Paper presented at Expert Group Meeting in Celebration of the 30th anniversary of the International Year of the Family, 28-29 February 2024, The Everly Hotel, Kuala Lumpur 2024年3月 招待有り筆頭著者
Although family sociology in Japan has a long history, sociological family studies in Japan have undergone major changes since the 1990s. This article recounts the ways in which family sociology in Japan has developed and its current state, with a special focus on the developments in the last three decades. The 1990s marked a turning point in the history of Japanese family sociology in terms of the establishment of new academic societies and a paradigmatic shift in theoretical orientations. The trends in family research articles indicate the continuing importance of quantitative research, with the role of qualitative research on the rise over the last two decades. In reviewing the literature over the last three decades, the author summarizes four major strands of empirical research: (a) care and families, (b) social inequality and families, (c) comparative research, and (d) diversity of families.
Journal of Natural Disaster Science 29(2) 53-61 2007年11月
This paper is based on the results of research by the Sumatra Earthquake Interdisciplinary or Integrated Research Team, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University. This research shows: (1) the Sumatra Earthquake tsunami disaster damage in Banda Aceh can be divided into four areas; (2) the tsunami action was directed left and right by the Banda Aceh topography; (3) within which District I saw total destruction of housing, a high death rate, and the collapse of families; (4) with the high death rate due to a lack of earthquake-tsunami association; (5) that even in the core of housing reconstruction, the pace is slow; (6) there are four main obstacles to housing reconstruction; (7) the slow pace of the reconstruction is a function of social causes related to the size of the tsunami, the lack of established adjustment mechanisms for aid groups, the slow pace of the reconstruction in society overall, and the failure of market functions; (8) that in the case of large scale disasters, with the loss of life and home, as well as infrastructure, the collapse of society as an entity occurs as well.
Tsunami evacuation plannings have been built on "alert-evacuation" model, which assumes "tsunami alert -transmission -evacuation behavior" connection. Analyzing the data on the behavior of residents (n=1,710) in coastal area of Aichi prefecture after the tsunami warning on September 5, 2004, the results indicated that only a few residents evacuated despite their strong concerns on tsunami. This behavioral pattern results from the "empirical knowledge" which was gained by their past experience of not evacuating after a tsunami alert. In order to transform this knowledge, we need to build a new evacuation model based on the understandings of ambiguity which people face in disasters.