The claim that the legendary thief Ishikawa Goemon attempted to assassinate the warlord Oda Nobunaga by dripping poison down a thread into the latter’s mouth is a staple of English-language histories of the so-called ‘ninja.’ Despite its widespread circulation in popular histories of Japan, there is good reason to believe that this famous assassination attempt never actually happened. In this article, I trace the Ishikawa Goemon legend through a range of Japanese-language documentary and literary sources, attempting to find a source for the poison-thread tale. I conclude that the story is not only fiction but modern fiction, resulting from a misunderstanding of the climactic scene of a 1962 ninja movie, Shinobi no mono, as depicting an historical event. The poison-thread technique, I also suggest, is not an authentic historical technique at all but a borrowing from a 1925 novel by the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo. The article concludes by exploring how the poison-thread story managed to circulate unchallenged for more than fifty years, and by offering some observations on the serious methodological flaws of English-language ‘ninja’ histories to date.
The article considers the Japanese system of municipal solid waste management as well as work with the population in the field of environmental education. The roles and responsibilities of the parties in the management of municipal solid waste are analyzed. In Japan, unlike other countries, the state is deeply involved in the process. Sorting and disposal of waste occur at the municipal level due to the historical characteristics of the Japanese society. Extended producer responsibility requires their participation from product development to disposal, and consumers are required to cooperate with them and local authorities by properly disposing solid waste.
The regulatory framework in the field of MSW management is built around the Basic Act on Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society and the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources, which formulates the 3R strategy, aimed at Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling of waste. An analysis of recently adopted documents, the Plastic Resource Circulation Act of 2021 in particular, demonstrates that special emphasis is placed on 2R: waste reduction and reuse, which is successfully achieved thanks to the high level of environmental awareness of Japanese citizens and thoughtful and multifaceted educational work with the population.
Over the past decade, Japan has seen a steady reduction of municipal solid waste. However, while remaining one of the world leaders in the field, it is currently faced with a number of difficulties, such as a low recycling rate and a significant volume of incinerated waste. It is concluded that significant progress in this area is impossible without clearer goal setting for the volume of solid waste processing that would meet modern world standards.
<h4>Background</h4>The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has published Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. These provide a global standard for writing and editing medical articles, including research integrity. However, no study has examined the research integrity-related content of Japanese medical journals' Instructions for Authors. We therefore compared research integrity content in ICMJE member journals with those in the English- and Japanese-language journals of the Japanese Association of Medical Sciences (JAMS).<h4>Materials and methods</h4>This was a descriptive literature study. We obtained Instructions for Authors from English- and Japanese-language journals listed on the JAMS website and the ICMJE member journals listed on the ICMJE website as of September 1, 2021. We compared the presence of 20 topics (19 in the ICMJE Recommendations plus compliance with ICMJE) in the Instructions for Authors, and analyzed the content of the conflict of interest disclosure.<h4>Results</h4>We evaluated 12 ICMJE member journals, and 82 English-language and 99 Japanese-language subcommittee journals. The median number of topics covered was 10.5 for ICMJE member journals, 10 for English-language journals, and three for Japanese-language journals. Compliance with ICMJE was mentioned by 10 (83%) ICMJE member journals, 75 (91%) English-language journals, and 29 (29%) Japanese-language journals. The ICMJE Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form was requested by seven (64%) ICMJE member journals, 15 (18%) English-language journals, and one (1%) Japanese-language journal.<h4>Conclusions</h4>Although the topics in the JAMS English-language journals resembled those in the ICMJE member journals, the median value of ICMJE-related topic inclusion was approximately one-third lower in JAMS Japanese-language journals than in ICMJE member journals. It is hoped that Japanese-language journals whose conflict of interest disclosure policies differ from ICMJE standards will adopt international standards to deter misconduct and ensure publication quality.
The integration between the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the education sector requires teachers and students to utilize nowadays technologies, one of them is Padlet. Padlet is a web-based application that enables users to write or pin-up files such as pictures on its’ virtual walls. This study aims the utilization of Padlet to enhance students' Japanese composition skills in a Japanese basic writing class (Shokyu Sakubun). Involving a class of 15 (fifteen) students enrolled in a basic writing course at a state university in Bandung, West Java, this study attained the data through pre-test, post-test, and students' essay observations during four times treatments and questionnaires. The findings showed that there is a significant increase in the average grades after using Padlet for collaborative learning in basic Japanese writing courses, which is seen from the results of the pre-test and post-test. It can be interpreted that Padlet was helpful for Japanese learners to improve their competence in Japanese writing skills. The findings also showed that the respondents gave positive responses to Padlet utilization. Further, Padlet can be used not only as a medium in teaching but also as a medium to store and distribute teaching materials from teachers to students or vice versa, hence it is useful as an application to enhance Japanese language learning in general.
