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STATUS INEQUALITY AS REFLECTED IN THE TATOver a number of years, starting in 1947, various colleagues and I have been using the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to study comparatively the social attitudes of Japanese both in the United States and Japan and class differences among American youth. Subsequently, I have examined samples of Korean youth in Korea, Japan, and the United States. My most recent and still ongoing collaborative ventures have been involved with youth from Brazil and Venezuela. I have found that in eliciting unguided stories given in response to a standard set of pictures from given groups over time, and in given settings, I can gain some indirect reflections of cultural continuities in thought, as well as some changing attitudes related to shifting social circumstances. Throughout my work I have been concerned with the effect of minority status on the social attitudes of specific minorities starting in early childhood, but most readily available during the period of high school and college attendance. PROBLEMS IN STATUS INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL COHESIONIn two recent volumes, Status Inequality: The Self in Culture (De Vos and Suárez-Orozco, 1990) and Social Cohesion and Alienation: Minorities in the United States and Japan (De Vos, 1992), I have attempted some theoretical integration of themes tying together most of my writings about the experience as well as structure of social inequality. Throughout, my studies of "self" in society have been focused rather specifically on both the structural as well as experiential psychological effects of minority status as it influences both individual and group behavior with consequent political, social, and economic effects. These studies

HE recent accumulation of intensive data on Japanese rural culture has T revealed many regional differences in Japanese values and attitudes.Scholars concerned with Japanese culture are more aware that they must distinguish between what is broadly characteristic of the society as a whole and what is specific to smaller segments. The full range of variation, however, is still far from clear.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of using standardized projective tests, such as the Thematic Apperception Test, in studying intercommunity differences. Specifically, this paper reports results obtained by comparing TAT data from two Japanese communities in what is termed southwestern Japan. One is occupationally concerned with farming, the other with fishing. The over-all results obtained from the two villages are similar in many respects, but they also reveal certain consistent differences in attitudes concerning role behavior in the primary family.

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