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This article examines the ideas that underpinned American psychological war (psywar) in the Pacific. While we cannot precisely measure its effects, we can trace its intellectual history with more confidence. US psywar was a combination of scientific method and myth-making. Assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army tended to be careful, discriminating, and increasingly sophisticated, if not uniformly accurate. At the level of the battle front, practitioners of the ‘mind war’ strove to overcome stereotypes and refine and complexify their view of the enemy.The further they moved from the battlefield towards assessments of Japanese military leadership, society, and high politics, the more they became myth-makers, projecting onto Japan a powerful set of preconceived ideas. These included notions of the superstitious and malleable Japanese mind, the suicidal military elite, and the innocent symbol emperor. In their analysis two models of culture evolved. Their approach to the IJA mostly presented culture as dynamic, layered, and conflicted, whereas their view of Japanese society was monolithic, bounded, and timeless. This contradictory pattern can be explained by different levels of exposure to the subject, the practice of filling ‘knowledge gaps’ with preconceptions, and by American policymaking interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To what degree are historical animosities regarding another country relevant for foreign policy in the face of changes in the security environment? This paper seeks to answer this question in the context of Korea–Japan relations. While pundits have pointed to the Korean public's negative views of Japan—rooted in the colonial experience—as the explanation for the lack of cooperation between Japan and Korea in the security field, this paper argues changes in the level of common external threat can shift the public's priorities from perceived historical injustices toward the needs of security. Surveys from the period when the security environment was shifting markedly—the final years of the Cold War (1986–1990)—reveal that public opinion regarding Japan relative to other powers in the region began to deteriorate only after the security environment improved, pointing to a limit to the extent that "history" trumps security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores domestic dynamics in the complex making of institutional psychiatry in Japan in c. 1920–45. It mainly examines gender issues between the relatively long-lasting system of the family care of mentally ill members and the use of freshly introduced systems of psychiatric hospitals. I shall look at the record of Ohji Brain Hospital (1901–45) in Tokyo, which has several thousands of case histories mainly in Tokyo c. 1920–45. From the analysis of the cases of male and female patients, as well as the complex situations of their households and kin groups, I shall look at the gender issues in the making of the psychiatric hospital regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychotherapy had developed into a dynamic and diverse field in pre-war Japan. Apart from thousands of spiritually oriented lay psychotherapists, there were a few quasi-professional practitioners who insisted on a rational approach and experimented with a variety of psychotherapeutic methods. Among them was Kokyō Nakamura, whose quest for a viable psychotherapeutic method is intriguing and illuminating. This paper examines the evolution of Nakamura's theories and practices by dividing it into three stages: hypnotic suggestion, psychoanalysis, and Morita therapy. His pragmatic and adaptive approach to psychotherapy provides not only an interesting example for studying the spread of psychotherapy across nations and cultures, but also valuable clues to understanding its nature as a body of knowledge and therapeutic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. The significance of mutual-help in communities for disaster management is a fundamental important concept. However, the current societal state does not reflect this lesson. S&G (Simulation and Gaming) has the potential to overcome the challenges faced in promoting community-based disaster management. No scientific research is currently present that reviews their achievements in Japan. Aim. This paper analyzes the current achievements of S&G in enhancing community resilience against large-scale earthquakes in Japan. Method. The paper clarifies the theoretical advantages of S&G in enhancing community resilience in coping and adaptive capacity plus proposes a conceptual contribution framework of S&G in improving community resilience. Based on this framework, the paper analyzes some major games that tackle community resilience against earthquakes in Japan. Results. The paper demonstrates the achievements through the S&G spectrum that stresses the disastrous experience with specific resilience views on one side, while decision making for critical reflection from other players with more comprehensive resilience views on the other side. Conclusion. The paper showcases the current S&G achievements in enhancing community resilience against large-scale earthquakes in Japan using the proposed framework, which can be utilized by other disaster-prone countries to develop and evaluate applications of S&G for increasing community resilience against earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although measuring the ideal points of news media is essential for testing political communication theories based on spatial theory, prior methods of estimating ideal points of media outlets have various shortcomings, including high cost in terms of time and human resources and low applicability to different countries. We propose that unsupervised machine learning techniques for text data, specifically the combination of a text scaling method