It is a well-known fact there has been a variety of defintions of social institution in the conceptual schemes presented by sociologists. When we try to examine these different ones, however, we can assume that most of them are, to a considerable degree, congruous with each other in their implications, against the observations of both J. F. Cuber and F. H. Allport, and from somewhat different point of view with J. O. Hertzler's.
On the one hand, social institutions have been defined as “patterns of behabior of collectivities” by G. A. Lunderg and this seems to be accessible to almost all sociologists, since it represents the prevalent understandings of social institutions to which W. G. Sumner gave a classical formulation. On the other hand, some anthropologists tend to conceive social institutions in terms of “culture patterns” and to define them as “cultural configurations”.
Whatever terminological differences may exisit among them, however, they are the same or identical, in-so far as social institutions are viewed as “the organization of conceptual and behavior pattern” in the latter, too. But there are some shortcomings in such a definition. Above all, the shortcoming of such definitions is the vagueness of the very term “behavior pattern” and all its derivative implications. To say that social institutions are behavior patterns or cultural configurations is to say little, almost nothing, since there are various kinds of behavior patterns which differ in their important characteristics and therefore cannot be placed in the same category. Hence, it is desirable to distinguish the behavior patterns which have norms which control social relationships in terms of the rights and duties from thos patterns which have other norms. Thus social institution is to be defined as a body of rules which states what sort of behavior may be recognized as legitimate and what not in the social interaction of the members of a group.
The concept of “social system” of R. Linton seems, in this connection, to be approximately congruous with the concept of social institutions defined here. He seems to prefer the term “social system” to the term “social institution” in. order to connote almost the same concept. To me, it is similar the situation concerning the group behavior-patterns which used to be called “customs”, “folkways” and “mores” by sociologists and are now called by the very different term “culture patterns” by anthropologists.

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German Fascism was not limited to a movement of a sole class or group. It required the support of broad social strata (cf, Table I). But as it well-known, of these strata the core element was the lower middle class. We must grasp this class in its dynamic aspect as it were, i. e. not as fixed in quality and quantity, but rather as including the shift of its constituent elements, and so mainly concern ourselves with the phenomena of loss of status. The author considers Fascism as a manifestation of the intense desire for power concentration and monopoly in order to remedy the broad frustration suffered by those who have experienced a loss in status (the declassé). In Germany the core of them, the vanguard of Nazis were the demobilized officers' groups, Provoking the Kapp Putch, they organized a number of conspiratory military bands in country, and toppled the leaders of the government one after another. Afterwards these groups absobed petit bourgeois elements who had multiplied from 1895 to 1925 (cf. Table II), or unemployed masses who numbered more than 6, 000, 000 in the depression period. These groups became the reservoir of the nazi mass organization, Seen from the psycho-behavioral point of view, these movements were the counter-historic ones based-on the infinitely negative drive which had the denial, of all values under imperial Germany as a premise. The reason why Nazis displayed the brutalities, such as the conducts of the SS guards in concentration camps were (1) the gratification of their human needs in a most unhuman ways and (2) the dissolution of their feelings of inpotency by the destruction of the immediate objects, which resulted from the fear of the decline and decay of their former status or class positions. But in fact it meant the emergence of the limitless cycle of causality of fear-terrornew and greater fear. In this case, considering the fact that the people suffered from the fear adhered to the power mechanism, the state power was strengthened through the organization of them and the new fear was engendered by the stregthened power organization. As to the Nazi ideology, it emerged after (1) the decline of the mediaeval and authoritarian values under the second imperial regime and (2) toppling of the liberalistic values in the Weimar Republic by chauvinism. Such an attitude denying all values was reflected on the ideological plane. The anti-aristocratic and anti-traditional temperament made the Nazi ideol. ogy a emotional and random aggregate full of contradictions. It was beyond the design of the Nazi leaders. It may be said that the success of Nazis wasin this sense due.to a sort of selfsuggested process on the part of the people which served to deceive themselves by a trick utilized by a part of them.

