A new methodology for psychological study of personality is proposed in this paper based on review of mutually opposing propositions on psychology of personality. Mainly through the review of Mischel's theory, several findings described below were identified. First, individual variables are already existing within each person prior to the formation of what he calls the person variables. Second, the situation should be defined not as the environment external to the person but as the entity formed via functional relationship with the internal variables. Third, his terminology "interaction" should be restricted to imply the interaction between his/her behavior and the other persons. On the basis of these recognitions, it is proposed that the study of personality should conducted as the two-step study. The first-step study should be focused on the clarification of the basic total situation of the subject. Then in the second step, the individual characteristics of the subject's behavior in each situation should be investigated. Furthermore, it is suggested that the behavior to be studied should be of episode-type, and that the episodes be sampled from the attitudes of the subject to the other persons, to the life activities, and to oneself including self-conceptions.

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This article is a review of Prof. Tohru Watanabe's works. He was a founder of the Psychological Laboratory of Nihon University and a pioneer of personality psychology in Japan. He claimed that there were two main currents in the history of psychology in Japan, and he called them the orthodox school and the indigenous school respectively. The former was developed on the basis of imported ideas, which came mainly from Buddhism, and the latter was induced from the daily experiences of the Japanese. The orthodox school did not take the form of religional psychology in its development process, but developed into a type of psychotherapy in modern psychology, that is, the study of modification of personality. The indigenous school tried to describe local personalities and individual personalities. In the two main books, "Jinkokuki" and "Koyogunkan", that originated from the indigenous school, personality types, personality traits, inner consistency of personality, situational variability and other ideas were described. These ideas are still discussed by modem psychologists. The study of personality psychology in Japan underwent great changes due to the influence of the Western ideas of psychology after the Meiji era. In addition, it changed more on encountering American psychology after l945. However, the mainstreams already existed in the 16th century. The author greatly hopes that such future research of personality will not ignore the historical perspectives.

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