His book Some Japanese flowers of 1896. an original copy of which is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, features handcolored collotypes of flowers native to Japan, including the lotus, several varieties of chrysanthemum and lily ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music Teacher Education in Japan:Structure, Problems, and PerspectivesMasafumi OgawaSchool music education in Japan is in a less than ideal situation. In April 2002, the new course of study was implemented by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).1 The total number of music classes in the new curriculum was reduced to 33% of what it had been by the end of 2002. The reduction went from (...) two hours of music classes every week in grades one through nine to one hour in grades five through nine. This inevitably caused many problems. First, it became very difficult to teach music sequentially and instead music classes tended to be fragments of introductory experiences taught as disconnected activities. In this situation, it has been difficult for students to develop musical knowledge and skills. Second, the number of full-time music teachers was reduced greatly. It became common for a music teacher to teach at more than two schools in order to fill a full-time assignment. In some scenarios, many full-time music teachers were replaced with part-time teachers or teachers of other subjects. Music teachers have become disposable.Many music teachers are losing their effectiveness in the classroom. Students consider school music classes as a time to relax compared with other "intellectual subjects."2 They sometimes question music as an essential subject because they [End Page 139] do not value the developing skills that music requires or studying the theory of music. They believe that they can enjoy music outside of school anyway. Consequently, they are quite reluctant to participate in music classes and so behavioral problems arise and classroom management becomes more difficult. Some teachers attempt to force students to obey and force them to order; other teachers totally give up and let students behave as they like in class.3 In either case, teachers and students do not relate well to each other. It is not an exaggeration to say that school music in Japan is at risk of collapsing altogether and disappearing from the curriculum.One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that we have not wrestled with the fundamental problems of school music education until today. We might have intentionally avoided reviewing and criticizing the curriculum, expectations, and purposes of music education because it has been taboo to discuss the national standards, particularly for public school teachers to do so. Social and environmental conditions have changed greatly since the current system of Japanese education was established in 1947. It is obvious that the existing system does not match the new conditions.I strongly feel that it is time to review and reexamine what our pioneers of music education and the government had achieved in the field of music education. If we continue to avoid doing so, music in the schools will face serious consequences. In this paper, I discuss some of the fundamental issues of music teacher education in Japan. There are two reasons for focusing on music teacher education. First, starting with music teacher education is most important because music teachers have the most significant roles in school music education. Second, I have been engaged in music teacher education for seventeen years, and this is not only my research area but also an area in which, as an insider, I can offer direct insights. I will limit this essay to looking at the preparation of teachers in music for elementary and middle schools (grades 7 to 9).StructureThe course of study (COS) is a set of national curriculum standards for kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school, and schools for the handicapped and is issued by the MEXT.4 All schools, public or private, are required to follow these standards. No other curriculum is allowed. Therefore, in Japan, the COS is law through which the government controls all educational actions. The COS was first issued in 1947 and has been revised seven times.5 The most recent revision was announced in December 1998 for kindergarten, elementary, and middle schools, and in March 1999 for the other levels. All schools in Japan were required to implement the revised COS by April 2002. [End Page 140]The COS of... (shrink)

This essay retrieves the meaning and importance of renga, or linking poetry. Long forgotten, even in Japan, it was the form of which the great Bashō was the mater (not haiku as is now believed). When examining renga poetry, one can see that it is based not on authorial vision, but rather the trans-subjective mood that guides the different links made by the various poets who collaborate in the “rolling” of a renga. The radical implications of this form for both (...) aesthetics and ethics will be considered. (shrink)

Japan has been one of the nations where music education is not grounded on its own indigenous music. The universal slogan that school music education should be based on each country's own music has mainly remained unpracticed here. This essay is to clarify the exing questions raised by the above discussion--why Western music is still the core of public music education in Japan and how this came to be so. I then offer my views on the future of Japanese public (...) music education: how Japanese traditional music should be dealt with in school music education. The responsibility of Japanese music educators might be concerning this issue. (shrink)

