The discussion of foreign immigration policy has arisen in the face of the decreasing population of Japan. However, Japanese policy is still inadequate, because there are no social guidelines for integrating foreigners into Japanese society. The reason is that no vision of the future of this country has been determined. In other words, no decision has been reached as to whether foreign citizens may become Japanese or not. In this thesis we propose to consider a social, integrated strategy from the point of view of Korean-Japanese. These have undergone various hardships before becoming Japanese citizens. Therefore, their experiences are valuable in considering the system and the social problems confronting foreigners in Japan. Korean-Japanese are Koreans of former "special permanent resident" status who have now been naturalized. The reason for their application for naturalization was to escape discrimination. However, an increasing number of people have applied for naturalization to improve their chances in life. Up until now, nationality and identity corresponded. Now, however, this is increasingly not so, and the number of those outside the old framework has escalated. More people will certainly acquire Japanese nationality in the near future. The government of Japan should therefore craft a policy of regarding foreigners as potential Japanese nationals. The experience of the Korean-Japanese can show that there is always a possibility of transforming the nation from the inside. In that sense, it can be said that their existence will expose one of the national images that a Japanese society of the future must face.

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In this paper we consider the question of the possibility of modifying the inter-ethnic relationships between majority and minority peoples when the minority group starts to engage in a more socially valued type of employment than before. In Japan, there has long been a negative labeling by the society towards Filipino immigrants as "nightlife workers" due to the massive influx of young women entertainers from the mid-1980's to mid-2000's. As they grew older and settled here as spouses of Japanese nationals, they started to seek career development as licensed caregivers. The findings of a survey of Filipino caregivers in Japan, conducted by the author in 2008, are as follows: (1) The mean age cluster of Filipinos in Japan had then reached the late 30's. (2) It therefore became difficult for them to continue working as entertainers, and instead they sought a challenging day-time job with higher social status. (3) However, in the work place, they faced difficulties in understanding Japanese culture, as well as with the language necessary when dealing with clients/patients. (4) In addition, they sometimes felt discrimination from Japanese co-workers.

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In this paper we formalize the interaction between discriminators and those who are discriminated against, in order to make a theoretical linkage between mathematical sociology and fieldwork studies. We use the imitation dynamics of evolutionary game theory and analyze the change of share of strategies in each group, the discriminators and the victims of discrimination. By the analysis of our model, we obtain the following results. First, discrimination will decrease according to the increase of resistance to it. However, depending on the initial state, there will remain players who still choose a discrimination strategy when t→∞, even though players who are discriminated against prefer resistance to discrimination. Second, the more discrimination exists at the initial state, the more discrimination will have decreased at the end of the dynamics.

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This paper examines two hypotheses, the liberal hypothesis and the traditional public hypothesis, to explain the reason why mathematical sociology is unpopular among Japanese sociologists. The liberal hypothesis argues that mainstream sociologists often avoid mathematical logic, because they are politically liberal. Although mainstream sociologists induce sympathy for a minority through the construction of the life world of minorities, the models of mathematical sociology are often too simple and abstract to construct a life world. On the other hand, the traditional public hypothesis argues that Japanese mainstream sociologists often avoid mathematical logic, for the very reason that they are themselves traditional public sociologists. Since they prefer stories which are interesting and easily understood by the nonprofessional public, rigid mathematical models are often troublesome for them. These two hypotheses imply also the unpopularity of professional sociology as a whole, because professional sociology needs rigid logic and extensive inquiry into evidence, whether it is mathematical or not. However, the decline of professional sociology would entail the decline of liberal and traditional public sociology, too, because they are interdependent. The rehabilitation of professional, and especially mathematical, sociology is a challenge that confronts all Japanese sociologists.

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In this article we criticize and relativize the methodological controversy between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning from the viewpoint of the sociology of experience. Here, "sociology of experience" means not only the application of sociology in order to analyze the experiences of others, but also sociology performed by a student in referring to experiences of his own, i.e. experiences of suffering criticism of his study brought by the parties concerned. Hence, the sociology of experience needs a method or paradigm of "dialogue" between students and the parties concerned for the purpose of rethinking and reconstructing theoretical models. Thus, we can grasp a critical moment to relativize a positivistic view of reasoning such as deduction and induction.

