ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an auto-biographical review of Eiko Ikegami's journey into the intellectual and social-political contexts. Globalization has changed the cultural adjustments of immigrants enormously in terms of their relationship with their own cultures. Sociology as a discipline originated during the nineteenth century as a way of understanding the profound and ongoing transformations of European societies that were facing modernization and industrialization. As a typical member of her generation of Japanese women, who survived World War II and the occupation that followed it, Eiko mother is a disciplined, practical, and strong-willed person. She was fortunate to get a job at the Nikkei, a financial newspaper, the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. She started to read the works of such scholars as Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Mann. Eiko began to develop an interest in the interconnections between culture and the trajectories of state formation.
