Club activities in junior high schools are considered “extracurricular” and are not part of the curriculum. Nevertheless, the majority of students participate in club activities for extended periods of time. In recent years, the burdens and difficulties faced by students and teachers over club activities have raised attention as a social problem, and moves toward downsizing club activities and separating them from school education are underway.

This paper aims to summarize the significance of club activities in the growth of students and the maintenance of school order through a qualitative study in a junior high school that has managed to break away from serious “school violence” by focusing on club activities, and to encourage a reconsideration of the movement that is ongoing today.

This article aims to describe the experiences of children with developmental characteristics at elementary school and discuss the support for the children and parents in their community. As the literature focuses on the teachers’ standpoint, the problematic aspects of school or class have not been questioned. Thus, this study carried out an interview survey of two pairs of parents and children. The results are as follows.

(1) Excessive discipline at school and lack of special support for children with developmental characteristics trigger school refusal.

(2) Teachers seem to have no time to talk with children because they are exceedingly busy.

(3) In such a situation, school does not work well, but support by the community members is efficient in some cases.

Finally, these findings are considered from the standpoint of MORITA’s school refusal theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the educational and legal issues of student guidance policies and practices in relation to the phenomenon of juvenile law revision since the 2000s in Japan.

First, I examine the children’s rights infringement issues within the student guidance policy and its practice from the 2000s to the 2010s. Second, I focus on the United States which reviewed zero tolerance and developed restorative justice and consider children’s participation in the disciplinary action process. Third, I consider why it is difficult to position restorative practices in Japan, unlike in the U.S.

The purpose of this paper is to examine teachers’ approach to juvenile delinquents by conducting an interview survey of juveniles currently in juvenile training schools and preparing questions regarding their relationship with teachers at school. Using the classification of interpersonal attitudes toward teachers obtained from a previous study (Sakuta, 2018), the analysis showed that in the “repugnance” relationship, there was an extreme tendency toward one-sided guidance of delinquents by teachers and abandonment of the guidance itself. On the other hand, the “favorable impression” relationships showed superficial involvement and listening to and understanding of the boy. Furthermore, the question on the ideal teacher image yielded the following teacher images: empathy, respect, seriousness, and acceptance. While keeping in mind the social environment surrounding juvenile delinquents and teachers, he suggested that teachers will be increasingly required to approach juvenile delinquents as “practical knowledge” tailored to individual cases.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the current relationship between the discourse of self-responsibility in poverty and the discourse of child poverty, which is expected to play a counter role to it.

The analysis is twofold. First, I analyzed the transition of both the child poverty theory and the self-responsibility theory of adult poverty. As a result, we found that although we cannot deny the possibility that the discourse of child poverty was connected to the suppression of the discourse of self-responsibility in adult poverty, the extent of this connection seems to have been limited. Second, I analyzed the rhetoric that connects the discourse on child poverty and the discourse on adult poverty. As a result, it became clear that the scope of “adults” as a target to be linked to child poverty was limited to only the parents of the children or at most the parents’ generation.

This paper analyzes interview data with six people who have experienced the phenomenon of “circle crash” in order to discuss how people make sense of the difficulties they experienced as mismatched romantic relationships and the group context in which people are embedded.

Because previous research on the sociology of love has taken few approaches to investigating individual love stories, it has not been sufficiently clear how groups are made sense of when people fall in love. Therefore, this paper analyzes the data cross-sectionally, focusing on groups. First, this paper shows that weak relationships in groups lead to traumatic heartbreak for the “rejectee-side men” and perpetrative approaches on the “rejecter-side women”. Secondly, this paper shows that strong relationships in groups rather encourages homosociality, which leads to the condemnation of women based on “exclusivity norms” and “sexual morality”. The results of the above analysis present a new perspective on the difficulties of love in today’s “selective relationships”.

Studies on the well-being of the elderly in China emphasize the social structure of urban-rural disparity and hardly touch on the possibility that they will have a happy old age. In this paper, inspired by the theory of life structure in Japanese community studies, I assume that life structure mediates the elderly living in rural areas and the social structure, and through a semi-structured interview survey with the elderly in Lvshizhuang Village of Hebei Province in China, I investigate the living conditions of those who feel happy or unhappy. The results show that the sense of well-being of Chinese rural residents is largely influenced by their families, especially their relationships with their children. Based on the results, I believe that a cultural apparatus called “the institutions for reproduction” is working behind the background. Although rural residents in modern China have conditions to live a happy old age, whether these conditions are connected to their sense of well-being is also related to how these residents meet the living requirements under the constraints of social structure.

This paper aims to examine why in practices and discourses on crime prevention for child safety, the significance and effectiveness of the community is emphasized. In this context, issues such as voluntary crime prevention activities and unity of local residents are highlighted.

An analysis of newspaper discourse, the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun from 1997 to 2021, revealed the following points: (1)Some discourses disagreed with the promotion of safety measures; overprotection was sometimes considered problematic from the perspective of child development. (2)These discourses considered community a desirable safety measure that would not have adverse effects on children. (3)The community was considered effective based on the logic that would nurture future leaders and would create a secure space for children.

Crime prevention for child safety entails the dilemma between safety and education. It has been suggested that community should be placed as the most effective measure because it may resolve the dilemma.