Spirituality and religiosity have a significant impact on one's well-being. Although previous studies have indicated that the neuropeptide hormone oxytocin is associated with spirituality/religiosity, existing findings remain inconsistent. Some studies have reported a positive relationship between oxytocin and spirituality/religiosity, while other studies have reported a negative association. Herein, we examined the association between endogenous oxytocin and spirituality/religiosity in 200 non-Abrahamic Japanese individuals by measuring the level of salivary oxytocin and spiritual/religious faith. We found that the level of salivary oxytocin was (...) negatively associated with spiritual/religious faith. Individuals with higher levels of salivary oxytocin tend to have more negative spiritual/religious faith compared with those with low oxytocin levels. Moreover, this tendency was only significant in individuals who were not interested in a specific religion. The uniqueness of spirituality/religiosity in Japan could help interpret the current findings. (shrink)

In contemporary Japanese society, it is difficult to find a marriage partner, and therefore, “Konkatsu,” the search for a marriage partner, has become a socially accepted activity in Japan. In response to this social challenge, in addition to private companies, governments and non-profit organizations are supporting individuals in their search for a marriage partner. This paper reviews statistical information related to marriage hunting published in Japan. In addition, some of the authors’ collaborative activities and academic publications based on these activities (...) are reviewed. Subsequently, the paper discusses and highlights the importance of helping individuals have confidence in their physical attractiveness. (shrink)

This paper examines the question of how so-called indeterminate phrases in Japanese (Kuroda 1965) associate with relevant particles higher in the structure. In the universal construction in Japanese, the restrictor (provided by an indeterminate phrase) sometimes appears to be separate from the universal particle mo. It is proposed that quantification at a distance is only apparent, and that the restriction is in fact provided locally by the sister constituent of mo as a whole. The proposal leads us to a straightforward (...) uniform picture of the syntax-semantics mapping of the universal construction and wh-questions, building upon Hamblin’s (1973) semantics for wh-phrases as sets of alternatives. It allows for a switch of perspective on a long-standing puzzle regarding locality effects in the indeterminate–particle association by deriving the locality pattern from the way indeterminate phrases are interpreted and associated with particles, without any stipulations. (shrink)

Since 1993, coalition governments have replaced the 38-year-long, one-party dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP) in Japan. Except for one year, from 1993 to 1994, the LDP has remained a key party in successive governing coalitions, but the dynamics of party competition has been completely transformed since the period of the LDP's dominance. Although the LDP has survived to form a variety of coalitions ranging from a minority to an over-sized majority, since 1998 the Democratic Party of Japan (...) (DPJ) has continued to counter the LDP governments. The transformation of party systems in Japan accompanies the party switching of legislators and the mergers, breakups, extinctions, and formations of parties. In this regard, the Japanese case provides an interesting example to show how parties attempt to change the dynamics of policy competition by switching and reorganizing. Parties also attempt to shift their policy positions to attract public support and to gain a competitive edge in government formation. Using expert survey data about the policy positions of parties, this study explicates the dynamics involved in the reorganization of parties and the formation of governments. (shrink)

One prominent feature of belief is that a belief cannot be formed at will. This paper argues that the best explanation of this fact is that belief formation is a process that takes aim at the truth. Taking aim at the truth is to be understood as causal responsiveness of the processes constituting belief formation to what facilitates achieving true beliefs. The requirement for this responsiveness precludes the possibility of belief formation responding to intentions in a way that would count (...) as forming a belief at will. (shrink)

This paper looks at one area of potential crosslinguistic variation in comparatives. It has recently been claimed that Japanese clausal comparatives lack degree abstraction structures in the complement of yori ‘than’. Based on data from several empirical domains such as predicative adjectival comparatives, intensional contexts, and negative islands, this paper shows that Japanese clausal comparatives do not in general contrast with their English counterparts in the way predicted by the above claim. The syntactic and semantic phenomena observed in Japanese clausal (...) comparatives receive straightforward accounts if we assume that they do involve degree abstraction and degree comparison, along the lines familiar from analyses of their English counterparts. (shrink)

「権利」概念に対する「義務」、「人格主義」に対する「非人格」を基盤にした思考など、近代的人間観の矛盾を根底的に問うたヴェイユの思想と核心とその現代的意義を鮮やかに示す気鋭の野心作。第5回「河上肇賞」本 賞受賞作。.

