A Continuing Dialogue with Alfred Schutz

Abstract

Let me begin by describing my encounter and connection with the work of Alfred Schutz.1 1 discovered his work during the preparation for my master's thesis on Max Weber's verstehende Soziologie, submitted to the Graduate School of Waseda University in 1976. Before then, the name of Alfred Schutz had not found a place in my memory. Until 1976, there was just a little Japanese paper on Schutz (cf. Website of the Schutz Archives in Waseda University. http://www.waseda.jp/Schutz). When I discovered the first edition of his masterpiece, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Schutz 1932), in our University library, I took it out, read it as carefully as possible, and realized that it was very important and relevant to my research project for a master's thesis. I could not, however, deal with it at that time, because Schutz's studies in this book, especially in its Chapter 2, were so fundamental, elaborate, and ingenious that I had no confidence that I could treat them sufficiently. Entering a doctoral course in 1976, 1 asked my mentor, Professor Yoshiyuki Sato, to take up Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt as a text for our seminar. He was kind enough to accept my proposal. We read it passage by passage, giving our careful attention even to conjunctions and adverbs; then translated it into Japanese sentence-by-sentence, and discussed Schutz' s analysis in detail. Running parallel with this work, I embarked on reading his Collected Papers, Reflections on the