INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE ASIAN MIDDLE CLASSES AND THEIR CHARACTERISTICS

HEN it was recognized that the latecomer countries of Asia successfully began their economic development in the 1970s and later, a debate began to take place as to who were the prime movers of economic growth. In connection with this discussion, attention began to be focused on the questions of how the “middle class”1 emerged, and what characteristics it displayed. Subsequently, when the Asian countries with successful economic growth records became “democratized” in the 1980s and after, a new hypothesis suddenly gained wide circulation. Proponents of this hypothesis have claimed that the newly emerged “middle class” was the main thrust of the democratization movement. Identifying a unilinear chain of causal relationships among social developments, the hypothesis asserts that the intention to pursue modernization led to economic growth, giving rise in turn to the middle class, which spearheaded the democratization movement (Nakamura 1993; Huntington 1991). This view, which tries to understand the rise of the “new middle class” in Asia in a unilinear way, is becoming an influential one (Sonoda 1998). In this special issue, however, we challenge this interpretation. Empirical data of the middle classes are presented here that make rough cross-national comparisons possible, allowing us to reexamine the characteristics of the Asian middle classes as well as the sociocultural backgrounds of economic development in Asia. This special issue approaches this task from the perspective of area studies, and rests on an awareness of the similarities and differences in the preconditions for economic growth and the emergence of middle classes in different countries of Asia. We realize that the Asian middle W