In the field of clinical psychiatry, the increasing number of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) has become a crucial issue in recent years because patients with BPD, who exhibit suicidal or self-injurious behaviors due to difficulty in controlling feelings of abandonment, anxiety, and intense anger, are at high risk for completed suicide. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between the meaning of these affective actions and certain characteristics of late modern society, based on the narratives of people suffering from BPD. In the relevant medical discourse, their affective deviant actions have been attributed to a personality disorder that deviates markedly from the expectations of the existing culture. However, the narratives of people diagnos with BPD suggest that (1) they are not always suffering from BPD; (2) their actions are metaphors that represent relationships with their particular others. In other words, they have unsaid difficulty in particular human relationships; therefore, they may have to act metaphorically. To examine this phenomenon, discussions on plural habitus by Bernard Lahire provide clues. He asserts that there is a process of practical analogy in which past experiences embodied in the form of summaries of experience are mobilized in the present social situation. Thus, it seems that people suffering from BPD experience the unsaid difficulty of relating to particular others practically and appropriately within the relevant social context based on their plural habitus. Such difficulty, then, may lead them to engage in metaphorical practices to overcome it. However, such behavior reflects a broader social problem in late modern society (liquid modernity), in which human relationships have been changing, often drastically. That is, late modern society has imposed not only cognitive reflexivity on us but also reflexivity in the level of practical analogy about transpositions of habitus on our lived bodies.

The first objective of this study was to explore the types of sexual norms that support intimacy according to sufferers of hikikomori (social withdrawal). The second objective was to discuss the ways that hikikomori sufferers describe their living difficulties owing to the conflicting restrictions of the personal, such as individual experiences and desires, while clarifying the ways that sexual norms influence intimate relations.

With respect to the first objective, the nature of the sexual norms that lie latent in the narratives of hikikomori sufferers were clarified. When sexual norms demand homosociality, hikikomori sufferers who try to conform are forced to internalize misogyny. Consequently, an important opportunity emerged from the sufferers' narratives to improve our understanding of sexual deviations or adaptations (3.2).

With respect to the second objective, various insights became clear. For example, intimate relationships that seemed to be dissociated from sex were described as being constructed from sexual norms. These intimate relationships were based on norms that hikikomori sufferers recounted as their relational difficulties have complex restrictions on the personal, such as individual experiences and desires (4.1). Another aspect of intimate relationships that was clarified was that sufferers' strategies for returning to society within intimate relationships also have sexual norms embedded in them. Thus, the problems that hikikomori sufferers experience in their intimate relationships are not shared with others and, as a result, they continue to be personal problems (4.2).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which drug addiction intervention and recovery support are performed at DARC, drug addiction recovery facilities.

Drug addiction has existed through the ages and remains a social problem inside and outside Japan. Drug addiction intervention and recovery support are conducted largely through two approaches—one, a legal model, and the other, a medical model. DARC, the subject of this paper, represents a third approach, one in which intervention and support efforts are led by recovering addicts. Since it was established in 1985 by a recovering addict, DARC has used communal living arrangements to aid recovery from drug addiction. DARC is unique in that it is managed by recovering addicts, relies primarily on a 12-step program as a path to recovery, and was originated in Japan.

Research for this paper was initiated in April 2011. Focusing on two DARC facilities located in metropolitan areas, it consists of fieldwork and interviews with 31 people. Among the findings is the conclusion that DARC is a community that is managed according to principles different from those underpinning modern society at large. More specifically, applying an argument made by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, this paper concludes that DARC is a community in which the maximization of any particular variable (e.g., money, popularity, authority) is prevented.

This study utilized an exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to reveal through quantitative analysis the hardship of living as young women in modern-day Japan. The focus is specifically on girls in their late teens, including high school students. Their hardship was measured from three points of view: Riaju, which refers to recognition from others; supremacy of good looks based on the hierarchy of evaluated beauty and ugliness in terms of physical appearance, and the ideology of beauty. A sample of students aged 15 to 19 years was examined. The results of the analysis from a social survey utilizing the Internet that reached 458 respondents via a web questionnaire showed a tendency that the more “non-Riaju” they were perceived, the greater the hardships they experienced. Results also revealed a tendency that the more Riaju they were, the stronger their desires were to change their physical appearances.

This paper discussed the difficulty that families of crime victims and families of suicide victims are forced to face in contemporary society. What is this “difficulty in living” that seems to be common in families of crime and suicide victims but different from that of other families?

First, we simply confirm how these families are categorized in society with numerical data. In contrast to the results shown by figures, the existence of families of crime victims and families of suicide victims caused by actual crimes and suicide has not been thoroughly comprehended. Thus, we refer to such a society in which their existence has been unnoticed in spite of the steady annual and incremental increase as “society harboring difficulty in living” in this paper. Such a society categorizes families of crime victims and families of suicide victims under “ambiguous class inclusion.” “Realities” for those involved may be recognized as a “guilty conscience,” “problems between family and relatives,” and “difficulty accepting bereavement.” These realities may result in generating a significant gap between affected families and others in society. Such a gap in realities may force them into double bind situations in interactive settings, leaving them no choice but to choose silence and suffer from difficulty in living. Therefore, such a trend results in generating difficulties day after day that other families do not normally face.