The individual, without exception, is an independent entity having a distinctive personality. Each individual is the culmination of the way he has been formed socially. Furthermore, at any given point in time he is regulated by society even while he is in turn acting autonomously to regulate society.
Heretofore, sociology has avoided dealing empirically with this independent, distinctive individual. However, the study of individuals is not only possible but absolutely necessary in sociology, and it can be achieved if we treat individuals' social situations coupled with personal life histories.
I wrested unsuccessfully with this problem from the time I wrote my first article, published in the 1948 issue of this journal. Between 1968 and 1978 I was able to achieve prospects as to a method to solve it (see articles published between October 1968 and October 1978). I acquired confidence in this method during two field studies conducted around 1980.
Even in the analysis of the life of only one individual we gain an opportunity to broaden and deepen our sociological knowledge of the realities of the society in which that person has lived.
If we do not reinforce our knowledge of the autonomy of individuals having distinct personalities, sociology is in danger of inadvertently losing sight of living human beings and producing nothing but stereotypes. Only by means of new images of man gained through contacts with individuals, can sociological researchers, each in his own field, continue to renew and revitalize their thinking. There has been a tendency for primary importance to be placed on the development of research techniques and on efficiency in research, to the detriment of human contacts.
In the latter half of this paper I will discuss this method with reference to the precedent set by a sociologist already familiar to many, Aruga Kizaemon.

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The “buraku sabetsu” as a type of social discrimination has been defined as an excluded states of the “buraku” from society.
We have analysed it with regard to the every level of society, social relations, social gronps, and Japan as a total society.
Now, it is clear that the fact-finding researches of “buraku” discrimination is to find a new way of cooperation between the discriminator and the discreminatee.
In fact-finding researches of the so-called “buraku” after the second world war, we have investigated the actual conditions of the “buraku”, one of the outcast groups in Japan, after the comparative frame of description. But with the environmental amelioration of the “buraku”, we need to analyse our descriptive frame of reference against the actual conditions of their social lives.

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Au Japon, les premiers sondages d'opinion publique commencèrent a être effectués après la guerre. L'auteur y participa dès le début et continue d'étudier actuellement les méthodes de sondage et l'analyse de leurs données. Ces études ne sont pas encore achevées et nous nous bornerons ici a en présenter le rapport provisoire. Dès les premiers temps divers spécialistes réaliseaient les sondages avec très sérieux et tel attitude excerce encore une grande influence sur ceux d'aujourd'hui. Nous tenterons ici d'expliquer certains sondages effectués au Japon dans l'immediat après-guerrs. Puis nous analysons les sources d'erreurs concernant l'échantillonnag et l'interview. Enfin nous terminerous notre analyse sur l'étude de la validité et la fidélité des sondages.
Un autre article, en anglais, sur les sondages d'opinion publique au Japon sera paru dans Political Opinion Polling (title tentatif) édlité par Robert W. Worchester, 1981, chez MacMilan, Londres.

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Some economic approaches to environmental and resource problems have been radically tried by means of the “Broad Sense Economics” or “Regionalism” in response to the present situation that such problems are becoming more serious. However, little positive efforts in tackling such problems has been seen in the field of sociology.
In this article, the propositions of “Broad Sense Economics” or “Regionalism” are divided into the following two aspects.
(1) The conversion of the social scientific viewpoint ;
(2) Practical social organization.
The main purpose of this paper is to examine and develop the former from an urban community study standpoint and try to construct an ecology-sociological approach.
By this ecology-sociological approach we focus our analysis of sociological phenomena on the interaction between human action and ecosystem.
By means of this approach, we are able to build the theory from community life which is subject to limited resources for human life and propose a new concept of community, that is, “ecology-sociological community” which is different from traditional urban community.
This new concept is made up of the following four requisites ; (1) common control on the resources for human life, (2) self-sustaining social relationship, (3) fixed appropriate technology, and (4) inclusiveness of membership.

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Garfinkel's unswerving insistence on the indexical properties of actions and expressions (context-dependency of meaning) uncovers the actor's ongoing cognitive judgemental work which embeds the present scene in terms of the “common sense knowledge of social structure” into the coherent, repetitive and stable social order. Little attention is given to this ongoing judgemental work. This is because the skilled mastery of the work creates and sustains the normative structure of cultural community, so that the mastery defines the membership of that community. In a word, the member's competence is taken for granted to render the scene meaningful and under the jurisdiction of the normative social structure.
The fact that the ongoing practices of member's competence sustains the normative order radically alters the process of subjective interpretation i.e. the concept of “understanding”; “understanding” is no longer some “inner” process happening in the individual but an “operation” to render the present scene intersubjectively available. Sack's “conversational analysis” enters on to illuminate this culturally provided member's competence in the conversational interaction and in fact, succeeds in describing the fine mechanism built in the conversation.

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