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The article relates the details of a meeting between sociologists Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga in 1978. The discussion between Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga took place at the Iwanami Shoten publishers office in Tokyo, Japan on the afternoon of December 12, 1978. Parsons arrived in Tokyo at mid-day, after having taken the train that had departed from Osaka around 9:00 a.m. that morning. In a letter written to Parsons, a few weeks before the Parsons' visit to Tokyo, Professor Tominaga described the Iwanami Shoten session as a colloquy with himself concerning the retrospection of Parsons on the formation of his own sociological thought. What Tominaga had in mind was something along the lines that Parsons had written for Daedalus. Iwanami Shoten had already shown some interest in Parson's work, having published in 1958 a Japanese translation of Economy and society, with an introduction by Tominaga. Parsons was paid an honorarium of 50,000 yen for the discussion, the same amount that he was given for his lecture later in the day. A few days prior to the discussion, Tominaga had supplied Parson with the following list of provisional questions: voluntarism vs. utilitarianism, motivation vs. value orientation, nature of system theory, relation between the Theory of Action and the Structural-functional theory, phenomenological approach.

The article presents a text of the discussion that took place between Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga on December 12, 1978. Tominaga claims that he asked the editor of SHISO to publish questions and answers between them. His role will be limited to ask several questions. He also claims that his questions are from the point of view of the general readers and Japanese social scientists. According to Tominaga, the books and papers of Parsons developed much original theoretical thinking especially the voluntaristic theory of action, the action frame of reference, the theory of social system, structural-functional analysis, the paradigm of four functional requisites of A-G-I-L, the scheme of boundary interchange and the theory of generalized media of exchange. In terms of the problem areas, perhaps economic sociology, political sociology, and religious sociology would be the big three among other things and in addition to that, organization theory, social stratification, ego structure, educational problems, and medical problems are several topics which Parsons has developed. Parsons states that not only did he borrow ideas from European scholars but he actually translated two things from Max Weber from German into English and thinks that is one of the best possible ways to get to understand his work.