and latent topic modeling, can be applied to estimate ideal points of media outlets. We applied our proposed methods to editorial texts of ten national and regional newspapers in Japan, where prior approaches are not applicable because newspapers have never officially endorsed particular parties or candidates, and because high-quality training data for supervised learning are not available. Our two studies, one of which analyzed editorials on a single typically ideological topic while the other investigated all editorials published by the target papers in one year, confirmed the popular view of Japanese newspapers' ideological slant, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We also illustrate that our methods allow scholars to investigate which issues are closely related to the respective ideological positions of media outlets. Furthermore, we use the estimated ideal points of newspapers to show that Japanese people partially tend to read ideologically like-minded newspapers and follow such newspapers' Twitter accounts even though their slant is not explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how parental caregiving affects women's employment in Japan. Drawing on the 2005–2014 Longitudinal Survey of Middle-Aged and Elderly Persons, we estimate logistic regression models for the employment status of middle-aged women in various types of employment as a function of caregiving intensity to examine when and in what context caregivers' employment may be at risk for Japanese women. The results showed that working women who began providing 5 or more hours of care per week were significantly more likely to leave their jobs than non-caregiving women; those who began providing fewer than 5 hours of care per week did not show this likelihood. Among women in regular employment, those who began to provide 5 or more hours of care per week and those who provided care in the previous year were more likely to stop working or change jobs than their non-caregiving counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese officials commonly claim that their country retains and uses capital punishment because it deters homicide. Although this claim is contested, few empirical studies have been done to assess the empirical reality. This paper uses data not previously available (monthly homicide statistics obtained from Japan’s National Police Agency) to examine whether Japan’s death penalty deters homicide or robbery-homicide. Using vector autoregression models, it concludes that neither death sentences nor executions deter homicide or robbery-homicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background In common with other countries, Japan has an ageing population and geographical impediments to healthcare access. The role of telemedicine within the Japanese health system may be of wide interest, yet it has not been comprehensively explored and documented. Thus, the aim of this study was to systematically review the Japanese and English language literature relating to the clinical use of telemedicine in Japan. Methods For studies published in Japanese, we searched Ichushi and CiNii. For English language publications, we searched Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science. All peer-reviewed articles describing the clinical use of telemedicine and published between 2007 and 2016 were included. Data on clinical area, study type, technology used, and type of communication were extracted. Studies were categorised by prevention, screening, diagnosis, surveillance, and treatment. Results The search yielded 1476 records; 26 Japanese language and 15 English language articles were selected for review. A wide range of clinical areas were represented; however, home care and life-style related studies were dominant. More than 50% of studies were related to prevention and early diagnosis. The majority of Japanese studies involved doctor-to-doctor consultation. Smartphones and remote monitoring systems were the main types of technology used. Conclusions Most studies of telemedicine in Japan are published in the Japanese language and are thus relatively inaccessible to the rest of the world; for the first time, this study has provided an overview of the clinical use of telemedicine in Japan. The clinically related papers reflect the Japanese cultural focus on disease prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the question of how voters perceive party positions, much of the existing literature has not adequately considered the case of a multidimensional policy space. Since the ideological cues related to each issue differ in a policy space of multiple dimensions, it is possible that each individual favors different dimensional cues. To test this hypothesis, this paper focuses on Japan’s 2012 Lower House election, which took place in a two-dimensional policy space. An analysis of how voters position the three major parties relative to each other reveals that there is actually heterogeneity in the voter perception of the policy space. Further, using a mixed logit model, we find that demographic factors and political attitudes explain this heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The smell of real leather: as you slide on new shoes, or slip into a new car. Luxury. Refinement. Juxtapose this with the person who inappropriately smells of leather, of animal flesh. The nose curls with even the thought: contagion and filth, a different kind of person. These divergent sensibilities of the smell of leather exist alongside each other in contemporary Japan, each requiring a discriminating nose to demarcate sets of smell and sets of people. Set against this backdrop of aromatic bivalency, this paper examines how smell and the capacity for olfaction become key elements in the identification of stigma in Japan. I explore the ecology of interrelating sensibilities that compose the politics of stigma. The Buraku people