Lifetime Employment in 21 st Century Japan Stability and Resilience Under Pressure in the Japanese Management System By Peter Matanle School of East Asian Studies University of Sheffield p.matanle@sheffield.ac.uk and Kenji Matsui Faculty of Education Niigata University The final definitive version of this paper has been published in: Sierk A. Horn (ed.) Emerging perspectives in Japanese human resource management (2011): 15-44. By Peter Lang GmbH. ISBN: 978-3-631-62098-4. Book and publisher details are available here: http://www.peterlang.de/ . Suggested Citation Matanle, P. and Matsui, K. (2011) Lifetime employment in 21st century Japan: Stability and resilience under pressure in the Japanese management system. In S. A. Horn (ed.) Emerging perspectives in Japanese human resource management, Berlin: Peter Lang: 15- 44. This paper is a post-review corrected version, and is the final version prior to publisher proofing. Readers are advised to refer to the published paper for accurate citation and ref- erencing. If you are unable to access the published version, then please contact the author at: p.matanle@sheffield.ac.uk .