Modern Japanese Research Articles

The relationship of tooth crown dimensions between first molar and central incisor in maxilla.

The purpose of this study was to investigate a correlation between the cusp dimensions of the first molar and mesiodistal crown diameters of the central incisors in the maxilla. The study materials were composed of dental casts from 29 modern Japanese female subjects with a mean age of 20years and 8months. The mesiodistal crown diameters of the maxillary central incisors were measured. The mesiodistal and bucco-lingual crown diameters and the cusp diameters of the maxillary first molars, such as the paracone, metacone, protocone, and hypocone, were also measured. The crown areas and indices of the first molars were calculated. The Spearman's single rank correlation coefficients between the mean values for the crown dimensions of the first molars and the mesiodistal crown diameters of the central incisors were calculated. The hypocone cusp diameter and the hypocone index were the largest compared to those of the paracone, protocone, and metacone cusps. The bucco-lingual diameter and hypocone cusp diameter of the first molars positively correlated with the mesiodistal crown diameters of the central incisors on the same sides. There were positive correlations between the hypocone index of the first molars and the mesiodistal crown diameters of the central incisors. Based on the results, if a large hypocone is observed in eruption of the maxillary first molars, it will be predictable that of the mesiodistal crown diameter of the maxillary central incisor large.

Modern Japanese ancestry-derived variants reveal the formation process of the current Japanese regional gradations

Modern Japanese people have two major ancestral populations: indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherers and continental East Asian farmers. To determine the formation process of the current Japanese population, we developed a detection method for variants derived from ancestral populations using a summary statistic, the ancestry marker index (AMI). We applied AMI to modern Japanese population samples and identified 208,648 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were likely derived from the Jomon people (Jomon-derived variants). Analysis of Jomon-derived variants in 10,842 modern Japanese individuals recruited from all over Japan revealed that the admixture proportions of the Jomon people varied between prefectures, probably owing to the prehistoric population size difference. The estimated allele frequencies of genome-wide SNPs in the ancestral populations of the modern Japanese suggested their adaptive phenotypic characteristics to their respective livelihoods. Based on our findings, we propose a formation model for the genotypic and phenotypic gradations of the current Japanese archipelago populations.

Displacements: Current Work on Japanese Modernism

Displacements: Current Work on Japanese Modernism

The Shackles of Universal History and the Road Not Taken: ‘Ambivalent Possibilities’ in Maruyama Masao's Thought

It seems to be a challenging task for those non-Western scholars who are deeply immersed in European intellectual resources to theorise multiple forms of modernity and deparochialise political theory. What difficulty awaits us in non-Western contexts, when we attempt to throw off these shackles and to open up alternative views of modernity? To address this question, this article attempts to critically examine Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男, 1914–1996), an influential scholar on the history of Japanese political thought, with respect to his view of Japanese modernity, thereby exploring what obstacles await him in pursuing the multiplicity view of modernity and how he actually or potentially overcomes them. In doing so, I develop two arguments. First, Maruyama's move towards multiple modernities remains incomplete because he fails to throw off the shackles of universal history. Second, however, we can identify an alternative way in his own thought that, though not taken by himself, potentially goes beyond universal history towards multiple modernities.

The Role of Political Thought in the Japanese Renaissance: A Study in the Ideas of Shiga Shigitaka (1863-1927)

Objectives: The study aims to shed light on Japanese political thought by getting acquainted with the views of one of the most important Japanese thinkers who had a great role in presenting the visions and ideas that contributed to enhancing the factors of development and the causes of the Japanese rise in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, namely, the Japanese thinker Shiga Shigitaka (1863-1927), who was considered one of the most important intellectuals of the Meiji and Taisho era. The study relied on the descriptive analysis method according to the previous method of the study.
 Results: The importance of Shiga Shigitaka's ideas came from the accuracy of his analysis and his knowledge of the problems that have come to face Japanese society with the beginnings of its modernization experience while providing appropriate solutions to these problems.
 Conclusions: The thinker Shiga Shigitaka made great contributions to the modern Japanese renaissance, at the moment when Japan was exposed to external challenges that threatened its existence and survival as a nation after concluding unequal agreements with external powers that began knocking on the doors of Japan at this time, which later led to a revolution Meiji, and its initiation in the process of modernizing the country.

ГРАМАТИЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ДІЄСЛІВ КЛАСИЧНОЇ ЯПОНСЬКОЇ МОВИ БУНҐО

Background. Classical bungo Japanese and modern Japanese languages have a number of differences that make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for an untrained reader to understand a text written in the bungo style, even if the reader has a high level of modern Japanese. This makes it necessary to first familiarize yourself with the grammatical features of the classical Japanese language. Verbs in bungo texts are the most difficult element due to their grammatical differences with modern Japanese, which makes them the object of this study. Methods. The following methods were used: comparative – for comparing verbs in modern Japanese and classical; descriptive – for the description of conjugation rules and functions of auxiliary verbs. Results. The rules of conjugation of verbs in the classical Japanese language were formulated according to the bases of the verbs, examples are given in the form of tables. Examples of verbs in modern and classical Japanese are given, which refer to different conjugations, which complicates the perception of classical texts. After the analysis of literary works written in bungo style, the most common auxiliary verbs (suffixes) are singled out and the features of their use are outlined. The following suffixes have been highlighted: ～ず、～き、～けり、～ぬ、 ～つ、～たり、～り、～む、～けむ、～らむ、～らし、～まし、～べし、～めり、～なり. Such auxiliary verbs as ～ず、～たり、～べし, etc. exist in the modern Japanese language as well, but perform a narrower range of functions. Conclusions. Given the leading role of the verb in the system of the classical Japanese language bungo, the article only provides the list of the main verb suffixes and their functions, therefore, in further research, it is necessary to carry out a detailed analysis of less common verb suffixes, as well as grammatical features of other parts of the language. This will contribute to a deeper and more systematic understanding of bungo texts.

Changing the Image of Woman and the Family Model: Rethinking the Traditional Way of Life in the Current Realities of Japanese Society

The paper focuses on the study of the image of Japanese mothers in modern Japanese society in the context of rethinking the traditional way of life. In the course of the research, there was made an attempt to establish what underlies the value model of modern Japanese women and to analyze the degree of influence of habitual traditional gender stereotypes. The author considers the phases of the formation of the family institution in Japan and states that the principles of Confucian ethics, manifested in the presence of moral norms of behavior, attitudes and prescriptions, can be traced in the minds of modern Japanese. However, in the conditions of accelerated socialization of women and the ongoing process of atomization of families, the burden of responsibility from traditional expectations put on a woman increases, leading to adverse consequences in the form of “neuroses in the background of raising children”. The article discusses the changes in the structure of female employment over the past decades, in order to identify problems associated with the distribution of gender roles and the changing position of Japanese women in society. As a result of the study, it was suggested that despite the tendency in Japan to shift the value model towards individualism, the features of traditional family ideology are preserved, as evidenced by the presence of numerous proverbs and idioms of the Japanese language dedicated to family relationships and based on Confucian ethics. In such a society, social roles and labor functions are still divided and consolidated, the observance of the hierarchy is maintained, despite the disintegration of traditional ties, social division, separation from the clan and large family groups.

ФОНЕТИЧНО МОДИФІКОВАНІ АНТРОПОНІМИ СУЧАСНОЇ ЯПОНСЬКОЇ МОВИ: СТАТУС І СПОСОБИ УТВОРЕННЯ

Background. This article draws attention to personal nominations in modern Japanese, the status of which is not clear, namely of nominations consisting of changed forms of names, surnames or their parts and often attached by various affixes (mainly by suffixes of respect). We propose to call such personal nominations phonetically modified anthroponyms. Methods. Using the linguistic methods of description and comparison, the article analyses phonetically modified anthroponyms in the first season of the popular television teen drama "Gokusen" (ごくせん), in the works of Japanese researchers on onomastics and comes up to conclusions below. Results. Phonetically modified anthroponyms are regarded to be a subset of names of endearments (愛称), street names (あだ名) or nicknames (ニックネーム). In another words they are a part of what can be called emotive personal nominations. In different types of those nominations their ratio varies. For example, they make up the majority of nicknames and approximately a quarter of street names. The main ways of forming such personal nominations are 1) the cutting of the surname and/or given name which often involves the emerging of special morae (/N/, /:/ /-/) and 2) various phonetic manipulations such as adding, eliminating or changing the order of the syllables or morae. To cut off, reduced or full elements of the proper name, syllables with sound-symbolic meaning as well as relatively semantically independent suffixes can be additionally attached. Although these ways are common for all kinds of emotive nominations, cut off names with added suffixes of respect ちゃん, さん, くん occur commonly among nicknames, and among street names – proper names with added or rearranged order of syllables (which more affects an imagery). The length of the original proper name, its phonetic and associative characteristics can limit the possibility of its phonetic modifications. Conclusions. Taking into consideration the fact that phonetically modified anthroponyms gain an emotivity, yet don't lose connections to the original anthroponyms, we maintain the view that they lay between original, neutral proper names and such street names which are based on the individual characteristics of person and have no relation to real name of their owner.

