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The paper discusses heritage structures built of welded tuff masonry and timber frames. Such timber-masonry composite structures were built in Japan around the early 20th century. Timber frames are composed of studs and girts. The studs are coupled by penetrating girts via nuki joints. The studs are connected to masonry walls by means of L-shaped wrought iron pegs. In this paper, a warehouse is considered as the case study. Pull-out and shear tests were conducted to examine the performance of joints between a masonry wall and stud. A focus was given to the contribution of iron pegs. A microtremor test was performed on the case study. Based on these experimental activities, seismic analysis was carried out by numerical approach. Attention was paid to the discretisation of joint behaviour between masonry walls and timber studs. The paper introduces structurally a unique heritage building and discusses its seismic behaviour, focusing on joint behaviour derived from iron pegs and nuki joints. Findings are taken advantage of for the seismic analysis of historical composite structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

X-band radar observations with a transmitting frequency of 9.4 GHz were conducted for over 10 h at the mouth of Tenryu River, Japan, to estimate surface velocity distributions during floods in 2010 and 2020 and analyse changes in the flow field caused by dredging in 2014. X-band radar is an imaging radar that can collect backscatter of floating objects flowing downstream with the flood flow every 2 s. The observation area extends approximately 1000 m × 1000 m. Particle image velocimetry is applied to the image sequences to guess the surface flow pattern. Flow direction in the main river channel changed smoothly, while surface flow speeds ranged from 1 to 3 m s–1 depending on the discharge. Water levels were computed using the estimated surface flow velocities, river cross-section from survey data, and observed discharge for indirect validation: it agreed within an error of 0.3 m with the observed water level. This paper highlights radar's potential for estimating surface velocity distribution during floods and harsh weather conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'China threat' has been identified as an important driver of Japan's security agenda and discourse. The threat posed by China has been discussed either as a given factor determining the trajectory of Tokyo's security approach, as a product of identity construction, or as an expression of securitizing processes that facilitate institutional and policy change. This paper contributes to this debate by offering an alternative explanation of the process through which the Abe government constructed China as a threat. Building on securitization theory, the paper examines the modes and strategies employed by the Abe Administration to successfully securitize China. The paper argues that, while Beijing was labeled a 'concern' rather than an 'existential threat,' it was still securitized through a process of securitization that involves an association with those domains in which China engages assertively, namely the maritime commons. The paper suggests calling this type of securitizing pattern 'transversal securitization' and explores how this indirect strategy allowed the Abe government to pragmatically pursue its objectives both domestically and at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a collection of abstracts from the Japanese Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition. It includes summaries of various research studies and awards in the field of soil science and plant nutrition. Topics covered include greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural fields, the effects of cover crops on soil functions, molecular-scale speciation of elements in soil, environment-friendly fertilization and soil management technologies, evaluation of soil nutrient availability, transporters for mineral elements in rice, and microbial communities in paddy soil. The document also includes original papers on the underestimation of radiocesium retention in soil and the effects of pH neutralization on tea plant growth. Additionally, there are notes on analysis methods for ammoniac nitrogen and dung detection in pastures, as well as lectures on international collaboration in soil science and plant nutrition research and the digitalization of agroecosystems. The document concludes with miscellaneous articles on the importance of soil education and regional trends in the Kansai region. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines how female and foreign corporate directors influence their corporation's climate change behaviour. This study found that female directors contribute to the formulation of their company's climate change vision, and foreign directors contribute to the formulation of a climate change mission. Japan has set a long-term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, an extremely difficult goal to achieve. Our results suggest that it is important to appoint female and foreign directors to achieve net zero emissions. Our results also suggest that diversity among company directors needs to be further expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on migrants' experiences of moving house in the country of settlement, the study explores the housing pathways of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan over their life courses. This paper emphasizes the need for the anthropology of migration to consider not only the housing events but also the housing pathways experienced by cross-border migrants in receiving countries. It is argued that the act of moving from one accommodation to another plays a crucial role in how migrants develop their biographies and perceptions of self. In addition to investigating house relocation, the study borrows from the Russian formalist school of narratology to examine how migrants narrativize their experiences in stories that intertwine housing pathways and movers' identities. The study reveals how the instances of moving—and not necessarily the physical qualities of housing—emerge as dynamic forces that initiate migrants into their desired statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the dynamic interaction of Japan's total factor productivity (TFP), GDP, stocks of domestic and foreign private and public as well as mission-oriented R&D, called GBARD in OECD statistics, in a vector-error-correction model (VECM) for Japan with stock data for the period 1987–2016. Permanent policy changes show the following main results: (i) GBARD as well as private and public R&D each encourage growth rates of the other R&D stocks and of TFP and GDP, and (ii) all have high internal rates of return; (iii) Japan's R&D policies affect and are affected by foreign R&D; in particular, Japan's public R&D has a positive impact on European private R&D, whereas other OECD countries' R&D has a negative one. Japan's R&D policies should be supported by education policies