Social Differentiation of Cultural Taste and Practice in Contemporary Japan: Nonhierarchical Asymmetric Cluster Analysis

This paper is an application of a new procedure of cluster analysis which deals with asymmetric similarities to sociological data. The aim of this study is to explore how cultural practices in contemporary Japan are classified, and to assess how social class and gender are related to the difference in the constellation of cultural taste. Nonhierarchical asymmetric cluster analysis is used to gain better understanding the underlying structure of cultural taste of some social subgroups in contemporary Japan. Drawing on the national survey which provides detailed information on a broad range of cultural participation of the 2915 respondents from a nationally representative sample in Japan collected in 2005, the paper demonstrates that there are some notable dissimilarity in cultural participation practices between genders, as well as among social classes. The result shows that middle-class women has distinct cultural taste patterns from other social class groups. This finding suggests that they define boundaries and form cultural segmentation. The results obtained from the application of the clustering approach to the data are compared to those obtained from the asymmetric multidimensional scaling. Results are basically consistent.