Today I'd like to introduce one of the most famous contemporary Japanese sociologists, Shinji Miyadai, associate professor in Tokyo Metropolitan University. He was born in 1959 and writing actively about the problems of post-industrialized Japan, such as high school girls prostitution, cult and juvenile crime.

His thought is based on N. Luhmann's systems theory. Miyadai's books are controversial because of its straightforward and strong argument. Some of his essays can be found on his official web site. Here I'd like to pick up somes essays he wrote for a local newspaper.

Regarding religion, he asks why the number of young people who come to believe in the cult groups is increasing, even though the criticism by mass media against the cults is getting stronger. He argues that the strong criticism conversely forces more young people to run to cult groups.

He finds the fundamental function of religion in the point that it makes the unchangeable facts (e.g. blood, looks, ability, accident, etc) acceptable and enables people to survive in spite of such unchangeable facts.

Until 1970's the religion provided another chance than the chance which people can get in the actual society. For example, even when a person lost in the real life, he/she can survive and even win in the religious society. The religion functioned as compensation for the real world.

But since 1970's the role of religion has drastically changed. The main role of religion has become giving appropriate evaluation to people instead of schools or fathers. Schools and fathers had enough authority to be able to evaluate children and to make them believe they are worth living in the actual society. However, they have lost their authority and failed to evaluate young people appropriately.

This drastical change comes from the combination of two causes. One is that the evaluation in school has become absolute even outside of the school. If a child is labeled as not good in the school, the child is labeled so also at home and in the neighborhood. Miyadai calls this phenomenon "Schoolization of the whole society".

Another cause is that the whole Japanese society has been divided into small societies, e.g. sub-culture society, cult society, school society, neighborhood society, etc... Fathers are deep into the salarymen society, mothers are in the neighborhood society, children are in the sub-culture society and teachers in the school society. As a result, the discommunication between these people is becoming worse and the proper communication has come to be possible no more.

Because of these changes, religion has come to play an important role in evaluating young people appropriately. Young people want to be appreciated highly but the evaluation by fathers and schools are not persuasive at all for them. So they've found the gurus of various cult groups as appreciators. By entering such cults, young people can assure themselves by being highly appreciated by the religion.

On the background there is a serious shortage of appreciation supply to young people while the demand for appreciation is increasing. As long as the society cannot solve this unbalance between supply and demand of appreciation, young people will continue asking for help in the cults. The stronger the mass media criticizes the cults which give young people raison-d'etre, the more young people run to the cults.

This is Miyadai's argument about recent cult groups in Japan. But he doesn't provide us any solution for this problem. It is as if there is no easy remedy.

Here is another essay regarding Japanese notion of responsibility. In this essay, Miyadai takes the famous nuclear accident in Tokaimura in 1999 as an example. He says the irresponsibilities which can be observed in this accident might be found in every area of Japanese society. He even says this irresponsibility is one aspect of Japanese fundamental mentality.

He argues that Japanese still cannot get out of ancient closed communities which were found in the rural area in Japan since centuries ago. When Japanese talk about responsibility, it often means the responsibiliy within the closed community. Once Japanese create an accident like in Tokaimura, we tend to protect co-workers rather than to fulfill the responsibility toward external people. The intra-community responsibility is much more important for Japanese than the inter-community responsibility.

Miyadai says that, on the contrary, in western countries 'responsibility' firstly means the accountability toward the public. This western notion of responsibility resides in the necessity of living together with strangers.

Since there is only the intra-community responsibility in Japan, when the motivation which goes beyond the boundary of each community is necessary, we need a fiction of a community which covers different communities. That is the Emperor system of Japan. Miyadai provides two options as a solution of this problem. One is to rebuild an artificial national community by strengthening the Emperor system. The other is to foster the subjects who can decide free from the community binding.

As shown above, Miyadai's analysis of contemporary Japanese society is clear and distinct. But the arguments are sometimes too pessimistic since he provides only the extreme solutions which don't seem to be realizable. This doesn't mean that his analysis is inadequate but that it reflects very well the desperate difficulties of the problems of Japanese society. (No English translation is available regarding Miyadai's sociology)