Hasil untuk "Japanese language and literature"

F. Rafiqi, A. Maksum

This study examines the strategic role of sake as an instrument of cultural diplomacy within the framework of trade relations between Japan and Europe, using a theoretical approach that combines the concepts of soft power, gastrodiplomacy, and nation branding. Sake, as a traditional Japanese fermented beverage rooted in the spiritual and social practices of society, has undergone a reorientation of its function from domestic consumption to a symbol of national cultural identity promoted internationally. Through the Cool Japan policy, the Japanese government actively positions sake as a key element in public diplomacy, linking cultural heritage with export trade strategies.The implementation of the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) since 2018, which includes geographical indication (GI) protection, provides additional legitimacy for the authenticity of sake in the European market. Promotional strategies involving culinary festivals, cross-industry collaborations, and product narratives emphasizing aesthetic value, origins, and traditional production techniques have successfully enhanced European public perception of sake and, more broadly, of Japan. Export data shows significant growth, with France, the United Kingdom, and Germany contributing the most, indicating the success of this approach in expanding market penetration. However, this dynamic is not without criticism, including the commodification of cultural values, exclusion of small producers, and the risk of reducing the spiritual meaning of sake in a commercialized context.Therefore, this study emphasizes the importance of cultural diplomacy that not only highlights visual appeal and market narratives but also commits to preserving values and the participation of local cultural communities. In conclusion, sake diplomacy offers an intriguing model for the integration of culture and economy in international relations, demonstrating that cultural products can serve as an effective means to build cross-national relations rooted in empathy, experience, and appreciation for the uniqueness of traditions.

Masataka Kawai, Singo Sakashita, Shumpei Ishikawa et al.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) for supporting pathology report writing in Japanese remains unexplored. We evaluated seven open-source LLMs from three perspectives: (A) generation and information extraction of pathology diagnosis text following predefined formats, (B) correction of typographical errors in Japanese pathology reports, and (C) subjective evaluation of model-generated explanatory text by pathologists and clinicians. Thinking models and medical-specialized models showed advantages in structured reporting tasks that required reasoning and in typo correction. In contrast, preferences for explanatory outputs varied substantially across raters. Although the utility of LLMs differed by task, our findings suggest that open-source LLMs can be useful for assisting Japanese pathology report writing in limited but clinically relevant scenarios.

Domen Vreš, Tjaša Arčon, Timotej Petrič et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool for natural language processing and artificial intelligence in general. Current open-source models are primarily trained on English texts, resulting in poorer performance on less-resourced languages and cultures. We present a set of methodological approaches necessary for the successful adaptation of an LLM to a less-resourced language, and demonstrate them using the Slovene language. We present GaMS3-12B, a generative model for Slovene with 12 billion parameters, and demonstrate that it is the best-performing open-source model for Slovene within its parameter range. We adapted the model to the Slovene language using three-stage continual pre-training of the Gemma 3 model, followed by two-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We trained the model on a combination of 140B Slovene, English, Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian pretraining tokens, and over 200 thousand English and Slovene SFT examples. We evaluate GaMS3-12B on the Slovenian-LLM-Eval datasets, English-to-Slovene translation, and the Slovene LLM arena. We show that the described model outperforms 12B Gemma 3 across all three scenarios and performs comparably to much larger commercial GPT-4o in the Slovene LLM arena, achieving a win rate of over 60 %.

I. S. Tikhotskaya, M. A. Petropavlovskaya, S. Kato

Based on the analysis of statistical and information sources, academic publications, and the authors’ personal experience, the article analyzes the peculiarities of Japanese minimarkets that rank among amazing Japanese inventions, creations, and practices and have become an integral part of the Japanese way of life and a trademark of the country. In the academic literature, there have been no comprehensive works focused on this phenomenon so far, and their regional peculiarities, especially the geography of stores operated by different chains, are almost completely neglected. The purpose of this article is to highlight the key academic discourse, to characterize the unique character and universality, which, in fact, constitute the phenomenon of konbini, as well as to identify their regional features.The study clearly shows that these stores, which came to Japan from the United States in 1973, have been completely transformed and are constantly evolving, changing the store concept and presenting a globally unique phenomenon. It describes the characteristics of the leading chains of these stores in their endeavor to gain even greater popularity among consumers and the innovations that have emerged in recent years, including those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Studying the phenomenon of konbini, the authors, on the one hand, note their transformation into an important element of social infrastructure, that meets the needs of modern society and is especially necessary in the context of rapidly progressing aging of the population, and, on the other hand, their certain negative impact, especially on the younger generation.The paper features an analysis of the regional characteristics of these stores and the cartographic material illustrating them. It is revealed that, within prefectures, the location of konbini correlates with the number of inhabitants (the number of stores is proportional to the population of municipalities), and each of the 20 konbini chains operating in Japan is located in its own specific area. The authors conclude that konbini facilitate the development of the country’s regions as a whole, and their role in Japanese society cannot be overemphasized. The Japanese experience can be relevant to other countries, including Russian chain stores.

