Context: A growing number of Japanese people have completed advance directives, especially living wills, even though there is no legislation recognising such documents and little empirical research on their impact on clinical care at the end of life in Japan.Objectives: To investigate physicians’ attitudes about living wills and their experiences with patients who had completed a living will and later died.Design: Self administered survey and qualitative study using open question and content analysis.Setting: Japan.Participants: Physicians known to have cared for a (...) patient who had presented a living will prior to death.Measurements: The physician’s response to receiving a living will, communication about the living will, the impact of the living will on clinical care, demographics, and their opinion on advance directives, especially living wills.Main results: Fifty five per cent of respondents approved of advance directives in general, and 34% had more opportunities to communicate with a patient and his/her family after receiving the living will. Sixty nine per cent of the physicians who received a living will did not, however, change their course of therapy as a consequence of receiving the living wills. Based on the analysis, we identified three areas of concern in the comments on living wills: concerns relative to patients, physicians, and families; social context, and clinical and administrative concerns. The physicians raised various topics for discussion; they tended to describe the issues from a clinical perspective.Conclusions: Our identified areas of concern should prove helpful in better understanding the clinical and ethical implications of living wills in Japan. (shrink)

This article is the second translation of the preface and first chapter of Hatano Seiichi's Time and Eternity. A full translation of the text, published by Suzuki Ichiro 鈴木一郎 in 1963, is not easily accessible to most readers, while an excellent partial translation by Joseph O'Leary has recently been made accessible to a wider audience through the monumental work, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook. By providing a short historical introduction to both Hatano's life and works as a great thinker and (...) teacher, this article intends to supplement O'Leary's contribution and therefore enable more readers to gain access to the opening sections of Hatano's Time and Eternity. (shrink)

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross-cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians (...) and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 95-99 [Access article in PDF] The Distinction between ego (e) and ego-Self (e/S): Notes on Religious Practice Based upon Buddhist-Christian Dialogue Yagi Seiichi Toin University The Goal of Religious Practice We cannot see the transcendent as an object. Nor is it the case that the transcendent and the human are two separated realities that are united afterwards. When the Self (Christ in me--Gal. 2:19-20) (...) reveals itself to and in the ego (Gal. 1:16), the ego becomes aware of the Self, which is divine--human or transcendent--immanent. This is called enlightenment.In enlightenment, the ego (hereafter: e) does not vanish.When the Self (hereafter: S) appears to and in the ego, the ego (now a relatively independent part of S) becomes the function of S. The ego, understanding itself as the knot of inner and outer reality, plays the role of the reason of the whole body, the center of which is S. In this case we represent such a person as e/S. e/S is the subjectivity of the religious life. D.T.Suzuki and one of his disciples, Ryomin Akizuki called e/S the "individual qua trans-individual." 1 In enlightenment, e/S as the authentic subject, which remains potential before enlightenment, is actualized or realized so that it understands itself as e/S, no more as the mere ego. In order for e/S to be realized and understand itself as e/S, egocentricity, egoism and the confusion of the verbalized reality with "reality as it is" must be overcome. This is the goal of religious practice. e/S From the point of view of interreligious dialogue,"Christ who lives in me" corresponds to "actualized Buddha-nature" or "the Formless Self" in Buddhist language, that is, the Self as we call it. 2 In the case of Paul,"Christ who lives in me" is the ultimate subject of him on the one hand, and "Christ the Son of God" is the object of his faith on the other (Gal. 2:19-20). That means: the ego of Paul that believes in the Son of God is borne by "Christ in me"; as Paul says, "Christ was revealed to and [End Page 95] in me" (Gal. 1:16). In this way, the subjectivity of Paul consists of e/S. Of S, namely, Paul is aware as e/S--neither as e, which is ignorant of S, nor as S. It is impossible for S to exist alone. Egocentricity and Egoism The distinction between e and e/S is of fundamental importance to our theme. e means in this essay the mere ego that is ignorant of S.When it becomes aware of S we represent it as the ego of e/S. e is egocentric and egoistic. It goes without saying that the ego-centered "I" driven by desires produces immorality and social anomies. The biblical word for this is sin, the transgression of the Law.But there is another problematic concerning e, namely egoism, which can be at work even in the effort to attain a high level of morality. We understand the egoistic ego as follows: the ego is to itself the only reality that concerns and moves it. It posits itself solely on itself apart from the relation to others and to S. By itself it projects itself and strives to realize itself. It can, among others, set up its own ideals and pursue their realization. It can, for example, conceive the moralistic ideal that seems to be the reverse of immorality and social anomie. Indeed, it can succeed in controlling egocentricity so that it seems to have attained perfect morality. In reality, it is interested only in its own moral perfection, not in the person encountered (moralistic egoism). Such e is illustrated in Luke 18:9-14 and described in Romans 7:7-24. Egoistic ego must die to itself and must be freed from egoism. (In Romans 6, for example, Paul does... (shrink)

