| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This project is conducted in the form of participant action research to interrogate the process of community formation at the Yokouchi apartment complex in Hiratsuka City. The main objectives of this research are the following :
1) To search for a possibility for community formation in the Yokouchi area with the residents and their "collaborators" ;
2) To lay out the necessary conditions for training "Social Operators/Intracultural Mediators "[leaders] of multicultural communities in the Japanese society ;
3) To develop a new participant action research methodology appropriate for this kind of project, while comparing with methodologies employed for similar projects conducted by Italian sociologists (ex.riflessive research in the composite society).
The Yokouchi apartment complex in Hiratsuka City was constructed in the late 1960s and is consisted of 3291 residents. Among them, more 500 are foreign nationals, such as Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Peruvians. The Yokouchi apa
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rtment complex is a multicultural and multilingual ["community-in-difference"] where cultural differences are articulated between the residents of the complex and older residents in the neighboring area as well as between the Japanese and international residents at the complex. Even among the international residents, generation, gender and fluency in Japanese become signifiers of cultural differences.
There is some tension among various actors involved in the Yokouchi community ; those actors include the local government, volunteers' groups, NGOs, welfare commissioners, the self-governing body of the apartment complex, teachers of elementary and junior high schools, and the residents of the complex. To interrogate the process of "intracultural (multicultural, multilingual and multiehnic) community" formation at Yokouchi could bring about a transformation in the area of traditional urban sociology, whose main theme has been, "How is a new community formed in the urban area where the encounter between the old residents and the new immigrants produces conflicts? "
The members of this project, the members of the committee for supporting immigrants, and the residents of the apartment complex met about 70 times last year to hold Japanese language classes and meetings where reflexive conversations were carried out. I took notes of those meetings in the last two years, particularly paying attention to the social relations produced in the process of community formation [ex.language classes] and the nature of conflicts and cooperation among various actors produced in the Japanese language classes. Less
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