I have recently noted the following in "What's new" (9/11/2006).

I have just uploaded Hoji 1990 and Hoji 1991.

Hoji (1990) "On the so-called Overt Pronouns in Japanese and Korean," in E.-J. Baek, ed., Papers from the Seventh International Conference on Korean Linguistics, pp. 61-78.

Hoji (1991) "KARE" in Carol Georgopoulos and Roberta Ishihara, eds., Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of Prof. S.-Y. Kuroda, Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 287-304.

Hoji 1990 was written after Hoji 1991 "Kare," the final version of which had been written in 1989 but did not appear until 1991.

What has compelled me to upload these old papers is what seems to me to be a persistent refusal in the field to recognize that Japanese does not have anything like a 'pronominal system' that deserves to be so called, in light of the formal properties of the 'potential candidates for 'overt pronouns' in the language. I will try to make postings in the Further Discussion board on this topic.

See also Hoji 1995 (NELS), Hoji et al. 2000 (GLOW), and the references cited in the latter.

Among what I had in mind is a view that can be seen in remarks such as (1).

(1) a. (Elbourne 2002: p. 9)
[Considering "referential and bound uses of pronouns" as "a kind of definite articles"] thus provides a unified semantics for the E-type, bound and referential uses of pronouns, which is surely desirable, since no language makes any lexical or morphological distinction between pronouns used with these allegedly different meanings. (The emphasis by HH.)
b. (Elbourne 2002: p. 18)
As already mentioned, no language shows any lexical or morphological difference between pronouns used as individual variables and pronouns used as definite descriptions.

Elbourne, Paul. 2002 Situations and Individuals, Doctoral dissertation, MIT.

As discussed in the works cited above and in the references therein, there is a clear difference between the so demonstrative and the a demonstrative; it is not impossible for so-NPs to function as a bound variable while it is impossible for a-NPs to do so. If expressions like so-ko, so-re, a-soko, and a-re, all of which can translate English it, are considered as "pronouns," the alleged claim made in (1) is clearly invalid.

Note: Hoji et al. 2000: note 3 states, "-So- in a-soko comes from si in asiko that appeared circa between 800 and 1200, and is unrelated to so in so-ko, although the etymology of this si is not entirely clear." See Hoji 2003 (Lingua): note 10 for more on the basic demonstrative paradigms in Japanese.