The fruit of a lifetime of study and contemplation, Seiichi Hatano's final work, Time and Eternity, develops most fully his tripartite scheme of temporality. For Hatano, one of the first Japanese philosophers to study the works of Western thinkers, human experience could be analyzed with reference to natural, cultural, and religious temporalities. Each temporal stage is further characterized by the type of love that rules at that level of life. In Time and Eternity, Hatano explores the stages of temporality (...) in depth and attempts to locate the kind of love which governs in each phase. (shrink)

Schopenhauer and the two linguists, Tokieda and Miura, are indispensable figures to elucidate the logic of construction of our counterfactual experiences. In addition to the conditional and the ….

The intermediate logics have been classified into slices (cf. Hosoi [1]), but the detailed structure of slices has been studied only for the first two slices (cf. Hosoi and Ono [2]). In order to study the structure of slices, we give a method of a finer classification of slices & n (n 3). Here we treat only the third slice as an example, but the method can be extended to other slices in an obvious way. It is proved that each (...) subslice contains continuum of logics. A characterization of logics in each subslice is given in terms of the form of models. (shrink)

To apply reinforcement learning to difficult classes such as real-environment learning, we need to use a method robust to perceptual aliasing problem. The exploitation-oriented methods such as Profit Sharing can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem to a certain extent. However, when the agent needs to select different actions at the same sensory input, the learning efficiency worsens. To overcome the problem, several state partition methods using history information of state-action pairs are proposed. These methods try to convert a POMDP (...) environment into an MDP environment, and thus they are sometimes very useful. However, their computation cost is very high especially in large state spaces. In contrast, memory-less approaches try to escape from the aliased states by outputting actions stochastically. However, these methods output actions stochastically even in unaliased states, and thus the learning efficiency is bad. If we desire to guarantee the rationality in POMDPs, it is efficient to output actions stochastically only in the aliased states and to output one action deterministically in the other unaliased states. Hence, to discriminate between aliased states and unaliased states, the utilization of χ² -goodness-of-fit test is proposed by Miyazaki et al. They point out that, in aliased states, the distributions of the state transitions by random search and a particular policy are different. This difference doesn't occur owing to non-deterministic actions. Hence, if the agent can collect enough samples to implement the test, the agent can distinguish between aliased states and unaliased states well. However, such a test needs a large amount of data, and it's a problem how the agent collects samples without worsening learning efficiency. If the agent uses random search in the course of learning, the learning efficiency worsens especially in unaliased states. Therefore, in this research, we propose a new method called Extended On-line Profit Sharing with Judgement (EOPSwJ) to detect important incomplete perception, which doesn't need large computation cost and numerous samples. We use two criterions for detecting important incomplete perceptions to attain a task. One is the rate of transitions to each state, and the other is the deterministic rate of actions. We confirm the availability of EOPSwJ using two simulations. (shrink)

A formal and functional study of the three meters of Old Norse eddic poetry, fornyroislag, malahattr, and ljooahattr, this book provides their systematic account (synchronic, diachronic, and from a comparative Germanic perspective). With thorough data presentation, detailed philological analysis, and sophisticated linguistic explanation, it will be of interest to Germanic philologists/linguists, medievalists, and metrists of all persuasions.".

Life is short and transient--Japanese people call this sentiment mujokan. However, what if we could sweep away the "despair" looming over the present age by proactively accepting this mujo (transience)? Perusing the thought of mujo from the perspectives of philosophy, literature, art and religion, Takeuchi delves into the view of life and death unique to the Japanese people who have shared "grief" and "pain" with each other, as well as into the very core of their underlying spirit." -- Publisher's description.

1-3. [without special titles] -- 4. "Kogaku" no shisō.

「日本語の哲学」の可能性を求めて、「おのずから」と「みずから」の「あわい」という斬新な視点から、やまと言葉の思索を通して、日本人の思想と感情を究明する画期的論考。.

斬新な視点から、やまと言葉の考察を通し、日本語の哲学の可能性を探り、「日本人の心のありか」を指し示す、刮目の書。.