The Research Institute for the Next Generation belongs to the business sector, and aims to investigate actual lifestyles without being held back by common stereotypes. Our study of the next generation is an extension of this approach. Our purpose is not to place labels on a particular generation but to deepen our understanding without becoming too academic. Our stance towards surveying the younger generation is the same; as affluence and the information society have been realized at a rapid pace, the older generations wrestle with the feeling that it is difficult to understand the younger generation, and our aim is to work towards narrowing the gap that has opened up between the generations. We have carried out a new type of survey employing in-depth interviews to obtain full life histories, and workshops that allow youth to express themselves in their own words. In this way we can ascertain their ideas with regard to work and information/media, and understand other trends among young people. In relation to work, we were able to clarify that salaried office workers feel a profound burden due to the fact that they were "not able to choose and work in a job they like" and subsequently experience anxiety about these feelings. This opened up a new avenue of investigation. With regard to the use of information/media, we investigated issues concerning the meaning and importance of the media that youth use, along with issues related to communication, etc., by making use of the youth's own words. An enormous change in the environment has brought new values to the younger generation, and this has made it difficult for the older generations to understand them. However, in thinking about the future of society, it is necessary for the older generations to know about new lifestyles and values, and the study of generations is one way to make this possible.

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In recent years, intergenerational relationships, especially, intergenerational equity has grown in importance in Japan. Intergenerational equity is defined as an intergenerational conflict for resource allocation. Accelerated demographic aging, slow economic growth, changes in family relationships, and increasing employment mobility are all important factors influencing intergenerational equity. In this study, intergenerational relationships were analyzed in birth cohorts. Firstly, feelings with regard to the public pension system were explored. The results indicated that since the late 1990s, most cohorts have an increasing sense of unfairness with regard to the public pension system, with younger cohorts in general feeling a more intense sense of unfairness, implying weakened social cohesion. Knowledge regarding the public pension system has not necessarily reduced this sense of unfairness. It is recommended that media coverage of public pension system should be redesigned to relieve the sense of unfairness. In this regard, researchers have suggested the possibility of substitution between the state and the family. Secondly, the support given to children was investigated. The results showed that the younger the cohort, the less they were likely to receive funds from their parents to acquire housing. Moreover, in the case of housing, there was no possibility of substitution between the state and the family. Therefore, it was concluded that the sense of unfairness among the younger cohort would remain high. At the same time, being in the life stage in which educational costs of children would progressively increase may also result in a feeling of unfairness. If these inferences were correct, effective housing and educational policy would reduce the sense of unfairness by reducing the household burden. Intergenerational relationships are politically important matters in an aging society. It is suggested that future studies should investigating the intergenerational allocation of resources from a life course perspective, as well as investigations the interaction between macro and micro levels of intergenerational relationships.

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This paper performs a comparison between industries with regard to "the richness" of employees. As the result of analysis, the following four points became clear. First, a negative correlation was found between income and working hours through an analysis of economic richness (annual income) and space of life time (annual total actual hours worked). This is to say that the rich earn well despite short working hours. Second, there are different phenomena among industries with regard to both the effect of education and of business scale. Third, in an industry, the income of the major education group pulls the minor group. This "major attractor" phenomenon dominates the business scale effect. Fourth, the effects of education and business scale are different for each generation. As a result, there are factors that influence all industries and generations.

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Media cultures in contemporary societies are highly subdivided and diversified. Given this situation, who could observe the culture belonging to a particular generation? To date, many sociologists and scholars have discussed youth culture or subculture as the cultures of a particular generation. Yet, these may have only been phenomena that media commodities and the market created at a particular time. In this article, I will consider the difficulties faced by generationism from the cultural studies perspective. In addition, I will discuss the methodological possibility of analyzing the common media experience by generation.

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Communication in the field of healthcare involves various actors such as patients, families, doctors and co-medical staff. The relationships among these actors and their power politics have been examined in research in the field of sociology of medicine. Recent changes in the social environment and policies related to healthcare have placed new actors on the healthcare communication stage. In this article, I first define the concept of "advocacy" and then discuss roles in the medical profession, especially the roles played by the co-medical staff in healthcare communication from the viewpoint of enhancing rights protection and patient advocacy. Next, I examine the impact on the patient-doctor relationship of the market-oriented healthcare reform that began in the 1980s in the U.S.. This reform enabled insurance companies to control the treatment choices that a doctor could offer to a patient. The power and autonomy of doctors seem to be declining, while insurance companies and organizations are gaining power as they increasingly intervene in the communication process between patients and doctors. It is clear that this fluctuation in the autonomy of doctors is not necessarily beneficial to their patients. Although doctors' professional autonomy was the source of their domination and paternalism in healthcare, and sometimes attracted criticism from patients, now the role of doctors and their professionalism should be redefined toward an improvement of patient advocacy. In Japan, however, the possibility of such dynamic healthcare reform is remote. The U.S. case shows us that people who intend to improve patient advocacy in the Japanese healthcare system should be sensitive and come up with a strategy for adapting to change in the social and economic environment of healthcare. Finally, I propose a more flexible framework, one that is not founded on a conflict-based approach to communication in healthcare, and in which co-medical personnel play the role of patient advocates.

