This study aimed to describe, from a life structure theoretical perspective, a way in which rural communities are coping with a new challenge to their way of life. This challenge, which lies in the ever-increasing number of people who never marry, is considered to result from the globalization of Japanese society. Interviews were conducted with participants in a marriage promotion program run by a small town in rural Kyushu suffering from depopulation. In doing so, this study aimed to answer the following three questions. First, which kinds of life structures were associated with men who never married? Second, which kinds of changes did participation in the program engender in the ways in which these men had structured their lives? Third, how did these changes transform this rural community?

The results first showed that two barriers to marriage and, simultaneously, reasons to agonize over not being able to get married, were the closed nature of the men’s social networks and their family values. According to these values, these men were expected to live with their aging parents and take over as the family heir. Second, along with expanding the men’ s social networks, participating in the program influenced their views on marriage and family. Finally, through these changes, the marriage promotion program became a hub bringing together the town’s villages to find solutions to this challenge to their way of life. It now functions as a point of contact for building relationships with cities and provides resources to the local community to enable its members to cope with new challenges in their daily lives.

Recently, the local inhabitants of rural communities have taken the initiative to implement movements called “new endogenous development” in cooperation with outside human resources. In addition, the employment of overseas technical intern trainees has been remarkably expanding. However, the transfer of skills and knowledge to developing countries through the medium of the Technical Intern Training Program is hardly accomplished. This article discusses the possibility of agricultural management through hiring trainees and the transfer of skills, taking Vietnamese trainees as an example.

Community cooperative association X, based in the underpopulated area of Ehime Prefecture, has been actively developing a community business centered on organic agriculture. To carry out labor-intensive organic agriculture, trainees are critical for X. Moreover, by establishing its organic agriculture center in Vietnam and reemploying former trainees who have returned to their country, X has been launching a new import business and spreading organic farming methods in Vietnam.

As a result of the analysis, the following findings were acquired. First, farmers can fulfill innovative agriculture and sustained regional revitalization in depopulated areas through the employment of trainees. Second, if farmers implement a succession of skills and knowledge, that possibility will increase. Third, the conditions under which farmers act on the transfer of skills are the following. They consist of a firm business strategy based on a definite management ideology, a great enthusiasm to train the younger generation, and a comprehensive understanding of the current agricultural situation in the traineeʼs home country.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that improving farmersʼ management ability and reforming the Technical Intern Training Program to a system that fully considers the situation of the traineeʼs home country constitute urgent issues.

This paper reveals changes among rural families in depopulated areas of the Tohoku region by focusing on their attitudes toward in-home care. The characteristics of present-day families living in depopulated areas and the ways in which they differ from families in the past can be ascertained by looking at both patients and families from the perspective of doctors and nurses providing medical care and living in the same area. Previous research has established Tome City as a classic example of an area where there is a strong tendency for families to live together, and where several multigenerational stem families are present. An interview survey conducted, however, revealed signs of changes in the local community and rural families that can be seen in home medical care settings in Tome City. When the burden of care increases, families actively choose to employ the services of nursing homes. Social resources and home medical care providers are both available in this region, and care provided by medical and welfare professionals lightens the burden of care placed on families. Due to these factors, the normative expectation on the part of cohabitating family members to provide care has reduced. Furthermore, patients and families are supported by a network of various relatives and family members. It has also been demonstrated that family members live near one another and show a great deal of consideration for members of other generations. Long-term care systems and policies in Japan today are still predicated on care from cohabitating family members. However, even in an area that has exemplified multigenerational families because it has so many, people are still discovering ways of providing care and creating family structures that do not rely on this assumption.

This study aims to reconsider the current perception of mountainous areas through a historical analysis based on the structure and dynamics of mountainous society before depopulation.

The results of the survey showed that numerous forestry workers migrated to procure a large amount of timber that supported the modernization of Japan, and a wide-area network was formed among the mountain village societies.

The network formed through the movement of forestry had the following characteristics. First, this network was entwined with the networks of various organizations and influential people through the development of transportation infrastructure and administrative organizations. A mechanism for politically and economically mobilizing mountainous areas was embedded within this network. Next, the traditional forestry area was the main employment source of migrant workers. A new deforestation frontier has also welcomed migrants from various regions. Consequently, this network has spread to mountainous areas throughout the country. Finally, this network consisted of various types of human relations networks that were autonomous from the state and capital. Specifically, it is created by gathering people with different forestry skills from across the country and interacting with people through a mountain pass in a narrow range. Conversely, it was created from the kinship networks and high social mobility found in the movement of people over a wide area.

This study has two significant conclusions. First, it emphasizes the wide and narrow spatial movement and high social mobility in mountainous areas, as opposed to the perception of mountain villages in previous research. Second, even in the present mountainous areas, which appear to be closed and rigid, an open and flexible social relationship exists at their core.

