Happiness in Japan

Lecture by Florian Coulmas (German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo).

This talk is about the relatively low happiness of the Japanese by international comparison. The observation that in Western Europe, North-America and Japan GNP per capita has been constantly rising during the past half century, while subjective life-satisfaction has remained almost unchanged is known as the “Easterlin paradox,” after its inventor, economist Richard Easterlin. It is called a paradox because in capitalist market economies it is taken for granted that higher incomes make people happier. Japan’s nominal GNP grew tenfold from 1950 to 1980 alone, but the self-reported life-satisfaction did not increase notably. This throws into doubt even the notion that there is a strong link between growth and happiness in poor countries, for during the years of reconstruction after World War II Japan was very poor. It is now, and has been for three decades, one of the wealthiest countries in the world by any measure. However, nowadays the life-satisfaction of the Japanese is negatively affected not so much by the absence of economic growth as by social developments some of which can be associated with the penetration of market mechanisms into all spheres of life. Demographic trends also play an important role.

Florian Coulmas is director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo. Prior to assuming this position in 2004, he was chair of Modern Japanese Studies at the Institute of East Asian Studies, Duisburg-Essen University. He held teaching and research positions in various environments, including Georgetown University, Washington DC, The National Language Research Institute, Tokyo, and was a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study, Berlin. His publications include 20 monographs, more than a dozen edited volumes and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He is Editor of Contemporary Japan, DIJ’s peer-reviewed biannual journal. and Associate Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Recently he published Fukushima. Vom Erdbeben zur atomaren Katastrophe, Munich: C.H.Beck, jointly written with Judith Stalpers, and Imploding Populations in Japan and Germany, Leiden: Brill, with Ralph Lützeler. For a comprehensive list of publications please see: http://www.dijtokyo.org/about_us/director&lang=en