This paper analyzes commonalities and differences between Japanese and Korean national identity by multi-group covariance structure analysis with structured means. In this article, “criteria for national member,” “national pride,” and “xenophobia” are cited as “national identity” by referencing previous research. The result shows that Japanese and South Korean criteria for national membership are both one-dimensional. This is affected by the prevailing myth of a “homogeneous nation.” The correlations between political national pride and xenophobia are negative in many Western European countries, but positive in Japan and South Korea. Because of the authoritarian regime experiments in Japan and South Korea, political national pride in both countries associate anti-sentiment toward non-national others. The conceptual configuration of “armed forces” and “history” are different between Japan and South Korea. This result shows that variant historical experiments affect people's attitudes toward their own nations.

The purpose of this study is to develop a national prestige score by emulating occupational prestige scores and to analyze how Japanese people perceive the prestige of various countries. The results of my analysis show that the overall ranking of national prestige is consistent with prior research that measured preferences toward nations, e.g. Western countries are evaluated more highly than African or Middle Eastern countries. Furthermore, while prior studies on 'preference' indicated relatively low positions for neighboring countries such as China, South Korea and Russia, this study found that they were ranked in the mid-range, regarding their prestige. I also examined the validity and reliability of the national prestige scores, with the following findings: first, a comparative analysis between national prestige and national preference revealed conceptual differences between prestige and preference and the external validity of a nation's prestige score. Second, in order to assess the reliability of the scores, I analyzed differences based on gender, educational level and age group. However, those attributes did not make any notable differences in terms of the overall ranking of nations. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the University of Tokyo. All rights reserved.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how Japanese people perceive various nations of the world. It focuses on the differences among Japanese generations in the cognitions of nations by analyzing survey data on the attitude toward 20 nations.<br>I found that the Japanese tended to favor Western nations more than other nations. This result is consistent with the so-called high western and low eastern-type rank ordering of the Japanese preference of nations, which has been pointed out by many previous works. To examine the differences between generations in the cognitions of nations, the average liking score of 20 nations was compared among four age groups (20-34, 35-49, 50-64, 65+). It showed that people with age 50 or above hold less favorable attitude toward Russia compared to those with age under 49 years. This implies that there are generation gaps in the subjective liking of an individual country.<br>To investigate the liking data in terms of not only one-dimensional order but also multidimensional relations, I used a multidimensional scaling technique (INDSCAL). I found that the respondents judged their liking of nations based on two dimensions: The first dimension was "Western nations (Japan included) vs. Non-western nations (excluding Japan)" which is very similar to the high western and low eastern-type rank ordering. The second order may be interpreted as the "exposure to negative images through the mass media." Older respondents (over 65 years old) based their judgment heavily on the first dimension, while people under 64 years used the second dimension for their judgment. This result indicates a possibility of changes in Japanese subjective liking of various nations that was once believed to be stable in previous research.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper investigates how Japanese people see other nations and peoples of foreign countries by representing their perceptions on cognitive maps. I collected several types of data from university students: 1. Judged similarity among 26 nations/peoples (pile sort), 2. Preference data on 10 nations/peoples (paired comparisons), and 3. Exposure to foreign nations/people such as experiences of foreign travel and having foreign friends.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;By analyzing the judged similarity data using Multidimensional Scaling, it was found that the respondents categorized nations/peoples based on three dimensions: &ldquo;Western vs. non-Western (White vs. non-White),&rdquo; &ldquo;psychological distance,&rdquo; and &ldquo;geography.&rdquo; Those who have experienced traveling aboard had a tendency to place less weight on the &ldquo;Western vs. non-Western (White vs. non-White)&rdquo; dimension in their cognition. Preference data showed that some preferred Asian people, while others favored Western people; however, almost every respondent revealed his/her unfamiliarity with Islamic and African people.

The concept of national identity has been used in a wide range of theoretical studies in social sciences. The diversity of the contexts in which this concept has been applied, however, might have resulted in a lack of common understanding as to what exactly constitutes the concept of national identity. Hence, the aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the structure of the concept to clarify the components of national identity. In past research, the term &ldquo;national identity&rdquo; was employed to refer to the following : (1) national membership identification, (2) national pride, (3) ethnocentrism, and (4) xenophobia. Using the Japanese sample of the 1995 ISSP data, items relating to national identity were factor analyzed. The results confirmed the above components as constituent factors of national identity. However, &ldquo;national pride&rdquo; was found to consist of two distinct dimensions : political and cultural. Analyses further revealed an additional factor, namely, &ldquo;orientation towards internationalization.&rdquo; Interpretation of each component, as well as the relationships between components, pointed to certain aspects unique to the Japanese society.

In sociology, occupation and industry variables are as important as sexual and age variables. For the purpose of statistical processing, answers collected from open-ended questions in social surveys need to be converted into code, which requires considerable time and effort and often results in inconsistencies in large scale surveys. This work deals with occupation and industry coding. In this work, we develop an automatic system using hand-crafted rules and Support Vector Machines. Our system can assign three candidate codes to an answer and estimates the confidence level of the primary predicted code for each national/international standard code sets. The system has now been released through the website of the Center for Social Research and Data Archives. The user can get the required coding result by uploading the data file in a specific format.&lt;/p&gt;