Individual Patterns in Historical Change Japanese Youth.

The article presents an abstract of the paper "Individual Patterns in Historical Change: Imagery of Japanese Youth," by Robert Jay Lifton was published in the October 1964 of the periodical "Journal of Social Issues." This paper describes three patterns of time imagery encountered in contemporary Japanese youth. These are the mode of transformation, characterized by a vision of near-total remaking of social and individual existence, and by unconscious nostalgia for the past; the mode of restoration, characterized by a conscious urge to return to ennobling symbols of personal and cultural past, and by an unconscious fascination with modern symbols; and a mode of accommodation, a quest for a modus vivendi blending imagery closest to present experience, immediate future, and recent past. All three modes, in different fashions, promote historical change. They are frequently interchangeable, as they all share an emotional--symbolic substrate, which finds its individual model of unity in the mother-child relationship, and its cultural model in the stress upon social and racial harmony.