Belatedness and innovation: Korean modernism

AbstractIf Japanese modernists, as Eric Hayot argues, conceived modernism and modernity as originating in the West, colonial Korean artists inevitably apprehended modernism from a double remove, through the mediation of Japanese literature and language. While they self‐consciously sought to develop a distinctive Korean modernist poetics (one not prefigured by Japanese modernism), the sense of belatedness remained inescapable among Korean modernist practitioners. With the ‘expansionism’ of the new modernist studies, as is well known, there has been substantial critical work to challenge and reject the belatedness and derivativeness attributed to ‘peripheral’ modernities and modernisms. However, to properly appreciate the singularity of Korean modernism, and its expressive efforts to place its colonial modernity in a global context, it is necessary to confront how these modernists understood, figured, and rearticulated their sense of belatedness. Taking a cue from Michaela Bronstein, I attend to the uses Korean modernists made of Western (and Japanese) modernisms and how these engagements enact the aesthetic and critical force of belatedness. Ultimately, I contend, Korean modernism's self‐reflexive, intertextual stagings of belatedness generate stylistic innovation, enabling writers to situate themselves within global modernism and disclose the fraudulence of colonial modernization and its imposition of second‐hand forms.

Women Artists Are the Conductors of Artistic Phenomena in Modern Japanese Painting.

Women Artists Are the Conductors of Artistic Phenomena in Modern Japanese Painting.

日本の「人形劇」誕生前夜 ドイツの芸術的人形劇との関わりを中心に

Westernized theater emerged amidst Japan’s existing theater circuit during the early 20th century. Soon after, in the 1920s, Japan’s puppet theater scene saw the emergence of its Western counterpart. The pivotal moment came in 1923 when the marionette play Aglavaine et Sélysette was performed by Ito Kisaku and Senda Koreya, who would later become active in the shingeki theater world. While this play is widely recognized as pioneering the establishment of modern Japanese puppet theater, there has been little discussion about the period leading up to this performance. This thesis focuses on the context that led to the birth of modern Japanese puppet theater by examining discourse surrounding the art form in the 1900s and 1910s. Specifically, it explores why a new form of puppet theater emerged at this time, the concrete influences that shaped the creation of the ''Western-style,'' and the changes in the perception of the art form in Japan. The thesis first compares the performances of the Victorian marionette troupe, the D'Arc, which came to Japan in 1894, with the performance of Aglavaine et Sélysette of Ito and Senda in 1923. While the former was viewed as a mere spectacle, the latter was recognized as a sophisticated theatrical work. Second, to trace the evolution of perceptions of puppet theater between these two performances and the impact it had on the Japanese theater scene, this thesis refers to the commentary on Western puppet theater that appeared in literary and theatre-focused magazines, such as Kabuki, from 1905 onward. Likewise, critical discourse on Japanese puppet theater in general, found in Kabuki and Engei Gahō, are also compared. One notable influence of Western puppet theater on Japanese shingeki theater was the incorporation of costume designs from German artistic puppet theater into a shingeki play, which demonstrated the growing appreciation for Western puppet theater as a serious art form. Lastly, this thesis examines how Tsubouchi Shoyo re-evaluated Japanese puppet theater, in the late 1910s, by comparing it with Western puppet theater.

