Honestly, I'm much more familiar with China scholarship than Japan scholarship, and with historical scholarship than anthropological. But Bruce Batten's To the Ends of Japan might be worth a read. There are also quite a few scholarly works concerning the role of kokugaku (roughly, "national learning") -- a fairly fundamentalist, xenophobic school of philology and philosophy that sought to purge Japanese culture of foreign "impurities", and rose to prominence from the Meiji Restoration through WWII. (It also exercised considerable influence on modern Japanese archaeology in its formative period; my impression is that its nativist premises colored many early archaeologists' findings.) Stuff on social status (John Hall's "container society" and more recent materials) might be interesting too -- e.g. on the status of burakumin).