[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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In 1947, the Constitution of Japan and the original Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) were enacted in the same year. Article 1 of the FLE specifies the aim of education as follows: “Education shall aim at the full development of personality, striving to nurture citizens to besound in mind and body, etc.” The school education system is based on the School Education Act, which was enacted in the same year. Article 1 of the revised FLE（2006）also keeps this same wording found in the original law. Seventy-five years after the enactment of the original FLE, the words character and human dignity have become familiar to people who received democratic education after World War II. But what is the content of character or character education that is variously discussed among people? What is the uniquely Christian understanding of character and what is its nature? What does it mean today? We would like to consider those questions from the view of theology and religious pedagogy. First, we focus on the relationship between personality and face (i.e., respect or honor). Then in chapter two, we deal with personality theory as understood by educational thinkers of modern Japan. In the last chapter, we discuss the mission of character education at Christian schools.

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During the postwar occupation period, the GHQ/SCAP ordered the establishment of school libraries to support the educational curriculum (library education) as a part of educational reforms. This paper examines the case of Kofu Municipal Minami Junior High School, one of the schools participating in the experimental school program implemented by the Yamanashi Prefectural Board of Education since 1949, based on the school's reports. In the first year, the school made a plan to incorporate library guidance to the school curriculum by referring to the paper of Ministry of Education and previous school cases, and tried to implement this in the second year under the name of“ Reading Guidance”. However, in the third year, the name was changed to just “Guidance” focusing on student counselling, and in the fourth year, the implementation of library education was reported to be virtually unsuccessful. The reasons for the failure were that priority was given to dealing with more difficult issues such as student care in the new junior high schools that had just been established, and that the entire teaching staff did not agree to the project nor was a professional staff assigned to implement it.

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This paper seeks to redefine the autobiographical implications of allusions to Herman Melville in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) by analyzing the author’s alterations to the novel’s original 1951 scroll manuscripts. In a letter to his former mentor Elbert Lenrow dated on 28 June 1949, Kerouac noted, “Meanwhile, I’m making On the Road a kind of Melvillean thing, in spite of myself.” Kerouac’s alter-ego, Sal Paradise, calls his bohemian friend Dean Moriarty“ that mad Ahab at the wheel” during their return journey from San Francisco to New York. Interestingly, this suggestive allusion to Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) does not appear in the original manuscripts. Meanwhile, Kerouac eliminated an overt allusion to Melville from the opening chapter of On the Road by striking out the original reference to the name of Ishmael, narrator of Moby-Dick. By so doing, Kerouac obscured the Melvillean overtones charged in his literary self-portrait as a son of his mother. In Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (1979), Dennis McNally places special emphasis on 25-year-old Kerouac’s“ extraordinary dependence on his mother” who provided domestic support while leaving her son free to write his fictions. Kerouac’s identification of Dean as “that mad Ahab” and elimination of allusion to Ishmael from Sal’s self-portrayal would suggest a subtle shift in the author’s perspective on the possibility and condition of On the Road as a new form of American spiritual autobiography.

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The marriage of Estelle Oldham he had loved caused William Faulkner to desperately apply for a fighter pilot of RAF in Canada in 1918. The armistice of the World War I destroyed his dream of becoming an aviator but led him to the performance of a wounded pilot officer in Oxford, his hometown, as well as in his family. From this fake experience of shot down in the air battle, Faulkner's genius created characters of severely wounded pilots, first in verse and then in fiction. Estelle Franklin, who sometimes came back home from overseas and made a long stay, were origins of Faulkner's creative energy, objects of dedication of his poems, and models of nymphs and young girls in his work. In his play, The Marionettes, Faulkner created two types of characters, Pierrot and his Shade, who have their descendants in his early novels such as Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, and Flags in the Dust / Sartoris. In Benjy (Benjamin Compson) in The Sound and the Fury, these two types successfully merge into one.

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This paper seeks to explore F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrative strategies in constructing“Winter Dreams”(1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925) as paired semi-autobiographical narratives. In a letter written in June 1925 addressed to his editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald refers to“ Winter Dreams”as“a sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea.” The relationship between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby can be seen as a transformation that mirrors the doubling of Dexter Green, the protagonist of “Winter Dreams.” In a letter to Ludlow Fowler written in 1924, Fitzgerald highlights the central theme of Gatsby.“ That’s the whole burden of [Gatsby ]—the loss of those illusions,”relates Fitzgerald, “that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.” By reexamining Nick and Gatsby as paired fictional instruments for the author’s conflicting impulses for voicing and muting, we can define the way Fitzgerald’s narrative agenda for displacement and identification creates an intimate space of empathy for the reader, narrator, and author.

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[in Japanese]

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