Feminist critics have argued that Rawls’s ‘political turn,’ with its clear distinction between the political and the comprehensive, ignored the decades of feminist effort to bring forth various forms of ‘women’s oppression in the private sphere.’ Although Rawls’s own response fell short, it is argued in this paper that his theory did indeed contain a valuable normative resource for framing a better reply by focusing on the ideal of civic community and its role in overlooking individuals’ experience in their comprehensive social world, as well as in liberal democratic governance. Being backed by liberal civic community, individuals in Rawls’s ideal theory are equipped with the strength to act on their own environment, which in turn normatively empowers us, as true emancipatory thoughts have always aimed for.

The aim of this paper is to tackle the publicness of feminism by referring to the criticism on the public-private distinction of liberalism. The concept of the phrase “personal is political” in second-wave feminism was explained not only in personal relationships controlled by gender power relations, but also by the fact that these power relations determine the privacy of individuals. However, liberalism tends to prioritize freedom and privacy of individuals more than feminists’ explanations on people’s preferences and actions attributed to gender power, since the preferences and values of individuals are secured without considering their contexts or status in our society or the impact on the lives of other people. This paper concludes that feminists’ explanations of how gender relations affect our preferences and future disposition should be interpreted as to allocate their public responsibility regarding gender injustice toward each individual.

Public administration studies (in Japan), which primarily focuses on administrative structures, has viewed “neoliberalism” primarily as an ideology that seeks to restore “small government.” On the other hand, the growth in the number of public servants in Japan already reached a ceiling at the beginning of the country’s rapid economic growth, and even today, the number of public servants per capita in Japan remains low by international comparison. In other words, “small government” had already been realized in Japan before the “neoliberal” administrative reforms that brought about the concept of governance and NPM in advanced democracies after the 1970s. Reviewed in this paper is how “neoliberalism” has been evaluated by Japanese public administration studies, whose research focuses on such administrative structures.

In this paper, how the concept of neoliberalism has been accepted in Japan is analyzed, and then the extent to which it fits into Japanese society is examined using data on four issues: economic policy, social policy, governance, and subject. Subsequently, by using articles on education, ways in which the neoliberal concept is used as a comprehensive description of society is examined. Finally, consideration is given to how we should deal with the neoliberal concept.

The term/concept of neoliberalism has perhaps been one of the most popular and continuously used terms/concepts in critical sociology, economics, politics, geography, gender theory, etc. over the past few decades. While examining the ambiguity and inflexibility of this concept in the history of economics and sociology with Marxism at its core, Shinichiro Inaba has extolled the concept of neoliberalism as a “Brocken spectre.” In this paper, while continuing Inaba’s problem-setting, we will address the question of how the use of the concept of “neoliberalism” is justified, and what people are doing by using the concept. One task will be to detect its social and sociological functions rather than to show the expiration of neoliberalism as an explanatory concept.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the historical background and social relations affected the establishment of body-donating organizations for medical research and education in post-war Japan. In particular, we discuss the latent process of the movement and the states of emotions. This study will focus on Furoukai, one of the body-donating organizations. Furoukai was established in 1962 by the network of Tokunouka, who were engaged in the promotion of agriculture in Aichi Prefecture, to offer memorial services to the victims of postwar regional development. At that time, Tokunouka associated body donation with the morality proposed by agricultural fundamentalist Nobuyoshi Yamazaki. Accordingly, this mentality contributed towards the spread of kentai (body donation).

“Turning the Japanese people into a 100 million idiots (ichioku-sō-hakuchi-ka),” as insisted by Soichi Oya, is the most famous phrase critical of TV at the earliest stage of TV broadcasting in Japan. Thus far, little attention has been given to the logic of this theory. In this paper, we analyze Oya’s texts and try to reveal what kind of logic is used in the theory. As a result, we reveal that Oya’s texts are organized according to the following methods: (1) To place people, culture, and media technologies in a ranking order, (2) To assume a positive correlation between these ranks, and (3) To interpret a certain vulgar TV program as an actual appearance of the underlying pattern of problems facing Japanese society.

Through a membership categorization analysis of the coverage of a “Mixed-race Juvenile Serial Murder Case,” how the suspect of the case could be positioned as a victim is analyzed in this paper. With the suspect’s confession of his experience of racial discrimination as the motive for the crime, the press identified the suspect as a victim of Japanese racism rather than a blameworthy criminal. The press focus on Japanese racism, in turn, made it possible to emphasize the “perpetrator-victim” relation between a “Japanese” “adult” and a “mixed-race” “juvenile.” On the other hand, those who mentioned the incident from the point of view of “mixed-race” blamed the suspect by associating the crime with his own personality.

In this paper, recent debates on immigrant second generation assimilation and outcomes in the United States are reviewed with a focus on cultural concepts. Special attention is paid to Segmented Assimilation Theory by Alejandro Portes and his colleagues, which is recently gaining popularity in Japan. In the process of formulation, the idea of downward assimilation into the “underclass” was criticized, and thus references to cultural concepts decreased. However, renewed cultural explanation is recently emerging in American immigrant second generation studies, which employs a renewed concept of culture, such as frames and repertories. Building on these debates, the author examines the framework to better understand the relation between culture and achievement.

The interest of this study is in the division of labor of parents for disability care in families with a son/daughter with intellectual disabilities whose parents are currently about 70 years old. The specific care involvement of the father and the mother’s interpretation of the father’s care involvement were clarified. The survey method consisted of interviews with three mothers and two fathers. As a result, it became clear that fathers were taking care of the son/daughter with intellectual disabilities outside the house. Further, the care of the father was not considered sufficient by the mother, but was still justified by other interpretations that gave the father a role in caring. From the above results, we clarified a new aspect of the mechanism that produces long-term family care for sons and daughters with intellectual disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the publicness of the critical movement against the promotion of land readjustment in the 1920s Imperial Capital Reconstruction Plan by focusing on the concept of shimin (citizens). In particular, the practice of the Kaizen Domeikai and District 31, which used the notion of shimin, in opposition to the norm of shimin demanded of urban residents by the reconstruction authorities, is analyzed in this paper from the pamphlets published by the Kaizen Domeikai and District 31. As a result, first, we find that the concept of shimin used by the main body of the movement partly included the publicness that was discussed in postwar social movement theory. Second, from their notion of shimin, we can also find subjects who were able to resist urban modernization in an organized and continuous way by connecting their interests with the publicness required by the authority.