Review by authors

I am delighted that this commemorative volume for the 100th anniversary of the Japan Sociological Society includes essays by Professor Akira Takahashi and Professor Munesuke Mita, who were my advisors, as well as Professors Tsutomu Shiobara, Saburo Yasuda, and Harutoshi Funabashi, who taught me during my student years. Of course, the Japanese sociologists from whom I have learned are even more numerous. The works collected here offer but a glimpse of sociology’s sky through a thin straw, so to speak—in reality, the blue expanse of sociology stretches much further, with rich diversity and fascinating breadth. While this may go without saying, I want to emphasize that these selections represent only a small fraction of Japanese sociology’s accumulated accomplishments.

I translated one of Munesuke Mita’s major works for this book and contributed a brief commentary. Translating a renowned paper by my own advisor was a weighty responsibility, and I would have preferred to avoid it if possible. However, like other translators and commentators might have experienced, the process of careful reading for translation revealed many new insights. Indeed, revisiting the classics always brings fresh perspectives. Outstanding scholarly works allow us to discover pivotal turning points and unexpected connections among various themes in the history of sociological research.

Let me mention a few observations of my own.

The 1955 work “The Political Consciousness of Workers” by Joji Watanuki, Akira Takahashi, and Kotaro Kido represented an attempt to measure society using social research methods that were being earnestly adopted in postwar Japan. We can sense the authors’ passion for understanding not just opinions and attitudes but the lived social thought of people in various occupations—white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, homemakers, small merchants, and craftspeople of that era. A decade later, Tsutomu Shiobara’s 1965 article “The Ideologies of Soka Gakkai” in the magazine Tenbo analyzed the values and ethics of people supporting the activities of a growing religious group. That paper, later included in his book The Theory of Organizations and Movements (1976), demonstrated that a theorist who had developed a social movement theory paradigm through critical revision of Neil Smelser’s work could also effectively analyze actual social phenomena. His interest in real-world phenomena led to his examination in the 1980s of the unique folk-religious phenomena in the Ikoma area. That was, I believe, another attempt to focus on people’s lived social thought in action.

Munesuke Mita’s influential 1970s work “The Hell of the Gaze” can be seen as challenging the conventional wisdom that sociology must focus on surveys of groups. It marked a subtle turning point, as it demonstrated that, even when focusing on individuals, one could still uncover structural issues that sociology should explain. From the late 1970s and into the 1980s, various studies were conducted in Japan to collect individual life histories through interviews. In discussions of the significance of those efforts, qualitative interviews and fieldwork were often positioned as diametrically opposed to quantitative questionnaire surveys, reviving debates about the conflict between quantitative and qualitative data. I believe, however, that framing the issue in terms of that opposition was itself misguided. The conflict was a pseudo-problem in terms of methodology—what should have been explored and questioned instead was the quality of the data, that is, the social form in which the materials existed. In this context, it may be interesting to recall that Hiroyuki Torigoe studied under Takashi Nakano, who pioneered the study of personal life histories, and to consider how Torigoe’s research on local communities in the 1980s connected to the lineage of Kizaemon Aruga, who produced monumental fieldwork studies in Japanese sociology.

These are, naturally, just casual thoughts strung together as they occurred to me. Though the classics gathered here represent but a fraction of the whole, they give us wings for countless flights of imagination and creativity.