Happiness in Japan: Continuities and Discontinuities

The new research focus was introduced in 2008 after three new research fellows had joined the DIJ. While quite different in orientation, it relates in several respects to the previous research focus on demographic change. With “happiness” and “life-satisfaction”, the DIJ puts at the centre of its research agenda a field of inquiry that has not only gained much attention in Japan – both in the media and in academia – but which is also of increasing importance internationally. The new research focus of “happiness” ties in with some of the issues already dealt with in the DIJ’s research focus of demographic change in Japan. This holds in particular for ageing, fertility decline and the emergence of a new underclass in the wake of socio-economic change. The high life expectancy enjoyed by the Japanese is testimony to a highly successful society. Yet the bliss of longevity brings in its wake structural changes for which both individuals and institutions are badly prepared. Reflecting the impending problems are catchwords such as “care hell”, which came into currency around the turn of the century. Despite Japan’s considerable economic success and high degree of material comfort, Japanese society as a whole is not happy, and much suggests that demographic developments are at the bottom of this discontent. Why it should be that gains in life expectancy go hand in hand with low fertility (due to hesitant reproductive behaviour) is a highly complex question. However, it can hardly be doubted that the change in reproductive behaviour, leading as it does in the long run to population decline, is an indication of collective uncertainty, if not dissatisfaction. A society of extremely low fertility has problems not just with the sustainability of its social security systems; it is also a society that fails to provide the middle generation with optimal conditions for satisfying a fundamental human desire, thus jeopardizing its own continuance. And it is this generation that experiences the transformation of what was for its predecessors an all-encompassing middle-class society into one consisting of winners and losers.

This is the backdrop against which the DIJ’s new research focus investigates life-satisfaction, the conditions of individual and collective happiness, as well as current discourses about it. For the past couple of decades, the problem of how to measure happiness has occupied a number of disciplines, with psychology and economics in the vanguard. A crucial question is whether and how concepts of happiness can be compared across nations and cultures. Once again Japan is of particular interest here. In terms of standard of living, Japan is on a par with the most advanced countries. It is the first non-Christian, non-white country to have accomplished this. Is Japan happier, therefore, than other countries outside the Western world? The DIJ’s new research focus is designed to help answer this question, a far-reaching question that calls for the involvement of social structural analysis and welfare research as much as political analysis, media studies and cultural anthropology.