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Japan can be regarded as a very successful society in terms of economic impact, level of technology, quality of health care, educational standards, and life expectation. Since the 1980s, Japan has consistently ranked among the top ten countries in all three categories of the United Nations Human Development Index: health, education and standard of living. However, there are some indications that this has not necessarily brought more happiness to Japan. Various statistics support the assumption that the prosperity of a country does not go hand in hand with the level of happiness of its inhabitants – Japan’s suicide rate, for example, is one of the highest in the world. How significant, then, is this kind of success for individual members of a society and to what degree does it influence their subjective well-being? This leads to the question of what “happiness” actually implies – or can imply – and what spectrum of topics and emotions this concept connotes. This question becomes even more pressing if one assumes that “happiness” is historically and culturally contingent.
Conventional images of a “happy life” continue to exist in present-day Japan. Yet in the course of social destabilization and diversification, they are also changing. At the same time, integrative mechanisms of modernity seem to become dysfunctional. Thus, do social transformations (e.g. demographic change, the erosion of ideas of social homogeneity) bring about shifting levels of subjective well-being? If so, how would this manifest itself? What might be the implications of such a development for Japanese society? Furthermore, how can they be evaluated from a historical, political, and economic point of view? Within this new focus of research, these questions, among others, shall be examined from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Research Projects 
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Staff (DIJ)
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