Sociology & Society Of Japan (Japanese Studies)

This is a detailed study of the sociology and society of Japan. Japan is the only major industrial society yet to emerge outside the West, yet Japanese society is very different from Western society and must be understood in its own terms. The difference is found not so much in organizational and industrial structures as in the Japanese view of the individual and society and the relationship between them, which is the focus of this book. Part I deals with the development of sociology in Japan from the end of the Tokugawa period to the present with the modernization of Japanese society from the Meiji Restoration to the end of World War II, and with the relationship between sociology, socialism and society in the interwar years. Part II considers the theoretical and empirical problems of rural and urban community studies. Separate chapters are devoted to a critical examination of Tadashi Fukutake, the best-known sociologist of post-war Japan, to community power structures and to the environment movement. Part III deals with the development of capitalism in relation to the religious cosmos of ordinary Japanese people, with the Tennousei ideology, Japan's war of aggression and with the Japanese image of the world.