The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture, edited by Yoshio Sugimoto, is a compendium of nineteen essays by scholars based in Australia, Japan, the United States, England, and Austria. Part of Cambridge University Press's expanding series of modern culture “companions,” the book is a welcome supplement to Sugimoto's own widely used Introduction to Japanese Culture, which has been in print since 1997 and is now in its third edition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The contributors collectively speak to Sugimoto's argument, articulated in his opening essay, “‘Japanese culture’: An overview,” that “[a]n unacknowledged paradigm shift appears to be underway in contemporary Japanese culture, with public discourse suddenly focusing upon internal divisions and variations in the population” (p. 1). Each of the individual chapters “reflects. . . the ‘multicultural model’ of Japanese society, and highlights the ways in which Japanese culture is diversified and stratified along class, regional, generational and gender lines, among others” (p. 3).

Harumi Befu's “Concepts of Japan, Japanese culture and the Japanese” builds on Sugimoto's overview in providing a theoretical framework for the Companion as a whole. Under the headings “Stratified Japan,” “Othernesses of Japan,” “Essentialism,” “De-territorialization/re-territorialization,” and “Koreans and Chinese in Japan,” Befu makes the point that “‘Japan,’ ‘Japanese culture,’ and ‘the Japanese’ are relativistic, fluid, mutable and multifaceted concepts” (p. 34). In “Japan's emic conceptions”—a reference to the deployment of culture-specific terms of analysis—Takami Kuwayama provides a fresh assessment of well-known works that include Takeo Doi's The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1973) and Chie Nakane's Japanese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). The essay draws attention to the feeling shared by a number of Japanese scholars that Western discourse relating to Japan has fallen short, and, at the same time, that they do not receive adequate respect from the West for the originality of their research. Noting that Japan has the world's second largest professional society of anthropologists, Kuwayama points out that “Japanese emicists are convinced that Western theory is incapable of fully explaining Japan” (p. 49). Concluding that “many of Japan's emic concepts”—such as Doi's amae and Nakane's tate—“have emerged in response to, or out of struggle with, Western theory,” he writes that “[t]hey are, however, contributions in their own right, which should be commended for the new light they have thrown on the study of Japan, thus opening new horizons of research” (p. 53).

Most of the other chapters survey specific segments of culture in Japan. Authors and their topics range from Hugh Clarke (language), Anne Imamura (family), Kaori Okano (schooling), Stephen Covell (religion), Ann Waswo (housing), and Naomichi Ishige (food) to Morris Low (technology), Ross Mouer (work), Takashi Inoguchi (politics), Sepp Linhart (popular leisure), and Miho Koishihara (sports). Toshiko Ellis writes on literature, and Junko Kitagawa provides an outline of art, folk, and popular music terminology and practices. Surprisingly, though, there are no chapters on other genres of the performing arts (theatre or dance) or, with the exception of Craig Norris's “Manga, anime and visual art culture,” the fine arts or film—all of which, needless to say, are enormous and highly significant categories that would have provided a rich trove of examples illustrating the diversity of culture in Japan. One essay that does focus very closely on such diversity is Hideo Aoki's “Buraku culture,” which looks at discrimination directed against burakumin within the context of an introduction to aspects of buraku culture and identity. Aoki also opens up a wide-ranging discussion of minority issues in Japan by including material on the Ainu, Okinawan, and Zainichi Korean populations. The book concludes with two chapters that consider Japanese culture within the framework of the global marketplace. Takashi Inoguchi's “Globalization and cultural nationalism” is grounded in examples as varied as soba noodles, “a potent symbol of normative cultural tradition for the Japanese people” (p. 338) that are now being produced in China, and Filipino nurses who are hired to care for elderly people living in group homes in Japan. “Exporting Japan's culture: From management style to manga,” by Ross Mouer and Craig Norris deals with both the decline in the once-thriving export of Japanese-style management and the continued growth in markets around the world for Japanese popular culture.

The Companion will be especially useful to instructors designing and teaching undergraduate courses on Japan who subscribe to what Sugimoto describes as “the inductive approach[,] which assumes that there are a variety of Japanese who generate various kinds of culture”—and who do not go along with “the deductive approach in which Japanese culture is defined “a priori” and the Japanese are those who embody it” (p. 5). There is also much material for students working on research papers and doing background reading. The language and style of each of the essays is generally straightforward and accessible. All of the authors are clearly comfortable with their subjects. The endnotes and suggestions for further reading appended to each chapter, the thirty-page bibliography, and the detailed index are integral to the usefulness of the volume. Despite the many different topics that are addressed, the Companion gives the impression of being a unified project, one that was carefully conceived and edited.