Until recently a distinction between history and historical sociology made little sense, but now, with the contemporary tendency to prefer the present reality of the past constructed from collective memories or narratives of one's experience over factual accounts verified by historical inspection, there seems to be a more notable distinction between the “sociology of history” and historical sociology.
To grasp the situation with respect to sociological methods as whole, this article introduces some presentations from workshops and symposiums organized by The Kanto Sociological Society during the last two years. We argue the interaction between historical materials and the sociological imagination and the reflexivity of historiography and “lived history”.

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“Jichitai-shi” are histories edited by local governments. After the Second World War, most local governments have edited their own local histories and have built up skill in this area. Nonetheless, from the 1970s onward there was criticism that citizens were absent from the local histories and that they represented only the interests of the local bureaucracy. Histories have been debating how citizen participation could be increased and how citizens could be encourage to read these local histories. This paper is a reevaluation of local histories from a sociological standpoint and describes the efforts of historians to increase citizen participation in the creation of local histories.

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Despite the late introduction of data archiving in Japan, its development over the last 10 years has finally laid the groundwork for serious secondary analytic work. Survey data collected decades ago is, de facto, historical data, and thus, secondary analysis of these data must be approached from a historical perspective. In treating research data in its necessary historical frame, the following three principle dilemmas arise: 1) changing statistical categories, 2) lack of historical perspective, and 3) a tendency to find one's starting point in contemporary values.

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I produced the digital archive of 10,000 titles of early Japanese television commercials. Some of these commercials contain the elements related to the program. For instance, the cast in the program appears in the commercial, the same setting as the program is used in the commercial, or the commercial is integrated into the opening or the ending of the program. When we extract these commercials from their broadcast context and arrange them in a taxonomic space, the constructed meaning that a viewer at that time would have been experienced is lost. The loss of context can be restored to some degree by supplying textual information but it is almost impossible to do this perfectly. This case suggests that the commercials as they appeared in the flow of broadcasting and the commercials stocked in database cannot be the same semantically. A digital archive is not a transparent box. It alters the meaning of the stored material. We should advance the analysis of such power of the media.

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In the present essay, Jürgen Habermas's early sociological works will be examined in two respects: on the one hand, their stratified relationships to the conceptual constructions of Carl Schmitt and Rüdiger Altmann; on the other, his understanding of historical development in eighteenth-century England. The analysis through these two subjects maintains that the core of his conceptualization of the civil/bourgeois public sphere consists in the articulation between institutionalized political powers (not only government, but also parliament) and private citizens who generally criticize political affairs. In addition, the essay will also argue that his diagnosis of modern society depends especially on his critical attitude of intermediary organizations which attempt to affect political processes without public control in the re-politicized social sphere that emerged after the disappearance of the liberal distinction between the public and private realm.

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The purpose of this article is to describe the interweaving of nationalism with sociological imagination in Japan by scrutinizing Fukuzawa Yukichi's discourses. Fukuzawa was the initial person who observed and described society using discourses on nationalism. Such agency was realized in the context of 19th century's globalization in which technologies of communication and transportation transformed the world drastically. By reconstituting Benedict Anderson's theory of nationalism from the perspective of technologies of communication and transportation, we will focus on the moment of technology in Fukuzawa's discourses. This investigation will reveal that Fukuzawa's sociological imagination was conditioned by the tension between constituent power and constituted power.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine how the so-called “Liberal” position arose concerning the issue of ethnic minorities in 1960s America. Some earlier research has seen “Liberal” as only the opposition to “Conservative”, and explained that the “Liberal” position in America was established in the presidential election of 1964 in which the main issue was civil rights policy. According to such research, as the civil rights movement became radical in the late 1960s, the “Liberal” began to collapse. But in this paper, to grasp the “Liberal” more appropriately, I focus on the relation and difference between “majority” and “minority” inside the “Liberal”, and examine how “Liberals in the majority” responded to claims of minority. From this perspective, I will make it clear the radicalization of civil rights movement was not the beginning of the collapse of the “Liberal” but rather the critical momentum for the establishment of “Liberals in the majority”, as it were a “Liberal Majority”.

