Abstract
Admitting that in the present situation of the world history the problems of youth have become an important problem in all social systems and countries, in this article I am discussing how we should treat the problems on the basis of the past sociological researches.
When we approach the problems I think the following three points necessary : (1) to take them in relation to essential aspects of social change and to make clear the quality of the change, (2) to take what the problems involue as the phenomenal form of the relations of confrontation and tension between other generations and within the same generation, and (3) to grasp the problems in relation to the buckgrounds of the times facing the world-historical change.
The problems of youth in the real situation, however, are so complex and diverse that it is difficult to take them simply and uniformly. Especially in Japan rapid changes have been taken place for recent ten or more years, so it is not always possible to clarify the phenomena that have come out as the problems of youth wholly. Therefore I think it necessary to take the problems, which have been taken as the problems of university students or universities, by putting more emphasis on young laborers transfered to factories or industrial sections in a large scale and the youth in rural villages forced to flow out of their villages in the development of industrialization. I want to seize the problems of youth, and the changes of Japanese society through economic and technological changes, and what these changes have brought. By doing this we should clarify the rules and forms of individuals' behavioral patterns and consciousness, and there exists the method of sociological researches not of speculative and philosophical ones.
International comparison of the problems is needed, but when it is practiced we should pay attention to discriminating between the specularity of each society and the general tendency.
