This essay examines the political implications of Edo (present-day Tokyo) popular culture in early modern Japan by focusing on the interface between distinct forms of literary and visual representation and the configuration of social order (the status hierarchy and the division of labor), as well as moral and ideological discourses that were conducive to the reproduction of the order. Central to the forms of representation in Edo popular culture was the overarching literary and artistic principle, which I call a phrase (...) adapted from M.M. Bakhtin's work on Fyodor Dostoevsky. By creating a dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives, Edo popular culture created pluralized, contentious images of Tokugawa society, images that underlined contradictory realities that had become widely discernible around the turn of the eighteenth century. The most salient of all the contradictions was the growing disjuncture between the ideological premise of social and economic hierarchies and their actual reversals. The dialogic imagination captured and accentuated the fluid and dynamic social interactions that threw the formal arrangements of social order into disarray, as well as the widely perceived tensions originating from these interactions, by supplying images that sharply contrasted with those that the Tokugawa authorities worked hard to foster and defend: of a harmonious, self-contained, and perfectly functioning society. (shrink)

We build a multiple hierarchical model of a representative democracy in which citizens elect ward representatives, ward representatives elect county representatives, county representatives elect state representatives, and state representatives elect a prime minister. We use our model to show that the policy determined by the final representative can become more extreme as the number of hierarchical levels increases as a result of increased opportunities for gerrymandering. Thus, a sufficiently large number of voters provide a district maker an advantage, enabling her (...) to implement her favorite policy. (shrink)

We propose an idea called ``ontology reuse'' to develop ontology (or taxonomy) for information search more easily by its development cost reduction. For its feasibility demonstration, we developed a prototype system that converts taxonomy information of web contents to RDF format, collects it into a server and visualizes taxonomy infomation as a 2D map for editing itself and searching information. And our goal is to realize ``ontology circulation'', which means that ontology information flows freely and easily over the Internet and (...) an intranet. (shrink)

In The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1949), Nishitani Keiji provides a thoroughgoing questioning of the theme of nihilism in Japan. Yet, while the text contains a sharp and penetrating interpretation of Heidegger, it focuses on the early Heidegger, whose thinking had not yet ventured into the theme of nihilism. The relationship between Heidegger and Nishitani thus contains a certain “gap” that needs to be investigated. This study takes a cue from the appendix to the The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, “Nihilism and Existence (...) in Nietzsche,” in order to clarify the differences between Heidegger and Nishitani vis-à-vis Nietzsche’s nihilism. Through this process, we will come to know the difference in their positions on who is the “subject (主体)” of nihilism in terms of their interpretations of a constellation of Nietzsche’s key terms, such as “will to power,” “the eternal return of the same,” the “overman,” “amor fati,” and so forth. From there, we will further identify some of the issues involved in their particular understandings of nihilism, and present a perspective on “contemporary nihilism.” I argue that central to their differences is the status of “morals” in nihilism. (shrink)

For a tree T of its height equal to or less than ω1, we construct a space XT by attaching a circle to each node and connecting each node to its successors by intervals. is the Hawaiian earring and H1T denotes a canonical factor of the first integral singular homology group. The following equivalences hold for an ω1-tree T: π1 is embeddable into π1, if and only if is embeddable into H1T, if and only if T is not an Aronzajn (...) tree. π1 is embeddable into if and only if H1T is embeddable into if and only if T is a special Aronzajn tree. π1 has a retract isomorphic to an uncountable free group, if and only if H1T has a summand isomorphic to an uncountable free abelian group, if and only if T has an uncountable anti-chain. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become indispensable in our lives. The development of a quantitative scale for AI ethics is necessary for a better understanding of public attitudes toward AI research ethics and to advance the discussion on using AI within society. For this study, we developed an AI ethics scale based on AI-specific scenarios. We investigated public attitudes toward AI ethics in Japan and the US using online questionnaires. We designed a test set using four dilemma scenarios and questionnaire items (...) based on a theoretical framework for ethics, legal, and social issues (ELSI). We found that _country_ and _age_ are the most informative sociodemographic categories for predicting attitudes for AI ethics. Our proposed scale, which consists of 13 questions, can be reduced to only three, covering ethics, tradition, and policies. This new AI ethics scale will help to quantify how AI research is accepted in society and which area of ELSI people are most concerned with. (shrink)