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A patient (Mr. A) who had been suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) for several years, told the story of his illness at a public health center where a public health nurse (Ms. B),who had heartily supported Mr. A, worked. The aim of this paper is to examine how Mr. A generated the story with Ms. B and how he reconstructed it thereafter. As a result, some characteristics of the social generation of an illness story were elucidated as follows: 1) The first plot to Mr. A's illness-story—one which was constructed through a collaboration with Ms. B— was composed of three parts, (1) his medical history with ALS, (2) a conversion in his attitude towards intimate others, resulting from a gradual decline in his QOL, and (3) a return to the writing of his life history, spurred by the introduction of a personal computer. 2) To tell of the intolerable pain he had endured, which it seemed was important to Mr. A, he interrupted the story line from his conversion to the expression of his gratitude unpredictably in the end. As Mr. A frankly pointed out, his was a sort of chaos story, or what might be called an "anti-story," which enabled him to reconstruct his original dominant-story. 3) Seven months later, Mr. A took the opportunity once again to tell the story of his illness at a training meeting. On this occasion, he included a new version of his private illness story which contained a story of his pain, together with a model story of the ALS patients' community.

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In this paper, I will relate and offer an explanation with regard to the narrative of a hemophiliac with HIV. In the early 1980s, doctors infected a large number of hemophiliac patients with AIDS by using blood products that were contaminated with HIV. In Japan, this social problem is called HIV Yakugai. Many hemophiliacs lost their trust in the doctors who had infected them with HIV. When we read the narrative of one patient, we can see the process whereby he lost trust in his doctor who did not inform him of his infection for seven years, and he had criticized the specialist doctors who treated hemophiliac patients. Finally, this patient participated in a legal trial against the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the pharmaceutical companies. On the contrary, one doctor who had infected this patient with HW won his trust because he gave an honest account to the patient. Some years ago, we received narratives of this hemophiliac patient with HIV. In this paper, we will focus on relations between a hemophiliac patient with HIV and his doctor by reading the patient's narratives.

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NGOs/NPOs are expected to be fundamental to civil society, yet people sometimes doubt whether volunteer activities can promote a neoliberal reconstruction of society. However, these activities cannot always promote change in concert with neoliberalism. We know there are activities against neoliberalism and the support of undocumented migrants is one of them. Undocumented migrants are regarded as a "risk" and excluded from society. This trend is considered a part of the neoliberal reconstruction. In opposition to this trend, it is useful to know how activists who support undocumented migrants imagine their solidarity with them. Thus, this paper discusses how activists experience ties with migrants and imagine their solidarity with them. This study shows that the activists imagine this solidarity in various ways, based on their own contexts. We see them from these viewpoints. Though individual imagination cannot, without exclusion, include all undocumented migrants, activists tend to include all migrants by using plural imaginations when viewing them. This is to say that activities in support of undocumented migrants as a whole can help to performatively imagine a solidarity with all undocumented migrants.

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Although writings that admired love existed in the Meiji period, this voice came to have greater power in the Taisho period. However, in reality, even the freedom of an individual to select his/her spouse was not accepted in Taisho period, as is well known. Then, how did love harmonize with the social order at that time? This paper answers this question by analyzing the cultural norms for what kind of love and marriage were suitable to, and in harmony with, the social order that existed in the Taisho period and early in the Showa period. This analysis found that love harmonized with the social order under the cultural norm of a love that was critical of the passionate side of love as something that was blind. Such cultural norms of love emphasized that the approval of parents was necessary to the making of a rational judgment. Moreover, such cultural norms with regard to love denied temporary emotional satisfaction, and invented the logic that it is necessary to use love for the creation of descendants and the continuation of the race.

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"Traveling Cultures", presented by James Clifford, was very influential in cultural studies and anthropology, and its methodology remains fascinating in sociology today. However, some feminists have characterized the metaphor of "travel" as andro-centric and Euro-centric. But when considering the broad theoretical and political range of "Traveling Cultures", these criticisms are not persuasive. This article will re-examine whether or not "Traveling Cultures" has other aspects that are not contradictory to the politics and practices of feminism. By examining Clifford's theoretical view, especially his critical attitude toward theoretical objectivity, and by examining the theory of "transnational feminism," this article will find the following. Clifford's "travel" metaphor is intended to compare gendered and racialized experiences. As a background to his critical perspective with regard to theoretical objectivity, there is the de-centered character of the "West" in the late twentieth century and "Traveling Cultures" incorporates a "politics of differences" which is not contradictory to the politics of feminism. In addition, it is also a "hybridity theory." Although the concept of "travel" includes the problem of modernism, which functioned during the European expansion era as a depoliticized art movement, the concept of "postmodernity" provides insight in compensating for the problem of modernism in "Traveling Cultures".

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In 2005, the Japanese Diet established the Fundamental Law of Shokuiku, and as a result, Shokuiku became the duty of the nation. Shokuiku was widely defined to include "improved health," "improved self-sufficiency in food," "food security," and so on. Particularly, it emphasizes the teaching of a feeling of gratitude. Thus, the contents of Shokuiku are very normative. For that reason, few people have examined how Shokuiku policy formed. In this paper, I have two aims. The first is to show the process by which the Shokuiku policy formed. In particular, I will focus on the time when the policy was introduced. At that time, Shokuiku was a solution to mad cow disease, and thereafter the contents of the policy increased. The second aim of this paper is to show how symbols were reconstructed during this process. Here I will focus on two symbols, namely "Slow Food" and Shokuiku. The phrase "Slow Food" was very popular in those days. Policymakers equated Slow Food with "eating local foods," a solution to the mad cow disease, and they said that eating local foods contributed to the establishment of "face-to-face" relationships. The symbol Slow Food explained the meaning of Shokuiku, an expression that was not famous yet. The reconstruction of symbols made the expression Shokuiku a new symbol and mobilized many kinds of people. In this work, I will apply cultural theory to depict the supply route of the Slow Food symbol as a resource. In that way, I can describe the intentional and unintentional actions among groups with regard to the symbols. Finally, I will suggest the dynamics of a collective action using these symbols.

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