This paper describes an automatic monitoring system that constantly checks partial update in Web pages and notifies them to a user. While one of the most important advantages of the WWW is update of Web pages, we need to constantly check them out and this task takes much cognitive load. Thus applications to automatically check update of Web pages have been developed, however they can not deal with partial update like update in a particular cell in a table in a (...) Web page. Hence we developed a automatic monitoring system that checks such partial update. A user can give a system regions in which he/she wants to know the update in a Web page as training examples, and it is able to learn rules to identify the partial update by classification learning. By this learning, a user do not need to directly describe the rules. We implemented our system and some executed examples were presented. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an organization method of page information agents for adaptive interface between a user and a Web search engine. Though a Web search engine indicates a hit list of Web pages to user’s query using a large database, they includes many useless ones. Thus a user has to select useful Web pages from them with page information indicated on the hit list, and actually fetch the Web page for investigating the relevance. Unfortunately, since the page information (...) on a hit list is neither sufficient nor necessary for a user, the adequate information is necessary for valid selection. However which information is adequate depends on a user and a task. Hence we propose adaptive interface AOAI in which different page information agents are organized through man-machine interaction. In AOAI, the page information agents indicating different page information on a hit list like the file-size, network traffic and a page title are prepared at first. A user evaluates them through searching with a search engine, and the agents are organized based on the evaluation. As results, different organizations are achieved depending on a user and a task. Finally we make experiments with subjects and find out AOAI is promising for adaptive interface between a user and a search engine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 50-58 [Access article in PDF] Evolution in Qualitative Factors Used to Evaluate Japanese Students [Tables] Introduction Two basic viewpoints are typically taken in the evaluation of achievement in Japanese schools: either the focus is primarily on "field-content-basedevaluation" or on "ability-concept-based evaluation." I have compared the qualitative factors encompassed by these two viewpoints as reflected in the permanent school records of Japanese students. (...) These recordsinclude classes taken, grades earned, and school-related information. Kanten (in Japanese) has become a key word in the evaluation of academic achievement in Japan. It represents the qualitative factors that should be considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements. In this essay, I review how these qualitative factors have evolved, both for general subjects and for fine arts.From the beginning of the educational system (1872) to 1938, the "assessment" [Hyoutei] of a student depended on the comprehensiveness of the student's achievement in each subject. (Overall assessments are now usually made using a three-point scale; 1-3, a five-point scale; 1-5, or an ABC scale.) However, it was not clearly specified how scholastic ability and learning accomplishment should be assessed or which qualitative factors should be considered.Starting in 1941, teachers were required to evaluate, comprehensively assess, and record the student's learning, consideration, dealing, application, skill, appreciation, practice, and learning attitude through his or her daily learning and activity. 1 The factors seem to be basically equivalent to those recently used as "interest/aspiration/attitude," "thinking," "judgment," [End Page 50] and "expressive power." After 1941, the point of view in the area of fine arts gradually changed from focusing on the "field-content-based factor" to the "ability-concept-based factor" in both the educational content and in evaluation.This report focuses on the evolution in the qualitative factors used in evaluations in the postwar era. From 1949 to 1991 "Understanding," "attitude," and "skill" were specified as factors that shouldbe considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements in 1949. For a few years, these factors were considered independently in the non-referenced evaluation of five-point ratings. The two basic viewpoints, "field-content-based factor" and "ability-concept-based factor," coexisted in the course of study in the early 1950s, according to a tentative plan published in 1951. "Attitude" and "habits" carried the same weight as "understanding" and "skill." These factors received minimal attention at the elementary school level. Evaluations thus evolved from simply an overall assessment of the student's achievement in a subject to an assessment of these specific factors. For instance, at the elementary school level, drawing and handicrafts both had factors related to "field content difference" (for example, drawing, color, and pattern) and to "ability concept difference" (for example, attitude and habit). At the junior high level, the factors were represented by a double-layer structure (Table 1). The elements underlined in Table 1 reflect on the "ability concept difference" (for example, expression activities and understanding activities) instead on the "field content difference." Following the revision of the permanent cumulative records in 1955, students were evaluated based only on an overall assessment of their individual [End Page 51] performance in each subject (Japanese language, mathematics, social studies, music, and drawing and handicrafts). There were three main reasons for this change.The effort it takes to evaluate each factor analytically. The difficulty of evaluating "attitude." The demand by schools at the next level for a comprehensive and uniform evaluation for each student for each subject. 