The modern society or modern civil society, holding an immature part and taking an ambivalent character of liberating and suppression because of a historical process of the formation, has consisted until today. It has had various influence on the consideration of the contemporary society as thought tendency to which the remark theory on various thought (postmodern) such as antimodern ages, post-modern ages, ultra-modern ages, and reject-modern ages caused during the maturity can be summarized. It is necessary to ask it from the standpoint of the macro sociology that diagnoses a whole society like the modernization society image etc. that exist historically with the thought image as system in the age.
Talcott Parsons thought modernization of Europe established the Industrial Revolution and a democratic revolution and that of America achieved an educational revolution and associations. Kenichi Tominaga discussed the modernization of Japan society, and has generalized the model of a modern industrial society. Mutsundo Atarashi explains the latter term modern by comparison with the first term modern the transformation of informatized, managerial, the internationalization, and the popularization. Isamu Kaneko and Kouichi Hasegawa pursed 9 flows of the present age from the aspect of the macro sociology. Especially the most sociological modern theme is a reality of the globalization that Yosuke Koutô emphasizes as a hybrid modern. It begins there to see symptom the post modernization that exceeds the latter term modern though is one phase of the modern. Risk and the environment by Niklas Luhman high-modernity and surveillance by Anthony Giddens, the liquid society by Bauman explains such a symptom.

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Without doubt, an international society exists in our contemporary world. However, since most of the serious problems that we are facing today have not been resolved within the framework of international society, we need a new underlying concept to enable our comprehension of a new emergent society. Although we may refer to a new society as a world society, it is much more plausible to define it as a global society because the terms "two worlds" and "third world" have lost their meaning, and global environmental problems are currently assuming critical importance. If we regard societies as contradictions and overdeterminations (surdéterminations) of communality, stratification, systematization, and ecological restriction, global society can be understood as one that comprises the processes and effects of the global expansion of civil societies, which have been based on the separation of politics and religion, democracy, and the combination of science and technology. This constitutes the second social systematization that has been enabled by overcoming empires, which were the first social systematization sublating (aufhebung) the contradictions between communalities and stratifications with religions, states, markets, and cities. The structure of global society seems excessively weak in its communality and excessively complicated in its stratification due to the overwhelming
insufficiency of its systematization. Global environmental crises and an unevenly increasing population have emerged as unavoidable problems for global society. In order to overcome these obstacles, citizens around the world are making positive use of the global informationalization in their own capacities, criticizing the "empire" -like world ruling system, raising their own newly identified consciousness, and trying to counter global social formation with the help of NGOs and NPOs. These efforts portend growing participation in activities such as the World Social Forum in the future.

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In this article, I examine the works of sociologist Kurihara Akira because I consider his work as a continuation of the Japanese academic tradition of "civil society research." When he began conducting his research, Kurihara espoused E. H. Erikson's concept of identity. Usually, this concept is understood as a tough and stable psychological state that is established when an individual resolves the conflicts that arise in each stage of life. According to this understanding, establishing an identity is a problem that concerns the individual's psychological process. However, Kurihara's concept of identity differs from the usual understanding.
During the 1960s, E. H. Erikson participated in the U. S. Civil Rights Movement and contributed to young African Americans'attainment of rights. Kurihara, who was staying in the U. S. during the same period, was very impressed by Erikson's activities and learned the immense utility of the concept of identity when researching young people's activities of self-identification during a historical event such as the Civil Right Movement. Therefore, for Kurihara, the concept of identity is a strategic one that enables us to simultaneously analyze the behavior of individuals and historical social actualities.
With this understanding of the concept of identity in mind, Kurihara tried to analyze the behavior and social background of political leader Konoe Ayamaro in pre-war Japan. Next, he analyzed the situation of young Japanese people in the 1970s for whom affluence came with the oppressing atmosphere of a well-programmed and managed society. Moreover, he recently spent a great deal of time researching those afflicted with Minamata and attempted to reveal a new perspective concerning their style of protesting against the governmentcorporation complex.

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1. The term "industrialism" or "the industrial society" was coined by Saint Simon. At the time of its coinage, it implied a new industry-based social regime that was expected to be built after the French Revolution. Subsequently, the term was inherited by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, first-generation sociologists. Although Comte was one of the advocates of the use of the term under the influence of Saint-Simon, he used the word positivism rather than industrialism, as shown in the title of his principal work Cours de philosophie positive. Spencer was the main user of the word in his evolutionary thesis "From militant type of society to the industrial type of society."
2. Emile Durkheim, a second-generation sociologist, in his work De la division du travail social, inherited both words of industrialism and positivism from Saint-Simon and Comte. Durkheim asserted that industrialism is the modern social regime that was formed by the division of labor. Georg Simmel, another second-generation sociologist, in Philosophie des Geldes, understood industrialism not in terms of division of labor but in terms of the exchange relations mediated by money in his sociological formulation of the economy. On the other hand, Max Weber, also belonging to the same generation, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, analyzed the money economy by contrasting it with the natural one, and emphasized the importance of the role of money in the industrial society.
3. The Japanese society was, for a long time prior to the Pacific War, a militant type of society. But after Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, it converted itself to an industrial type of society for the first time in the high economic growth period beginning in 1955. As shown in the third national survey of Social Stratification in every ten years since 1955, Japan reached its peak as an industrial society, when 77% of the nation expressed the subjective attitude of belonging to the "middle" class in 1975 under equalization policy in the economic development. After the 1980s, however, Nakasone LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) government, being influenced by the policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, began to adopt the strong competitive market principles and to deregulate governmental control. These policies are currently enlarging social class differences, destroying the development of middle-class-centered structure, and worsening the national situation of equality and welfare. Japanese industrialism now faces the need of developing a "social policy" in order to regain the balance of Japanese industrial society.

