In the animation industry, a lot of creators, who have various specialties, cooperate to make up products. In particular, animators often do it although they don’t work in the same place and time. This paper addresses how they accomplish such cooperation without co-presense from the analysis of their work of drawing. The pictures which a sub-key animator drew in her labor process contain instructions for the animators in the subsequent process. These prevent them from a misunderstanding of the upper-process animators’ directions. In the same vein, she added drawing papers to make instructions without any rewards. These observations imply that animators orient to generate smooth cooperation, and we should understand the labor problems of animators from their systems of cooperation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the emblem problem of the Tokyo 2020 Games sociologically. Previous research has analyzed Internet communication, but this paper explains the emblem problem from a historical context. First, the relationship between designers and the Olympics (the way of creating), then the relationship between advertising agencies and the Olympics (the way of using), and then the relationship between the designers and advertising agencies over the Olympics. After that, I will consider the two issues of “Plagiarism of design” and “Selection process of the emblem” and reveal what happened in the emblem problem of the 2020 Tokyo Games.

This study aims to analyze interaction in the form of readers’ comments and writers’ responses in online comment columns from an ethnomethodological standpoint. The study focuses on Mushoku Tensei, the most-accessed web fiction on the most popular and relevant site, Shōsetsuka ni Narō. The findings of the analysis indicate that: 1) in terms of the design of the reader’s comment, the reader posted some comments with a downgrade to save their face; and 2) in terms of the content of the reader’s comment, the reader noted problems in some character’s line by referencing the rule of “onnna kotoba/otoko kotoba” in fiction writing.

This paper analyses people’s attribution of the Sagamihara care home attack in 2016, in which 19 disabled residents of a care facility were killed by a former employee, U. Three forms of causal observation are distinguished: societal, personal, and bodily attributions. Although some people suspected that U’s psychiatric condition was the likely cause, many organisations of/for disabled people ascribed the case to social attitudes that deny disabled people’s lives (“eugenic thoughts”). However, societal attribution is dysfunctional, in that it renders U’s rampage understandable in a performative way, impeding progress toward the unconditional inclusion of disabled people. Thus, attribution analysis, the approach adopted here, can explore the functions, implications, and effects of people’s causal observations.

This paper aimed to think about how we could maintain others’ dignity from the consideration of “the illegal actions” of the people with learning difficulties and autism. We can find that “the illegal actions” are contiguous to everyday actions by the concentration of the social process they constructed. There are two typical distorted views about the people with learning disabilities and autism who did “illegal actions”, one is they did it for no reason, and the other is they cannot reflect on themselves. However, these views consisted of our arbitrary assumptions. In Takonoki-club, the supporters and attendants tried to reflect their communication with the people with learning difficulties and autism as double contingency. The way they did shows us how we can maintain others’ dignity if we cannot understand them.

This study aims to investigate the poverty attribution of people in Japan. Some previous studies have argued that various variables, including demographics, socio-economic status, and social awareness, correlate with whether people attribute poverty to individual willpower, social unfairness, individual unluckiness, or inevitable features of society. However, it is also asserted that people’s belief on the course of poverty has a complex and compound nature: people blame individuals and society at the same time. This study investigates such compound attribution using multiple answers of poverty attribution. The analysis shows that people who tend to blame society do not always privilege individuals and vice versa. As the robustness of social policies is partially based on people’s awareness, this result can be referred to when social policies are developed.

This paper examines whether the effects of social class and academic achievement on access to university have changed due to rapid educational expansion since the 1990s. Analyzing the National Survey of Social Stratification and Mobility in Japan, the magnitude of the effects of the father’s occupation decreased significantly after educational expansion only in male samples, but impacts of the father’s and mother’s education have not changed significantly in both male and female samples. The direct effects of the father’s and mother’s education remain strong after controlling the stable impacts of academic achievement, indicating that “secondary effects” play important roles even in Japan. Considering the above, it is argued that the trends and mechanisms of educational inequality appear differently depending on which social class variables researchers use.

In this paper, we clarified the factors that make up the spatial structure of income levels and economic disparities, and the changes in their spatial distribution in the Tokyo metropolitan area. In this analysis, we performed correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis for each municipality. It became clear that changes in social structure caused change in spatial structure in cities. In addition, regarding the transformation of the spatial structure of income levels and economic inequality in the Tokyo metropolitan area, it was confirmed that the low-income class increased, the income level decreased, and economic inequality increased from the 1990s to the 2010s.

This study investigates how Japanese youth lost interest in politics after the 1970s. Previous research in youth studies showed great interest in and conducted research into youth culture after the 1970s. The author aims to demonstrate how the youth lost interest in politics through articles by editors and readers of the magazine Bikkuri House, published between 1975 and 1985. From the collected data, the author found that editors and readers mentioned political issues, but that youth interest changed after the 1980s. The youth supported or criticized political actors such as political parties and social movements in the 1970s. However, they came to caricaturize political actors after the 1980s because editors regarded some political topics as things of the past and expressed little interest in politics. This paper concludes that youth culture after the 1970s did not lose interest in politics, but that that interest was based on ridicule and a caricaturized view of politics.