The article is devoted to military and political events in the Far East on the eve and at the beginning of World War II, namely, German-Japanese relations. The rapprochement of Germany and Japan during this period had a serious geopolitical reason, which consisted in the attitude of both countries towards the Soviet Union. It was a common military and political goal for both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The presence of such an external enemy led to the creation of a German-Japanese military-political alliance, which, however, could not overcome the geographical remoteness of both countries, as well as the partners’ wary attitude towards mutual ambitions in the Asia Pacific region. A huge role in the development of military-political relations between Germany and Japan was played by their military diplomats operating in Tokyo and Berlin. Military-political cooperation between the two countries did not stop until April 1945 and was represented not only by the conclusion of bilateral agreements, contacts with the top leadership of Germany and Japan, and the exchange of intelligence information, but also by the organization of delivery of military supplies, which, however, did not have any real significance. Central to the article is the analysis of reports of German military attachés accredited to the German embassy in Tokyo. These documents are deposited in the captured archival funds, which are stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Most of these documents are reviews of military operations during the Sino-Japanese War, as well as data on the armed forces of Japan and the army of the central government of China (Kuomintang). Some of the materials contain intelligence information about the Red Army and the Soviet military forces in the Far East. The Authors did not set themselves the goal of recreating the full picture of military-political cooperation between Germany and Japan in the pre-war period and during the Second World War, but rather limited themselves to analyzing the reflection of this topic in the reports of German military attachés from Tokyo.
This paper takes Imamura Eiji (1911–?) as a case study in developing a theory of minor literary style and pedagogical poetics in Japaneselanguage Manshū literature. At the same time, it grapples with reading Japanese-language Manshū literature with postcolonial reflexivity. Imamura Eiji was an ethnic Korean who was an active participant in the Japanese language literary community of Japan-occupied Manchuria. While he is best known for his short story “Travel Companions,” this paper contends that his work and position within the Manchukuoan state can be better understood through the juxtaposition of multiple of his diverse works, including another short story entitled “New Womb.” Borrowing from Elleke Boehmer’s “postcolonial poetics,” I approach these texts from the perspective of not merely what politics they attempt, but also how they do so aesthetically and technologically. I conclude that Imamura produced a form of minor style observable in other contemporary literary production as well. While previous work on Imamura has laser focused on decoding his ethnic politics, I argue that we must aim for a more careful and critical reading by remaining aware of the contemporary politics of the academic field and relationality between scholar and text.
The article summarizes the results of the religious-studies and historical-philosophical research based on the Konjaku monogatari-shū (1120s). This largest set of didactic setsuwa tales provides an encyclopedic picture of Buddhism as it was known in Japan at the beginning of the 12th century. The history of the Buddha Law, shown in the series of stories, is traced through the centuries, from the very beginning until recently, spanning India and China and continuing in Japan; the same issues that are important for the Buddhist community are covered from different angles in all three parts of the collection. From the perspective of the Konjaku narrator, people can follow Buddha in different ways: a monk in a community, a hermit monk, a righteous layperson, and a sinner layperson - all of them move in their own ways towards liberation, and for all of them the main thing is compassionate concern for others. All kinds of rituals based on the veneration of sacred books, repeating the names of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, presenting gifts to the community, etc. serve not only to establish connections with higher powers, but also to strengthen good ties between people and get rid of bad ties. Many worldly habits, seemingly far from Buddhist piety, lead to the same thing: one can move towards liberation along the path of ruler, courtier, warrior, rich man, and poor man. Any event, from common to miraculous, can be interpreted in terms of the doctrine of retribution and thus one can find an instructive meaning in it.
The article examines some aspects of the evolution of Japanese theoretical approaches to international relations (IR). A brief description of intellectual currents and concepts characteristic of the IR studies in the pre-war period is given, and their development after 1945 is considered as well. Japanese theoretical approaches to international relations mainly originate from Western schools of philosophy, political science, and law, but national peculiarities are traced in them. Western theories selectively lay on Japanese soil, and while some of them were further developed in the works of Japanese scholars, others, on the contrary, did not arouse much interest. In general, we can say that, under the influence of Western thought and Japanese traditions, distinctive concepts emerged in Japan. Japanese approaches to IR have evolved simultaneously with the conceptual rethinking of the surrounding world and Japan’s place in it, as well as its national identity. A feature of Japanese approaches to IR is the emphasis on their economic and cultural aspects, as well as the promotion of concepts that could ensure the global leadership of Japan as a non-military power. One can note the interest in the applied aspects of the IR theories, which make it possible to substantiate certain foreign policy goals. In general, theoretical approaches to IR tend more towards finding answers to specific questions than to abstract constructions. This reflects the peculiarities of the Japanese mentality and the characteristic features of Japanese political culture.
