Ninety percent of Japanese women have defined themselves as “middle-class.” More than half the country’s citizens support just one of the country’s twelve professional baseball teams, the Tokyo Giants. On New Year’s Eve, nine in every ten television-owning households in Japan have at times been said to tune in to the same show, pitting a group of female singers against a group of men. But still the country around me remains a society based on a vertical, not a horizontal, model.
