Since the economic boom of the 1970s, Japan was generally discussed as a mass middle-class society. This image was based less on objective status indicators and more on the fact that over 90% of Japanese self-identify as middle class. Even with an increase in income inequality and the onset of the discourse on Japan as a gap society since the mid-2000s, the distribution of self-identification has hardly changed. However, this does not mean that the objective shifts in Japan’s social structure have gone unnoticed by the population. The way objective changes have impacted evaluations of individual social status is simply more subtle: what has changed is not the distribution of how people self-identify, but rather the way their objective social status (measured via education, occupation and income) impacts their self-evaluation. Added up, the share of the population that places itself in the middle has not remarkably changed. But, whereas there was no clear concept of what it meant to be upper or lower middle in the mid-1980s, resulting in rather arbitrary self-placement, there now seems to be more awareness of distinctions also within the middle. As a result, self-placement has become more closely connected to objective social status, with people with relatively higher incomes, level of education or occupational status being more likely to place themselves in the upper middle, and people whose objective social status is relatively lower being more likely to place themselves in the lower middle. To show this ‘quiet transformation of status identification’, we use data from the Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) and Stratification and Social Psychology (SSP) survey series, covering the three decades from 1985 to 2015. Running OLS-regression models, we compare the impact of objective social status on status identification across time. Our results show that this relationship has become stronger, implying that today Japanese people have a more realistic understanding of their social status.

中文翻译：

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幕后运动：日本身份认同的悄然转变

自 1970 年代的经济繁荣以来，日本被普遍认为是一个大众中产阶级社会。这个形象不是基于客观的地位指标，而是基于超过 90% 的日本人自认为是中产阶级的事实。即使自 2000 年代中期以来收入不平等加剧和日本作为差距社会的讨论开始，自我认同的分布也几乎没有改变。然而，这并不意味着日本社会结构的客观变化没有被人们注意到。客观变化对个人社会地位评估的影响方式更加微妙：改变的不是人们如何自我认同的分布，而是他们的客观社会地位（通过教育、职业和收入来衡量）影响他们自己的方式-评估。加起来，处于中间位置的人口比例没有显着变化。但是，尽管在 1980 年代中期没有明确的中上或下中的概念，导致相当随意的自我定位，但现在似乎对中间的区别有了更多的认识。因此，自我定位与客观社会地位的联系更加紧密，收入、教育程度或职业地位相对较高的人更有可能将自己置于中上，而客观社会地位相对较低的人更有可能将自己置于中下层。为了展示这种“身份认同的悄然转变”，我们使用来自社会分层和社会流动 (SSM) 和分层和社会心理学 (SSP) 调查系列的数据，涵盖 1985 年至 2015 年的三个十年。运行 OLS 回归模型，我们比较客观社会地位对身份认同的影响跨越时间。我们的研究结果表明，这种关系变得更加牢固，这意味着今天的日本人对其社会地位有了更现实的理解。