This article describes three newcomer Brazilian children's strategies for surviving identity politics and their crosscultural adjustment in a Japanese elementary school. Data analysis from a three-year ethnographic research in Nagano Prefecture suggests that two key factors influenced these children's acculturation in the school: specifically, 1) interpersonal identity, in which the students constructed positive senses of themselves as they participated in social groups and built reciprocal relationships with other co-members; and 2) intra-minority politics, in which the students constructed positive senses of themselves by either associating themselves with or differentiating themselves from other students who were also different from the mainstream. The analysis shows how the three Brazilian boys actively took control of their identities and struggled to create positive senses of themselves. Futhermore, the agency displayed by the students illustrates the need for theories that do not rely solely on cultural mismatches or institutional assimilation pressures. These Brazilian students managed to integrate socially and advance academically by creatively using the skills and identity resources available to them, thus showing how the supposedly homogenous and homogenizing Japanese educational system can in fact serve ethnic minority children. The article ends by suggesting some options to empower such newcomer foreign students by maximizing advantages of community-oriented Japanese classroom practices.

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What's the relevant account of 'trouble' between children for field workers with a videocassette recorder? This notes raise the problem about field workers with a videocassette recorder. Nowadays, many field workers have used videocassette recorders for their field work. Such a circumstance carries a change of field work. A videocassette recorder made many field workers to record an occurrence more accurately and easily, and brought them closer anatomy and micro-ethnography. On the other hand, it also has made some field workers to account an occurrence in the field with much difficulty. In other words, having sounds and tape recordings made them to complex accounts of an occurrence in the field.

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This paper aims at clarifying how a third-grade child became self-dependent as a presenter. Through a one year fieldwork study, the analysis focused on changes in her actions during presentation, changes in the relationships among the presenter/audience/teacher, and changes in the issues affecting her self-dependency. The following process was observed: 1) The child's low voice when presenting was frequently pointed out to her. The teacher's advice to read loudly supported the establishment of interactions between the child and the audience. 2) The character of the child was understood by the teacher through observing how the child handled the presentation artifacts. 3) The audience commented directly to the child that they could not hear her voice. Therefore the issue of the child's "low voice" was also an issue for the audience. 4) Exchanges of questions and answers took place between the child and audience. At this time the "low voice" was no longer an issue. It became clear that self-dependency as a presenter can be argued from the following four points: 1) awareness and dissolution of the issue(s) affecting the presentation, 2) being heard by an audience, 3) observations and expectations from teachers and others, and 4) duality in the individual and the relational nature of self-dependency.

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The self has been self-evident for many adolescent psychologists, therefore they have had little concern about emerging processes of the self: how the self emerges and how it becomes an issue or thematic. The purpose of this article was to examine emerging processes of the self from students' learning experience seen in the field of KKJ project, a selfconstruction education for university students, a joint seminar between Kyoto University and Keio University. The results were shown: (1) the self emerges by responding to others he or she confronts with, and (2) the other let the self appear as far as it becomes an intruder who differentiates the individual's whole experience with a place of identity.

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The purpose of this study was to obtain qualitative factors of the identification with American culture, as it occurs in the acculturation process through marriage, of Japanese wives of American husbands. Questionnaires and in-depth interviews were administered to 20 Japanese-wife/American-husband couples. A qualitative analysis was conducted focusing on whether the husband or the wife takes the initiative in domestic cultural practices, and whether domestic cultural practices are Japanese or American oriented. From this analysis informants were categorized into 3 groups. Regarding the wives' identification with American culture, two qualitatively different processes were extracted. The wives of "Japanese wife initiated couples" had established their identification with American culture from experiences before marriage. They kept their identification after marriage and initiated domestic cultural practices in accordance to that identification. The wives of "American husband initiated couples", however, first identified with their husbands after marriage before being able to identify with an American culture that incorporated the husband's views.

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The purpose of this study was to reconsider the concept of play in order to break the current deadlock between psychological research and theories of play. First, regarding research problem formation, it was argued there would be no need to answer why people play but need to consider what play is to solve the problems. This study clarified the limitations of methodologies based on either extreme subjectivism or objectivism, and adopted structuralism instead. Second, a new model for understanding the structures of play was advanced through a discussion of studies of play conducted by Piaget and others. Third, it was suggested that this structure model, could elucidate both the similarities and differences between play and exploratory behaviors and, further, that the model could be applied to qualitative research. Finally, future research issues were discussed.

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In this paper the theoretical relationships of my term "Coexistent Narratives" and side-by-side narrative positions are analyzed in three scenes from Ozu Yasujiro's film "Tokyo Story": 1) The narratives of the old couple at the Onomichi home, who sit beside each other, are compared to dialogic narratives that operate from opposite positions. 2) The processes of change that narratives undergo are analyzed in the scene where three old friends, at a Tokyo bar, shift their positions from being opposite to being beside each other. 3) The transitional processes by which the old couple change their narratives from dissonant to harmonious are analyzed in the scene where they occupy side-by-side positions at the Atami hotel and at the seashore. The following features in relation to three key concepts were identified through comparison of Coexistent Narratives and Dialogic Narratives: 1) The relationship with self and other: a common and mutual subjectivity is contrasted with the subject-object relationship. 2) The words, phrases and rhythms in the conversations: similarity and repetition are contrasted with dialogue and competition. 3) The changing process: a shift from tuning to harmony is contrasted with a shift from struggle to harmony. The concept of "Coexistent Narratives" is likened to "Kasane (coordinate) colors", which are associated with what is similar, with parallel repetition, and with coordinate matching, seasonal timing and transitional forms of movement.

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Foreigners living in Japan have risen to account for 1.4% of the population. In recent years, researchers have seen an increasingly large and diverse number of Japanese language learners. While foreign exchange students learn Japanese in a particular institution, the majority of foreigners who are spouses of Japanese citizens or inhabitants in some other capacity often learn Japanese through local government language programs or acquire Japanese naturally in everyday life. Some research has been done on how foreigners use Japanese in their personal networks, but this has typically been done solely from the point of view of language instructors. Therefore, to further explore this issue from the learner's point of view, this study focused on the experiences of a Korean woman married to a Japanese man and analyzed the relationships between her networks and her identity. The data suggest that there exists social inequality between her and her husband, and although she often feels uneasy at home, she can be herself and even make jokes with others through her use of Japanese in other personal networks outside the home. It was concluded that, for her, using a second language is a way of securing a place in the communities with which she aspires to participate, and it is a way of expressing her "self" through interaction with others.

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The purpose of this paper was to comment on Sugamura (2003) and Yamada (2002) and to consider the applicable scope of qualitative psychology in terms of the methodological and theoretical implications from the standpoint of "structure-construction qualitative psychology." The suggestions given were as follows: (a) the narrative approach based on an emic perspective critiqued by Yamada (2002) could be appropriate as qualitative psychology, (b) some critiques done by Sugamura (2003) and Yamada (2002) could be inappropriate in that they did not consider the epistemological differences between the narrative approach and experimental psychology, (c) on the other hand, their critiques revealed what one should be aware of regarding the narrative approach, (d) the differences between the concepts of "hypothesis-testing" and "generativity" were pointed out, and (e) it was suggested that "structureconstruction qualitative psychology" could be a grand theory of qualitative approaches. Lastly, the importance of having a constructive attitude for further discussion was emphasized.

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