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The prevalence of discourses on "gap-widening society" is an important phenomenon for sociology in so far as it has revealed the weakness and crisis of class studies and stratification studies. Current class and stratification studies cannot provide sharp and effective tools for understanding the widening economic disparities and so-called immobilization of an unequal society. Furthermore, current class and stratification studies cannot fulfill their central function of providing effective independent variables for other sociological fields.
Such difficulties and stagnation have been produced by a specific developmental process of class and stratification studies in post-war Japan. Class studies were established by Ryuuken Ohashi and his class scheme was accepted among many Japanese sociologists. However, his two-class scheme was based on polarization theory and an overpoliticized understanding of class ; since the 1980s, its explanation power has diminished. Kunio Odaka, who established stratification studies in post-war Japan, also regarded class as a political subject. Odaka argued that there was no apparent class in Japanese society and he promoted the study of stratification as a hierarchical continuum that can be artificially operationalized into certain statistical categories. In this process, the concepts of class and stratification have been regarded as conflicting sociological viewpoints ; thus, their validities and actualities have diminished to a large extent.
In order to conquer such weakness and difficulty in class and stratification studies, we propose two suggestions: (1) We must explicitly deny Marx's two-class scheme and adopt a four-class—capitalist, new middle, working, and old middle class—scheme that is widely accepted in European sociology ; (2) Social stratification is understood as a system of social categories that is formed when class locations are mediated by institutions such as industrial structures, the labor market, family, and the State. From this viewpoint, class and stratification are regarded not as antagonistic but as complementary, and we can proceed to newly defined and fruitful sociological fields : class-stratification studies.

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What regime providing goods and services in a "post-industrialized society" is emerging in Japan following the transformation of the social production system from a postwar system based on the mass production system and Keynesian welfare state? What is Japanese trajectory moving toward a post-industrialized society? Over the past dozen years or so in Japan, neo-liberal institutional reforms have been undertaken to promote marketization and financialization. Consequently, established Japanese management and employment practices are facing strong pressure to change.
To examine the change and continuance of Japanese management and employment practices, this paper argues three theoretical points--mutual interaction among markets, hierarchies and workers'needs/orientations ; individualization ; and restructuring of paid work and unpaid work including domestic labor, work in non-profit associations, and volunteer activities.

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This paper examines the narratives of being the "justifiable party of Gender Identity Disorder (GID)" and explicates the types of criteria that are used.
First, it focuses on how the GID category is used, by referring to the question of the distinction between self-enforcement and other-enforcement, as posed by Harvey Sacks (1979). Second, the paper analyzes interview data concerning the "justifiable party" based on 23 interviews with 21 people with GID, and explains the criteria that are used. Principally, there are four criteria that define the GID category : serious illness, self-sacrifice, struggle for feminity or masculinity, and possession of social skills. Although these criteria are based on medical grounds they are currently being used within the GID community by people with GID.
GID is a category that not only doctors, but also people with GID themselves have the right to enforce. People with GID modify the medical use of these criteria in a rigid manner and apply them to the criteria of possession of social skills. The GID category is decided on by people with GID, and this decision assumes a strong moral character away from the medical setting.

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The seeds of conflict, or even of a revolution, in a society can germinate from policies of a nation-state that are designed to strengthen its power of governance. This paper explores how such seemingly contradictory phenomena emerged within the Qing government and led to the Repiblican Revolution of 1911. The ideas included here have been borrowed from Theda Skocpol, a historical sociologist, who has made a major contribution to research on the revolution. Emphasizing that a state autonomously functions as a governing body, she focuses on the process of how old regimes in the past, pressured by military competition with foreign powers, provoked conflicts within and among different groups of people or along the lines of class while campaigning for the modernization of national institutions. This paper shares her view but differs in that it terms a government's attempt to strengthen its functions as "naturalization," instead of "centralization," in order to more clearly outline how state policies and society influence each other, thereby laying the seeds for a possible revolution.
In this context, the Republican Revolution best demonstrates how a revolution can result from policies intended to strengthen the government's functions. The Qing government initiated "naturalization" through the devolution of its power to provincial assemblies in the 1900s. On being granted a certain degree of autonomy by such a policy, political actors in several provinces utilized the assemblies as a channel to directly make claims to the central government. In fact, the assemblies served a wider function : Local intellectuals, who identified themselves as "Han," made them a base from which to resist the dominance of the Qing government, i. e., the dynasty of the "alien" Manchu. This paper brings to light how such "naturalization" through devolution, which was accelerated by the military organization during this period, induced local revolutionary elements and resulted in the collapse of the dynasty.

