9 - The Japanese ‘Welfare Society’: Social Rights in Action and the Seeds of the Precariat?

Summary

This chapter traces the origins of today’s Japanese precariat class back to the post–Second World War development of the Japanese ‘welfare society’ – an alternative model to the West’s ‘welfare state’. The Japanese Constitution of 1945, promulgated in the wake of the country’s defeat, included social rights, but tethered them to an older, traditional concept – never before legislated – of the ‘right to existence’ (seizonken). Efforts were made after the war to investigate working-class conditions and devise social policies favourable to meeting the needs of workers and their families. But strong opposition to unionism, socialism and the welfare state bent these efforts towards a non-state model of social solidarity, one that saw the individual as belonging to a company and family – what came to be called a ‘welfare society’ by the late 1970s. By that time, only full-time male workers receiving monthly salaries benefited from the socio-economic policies of the immediate post-war era; women were excluded. Thus, decades before the advent of neo-liberalism, social rights were being undermined, workplace hierarchies were being created, and the rise of the precariat was underway.