Greetings and the Outline
We would like to welcome all of the sociologists, social welfare scholars, researchers, andinterested civilians from around the world to Japan on this occasion! We would also like to offer aheartfelt greeting to everyone who was not able to come this time around.
There are about 30 academic societies for sociology in Japan, the major ones of which joined
together with the primary academic societies in the field of social welfare studies to create theConsortium. The reason the Consortium was created in 2007 was to facilitate communication
between the various different academic societies and to work to address shared challenges. Evenback then it already appeared as if the 2014 ISA World Congress of Sociology was going to beheld in Japan, and so the primary concern of many of the academic societies resided in thesignificance of and methods for international exchange. Therefore, the Consortium set this as its
theme for the symposium that was carried out at the beginning of each year from in 2008, anddiscussions were held on this four times from various different angles.
Sociology was introduced into Japan from relatively early on in the second half of the 19thcentury. The Japan Sociological Society was founded in 1924, and following World War II it had
spread to all over the country and Japan had accumulated considerable reserves of sociologicalresearch and education. Throughout the course of this, those of us in Japan learned languages like
English, French, and German as we voraciously absorbed the achievements of Western sociology.
Most studies that assimilated these and set to work establishing their own hypotheses and theories
were presented in Japanese, and so to this day there have only been limited opportunities totransmit the results of these studies overseas. Questions over what should be done to increase thenumber of opportunities for this, and by what manner presentations should be given have posed
major challenges for Japanese sociology, and still do so to this day.
Then on March 11, 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred. The region along thePacific Coast of Eastern Japan was struck by what has been described as a once in a millennium
earthquake and tsunami, which left some 20,000 people dead or missing. But it was the accident at
the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that occurred as a result of the earthquake andtsunami that amplified the damage by several orders of magnitude over. Those victims whoescaped death at the hands of the earthquake and tsunami but who lost their homes and the likenumber in the hundreds of thousands, and there are hundreds of thousands of disaster victims who
were forced into an emergency evacuation to avoid the radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Plant, and who still continue to take refuge all over Japan.
The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident inflicted a heavy toll on the under-populated
regions along the Pacific Coast of Eastern Japan, which includes the major city of Sendai. These
disasters laid bare the problematic features inherent in the social system itself that had been built
up by Japan over 60-some years following World War II in its entirety. In one fell swoop it exposed
problems such as the depopulation of rural villages, which advanced in counterpoint to theconcentration of the population in major cities, and how influence peddling was directed at people
seeking economic stimulus for the depopulated regions. It also exposed the dangers of the nuclearipower plants that were built in coastal regions, and conversely the instability of life in the major
cities that had secured their own comfort through the energy produced in this manner.
Japanese sociology and social welfare studies have been making a concerted effort to confront
and address these problems. It was around this time that the Japan Consortium for SociologicalSocieties sent out a request to the academic societies affiliated with it asking them to deliver theirmessages to the world for the 18th World Congress of Sociology. Despite being busy with theirinitiatives for the recent great calamity on top of their day-to-day activities, the academic societies
thoroughly grasped the essential tenor of our request and responded to it with great drive andenthusiasm. These were then edited to become this collection of messages.
We would like to ask that everyone please start by accessing the site found on the front cover,where the Contents of this collection of messages will appear before you. From there, you can go to
any location that you are interested in simply by clicking on it.
We encourage you to start by opening up and viewing the Preface by YOSHIHARA Naoki, thecurrent President of our Consortium. Next, if at all possible we would encourage you to view theIntroduction written by SHOJI Kôkichi, who is both the Chairperson of the Editorial Committee
for this collection of messages as well as the Editor-in-Chief. There you will learn (albeit briefly)
about Japanese sociology’s extensive history and the problems facing it, as well as its points ofcontact with world sociology. You will also take away from it an overview of the messages fromthe 29 academic societies that supplied messages for this collection. From there you can leap to
any of the messages from the academic societies that you are interested in.
Part I features messages from the Japan Sociological Society and the academic societies thathave taken root all over Japan, as well as from bilateral exchange societies that have been activewith France and China. Part II features messages from academic societies on masscommunication studies and socio-informatics, to which sociology has made significant
contributions in postwar Japan. Part III features messages from academic societies in the social
welfare field, to which sociology has contributed while maintaining close ties with it in postwar
Japan. Part IV features messages from the academic societies for sector-specific or hyphenatedsociology that sprang up one after another in response to the complexity of Japanese society, which
had grown affluent and begun diversifying as a result of its rapid economic growth. This includes
messages from academic societies specializing in villages, local regions, cities, discriminationand liberation, social problems, labor, sports, the family, and the environment. And finallyPart V features messages from academic societies working in fields such as sociological history,
mathematical sociology, and sociological theory, which developed in order to deepen thetheoretical and methodological reflections in and of themselves that Japanese sociology has carriedout through this. Links have been pasted by the names of each of the academic societies in theContents, and so we encourage you to access any of them that may interest you.
Finally, there is an Editors’ Postscript that discusses the launch of our Editorial Committee andthe course of its activities, while expressing its myriad difficulties. As is written there, our desire
has been to spark dialogue with all of our readers and continue developing sociological studies thatgive rise to communication all around at the global scale through this collection of messages. Theii

contact information for the academic societies is listed with each of the messages, and we would
be greatly pleased if you used it to proactively get in touch with them.
Moving forward, we must join forces in working to develop sociology in each country, andat the global level!
(SHOJI Kôkichi,
Chairperson of the Editorial Committee for “Messages to the World”,
Japan Consortium for Sociological Societies)iii