Enrico Benedetti, Akiko Aizawa, Florian Boudin

Providing example sentences that are diverse and aligned with learners' proficiency levels is essential for fostering effective language acquisition. This study examines the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to produce example sentences targeting L2 Japanese learners. We utilize PLMs in two ways: as quality scoring components in a retrieval system that draws from a newly curated corpus of Japanese sentences, and as direct sentence generators using zero-shot learning. We evaluate the quality of sentences by considering multiple aspects such as difficulty, diversity, and naturalness, with a panel of raters consisting of learners of Japanese, native speakers -- and GPT-4. Our findings suggest that there is inherent disagreement among participants on the ratings of sentence qualities, except for difficulty. Despite that, the retrieval approach was preferred by all evaluators, especially for beginner and advanced target proficiency, while the generative approaches received lower scores on average. Even so, our experiments highlight the potential for using PLMs to enhance the adaptability of sentence suggestion systems and therefore improve the language learning journey.

Wataru Ogawa, Palvi Gupta

Obesity is a focus of Japanese public health policy, due to Japanese individuals' high susceptibility to weight-related conditions. In contrast to global definitions, obesity is defined as a body-mass-index (BMI) of ≥25 kg/m2 in Japan. Despite public efforts, rates of obesity have not decreased over the past decade. To better understand its societal impact, we examined the economic, quality of life (QoL), and complications burden of obesity in Japan. Electronic databases were searched for English and Japanese-language publications from 2005 to December 2020 reporting on adults with obesity in Japan; other diseases were excluded, with no restriction on intervention. Outcomes of interest included costs or resource use, QoL, risk of complications, and other clinical outcomes. We identified 137 studies, including 19 reporting on economic evidence, eight reporting on QoL, and 115 reporting on the relationship between obesity and the risk of complications or mortality. The studies consistently showed that Japanese adults with obesity (BMI ≥25 kg/m2) are at increased risk of complications vs. normal weight adults. They also confirmed higher total and medical costs, resource use, and hospitalization costs among adults with obesity vs. normal weight adults. In addition, the studies confirmed a considerable impact of obesity on physical and mental aspects of QoL. Overall, this study found that obesity in Japan is associated with a substantial burden. Japanese people are at risk even with BMI ≥25-<30 kg/m2, which are generally considered as pre-obese in other countries.

Alexis Busso, Becky Sanchez

English language education in Japan has long been criticized for its traditional methods which emphasize grammar and reading at the expense of communicative competence. This article explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) to address this issue. A review of literature explored key challenges faced by Japanese EFL learners including Japanese teachers’ low English proficiency and attitudes towards English teaching, heavy focus on entrance examinations in high school, overemphasis on grammar in EFL curricula and textbooks, lack of authentic communicative practice, and differences in cultural values. An analysis of technology integration in Japanese education revealed that while many institutions have begun incorporating technology, its widespread adoption has been gradual. Several case studies support the use of AI to address the psychological barrier to speaking by offering a safe and engaging learning environment, thus boosting confidence and fluency. Furthermore, in the Japanese language context, the use of AI can lower anxiety, promote creativity, and offer personalized learning. In addition to the individual benefits, AI empowers institutions to tailor learning needs, teachers to shift their role from instructors to facilitators, and students to become independent critical thinkers. Finally, challenges and limitations including ethical considerations surrounding data privacy, overreliance, authenticity, watermarking, and academic integrity are addressed. Despite potential drawbacks, the benefits of AIEd merit a deeper exploration of its adoption in EFL curricula. AI tools can be a practical solution to prepare Japanese EFL students to effectively and confidently communicate in English and thus participate in the global landscape.

