This paper presents the current identity status of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast and in Hawaii, and focuses on the way in which members of the younger generation connect "being a minority" with "being an American." In doing so, this paper examines the relationship between the empowerment of ethnic minorities and the conservative tendencies of American society. Neoconservatives claim that racial discrimination and racial equality should be considered only on the level of the individual, not on the level of ethnic groups. In the "color blind" United States of the twenty-first century, this logic can be adopted even by minority groups that have obtained some social power. This paper reviews previous studies about Japanese Americans' identities, and shows the result of the author's own research on the contemporary conditions of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry.
　Japanese Americans on the West Coast and Hawaii share the following two characteristics. First, among people of Japanese ancestry, those of the younger generation assert the priority of their American identity. They evoke their Japanese ethnicity secondarily in order to claim their uniqueness and to promote the diversity of the American nation. Second, the separateness of the Japanese ethnic group is disappearing. As seen in the examples of Japanese American Citizens League and Japanese American National Museum, the goals and the membership of the organizations are no longer exclusively and specifically Japanese. This paper therefore concludes that the democratization of national unification in the U.S. has proceeded in conjunction with not only the risk of populism in connection with overwhelming individualization, but also with the possibility of hybrid identities.

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　Regarded as the beginning of the constructionist controversies, "the Ontological Gerrymandering Critique" addressed both constructionist forms of description and their methodological presuppositions. In the course of the debates, while a variety of improvements were suggested for the former, no clear-cut prescription emerged for the latter.
　This paper employs radical constructivism's arguments to the epistemological premises which underlie constructionist's works. The aim is to elaborate a methodological foundation that can permit an approach to plural realities, which cannot be considered within the framework of social constructionism.
　After surveying the constructionist controversies, I focus on two pressing tasks.The first is a methodological inconsistency. Constructionist research is selective in its construction of reality, yet its epistemic standpoint itself is placed out side its own methodological principles. The other is that the more strictly constructionists elaborate their methodology, the more they exclude important factors which also contribute to the organization of social problems.
　Radical constructivism's perspective draws attention to self-referential concepts and arguments related to mutual interdependence between the observer and the observed. From this point of view, we can comprehend only after we construct cognition on the basis of individual standards, which Luhmann called "distinction". Although "distinction" is an essential element of observation, observers cannot distinguish their own distinctions during observations. They would require yet another distinction to do that. Therefore, radical constructivism says, distinction is a "blind spot" for observers themselves. Nevertheless, it's still possible to observe others' latent distinctions or latent social relationships by means of one's own blind spot. Employing the framework of radical constructivism, we can accommodate multiple realities which cannot be reduced to a single definition, and we can comprehend a wide range of social constellations.
　By adopting these explanations, I handle the constructionist problems noted above. In conclusion, I present a method of constructivistic observation, which can complement to social constructionism in a consistent way, and indicate some pragmatic problems involved in the constructionistic view.

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　In this paper I argue that Durkheim's theory of the sacred and profane offers a theoretical perspective from which to grasp the unique dynamics involved in the interplay between romantic love in the Victorian period and Victorian culture.Durkheim's later theory is particularly apt for exploring the sociological dimensions of emotional phenomena, and I argue that its focus on the "religious" elements of social life such as beliefs and rites makes it viable as a framework from which to understand romantic love as an historically distinct phenomenon. While the "modern cult of individual love" has previously been analyzed in terms of Durkheim's ritual theory by Randall Collins, I argue that Collins's understanding of romantic love lacks an historical perspective, and that while his theory is valuable in its explanation of the significance of courting rituals , thus incorporating Durkheim's assertion about the importance of "rites," it fails to incorporate Durkheim's emphasis on the importance of "beliefs" and symbols.
　As a case study aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of Durkheim's later theory in illuminating the nature of romantic love in the nineteenth century, I sketch the nature of both the beliefs and rites that made up the "religion" of romantic love in Victorian-period America. I then analyze the role of romantic love in the formation of the Victorian-period ideology of sexual purity in light of Durkheim's theory of the dual nature of the sacred as well as anthropological research on purity and pollution. I argue that the sacralization of romantic love brought about the coding of sex as a radically impure and polluting (profaning) force, and that the resulting need to purify sex led to the ritualization of sexual expression in marriage. This argument follows Foucault in rejecting the "repressive hypothesis" which characterizes so much theorizing about Victorian-period sexuality, but attributes the newfound preoccupation with sexuality in this period not to notions of "power/knowledge" but; rather to the symbolic power of the sacred and the equally powerful symbolic polluting force of the profane, resulting in an emphasis on extreme sexual purity outside of ritualized contexts.