The article analyzes how the “comfort women” issue influences current relations between the Republic of Korea and Japan. In the early 20th century, Japan annexed Korea, and the memories of colonial-era humiliation are vivid in Korean collective consciousness. As a result, issues of the past often sour bilateral relations even today. Recently, Seoul has been actively pressing the issue of sexual slavery in Japanese military brothels, and differences over this seemingly irrelevant issue have impeded political and military cooperation. Articles on former sexual slaves (also called wianbu in Korean) have resurfaced time and again in Korean press throughout the 1940-80s, but the problem internationalized only in the 1990s, when a broad public discussion started. Although Japan maintains that the 1965 bilateral normalization resolved all issues of the past, Tokyo has several times offered official condolences and compensations to the victims, however Seoul found these steps or the tone thereof unsatisfactory. Most recently, in 2015, Abe Shinzō and Park Geunhye signed an agreement to close the wianbu issue, but the document irritated South Korean public and opposition, so Seoul abandoned it. President Moon Jaein, who came to power in 2017, continued this course and added pressure on related historical problems, such as Korean forced laborers in imperial Japan. As the crisis deepened, Tokyo introduced economic sanctions against South Korea (technically on unrelated grounds). Conflicts stemming from collective memory are a characteristic feature of North East Asian political culture. They are a popular tool in foreign and domestic policy of many countries. This, coupled with the irrational nature of nationalism and imperfection of regional security, makes issues of the past a very real threat to the present.
This article responds to the important effort, regarding diversity and inclusion, to draw attention to the imbalance in identity representation amongst the ranks of Japanese language teachers and to interrogate whether this is a symptom of native speaker supremacy bias. While recognizing the presence of this bias, I argue that addressing it through frameworks of representation (e.g. increasing the number of non-L1 female-identifying teachers) could inadvertently serve to support larger frameworks of oppression. Promoting, instead, a method of inclusive teaching that prompts us to look inward and actually transform the way we teach by having the courage to draw attention to our gendered, racial, national, and class identities within the classroom and connecting them to the content we teach, I offer a tactic for more directly addressing native speaker bias, as well as other structures of exclusion, that can be practiced by any instructor, no matter what their identities.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
This commentary tries to address how we can foster diversity and inclusion among peers and potential peers in Japanese-language education based on my experience with providing pedagogical linguistics training to graduate students at The Ohio State University. Pedagogical linguistics training aims to instill future Japanese-language instructors with the knowledge of how the Japanese language works and to foster their ability to incorporate such knowledge into teaching. I would like to propose that pedagogical linguistics training can be a powerful tool to help individual teachers achieve their potential regardless of their prior experiences and backgrounds. I will discuss 1) the importance of pedagogical linguistics training and how it empowers future Japanese-language; and 2) issues in pedagogical linguistics training.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
To increase understanding of the epidemiology, risks, consequences and resource utilization of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) in Japan, a systematic literature review was undertaken of relevant publications from January 2006 to November 2017. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and methods, 55 articles met the criteria for full review. The majority (58%) of studies were from a single site, with the most recent data from 2015. The incidence, reported prevalence and recurrence rate of CDI in Japan were 0.8–4.71/10,000 patient-days, 0.3–5.5/1000 patients and 3.3–27.3%, respectively, and varied according to setting, population, CDI definition and detection method. Most C. difficile isolates associated with CDI in Japan were toxin A+B+, with a low level of C. difficile binary toxin-positive (CDT+) strains (0–6.8% reported across studies). The most common C. difficile PCR ribotypes associated with infection in Japan were smz/018, 002, 052 and 369. Data regarding the impact of CDI on length of hospital stay were limited. Reported all-cause mortality in patients with CDI ranged from 3.4 to 15.1% between 2007 and 2013. Two studies assessed risk factors for CDI recurrence, identifying malignant disease, intensive care unit hospitalization and use of proton pump inhibitors as factors increasing the risk of initial and/or recurrent CDI. No study analyzed initial CDI treatment in relation to recurrence. More comprehensive surveillance and coordinated studies are needed to map trends, understand risk factors, and recognize the extent and impact of CDI in Japanese patients.FundingAstellas Pharma, Inc.Plain Language SummaryPlain language summary available for this article.
