Japanese View Research Articles

The Great Earthquake Disaster and the Japanese View of Nature

The Great Earthquake Disaster and the Japanese View of Nature

Language Difficulties in kyosei (‘living together’) of Japanese and Foreigners

This paper focuses on language difficulties in the co-existence of the Japanese and foreigners in Japan. Language is without doubt one of the most important factors in how successfully locals and foreigners live together. The author demonstrates the difficulty of co-existence when foreigners lack Japanese language competence in two areas, housing and medical services. Most publications on co-existence base their arguments on how the Japanese view the issues or how they behave in this area. This paper takes up foreigners’ views, thus examining the issues from an outsider’s perspective.

A blunt Japanese view of Poland’s socialist-era managers

A blunt Japanese view of Poland’s socialist-era managers

A Discursive History of Hawai`i as Paradise in Japanese Cinema: Whose Dreamland Is It and What End Does the Dream Serve?

Hawai`i occupies a special place in the imaginations of Japanese people. Ever since the end of World War II, Japanese media have portrayed Hawai`i as a paradisical dreamland. This does not mean the cultural meanings attributed to Hawai`i have remained constant over the past 70 years. Both the notion of ‘paradise’ and the content of the Hawaiian ‘dream’ have transformed along with changing socio-economic conditions and ideas about how Japanese people view themselves in relation to the outside world. This article examines Japanese films from the early postwar period to the present that portray Hawai`i as a ‘paradise’ in which ‘adoration’ and ‘yearning’ play out and ‘dreams’ are fulfilled. These cinematic discourses of ‘paradise’ and ‘dream’ first portrayed Japanese individuals as modern, wealthy national subjects during the postwar economic boom period that ended in the 1980s. In response to changing socio-economic conditions in the early twenty-first century, the dream of Hawai`i came to represent a more relaxed paradise and Japanese individuals were shown embracing an alternative ‘local’ lifestyle.

CardioPulse Articles.

CardioPulse Articles.

Japanese Perspectives on "Global History"

The author stresses delicate but important differences of meaning between "global history" in English and its Japanized form "gurobaru hisutori." After explaining the specific path of Japanese historiography on world history from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, he points out important features of contemporary Japanese view on world history and discusses its merits and demerits. Finally, he underlines the potential of various contributions by Japanese historians who have a particular background and joined the discussion on global history in the world through a different path.

International Commercial Arbitration – The Japanese View

International Commercial Arbitration – The Japanese View

Japanese learners' point of view on learning management system

This study examines Japanese students' views on LMS in different educational settings. Based on a year-long empirical data and the study of their use of LMS, this study examines how students perceive the use of LMS in instructor-directed and non-instructor-directed educational contexts. Although this study was exploratory and was conducted upon only 48 students, the LMS may not serve as an alternative instructor and therefore new methodologies for diverse users of LMS should be developed. In order to encourage students to make the maximum use of LMSs, the focus should be on shifting from traditional teacher-centred classrooms to learner-oriented environments. It is important to develop approaches which give more control to students based on their own individual learning preferences and needs. This study created an opportunity for those who are involved with e-learning, to ensure how to instruct students in LMS.

Defining Minimalism and designing Museum with the Approach of Minimalism

Hearing the word “museum” most of us imagine a magnificent luxurious building which embodies human civilization remnants and with its stunning beauty evokes the feelings of pride and humiliation. But if one attends physically or virtually in world's modern museums, he will confront with a scene completely different with his mental image. It can be said that simplicity in minimal art was started by Russian artists after the great revolution of Russia who were formalist and structuralist and oriented summarizing and geometric forms. Minimalism is the last major modernist movement. And everything happened after that is known post-modernism. In architecture and generally in design minimalism was influenced by Japanese architectures and artists, since this approach to design was completely in accordance with Japanese traditional view point. This article studies minimalism, museum, and museum generals and definitions and analyzes national and foreign samples.

日本人の富士山観の変遷と現代の富士山観

This study clarifies contemporary perceptions of Mount Fuji on the basis of the sensibilities of the Japanese people, who are influenced greatly by subjective and sentimental ways of viewing landscapes. Over the course of history, the way in which the Japanese have perceived Mount Fuji has changed due to experiences in each successive era, whether these have been natural disasters that accompanied eruptions, the shifting vista of Mount Fuji as seen from moving political capitals, or the development of mountain-climbing routes; in other words, reflecting of subjective factors such as individuals' perceptions of nature and culture within the context of such experiences. This study is a quantitative analysis based on a questionnaire survey of contemporary Japanese perceptions of Mount Fuji following its registration on the UNESCO World Heritage List. From the results of the analysis, when considering the way Mount Fuji is perceived from the Japanese sense of landscape, a comparison with ways Mount Fuji was perceived in the past indicates the following: while some aspects of contemporary perception of Mount Fuji have been inherited from a past that reflects underlying Japanese views of nature and culture, there are also newer aspects that have originated from a more recent overall national experience of the movement for World Heritage registration and the social background revealed in media coverage following registration. However, no significant differences are found as to whether individual respondents' had ever climbed to the summit or lived in a region where Mount Fuji is visible. This appears to be a result of increased exposure to various of information on Mount Fuji in the mass media, which have provided supplementary information to citizens living far away or who have no personal experience of Mount Fuji. This can be said to have formed a unified national view of Mount Fuji.