Recent developments in the global economy and their corresponding neoliberal agricultural policies have caused serious damage to the conventional ways of parttime rice farming families and their rural communities in Japan, especially in hilly and mountainous areas. In the form of collective actions to survive the crises, farmers have initiated community-based farming（CBF）. CBF is a farming system practiced by a cooperative organization in which most family farms within a hamlet participate. By pooling all the resources such as farmland and labor force, CBF aims to reduce the financial difficulties and labor shortages of each farm as well as to sustain the farmland and milieu of the entire community. Our case study shows that CBF organizations have succeeded in both tasks through the efforts of the competent senior core members who engaged in full-time farming after retiring from their off-farm jobs. However, ironically, the successes have led to a marked decrease in participation of the rest of the CBF members and their younger families in farming and community activities. Being uncertain about CBFʼs long-term viability, the core members have begun to rebuild the original management and recruitment system. The implementation of CBF has irreversibly accelerated the fundamental transformation of the composition and nature of farm families and rural communities. In our case study, we found that the present rural communities are constituted by four types of households: （1）the entrustment to CBF type （great majority）,（2）the conventional family farm type（minority）,（3）the newcomer non-farm type（minority）, and（4）the newcomer farmer type（very few）. The future of rural society must be envisaged on the basis of such a transformation.

The significant change in Japanese society brought about by rapid economic growth since 1960, and the implementation of countermeasures against the discrimination of the Buraku and the Buraku people have drastically changed the Buraku. There has now caused a growing tend among people to move out of the Buraku or move into the “general zone.” Nowadays, most people hardly recognize who are the Buraku people.

Not too long ago, a female high school student killed herself because of discrimination in October 1991. She was part of the Buraku people, although she was born and raised in the “general zone.” Why did she experience Buraku discrimination? Moreover, why did she resort to suicide? Administrators in Hiroshima spent two and a half years to compiling “The General Report on the Discrimination Case about Marriage by a Junior High School Teacher;” however, they ultimately could not determine why she killed herself.

Nearly 30 years after her death, there has been an increasing number of people living within boundaries. That is why I am convinced that it would be meaningful to try to understand the difficulty of living under such conditions.

This paper seeks to logically prove that she was discriminated against, and to identify the difficulties of living within a boundary that she faced by examining “The General Report.” which is the only existing official public document attributing her death to discrimination.

In addition, this paper aims to clarify the types of identities that people who live within a boundary form, and the various difficulties they face.

In Japan, self-starvation（SS）has only recently begun to be recognized as an eating disorder. Although SS has existed for a long time, it was not initially understood as an eating disorder. This paper describes the transition of the semantic understanding of SS in Japan from a historical point of view.

This paperʼs analysis focuses on articles published from 1872 to 2018. A keyword search for six terms related to SS was conducted and a total of 13,577 articles were collated. The changes in the meanings of SS based on the data collected will be further summarized through text mining and content analysis.

In the late nineteenth century, SS was understood in various contexts such as religious fasting, hunger strikes for political purposes, and suicide to escape from society. In the middle of the 20th century, SS was begun to see as a mental illness under various medical names. From the 1980s onwards, medical professionals, educators, and feminist counselors treated it as a mental problem and it gradually became considered as anorexia nervosa. During this time, they described it as a mental problem and tried to make sense of it in relation to social problems. SS was regarded as a problem, and the cooperation of public and non-public organizations, including medical care, was highly encouraged. Entering the twenty-first century, SS has become more prevalent across Japan. Entering the twenty-first century, SS has become more prevalent across Japan. Some psychiatrists and social workers have begun understanding it as an addiction, habitual behavioral problem. In recent years, people suffering from eating disorders have started to receive social support from local communities in Japan. This new trend is can be related to the new semantic understanding of SS as a habitual behavioral problem rather than as a mental problem.

This study discusses the mechanism of subordinate inclusion of foreign technical trainees into the Japanese labor market, with special emphasis on the labor management in the Technical Intern Training Program（TITP）. Given that they are part of a separate workforce from Japanese workers, technical trainees are faced with various institutional restrictions. While the harsh realities of the traineesʼ working conditions have previously been recognized as human rights and labor violations, trainees are not necessarily managed through direct coercion and/or inhumane oppression. In light of this, this paper highlights the ideology of “debt of gratitude” incorporated into the policy and labor management. The following points will be clarified: First, pseudo-family labor relations with the employer and paternal labor management will be examined through the case studies of trainees working for family-operated businesses in remote areas. Second, the four adaptive patterns shown by trainees（i. e., to endure, return home, escape, or fight）are discussed. An analysis is conducted on how paternalistic labor management and institutional restrictions impact the traineesʼ choice of adaptive patterns. The results indicate that the logic of debt of gratitude, or “being cared for,” is present at a policy level and actual workplaces under the TITP. It is also shown that trainees are placed at the bottom of the labor market within this mechanism.

Considering new research trends in the sociology of knowledge occurring mainly in the German-speaking world since the 1990s, this article focuses on the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse（SKAD）, as proposed by Reiner Keller. The SKAD presents a research program for empirically exploring the production and circulation of knowledge and the changes thereof at a macro level by combining the frameworks of knowledge analysis with different traditions of sociology of knowledge and discourse analysis. The SKAD has now spread internationally, beyond the German-speaking world. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the basic theoretical framework and analytical scheme of the SKAD and highlight a particular theoretical issue.

The characteristic feature of the SKAD is that it not only analyzes the content structure of macro-level discourse, as mediated through the mass media for example, but also explains its production, circulation, and transformation in terms of the relationship with elements external to a specific discourse. Considering that issues about the social acceptance of scientific knowledge and the emergence of new technologies have become increasingly serious, this research perspective is highly relevant and has critical significance as it provides a new framework for sociological knowledge analysis. The SKAD, however, presents a challenge in that there is a need to provide a theoretical basis for the ontological or epistemological status of extra discourse elements. Therefore, this paper contends that, while pursuing empirical studies based on the SKAD is useful, further theorizing is necessary to address the challenge of providing such a basis.