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Wushu (Kong-Fu, Chinese martial arts) schools are private technical schools that teach courses in Modern Wushu. Most of them are founded in the cities. However, most Wushu students transfer from public village schools to Wushu schools before entering junior high school. In this paper, we shall examine the modern relationship between farmers and Modern Wushu by considering why these students transfer. Firstly, Wushu schools can give children with poor grades a certificate of secondary education through sports. Secondly, Wushu schools have boarding houses and school staff to keep them secure, providing food, clothing and shelter. Recently, many farmers have gone to big cities to work. These workers cannot afford decent apartments nor take care of their children due to their low income and their long hours of work. Many of these children's parents are such workers, and they use the school's boarding houses as safe and cheap lodgings. Thirdly, the educational environment of Wushu schools is better than that of both public elementary schools in the villages and private schools in the cities. In China's education system, local governments pay the cost of compulsory education. Thus, the quality of compulsory education in poor villages is very low. When a village's parents have gone to the city for work, many of them take their child with them. However, many of these children from the village cannot transfer to public schools in the city due to institutional and economical reasons, and low achievement. In addition, the educational environment of a city's private schools for such children is poor. Therefore, many parents select a Wushu school for their child's education. Finally, we show how the Chinese social structure creates these relationships, and how the Chinese family register system promotes this social structure.

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The purpose of this article is to analyze the discussions criticizing the institution of marriage, and the consequent transformation, in Fujinkoron. It also aims to explain the transformation within the ideals of intimacy in contemporary Japanese society. The result of the analysis shows that an intimate relationship built on the basis of communication and commitment has become the new ideal in Japan. This gives rise to the question, "What is a relationship founded on communication and commitment ?". One development that demonstrates this is that between the 1970s and the 1990s, a relationship built on "the sex-role division" came to be rejected, and discussion of questions such as, "Passionate romantic love or marriage?" and "Is legal recognition necessary to lend significance to love between a man and a woman?" came to the fore in Fujinkoron. A relationship that neglects communication and commitment is rejected in the discourse that affirmatively supports marriage. However, such an ideal of love gives rise to uneasiness, because external anchors in the relationship are lost. Therefore, the definition of love which idealizes the "one-and-only" continues to exist in contemporary Japanese society to provide an escape from such uneasiness.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism of the construction of the idea of "Art for art's sake" in modern European society, from the viewpoint of the commodification of classical music. We shall consider the case of Beethoven, who is generally regarded as a model of Art for art's sake in the history of classical music, and analyze his biographies and letters, with reference to the method of Norbert Elias's study of Mozart. First, we examine Beethoven's ideas on music or musicians, ideas which are considered to represent the autonomy of music. Next, we analyze in greater detail the mechanism by which he learned to show such ideas, focusing on his musical activities: criticism, publications and concerts. From this analysis we demonstrate that, in parallel with his ambivalent attitude, the more his music was publicized and commercialized, the more his performance was heightened and purified. In this "twisted structure," we shall point out that it is from such beginnings that the Art for Art's Sake movement was generated. Finally, applying the discussions of the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Georg Simmel to this result, we conclude that the Art for art's sake ideal has a complementary relationship to the commodification of music. Overall, we illustrate one aspect of the phenomenon called the "modernization of music" in terms of the relationship between Art and commodification.

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How did the socialist utopian imagination affect the minds and thought of the people who lived in the former socialist Eastern Bloc? What kinds of idea and practice did it create? In answering these questions, this paper analyzes Polish documentary films in the 1950's, and considers how such films represented reality in socialist Poland in its relationship with this utopian imagination. In the era of socialist realism (1949-55), documentary films triumphantly depicted reality in Poland as that destined to become the model of the future socialist utopian society. But such representation dramatically changed when a great socio-cultural change occurred in 1956, the socalled "Thaw." Then, new documentary films in the "Black Series" (Czarna Seria) which appeared with the Thaw depicted reality as disillusionment with the regime's utopian projects. From an analysis of films, this paper argues that these two kinds of film marked two different perceptions of reality, that of the utopian imagination and of the post-utopian imagination. Such a difference implies that within socialist projects in the Eastern Bloc, which is normally regarded as a monolithic "totalitarianism," there existed various imaginative possibilities which were in conflict with each other.

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