This essay tries to clarify Hegel's idea in the Jena period of the individual's political position in ethical life (Sittlichkeit) from the viewpoint of his ethic of virtue, with which he attempted to solve the problem of the discrepancy between reason and sense in modern moral philosophy. First, the young Hegel understood virtue (Tugend) as a sentiment of genuine self-abnegation (Aufopferung) inherent in one's political or public position (Stand), an idea which had its origin in ancient Greek ethics and seems to be quite different from bourgeois individualism. However, Hegel learned to recognize that in modern society one's economic or private position also involves a reflective internalization of political sentiment. According to him, individuals acknowledge each other as universal selves through alienating their own particularity, in order to construct various local communities in which they cultivate trust in the ethical substance. Through such a recognition, Hegel finally reconstructs the general concept of modern civic virtue as an account of the dispositional attitude (Gesinnung), which is not only a condition necessary to bring about the good life in communities, but also the source of patriotic sentiment. This essay concludes by relating Hegel's political ethic to contemporary discussion of virtues and social reality.

  Yanagita Kunio was a governmental official in agricultural politics. However, today he is famous for his achievements in folklore : Yanagita-minzokugaku. His results in agricultural politics are usually neglected or he is even thought to have failed in the political field. This notwithstanding, however, Yanagita-minzokugaku is often thought as a resistance to national politics.

  I see Yanagita's agricultural politics to be quite important, especially when viewed together with all his work. Indeed, his folklore and agricultural politics should be examined together.

  When Yanagita was an official he insisted that Japan, the ‘eternal’ nation-state, included all the people eternally and that the ie, the eternal family, should support the Emperor's nation-state. He also planned that the number of independent farmers should be increased for the sake of the nation's wealth. But he didn't carry out his plan, for he resigned as an official and devoted himself to folklore. It seems that he gave up agricultural politics but this was not so. He transformed his plan and carried it over into the field of folklore where he investigated many customs and dialects all over Japan, certifing that the life of heimin, the people who live in Japan, reveals the nation's history. He also tried to prove that the heimin had supported in the past, supported then, and would support in the future, the nation-state of Japan.

  Thus, we can see the same nationalistic orientation in both Yanagita's agricultural politics and his folklore.

  In this paper, I want to use “Ein Hungerkünstler” written by Franz Kafka to study both the impossibility and the indispensability of the communication process. Kafka had lived in a Prague that was changing dynamically in the area of modern city planning. With this turning point, the human body also changed strangely, and Kafka paid attention to this strangeness. His attention crystallized into “Ein Hungerkünstler”. Through a reading of this text, I make clear how ceaselessly the struggles in power relations go on, and how, in the modern world, these struggles are enacted on the stage of the human body. For example, Kafka depicts a human body deformed into an animal or non-living thing, but that strange deformation-the body of the hungry artist-represents the modern human body. The hungry artist starts his struggle at this point. His struggle is against the ‘bio-power’ that divides a human body from others and territorializes it into a subject-position. By seeking communication with others, he goes a long way along the path of deterritorialization. His struggle breaks down in the end ; yet in describing such a broken body, paradoxically, Kafka brings the social system that gave rise to it some relief. Thus, in my conclusion, I stress that the communication process is indispensable even when broken down.

  In this paper, I discuss left-wing theories of Japanese-language reform that suddenly appeared in 1930s, covering their intellectual background and historical significance. Such theorists proposed the rearrangement of vocabulary, the restriction or abolition of kanji, and the phonogramization of Japanese into kana or Roman letters. These proposals were based on the “theory of international language” : a mix of Marxian class theory, Marxian linguistics from the Soviet Union, and Proletarian Esperanto philosophies. Apart from this theoretical background, there was an additional context: the history of Proletarian Esperantist movements. Marxian linguistics critiqued the linguistic situation of class society and theorized the development of national and international societies that would relativize ethnocentric language nationalism. While this was used as a starting point by the leftist proponents of Japanese-language reform, they ultimately relied on the mediating factor of the Esperantists' theoretical activities.