Tradition of the past, traditionalism of the future: A view from a pottery cooperative

In recent years, the number of foreign visitors to Japan has increased year by year due to the global trend of Japanese culture. In such surroundings, not a few foreign visitors are interested in Japanese traditional culture and traditional crafts. Therefore, information dissemination for foreigners and development of overseas markets are required in the Japanese traditional craft industry. In this research, we implemented a high-presence Japanese traditional crafts presentation system with different cultures by using virtual reality technology with a head-mounted display. Our proposed system promotes the understanding of Japanese traditional culture to foreigners by fusing Japanese traditional crafts with foreign architectural styles. Furthermore, our research supports the dissemination of information and sales channels for Japanese traditional crafts.

In Japan, there are traditional Japanese crafts such as fittings, furniture, textile, etc., which are closely related to Japanese culture and life. The design of Japanese houses and their rooms is very important. However, this is now easy because people have different feelings. In order to deal with this problem, we have developed a digital traditional Japanese crafting system (DTJCS) which provides a presentation space for traditional Japanese crafting. In this paper, we analyze the effect of room change of fittings to people's feelings using the presentation system.

Evaluation of soot particles from different-sized rapeseed oil flames: scientific focus on a traditional Japanese craft, Nara sumi

In this research, we investigated the influence on Kansei when placing Japanese traditional crafts in virtual reality space of Japanese-style room, Western-style room and Chinese-style room. We placed Japanese traditional crafts such as Fusuma (sliding door), Shoji (paper sliding door) and Tsuitate (screen) in each room style. We conducted a questionnaire survey on 14 subjects using 10 Kansei word pairs on the impression of Japanese traditional crafts placed in each room style.

In exploring skilled performance in Contact Improvisation (CI), we utilize an enactive ethnographic methodology combined with an interdisciplinary approach to examine the question of how skill develops in CI. We suggest this involves the development of subtleties of awareness of intra- and interkinaesthetic attunement, and a capacity for interkinaesthetic negative capability—an embodied interpersonal ‘not knowing yet’—including an ease with being off balance and waiting for the next shift or movement to arise, literally a ‘playing with’ balance, falling, nearly falling, momentum and gravity. We draw on insights from an interdisciplinary approach, including from a developmental perspective concerning the experience of dyadic interpersonal embodied skill development in both infancy and CI. Building on Ravn and Høffding’s (2021) definition of expertise in improvisation as an “oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency” we propose that a key aspect of expertise in CI involves oscillation between levels and processes of interkinaesthetic sense of agency. These interdisciplinary insights also elucidate limitations within current conceptualisations of sense of agency, including the relationship between sense of agency and sense of control.

The article substantiates the relevance of studying the problem of ethno-confessional safety of a polycultural region in modern Russian society. The authors differentiate the concepts concerning the problem of ethno-confessional safety. They consider features of the presentation of concepts: confessional safety, religious safety, ethnocultural and ethnic safety, ethno-confessional safety. Threats of ethnoconfessional safety in a situation of uncertainty and instability of modern society are designated. The role of the family as a social institute transmitting values of culture and traditions of its ethnos is demonstrated. Results of the empirical study of family values of married couples of various ethnic origins living in conditions of the polycultural region (the Chechen Republic) are presented. Features of values of a modern family, depending on ethnic origin (Russians, Chechens, mixed families), in the context of ethno-confessional safety are distinguished and described. The authors have revealed that values of wellbeing (to have a good job and a good family, health, to be loved) are significant for families of ethnic Russians. The majority of respondents stated the necessity of supporting national traditions, to instill national values and traditions in the children. It is established that in the mixed families the most part of respondents of both sexes noted that it is important to keep national traditions and develop national culture, to impart national values and traditions to children, to lead a spiritual life; the system of respondents’ estimates vary between high and above average. The authors have revealed that in ethnic Chechen families they note that it is importance to impart to their children national traditions forming and supporting the feeling of unity at the level of ethnos, community, family, enabling an individual to realize his/her ethnic origin preserving centuries-old value guidelines and attitudes.

