It has been said of Chinese society that it is “society under the rule of man” in which even laws and morality emerge from within human relationships. On the contrary, we can observe any other norms, such as “reason or rule” if we go deep into the Chinese life-world. Therefore, this paper attempts, through research on a rural village in Shandong Province, where I was born and lived for 18 years, to consider the mechanisms used by Chinese people to determine the standards of correctness of acts and conform to them.

From this field survey, we found that ti qing (to embody one's sympathy) functions to turn people's mind to qing (sympathy) and to generate “public from below.” The character for ti (embody) means to put yourself in another's place and to act as if you were that person. The character for qing (sympathy) means to let your heart go out to the weak who are caught in a dilemma. Through ti qing in its verb form, Chinese people have been able to discover “public from below.” When we focus on ti qing, a stereoscopic image of Chinese society emerges, and we will be able to understand the Chinese view of humans and society. This is the framework under which the Chinese people demonstrate their qing for each other.

The aim of this paper is to propose a new theoretical explanation for the transition away from arranged marriages in favor of love matches. Using a formal approach, we examine the hypothesis that a rise in individualism has driven the spread of love matches.

Prior research on the subject assumes that individuals who value the social status of their family choose arranged marriages whereas those who pursue their own interests choose love matches. However, some researchers criticize this assumption on the premise that people with a preference for individualistic pursuits do not necessarily choose love matches.

In this paper, we formalize the hypothesis by using “the evolution of preferences” framework to analyze the complex relationship between individualism and love matches. Our model takes into account the process of the spread of individualism in order to capture the time variation and measure the proportion of shared variance between individualism and love matches.

We present two conclusions. First, we find a new pattern of choice, which we call “careful individualism.” Careful individualism differs from the term individualism as it has been used in preceding studies in that it considers the social status of one's family to some extent while individualism does not. Second, we show that careful individualism plays an important role in the spread of love matches; careful individualism cultivates the preference for love matches in a society where the majority choose arranged marriages.

Discourses in public policy, media, as well as academia, have tended to ignore people commonly called hafu (half) or konketsu (mixed blood), who are unclassifiable within the Japanese/foreigner binary. However, as this article demonstrates, historical circumstances have helped bring their existence to the fore, producing various discourses and images associated with them.

Drawing on the theory of racial formation (Omi and Winant), this study analyzes the formation of discourses regarding konketsu and hafu in postwar Japan, by distinguishing four periods and their respective contextual dimensions. Also, the social consequences brought about by these discourses are discussed based on articulation theory. The konketsu discourse reconstructed in the first period (1945 to 1960s) is transformed into a racialized and gendered discourse on hafu in the second period (1970s to 1980s). In the third period (1990s to 2000s), advocacy movements emerged using the concept of daburu (double), although they failed to fully represent the experiences of those concerned. In the fourth period (mid-2000s to present), the hafu discourse has considerably changed under neoliberalism and nationalism and has been rearticulated by those who identify themselves as hafu. While this study finds a certain continuity in structures of discrimination directed against hafu or konketsu throughout the evolution of discursive formations, it also shows how the movements of those concerned are starting to bring these structures to light.

Cinema was the most popular form of mass entertainment from the end of the Pacific War through the 1950s and it produced many national film stars. In this era, around the mid 1950s, there occurred a transition in the manner of desire for actresses that encompassed the transformation of stardom and the discourses evaluating film stars. The purpose of this paper is to explore the cultural transition of value toward movie stars by studying personas of film actresses of the 1950s. In particular, we study the shift from Hara Setsuko and Takamine Mieko, the most desired actresses in “the era of idealization,” to Wakao Ayako in “the era of everydayness” after 1955.

