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Testing an argument of convergence on a sample of employed males in Japan and the United States, this paper compares young (18-24 years) with older (45-55 years) workers within each country on work-related attitudes, education and employment, mobility, interest in the company, characteristics of superiors, and job satisfaction. Comparisons of these attitudes are also made within age-group cross-nationally. Our general finding, which is upheld when company size, type of job, and educational attainment are controlled for, is that cultural diversity is (still) a better explanation than convergence when applied to work-related attitudes. Aging per se seems to have some similar effects in both societies, e.g., a positive relationship between age and work satisfaction. Attitudes affected more by historical changes in work organization, however, exhibit stronger cultural differences than age differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A state-centered perspective in studies of revolutions holds that international pressures contribute to outbreak of revolutions, assuming that the magnitude and intensity of international pressures vary from case to case. This study argues that in the paradigmatic communist revolutions of the 20th century, such as the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the role of the exogenous factor of war was paramount. After outlining a war-centered framework for studying communist revolutions, this research shows how the devastating experience of total war against Japan (1937-1945) undermined the Kuomintang state in China and created structural conditions for the communist takeover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public consciousness of sexual harassment, or sekuhara, emerged much later in Japan than in the United States. This article, the first comparative study of sexual harassment in the two nations, explores how consciousness of a new legal category diffuses across nations and begins to take root in younger cohorts. Analyses of the U.S. General Social Survey and the Japanese Survey on Working Women's Consciousness show how age cohorts entering the labor force following major equal opportunity legislation report more sexual harassment than do older cohorts. We first conduct a separate nation-specific analysis and then pool the data sets to test for national differences with cross-product interaction terms. The effects of age, income, and job satisfaction all differ significantly between the United States and Japan. Family and life course factors are also important predictors, particularly in Japan. We interpret these results based on the extant literature on sexual harassment, legal consciousness over the life course, and comparative research on workplace behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manifold factors have been identified as causal mechanisms in social change, but an important one—temporality—has been neglected. Temporality is the social time that characterizes any society, and that social time is consequential for the rate and direction of change. The three dimensions of temporality are temporal pattern, temporal orientation, and temporal perspective. The differences between the Japanese and Chinese along these three dimensions help explain their differential responses to the 19th century Western challenge. Specifically, two propositions are examined in the light of the historical data: a society's temporality limits the range of adaptive responses to new circumstances, and the symbols of social time act as a mechanism of social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on some interrelationships between urbanization and social change in Japan since 1600. Japan is proposed for investigation of some possible interrelationships between urbanization and social change for several reasons. In the first place, Japan is the most highly industrialized and urbanized of the major nations of Asia. In Asia lives the bulk of the world's population, a population that is now in the midst of major social, economic and political transformations of enormous consequence to the rest of the world. In the second place, Japan lends itself to the testing of hypotheses regarding social and cultural change, which have been primarily documented with data on European, and European-dominated peoples. Third, Japan is an appropriate concern of American scholars because of close past and present relationships between the two countries. It is the central argument of this article that Japanese history since 1600 may profitably be regarded in terms of three remarkable experiments in planned social change undertaken by powerful, centralized governments which were relatively free to exercise unlimited authority. In each of these three instances the regime consciously set out to fashion Japan's national life after a preconceived pattern and in each case the planned change was in substantial degree realized.