This paper discusses working in a medical setting based on my interview research to medical professionals who are working in pediatrics. In a certain aspect, to work in a medical setting mean to work on the edge of life and death. Previous sociological studies have paid much attention to how medical organization routinizes death in a hospital setting, but this article shows that medical professionals are not always used to patient’s death and they are engaged in highly emotional labor. Next, I indicate that qualitative research is effective to grasp the ‘human conditions’ of medical professionals. Lastly, I consider how we can return the result of our sociological research in a medical setting to the informant or the whole society.

“Ethnomethodological studies of work” may be located as one branch within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. It is a research program Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology had been concerned with during his later years. Studies of work have investigated how work is conducted in workplaces to feed information about the actual organization of work practices into design of work, technologies, and social policies. Thus, studies of work have been conducted in various interdisciplinary contexts. This paper looks into hybridity, i.e., the ambition to merge ethnomethodological studies with the investigative topics treated within the settings being studied, which Garfinkel introduced as a set of criteria studies of work should satisfy, to reflect on how Garfinkel intended this policy to be implemented. Two studies in emergency medical settings are examined in light of hybridity, and also in light of how studies prompted people to think reflectively about social issues.

This paper aims to answer the following questions by exemplifying the ethnomethodological studies based on the fieldwork in an acute care hospital. (1) What kinds of the experiences do people have while working in medical settings? We insist that the question is also a question for participants in the practice themselves. They use “member’s methods” to understand their experiences. (2) What kind of methods are there to research medical settings? We formulate ethnomethodology as the method for investigating these “member’s methods.” (3) How can we report our findings? This paper explicates the policy of ethnomethodological studies as hybrid studies, which regards findings as reminders of the practices.

This article aims to analyze the transformation of what may be termed the politics of framing the concept of the “migrant-refugee.” The present paper examines the manner in which migrants and refugees are classified by the French administration and perceived by French society in the midst of the European “migrant-refugee crisis.” Three observations are made: (1) the differentiation between legitimate “refugees” and illegal “migrants”; (2) the justification of the exclusion of the latter in the name of guaranteeing protection for the former; and (3) the reconfiguration of the hierarchy of categories in the asylum system. These observations allow us to note several arguments contending that priority must be accorded to the individual rather than to the group and that these are favors granted rather than rights claimed; further, such logic fragments and places individuals in similar situations within a hierarchy. The combination of the aforementioned aspects poses a major challenge to the building of a collaborative and cohesive solidarity movement.

This article will try to explore the meaning of “vulnerability” in the context of migrant women workers in Asia. Numerous cases of human rights violation on migrant women workers have been reported, and in worse cases, the lives of migrant women workers are physically at risk amid the process of migration. Referring to the feminist arguments on “vulnerability,” “paternalistic” protection policiesy toward the migrant women workers by the labor sending countries will be examined. From the discussion, the limits of the “dignity” approach and the need of a paradigm shift of host countries toward migrant workers are proposed.

The refugee crisis that dominated the news in 2015 consisted of a sharp rise in the number of refugees coming to Germany. The German government and civil society has been confronted with the challenge of encouraging social integration based on the liberal democratic principles. However, as liberal racism has an influence on the principles, German immigration and refugee policy may be prone to leading to the exclusion of immigrants rather than to their integration. This remarkable example was sexual assaults and thefts in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. This article analyzed the German media response to and parliamentary debate about Cologne.

Using a historical approach, this study examines the transformation of graves from a material perspective, specifically the marketing strategy of gravestone shops. First, I reveal the relationship between the construction of graves for people who flowed into urban areas during the period of high economic growth and the commercialization of graves through advertising with its purpose of maintaining extended reproduction of these shops. Second, I demonstrate that, with the changes in the economic structure since the 1990s, gravestone shops have contributed to the social expansion of funeral and grave systems that do not require inheritance.

This paper examines whether attrition in a panel survey causes bias in the estimation of individual income. The Japanese Life Course Panel Survey (JLPS), which has been conducted every year since 2007, is analyzed along with the 2006 and 2012 Japanese General Social Surveys and the 2015 SocialStratification and Mobility Survey. Regression results for income are used to compare the JLPS andthese major cross-sectional surveys. The magnitudes of coefficients differ at the initial stage of JLPS, but they become closer as the survey progresses. Even though JLPS has experienced an approximately 40% reduction in the original sample after 8 years, the results do not provide strong evidence that it has become unrepresentative.

This paper reveals the hidden history of AIDS grass roots activism through the gay magazine G-men. There are few qualitative sociological studies that focus on the lives of persons living with HIV that has been sexually transmitted, and even fewer resilience studies on how these people have survived and what they have achieved. To address these topics, in this study, we interviewed Hiroshi Hasegawa, a former editor of the gay magazine G-men. Hasegawa emphasized the pleasure-based approach, promoting an understanding that it is possible to participate in safer sex while indulging in one’s fantasies. Based on the experiences of people who are living with HIV, readers were able to discover practical perspectives and reduce the stigma that society has attached to their sexualities and HIV/AIDS.

Since the 1970s, disability movements to reveal the social discrimination have grown rapidly worldwide. What was endemic to Japan was the blame placed on parents by people with disabilities themselves; parents were accused of hindering the independency of disabled people. This paper conducted a case study on the 1970s Tanpopo Movement, which was established by mothers of children with disabilities. It shows how these mothers let go of their role as parents as the movement spread. Following a description of the process, the paper looks at aspects of the avoidance of suppression by parents in this movement.

This article aims to illustrate how the French elite obtain reading habits enabling to acquire language capital in French. These habits are said to contribute to the formation of the elite in France. We analyze narratives about language capital and reading habits from the life stories given by seven members of the French elite. As a result, it becomes clear that their reading habits were acquired after prompting by parents and relatives. Especially when their parents were teachers, they tended to become strongly conscious of reading. Accordingly, home education conducted with the consciousness of the importanceof reading must affect their reading habits in such a way as to enable them subsequently to acquire language capital.

The aim of this paper is to examine how moral education in Japan is or is not possible by using Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. In this paper, I show that it is more appropriate to consider moral education as educational communication under the control of a binary code of “good/not good”, rather than moral communication based on “respect/disrespect”. Students who receive education about morality will be busy concerning themselves with their teacher’s evaluation. Moral education is almost impossible as a method of changing a student into a moral person because moral education itself is a paradox. However, moral education is possible as a program in an education system through a process called de-paradoxication.

This paper discusses the effect of urban policy on ethnic relations in the case of the Okinawan community in Tsurumi, Yokohama. In Tsurumi, there live two kinds of Okinawans: Okinawan Japanese and Okinawan Latinos. Until the second half of the 2010s, there were almost no connections between them. However, from 2016, some Latinos began to participate in the Tsurumi Okinawan Association and in that same year the association met with the Okinawan Association in Brazil for the first time. This paper elucidates such a reformation of ethnic relations as occurring not only in the context of colonialism but also in the context of a neoliberal urban policy, and it suggests the need to focus on urban policy when investigating ethnic relations.

This paper clarifies the process of transition in the concept of ‘consumer’ in Japan by analyzing the practice of a consumer cooperative movement before WWII. In social science, this concept has frequently been used as an analytical category. However, why was this concept, originally a term representing a recipient of goods, used as a category that people identified with.

In this paper, we analyze this transition by focusing on the socio-economic discourse in Japan. This concept was used not only as a trading entity but also as an actor of social change in the consumer cooperative movement of the 1920s. Moreover, faced with the problem of a lack of commodities in WWII, activists in the women’s movement identified themselves as “Consumers” serving the nation.