In the field of cultural studies, I have been tackling the problem of Americanism in East Asia. My focus is on the everyday cultural reception of “America” among the people of East Asia since the end of the Second World War. I have been reviewing the relationship with America built up especially during the period of the Cold War from a comprehensive regional perspective, taking into account the level of people's everyday consciousness and culture along with the military and politico-economic aspects. Despite the evident importance of research on such a wide-ranging and complex phenomenon, hardly any attempt has been made until very recently to study the significance of “America” in a region-wide context. The new approach we need relates to the field of post-colonial studies in East Asia. The postwar dominance of America in East Asia is, in a certain sense, a reconstruction of the Japanese imperial order that existed until the end of the war. It is essential that the mediating role of “America” be considered in investigations of the further postwar development of colonial consciousness and practice in Asia under the Cold War order.

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This paper critically analyzes how the contemporary ‘sociology of culture’ (youth culture theory, media culture theory and consumerism theory, etc.), which have been developed in the postmodern era (1980s), have fallen into a self-alienated situation. The ‘sociology of culture’, whether it is ‘postmodern sociology’ in the 1980s or ‘cultural studies’ in the 1990s that criticized postmodern sociology, both postulated that culture is often alienated from the everyday life of people. In contrast, this author insists that in principle culture should be recognized as a self-alienated activity. Not only do human beings follow their everyday lives as they are but they also desire to enjoy more pleasurable things. Therefore human beings voluntarily destroy and reconstruct their everyday lives. Recognition that culture is a self-alienated activity opens up new possibilities for cutting through cultural estrangement.

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In the context of sociology in Japan, where ethnic homogeneity has been assumed and vernacular culture has rapidly vanished since the end of WWII, it has been usual that the term “diversity” has carried a critical nuance. However, recently, in the age of late modernity, “diversity” has come to be embedded into the logic of global capitalism and the efforts of national and municipal governments that hope to attract fluid multinational companies and a cosmopolitan “creative class”. The author seeks to articulate the meaning of “diversity” in this context, and to point out that what kind of urban practices would be excluded in the recent urban redevelopments that have sought to create cities with diverse urban amenities. This paper examines the paradox that some restrictions on what can be done in the urban space are required to guarantee the diversity in that same urban space.

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This paper analyzes relations between the city, something produced by society, and its images as a social and historical productions. Here, for this purpose, I deal with the specific case of turn of the century Paris as it was depicted in the collection of picture postcards “Cartes postles illustrées de Paris”. While dealing with the problem of treating urban representation merely as a means of conveying political meaning, I propose a new approach to urban representational analysis, one that goes beyond the political or anti-political approach to the city.

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Many scholars have conventionally posited a notion of sovereignty against transnational migration. This binary assumption has remained untouched until today. Such an understanding, however, produces a problem; migrants cannot be anything but a group of people under the surveillance of a nation-state. This becomes problematic especially today when a sense of crisis in some nation states leads to a nationalism that targets foreign migrants. Thus what is needed is to reconsider the intact dichotomy between sovereignty and transnational migration. For this purpose, this paper attempts to redefine sovereignty from a perspective of transnational migration, revealing how national sovereignty has been in fact transnationally constituted. In order to substantiate the argument, the paper examines the particular case of Chinese migration to the U.S. in the late nineteenth century.

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This paper examines the relationship between civil servants and community in the New Order in Indonesia. Civil servants in Indonesia increased rapidly in numbers and political power after the 1970s to support the ruling political party Golkar.
On the other hand, civil servants pushed Pacasila as a national ideology. Consequently, Indonesia's civil servant came to manifest a particular habitus that mediated the observance of rules and regulations. Civil servants manifesting this particular habitus demonstrated their particular “administrative skills” through the neighborhood associations, RT/RW.

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This paper explores the structure of sport culture using the concept of the “constructive outside” as proposed by Judith Butler. Issues of “sexual commodification” by female athletes, such as nude representations, have been on the rise since around 2000. Although most scholars explain this as resulting from a lack of funds for women's sport, explanation is based on the notion that a “woman” is a consistent entity. In addition, such perspective may ignore the power of sporting norms that implicitly universalize “masculinity” in sport. In this paper, I am concerned with the relation between the issues of the “sexual commodification” of female athletes and the function of the “constructive outside” that always surrounds sporting norms.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine how gender role assignment is embedded in newspaper reports. This paper analyzes seven newspaper articles (1988) published during the period of the Agnes Chan Controversy, a controversy strongly related to women's dilemma between career and childcare. This paper describes coverage of the Agnes Chan Controversy as reported on newspapers. Critical Discourse Analysis introduced by van Dijk is employed as the research method. This analysis shows that the newspaper articles enthusiastically contributed to the process of defining the dilemma of having a career and having children as one solely related to women. A tendency can be observed whereby newspapers only dealt with women's movements that accepted conventional gender role assignment while ignoring the assertions of those women who repudiated such assignment.