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This paper explores the concept of “ethnic contact” used by a Japanese sociologist Eizo Koyama (1899–1983) to analyze three types of travel/displacement: immigration, tourism and fieldwork. Since the early 20^th century, many fieldworkers had begun to authorize their own inter-cultural practices in contrast to other ones by tourists and immigrants, etc. But Koyama claimed that tourism involved the meaning of fieldwork as well as one of leisure activity. Why is it? By reconsidering his claim under the Japanese tourism policy in the 1930–
40s, I argue that it reflected the process in which tourists were perceived as agency mediating between different cultures while ethnic contact became an efficient medium for (re-)presenting national self-image. I also argue that his population policy attempted empire building through the media of contact between Japanese immigrants and natives in the colonies.

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The aim of this paper is to clarify the category referring to ‘foreigners’ when the Japanese people are asked about prejudice against foreigners or xenophobia in surveys. Previous studies concluded that age, education, and prior contacts with foreigners have an effect on the Japanese attitudes toward ‘foreigners’.
However, there is diversity within this generic category of ‘foreigners’. The present study is based on a survey conducted in 2006 that contained a questionnaire item that would differentiate the nationality of the foreigner being referred to. The following were found. Those who are positive about any type of foreigners are highly educated and are those who have/had prior contacts with foreigners. And those holding positive attitudes towards all except Asians tend to be younger individuals.

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“The ban on Japanese popular culture”, which had been formed in the intersection between “Japan as a historical memory” and “Japan as cultural experience” was a phenomenon that existed because of “the local” particularity of the relationship between Japan and Korea. In the 1980s, in response to strong pressure from the U.S. government, Korean society began to recognize the culture industry anew by joining the Universal Copyright Convention. This meant fundamental changes to the structure of the ban, since Japanese popular culture, which had been distributed and consumed in Korea spite of “the ban”, became the subject of protection by the “global” legal system.

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This study is a tentative attempt to bring a new framework to analyzing the factors that induce trans-border migrants who live a dual reality, something that is not explained by the existing literature on migrants that is premised on national economic gaps as the factor that induces trans-border migration. In Thailand, educational development preceded spontaneous industrial development. Thus, foreign-affiliated factories absorbed people who have no social capital except higher education background and they came to faced with underemployment. Some of them migrated abroad for the sake of gaining a status of “successful daughter” at home. For such migrants, their life in the destination country is merely a temporal life and their true life is at home. In other words, they live dual reality.

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Today kabuki is considered as highbrow. This paper clarifies how the highbrow image was constructed, and shows that the image was not created by the specialists of kabuki. Since the Meiji era, kabuki had been criticized as vulgar and non-artistic. The highbrow image has been created by non-specialists who are unaware of the modern history of kabuki as a lowbrow culture. Now kabuki's highbrow and artistic image has spread widely being propagated by non-specialists. It is said that ‘popularization of highbrow culture’ has occurred in Japan. Non-specialists who are in the majority in Japan have created the image of kabuki as highbrow culture, but they do not have a habit of seeing kabuki in their daily life. It is important for ‘popularization’ of kabuki that the authorization of kabuki rests on those who are not regular viewers of kabuki.

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With recent administrative reforms, the Council of Social Welfare puts forward plans to organize people to undertake public welfare service. As a result of these plans there has been an increase in the number of volunteers engaging in a welfare work. But why do they voluntarily when they are simply substitute labor? This paper will focus on the organizational reform of the volunteer management by the Council of Social Welfare. The findings are as follows: in recent years on-the-spot voluntary acts have been highly rationalized to use individual competence, and the Council has produced organizational reforms to support this. However, this may easily lead to people becoming nothing more than basic substitute labor.

