Status and Role of Younger Generations in Japan

Abstract What is generally referred to as generation is a kind of “social strata” partitioned by a biological property called age. Medically speaking, age denotes the stages through which man as a biological being matures and grows old, and in the field of genetic psychology it means the several stages involved in the formation of the mind. However, when a sociologist considers the problem of generations, unlike the case of medicine or genetic psychology, he views it not from the standpoint of individual growth nor from the standpoint of the chronological stages in human development, but rather he considers it along with the important spatial classifications he uses to explain differences in social behavior and attitudes, together with such indicators as education, occupation, income, and the like. For example, when a sociologist wants to examine the structural distribution of a public opinion poll, he takes age difference into consideration in the same sense he does differences in education, occupation, and income.