This is to make a few introductory remarks for the Symposium held during the 1960 Congress of the Japan Sociological Society, on which occasion the present writer served as chairman of the disscusion meeting.

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I selected Toyo rural district in Ehime province and studied the changing process of the villages, especially concerning with landowners before the W.W. II.
In my study, I used the materials of 17 landowners who held 50 hectares and over in 1924. We must notice that most of them were already small landowners and merchants in the last days of Tokugawa Era. I could trace also fully the developing process of two landowners out of them. Their developing process carried with it the falls of many small and a few large landowners in that district. And they had established their domination system in the village after the middle of Meiji Era. One of them could hold its domination system down to the Land Reform after the W.W. II.

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Utopisch ist ein Bewusstsein das sich mit der es umgebenden Wirklichkeit nicht in Deckung befindet. Die wirklichkeitsfremde oder wirklichkeitstranszendente Orientierung wird uns als utopische gelten. In diesem Sinne mag die Utopie zwar das Produkt der poetischen Einbildungskraft sein. Aber sie ist mehr als eine blosse Angelegenheit der Literatur. Utopisches geht stets über die gegebene Wirklichkeit hinaus, bleibt aber immer von ihr abhängig und wandelt sich mit ihr. Von “Politeia” des Platon his zur modernen “science fiction” sind utopische Darstellungen nach Inhalt und Form so mannigfaltig, aber spiegeln sie das jeweilige Zeitbewusstsein wieder und entwickeln sich, indem sie dem Wandel der Wirklichkeits situationen entsprechen. Hinsichtlich dieser “Wirklichkeitsbezogenheit” können wir die Möglichkeiten der soziologischen Fragestellung über die Utopie suchen.
Für die bishörigen Untersuchungen bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts ist eine solche Forschungsweise nie zum Vorschein gekommen. Erst hat K, Mannheim in seinem glänzenden Buch “Ideologie und Utopie” recht scharfsichtig darüber analysiert. Sein Zielpunkt besteht darin, die modernen Bewusstseinskonstellation mit Hilfe der drei Faktoren, d.h. Ideologie, Utopie, Wirklichkeit, einheitlich zur Frage zu setzen. Aber das philosophische Relevante seiner Wissenssoziologie ist nicht darin zu suchen, dass sie die endgültige und vollständige Problemstellung über die Utopielehre gestaltet hat, sondern dass in Mannheimschen Fragestellung schon das historistische Zeitbewusstsein als selbstveraständlich vorausgesetzt wird.
Neulich hat M. Schwonke eine ausführliche Untersuchung über Geschichte und Funktion der naturwissenschaftlich-technischen Utopie veröffentlicht. Darin versucht er auf dem Standpunkt der Plessnerschen Antholopologie, sich mit der sogenannten Säkularisationstheorie auseinanderzusetzen, und bestrebt sich einengenden Horizont der Mannheimschen Problematik zu Überwinden.
Sicherlich haben sie, die wissenssoziologische Methode Mannheims und der antholopologische Gesichtspunkt Schwonkes, jeder für sich einen hohen Wert für die Utopielehre. Welche Gültigkeit haben sie aber noch für die Charakterisierung der Gegenwart, in ihr sei “das Ende der Ideologien” ?.
Die vorliegende Arbeit bemüht sich, auf diese Frage kritisch zu antworten, damit sie einen Beitrag zur gründlichen Interpretation des modernen utopischen Denkens liefere.

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It was not until recently that both students and practitioners in management began to realize the fact that management and human relations in industry are influenced by the society and culture just as are other aspects of human endeavor. In this respect, the case of Japan's industrialization has drawn particular attention in recent years since the patterns of organization and behavior observed in Japanese industry are so distinctly different from those in the Western industrial World. Furthermore, the unique socio-cultural heritage has undoubtedly contributed to the success of Japanese industry in bringing about organizational efficiency and worker satisfaction.
The basic rationale for human relations in Japanese industry still appears to be wide acceptance of an authoritarian-patriarchal relationship by both management and the worker in their enterprise. Even in recent years, the role of management as organizational leader and source of paternal protection has seldom been challenged by the worker as completely undesirable. To the extent to which management fulfills this role of responsibility for work authority and personal welfare in the eyes of the worker, management seems to command a correspondingly high degree of worker loyalty and motivation in work.
In a country where relative surplus of manpower has always existed, the most obvious protection ever afforded to the worker is the provision of lifetime security of employment extended by each firm to some selected group in its workforce. Although the practice has undergone changes in both its scope and implication, career commitment of “permanent” male workers at least constitutes an unwritten law for both management and such workers. Career employment indeed accounts for most of the major personnel practices so dissimilar to their counterparts in the West.
Within the framework of protective authority and stable personnel, a well-defined hierarchal structure has emerged which appears highly conducive to systematic social order and discipline in Japanese organizations. At present, the level of previous educational attainment provides the basic dividing lines in hierarchy. However, work tenure functions as a primary determinant of the relative status of individuals within each educational group. Although performance and ability play no insignificant role in managerial promotions, precaution is taken not to disturb the preexisting senior-junior relationship among the individuals affected.
As a consequence, the process of making and implementing decisions at the management level takes a unique form which may be termed “decentralized planning with centralized control”. Young staff assistants at the bottom of the hierarchy in each managerial function carry most of the research and planning responsibility, and their proposed actions are implemented often with only nominal sanction of higher levels of management. The dynamic strength of Japanese enterprises may be accounted for, at least partially, by this de facto assumption of authority on the part of jonior executives.
Even such a cursory review seems to suggest the uniqueness of management and human relations in Japanese industry, which has led to a relatively high degree of success in achieving both organizational and individual goals in management-worker relationships. It would be far too naive, however, to underestimate the significance of recent changes, both social and economic, that have been taking place in business organizations and society as a whole, that may in fact undermine the earlier panacean effect of traditional approaches in Japanese industry.

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