This paper aims to portray the extent to which “family” existed in the Tokugawa era. In this paper, “family” is defined as the condition maintained with the mother-child and father-child dyads. Using the Shumon Aratame Cho (Register of Religious Faith and Relationships), the possibility of “family” was investigated in villages in the Tokugawa era. The method of analysis used demographic life tables to the parents' deaths— in other words, the parents' life tables from a child's standpoint.

The research yielded the following findings. First, when children reached 10 years of age, 75% had two parents in the village. Meanwhile, 25% of children had lost either their mother or father. At age 20, only 48% of children had their mother and father. Second, the mean age at which children experienced their fathers' deaths was 24 years, and the mean age at which they experienced their mothers' deaths was 35 years. Furthermore, the mean age at which children experienced both parents' deaths was 39 years.

Because of the increase in life expectancy since that time, our life courses have changed drastically. In the same way, the development of the possibility of “family” strongly affects our life courses and society. The possibility of “family” in the past has relativized family roles, family issues, and family systems in contemporary society.

In Japanese society of the prewar era, growing disparity in wealth was frequently taken up by the media as a societal problem. Accordingly, rising criticism of wealthy businessmen (i. e., wealthy investors) is known to have become an opportunity for the historical transition toward a total war system. This paper postulates that one factor that heightened this growing criticism is that the legitimacy of the operations of these men administering enormous wealth and their societal raison d'?tre as the elite wavered in the Taisho period. Accordingly, to approach this process, this paper turns attention to the periodical Jitsugyo no Nihon, which enhanced the societal raison d'être of businessmen in the late Meiji period, then investigates chiefly the editorials of these men in this periodical and discusses the relation between changes in their tenor and the historical and societal background.

As a result, the following was determined: 1) The first International Labor Conference served as the opportunity to put into sharp relief the espousal of paternalistic labor-capital relations by many businessmen of the era, resulting in a rapid rise in mistrust with respect to the words and actions theretofore of these men, who were endorsing self-sacrifice to contribute to transforming Japan into a great power, and 2) amid the shortages and the catastrophic earthquake after the First World War, the speech of businessmen of that time returned to the struggle-emphasizing ideology formerly asserted by older generations of businessmen, and therefore did not turn toward a softening of the growing criticism of businessmen. This change in the state of words and actions surrounding businessmen in the Taisho period is presumed to be a factor that led to skepticism regarding the raison d'être of these men in society.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the formation and transformation of images of working women during the interwar period in the Japanese women's magazine Shufu no Tomo.

The findings were as follows: The magazine considered women working in offices, schools, hospitals, and department stores as typical working women. During the first decade (1917-27), many writers who wrote about working women were critical of the employment of women. These writers generally believed that working women were unenthusiastic and susceptible to temptation. They argued that women should find their calling as housewives and mothers. In addition, they claimed that working women should not compete with male workers in business, and women should instead find the right job to take advantage of their strengths: meticulousness and a soft attitude. Furthermore, these writers taught women that their success through work was demonstrated by getting along well with their colleagues. These arguments regarding women's success lowered the career aspirations of women.

During the second decade (1928-37), many writers accepted the employment of women because they understood working women's labor as a form of education that prepared them for marriage. These writers found similarities between the characteristics of working women's labor and that of housewives, namely, manual and emotional labor. Writing during this period taught women that the success they achieved through work was shown by getting married and being happy housewives. This type of success agitated women's career aspirations. The image of the working woman became contiguous with the image of the housewife because of this process. The normal course of a woman's life legitimized the idea that working women were marginal workers, and it enhanced the legitimacy of the position of the housewife because working women were perceived as callow daughters, which made the position of a housewife more appealing.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the historical meaning of Japanese citizens' learning of Asian languages to substantialize the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere concept as a case study on Malay (Malaysian / Indonesian, today).

In this paper, we first trace the appearance of “Malay Fever” in the Asia-Pacific War. As a result, it is clear that many Japanese citizens learned Malay at various educational institutions and schools, and many learning books and dictionaries were published about the Malay language, not only in terms of the kinds of materials published but also in terms of their circulation. Second, we indicate that two unabridged Malay-Japanese dictionaries were published one after the other during the war in a top-down fashion by the cooperation of Japanese Army, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Greater East Asia.

Third, we indicate the power mechanism of multilingual Malay textbooks and dictionaries. To this point, Japanese learners could see and realize the Japanese language as a common language in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Finally, we discuss the fact that the “Imagined Language Community” substantializes the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere concept.

As a result, it became apparent that learners recognized the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere as a substantial body through the multilingualization of learning books and dictionaries.

