The 1990s in Japan have been a period of far-reaching changes in Japanese society, which have not come to an end yet. These developments demand a reexamination of our accumulated knowledge of Japan. This volume looks at them from different perspectives; the contributions deal with issues from the fields of economy, education, political and social science. The volume is a collection of papers from the 2002 meeting of the German Association of Social Scientific Research of Japan (VSJF) at Halle-Wittenberg University.