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That we live in a world ruled and confused by cultural diversity has become common sense. The social sciences gave birth to a new theoretical paradigm, the creation of cultural theories. Since then, social science theorizing applies to any social phenomenon across the world exploring cultural diversities in any social practice--except the social sciences and how they create knowledge, which is is off limits. Social science theorizing seemingly assumes that creating knowledge does not know such diversities. In this book, Kazumi Okamoto develops analytical tools to study academic culture, analyze how social sciences create and distribute knowledge, and the influence the academic environment has on knowledge production. She uses the academy in Japan as a case study of how social scientists interpret academic practices and how they are affected by their academic environment. Studying Japanese academic culture, she reveals that academic practices and the academic environment in Japan show much less diversity than cultural theories tend to presuppose.

With a population that is aging faster than any other in the world, Japan faces serious public finance problems, particularly when it comes to tax and social security issues. The structural reforms that are urgently needed to accommodate the impending demographic change are the central theme of this book, which is the first work of its type to look at the Japanese tax and social security systems through a life-cycle general equilibrium simulation model. The author aims to establish guidelines for fiscal reform in Japan's graying society and uses such advanced modeling techniques to permit the calculation of the effects of alternative tax policies on capital accumulation and economic welfare. The author also examines the impact of progressive expenditure taxation, coming to the novel conclusion that this form of taxation may hold the key to overcoming the large welfare loss Japan faces as its society ages under the current tax system

Although social ontology (SO) has attracted the attention of scholars in various disciplines, how it is applied to social scientific studies is still under-researched. To tackle this issue, this paper initially considers major streams of research on SO. It then argues that one of the aims of SO in the social sciences is to identify the rhetorical expression of social dynamism. To support this argument, the present study introduces a perspective of performativity and proposes that generic performativity should be identified by social scientists. Finally, such an attempt is demonstrated with reference to the global pursuit of financialization.

The purpose of the present study is to bridge ontological pluralism which regards the native's discourse as a clue for philosophical speculation and a naturalistic approach which tries to connect anthropology to the natural sciences, and to investigate how to maintain a naturalistic approach in the ethnographic context. Contrasting Viveiros de Castro's notions of the anthropologist's and native's discourses and Sperber's epidemiology of representations, I argue that the anthropologist can entertain both ontological pluralism and a scientific discourse when he consciously conceptualizes the world and nature. After that, I investigate a perspective from which the anthropologist can address the native's lifeworld while at the same time maintaining a naturalistic approach. I argue that the material foundation of mental representation in the brain is not beyond doubt and that we can think of implicit beliefs with no storage in a society.