Hibakusha are “witnesses” of the atomic bombings, not just in a standard sense but also in the instrumental sense. For medical and scientific experts, hibakusha are biological resources of unparalleled scientific value. Over the past seventy years, the hibakusha bodies have narrated what it means to be exposed to radiation. In this paper, I explore studies at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that examined hibakusha bodies as sites where risk could be read. I focus on a period from the mid-1950s (...) to 1975, during which new methods, practices, and technologies allowed ABCC scientists to investigate chromosomes as a way to study radiation exposure and human risk. By focusing on chromosomal aberrations, ABCC scientists connected their work directly to the emerging infrastructure for radiobiology at the time. ABCC administrators actively sought out such prestige, especially given their relationship with the Atomic Energy Commission. The shift in approach would also alleviate some public relations problems with which the institution was struggling. Launching a cytogenetics program required some older practices that had assumed American privilege and dominance to be abandoned. Eventually, the decision to let chromosomes speak of radiation exposure brought about fundamental changes in ABCC, which came to symbolize the model for future studies at the organization, especially as ABCC was transitioning to a US-Japan binational organization. More broadly, this case highlights the intricate scientific negotiation of radiation risk where uncertainties necessarily prevail. (shrink)

The ArgumentJapanese eugenic discourse and institution building contrast sharply with comparable movements elsewhere. As a social-intellectual phenomenon, Anglo- American eugenics considered the Japanese racially inferior to Western peoples; yet eugenic ideals and policies achieved a remarkable popularity in Japan. Most of mainstream Japanese genetics was derived from orthodox Mendelian roots in Germany and (to a lesser degree) the United States. But French-style Lamarckian notions of the inheritability of acquired characters held surprising popularity among enthusiasts of eugenics. Japanese eugenicists could condemn (...) the actions of foreign eugenicists like Charles Davenport in the United States for their efforts to forbid Japanese immigration in the 1920s, yet appeal to these same eugenicists as a source of legitimacy in Japan.These paradoxes can partly be explained against a background of relative isolation in a period of profound social change. Few Japanese eugenicists had close personal contact with foreign eugenicists, and most of their knowledge was acquired through reading rather than direct exposure. The eugenic ideal of ethnic purity was attractive to a society long accustomed to monoracial self-imagery. The need to defend national independence in an era of high imperialism seemed to require the most up-to-date policies and ideas. And Japan's own acquisition of an overseas empire seemed to demand a population management philosophy ostensibly based on scientific principles. These and other forces supported the implementation of eugenic policies and prescriptions among the Japanese people in the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the (...) presence of labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that followImai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of (...) labelsper se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

This paper explores the eugenic thought of Yamanouchi Shigeo (1876–1973), who was trained in plant cytology under the tutelage of botanist and eugenicist John Coulter (1851–1928) in the USA, and later became one of the early and important popularizers of eugenic ideas in Japan. His career demonstrates a direct link between Japanese and US eugenics. Despite his academic training and research at various internationally renowned institutions, numerous publications, and longevity, his life has received little scholarly attention. By the early twentieth (...) century, most biologists in Japan, as in the USA, began accepting Mendelian evolutionary theory and rejecting the Lamarckian notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, Yamanouchi Shigeo's eugenic view represents a paradox: he was a Mendelian cytologist sympathetic to Lamarckism. Was his ‘nurture’‐oriented eugenic view unscientific? Is that why he was largely ignored in the history of botany in Japan? This study attempts to answer these questions and to analyse the origins and distinct features of Yamanouchi's eugenic ideas by situating Yamanouchi's eugenic thought historically and culturally. After examining his scientific papers, popular writings, and documents of various organizations to which he belonged, I argue that Yamanouchi's ‘softer’ (or less biologically deterministic) perspective may have reflected the Japanese desire to catch up with the dominant ‘race’ by using eugenics without accepting permanent inferior status. (shrink)

This paper compares aspects of the thinking of Walter Benjamin and John Dewey. Both attempted to address the problem of ‘poverty of experience’ in modern society by means of an anti-dualistic concept of experience and the concept of media. These concepts can be observed optimally in their work on aesthetics. Such concepts of experience and media were the keys to the development of new conceptions of education. Differences in their understanding of media, however, led them to different strategies in the (...) development of their educational thought. The present paper will show that Benjamin's strategy offers a promising alternative to that of Dewey. (shrink)