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This paper highlights the circumstances leading to the forming of a residents' movement in order to combat an environmental risk. It achieves this objective by conducting a case study of a protest against the construction of a wide-area waste management facility in the southern part of "Shiga" Prefecture in the former town of "Shiga".
This paper is based on the framework of McAdam et al. (political opportunities, mobilizing structure, and framing processes) and the point of view that Broadbent had regarded a social institutional and collective cultural context in local community as a factor of characterizing a Japanese movement. It investigates the circumstances leading to the emergence of a residents'movement in order to combat an environmental risk by comparing the case of "Shiga" to the case study of "Maki" Town, which is a successful case of a residents'movement combating an environmental hazard.
In the case of "Shiga" Town, a majority of the opposition emphasized the election of opposition members of the town and prefectural assemblies, instead of discussing about the environmental risk posed by the waste management facility with the residents of the area.
Consequently, the movement resulted in residents participating in the policymaking process by electing a prefectural legislative representative for their single-seat constituency and a mayor. However, it became apparent that the conflict surrounding the planned waste management facility was not driven by the concern regarding environmental risk but by the existing political confrontation between the conservatives and reformists. Ultimately, the construction of waste management facility went forward.
In order to organize a residents'movement for combating an environmental risk, it is important for such a movement to be harmonized with the priorities of the local community during the participation in policy making that is driven by the three factors mentioned by McAdam et al.

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During the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, private consumption demanded. flexibility in social welfare provisions. Thatcherism attempted to respond to the call that advocated deregulation and privatization. Surprisingly, both the proponents and opponents of Thatcherism alike embraced the new articulation of identities promoted by private consumption.
However, in consumer society, the poor become marginalized as welfare recipients. Zygmunt Bauman suggests not only that the poor in consumer society have no consumer choice but also that they are criminalized because they no longer engage in both labor and consumption. The poor are "self-portraits of the society with minus signs" and as such, maintain the society's self-image. The criminalization of poverty places them outside the normative consensus of the welfare state ; thus, the result is a moral and economic justification of poverty.

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This paper demonstrates how the self-oriented method of job decision making by university graduates became common in prewar Japan. In the Meiji and Taisho eras, informal connections and school exam scores of prospective employees were considered very important by employers. Most studies have overlooked the implication of this phenomenon because they were conducted from the value perspectives of the present society. This paper explains the phenomenon from the standpoint of interpretative sociology and points out that the new self-oriented phenomenon followed it.
The discussion is developed as follows. First, from the sociological perspective, the author defines the freedom to choose an occupation in modern Japan as the opportunity to make a career choice. This notion did not exist in the situation surrounding employment in merchant enterprises in the Edo era. Second, the author points out that while employing candidates, companies in the Meiji and Taisho eras depended on informal connections and scores in school examinations ; this was considered normal practice. Finally, this paper illustrates the process by which such a trust came to be regarded as abnormal and job interviews focusing on a candidate's personality started being considered normal. This process implies that the distinction between self and others (or between an individual and institutions) was related to the moral distinction between normal and abnormal. The emergence of job interviews suggests the legitimacy of self-oriented method of job decision making.

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In this paper, different aspects pertaining to the negative consciousness that the Japanese residents living in the industrial city which has a large population of foreign residents harbor toward foreign residents, and their contribution factors are clarified through a local resident investigation conducted twice in 1999 and 2005.
Firstly, I analyzed the contribution factor of "exclusive consciousness." Subsequently, it became clear that the "relative size of foreign population" in an area had an impact on the "exclusive consciousness" harbored toward the foreign residents in the area in the investigation in 1999. On the other hand, in the investigation in 2005, the effect of the "relative size of foreign population" was lost and the variables of individual attributes and personal characteristics exhibited considerable effect on the exclusive consciousness of the Japanese residents. These findings support the "group threat theory."
Secondly, I analyzed the contribution factor of the "consciousness of deteriorating life environment" as perceived by Japanese residents. No variable barring "education" revealed significant effects. This result suggested that the "conciousness of deteriorating life environment" is shared widely among Japanese residents.
This paper revealed the following two findings. One is that the group threat theory is supported in the industrial city which has a large population of foreign residents in Japan, and the other is that there is a clear difference between the contribution factors of the "consciousness of deteriorating life environment" and "exclusive consciousness." This implies that different mechanisms are working between "perception" of the "deteriorating life environment" and "manifestation" of the "exclusive consciousness."

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