Reframing Modern Japanese Literature: Translation and Science Fiction in Meiji-Era Japan

Reframing Modern Japanese Literature: Translation and Science Fiction in Meiji-Era Japan

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ РОЗВИТКУ ОПОЗИЦІЙНИХ ПАРТІЙ В ЯПОНСЬКІЙ ПАРТІЙНІЙ СИСТЕМІ НА СУЧАСНОМУ ЕТАПІ

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the development of opposition parties in the context of transformation processes in the party system of Japan at the present stage. The author characterizes the peculiarities of the formation of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after the reform of the electoral law and the establishment of a mixed electoral system in Japan in 1994. The author identifies the miscalculations of the DPJ's activities during the period of its stay in power, in particular, the causes and peculiarities of the development of centrifugal tendencies in the Democratic Party since 2017. The key factors of the success of the right-wing populist "Japan Reform Party" in the 2012 House of Representatives elections are outlined. It is concluded that one of the main reasons for the divergence in the political programs of the leading parties is the attitude to the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution. Based on the analysis of the results of the elections to the lower house of parliament in 2017 and 2021, and to the upper house of parliament in 2019 and 2022, the election manifestos of the main political forces are characterized. Attention is focused on the phenomenon of the electoral coalition, which was formed by the left-wing opposition forces. The author concludes that the modern Japanese opposition is characterized by the absence of any basis for cooperation between the right and left poles of the opposition forces. The author outlines, on the one hand, the prospects for the potential formation of a temporary coalition between the ruling bloc and the right-wing opposition center to pass certain bills, including constitutional amendments, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of consolidating the left-wing center of the opposition in the near future. Key words: party system, party, elections, opposition party, right-wing populism.

A Robust Residual Shrinkage Balanced Network for Image Recognition from Japanese Historical Documents

Kuzushiji, as characters written in a cursive style, had been continuously used for both publishing and handwriting in Japan before the end of the 19th century. However, well into the twentieth century, most modern Japanese lost the ability to read Kuzushiji due to changes in writing systems. Therefore, how to develop advanced machine learning algorithms to identify Japanese historical characters has great significance in preserving cultural knowledge and promoting sustainable development in urban living. Unlike traditional digit image recognition, Kuzushiji image recognition is a more challenging task due to the complex script for cursive handwriting, multiple variations between characters, and imbalanced data. To address such issues, a novel deep learning‐based character recognition method called residual shrinkage balanced network (RSBN) is developed for classifying Japanese historical characters. A novel residual shrinkage structure with a soft threshold function is constructed to reduce redundant features using specially designed skip‐connected subnetworks. Then, multiple residual shrinkage modules are stacked together to learn hierarchical features from raw input. Furthermore, a novel class rebalancing strategy is further designed to improve learning performance from imbalanced data. The experiments are conducted on Japanese classical literature datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains more than 89.01% testing accuracy on Kuzushiji‐MNIST dataset, which outperforms the existing deep learning‐based character image recognition methods. Moreover, without additional data augmentation techniques, the proposed approach also achieves 97.16% balanced accuracy on Kuzushiji‐49 dataset, which is the best one compared with existing published results. When considering the computational performance, the number of trainable parameters of the proposed method is competitive with that of the typical ResNet‐18.

Discovering Women's Voices: The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words by Sandra Schaal (review)

Discovering Women's Voices: The Lives of Modern Japanese Silk Mill Workers in Their Own Words by Sandra Schaal (review)

Какой он — «японский Достоевский»? (XVIII Симпозиум Международного общества писателя)

At the end of August 2023, the XVIII Symposium of the International Dostoevsky Society (IDS), dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the novel Demons, was held at the Nagoya University of Foreign Studies (Japan). The symposium took place in Asia for the first time and found wide resonance in the academic world. Scholars from 17 different countries participated with papers at the forum, showing a variety of approaches to research Dostoevsky’s works and life and raising a wide range of research issues, such as: “Current questions of research in Dostoevsky’s studies,” “Demons in its time and 150 years later,” “Dostoevsky in the Arts (music, cinema, theater, painting)”. The organizers of the Symposium paid special attention to the perception of Dostoevsky in Asia and his influence on Asian culture and literature; a significant event of the Symposium was the round table “Dostoevsky and modern Japanese writers.” The article includes a review of the reports that revealed the image of a “Japanese Dostoevsky”: they were devoted to the analysis of translations of the writer’s works into Japanese, their intermedial transcriptions, new interpretations of Dostoevsky’s works by Japanese scholars representing different generations and academic schools. Attention is paid to the reports of Russian scholars, dedicated to current topics in Dostoevsky’s studies and new research methods to approach the writer’s work.

