抄録
The study tries to get various infomations on how Japanese look to American students as well as on evaluating the social and psychological distance between Japan and the United States. Systematic framework revised from the one which was constructed for nation's prestige index measurement says that knowledge, feeling and understanding of another country are aspects of a nation's attitude to that country. Feeling and understanding have certain amount of scale in measuring these aspects of a nation's attitude but knowledge does not. On knowledge we know just it is right or wrong. Apart from the components on measuring the nation's attitude, you may say that someone constructs a nation's attitude from vague image of a country. I suspect that this kind of image might be applied for the nation's attitude when a respondent does not have any idea on a specific aspect of a nation. Thus, according to my frame of reference of evaluation system of a nation, the attitude which has such three aspects is put parallel with social evaluation as I defined or so called synthetic evaluation of a nation. The attitude and the social evaluation are interrelated in its nature.
Besides the evaluation system, the study has tried to construct a social distance and psychological distance between the nations. Here we suppose that some nations might be evaluated highly because of emotional feeling, but others do not. Then, in a distance system it is determined that the former constructs a psychological distance and the latter a social distance. Findings: The American students have evaluated Japanese relatively highly, but from analysis of the difference among the aspects of the attitude we know that their score on knowledge is higher than the one on feeling. From social evaluation of Japan we could know that Japan is now ranked in a group of the second class developed countries in the world but after ten years from now she gets a position among the first class developed countries. The psychological distance between Americans and Japanese is very close, but the social distance is not.
