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Inspired by the call to question (critical) assumptions underpinning frameworks for "seeing" (Lather, 1993) and ground criticality in alternative forms of knowing (Pennycook, 2018), this paper examines critical frameworks for approaching identity, experience, and (in)equity in "English" language teaching (ELT), with a focus on critical attention to Japan. Transdisciplinary scholarship, social movements, and other voices have detailed how the narrative of "homogeneous Japan" has given shape to notions of Selfhood‐Otherness, resulting in the erasing of Japan's history as a site of movement, change, diversity and hybridity, and marginalization of many therein. The author notes that the scope of dominant, critical approaches to identity, experience, and (in)equity in Japan and globalized ELT ‐problematizing essentialized and idealized "nativeness" in English—does not afford conceptual space for attention to how the negotiation of being, belonging and becoming in ELT is situated in broader negotiations of identity and community membership. The author contends that this issue is linked to tensions within criticality pertaining to the imposition of essentializing frameworks for seeing upon individuals and communities around the globe. The author then discusses potential broader implications for theorization, inquiry, and practice in ELT in and beyond Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there have been few studies on Yaeyama (the southern end of Ryukyu Archipelago) locals’ migration during the pre Asia-Pacific period, a significant number of people went from there to colonial Taiwan, in particular during the 1920s and 1930s. In this paper, I discuss why many locals of Yaeyama worked in colonial Taiwan by analysing narratives of former migrants in autobiographies and my own interview research. First, this paper demonstrates how Yaeyama locals’ attitudes to “work” and “occupation” were converted into more modern attitudes between the 1900s and the 1920s. Yaeyama locals often mention there being “no jobs” in their home islands, which justified their decision to go to Taiwan; but the discourse of “unemployment” should not be understood as a mere reflection of Yaeyama's economic condition, but also as a mark of change in people's attitude to the world. Since “work” and “occupation” are not just a matter of economic necessity, it could be said that Yaeyama locals searched for jobs in Taiwan not strictly in terms of economic profitability. Yaeyama locals went to colonial Taiwan, in search of “employment”; this action was closely associated with a financial motive, but it also implies development of self-worth as a social being. Although Yaeyama locals in Taiwan sometimes suffered ethnic discrimination from Japan proper, they were usually treated better than Taiwanese; Colonial Taiwan was an attractive destination to Yaeyama locals not only because Taiwan was more affluent and modernized, but also there were more opportunities for them to achieve social promotion in the context of the Japanese Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ways in which the department store has become a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity through the introduction of images and goods taken from the West, along with the emphasis on “Western design” and “Western taste”. These new consumer spaces have become aestheticized in various ways so that we can speak of an “aestheticization” of everyday life. Yet this was also a modernizing learning process for Japanese consumers, hence a key problem was how these new experiences were to be classified and ordered into a relatively stable habitus. The rise of the department store has had an important mediating function here. Department stores not only provided new goods along with interpretations of how to use them, but also acted as theatres, as rehearsal spaces, with front and back stage areas where one can watch the performance, try out for oneself new roles. This is especially the case for women in the city, who were able to explore a new identity space with a new set of competence experiences and pleasures. In this process, the department store also provided a form of women's public sphere where they could enjoy shopping, entertainment and learning opportunities. Department stores encouraged not only a sense of luxury and theatrical settings, but also help to teach women how to assemble new tastes and styles into their lifestyle. In addition, it should be emphasized that in the Japanese case, department stores also played an important role not just as a new cultural initiative on the part of the businessmen and cultural intermediaries who invented consumer culture, but also as a political initiative on the part of the government who sought to link them to the reform of everyday life and the production of good Japanese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the significance of gender related studies in sociology, with reference to post World War II. It states that women's liberation movement not only raised awareness about the problems of the sexually discriminatory social structures and social consciousness in Japanese society but also employed self-criticism of the sexually discriminatory consciousness that existed within women themselves.

New Urban Sociology began in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s and then spread to the United States. It also influenced urban studies in Japan. This article examines the changing debates that have occurred in New Urban Sociology since its introduction to Japan in the late 1970s. The twenty years since its introduction from the West can be divided into three stages. The first covers the period from 1977 to 1985, when French urban sociology, particularly Manuael Castells’ theory of the state, was highly influential. The second stage, from 1986 to 1992, focused on theories of urban social movements and the concept of global city in a context of urban renewal in Japan’s major cities. The third stage, from 1992 to the present, is characterized by a transformation of New Urban Sociology into a sociological theory of space under globalization that has been heavily influenced by the work of David Harvey. Née en Europe au début des années 1970, la Nouvelle Sociologie urbaine a ensuite atteint les Etats–Unis, mais elle a aussi influé sur les études urbaines au Japon. L’article examine l’évolution des débats qui ont animé la Nouvelle Sociologie urbaine depuis qu’elle y est arrivée d’Occident à la fin des années 1970. Les vingt années qui ont suivi peuvent se décomposer en trois phases. La première va de 1977 à 1985, alors que la sociologie urbaine française, notamment la théorie de l’État de Manuel Castells, faisait autorité. La deuxième, entre 1986 et 1992, s’attache aux théories des mouvements sociaux urbains et au concept de la ville planétaire (global city) parallèlement à une rénovation des grandes villes nippones. La troisième phase, de 1992 à nos jours, se caractérise par une transformation de la Nouvelle Sociologie urbaine en une théorie sociologique de l’espace soumis à la mondialisation, concept largement inspiré des travaux de David Harvey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate cause lawyers' roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human rights norms. Social movements scholarship often assumes that lawyers will divert activism toward institutional tactics, while the sociolegal studies literature emphasizes that lawyers are active in diverse ways across venues. A paired comparison of antidiscrimination movements in South Korea and Japan reveals how critical junctures in regime history shape the tactical repertoires that cause lawyers bring to their interactions with movement actors, and thus also movement tactics. This research advances scholarship on professionals in social movements, cause lawyers as norm entrepreneurs, and legal mobilization in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban social movements (USMs) and regulation have co-evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness, spatializaing their politics on the national and subnational scales. The author first theorizes these USM-regulation relationships as scale-oriented dialectics between two opposing forces-'commoning and othering'-both of which in my view are always internalized in today's 'rebel cities' (Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities, Verso). Then, he analyzes two trajectories of USMs that attempted commoning-ie radical opening up of public goods/spaces within 'zones of weakness' (Lefebvre )-against policing and workfare disciplines. The author detects 'rescaling' dialectics in the case of Yokohama and 'nationalizing' dialectics in the case of Tokyo. Lastly, through exploring and refreshing Engels's notion of the (petit-)bourgeois utopia, the author concludes that our commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained by capitalist urban form that spatially others the homeless; but truly revolutionary moments of commoning emerge whenever people-even temporarily-conquer the fetishism of the public/private binary embedded in this urban form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the 'new urban poverty' ( NUP) ( Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long-term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi-scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post-bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule-setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]