Abstract
The recent work of Frances Chaput Waksler—The New Orleans Sniper: A Phenomenological Case Study of Constituting the Other—demonstrates, by close examination of the case of the New Orleans Sniper of 1973, how people constitute and unconstitute an “Other” in certain situations. This paper explores the process by which people constituted the Other in Japan in February of 2011 through the course of an incident that surprised Japanese people: university entrance exam cheating by use of the Internet question-and-answer bulletin board. I will further examine how the incident can be constructed as a social problem with the construction of a victim and a villain. For data, I use reports from newspapers with nationwide circulation and reports from news agencies present at the time of the event. I also cite additional data from Internet news sites. Although my research here is small and elementary and my analysis is sociological rather than phenomenological, it is inspired by Waksler’s work. I will show how peoples’ commonsense knowledge frames their understanding and construction of an event. This paper will show that Waksler’s ideas about the New Orleans Sniper and her analysis of this case are applicable to another event in a different time at a different place: contemporary Japanese society.
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Notes
This paper is based on a paper I presented at a session entitled “The Story of the Book: Panel Discussion of Frances Chaput Waksler’s ‘The New Orleans Sniper: A Phenomenological Case Study of Constituting the Other’” at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences in 2011. I would like to thank Frances Chaput Waksler; Hisashi Nasu, the organizer/moderator of the session; and Lenore Langsdorf and Kenneth Libermann, presenters in the session for which I developed the idea for this paper.
These are: Yomiuri Shimbun or The Daily Yomiuri in English (Yomiuri, Yomiuri-E), Mainichi Shimbun or Mainich Daily News in English (Mainichi, Mainichi-E), and Asahi Shimbun or Asahi.com in English (Asahi, Asahi-E).
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Kusayanagi, C. Constructing and Understanding an Incident as a Social Problem: A Case Study of University Entrance Exam Cheating in Japan. Hum Stud 36, 133–148 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9256-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9256-2