GLOCAL Vol.18

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6Reminiscences of a Scholar's Life国際人間学研究科　国際関係学専攻　教授メーワルト　ウルリッヒ（MÖHWALD, Ulrich）旧西ドイツ・マールブルク大学で社会学、民族学、日本研究と中国研究を学んだ。マールブルク大学助手とベルリン自由大学講師を経て、1987年に来日した。東京大学社会科学研究所外国人研究員と在東京ドイツ日本研究所専任研究員を経て、1993年9月に中部大学国際関係学部に転職した。1998年以降中部大学大学院国際関係研究科・国際人間学研究科教授。専門は、社会学、日本地域研究、ヨーロッパ地域研究。研究分野は、日本における社会科学の発達の研究、家族研究、ジェンダー研究、価値観変化の研究、ドイツにおける移民と人間の移動の研究、ヨーロッパにおける若者文化の研究。写真家としても活動する。economic development at the times. I was asked recurrently to write papers on the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s subsequent modernization. So I decided to take up this topic for my graduate research.But then unforeseen things happened. First both of my advisors in sociology and Japanese Studies unexpectedly died, and a year later the inter-faculty strife in ethnology aggravated to a point that led to the closure of the institute for several years. I had to find new advisors, and in this process I was forced to change the focus and topic of my graduate research in order to accommodate my new advisors. The new focus of my research became family and rural sociology, and the evolvement of empirical research on the rural family in Japanese social sciences during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s became the new topic for my master thesis.After I received my master degree in February 1981, I was hired as an assistant at the Department for East Asian Studies at Marburg University and entered the doctor course. In 1983 I also published my first book on the research of Japanese rural sociologists on the family during the 1930s and 1940s. The publication Since entering Marburg University in October 1970, I have spent a bit more than fifty years of my life in universities and research institutions, the first nineteen years in former West Germany, and afterwards more than thirty-one years in Japan. Throughout these fifty years I had to change the focus and the topic of my research several times – life is a procession of voluntary and involuntary changes. And while some of the changes offer new opportunities that one cannot refuse, other ones happen without oneself having much influence on them.When I entered Marburg University in 1970, university life was still very much determined by the aftermath of the preceding period of student revolt and social upheavals, and it was a period of inter-faculty political strife and antagonism that sometimes interrupted the smooth proceeding of education. I enrolled in sociology, ethnology （which was a hot-bed of inter-faculty strife）, Chinese Studies, and Japanese Studies. The latter two were very small departments with only few students at the times. So I concentrated on sociology and ethnology while learning Japanese and Chinese and becoming proficient in English and French.An important research field in sociology and ethnology at Marburg University was developmental sociology – the study of underdeveloped countries and the social modernization and economic development of societies. Quite a number of faculty and postgraduate students did research on countries in Latin America and Africa. From my third year on I joined research groups in this field, and also groups that studied the history of French sociology and the development of East Asian Area Studies in Germany and Europe. I had to do a lot of reading, especially in French, which was a language in which most of my fellow students were not well versed. Therefore I was asked to translate texts from the French discussion on the Asian Mode of Production and on dependency theory, and from Comte’s and Durkheim’s sociology that were not translated into German at the time. I also was asked to deal with everything Japanese.A strange thing in my opinion was that the Japanese transition into a modern industrial society was almost completely ignored in European research on modernization and