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanese-speaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had picked up regularities in the Japanese sound-symbolic lexicon or were sensitive to universal sound-symbolism. The present study aimed to provide support for the latter. (...) In a verb generalization task, English-speaking 3-year-olds were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on Japanese sound-symbolism, or novel nonsound-symbolic verbs. English-speaking children performed better with the sound-symbolic verbs, just like Japanese-speaking children. We concluded that children are sensitive to universal sound-symbolism and can utilize it in word learning and generalization, regardless of their native language. (shrink)

In German, nouns are assigned to one of the three gender classes. For most animal names, however, the assignment is independent of the referent’s biological sex. We examined whether German-speaking children understand this independence of grammar from semantics or whether they assume that grammatical gender is mapped onto biological sex when drawing inferences about sex-specific biological properties of animals. Two cross-linguistic studies comparing German-speaking and Japanese-speaking preschoolers were conducted. The results suggest that German-speaking children utilize grammatical gender as a cue (...) for inferences about sex-specific properties of animals. Further, we found that Japanese- and German-speaking children recruit different resources when drawing inferences about sex-specific properties: Whereas Japanese children paralleled their pattern of inference about properties common to all animals, German children relied on the grammatical gender class of the animal. Implications of these findings for studying the relation between language and thought are discussed. (shrink)

Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., any giraffe, be it male or female, is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender. This research investigated whether this motivation affects deductive inference in native German speakers. We compared German with Japanese speakers (a language without grammatical gender) when making inferences about sex-specific biological properties. We found that German speakers tended to (...) erroneously draw inferences when the sex in the premise and grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. An over-generalization of the grammar–semantics mapping was found even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated. However, these effects occurred only when gender-marking articles accompanied the nouns. These results suggest that German speakers project sex-specific biological properties onto gender-marking articles but not onto conceptual representations of animals per se. (shrink)

Although Caenorhabditis and Drosophila proved invaluable in unraveling the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis, it is now clear that these animals are of limited value for understanding the evolution of apoptotic systems. Whereas data from these invertebrates led to the assumption that the extrinsic apoptotic pathway is restricted to vertebrates, recent data from cnidarians and sponges indicate that this pathway predates bilaterian origins. Here we review the phylogenetic distribution of caspase‐8, the initiator caspase of the extrinsic apoptotic pathway, its paralogs and (...) other components of the network. The ancestral caspase‐8 gave rise to four paralogs early in vertebrate evolution, and these have been maintained in many tetrapods. However, eutherians have lost caspase‐18 and myomorph rodents have lost caspase‐10, these losses suggesting functional redundancy amongst caspase‐8 paralogs. The apoptotic network of the eumetazoan ancestor appears to have been complex and vertebrate like, and is only now being revealed by studying simple animals. (shrink)

In Japan during the 1980s, there was an interesting debate about how to teach the area of a parallelogram effectively to primary school children. Yutaka Saeki criticized the standard method, which relies on a cut-and-paste procedure. He argued that the standard method inevitably failed to convince children because it does not provide any cogent reason for them to accept that the formula ‘base x height’ is indeed true. Saeki proposed his own method using a bundle of paper. This method, however (...) convincing at first glance, was totally dismissed by Akira Nakagaki based on his orthodox scientific methodology. There emerged a lively debate between the two. By means of a reconstruction of this debate, this paper will show how the materiality of a thing can scaffold the process of gaining understanding of the concept of geometrical space. Although Saeki and Nakagaki were both unaware of the fact, the debate between them shows clearly that the convincing points of Saeki’s method rely on its material basis. The materiality of a thing can serve as a common basis, in which acquaintance in the context of everyday life is transgressed to the mathematical context. With this transgressive structure entailed in the materiality of a thing, children can be led to understand the spatial logic of the parallelogram, while they themselves make their own reasoning and judgement based on the context of their everyday lives. (shrink)

Die Naturalistische Auffassung der Pädagogik scheint unaufhaltsam voranzuschreiten, wie es an der globalen Tendenzen der „learnification“ der Erziehung ablesbar ist. Naturalistische Ansätze hinterlassen in der Pädagogik sichtlich widersprüchliche Konsequenzen: die Hervorhebung der vorbestimmten und der plastischen Merkmale der menschlichen Natur und ferner die Hervorhebung der aktiven und der rezeptiven Seiten der menschlichen Plastizität. Um die komplizierte Beziehungsstruktur dieser doppelten Beidseitigkeit zu erläutern, wird auf die geschichtliche Ursprungsphase der pädagogischen Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Naturalismus zurückgegriffen: eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Evolutionstheorie in der (...) Pädagogik in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. und am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)