enhancing especially the number of PhDs and IT personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reinterpret asylum theory (1954) propounded by Ortwin Henssler (1923–2017) as a free-space theory of education, as a way of grasping the problematic nature of 'pedagogical protection.' The theoretical potential of Henssler's thought has been more appreciated, accepted, and developed in Japan than in his native Germany. First, I outline Henssler's theory of asylum and show how his theory has been received and developed in Japan, especially in the fields of historical researches. Secondly, I discuss the possibility of reading Henssler's thought of asylum as a theory of 'pedagogical protection.' Thirdly, I consider whether it is possible to interpret 'free space' in education based on the model of asylum. Finally, I delineate some prospects for and challenges involved in connecting the theory of asylum to the theory of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the Japanese government launched the Go To Eat campaign, a policy initiative involving the distribution of vouchers to households for use at restaurants, with the aim of supporting the food service industry, which had experienced a significant decrease in sales due to the government’s ‘self-restraint request’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses a nonparametric method to investigate the relationship between the Go To Eat campaign and the spread of COVID-19 in Japan by examining food service expenditures, mobility, positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, and the Indices of Industrial Production. The distribution of food service expenditures changed in October and November, when the campaign started, as well as in December, when the campaign ended. In addition, the distribution of mobility changed in January 2021, when a state of emergency was declared. The Go To Eat campaign was economically effective as a temporary subsidy, and it might have facilitated mobility in a way that was difficult to control for some time. As such, the indirect effect of the campaign on the rise in the number of positive PCR tests is undeniable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Japan, young people are becoming increasingly apathetic about politics, while at the same time they are experiencing a rightward leaning and a growing sympathy for totalitarianism and authoritarianism. To understand this contradiction, we need to look at the digital communication environment in which they engage in political discourse. One of the most representative opinion leaders in this regard is Hiroyuki Nishimura. In recent years, Hiroyuki has become widely known as the 'King of Refutation' and is immensely popular among the young generation. He is very active in political and social issues, arguing in a logical and neutral manner. However, despite his enlightened mode of argumentation, his arguments have been perceived as accommodative to totalitarian and authoritarian perceptions. This paper argues that at the heart of this mode of refutation is a process of 'decontextualisation' and 'recontextualisation' which has resulted in reducing the complexity of the issue, making it comprehensible to the majority while oppressing minorities. And this mode of refutation and the processes of 'decontextualisation' and 'recontextualisation' are at the centre of the various digital communication platforms that he operates and that have become hubs of political communication around the world: 2channel, 4chan, Nico Nico Douga and YouTube clips. In this sense, the totalitarianism and rightward leaning of the young generation is not due to a specific ideology but is strongly conditioned by the communication environment. 'Communication totalitarianism' can be used to describe the totalitarianism and right-wing tendencies taking place in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article briefly introduces and comments on the EPAT special issue 'Philosophical reflections on modern education in Japan: strategies and prospects' edited by Morimichi Kato. There are seven papers excluding the editor's introductory essay. This special issue provides a unique approach to Japanese educational philosophy by offering and deliberating features and concepts peculiar to Japanese education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes female make-up and modern consumerism in Uno Chiyo's early short stories Shifun no kao ('Painted face', 1921) and Rōjo Manon ('The old woman Manon', 1928). These works were published as the notion of beauty transitioned in Japan's modern era, shifting from a preference for heavy to light make-up. The obsession with whiteness of the female protagonists, as well as unique motifs in Uno's short stories, suggests racial and sexual issues in modernity. Despite the common perception of their cosmopolitanism, this article argues that the modern girls described in Uno's works tend to internalize the ethnic and cultural hierarchy between Caucasian men and Japanese women, denigrating and othering non-Western people, including the Japanese whose bodies do not successfully represent Westernization or modernity. In a similar vein, Uno portrays the failure of female make-up as the attempt to emulate an artificial Western beauty, thereby illustrating the challenges faced by female authors describing Japanese female characters in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan's national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The mechanisms underlying stabilization of soil organic matter (SOM) in vegetated coastal ecosystems, including mangrove forests, are poorly understood, limiting our ability to predict the consequences of disturbances. Here, we introduce density fractionation to mangrove soils to identify the distribution and properties of the functional components of SOM regarding degradation state, stability, and origin, namely, the free low-density fraction (f-LF), mineral-associated LF (m-LF), and high-density fraction (HF). Three soil cores (1 m) were collected in a mangrove forest on Ishigaki Island, Japan, and cut into 10 cm intervals and analyzed. Although HF was the most abundant, the massive production of mangrove fine roots resulted in a high abundance of LFs throughout the cores, which markedly differed from terrestrial soils. Relative abundance of LFs together accounted for 38–66% of total soil C. The m-LF was as abundant as f-LF and 1.6 times higher in relative abundance than the global average of terrestrial soils. The C/N ratios and δ13C values clearly increased with depth in all fractions, which was attributed to the increased contribution from roots. We found a consistent pattern in Δ14C values of density fractions. HF was the oldest with Δ14C between −149‰ and −97‰ followed by m-LF (between −130‰ and −87‰) and then f-LF (between −89‰ and 78‰), suggesting that mineral association may be pivotal in long-term carbon storage in the mangrove mineral soil. Our analysis successfully identified meaningful functional components of mangrove SOM, yet several questions remained unanswered, including