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In this paper, I examine the relationship between spouse selection and the issue of ethnicity for Korean residents in Japan through analysis of the readers' columns about the ‘marriage problem’ found in Toitsunippo (Unification Daily). This analysis shows that spouse selection was not oriented to an individualism but rather to strengthening a new ideology of the family. While endogamy within the Korean residents in Japan is actually on the decline, this is related through a reconstruction of family and ethnicity.

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This paper aims to examine under what conditions teachers put education tackling gender discrimination into practice in public schools and what problems they have. Feminists have made an issue of gender discrimination hidden in schools calling on teachers to ‘reform their own awareness’ and push forward with educational practices to correct the situation. How these practices are carried out, has, however, been overlooked. Based on field work at a particular school I found that a teacher who sought to handle gender problems aggressively had a hard time with the attitudes of some children, especially a few of the boys. This suggests that this dilemma is a logical consequence of thoughts about anti-gender discrimination not fitting into existing school structures.

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By examining criticism of ability grouping in teaching English in the teachers' movement, this paper investigates issues how participants who are teachers in junior high schools act and how leaders maintain movement organization in a situation in which there is a discrepancy between the problems participants see on a daily basis in their schools and the goals of the movement. We find that criticism of ability grouping as a movement principle was formed in the early 1960's and this movement principle inspired participant support of the movement meaning that “amplification of approval” and “integration resulted.”

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There are many support groups for people suffering from hikikomori (social withdrawal). How to aid their rehabilitation is a complicated subject. What do the supporters do actually? One role for private support groups is to visit people in hikikomori and act as “the disturbing other, ” to shake up their daily life which is divorced from any significant happening and to introduce an element of uncertainty. In so doing, the supporter has to manage her emotions to enjoy the uncertainty, and to make herself happy to meet people in hikikomori. Through this management of emotion, the supporter manages to show people in hikikomori that the uncertainty is necessary and fun and therefore they are welcomed by society.

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This paper summarizes the results of a case study on how mobile phones are used among high school students in Japan and what impact this usage has on relations with friends.
It is said that the use of the cellular phone has had the effect of expanding interpersonal relationships. And, in quantitative terms, high school students do indeed have many more friendship relations now that the cell phone is nearly ubiquitous than they did when cell phone usage was just starting to expand. However, when paying attention to the qualitative aspects of interpersonal relationships, it was found that high school students and their relationships when cell phones have become essentially ubiquitous are like those of middleschool students. This suggests that the use of cell phones influences mental development during adolescence.

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This paper seeks to clarify the disincentives in “inheritance-via-the mother, ” the case where mother inherits a part of a father's inheritance in order to secure her remaining life. Based on study of a number of cases, it appears that inheritance-via-the mother is often obstructed by a child with whom she lives. An important finding of this study is that we must think about this matter by dividing it into two stages; a mother's attitude toward her inheritance and her environment surrounding her inheritance.

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The factors that explain the unequal contributions to housework by husband and wife have been repeatedly analyzed in the field of research into family. A few plausible models have been proposed, among which the relative resource model, available time model, ideology/gender model and necessity model have been mainly discussed. In this paper, taking the difference in contribution between husband and wife in Japan, rather than their individual contribution, as the response variable, those models are validated through the detailed interpretations of the estimated result of several statistical models. As a result, the relative resource model is found to have the most explanatory power regarding the division of labor among Japanese couples.

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When homeless live in the urban space, they often subvert the formal functions of that urban space. If their use disturbs the formal functions of the urban space, attempts to control and restrict their usage appear. At the same time, the actual working of spatial control depends on the responses of the homeless. This paper takes as an example of this pattern, four areas in a certain city (City A) and examines the relationships between the life of the homeless and spatial control in each area of the case study. It was found that (1) the content, strength, and agent of control differed in each area; (2) that the homeless try to avoid spatial control in various ways and continue their life; (3) ultimately, the homeless cannot be entirely free from spatial control.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of regional community identity. Although studies have been made on large distressed areas, there are no previous studies using a farming village as the unit of analysis. The subject of this paper, the k district, the main distressed area, did not adopt a networking strategy. Therefore the problem of unlawful dumping and RDF has not been faced in common with the other networks and the surrounding areas. If local problems had been faced through a common strategy, it is probable that the K area revitalization program that was promoted as part of a village image would not have occurred.

