The key for creating solidarity in Japan of today is for every member of the general public to become a co-investigator for victims who have experienced inhumane conditions because of non-regular employment, subcontract labor in nuclear power plants and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following question: how can we enable the general public to become co-investigators ?

  To clarify this question, I analyzed the Unearthing Movement by Minshushi, particularly regarding Takobeya labor and the perpetration for Eastern Asian people in World War II. Specifically, I focused on the perpetrators.

  The findings are bellow.

  1. Perpetrators have a dual experience as both “perpetration as perpetrator” and “perpetration as victim.” When people understand this, they can understand rules for the structure of this society.

  2. When people who believe themselves to be victims are accused as perpetrators, they experience a contradiction. This contradiction enables people to make progress. In this case, this regards understanding the contents of the constitution.

  3. Making progress is a precondition for developing subjective co-investigators: as they learn about constitution, they find that they consciously need to choose humane work.

  This paper examines the concept of “distance” in relation to correspondence education in adult and community education. In this paper, we focus the discussion on early days: using materials from IFEL, we focus on how policymakers and correspondence education actors are influenced by “distance” and how they define the non-simultaneous acts of teaching and learning on the basis of the “distance”. The findings of this analysis are as follows.

  First, I have shown that those recognized as being at a “distance” in relation to correspondence education were perceived as having a “fatal disadvantage” or “intrinsic flaw”. Second, I have shown that those students were recognized as people for whom learning is difficult as well as being industrious. Third, I have shown that they presented a picture of the moral educator called “the correspondence student's father”. Fourth, I have shown that the discussion of their attempts to justify the “distance” failed.

  As a result, I have clarified the structural problems of correspondence education in adult and community education. That is, in relation to correspondence education, the guarantee of freedom to teach and learning “distance” are at odds with one another: the problems can all be attributed to the independent education and autonomy of the learner.

  Mass unemployment caused great concern and hardship in the Chikuhou region of Fukuoka prefecture in the 1960s. With a rise in unemployment, problems of poverty created serious issues for local communities. The changes that occurred directly affected people's daily life and especially influenced their learning environment. The purpose of this study was to consider the effects on adult and community-based learning when the people were faced with insufficient public assistance that resulted in living problems. From this point of view, this paper analyzes learning activities among literacy circles of the Chikuhou region during the 1960s. In the town of Kawasaki, a number of autodidactic organizations were formed, through which many people learned about their living problems. They studied, for example, human rights, child education, child care problems, social security systems, and the right to education.

  The conclusions of this study can be summarized as follows: first, in the postwar period, learning organizations were working toward alleviating poverty and illiteracy to improve the future for children in the region: second, after the 1960s, people living in the coal mining areas became independent learners with respect to social problems.