The contemporary times are the era in which the natural sciences and technology are hyper-developed. Nowadays the future of mankind is not altogether filled with the light of hope. On the contrary the human beings are thrown into the difficult situations. What kind of critical situation is there in front of us then? Three points must be considered and inquired. 1) What is the recognition of the present condition? 2) From which does the critical situation arise? 3) On the base (...) of these two steps aforementioned, I would like to elucidate how it is possible for mankind to conquer and to overcome the crisis of human beings. A fundamental cause of this predicament is the concentrated will in the subjectivity and the voluntary constitution of the metaphysics since the Greek and Roman School of Stoic Philosophy and its successor, Descartes as its precursor. Therefore every one must achieve the self-negation of his own will not only for himself but also for the human society. (shrink)

Increasing psychophysical evidence suggests that specific image features - or statistics - can appear unpleasant or induce visual discomfort in humans. Such unpleasantness tends to be particularly profound if the image's amplitude spectrum deviates from the regular 1/f spatial-frequency falloff expected in natural scenes. Here, we show that profound unpleasant impressions also result if the orientation spectrum of the image becomes flatter. Using bandpass noise with variable orientation and spatial-frequency bandwidths, we found that unpleasantness ratings decreased with spatial- frequency bandwidth (...) but increased with orientation bandwidth. Similarly, a subsequent experiment revealed that sinusoidal modulations in the amplitude spectrum of 1/f noise along the spatial frequency increased unpleasantness, but modulations along the orientation decreased it. Given that natural scenes tend to have a linear slope along the spatial frequency but an uneven spectrum along the orientation dimension, our opposing results in the spatial-frequency and orientation domains commonly support the idea that images deviating from the spectral regularity of natural scenes can give rise to unpleasant impressions. (shrink)

Mādhyamikas argue that ultimate reality, which is without any delimitation and hence cannot be verbalized in itself, can be expressed in words on the basis of the attribution or superimposition of the basis for the application of the word. The denotation theory of ultimate reality Bhartṛhari advances in the Dravyasamuddeśa of his Vākyapadīya convincingly explains that, insofar as ultimate reality is spoken of, we must say that it is denoted by the word; ultimate reality is said to be ineffable only (...) in the sense that it is far from what is conveyed as something by the word; language is a pointer to the ultimate reality. The point that the application of a word to ultimate reality depends on the attribution of the basis for the application of the word to it naturally leads to an idea that one should not hypostatize the basis, although without resorting to it any word cannot be used to convey the ultimate reality; otherwise, it would have to be said that the ultimate reality to which the word is applied has in essence the property which serves as the basis. Such a property is precisely what the Mādhyamikas consider to be the svabhāva ‘intrinsic nature’. What they understand by the term śūnyatā is precisely that everything has no real basis for the application of the word to it. (shrink)

Previous studies have suggested that musical training in childhood is beneficial for sociability. However, it remains unclear how age of onset of group music lessons is associated with the late sociability of children from a long-term perspective. This study investigated associations between group music lessons conducted at a music school and children’s levels of sociability by focusing on the age of onset of the lessons. We conducted a survey of 276 children aged 4–5 years (M = 58.5 months) and 6–7 (...) years (M = 82.7 months) who commenced music lessons at ages 1, 2, 4, and 6 years. We found that (1) the empathy scores of children aged 6–7 years who began lessons when 1-year-old were greater than those who began lessons when 4-years-old, (2) the communication scores of children aged 4–5 years who began lessons when 1-year-old were greater than those who began lessons when older than 1 year, and (3) the empathy and extraversion scores were high in those aged 6–7 years who began lessons in that age range. The results suggest that early onset of music lessons could positively influence children’s sociability; in contrast, after about age 7 years, children who already had high sociability may be more inclined to select group music lessons. By focusing on the impact of regular group music lessons from a very young age on later levels of sociability, these results further elucidate the effects of musical lessons. In sum, participation in group music lessons 2–4 times per month can be effective social training for very young children and foster their later sociability. (shrink)

Philosophy is global, insofar as it is a relation of a human being towards its world and as such a thinking of the »betweenness«, of logos and of structure, as they disclose themselves in the relations between the Ego and the world, between the beginning and the end, between the Ego and the others. e theme of »the relational thinking« transcends boundedness to a particular cultural sphere. e transcendence is possible because of the insight into the identity of structures in (...) every culture, which is founded on the performance of a deliberation upon a repeated analysis of the most fundamental issues. e thinking of the relation is the heart of philosophy. (shrink)

東アジア共通の知の基盤を創った99人。日本・中国・韓国の3か国から各33名、近世の代表的思想家を紹介。単なる技術の学ではなく、儒学を基調として、自己修養や自然への畏敬など「心」を重んじる実心実学思想は 、東アジア世界の独自かつ共通の知的達成であった。近代以降を席巻した西洋の知的体系が大きな見直しを迫られるいま、東アジア独自の知の源泉を再認識する。.