3Furthermore, although "interest" was added as one of factors to be considered in the evaluation, it was not to be dealt with analytically in the evaluation of what the student learned. Consequently, evaluations became clearer and more comprehensive, although the weights of the factors, referred to as the "affective domain," took a step backward. In 1961, the factor "interest/attitude toward fine arts" was added. At the same time, "interest" was given more weight. However, the higher weighting of the factor was short-lived because intangible factors such as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 50-58 [Access article in PDF] Evolution in Qualitative Factors Used to Evaluate Japanese Students [Tables] Introduction Two basic viewpoints are typically taken in the evaluation of achievement in Japanese schools: either the focus is primarily on "field-content-basedevaluation" or on "ability-concept-based evaluation." I have compared the qualitative factors encompassed by these two viewpoints as reflected in the permanent school records of Japanese students. (...) These recordsinclude classes taken, grades earned, and school-related information. Kanten (in Japanese) has become a key word in the evaluation of academic achievement in Japan. It represents the qualitative factors that should be considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements. In this essay, I review how these qualitative factors have evolved, both for general subjects and for fine arts.From the beginning of the educational system (1872) to 1938, the "assessment" [Hyoutei] of a student depended on the comprehensiveness of the student's achievement in each subject. (Overall assessments are now usually made using a three-point scale; 1-3, a five-point scale; 1-5, or an ABC scale.) However, it was not clearly specified how scholastic ability and learning accomplishment should be assessed or which qualitative factors should be considered.Starting in 1941, teachers were required to evaluate, comprehensively assess, and record the student's learning, consideration, dealing, application, skill, appreciation, practice, and learning attitude through his or her daily learning and activity. 1 The factors seem to be basically equivalent to those recently used as "interest/aspiration/attitude," "thinking," "judgment," [End Page 50] and "expressive power." After 1941, the point of view in the area of fine arts gradually changed from focusing on the "field-content-based factor" to the "ability-concept-based factor" in both the educational content and in evaluation.This report focuses on the evolution in the qualitative factors used in evaluations in the postwar era. From 1949 to 1991 "Understanding," "attitude," and "skill" were specified as factors that shouldbe considered when evaluating a student's learning achievements in 1949. For a few years, these factors were considered independently in the non-referenced evaluation of five-point ratings. The two basic viewpoints, "field-content-based factor" and "ability-concept-based factor," coexisted in the course of study in the early 1950s, according to a tentative plan published in 1951. "Attitude" and "habits" carried the same weight as "understanding" and "skill." These factors received minimal attention at the elementary school level. Evaluations thus evolved from simply an overall assessment of the student's achievement in a subject to an assessment of these specific factors. For instance, at the elementary school level, drawing and handicrafts both had factors related to "field content difference" (for example, drawing, color, and pattern) and to "ability concept difference" (for example, attitude and habit). At the junior high level, the factors were represented by a double-layer structure (Table 1). The elements underlined in Table 1 reflect on the "ability concept difference" (for example, expression activities and understanding activities) instead on the "field content difference." Following the revision of the permanent cumulative records in 1955, students were evaluated based only on an overall assessment of their individual [End Page 51] performance in each subject (Japanese language, mathematics, social studies, music, and drawing and handicrafts). There were three main reasons for this change.The effort it takes to evaluate each factor analytically. The difficulty of evaluating "attitude." The demand by schools at the next level for a comprehensive and uniform evaluation for each student for each subject. 3Furthermore, although "interest" was added as one of factors to be considered in the evaluation, it was not to be dealt with analytically in the evaluation of what the student learned. Consequently, evaluations became clearer and more comprehensive, although the weights of the factors, referred to as the "affective domain," took a step backward. In 1961, the factor "interest/attitude toward fine arts" was added. At the same time, "interest" was given more weight. However, the higher weighting of the factor was short-lived because intangible factors such as... (shrink)

