Children are relative newcomers as subjects of study in the social sciences, and have only become the subjects of intensive research in Japan during the past several decades. In this paper, I review the extensive literature on children in Japan and summarize the recent trends, problems and tasks for researchers. It is very difficult to classify the varieties of research on children, because some researchers have used quantitative methodologies while others have used qualitative methodologies.
However, in reviewing the research, I identified four main topics in the research on children as follows:
(1) historical studies on the changing concept of children under the influence of Aries;
(2) documents on real children living in a world very different from that of adults';
(3) ethnographical studies of school children and methodological problems;
(4) sub-cultures and play behavior of children under the strong influence of multi-media.
Research on children can be found in such diverse fields as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, cultural anthropology, pedagogy, and studies of sub-cultural play behavior and media behavior, and large quantities of information in each specific field of child research have been accumulated.
Therefore, it is the time to integrate a very wide diversity of researches into an interdisciplinary system of child research, especially for the purpose of promoting children's well-being. The main issue is whether or not we can understand throughly real child as a whole.