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The aim of this article is to clarify the dynamics of the members of a Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-Operative Hokkaido where the delivery to home system (KOHAI) was introduced in recent years. In the preceding study of the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-Operative, the home delivery system was not part of the investigation. We made a comprehensive survey of the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-Operative Hokkaido. Analyzing the impact of the home delivery system on the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-Operative Hokkaido, we consider the present and future of “Solidarity” in the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-Operative Hokkaido.

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This paper explores how the experience and the practice of providing family day care are organized by analyzing the narrative of family day care providers. Their work is made accountable through the logic of domesticity and the logic of professionalism. Although professionalism is often referred to in opposition to domesticity, redefining their own professionalism in terms of the artfulness of realizing the logic of domesticity is useful for avoiding the occupational dilemmas concerning providing family day care and experiencing their work as meaningful for themselves and their clients. Logic through which participants are making realities accountable has to be taken into account in the forthcoming reorganization of family day care system.

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This paper analyzes the socialization theory and the repeated criticisms of it. Critics partly believe that the childhood socialization is related to better relations between individuals and society (i.e. the “Hobbesian Problem”), and partly doubt the peculiarity of childhood relationships. Luhmann converted the theory by his original interpretation of socialization, and the concept of “the child as a medium of the education”. However, he still remains inside our sociological imagination concerning individual and society. We should rethink why we have tried to question the relation between individual and society, and, on the one hand, analyze “childhood” as a discourse.

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The purpose of this paper is to elucidate one aspect of the scholastic socialization. This is the socialization through which Kindergartners are oriented to the methodology of ‘A and Bs attending to the same thing’ as a scholastic skill. This paper demonstrates that two respective designs of two interaction formats, ‘adjacency pair’ and ‘adjacency triple’, are used to cohort the kindergartners, make the teacher's and kindergartners' states facing each other, and then, achieve the methodology of ‘A and Bs attending to the same thing’. These procedures are describable as one aspect of the scholastic socialization that orients kindergartners to a skill mainly required in schools.

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In this paper I have made a comparative research of the social background and trends that support Japan-South Korea student's friendship. It turns out that both national groups were generally satisfied with their friendship although there was a difference in the process of mingling with their friends. In case of associating with friends, Japanese students tended to value the feeling side, while South Korea students tended to value their attributes and their shrewdness. In the process of forming friends, analysis showed that both national groups were influenced by their degree of school adjustment and their quality of family life, while school achievement (Japanese students) and an item that asked about Internet friends (South Korean students) had a passive effect.

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The purpose of this article is to make the history of relationship between “SENSE” and “YOUTH” clear. For this purpose, this article treats the graphic designer as a profession in Japan in the 1960's as a case. The methodology of this article is historical sociology of the discourse. The analysis is as follows. Firstly, the graphic designer was an adult profession until the 1960's. Secondly, the graphic designer became a young person's profession in the 1960's. Thirdly, at that time, the “SENSE” that had been denied before came to be affirmed. Fourthly, the affirmation of the “SENSE” at that time accompanied the change in the context of communications. Fifthly, it is a change from evaluation based on understanding to evaluation based on interest.

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The purpose of this paper is to sociologically examine the caring culture in free schools. In previous studies, free schools have been recognized as self-help groups for school non-attendees to reconstruct their negative self-narrative to an active one, a place where they can change the meaning of school refusal. Free school supporters are seen as significant others who help non-attendees in realizing these changes. But in fact the supporters do not just engage in such a narrative therapeutic care, but also conduct passing-care that avoids narrative construction. This paper suggests that these contrastive approaches to care are achieved by the cultural factor of the secret and the factor can cause the group to hold other people than school non-attendees.

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This article was Retracted due to personal information protection

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This paper examines the vocabulary of “legitimation” in the funeral business. I examine two movements that have occurred in post-war Japan. Both movements were related to funeral simplification. In the course of opposing funeral simplification, the funeral business experienced difficulty in asserting its legitimacy vis a vis the actors in each movement. In this paper, I indicate the relationship between the vocabulary used to explain the legitimacy of the funeral business to the actors in each movement and its effect in achieving social recognition.

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