Kansai Sociological Review
Online ISSN : 2423-9518
Print ISSN : 1347-4057
Volume 14
Displaying 1-19 of 19 articles from this issue
Articles
  • Jung-eun HONG
    2015Volume 14 Pages 3-16
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This article discusses how the mother's identity among pro-North Korean female residents of Japan had been constructed in the 1960s through focusing on the performativity of female activists who participated in Nyeosung-Dongmaeng (NSDM), an affiliated women's organization of Chongryun, the largest left-wing Korean organization in Japan. Since the early 1960s, a mother's role had been ideologically emphasized in the pro-North Korean community under the influence of the Revolutionary Mother Ideology (RMI) from North Korea. The first congress of Korean mothers in Japan was held in 1962. This congress was influenced by a speech given by Kim Il-Sung, where he stated that the responsibility of caring for children was in the hands of mothers. In the late 1960s, female activists from NSDM initiated the movement following in the footsteps of Kim Il-Sung's mother, Kang Pan-Suk. Through NSDM's campaign, Kang Pan-Suk became the ideal of Korean womanhood as the revolutionary mother who put her heart into raising children who will become great revolutionaries. To put RMI into practice, female activists organized mothers' associations at each Korean school to support ethnic education for Korean children. As a result, their practices represented the image of the traditional mother because RMI was based on a patriarchal gender role. On the other hand, a subversive reading of the lessons gained from narratives of unknown Korean female warrior biographies in the anti-Japanese movement during the period of Japanese colonization demonstrates the new performativity of female activists of NSDM would be possible as revolutionaries, not as mothers. In this context, the potential of gender parody appears. In conclusion, female activists from NSDM had performatively constructed the mother's identity in the 1960s. This means that their identity politics was always gendered.
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Special Section Rise of nationalism and hate/phobia in contemporary Japan
  • Kohei KAWABATA
    2015Volume 14 Pages 17-20
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Koichi YASUDA
    2015Volume 14 Pages 21-35
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Myungsoo KIM
    2015Volume 14 Pages 36-53
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In recent years, far right movements characterized by behaviors such as hate speech toward minorities have been recognized as a problem extending also to Japan. The purpose of this paper is to use a quantitative approach to specify, in an exploratory fashion, the determinants of the anti-foreigner sentiments regarded as social attitudes supporting such movements. The data was a survey conducted by mail in 2012 of voters in municipalities affiliated with the "Council of Cities with a High Concentration of Foreign Residents." In developing an analysis model, the framework of social awareness theory-which precisely specifies the meaning of the covariance relationship between variables expressing position in a social structure and the objective variable-was used by introducing multiple attitude concepts. The following three points were discovered as a result of the analysis: 1) Social structure variables which directly act on the formation of anti-foreigner sentiments were not evident, and anti-foreigner sentiments varied in a fashion mediated by social awareness; 2) The largest factor which directly boosted anti-foreigner sentiments was assimilationism, with assimilationism being stronger with increasing age; and 3) The factor which directly inhibited anti-foreigner sentiments was general trust. General trust is higher when social networks are broader, and social networks are broader when educational attainment is higher. Based on the above discoveries, this paper discusses the fact that, in order to inhibit the anti-foreigner sentiments which impair integration and order of society as a whole, it is important to have resources (often scarce) which might be called "multicultural relations resources." It is also necessary to reevaluate the value of multicultural relations resources, and make systematic efforts to reproduce these resources.
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  • Teruhito USHIRO
    2015Volume 14 Pages 54-63
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This article deals with the origins of postwar anti-racism from a historical perspective. It examines political and theoretical aspects of two subjects. First, countermovements against Nazism which motivated postwar anti-racism: 1) Anti-racist network initiated by Ignaz Zollschan and his Zionism; 2) Franz Boas's 'Scientists' Manifesto' followed by resolutions and manifestoes which were issued by American university professors and academic societies; and 3) 'Geneticists' Manifesto' by left wing geneticists criticizing Nazi science from their standpoint of eugenics. Second were two statements on race by UNESCO (1950, 1951) which started the anti-racist campaign shortly after the war. Analyzing these two statements, we find changes in the concept of race and in the way of thinking about the difference related to human groups. In the end, we characterize postwar anti-racism as institutionalized metapolitics makes recognizing the differences among human beings or human groups as a universal value. It could be possible to conceive recent forms of racism as a kind of challenge to the metapolitics of that universal value.
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  • Ryuta ITAGAKI
    2015Volume 14 Pages 64-67
    Published: June 25, 2015
    Released on J-STAGE: September 22, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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