This paper presents the first dataset for Japanese Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP), the Japanese Tort-case Dataset (JTD), which features two tasks: tort prediction and its rationale extraction. The rationale extraction task identifies the court’s accepting arguments from alleged arguments by plaintiffs and defendants, which is a novel task in the field. JTD is constructed based on annotated 3477 Japanese Civil Code judgments by 41 legal experts, resulting in 7978 instances with 59,697 of their alleged arguments from the involved parties. Our (...) baseline experiments show the feasibility of the proposed two tasks, and our error analysis by legal experts identifies sources of errors and suggests future directions of the LJP research. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of the latest in a series of expert surveys of party policy positions in Japan and considers some of the implications of these results for our understanding of party competition and government formation in recent Japanese politics.

生命倫理、環境倫理などの諸問題に目を据えながら、さらに「真に人間として生きることはいかなることであろうか」という私たちにとって永遠の究極的な問題に迫る。現在、世界的に見れば、飢えと戦乱に苦しむ地域もあ るのに、日本では、物質的な豊かさに溢れ、経済的効率性に社会が支配されている。その中に見失われた人間性の取り戻しこそ、いま、何よりも必要なことである。内面的な豊かさとしての生の充実を求めて、改めて、自己 自身に対して、意識を深く向けなおすべき時であろう。.

This book contains a detailed description of philosophical trends in Japan since 1868, with a chronological table of relevant Japanese publications and an index of names.

The present study investigates the ways in which Japanese speakers negotiate their opinions in conversational interaction. On the one hand, speakers are apt to exaggerate a particular aspect of a given issue in asserting their opinion, on the other hand, they may also incorporate a self-qualification admitting a potential problem in their claim. By expressing their awareness of the problem before it is pointed out by the co-participants, the speakers seem to get license to proffer an exaggerated or overgeneralized claim (...) and to increase their chance of receiving an affiliative response. This study explicates the mechanism through which such a self-qualifying clause emerges in the development of opinion-negotiation sequences. Further, as a contribution to a growing body of research on "interaction and grammar" (Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson, 1996), this study explores the use of "contrastive" markers, -kedo and demo, in constructing turns and sequences in opinion-negotiation. The data demonstrate these two structurally different types of markers play distinct roles in differentiating and yet conjoining the speakers' assertion and self-qualification. (shrink)

Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We conducted two experiments to test whether this difference would be observed in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, preschoolers in France and in Japan were asked to identify (...) with either a dominant or a subordinate. French preschoolers identified with the dominant, but Japanese preschoolers were at chance. Experiment 2 revealed that Japanese preschoolers were more likely to believe a subordinate than a dominant individual, both compared to chance and compared to previous findings among French preschoolers. The convergent results from both experiments thus reveal an early emerging cross-cultural difference in the valuing of dominance. (shrink)

This collection of essays analyzes relations of social inequality that appear to be logical extensions of a "natural order," and in the process demonstrates that a revitalized feminist anthropology of the 1990s has much to offer the field of feminist theory. Fashioned as a response to the lack of cultural analysis in feminist scholarship, the contributors question the category of gender within the inclusive context of the structural dynamics of inequality. They also examine how cultural identities, domains and institutions affect (...) our perception of gender in society. The first selection of essays addresses how ideas of family and kinship have fostered society's hierarchies and legitimized the status quo. In part two, the essays show how several dimensions of inequality are implicit in the construction of identities that are based upon ideas of social solidarity. Contributors: Susan McKinnon, University of Virginia; Kath Weston, Arizona State West; Rayna Rapp, New School for Social Research; Janet Dolgin, Hofstra University; Harriet Whitehead, Duke University; Carol Delaney, Stanford University; Brackette Williams, University of Arizona; Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford University; Phyllis Chock, Catholic University; Sherry Ortner, University of Michigan; Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz. (shrink)