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　This paper reconsiders gender/sexuality theory by focusing on a transgendered individual's way of life. It is also an attempt to extend the sociology of life history by focusing on changes in her narrative. My task in this dissertation is to externalize their straggles with their own issues.
　For the purpose of analyzing changes in narrative, I introduced the approach of Narrative therapy. Narrative therapy assumes that when people tell their own stories certain events are untold and recognized, or intentionally left out. A person's subjective narrative is told as if it were the definitive story of what has happened.
　This is the method of Narrative therapy. Subverting the dominant narrative of personal experience will create alternative stories that have been left out in repeated retellings, locate the multi-dimentional nature of the individual's own stories, and respond to their complexity. Furthermore, attention to power in narrative therapy will show what kind of power is at work when such stories are formed.
　By analyzing the individual's narrative in this fashion, I describe the creative process of techniques for overcoming the difficulty and pain that exist in a minority's everyday life.

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　The aim of this paper is to outline the way in which Chinese people in Northeast China have remembered, and today portray, the reality of their past experience during the war and their time under Japanese colonial rule. The following argument is based on a survey conducted at twenty-one facilities aimed at commemorating the colonial era. I conducted close observations and interviews at these facilities.
　I chronologically and analytically categorize these facilities into three types as follows. In the first place, from the end of the 1940s to the middle of the 1960s many monuments, such as memorial tombs commemorating heroes of the war, were constructed. To the Chinese they represented new values and were symbols of unity, and freedom from the colonial order. The objects commemorated in this stage represent “individual death.” Next, from the middle of the 1960s to the 1970s the places where massacres had taken place and forced laborers’ corpses had been left were memorialized. This made the victims of colonial rule visible. To put it simply, these commemorate “collective death.” Most recently, since the 1980s many museums focused on “Manchuria” have been founded. Their similarity does not lie in the displayed things themselves, but in the way things are displayed: Fragmentary stories have been merged into a story of the nation as a whole. Here, a “collective life” that retrieves historical process is commemorated.
　The changes seen in commemoration forms over this long period of time show the development of our cognitive means of relating to the reality of the past. That is, there has been a development from personal contact with the past by way of martyrs and victims in national events, to impersonal contact by way of the reorganization of the historical story itself. I see these commemorations as corresponding to the development of the museum system, which is a phenotype of modern knowledge.

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　 I have focused on group participation in old age as a means of understanding the productivity of the elderly in finding their own way of life and rebuilding their lifestyle.
　The objective of this paper is to clarify the diversity of subjective significance that is found in group activities, and to study the various functions of friend network that arc based on a newly reorganized context of locality. I regard group participation in old age as an important factor that directs "aging."
　In the relational context, group participation in old age is close to the concept of "Kanshin-en" (relation based on common interest), and in the context of the social domain, it is found in the concept of "Kyo" (a social domain composed of voluntary associations based on spontaneity and interest). In this paper, voluntary associations are divided into "Shi-en" (social contribution-oriented groups) and "Yu-en" (recreationoriented groups) by the types of individual interest. This paper is written based on data from interviews carried out with elderly who live in suburbs and participate actively in various voluntary associations.
　The following three points can be raised as the result of my analyses. First of all, the social function of group participation in old age is the creation of "one's place." It supplements the diminishing private domain in one's life structure while involving one in situations that occur in neighboring networks and between couples. Second, by creating a new type of role in the transition of one's life course, one can bridge the transition from middle age to old age, working to affirm the value of one's old age.Third, in the community, the intermediate group "Shi-en" improves community welfare and deepens mutual understanding among generations by reorganizing networks that are centered on friends to include the wider context of family, kin and neighbors.

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　Family relationships are thought to be important for elderly people's human relations, and a great deal of knowledge has been accumulated concerning them. But the "family" that has been discussed in this context is centered on 'the family of procreation,' meaning one's marital and parent-child relations. By contrast, 'the family of orientation,' including siblings, has been overlooked. With the growth in life expectancies, the importance of the sibling relationship which is one of the longest family relationships is seen in a new light. This paper focuses on sibling relationships in people's later years, and uses questionnaire data to examine their actual conditions and determinative factors.
　The findings are as follows: (1) Although the amount of 'contact' has been analyzed in earlier Japanese research, those engaged in the contact differ depending upon whether it is direct or indirect contact; (2) Although knowledge of "close relations between sisters" is applied in earlier research to situations of indirect contact and emotional support, it is not applied in cases of direct contact; (3) The influence of other human relations differs depending upon the kind of relationship (with a child, a spouse, or a friend) and the facet of sibling relations (direct contact, indirect contact, or emotional support) that is affected by them; (4) Although 'geographical distance' has become an important determinative factor in direct contact and indirect contact, 'consciousness of sibling relationship' has become an important determinative factor in emotional support. This suggests the necessity of a viewpoint and an analytical method that examine the sibling relationship in later years on the basis of its development up to that point.

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