'Mary C. Brinton's Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan focuses on one of the most important social changes of the beginning of the 21st century in Japan ... Long envious of Japan's famed social stability and its assumed relation to economic success, the international community had been for the most part unaware of the highly orchestrated nature of this stability, including the complex relationships and political-economic contexts that made it possible. What the author of Lost in Transition brings to our attention in excellent quantitative and qualitative detail is how this system functioned and the effects upon the 'nonelite' student population most disadvantaged by its unraveling.' Andrea G. Arai, Journal of Sociology