We propose a Kansei retrieval method based on the design pattern of a traditional Japanese craft object to provide a user with the desired presentation space in the digital traditional Japanese craft system. Visual quantitative feature values are extracted using visual pattern image coding (VPIC). These values include the total number, the frequency, the dispersion rate and the deviation rate of different edges. The quantitative feature values for traditional Japanese craft objects are registered in a multimedia database and the relation between Kansei words and the visual features of traditional Japanese craft objects are analyzed using a questionnaire. Then, the visual features are compared with the quantitative feature values. Through the above process, we want to find the relation between the design pattern components and edge types using VPIC. By finding this relation, the Kansei retrieval method can be realized.

This article explores how teenage mothers talk about their subjective experience of teenage motherhood and their motivation to complete schooling after their pregnancy. Individual interviews were conducted with teenage mothers aged 15 to 19 years who attended an inner-city public school in Johannesburg, South Africa. Discursive analysis was used to identify and analyse key themes that emerged from the study. The findings indicate that despite the challenges of being a teenage mother, the participants were able to persevere towards achieving their academic goals and future aspirations. This was due to a heightened sense of responsibility and maturity, as well as great motivation to continue schooling so as to be able to provide a better future for their children. These findings are contrary to the existing mainstream literature, in which teenage mothers are often associated with high drop-out rates at school, poor academic performance and inadequate parenting skills. Recommendations are made for policy making and school interventions to acknowledge and celebrate teenage mothers’ sense of agency and heightened sense of growth post-pregnancy, rather than seeing them as a source of social ills.

In this paper, a remote experimental system for traditional Japanese craft design for students of architecture in universities and professional design schools is proposed. Many students at different locations can share those craft elements distributed over high-speed networks to design the insides of buildings and houses so that the human being can be satisfied emotionally. In order to demonstrate the relation between human feeling and traditional Japanese crafts, an on-line analysis method is provided and carried out by wed-based questionnaire. Eventually, those analytical results could be reflected to our remote experimental system to totally design the most desired houses with the best intentions to human feelings.

The impressions of traditional Japanese crafts retrieved by a presentation system adopting the Kansei method were evaluated in a questionnaire survey. By analyzing the survey results, we associated the visual features of the traditional crafts with the Kansei words. Kansei means sensibility and the ability to accept the impression. In addition, we extracted a feature quantity of the traditional crafts, called the visual pattern image coding, from the traditional craft image, and associated this physical feature with the visual features of the traditional crafts. From these analyses, we implemented an augmented reality (AR) Traditional Japanese Craft Presentation System using the Kansei retrieval method. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Kansei retrieval method, we investigated the satisfaction levels of the retrieved results of traditional crafts. The subjects’ responses to the AR Traditional Japanese Craft Presentation System were overwhelmingly positive.

This paper deals with the evaluation of Japanese traditional crafts, in which product items are assessed according to the so-called “Kansei” features by means of the semantic differential method. For traditional crafts, decisions on which items to buy or use are usually influenced by personal feelings/characteristics; therefore, we shall propose a consumer-oriented evaluation model targeting these specific requests by consumers. Particularly, given a consumer's request, the proposed model aims to define an evaluation function that quantifies how well a product item meets the consumer's feeling preferences. An application to evaluating patterns of Kutani porcelain is conducted to illustrate how the proposed evaluation model works, in practice.