During World War II, a large number of Japanese men were drafted in military service or forced to work for military factories. How could this massive wartime mobilization contribute to forming a stable postwar Japanese society? This paper explores the influences of wartime mobilization on career mobility of Japanese men, using 1955, 1965, and 1975 Social Stratification and Mobility surveys. This paper first attempts to reconstruct life history data of respondents that enable us to analyze the relations between wartime experiences and careers. The analyses of the life history data then revealed that there were clear age differences in wartime experiences among birth cohorts. Highly educated men of the 1916-20 birth cohort tended to be forced to work for military factories or drafted. After the war, they tended to switch workplaces more often and achieve better occupational status. In addition, multivariate analyses of occupational attainment indicated that educational levels and fathers' occupations strongly influenced patterns of occupational transitions from wartime to the postwar period among people who experienced wartime mobilization in their twenties or thirties. Using these results of analyses, this paper argues that the fluidity of highly educated men from wartime to the postwar period contributed to forming a stable postwar stratification system.

This article aims to elucidate the activities of juvenile court probation officers that enabled the philosophy of scientism to reify in Japan in the early 1950s. The current juvenile law was enacted in postwar Japan, and the juvenile court was constituted in 1949. The current juvenile justice system institutes a juvenile court probation officer and technical officials at juvenile detention centers. These personnel are required to explore the causes of delinquency and estimate the potential of juvenile delinquents to re-offend and be transformed into socially responsible individuals and rehabilitated in the future by using their expertise in human sciences. However, the juvenile justice system has been criticized for lacking the spirit, detailed procedure, and material knowledge of the philosophy of scientism. The researchers of this paper have developed a method of calculating the potential of juvenile delinquents to re-offend, improve, and rehabilitate by utilizing sociological knowledge. The results of the analysis revealed that the juvenile court probation officers should ascertain the discrepancies between criminal law and folk characteristics and should rationalize acts by categorizing juvenile delinquents as members of rural communities (e.g., Wakasyū). This categorization enabled officials to predict the possibilities of juvenile delinquents improving and rehabilitating and their likelihood of re-offending in the future.

This paper describes the problem of social segregation, which has grown in recent years, the achievement of the continued regular employment of women, and the emergence of women in non-regular employment who work as substitutes during regular employees' maternity leave. We will focus on the maternity leave substitute teacher's system, which was realized in 1961.

A previous study insisted that this system achieved the continued employment of women after childbirth. However, we can demonstrate that the system had a problem in that non-permanent substitute teachers supported the permanent teachers. This is similar to the female labor situation in recent years; while regular women continue to work after maternity leave, women in irregular employment have fragmented careers.

However, previous studies have failed to regard the process of establishing the maternity-leave substitute-teacher system. Subsequently, I considered, an interview survey and historical document analysis, how the maternity-leave substitute-teacher system was formed, and whether the problem of the gap between regular and irregular employees interfered with the institutional establishment process.

As a result, female teachers revealed that they attempted to overcome negative treatment by paying attention to the treatment of substitute teachers during maternity leave at the time of the development of the system. However, the movement did not spread beyond gender, and they could not achieve the original concept of maternity leave substitute teachers becoming regular employees pooled in each city. This historical case suggests that it is difficult to overcome “gender disparity.” It also suggests that the stratification of female workers, for example, permanent employees or non-permanent employees, is likely if a comprehensive view of female labor including diverse social segregation is not undertaken when we think about the contemporary policy issues of women's labor force development.

The life courses of people with military experience is an important research theme in historical sociology, in terms of how they influenced the formation of postwar society. This paper focuses on leaders of veterans' groups and women's residents' groups who have built memorials for fallen soldiers.

This is a case study of the process of building memorials for fallen soldiers of graduates from the Japanese naval school for airplane pilots before WWII: Yokaren. The question here is how graduates were able to build large-scale memorials, despite the fact that they were generally young and low in social position. Previous studies have mainly explored the collective consciousness such as oime, which made veterans feel indebted to fallen soldiers. This study aims to explore the lives of leaders between the war and post-war periods, when they acquired resources and abilities that enabled them to build large-scale memorials, with a focus on their military experiences.

Veteran leaders have received support from influential politicians and enterprises through their connections with former generals and officers who had trained them in school. Leaders of women's residents' groups located in the same area as the memorials also played an important role by actively helping and bringing together veterans, based on their experiences of military assistance during the war.

The theoretical implications of this paper lie in the experience- (keiken) oriented model, with an emphasis on the leaders' accumulation of resources and abilities, despite a consciousness-oriented model.