According to popularity polls, Wakao Ayako embodied the mass collective desire at this turning point. Different from the stars with supermundane beauty during the U.S. occupation period, the discourse toward Wakao Ayako was “ordinary,” “sense of intimacy,” or “average.” Her representation of “everydayness” enabled her instant rise to the top of stardom. By analyzing how leading actresses are spoken about in entertainment magazines, this paper captures the transition of discourse space that is hard to explain by the economic development around the mid 1950s. What we found is that the discourse evaluating the ordinary actress, and the embodiment of “everyday life” as the materialization of mass culture was a reaction to film stars symbolizing the “idealized” society of democracy. In the mid 1950s when society's reflected image created mediatized stars, an ordinary actress, Wakao Ayako, epitomized public “everydayness” and embodied its “reality.”

This article explores the process by which occupational inequality is created by career interruptions. Career interruptions cause fluctuations in an individual's career and occupational status. Many studies measure the effects of past events such as career interruptions, using cross-sectional models. These models cannot distinguish the causal effect of career interruptions and unit heterogeneity. I apply random-effects and fixed-effects logit models to longitudinal data from a retrospective life-history survey in Japan (SSM survey, 2005) to show the persistent negative effects of career interruptions on the chance to get regular employment. In addition, I examine the variance of effects by the age of individuals, length of interruptions, and reason for leaving their previous jobs.

The empirical results in this article are as follows. First, career interruptions have persistent negative effects on the probability of getting regular employment. The effects last for a period of approximately 20 years for men, and over 20 years for women. Second, for men, severe persistent effects are found only when they exit employment after the age of 30. Third, for women, negative effects are found especially when they are younger, leave employment longer, and exit for involuntary reasons, although the scars of career interruptions persist longer for women, regardless of their characteristics. Fourth, career interruptions increase inequalities observed before interruptions, because people with low-status jobs are more likely to interrupt their careers.

In this paper, the author investigates how audiences affect conflicts and competitions among participants in the local community festival. Previous research focuses on conflicts and competitions because of their high correlation with the concepts of legitimacy and superiority in community festivals. However, competitions and conflicts are underpinned not only by participants but also by audiences. A lot of researchers have attempted to examine conflicts in festival groups, but they have not investigated the effect of audiences.

The author conducted research on the process of conflicts by some festival groups in context of the gaze of audiences. The case study for this research was the “praying rally” (hadakamairi) in Hikiyama Festival in Nagahama, Shiga, which is conducted by some festival groups in local areas. Although participants vie and compete during the festival, its success requires the cooperation of the groups. The author investigated the bumping and fighting among the groups on the street during the praying rally. Drawing on the observations, there was evidence of some conflicts based on the negative connection (in'nen) among local groups. Negative connections are transmitted from audiences to participants: audiences tell participants rumors of other participant groups, expecting fights to happen on the street. The smallest provocation provides participants with motivation and triggers a fight.

Both audiences and participants expect these conflicts between groups. To meet the audience's expectation, participants trust the negative connection and actualize the conflicts as street fights and bumping. In this process, audiences can see the exciting conflicts on the street and participants can justify their bumping and satisfy their pride. Thus, the praying rally has roles of not only praying but also fighting with participants from other local festival groups.

Some researches explain intergenerational income mobility in Japan through the paths determined by the effects of parental economic status, which would bring about reproduction of economic status between generations. These paths include both indirect and direct effects: while the former is mediated by the status attainment process, the latter come from parental economic status directly. Other studies on intergenerational poverty transmission suggest the existence of a route for the sequential status that connects parental and child's poverty. However, compared with other family background factors, whether this sequence of effects (or status transmission) from parents is decisive for child's economic differential needs to be verified empirically.

By employing a sample of national data, the results of the analysis show that the patterns deriving from parental economic status are not crucial for the economic gap in the child's generation. The main mechanism determining such differential is as follows: parental education, occupation, and economic status affect child's education; then, child's education influences occupation after leaving school, which in turn affects current occupation; finally, the latter has an effect on the economic status. While the path of the sequential status from parents' low educational and economic status to child's poverty emerges clearly for men, results for women are ambiguous.