T he protests of the 1960s provoked by public policy decisions and in-dustrial pollution signaled that the consequences

of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) domination and high-speed economic growth could no longer

be ignored. The 1970s saw political scandals, diplomatic crises, economic setbacks, and economic adjustments that
positioned Japanese companies to expand in export markets while minorities and working women demanded political
initiatives to overcome discrimination. In the 1980s, Japan had the world’s second largest economy, and the euphoria of
seemingly unstoppable growth led to a bubble in overpriced investments. When the bubble burst in 1990, the economy
deflated with the latest in a series of economic rallies foun-dering in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Despite political, economic, and social problems, most Japanese people have enjoyed low crime rates, clean cities, superb
public transportation, and unprecedented prosperity.

Political Protest and

Environmental Pollution

The 1960s saw student movements worldwide, and Japan was no exception. Students protested Japan’s
support for the American war in Vietnam under the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty at the same time that
they attacked educa-tional policies and assembly-line–style courses. At Tokyo University, medi-cal
students opposed a top-down reorganization of the program that ignored their concerns, finally going
on strike in January 1968. When university administrators refused to hear their grievances and expelled
their leaders, students in other departments struck in sympathy. They wanted curricu-lum control,
amnesty for students arrested in confrontations, and exclusion of riot police from campus. To make
their point, they barricaded the cen-tral building, forcing the administration to cancel entrance
examinations for 1969. On campuses across Tokyo, students launched sympathy strikes.

The increase in air travel and a desire to position Japan more prominently in world affairs led the LDP
and Transportation Ministry to decide on a new in-ternational airport for Tokyo in 1965. Farmers who
owned land at the proposed site outside Narita pro-tested because taking their land destroyed their
liveli-hood, secrecy surrounding the decision demonstrated that popular opinion had been ignored, and
the air-port might be used to support the American war ef-fort in Vietnam.

In the 1950s, local governments encouraged industrial development that spread pollution from cities to
towns and made Japan the most polluted nation on earth. By the early 1970s, about half the population
complained of suf-fering from pollution. Citizens’ movements mobilized hundreds of thousands of
ordinarily apolitical residents to sign petitions, visit industrial sites, display posters, and launch education
drives to rally support in stop-ping polluters from building in their neighborhood.

etween 1932 and 1968 at Minamata in southern Kyushu, a Chisso factory produced acetaldehyde, a key
ingredient in making plastics through a pro-cess that released methyl mercury as a by-product. Dumped
into the water, mercury concentrated in marine life and then attacked brain cells in domestic animals
and humans. Victims became increasingly feeble until they reached a vegetative state and death.

In 1959, a Kumamoto University research team traced the cause to the Chisso factory. The team lost its
government funding. With support from the

Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Chisso hired researchers who proved mercury was not at
fault while workers at the plant and community leaders blamed the victims’ poor diet and unsanitary
living conditions. In 1965, another outbreak of the disease in Niigata on the Japan Sea was traced to
mercury discharged by a chemical factory.

By 1978, air and water pollution had de-clined, and manufacturers had learned how to profit from
measures to keep the environment clean.

Continuing Social Issues

Women’s career choices were limited. They typically worked after graduating from high school or junior
college; to the mid-1980s almost 90 percent of com-panies rejected female graduates of four-year
colleges because they had to be placed on a management track. Instead, women were hired as clerical
or assembly line workers with the understanding they would retire at marriage or when they turned
thirty. In the late1960s women got the courts to agree that this prac-tice constituted sex discrimination.
In the early 1970s the courts forbade mandatory retirement because of pregnancy or childbirth or at a
younger age than men. Women objected to being kept from managerial posi-tions and to well-meaning
restrictions on the hours they could work and the kinds of work they were al-lowed to do. In response,
the Diet passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1985. Although it urged employers to treat
women the same as men, it made no provisions for sanctions if they did not.

In 1976, women’s earnings stood at 56 percent of men’s; in 1988, they declined to 50 percent. Com-
panies still refuse to promote women at the same
rate as men. Rather than pay women equal wages, some companies do not hire women at all. Full re-
sponsibility for home and children makes it hard for women to work past childbirth. Only once the
children are in school can mothers take part-time or temporary jobs in small, often marginally profitable
companies. Although the working woman in Japan is imagined to be single, most are married women
over age thirty-five.

