highlight how institutional deregulation and the decline of stable employment are deepening social cleavages in Japan, with consequences that extend from economic inequality into the fabric of everyday social life.
Shin Arita is a comparative sociologist and professor at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. His research focuses on the labour market, educational systems, and social stratification in East Asia. He earned his PhD in area studies from the University of Tokyo after completing his undergraduate studies in sociology. Selected publications include Education and Social Stratification in South Korea (University of Tokyo Press, 2020) and Sociology of Reward Inequality Based on Employment Positions: A Comparison of Non-standard Employment and Social Stratification in Japan and Korea (University of Tokyo Press, 2016, in Japanese). His work has received several academic awards, including the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Kenji Ishida is associate professor at the Center for Social Research and Data Archives, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in education from Tohoku University. His research spans social stratification and inequality, labour market inequalities across the life course, social isolation and social networks, immigration and immigrant integration, and social survey methodology. He has been a leading member of the Japanese Life Course Panel Surveys Project, a long-running panel survey that has tracked Japanese youth and middle-aged adults for nearly two decades and is currently transitioning to web-based formats. He is co-editor of In Search of Second Chances in a Divided Society (Keiso Shobo, 2024, in Japanese). His work has appeared in Social Forces, International Migration Review, Frontiers in Sociology, Contemporary Japan, and other international and Japanese journals.