I have been interested in the legal problems on the relationship between social groups and their members because social groups are essential for human beings to develop themselves and to live happily. There are many kinds of social groups. From my viewpoint, however, post-war theories on the Japanese Constitutional Law have not sufficiently propounded the persuasive classification of them. In this paper I examine the meaning of the words 'commune' and 'community', which has been used in several recent papers and suggest useful way of classification of social groups from the viewpoint of the Japanese Constitutional Law.
