The issue of how Japanese society operates, and in particular why it has succeeded, has generated a wide variety of explanatory models, including the Confucian ethic, classlessness, group consciousness, and uniqueness in areas as diverse as body images and language patterns. In Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan the contributors examine these models and the ways in which they have sometimes been used to create a sense of Japaneseness, that obscures the fact that Japan is actually an extremely complex and heterogenous society. In particular, practice at the micro-level of society is...