Acknowledgements

I should perhaps mention a background of this joint project. In my student's time, some favorite German teachers had been organizing voluntarily a very attractive German learning summer camp in Hakuba every year. It was certainly a very very short collaboration, only 4 days long program. I participated there with about 20 my Japanese colleagues. Some of them were undergraduate students like I, some were already graduate students. Some German and Austrian native speakers also joined in this camp. They were at that time studying Japanese, sociology, political science etc. in Japan. Only 4 days though, we did do lots of things; for example, making some original short plays in German, discussing on some actual themes, and presenting each original German play on the last evening, we could found ourselves in a new and wonderful academic situation. I was 21 years old.

This experience became really a very certain motivation to my next ten years' activities. Since then "Austria", "Vienna", "German Social Theory" etc. have been always being some of my important themes. I have found some best friends of mine particularly in Vienna, and I have been keeping on researching some famous social scientists in Vienna with the methods of sociology of knowledge since 1992.

My researching in Vienna last year, this was an intensive field research on "Friedrich von Hayek", it was really and purely by chance I met Professor Peter Gerlich and Lecturer Birgit Klausser. I was astonished at their long run activities of motivational education. They have been organizing a very impressive joint seminar with many universities in Europe since 10 years; Maltha (1996), Norway (1997), Portugal (1998), Estonia (1999), Israel (2000), Denmark (2001). They had already collaborated with the University of Beijin in 2002. Firstly I was afraid that I could do undertake this project with my students in Tokyo. But with lots of discussions, we examined our total plan of joint seminar minutely to be perfectly sure. I would like to thank them for everything, particularly for their changing my skeptic mentality and their improving very kindly my poor communicative performance.

It is delightful opportunity to thank our 14 Austrian and 11 Japanese students who participated in the joint seminar. They have been being a totally mixed team since the beginning of seminar. And their friendship continues still now very vivid with our e-mail mailing list. I hope that they will and can develop their friendship for their own future. I wish they could meet again each other in Vienna 2004.

I also thank others who assisted in some way; providing information, encouragement or other assistance - include the staffs of Institute for Sociology of Waseda University, some officials and faculties of the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Professor Nobuyuki Kanechiku, Professor Kouji Okubo, Professor Tokuya Miyagi, Professor Keiko Kusano, particularly Naotoshi Kashiwabara (former bureau chief of the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences' office), Naoko Sakurai (bureau chief of the International Exchange Office of Waseda University), Nobuko Hamaya (Kyoto City International Foundation). I finally and specially thank the deputy Dean of Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Professor Teruhisa Tajima, and two deputy Presidents of Waseda University, Professor Takehiko Nishimoto and Professor Ken'ichi Enatsu for their very kind and generous understanding of our small project.