Social Stratification in an Aging Society with Low Fertility The Case of Japan

Sawako Shirahase is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo. She received her D.Phil. in sociology from the University of Oxford, conducted post-doctoral research at the East Asian Institute, Columbia University as a junior researcher, and held positions of Senior Research fellow at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Tsukuba University. She is currently a director of the UTokyo Center for Contemporary Japanese Studies. 

Dr. Shirahase’s research interests include comparative social stratification and demographic transformation, gender and generational relations, and family change and social security system. She is the author of Social Inequality in Japan (Routledge, 2014) and Demographic Change and Inequality in Japan (ed.) (Trans Pacific Press, 2011), and her recent publications are “Social Stratification Theory and PopulationAging Reconsidered,” ( Social Science Japan Journal 24(2): 277–288, 2021) and The Structure of Social Stratification in the Late-stage of Life (in Japanese) (ed., with S. Arita and N. Sudo) (University of Tokyo Press, 2021).

Dr. Shirahase is on the editorial board of International Sociology and Contemporary Japan , and on the advisory board of Social Politics . She currently serves as Vice President of the International Sociological Association and Vice President of the International Science Council. She was the principal investigator of the research project conducting the 2015 National Survey of Social Stratification and Social Mobility (SSM) Survey which has been conducted every 10 years since 1955.