This paper clarifies the historical position of the discourse of rising aspirations in business magazines in Japan. Success ideology as a drama is said to have ended in the 1970s, but the media that drive us on to success has been kept alive. This paper focusses on business magazines and looks at how the discourse of rising aspirations has (or has not) been presented. As a result, it was found that there is a historical process in which business skills using psychological knowledge are referred to as a driving and realization device for rising aspirations, instead of success ideology as a drama supported by self-cultivation.

This paper examines whether residents’ support for their local professional sports teams has an impact on their community consciousness. We focus on two types of consciousness. One is place attachment to the regional community, and the other is expanded ego, which represents one’s identity with the locality and the instinct for self-preservation from those beyond the bounds of the community. We conducted a social survey of residents (N=1000) of northwestern Chiba in 2018. Through multivariate analysis, we found that fans are likely to have a stronger attachment and ego than non-fans. This result implies that supporting local teams has a possible impact on the relationship between residents and the regional community.

Voter turnout has been declining in Japan since the 1990s. However, due to a lack of research on the resources needed to vote, the relationship between resources (e.g., social stratification and living conditions) and voting is not yet clear. In this study, we focused on the social stratification and life circumstances of voters, and analyzed how they affect the willingness to vote, distinguishing between effects and within effects using the Japanese Life Course Panel Survey. We found that income was positively affected by between effects only, and working hours were negatively affected by within effects exclusively. Therefore, it is clear that relative differences in income and changes in individual working hours affect one’s willingness to vote.

Through narratives from magazines and 14 interviews, this paper examines how, from the late 1990s, a gender identity category, X-jendā, was formed and spread with self-enforcing abilities. We clarified how X-jendā was utilized in the sexuality mixed self-help group as a transgender subcategory to enable differentiation from the norms of existing categories. In addition, the abilities of X-jendā seemed to be changed in the process of spreading, partly separated from the usage of transgender categories. These results show that the abilities of self-enforcement were regulated differently in the local settings of the self-help groups and in the internet sphere.

Although gender segregation of the public and private spheres once reigned in the modern family, it seems to have waned in recent years. However, previous research drawing on interviews has shown that having a husband or child makes women’s lives home-centered. Using Japanese Life Course Panel Surveys, this study investigates whether Japanese married women and mothers spend less time outside the home compared to men because of their larger share of housework. Fixed-effects models showed that having a spouse or child decreases women’s time spent outside and increases the time spent inside the home. After controlling for housework, some independent variables are still significant. These findings suggest that another mechanism is at work behind the gender segregation of the spheres.

It is said that the reproductive experiences of men and women significantly differ from each other. Certainly, the reproductive processes such as pregnancy and childbirth occur in the female body. For this reason, men have never been considered as the subjects of reproduction. However, it is now becoming clearer that men are also involved in reproduction. This paper therefore aims to clarify men’s reproductive experience by re-establishing men as reproductive subjects. Specifically, based on interviews with ten men who are actively engaged in childcare and are highly interested in reproduction, describe the actual reproductive experience of men that has been a black box.

This research explores how and in what context parents take their adult son/daughter with intellectual disabilities from care homes back to their own home. This paper focuses on mothers, because in Japan mothers take on the role of making decisions for children with intellectual disabilities. This research is based on interviews with these mothers. A qualitative analysis shows that the mothers passively accept the burden of care rather than actively accepting the idea of taking care of their child. In addition, the research suggests that whether the family has an environment conducive to childcare is an important condition.

In Europe and North America, nightlife has been utilized since the late 20th century as the “night-time economy” to revitalize post-industrial city centers and enhance global competitiveness. In Japan, however, nightlife was controlled until the amendment of the “Act on Control and Improvement of Amusement Business (Fueiho)” in 2015. Using the case of the crackdown on nightclubs in America-mura, Osaka, this article examines why nightlife in Japan had not been recognized as a resource for urban economic growth until the late 2010s. From this crackdown process, the article reveals that nightlife tended to be excluded due to the “Building of Safe and Reassuring Communities (Anzen/Anshin na Machizukuri)” which supported the daytime use of urban areas.

Through the analysis of textbooks, this paper reveals the structure of research topics on the sociology of work in postwar Japan. The analysis revealed the following points. (1) The number of textbooks in the sociology of work has decreased compared to sociology textbooks in other fields. (2) Until 1970, the structure of topics was centered on organizational theory; since the 1990s, this structure has become fragmented. These findings correlate the view of previous studies that the sociology of work in Japan has stagnated. In addition, this demonstrates the need for a “sociology of the sociology of work.”

The Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in March 2011, provoking the critical accidents at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The strictest type of evacuation zone was established, legally banning lives, enterprises, and labor inside the border. A hundred thousand residents and workers, who left the area just after the accident, were not allowed to return. In a few months, however, some of them returned to the area around the zone and worked for the local company that had employed them previously. Why did the workers return to their workplace? Based on interviews with employees in a restaurant corporation, this paper finds that their living conditions as well as social ties helped reorganize the workers’ occupational attitude, encouraging them to “return and continue working.”