This article tries to review socialization theories in educational sociology in Japan.
In the early 1960's, many researchers developed an interest in using the term of socialization in their articles. Before 1960's, research on personality development concentrated on autonomy, ego-formation, national character, and personality type, and thus the research was influenced not only by sociological theories but by cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. After 1960's, structural-functional theories, role theories, social learning theories, developmental tasks, and social interactionism were introduced and many theoretical and empirical studies on socialization were conducted.
Today, advances in socialization research are shown in such areas as political socialization, economical (monetary) socialization, vocational socialization, linguistic socialization, and moral socialization.