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This paper uses a case study of Oumihachiman in Shiga Prefecture to clarify how residents interpreted the “history” of their region. Heretofor, environmental sociologists have explained the “history” that appears in an area slated for historical preservation as a unitary symbol. However, by implementing such policy, which emphasises a specific “historic” value, residents in the preservation area become subject to restrictions on their everyday life. This paper finds that the residents in the preserved historic environment in Oumihachiman were originally had that own image of “history” that was not based on a single symbol but rather on relationships. The possibility of governance based on the view of history held by the residents is also investigated.

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This paper aims to clarify how the publicness of landscape (keikan) is, examining two judicial cases involving the issue of landscape, from sociological standpoint. The court recognized the “landscape profit” from their ownership of property that created the landscape concerned, but this decision is arguable because it lacks the publicness of landscape. And it seems difficult for legal ways of thinking to manage this situation as it is, because the concept of landscape is formed in the tangle of the “public” and the “private”. Referring above, this paper concludes that the publicness of landscape is turned out to be “uneven”, depending the types of involvement to it by people.

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Because theorizing organization as a rationalized entity, the students of organizational studies had long dismissed emotion as irrational and impossible to theorize. However, based on Hochschild's pioneering research [1983], many now seem convinced that it is emotion (management) that helps keep the organization organized, and that organizational emotion (OE) is worth theorizing. In this paper, two theoretical frameworks are critically reviewed in terms of the possibilities of theorizing OE. One is Hochschild's emotion management perspective, and the other is organizational culture perspective. Both are culture-based theories, and their advantages and disadvantages in theorizing OE are contrastively discussed so as to advance the theorization of OE.

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The relationship between descriptions which sociology makes and the value judgment of the sociologist in making such descriptions has long been recognized as a serious problem for sociology. Sociologists traditionally have struggled to exclude this judgment from description, or more recently, insist that such judgment should be included in description. In this paper, I suggest that such a dichotomy based on inclusion versus exclusion is predicated on the on the systematic neglect of at least one sort of social phenomenon which sociology can/should describe in its own right.

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The aim of this paper is to consider how ‘Now and So’ can be now and so. The theory of social systems as a second order observer observes the phase ‘Now and So’ in system time of a first order observer because it is always a blind spot for the first order observer.
For this purpose, (1) I will formulate the theory of social systems by Niklas Luhmann as “Sociological Phenomenology”: Parallel to consciousnesses, social systems are observed not as things but as subjects in the world. However, (2) contrary to phenomenological sociology, I start not from ‘the problem of meaning is a problem of time’ but from ‘the problem of time is a problem of meaning’. This means that system time is a meaningful construction. Finally, (3) I show that the phase ‘Now and So’ can be now and so through the distinction of past/future. In whole system time, an event as an element of the system can appear and disappear in the present.

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This paper investigates how discourse as an analytical framework can be constructed in the development of Michel Foucault's analyses. By doing so, the paper argues that multiple frameworks exist in analysis using the discourse. Moreover, the paper shows that the analytical method used and the character of the discourse in question rely on the researcher's understanding of the mechanism of society, as well as on his attempt to strategize discourse as an analysis framework to better understand social phenomenon.
Given these points, a discourse should be understood in relation to the object of analysis. Therefore, the methodological concern should shift from explaining the nature of discourse analysis to assessing the analytical feasibility of the discourse.

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The aim of this paper is to rethink public sphere in the age of globalization by examining the dialogue between Fraser and Honneth [Fraser, N. & Honneth, A. 2003]. Firstly, this paper examines Fraser's “the political” and Honneth's “moral sensitivity” and “cooperation”, and secondly compare these concepts. In conclusion, this paper inidicate “participation parity” and “solidarity” as key concepts to take part in political dicision-making.

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This paper addresses two francophones who had penetrating insights into the unshakable bonds that exist in market economy societies. One was a native of Geneva, the early 19th century anti-classical economist J.-C.-L. Simonde de Sismondi; the other was of Jewish origin and a modern founder of sociology É. Durkheim. In his Socialisme, Durkheim deals with Sismondi's analysis of economic crisis but makes no mention of his proposals for reconstructing the corporation. Similarly Durkheim explored the role of the corporation as an agent in producing social integration without reference of Sismondi's proposals for restructuring. Based on this point, we make an attempt to examine the similarities and differences in their ideas concerning the crisis of solidarité in a market economy society and compare their views of the corporation. This attempt is inherently a preliminary step in apprehending the history of French sociological thought and the development of its understanding of solidarité.

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