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From the results of opinion research in villages, we can conclude that the important conditions, though not the sole cause, for the existence of the scattered type of settlement are the following two points. (1) Facilities for cultivation : in this type of community, farmers can gather their cultivated lands around their houses. (2) Need : they can protect their houses from fire spreads by strong winds. Different characteristics of this type of settlement can be enumerated. First, the labor force is needless than in the collective village, because the fields lie near the owner's house. Therefore, there is created greater pressure toward emmigration. Second, the country town, i. e. «rurbanity» develops, which can satisfy the everyday needs of the farmers in the scattered and isolated settlements. Third, for the same reason, the neighbourhood relationships and consciousness of them are weaker than in the collective village. (But in the buraku relationships, the larger territorial ones, the difference is not so clear, and it may be said that the conditioning influence from the isolation of houses has a limit.) Fourth, the unidimensionality between the neighbourhood relationships and the buraku relationships, which can be observed in the collective village, does not exist, and the former and the latter become heterogeneous in some degree. Moreover according to the results of the research concerning cosciousness of the territorial relationships, rather individualistic persons are many. The status evaluation research also shows many who give particular evaluation quite different from others. From these facts stronger individuality of the inhabitants may be presumed. Finally, in the scattered settlements cultivation is essentially more important to the farmers than social life, and so they attach more importance to the physical conditions, such as land and climatic factors than to the human relations, for instance, to their neighbours. In short, the attitudes and personalities. in the scattered villagers are individualistic and may be related to material phenomema.

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This report is on a portion of the research in a crowded factory area in Tokyo conducted by the sociology department in the Tokyo University of Education from December 1953 to April 1954. The factories studied are primarily printing and bookbinding establishments which generally fall into the category of middle and small scale enterprises in Japan, while the industry has been recently attracting attentions by sociologists and economists who have made some studies but treated the problems horizontally and quantatively in most cases. That is why their conclusions are varied. The characteristics of the middle and small scale enterprise, especially in industry, are “subordination to big capital”, “industry lacking in the technical basis for the mass-production”, “dependecy on the personal abilities of its managers”, “more human factors in comparison with the materialized (verdlinglichten) big factories, ” “backwardness of lador relationships, ” etc. Apart from the question, in what degree these characteristics exist in reality, it is true that each of the factories with the above stated tendencies is functioning as a collectivity. The common element in the above theories is that small or middle enterprises are in a handicapped position relative to the big ones. Considering this point, they need strong internal unity and external flexibility as social groups to withstand the pressure of big enterprises. These requisites will naturally manifest themselves both in their inner group organization and in the external activities. Sociological study should aim at the study of these problems. In the actual research for this object of study, the qualitative understanding in essential rather than quantitative representation. The author was led to the case study both of enterprises and of workers. The characteristics of the bookbinding enterprises were set forth, then the conditions in the community which make it possible for them to survive, and their linkage to other enterprises. Thirldy, examples of six different types of (a) external activities and (b) internal organizations were considered. Lastly, eight qualitatively different cases of workers were described and analyzed. Its aim is to observe a phase of the worker's consciousness in order to understand the enterprises dynamically.
The author's intention is limited on the presentation of the materials by the field work of the bookbinding trade and the methodological essay of the study of the enterprises.

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The Japanese rural community may be divided into the Tohoku-type and the Kinki-type on the basis of the land ownership. In Tohoku-type, “the semi-serfdom landlord system permanently employing serf-like tenants.” The Kinki-type created “the parasitic usurious landlord system based on the semi-serf rent.” We can grasp the fundamental structure of the rural community by the understanding of the inter-determined relation between the types of land ownership and the forms of farming developed on it. The concrete form of the village institution and the farmers' conciousness in rural areas are defined by the material base of the rural community.
This essay analysed the concrete structure of these facts in the Tohuku-typed zone based on research in a rural community in Hiroshima Prefecture (Togochi Town in Yamagata County), close to the Chugoku mountains. By the analysis of the agricultural production relationships of such area, we can clearly indicate the fact that “kinship organization” and “Nago-system” is due to the material basis resulting from a combination of the Tohoku-type of land ownership and the form of farming. Moreover we can observe that after the land reform the landlord system is reemerging through the agency of forest ownership.
Semi-proletarian farmers in these areas are constrained by the semi-feudal agricultural production relationship which is an all-embracing economic relation including agriculture and forestery. They seek supplementary employment in forest work, and are under the intensive contradictions of the capital domination supported by the landlord system. We have observed what lies at the basis of the contemporary crisis in the rural community and have produced materials which enable us to give a judicious evaluation of the late “agricultural land reform”.

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