Australia and Japan's Admission into the Colombo Plan

In October 1954 Japan was admitted to the Colombo Plan as a donor country with Australia's sponsorship. The dramatic shift in Australia's position on Japan's involvement in the Colombo Plan, from strong opposition to sponsorship, was recognised by the Japanese government as the first Australian initiative to improve the bilateral relationship since the resumption of diplomatic relations in April 1952. This article examines Japan's attempts to participate in the Colombo Plan and considers how Australia's actions and reactions determined the course of events. The episode provides an insight into how Australian diplomacy was conducted towards Japan and the Japanese view of its relations with Australia at the initial stage of the bilateral relationship.

Kusunoki Masashige’s Chilsangmyeoljeok and Japanese view on life and death

Kusunoki Masashige’s Chilsangmyeoljeok and Japanese view on life and death

Identity and recognition: remembering and forgetting the post-war in Sino-Japanese relations

In the 1990s, Japanese views of China were relatively positive. In the 2000s, however, views of China have deteriorated markedly and China has increasingly come to be seen as ‘anti-Japanese’. How can these developments, which took place despite increased economic interdependence, be understood? One seemingly obvious explanation is the occurrence of ‘anti-Japanese’ incidents in China since the mid-2000s. I suggest that these incidents per se do not fully explain the puzzle. Protests against other countries occasionally occur and may influence public opinion. Nonetheless, the interpretation of such events arguably determines their significance. Demonstrations may be seen as legitimate or spontaneous. If understood as denying recognition of an actor's self-identity, the causes of such incidents are likely to have considerably deeper and more severe consequences than what would otherwise be the case. Through an analysis of Japanese parliamentary debates and newspaper editorials, the paper demonstrates that the Chinese government has come to be seen as denying Japan's self-identity as a peaceful state that has provided China with substantial amounts of official development aid (ODA) during the post-war era. This is mainly because China teaches patriotic education, which is viewed as the root cause of ‘anti-Japanese’ incidents. China, then, is not regarded as ‘anti-Japanese’ merely because of protests against Japan and attacks on Japanese material interests but for denying a key component of Japan's self-image. Moreover, the analysis shows that explicit Chinese statements recognising Japan's self-identity have been highly praised in Japan. The article concludes that if China recognises Japan's self-understanding of its identity as peaceful, Japan is more likely to stick to this identity and act accordingly whereas Chinese denials of it might empower Japanese actors who seek to move away from this identity and ‘normalise’ Japan, for example, by revising the pacifist Article Nine of the Japanese constitution.

Limitations on the Legal Interpretation of Japanese Tax Laws

Japanese legal interpretation of tax statutes and administrative ordinances thereunder has some unique legal characteristics when compared with the interpretative methodologies of other countries. In this article, some of these traditional and new methodologies are analyzed with reference to the main Japanese academic views in this field. The following is a list of possible legal sources for tax law interpretation: (1) the Constitution, (2) tax statutes themselves, in which tax wordings that are also used under statutes of other legal fields should follow the legal interpretation in those other fields, (3) judicial decisions and legal doctrines derived from judicial decisions including decisions in non-tax cases, (4) administrative interpretative circulars, although these have limited binding power only within administrations, (5) determinations of the National Tax Tribunal, for national tax matters, and (6) academic/theoretical doctrines and principles, as academic observations of tax laws sometimes influence legal interpretation. In this article, there are methodologies for the interpretation of some subject, like interpretation of constitutional validity, constitutional interpretation or statutory interpretation, difference between the two institutions, relevance to the Korean legal system. Japanese methodology for tax law interpretation follows basic methodologies for the legal interpretation of other laws. However, to control tax avoidance and abusive tax shelter issues, certain levels of discussion of substance over form are accepted by the courts, although there is an unclear line of limitation for the application of such judicial doctrine in tax practice.

In and out of space: identity and architectural history in Korea and Japan

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the architectural history of Korea was born with the colonial surveys and texts of the first architectural historians of Japan. These narratives, following the Japanese imperial view of world civilisation, became the basis of the simultaneous restoration and destruction of Korean architecture. After the Second World War, the historical ground of architectural history changed for both Korea and Japan. The idea of space, adopted from Western sources, was the key to these transformations. Driven by the nationalistic policies of the 1960s, architectural history in Korea re-emerged carrying both the burdens of colonialism and the possibilities of new spatial discourses. The most important Korean text in the emergence of a spatial subject is Ahn Young Bae's Exterior Space in Korean Architecture (1978), a work that parallels Ashihara Yoshinobu's Exterior Design in Architecture (1962). While Ashihara's Gestalt project maintained a stable relationship between subject and object, Ahn brought an anxious subject into the site through the constantly moving camera. In Ahn's proto-phenomenological project, the historical disruptions of the site were simultaneously acknowledged and stabilised by the identity of the Korean subject and its architectural spaces.