Despite social problems, by the mid-1970s most Japanese people enjoyed unprecedented levels of
prosperity. Income disparities remained relatively narrow, and 90 percent of the population consid-ered
itself to be middle class. The proportion of to-tal income spent on food declined, while quantity, quality,
and variety increased. The older generation ate rice, vegetables, and fish. Young people ate meat, dairy
products, and spaghetti. Although Japan main-tained the highest savings rate in the industrialized world,
people had enough money to eat out, go to movies, and take vacations.

Social Problems for the

Twenty-First Century

Japan’s social problems also defied easy solution. In the 1980s, American social scientists praised Japan’s
educational system for producing literate students who scored higher on mathematics tests than did

Americans. Japanese critics feared that schools were turning out soulless automatons with weak char-
acters and no sense of national identity, unable to think for themselves and lacking the creativity to put
Japan in the lead of technological innovation.

Labor shortages in the 1980s in the sex trade and the dangerous, dirty, and low-paid work of
construction and stevedoring brought women and men from Taiwan, the Philippines, Iran, and other
countries to work as prostitutes and day laborers. About half entered illegally because the Labor and
Justice ministries refused to acknowledge the need for their services. Immigration by Latin Americans of
Japanese ancestry was encouraged because it was thought that they would assimilate to the dominant
culture. In 1999, 1.56 million foreigners lived legally in Japan out of a total population of 126.6 million.
Tokyo became a more cosmopolitan city, but main-stream Japanese were quick to accuse foreigners of
robbery, rape, and drug trafficking.
Economic stagnation and rising unemployment had social consequences. To keep middle-aged men
employed, corporations stopped competing to hire college graduates, even though “pay for perfor-
mance” started to replace the seniority system of merit raises. Unemployment rose to an historic high of
5.6 percent in 2009. This figure excluded part-time workers who had lost their jobs, most of them
women. Realizing that college no longer provided the escalator to permanent employment, some young
people now care little about school and find no iden-tity in work. Although they are criticized as -
“parasite singles,” structural changes in the economy have left them with few options for finding
satisfaction in the workplace.

The LDP tried to revise the

1951 Religious Corporations Law to bring govern-ment oversight to the fundraising, educational ac-
tivities, and business-related income of the 183,970 registered religious organizations. Opposition by So¯
ka Gakkai’s political arm and other religious

organizations kept the 1951 law intact.

Starting in the late 1960s, LDP politicians urged women to have more children; thereafter they la-
mented the selfishness of young women who put consumerism ahead of maternal responsibilities.

National health insurance, a 99 percent literacy rate, sanitary housing, and nutritious diets contributed
to one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world at 5 per 1,000 in 1989. By 2011 the longevity rate
for men was nearly 79 and for women, 86. Women had 1.3 children apiece, well below the 2.2 necessary
to maintain a population that started to decline in 2005. Couples who wanted a higher standard of living
or

were worried about the costs of their children’s edu-cation limited their family size regardless of political
propaganda.

In 2010, 23 percent of the population was age sixty-five or older, giving Japan the oldest popula-tion in
the industrialized world. It is projected to grow to 25 percent by 2015, when 25 percent of the national
budget will have to be spent on social wel-fare. Through the 1990s, corporations had plentiful sources of
investment capital at low interest rates be-cause Japan had the highest rate of personal savings in the
world. With more retired people, the savings rate will drop.
Although marriage is still the norm, it too has changed. The mean age of marriage for women crept from
twenty-two in 1950 to over twenty-nine in 2011.

So many women opt for four years of higher educa-tion that the former junior colleges have become
uni-versities, even though the decline in the college age population means that some have trouble
meeting their enrollment targets. In hopes of better futures than they perceive possible in Japan, some
women seek academic degrees and employment abroad. Women want careers, and they have become
increas-ingly choosy about whom they will marry and under what conditions. Older women have been
known to divorce their retired husbands because they cannot stand having “that oversized garbage”
underfoot ev-ery day.