After married, I moved to Fukushima, attracted by its natural setting. Our lives were badly disrupted by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear accident. Worried about radiation effects on my daughter, I moved with her to Kanagawa. As an evacuee, I almost lost contact with my husband, my friends, and the local community. It was then that I came to be involved in the “Hoyou Camp” for children in Fukushima run by the “Kahchanzu” group. We hope to continue our work for the children in Fukushima, as well as for my daughter and myself.

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    In Japan, natural disasters have occurred frequently since the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. However, there have not been many cases in which victims were evacuated from wide areas of the country in recent years. Indeed, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the case of Miyakejima following volcanic eruptions in 2000, and the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 are the only examples. Studies of disaster suggest that it is important for the personal life reconstruction of a victim to receive support in matters of health (physical and mental), work, education for children, and housing.
    In the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, some evacuees cannot expect to return home in the future. They will require more assistance and ongoing supports.

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    In this paper we discuss the future for families in the devastated areas after the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster as outlined in the July 2012 symposium. This paper aims in particular to comment on the two reports of Ms. Kanome and Ms. Tanami presented at the symposium. The reports indicate that a family strategy of “separating households” is significant for victims recovering from the disaster. Researchers in the field of family studies, should pay attention to the diversity of families in the devastated areas and recognize the significance of a family strategy in order to advise disaster victims trying to reconstruct their daily lives.

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    This paper attempts to reconsider Marxist feminism from the viewpoint of the discursive construction of the subject.
    In post-linguistic turn feminist theory, gender categories and sexual identity have been thought of as being constructed by discourse. Judith Butler, a feminist-deconstructionist, suggests that the subject is performatively produced by speech acts. However, some researchers, such as Nancy Fraser, criticize these theoretical tendencies for emphasizing the “cultural” dimension and overlooking the “material” dimension.
    Meanwhile, Marxist feminism has focused on the “material” dimension of sexism in modern society in accord with the tradition of Marxist theory. Many feminists, including Butler and Fraser, put a high value on Marxist feminism. However, we should reinterpret the theoretical framework of Marxist feminism in terms of the anti-essentialism since this framework assumes gender categories and sexual identity as given and fixed.
    This paper begins with a review of the significance of Marxist feminism, suggesting that Marxist feminism does not adequately theorize the discursive mechanism of sexual subjection. Secondly, I describe the relationship of sexual subjection and the public/private dichotomy in the social space by referring to Butler’s term of “(un)subject.” Finally, I reconsider the concept of the “material basis of patriarchy” in Marxist feminism. This paper insists that indeterminacy of “inside” and “outside” of society means that “the material” and “the symbolic” cannot be mutually reducible.

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    This study is based on the standpoint that the family retirement system has considerable significance in understanding the family structure of present-day Japan and we attempt to sort out how past studies have approached the family retirement system as well as placing the family retirement system in the discussion framework of “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity.”
    When we examined the studies that have evolved in sociology, ethnology, and social anthropology, since there is no common understanding of which family system the family retirement system belongs to, we added new viewpoints to the categorization suggested by Shimizu and Ueno. We found that six types of approach exist. As the result of the above, in placing the family retirement system, we came to the conclusion that three points in particular are important indications. The three points are whether the family structure is seen as homogeneous or heterogeneous, whether the important part of the family retirement system is inheritance or the living unit, and lastly, an understanding of the “Southwest Japan Type.”

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    This study investigates the meanings of the term familism by evaluating the discourses of intellectuals in the Meiji-Taisho era. Firstly, this study shows the modern character of familism by clarifying the fact that familism was praised by critics of feudalistic ideas and societies or those longing for charitable works. Secondly, examining the opposition between ‘family and home,’ this paper shows that the ideal of home as a longing for democracy was paradoxical. Finally, based on these historical analyses, I reconsider the relation between familism and democracy from the point of view of ‘passion.’ Thus, this study provides suggestions for a contemporary problem of family studies.

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    In family studies, there has been criticism of the over-emphasis of the nuclear family as the central unit of child rearing. On the other hand, the argument that the locus of social care should be “homelike” has gathered strength in recent years. This paper will consider why “home” can be the dominant logic in discussion about social care. Two controversies about social care will be taken up as sources. The analysis reveals that (1) At one time, there was strong criticism of making the locus of social care “homelike” so easily; (2) such criticism, on the other hand, has declined and various merits of care in small groups have been summarized in the concept of “homelike” today; (3) problems of child rearing in family or “homelike” care are therefore overlooked. In the discussion section, the reason why debate about social care is restricted to “home supremacism (idealizing family as the best care locus)” will be studied. In the conclusion, the need for a discussion about de-familialization to overcome the binary opposition of “homely” and “unhomely” will be suggested.

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    This article examines how people “orient to” the public/private distinction “in action.” Many studies argue that this distinction – one of the important properties of the “modern family” – forces housework into the domestic sphere. However, few have examined the actual interactional processes through which the distinction is established, maintained, and perhaps negotiated. To explicate one such process from a conversation analytic perspective, this article focuses on conversations about one kind of housework – making dinner. These are conversations between mothers and staff members in two “Kosodate Hiroba” in Osaka. Mothers repeatedly refer to (making) dinner when they are leaving a Kosodate Hiroba. When a mother produces such an utterance (hereafter, a “trigger”), she either talks to herself or addresses it to an infant of hers who cannot speak yet. Such a turn design of the trigger makes her treat (making) dinner as a private matter. Since (making) dinner is a private matter in the trigger, other people in the Kosodate Hiroba may or may not respond to it. A response to a trigger shows that the trigger is now accessible by others, that is, it is public. The degree of a trigger’s publicness varies with the type of response to it. The first type, a private response, or a soliloquy, makes a trigger public, but this type of response is not designed to elicit relevant further responses by others present. The second type of response is addressed to the trigger-utterer’s infant (who cannot speak yet). This type of response makes a trigger more public than the first type, because the trigger-utterer may respond to it. The third type of response is addressed to the trigger-utterer herself. This type of response maximizes the publicness of the trigger because the trigger-utterer is urged to respond to it. The response type is determined by whether or not the response involves agency of the person(s) who prepare(s) dinner: The more the response is oriented to agency, the more public it makes the original private trigger.

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    This paper examines the state of acceptance of the “Pietät (piety)” concept of Max Weber in Japanese family studies, with a particular focus on the writings of Teizo Toda and Takeyoshi Kawashima. In recent years, the “Pietät” concept of Max Weber has come to be understood as a consciousness supporting the authority-obedience relation in the “Ie (traditional Japanese family)” system. Toda and Kawashima were the pioneers of the acceptance of the “Pietät” concept in Japanese family studies.
    My examination of their works demonstrated that the “Pietät” concept was used by Toda and Kawashima in order to discuss the relationship between authority-obedience relations and emotive relations in the “Ie” before the Second World War. It also became clear that the emotive relations in the “Ie” differ from those in the “modern Japanese family.”
    I concluded that it is necessary to recognize the polysemy of the concept of emotion in any analysis of the “Japanese modern family” within the dual structure of the “Ie” and “Japanese modern family.”

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