Two genre classification of Japanese literary works written by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa and Kenji Miyazawa based on word vectors

Word vectors are applied various tasks in natural language processing. However, the potentiality of the word vectors of Japanese has not been discussed as much as those of English. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to classify the genre of modern Japanese literary works using characteristic features evaluated by the word vectors. The accuracy of the classification between novels and poetic works was 95%, and the one between novels and essays was 90%. The word vectors are applicable in the genre classification problem in modern Japanese literary works.

In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920 by Marnie S. Anderson (review)

In Close Association: Local Activist Networks in the Making of Japanese Modernity, 1868–1920 by Marnie S. Anderson (review)

Victorian Humanity in Colonial Korea, Where Asians Did Not See Themselves as the Other

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond the imperial Japanese modernity that stigmatized them. I briefly review how Asian critics located in colonial Korea read Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I suggest that their findings included the idea of humanity as a liberal, autonomous self and an environmental subject, both of which challenge the Japanese imposition of modern citizenship named as hwang-gook-shin-min (皇國臣民). I argue that such a response to Victorian literature from a locational perspective not affected by the hierarchical binaries of race or empire suggests that we as contemporary Victorianists (located around the globe) consider “transimperial” solidarity to explore a connection with others outside our immediate national community regardless of racial difference. It also urges us to promote “planetarity” in our reading to embrace willful dislocation accepting heterogeneous locationalities against homogenizing globalization.

중국어와 일본어의 상대절 마커의 특성 및 관련 통사론적 문제에 관한 연구 - 언어 유형학의 관점에서 -

본 연구의 목적은 언어유형학의 시야에 있다 다음은 중국어 일본어 관계절의 표기 유형, 출현 위치 및 표기 기능의 유사점과 차이점을 비교하고 관계절의 표기에 따른 구문 및 의미론적 문제를 논의한다. 현대 일본어는 연체형을 관계절의 표기로 하고, 중국어는 구조조사 "의"로 한다. 일본어 관계절은 속격 등 명사 수식어의 표기와는 달리 언어 공통성에 더 부합하며, 중국어의 경우 명사·대명사·관계절에 상관없이 명사를 수식하기 위해 통일된 표기를 사용하는 경우는 흔치 않다. 관계절 표기의 기능과 관련하여 중·일 양 언어의 관계절 표기는 모두 중심어가 절 서술어에서 작용하는 구문 성분을 나타내는 데 사용할 수 없지만, 일본어 관계절 표기는 관계절 표기를 표시하는 것 외에도 시체를 나타내는 데 사용되며 중국어 관계절 표기의 기능은 비교적 단순하다. 중·일 양 언어 관계절 표기에도 공통성이 있다. 중국어·일본어의 관계절은 모두 중심어 앞에 위치하기 때문에 표기가 중심어와 관계절 서술어 사이의 구문 관계를 식별할 수 없기 때문에 관계절의 관할을 결정할 수 없고 동위 어절과 동일한 구조를 채택하는 등의 문제가 발생한다. The purpose of this study is to compare the similarities and differences between Chinese and Japanese relative clauses in terms of the types, positions and functions of markers, and to explore the syntactic and semantic issues arising from the markers of relative clauses in the context of linguistic typology. In modern Japanese, the marker of the relative clause is the conjunctive form, while in Chinese, it is the structural auxiliary "de". In Japanese, the marker for the relative clause is different from that for noun modifiers such as the genitive case, which is more in line with linguistic commonality; in Chinese, the marker "de" is used uniformly for nouns, pronouns, and relative clauses to modify nouns, which is not uncommon in such languages. In terms of the function of relative clause markers, both Chinese and Japanese relative clause markers cannot be used to indicate the syntactic component of the central clause in the subordinate predicate, but Japanese relative clause markers are used to indicate the tense and aspect in addition to the relative clause, while Chinese relative clause markers have a single function. There are also commonalities between Chinese and Japanese in relative clause markers. Since the markers are located in front of the central clause, they cannot identify the syntactic relationship between the central clause and the predicate of the relative clause, which makes it impossible to determine the domain of the relative clause and adopt the same structure as the appositive clause, etc.