著者

AKAHORI Saburo

出版者

東京女子大学現代教養学部国際社会学科社会学専攻紀要編集委員会

雑誌

東京女子大学社会学年報 = Tokyo Women's Christian University annals of sociology (ISSN:21876401)

巻号頁・発行日

no.3, pp.33-44, 2015

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It is often said that society is a Western concept and that it does not existin the non-Western world. This essay will examine whether such an opinion is valid ornot through Niklas Luhmann's theory of society. In his theory, society is redefined asthe self-description (of society). Based on such a viewpoint, we explore how society hasbeen described in East Asia. In the late 19th century, intellectuals in Japan attempted totranslate the concept of society into various expressions. In the end the word shakai wasadopted. The Japanese word shakai (社会) consists of two Chinese characters, and thecharacter "sha " (社) implies the nature and "the sacred". It is quite different from what "society" or "Gesellschaft" indicates. The word shakai as a translation of the word societywas then imported to China, Korea, and Vietnam. As demonstrated by the adoption ofthe word shakai , we see that in the East, the concept of society contains the nature orthe integration by "the sacred" in itself. This essay concludes that, society does exist inthe East as the self-description (of society), and it differs between the West and the East,especially East Asia.