Japanese Sociological Review

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The theories of distributive justice attaching importance to equality of opportunity assert that inequalities caused by circumstances, which are uncontrollable by a person, need to be fixed. As one of these theorists, Roemer has proposed the idea, namely equality of opportunity principle, that if a society is partitioned into equivalence classes by profiles of circumstances, then persons who have the same percentile among equivalence classes can compare their responsibilities with one another. Based on this idea, we propose a measurement method for the degree of inequality under the condition that inequality of opportunity is regulated. Specifically, we assume that if inequality of opportunity does not exist, then the persons who have the same percentile among equivalence classes should have the same level of social resources. Under this assumption, a vector of social resources is virtually rebuilt by the mean of each group where the percentiles correspond to one another. In order to verify how the degree of inequality decreases, we compare the two Gini coefficients before and after the regulation. In general, when we partition a group into disjoint subgroups by a certain index, the number of samples in each subgroup is not equal to one another. Therefore, it is hard to make one-to-one correspondence of the percentiles. For this, resampling procedures of a data is needed.
As one of the applications of our method, we analyze the effect of inequality of opportunity in terms of sex on the individual income based on the SSM 1985 and 1995 data. As a result, we find that the inequality of opportunity in terms of sex increases gradually in all job categories except for blue-collar workers of large corporations and farmers.

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In this paper, the works of Toyama Masakazu, a sociologist in the Meiji period, are examined to clarify his view of sociology. There are two contrasting images of Toyama in the context of Japanese sociology : an opponent of the people's rights movement and a liberalist who insisted on women's liberation. I try to integrate these seemingly opposing images. First, how Toyama comprehended the role of sociology in the society of his era is examined. Second, the core of his study of the ancient society is discussed. Based on these discussions, I conclude that Toyama viewed sociology as an evolutionary one that could be introduced to educate people. What he tried was to apply the essence of mythology to the society of his era, and to find contemporary factors in the world of myth as well.

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The English word “middle-class” has experienced much more connotations and denotations-typically “bourgeoisie, ” “white-collar, ” and profession-than any other class-referring word since the latter half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalist class theories that the middle-classes have never been created until the contemporaries recognized what they call these. On the other hand, I think that they have also had the interpretation freedom to recognize “middle-classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The aforementioned typical middle-classes have emerged in such a way that the Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leaderships but still obtain inconsistent status to be recognized “middle-class” afterward in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle-class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle-classes into a modern society, contrary to the so-called class decomposition into the two poles.

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