Using a mixture of economic and demographic analysis, this book studies the changing patterns of family formation over the last twenty years.

Humans can pronounce a nonword. Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a sequential mechanism. Interestingly, the Japanese psycholinguistic literature went partly in the same direction, but it has since concluded that a sequential parsing mechanism is required to reproduce human nonword reading accuracy. In this study, by manipulating the (...) list composition, we demonstrated that past psycholinguistic studies in Japanese have overestimated human nonword reading accuracy. When the more fairly reevaluated human performance was targeted, a newly implemented Japanese PDP model simulated the target accuracy as well as the error patterns. These findings suggest that PDP models are a more parsimonious way of explaining reading across various languages. (shrink)

Though there has been an array of methods to evaluate the extent of sarcoidosis, it is generally difficult to detect central nervous system involvement. Recently it has become accepted that 18F-FDG PET is more sensitive than gallium scintigraphy in finding sarcoid lesions, however its usefulness and limitations for detecting sarcoidosis in the central nervous system, especially in the spinal cord, has rarely been investigated. Two patients with pathologically confirmed sarcoidosis manifested spinal symptoms. We conducted 18F-FDG PET along with conventional imagings (...) before and after treatment. Abnormal FDG uptakes which could not be detected by gallium scintigraphy were shown in the spinal cords in both patients. These abnormal uptakes were diminished in accordance with clinical improvement after treatment. Our findings suggest that 18F-FDG PET is effective in detecting and tracking the activity of spinal sarcoidosis. (shrink)

The topic of translation is in my view not only a linguistic problem, but also a problem in the philosophy of culture. In the lexicon of a foreign language we may find an unfamiliar word that designates an object that is unknown in the eyes of our own culture. Instruments employed in a religious ceremony of the Catholic church, for example, an “encensoir,”, “reposoir,”, or “ostensoir,” will have no corresponding word in the Japanese language. But you must translate words of (...) this type if you wish to translate Baudelaire’s poem “Harmonie du soir.” If these Catholic words are translated into Japanese, then we must use some traditional Japanese word as a rough equivalent of the original word, or we have to make up some new word in order to effect a translation. Through this, however, the single signans of the original word yields two meanings, since the new use of the old word or the new word must somehow carry the traditional meaning also. In the first case two meanings come to be involved, meanings derived from two different cultures. In the second case, the new word must somehow be explained in terms of Japanese, if it is to bear the new linguistic load. (shrink)

The generation of complex organ structures such as the eye requires the intricate orchestration of multiple cellular interactions. In this paper, early retinal development is discussed with respect to the structure formation of the optic cup. Although recent studies have elucidated molecular mechanisms of retinal differentiation, little is known about how the unique shape of the optic cup is determined. A recent report has demonstrated that optic‐cup morphogenesis spontaneously occurs in three‐dimensional stem‐cell culture without external forces, indicating a latent intrinsic (...) order to generate the structure. Based on this self‐organizing phenomenon, we introduce the “relaxation‐expansion” model to mechanically interpret the tissue dynamics that enable the spontaneous invagination of the neural retina. This model involves three consecutive local rules (relaxation, apical constriction, and expansion), and its computer simulation recapitulates the optic‐cup morphogenesis in silico. (shrink)

越後長岡藩の知られざる逸材、藩儒・秋山景山に焦点を結び、文武にわたって藩政改革を担った藩儒の存在と歴史の実相を描く。.

ベストセラー『7日間で突然頭がよくなる本』の著者による、はじめてのニッポン論。古代の神話や仏教、儒学、武士道から国学、さらには福澤諭吉らによる啓蒙書さえも「日本哲学である」と定義する。1500年にもお よぶ日本思想の遺伝子的深層を新視点から読み解く最新の入門書。.