have historically been marginalized in Japan because of associations with stigmatized industries such as leather and meat production. Since the 1970s, the groundwork for asserting such associations has been dramatically reconfigured. This paper focuses on the changing practices by which such attribution occurs, the demands these practices make on capacities for olfaction and the qualities of scent, and the role ceded to private detectives as purveyors of evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper originates from a ‘Generics Industry Forum’ that debated the development of the Japanese generic medicines retail market. Based on these discussions, the paper conducts a descriptive analysis of Japanese generic medicines policy and proposes recommendations for further developing the market by learning lessons from the European experience. The Japanese generic medicines market has benefited from measures that assure supply and quality of generic medicines, provide information about generic medicines, speed up registration of generic medicines on the reimbursement list, allow and reward generic substitution by pharmacists, increase patient co-payment, and reward physicians who adopt generic prescribing and/or who allow generic substitution. However, several factors hamper the development of this market, including extensions to the data exclusivity period and patent term of originator medicines, the requirement to launch the same generic medicine strengths as the originator medicine, mandatory reductions of reimbursement tariffs and weak incentives for physicians, pharmacists and patients to demand generic medicines. In order to sustain the development of the Japanese generic medicines market, a number of avenues were proposed that focused on speeding up market access of generic medicines, implementing a reference-pricing system and strengthening incentives for physicians, pharmacists and patients to demand generic medicines.Journal of Generic Medicines (2009) 6, 129–135. doi:10.1057/jgm.2009.4 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austronesia, one of the largest language families in the world, covers a vast area from Madagascar in the extreme west to Easter Island in the far east, Taiwan in the north to New Zealand in the south. The languages are spoken by the people of insular southeast Asia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia in the Pacific, as well as certain parts of the Asia mainland. The vernacular architecture of the people that belong to this language family shows certain shared characteristics that seem to indicate a common origin in the distant past. The Grand Shrines at Ise, Japan pose an intriguing phenomenon because they possess striking architectural features that are reminiscent of Austronesian vernacular architecture. This paper is an attempt to investigate the phenomenon using the findings of studies by experts from other disciplines such as historians, anthropologists, linguists and others, based on the link between culture, language and architecture.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

World War II yielded many photographs of bombed-out cities. In this paper we telescope between two sets and scales of images that represent the principal frames through which the American and Japanese publics have memorialized the incendiary bombings that laid waste to urban Japan: aerial photographs taken by the US Army Air Forces during its wartime planning, prosecution, and assessment of the raids; and the ground-level images captured by Ishikawa Kōyō, a photographer working on behalf of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. By means of a detailed examination of the production, circulation, and consumption of these photographs—what some scholars have called an “archaeological approach” to images of ruination—we explore not only the visual rhetoric and reality of the destruction of Japan’s cities, but also how that destruction is situated in history, memory, and visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on two ethnographic research projects in Japanese university sports clubs to examine the role alcohol plays in the social and cultural education of students. Over the course of a four-year membership, the university sports club is a site where members learn to negotiate drinking. This negotiation is demonstrated by the range of strategies members employ when engaging in one of the many official drinking parties that punctuate the university sports club calendar. Knowing how to drink is seen as an important byproduct of being a member and this knowledge is acquired via the pedagogical relationships established between junior and senior members. On graduating university Japanese students are literally expected to become full members of society and it is the habitus related to social interaction (including drinking) rather than that related to sport, which has enduring capital. Alcohol plays a central role in many aspects of Japanese social interaction and the university sports club is a site par excellence for the training in and mastery of such skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) have implications for the wage rates of home-country workers. Such implications have been particularly noteworthy in Japan where the traditional internal labor-market practices, which value long-term sustainability of employment and wages, collide with the pressure for change in the globalizing Japanese economy on many fronts. In this paper we estimate the impacts of FDI on workers’ wages in Japanese manufacturing industries. We find that Japanese employees benefit, in the form of wage gains, from their employers’ association with both inward and outward FDI operations. These wage effects differ systematically depending on gender and worker ranks within their employer firms and are likely to weaken the mechanisms underlying the sustainability of Japanese