Japanese Journal of Sociology最新文献

The Japanese government started to accept semi-skilled foreign workers officially under the newly established tokutei ginō status in 2019, and national policies for supporting foreign residents are gradually being developed. However, it is unclear how the principles of tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence or co-living), the official slogan for supporting foreign residents since the mid-2000s, have changed as a result of recent policy trends. In this article, I examine the transformation of logics for legitimizing policies for foreign residents using discourse analysis of the official government documents on tabunka kyōsei. Previous critical studies have revealed that tabunka kyōsei is based on the logic of a binary opposition between “Japanese” and “foreigners”. This was combined with the neoliberal logic of “supports for self-reliance”, a paternalism that sees foreigners as being in need of support if they can live "just as" Japanese. This paternalism has prevented the development of recognizing the human rights and cultural differences of foreign residents as de facto immigrants. In addition, a logic has explicitly emerged in the tabunka kyōsei discourse at the end of the 2010s that sees foreigners as a threat to national security and that their acceptance should be strictly governed by the border control policy and socially controlled from the viewpoint of national interests. To deal with this situation, tabunka kyōsei must be recreated as a principle for recognizing foreign residents as immigrants and guaranteeing their human rights and cultural differences.

Increasing numbers of people are absent from work with a diagnosis of depression, and this has become a social problem in Japan. This study examines the hypothesis that this rise of depression-related absenteeism in Japan is influenced by social factors that contribute to the medicalization of social problems. Here, “social factors” are corporate systems that affect workers' psychology and mental health, media coverage and disease awareness campaigns by pharmaceutical companies, the intentions of patients' physicians, as well as psychopathological factors such as increased workplace stress. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews conducted with 50 workers who had a history of taking depression-related leaves of absence, and a re-diagnosis by six physicians of 10 representative cases derived from categorizations based on data from the interviews. The data were analyzed to identify social factors underlying the rise in depression-related absenteeism and the mechanisms of medicalization of social problems. Social factors found to affect the rise of depression-related absenteeism include mentalities whereby patients, seeking to escape from harsh work environments, may wish to receive a diagnosis of depression to take a leave of absence; and the intention of participants' physicians to provide the diagnosis out of sympathy even when official diagnostic criteria are not met. Thus, it would seem that work-related social problems that should normally be addressed by public policy measures are in fact being medicalized. Moreover, this study considers how “self-medicalization” by patients renders the solution to social problems more complex by contributing to the further medicalization of social problems.

This study aims to illustrate the nuanced efficacy of Islamic-writing activism by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, who vigorously utilize online spheres. We regard this group as a part of transnational migrant domestic workers' cultural activism, which is currently flourishing in the region. In particular, we pay a special attention to this group's intersectional themes in Islam and writing, to ask how an intersectional activist group utilizes online terrains and multiple themes, to nurture affective ties with others and simultaneously build activist networks. By combining questionnaires, socio-metric surveys, interviews and web content analysis, we argue that the participation in this activism allows the members collective and personal empowerment online. From the data analyses, we uncover three key features of the members' Facebook usage: maintaining weak ties by balancing multiple group memberships, using tools for interactive self-identification, and being driven by networking. Additionally, the members re-contextualized their gender and class identities in positive ways, using Islam and writing. We argue that the members utilized Islam chiefly as moral yardstick and image-making, while writing as a multitasking tool and an alternative class marker for them.Through these acts of re-contextualization, the members recreate their alternative self-identifications incorporating class, religion, gender and nationality seamlessly. These features partly resonate with their offline behaviors, to assist and synthesize their attempt at self-actualization in-between their cultural spaces, by integrating the host society, native society, and the activist society.

The Olympics is not a space where the global and local are shown in two separate layers. It is where various sociopolitical conflicts of the hosting country bubble and surface from both levels. When the Olympic events were launched in East Asia they developed further in interaction with different cultural, political, and social backgrounds. This study pays attention to the diverse ways in which Olympic values are accepted and practiced. At the same time, it analyzes the perversion and limitations of Olympism ideals as displayed in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. This article focuses on specific changes that occurred in and around Korea along and after the PyeongChang Olympics and how the values of the global and local met without clashing with each other.

This is the Introduction to the special issue entitled "The Olympic Games in Japan and East Asia: Images and Legacies.”

This is an analysis of the historical continuity of the military-cultural spatial formation of the Tokyo Olympic Games throughout the prewar and postwar era. The sites that eventually became the basis for hosting the 1964 and 2020 Olympics had already materialized in the plan for the 1940 Olympics. Tokyo's modernization process entailed a shift of the city's core from the rich cultural heritage accumulated since the Edo in the city's northeast towards an area extending from the southwest of the city center into the suburbs. The northeast area of central Tokyo had been home to commoner districts since the Edo period, and with land that was highly subdivided, did not lend itself to large-scale development. But the southwest of the city center was originally the site of feudal estates, and these large sites were generally amenable to large-scale development. These areas were home to numerous Imperial Japanese Army bases before the surrender, which after seizure during the US occupation eventually became the footprint for large parks and urban developments. The 1964 Olympics played a determinative role in the developments of the southwest of the city center. This continuity from prewar to postwar planning is reflected in the similar placement of venues, and the their conversion from former military uses. So the Olympics came to postwar Japan as a postwar event, in the strict sense of the word. The term postwar here refers foremost to the strategy of converting the social consciousness from war that accompanied reconstruction and economic growth.

Olympic stadia are often regarded as political showcases stemming from a range of influences: the host nation's international politics, the interests of transnational capitalism, site-specific meanings, and the power of iconic architecture. By examining the 2020 Tokyo Olympic main stadium as a case study, this article analyzes the controversial Zaha Hadid Tokyo stadium design in relation to the Japanese national branding initiative. The article argues that branding should be seen as part of an economic and cultural system that seems to enhance the global value of iconic architects and their buildings. Yet the power of brands can be understood as contingent. Their ambivalent nature entails a tension between exclusiveness and banality; additionally, branded architects may find it difficult to work across the different regimes of global and local politics, and they are of course also constrained by the logic of neoliberal transnational capitalism. By investigating a major global branded architect, Zaha Hadid, the article considers why a new image of Japan could not be adequately created by Hadid's aesthetics and narratives of the Olympic stadium, which could have been regarded as a national cultural legacy. The article then discusses the contested processes of image-making and narrative creation in relation to the representation of Japan in contemporary Olympic culture. The article concludes with an examination of Kengo Kuma's architecture language in his 2020 Tokyo Olympics stadium design.