Purpose One of the chief purposes of bibliometric analysis is to reveal the intellectual structure of a knowledge domain. Yet due to the magnitude and the heterogeneous nature of bibliometric networks, some sorts of filtering procedures are often required to make the resulting network interpretable. A co-word analysis of more than 135,000 scholarly publications on Buddhism was conducted to compare the intellectual structure of Buddhist studies in three language communities, Chinese, English and Japanese, over two periods (1957–1986 and 1987–2016). Six co-word similarity networks were created so social network analysis-based community-detection algorithm can be identified to compare major research themes in different languages and eras. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach A series of filtering procedures was performed to exclude less discriminatory keywords and spurious relationships of a large, cross-language co-word network in Buddhist studies. Chief among the filtering heuristics was a percolation-transition based method to determine the similarity threshold that involves observing the relative decrease of nodes in the giant component with the increasing similarity threshold. Findings It was found that the topical patterns in the Chinese and Japanese scholarship of Buddhism are alike and observably distinct from that of the English scholarship. Furthermore, a far more drastic changes of research themes were observed in the English literature relative to the Chinese and Japanese literature. Originality/value The filtering procedures were shown to greatly enhance the modularity values and limited the number of modularity classes; thus, domain expert interpretation is feasible.
This paper aims to study the error that happens when students learning Japanese through listening. This paper describes misheard cases by students during listening class. The data in this research collected from students’ quiz and test results. Students participated in this study were first-year and second-year students, including 37 first-years students and 24 second-year students, with total participants 81 students. The data collected in this study then categorized based on the type of errors. The results showed that the errors occurred include confusion between two sounds, reduction of sound, and mis-guessing long vowel. Confusing of two sounds happened when the students misheard two different sounds such as alveolar nasal consonant /n/ in [hinan] with liquid consonant /r/ as in [hiran]. Furthermore, reduction of sound is occurred when students confused the same vowel at particle with front or back vowel sound of the word, such as yamagaafureru which misheard with yamagafureru. This error occurred because the vowel sound /a/ on particle /ga/ which covering up the vowel sound /a/ in the front of the word afureru. Lastly, there are errors that happened because thin overlapping borderline between error or mistake, where students mostly misheard or mistaken short vowels sound such as [ba∫o] with long vowels such as [ba∫o:].
BackgroundToxocariasis is a highly prevalent parasitic disease in the tropical regions of the world, with its impact on public health being typically underestimated. To better recognise the trends and characteristics of toxocariasis research, this study is a bibliometric analysis of the global toxocariasis research.MethodsSearches were completed on April 5, 2016, using the Scopus database. A search without any language restriction was performed to extract publications dealing with toxocariasis. Terms related to toxocariasis were used to perform a title keyword search.ResultsA total of 2765 publications comprising 11 document types and published between 1932 and 2015 were included in the analysis. Articles were the most popular document form, accounting for 83.62% of all publications, followed by letters (3.80%) and reviews (3.4%). The annual number of research publications increased from 30 in 1980 to 111 in 2015, indicating that the number of publications on toxocariasis has increased slowly over the past 35 years. The United States of America and Japan are the predominant countries of origin, with 303 articles and 207 articles, respectively, followed by Brazil and the United Kingdom, with 180 (6.5%) each. The h-index for all the publications was 60. The highest h-index were for publications from the United Kingdom (h-index value = 43) and the United States (h-index value = 39); these two countries were also involved with the highest number of international collaborations, with 27 and 28 countries, respectively.ConclusionsDeveloped countries, including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, are the world’s leaders in toxocariasis research, contributing to more than 34% of the total published literature. In addition, developing countries, such as Brazil, Poland, Argentina and India, showed a noticeable increase in published papers on toxocariasis research in recent years. A push for more collaboration is needed to achieve a superior research strategy related to toxocariasis at the global level from the viewpoint of epidemiological data, clinical aspects, medical ecology, molecular aspects and treatment practices associated with toxocariasis.
This article surveys the English-language literature on the history of financial reporting regulation in four non-English-speaking countries: France, Germany, Japan, and China. The choice of these countries was based on the availability of a sizable accounting history literature in the area surveyed. We first offer a summary of regulatory events in the four countries and suggest that the literature provides ample evidence of the countries’ intricate histories of financial reporting regulation. In addition, we point to important research gaps, where we believe that the literature has significant underexploited potential, in particular by moving beyond high-level overviews of changing regulatory mechanisms to in-depth studies of regulatory change that are embedded in the local legal, political, and societal contexts. Hence, plenty of opportunities exist for further research into these countries’ regulatory histories, either in terms of single-country studies or as comparative histories.