a large variability in Δ14C in different cores. Future studies would benefit from a coupled analysis of the quantity and quality of density fractions and geochemical factors in mangrove soils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reconsidered educational materials by analyzing educators' opinions regarding handmade manipulative materials (HMMs) for children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in Japan. Instead of concurring with the view that educational materials are static and inert products, the author adopted an agential realist perspective and considered them as agencies working and becoming with teachers and children. The author interviewed two retired teachers who had spent more than 30 years in HMM production and analyzed the obtained data using a diffractive methodology. Findings showed that making and remaking HMMs allowed teachers and children to engage with actualizing concepts without language and demonstrated the open-ended nature of learning for teachers and children with HMMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heat-related health burden is expected to persist and worsen in the coming years due to an aging global population and climate change. Defining the breadth and depth of our understanding of age-related changes in thermoregulation can identify underlying causes and strategies to protect vulnerable individuals from heat. We conducted the first systematic quantitative literature review to provide context to the historical experimental research of healthy older adults – compared to younger adults or unhealthy age matched cases – during exogenous heat strain, focusing on factors that influence thermoregulatory function (e.g. co-morbidities). We identified 4,455 articles, with 147 meeting eligibility criteria. Most studies were conducted in the US (39%), Canada (29%), or Japan (12%), with 71% of the 3,411 participants being male. About 71% of the studies compared younger and older adults, while 34% compared two groups of older adults with and without factors influencing thermoregulation. Key factors included age combined with another factor (23%), underlying biological mechanisms (18%), age independently (15%), influencing health conditions (15%), adaptation potential (12%), environmental conditions (9%), and therapeutic/pharmacological interventions (7%). Our results suggest that controlled experimental research should focus on the age-related changes in thermoregulation in the very old, females, those with overlooked chronic heat-sensitive health conditions (e.g. pulmonary, renal, mental disorders), the impact of multimorbidity, prolonged and cumulative effects of extreme heat, evidence-based policy of control measures (e.g. personal cooling strategies), pharmaceutical interactions, and interventions stimulating protective physiological adaptation. These controlled studies will inform the directions and use of limited resources in ecologically valid fieldwork studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides are major natural disasters in mountainous areas, often caused by earthquakes and heavy rainfalls. Traditional manual delineation methods for identifying landslide features using optical imagery are inefficient, highlighting the need for automated detection techniques. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as advanced solutions in computer vision for this purpose. Despite the reliance on pre-event and post-event imagery or various data sources like digital elevation models (DEMs), the success of deep learning models largely depends on the quality and availability of training data. This poses a challenge for their immediate application after a landslide. This study explores the transferability of a CNN model trained on data from the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquakes for detecting landslides in different events, specifically the 2018 Hokkaido earthquake and the 2017 Asakura Rainfall in Japan. These cases were chosen for their geographical similarities. The proposed deep transfer learning model, based on a DeepLabV3 + architecture built on a pre-trained ResNet50, automatically identifies landslide features without needing specific training data or model adjustments for each event. It achieved high accuracy in both cases, demonstrating CNNs' potential for broad application in landslide detection and enhancing disaster response efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online sellers continue to grow at the expense of traditional brick and mortar retailers. For traditional retailers to remain competitive in this modern consumer age, it is essential to identify the dynamics of effective customer interaction, to foster positive perceptions of the store. Specifically, in this cross-category study of almost one thousand retail consumers in Japan, the findings show that the behavior of sales personnel affects perceptions of altruism, trust, and expertise. Both directly and indirectly, these customer perceptions significantly impact store image. The existence of a traditional business philosophy of Omotenashi, makes Japan a good place to observe and study altruism in retail customer-sales personnel relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the capital structure of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Japan during 2007–2019 to identify whether firm-specific determinants of leverage exhibit locational differences among Japanese prefectures. To do so, we propose a testing scheme that disentangles potential similarities across prefecture pairs. When we apply the proposed testing scheme by creating 1081 prefecture pairs, we find that the impact of the firm-specific determinants of leverage does not greatly differ between prefecture pairs in terms of both sign and magnitude in contrast to the significant difference found by conventional hypothesis testing. As a convenient tool for other geographical research, we also discuss that the proposed testing scheme is helpful for regional policy-making, specifically during period of external shocks, the latest of which could be regarded as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers in the United States (n = 290) and Japan (n = 221) participated in 2 × 2 experiments designed to test effects of agent type (online human or chatbot) and communication strategy (targeted or tailored) on attitudes toward messages and agents. In both national samples, tailored messages were more effective in positively affecting attitudes. In addition, perceived humanness was found to mediate the relationships between agent type and attitudes such that when human or artificial agents are perceived as more human in text exchanges, perceived humanness in turn increases attitudes toward both the agents and messages. Hypothesized effects based on individualism-collectivism were not found. Theoretical and practical implications for designing interactive message strategy via conversational chatbots in an era of artificial intelligence (AI) and global communication are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]