firms’ traditional internal labor markets. The presence of FDI effects on worker wages also implies an increasing disparity between the incomes of workers who work for successfully globalizing firms and workers who do not, jeopardizing Japan’s traditional policy objective to sustain harmonious economic growth across all economic sectors. This would also deepen the structural divide including the wage gap of the Japanese economy that exists between large firms and small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) since firms which get involved in FDIs are mostly large firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the cultural dimensions of production networks between Japanese and Taiwanese firms. Conceptually, we argue that, due to historical and cultural ties between the two countries, as well as long-standing associations with Taiwanese suppliers, Japanese lead firms have deepened their relationships as Taiwan has entered a more technologically based stage of develop-ment. Taiwan has also been pivotal in Japan - Taiwan - China relations because of its cultural as well as geographic proximity to the two economic giants. Empirically, the analysis draws on interviews with sixteen Japanese electronics companies in Taipei and Hsinchu Science City, as well as secondary data concerning Japanese trade and investment in Taiwan. We contend that Japanese lead firms have moved to a position of insiders and partners with their Taiwanese suppliers in the information, technology, and communications sector. In addition, Japanese electronics firms now see Taiwan as a viable bridge to production and markets in China, while corporate relations are moving towards heterarchical or matrix arrangements, away from the hierarchical flying geese model. The study notes that there are challenges and limits to these new forms of relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors discuss the use of Parse’s humanbecoming theory in Japan. Elements of the theory are used in the nursing approach to an 88 year-old Japanese man who had complications following surgery. Process recordings of the dialogues between the patient, the patient’s wife, and the nurse were made and considered in light of the three methodologies of Parse’s theory; illuminating meaning, synchronizing rhythms, and mobilizing transcendence. The theory is seen as useful in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to provide a clinical review of a unique, emerging form of severe social withdrawal that has been described in Japan. This paper begins with a case vignette, then reviews the case definition, epidemiology, psychopathology, differential diagnosis, and treatment and management of the condition. Called hikikomori, it is well known to both the psychiatric community and general public in Japan but it has never been reviewed in the English medical literature. Patients are mostly adolescent and young adult men who become recluses in their parents' homes for months or years. They withdraw from contact with family, rarely have friends, and do not attend school or hold a job. Never described before the late 1970s, hikikomori has become a silent epidemic with tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of cases now estimated in Japan. The differential diagnosis includes anxiety and personality disorders, but current nosology in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders may not adequately capture the concept of hikikomori. Treatment strategies are varied and lack a solid evidence base, but often include milieu, family, and exposure therapy. Much further research, including population-based and prospective studies, needs to be conducted to characterize and provide an evidence base for treatment of this condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incidence of renal cell cancer has been increasing worldwide. Although the incidence of renal cell cancer in Japan is lower than the rates in the other industrialized countries, there is no doubt that it is increasing. In this paper, we would like to introduce the result of our studies, which evaluate the risk factors for renal cell cancer in Japan. Hypertension, diabetes mellitus, kidney diseases, fondness for fatty food and black tea showed an increased risk of renal cell carcinoma while an intake of starchy roots such as taro, sweet potato and potato reduced the risk of renal cell carcinoma. In Japan, however, drinking black tea may be a surrogate for westernized dietary habits while eating starchy roots may be a surrogate for traditional Japanese dietary habits. Further studies may be needed to evaluate risk factors for renal cell cancer because the number of renal cancer cases was small in our studies in spite of a large population-based cohort study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an attempt to address the paucity of research on sport in Asian settings, this paper uses a case-study approach to examine young Japanese men's participation in pre-game rugby rituals. Drawing on Durkheim's seminal work, it is argued that the pre-game ceremonies have much in common with rituals conducted in similar western settings. However, many of the ritual activities were performed in distinctly Japanese ways, suggesting that they also express and confirm dominant local values and mark rugby as a discrete cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past century, Japanese society has undergone a radical change in its temporal experience, moving from one following the rhythms of nature to one of mathematical precision, namely, the western time system. Why did Japan westernize its time? This paper argues that it was for the sake of industrialization, where time was equated with profit. The accelerating sense of time reflected Japan's desperate efforts to catch up with the western level of industry in the shortest possible time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]