Reviewed by: Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry by Jenny Hall Kaori Nakano (bio) Japan Beyond the Kimono: Innovation and Tradition in the Kyoto Textile Industry. By Jenny Hall. Bloomsbury, 2020. xxiv, 243 pages. $115.00, cloth; $36.95, paper; $33.25, E-book. It has been two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began at the end of March 2020, bringing international travel to a standstill. Until then, the Japanese fashion world had regularly traveled overseas to view new collections and exhibitions. Designers from other countries also visited Japan to promote their work, and reports on their latest offerings occupied the mainstream of Japanese fashion news. Suddenly, all of this came to a screeching halt. As if to fill this gap, the focus in Japan shifted to Japanese fashion brands and traditional Japanese culture—which, admittedly, were always present, but often went unnoticed and unremarked, obscured by the prestige of Western fashion. Today, however, Japanese fashion brands and luxury goods associated with traditional Japanese culture are increasingly featured in the fashion news, and many Japanese are beginning to "discover" and pay attention to the beauty and charm of their native tradition. The kimono is one of the products of Japanese culture that is attracting renewed attention at home. This reawakening of Japan to its own cultural legacy can perhaps be seen as a kind of de-colonization. Appearing fortuitously at this moment when the Japanese are taking a new interest in their fashion and its tradition, Jenny Hall's Japan Beyond the Kimono is an epochal and comprehensive exploration of the past, present, and future of the kimono and its world. Sustainability has become an important touchstone in recent years, but kimono were sustainable long before the term became a buzzword. Along with the knowledge for their proper wear and care, kimono are handed down through the generations from mother to daughter. When the fabric eventually begins to show signs of wear, the kimono will be refashioned into a cushion cover or other household object. As it finally reaches the end of its useful life, it will be recycled as a cleaning rag. The kimono is not just sustainable, it also endorses body diversity. Consisting of several rectangles of fabric, the kimono gently wraps bodies of all shapes, without forcing them into some oppressive "ideal" form. At a recent body diversity fashion show in Japan, a celebrity with prosthetic hands and legs wore a kimono, the body-positive garment creating an elegance that would not have been possible with a Western suit. Supporting sustainability, body diversity, and local industry, the kimono is in the limelight as a garment for our times. [End Page 255] And yet some, invoking the kimono's long tradition and historical weight, still insist on dogmatic rules for wearing kimono. These ultraconservative guardians—the "kimono police"—are always on the alert for any violations of the "proper" way to wear kimono and are eager to enforce orthodoxy. Lacking confidence about the proper way to wear kimono, most Japanese today are increasingly reluctant to don them on a daily basis. The kimono is now mostly limited to ceremonial occasions and special events, for which people call on a professional kimono master and hairdresser to dress them properly. Such formal kimono are often too tight and rigid to allow any extended activity and can even be hard to breathe in—another reason the kimono has come to be shunned as everyday wear. If the situation of the prospective kimono wearer is so daunting, the outlook for the kimono producer is even bleaker. A lack of successors to the elderly kimono craftspeople of the previous generation is putting many kimono workshops in danger of closure, and the precious lineage of traditional technical know-how is at risk of being severed. Most Japanese today are ignorant about both the kimono and the industry that produces it. While there are many books teaching the proper way to wear kimono, there are few books offering comprehensive information about the cultural significance of kimono or its industry, and probably very few Japanese even know how kimonos are actually made and distributed. Japan Beyond the Kimono investigates...

In this paper, I emphasise the relevance of affectivity in skilled acquisition and performance, an aspect that remains under-theorised in the philosophy of skills. Drawing on a phenomenologically informed enactivist framework, I argue that affectivity is not a mere by-product but an integral dimension of skilled agency. I identify two key ways in which affectivity shapes the dynamics of skilled performance. First, I discuss how affective appraisals serve as pre-reflective indicators of normative adequacy or inadequacy during performance, guiding corrections, sustaining motivation, and fostering creativity. Second, I examine self-esteem as an existential feeling that configures our sense of agency and practical engagement with the world. In this context, I analyse the phenomenon of stereotype threat to show how interpersonal interactions and sociocultural norms modulate self-esteem, and how repeated exposure to negative stereotypes can gradually erode it, thereby undermining an agent's skilful performance. These insights invite a reconceptualisation of affectivity as central not only to the execution and development of skilled action, but also to its possible breakdown.

The Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (Tribal MIECHV) Program provides federal grants to tribes, tribal consortia, tribal organizations, and urban Indian organizations to implement evidence-based home-visiting services for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families. To date, only one evidence-based home-visiting program has been developed for use in AI/AN communities. The purpose of this article is to describe the steps that four Tribal MIECHV Programs took to assess community needs, select a home-visiting model, and culturally adapt the model for use in AI/AN communities. In these four unique Tribal MIECHV Program settings, each program employed a rigorous needs-assessment process and developed cultural modifications in accordance with community strengths and needs. Adaptations occurred in consultation with model developers, with consideration of the conceptual rationale for the program, while grounding new content in indigenous cultures. Research is needed to improve measurement of home-visiting outcomes in tribal and urban AI/AN settings, develop culturally grounded home-visiting interventions, and assess the effectiveness of home visiting in AI/AN communities.

On Japanese Traditional Craft, NO. 5(THE 35ND ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE JSD)