Multicultural Japan

Sampling Problem and the Question of Visibility

Hypothetical questions sometimes inspire the sociological imagination. Suppose that a being from a different planet arrived in Japan and wanted to meet a typical Japanese, one who best typified the Japanese adult population. Whom should the social scientists choose? To answer this question, several factors would have to be considered: gender, occupation, educational background, and so on.

To begin with, the person chosen should be a female, because women outnumber men in Japan; sixty-five million women and sixty-two million men live in the Japanese archipelago. With regard to occupation, she would definitely not be employed in a large corporation but would work in a small enterprise, since only one in eight workers is employed in a company with three hundred or more employees. Nor would she be guaranteed lifetime employment, since those who work under this arrangement are concentrated in large companies. She would not belong to a labor union, because less than one in five Japanese workers is unionized. She would not be university educated. Less than one in five Japanese have a university degree, even though today nearly half of the younger generation gains admission to a university for a four-year degree. Table 1.1 summarizes these demographic realities.