Abstract

Not a day goes by that the press in Japan is not reporting on something related to social stratification, and it has been like that for the last sev- eral years. It is particularly the term kakusa shakai that has received massive media and public attention. Created in 2004 by Yamada Masa- hiro and variously translated as “unequal society”, “difference society”, “disparity society”, “stratified society”, “society of widening gaps”, and “polarized society”, the term obviously caught the spirit of the times. It quickly became a powerful  but at the same time increasingly empty signifier for all sorts of empirical as well as perceived inequalities, such as in regards to regional, medical, gender, and educational inequalities, to name just a few of the most frequent usages (keizai kakusa, chi’iki kakusa, iryo ¯ kakusa, jojo kakusa, kyo ¯ iku kakusa, kibo ¯ kakusa, jo ¯ ho ¯ ka- kusa, kakusa kekkon, even sekkusu (sex) kakusa). Japan thus appears as a highly unequal society  and in fact, the OECD has attested that Japan had a rising poverty level already in 2006, a comparatively high one among the OECD countries. The national pov- erty rate stood at 15.7 percent in 2006,