Sporting disability: official representations of the disabled athlete at Tokyo's 1964 Paralympics

Since the late nineteenth century, when sports emerged as a central component of efforts to modernize Japan, officials, intellectuals and athletes have used sports to articulate and enact their visions of Japanese bodies. Yet it was only during the post-World War II era, as Japan became involved in the emerging Paralympic Movement, that societal understandings of the sporting body expanded to include athletes with physical disabilities. The 1964 Tokyo Paralympics, the first international sporting event for disabled athletes held in Japan and the first Paralympics outside Europe, critically shaped Japanese views of disabled athletes. Focusing on official representations of disability in formal reports, a documentary film and the writings of Paralympic promoters, this article examines how these Games in many ways reinforced pre-existing medicalized views of the disabled body. At the same time, I argue that disability advocates and Paralympic athletes took advantage of the prominence of the Tokyo Paralympics...

Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, edited by Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon

Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, edited by Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2012. xvi, 472 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). This volume addresses the major issues stalking Sino-Japanese relations by showcasing history as process: not only do events unfold with different meanings to different observers but the writing of history itself occurs amid shifting and diverging contexts. While historians are trained to be aware of this reality, the contributors to this volume are reaching out to larger audiences by showing that Chinese and Japanese views of themselves and each other in the long twentieth century have typically suited particular needs and circumstances, including the intellectual trends generally accepted at particular times in their own societies. In the case of Sino-Japanese relations making this point is hardly banal--because it is fundamental it represents perhaps a hopeful starting point that may point to a way past current imbroglios. The volume itself is the product of a changed international context. Continuing tensions since the end of the Cold War have prodded academics and government officials alike to promote public discussion of historical issues as a means of diffusing Sino-Japanese and other regional frictions. The result has been a growing list of publications (some available online) that, including this volume, have been published in Chinese and Japanese as well as English. This collection thus represents not only how a new generation of scholars explores contentious matters but also how that generation endeavours to alter how these issues are broadly perceived. Despite the imbalance, apparent among the contributors to this collection--most are Japanese or at Japanese institutions this is potentially important work. As one latecomer to the project observed, the authors were empirical and engaged in dialogue, not in exchanging polemics. This is certainly a promising sign, even if one of the editors suggests rather modestly that the volume may be read as both a progress report and a case study of the effort to overcome as yet un-mastered issues of history in East Asia (p. 4). The first three contributions explore Sino-Japanese relations between the establishment of relations in 1871 and the Manchurian Incident of 1931 by dividing this era into three periods: the latter half of the nineteenth century, that extending from the first Sino-Japanese War to the Twenty-One Demands, and to the Manchurian Incident. The chapters trace the shifts in diplomatic perspectives apparent among Chinese and Japanese within each period relying chiefly on Japanese materials but sometimes Chinese or Korean, some of which are appended in English translation. (All of the volume's chapters include relevant documents in translation, some of which are not available elsewhere in English.) In pointing out how historical incidents appeared differently to historical actors, these chapters reveal some of the roots of historical misunderstanding between China and Japan. …

The Organisation and the Recontextualization of Rika (School Science) Education in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century in Japan

In this paper, the author considers the organisation and the recontextualization of Rika (School Science) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Japan. In considering developments, the author set up analyses points based on curriculum politics and concluded that the organisation and the recontextualization of Rika occurred between the 1870s and 1880s during the Meiji era. Consequently, Rika was socially constructed, being the product of a compromise made by particular groups and persons, under the Ministry of Education. The objective of Rika in elementary schools has been characterised as being in the affective domain ‘a love of nature’ which is based on the Japanese view of nature which has differed from the West since the establishment of Rika.

Japanese Women's Views on Penile Hygiene and Male Circumcision

ABSTRACT. Current campaigns to promote male circumcision to reduce the risk for HIV infection among heterosexual men do not seem to apply to Japan because the majority of men are uncircumcised and HIV/AIDS rates remain comparatively lower among industrialized countries. No official statistics on male circumcision exist; the surgery has never been mandatory for infants and it is rare among adults, who are largely circumcised at beauty salons. The procedure is largely commercialized as a cosmetic surgery to boost maleness and to “satisfy” the sexual desires of Japanese women. In this light, this article discusses the outcomes of semistructured interviews with 13 single Japanese women to explore their views on circumcision, penile hygiene, and sexuality. The analysis indicates a reluctance to talk about male circumcision among the participants due to ignorance, language availability, and gender matters. Intriguingly, the participants suggested that expressions related to the foreskin implied derogatory comments toward male's sexual performance and genital sizes.

Idea of the Soul in the Japanese and Russian Lingvocultures

The article is devoted to the comparison of Japanese and Russian idea of soul. It touches upon the subject of the place of this concept in the system of values of Japanese and Russian. The author gives a number of arguments for the fact that there is some similarity between Japanese and Russian views on the soul.