Prior's three-valued modal logic Q was developed as a philosophically interesting modal logic. Thus, we should be able to modify Q as a temporal logic. Although a temporal version of Q was suggested by Prior, the subject has not been fully explored in the literature. In this paper, we develop a three-valued temporal logic $Q_t $ and give its axiomatization and semantics. We also argue that $Q_t $ provides a smooth solution to the problem of future contingents.

This paper discusses a way to create social innovation around 2040. With such innovation, social restrictions that are regarded as being inevitable in the current society can be eliminated. First, it is necessary to determine how to approach the innovation. Symbiotic technology is one of the promising technologies for achieving social innovation. It is the fusion of scientific technology and socio-technology. Its elemental technologies are classified into two categories: technologies for converging the real and cyber worlds and those for integrating (...) hetero-systems. This paper describes examples of those technical categories and introduces the challenges of the first step toward social innovation. (shrink)

This paper presents what the authors call the ‘divergence problem’ regarding choosing between different future possibilities. As is discussed in the first half, the central issue of the problem is the difficulty of temporally locating the ‘active cause’ on the modal divergent diagram. In the second half of this paper, we discuss the ‘second-person freedom’ which is, strictly, neither compatibilist negative freedom nor incompatibilist positive freedom. The divergence problem leads us to two hypothetical views (i.e. the view of single-line determination (...) and that of one-off chance), and these views bring humans closer to the afree side – i.e. outside of the contrast between being free and being unfree. The afree side is greatly different from the ordinary human side. This paper tries to secure the second-person freedom as a substitute for the ordinary human freedom while preventing the divergence problem from arising. (shrink)

Anthropomorphic agents used in online-shopping need to be trusted by users so that users feel comfortable buying products. In this paper, we propose a model for designing trustworthy agents by assuming two factors of trust, that is, emotion and knowledgeableness perceived. Our hypothesis is that when a user feels happy and perceives an agent as being highly knowledgeable, a high level of trust results between the user and agent. We conducted four experiments with participants to verify this hypothesis by preparing (...) transition operators utilizing emotional contagion and knowledgeable utterances. As a result, we verified that users' internal states transitioned as expected and that the two factors significantly influenced their trust states. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a Future View system that assists user's usual Web browsing. The Future View will prefetch Web pages based on user's browsing strategies and present them to a user in order to assist Web browsing. To learn user's browsing strategy, the Future View uses two types of learning classifier systems: a content-based classifier system for contents change patterns and an action-based classifier system for user's action patterns. The results of learning is applied to crawling by Web (...) robots, and the gathered Web pages are presented to a user through a Web browser interface. We experimentally show effectiveness of navigation using the Future View. (shrink)

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects (...) upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”. (shrink)

Occupational therapy often uses craft activities as therapeutic tools, but their therapeutic effectiveness has not yet been adequately demonstrated. The aim of this study was to examine changes in frontal midline theta rhythm and autonomic nervous responses during craft activities, and to explore the physiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effectiveness of occupational therapy. To achieve this, we employed a simple craft activity as a task to induce Fmθ and performed simultaneous EEG and ECG recordings. For participants in which Fmθ activities (...) were provoked, parasympathetic and sympathetic activities were evaluated during the appearance of Fmθ and rest periods using the Lorenz plot analysis. Both parasympathetic and sympathetic indices increased with the appearance of Fmθ compared to during resting periods. This suggests that a relaxed-concentration state is achieved by concentrating on craft activities. Furthermore, the appearance of Fmθ positively correlated with parasympathetic activity, and theta band activity in the frontal area were associated with sympathetic activity. This suggests that there is a close relationship between cardiac autonomic function and Fmθ activity. (shrink)