Gregory Price

This study explores the perspectives of Japanese university students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) on the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), with a specific focus on the ChatGPT model, for academic assignments. Through qualitative analysis of data collected from three participants engaged in writing and discussion assignments, themes such as efficiency, reliability, ethics, EFL utilization, and unique insights are examined. Drawing on contemporary literature, the research focuses on the broader context of the emerging influence of GenAI in education. Insights from student perspectives reveal complex attitudes toward the use of ChatGPT. Despite reported efficiency gains, concerns about reliability, ethical implications, and the need for human oversight emerge prominently. The study also delves into the multifaceted role of GenAI in EFL learning, showcasing its potential as a language learning aid. The paper underscores the necessity for ongoing dialogue and critical reflection among educators and students to navigate the evolving landscape of AI integration in education, ensuring ethical and pedagogically sound practices. As GenAI continues to shape educational paradigms, understanding student perspectives and addressing their concerns is imperative for fostering responsible and effective utilization of AI technologies in academia.

Irena Lovčević, Sho Tsuji

Language development during the 1st year of life is characterized by perceptual attunement: following language-general perception, a decline in the perception of non-native phonemes and a parallel increase in or maintenance of the perception of native phonemes. While this general pattern is well established, there are still many gaps in the literature. First, most evidence documenting these patterns comes from "Minority world countries" with only a limited number of studies from "Majority world countries", limiting the range of languages and contrasts assessed. Second, few studies test both the developmental patterns of native and non-native speech perception in the same group of infants, making it hard to draw conclusions on simultaneous decline in non-native and increase in native speech perception. Such limitations are in part due to the effort that goes into testing developing speech sound perception, where usually only discrimination of one contrast per infant can be tested at a time. The present study thus set out to assess the feasibility of assessing a given infant on their discrimination of two speech sound contrasts during the same lab visit. It leveraged the presence of documented patterns of the improvement of native and the decline of non-native phoneme discrimination abilities in Japanese, therefore assessing native and non-native speech perception in Japanese infants from 6 to 12 months of age. Results demonstrated that 76 % of infants contributed discrimination data for both contrasts. We found a decline in non-native speech perception evident in discrimination of the non-native /ɹ/-/l/ consonant contrast at 9-11, but not at 11-13 months of age. Additionally, a parallel increase in native speech perception was demonstrated evident in an absence of native phonemic vowel length discrimination at 6-7 and 9-11 months and a discrimination of this contrast at 11-13 months of age. These results, based on a simultaneous assessment of native and non-native speech perception in Japanese-learning infants, demonstrate the feasibility of assessing the discrimination of two contrasts in one testing session and corroborate theoretical proposals on two hallmarks of perceptual attunement: a decrease in non-native and a facilitation in native speech perception during the first year of life.

Jinming Zhao, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura et al.

It remains a question that how simultaneous interpretation (SI) data affects simultaneous machine translation (SiMT). Research has been limited due to the lack of a large-scale training corpus. In this work, we aim to fill in the gap by introducing NAIST-SIC-Aligned, which is an automatically-aligned parallel English-Japanese SI dataset. Starting with a non-aligned corpus NAIST-SIC, we propose a two-stage alignment approach to make the corpus parallel and thus suitable for model training. The first stage is coarse alignment where we perform a many-to-many mapping between source and target sentences, and the second stage is fine-grained alignment where we perform intra- and inter-sentence filtering to improve the quality of aligned pairs. To ensure the quality of the corpus, each step has been validated either quantitatively or qualitatively. This is the first open-sourced large-scale parallel SI dataset in the literature. We also manually curated a small test set for evaluation purposes. Our results show that models trained with SI data lead to significant improvement in translation quality and latency over baselines. We hope our work advances research on SI corpora construction and SiMT. Our data will be released upon the paper’s acceptance.

Hong Xiao

Relying on the background of big data, this paper introduces the blended teaching model into the secondary vocational Japanese oral classroom and explores whether the teaching model is conducive to the improvement of the secondary vocational Japanese oral learning effect and teaching effect. In order to make this research more scientific and effective, this paper refers to a large number of literature materials. First, the purpose, content, and methods of this research are clarified; secondly, the relevant literature is sorted out and summarized. The SPOC blended teaching design was carried out, and teaching experiments were carried out accordingly. Finally, the data collected during the experiment were compared and analyzed, and the research results were verified with objective data. Research has shown that the use of a Japanese language teaching system enhances students' learning experience, promotes effective use of time, and improves overall learning outcomes.

Carlos L. Pimentel

The allocation of explicit and implicit pronouns and the literature extensively discusses the syntactic and pragmatic conditions that permit and necessitate the use of overt and null pronouns in Romance languages, such as Spanish and Italian. This topic has been explored by various researchers, including Alonso-Ovalle and D’Introno (2000), Fernández-Soriano (1989), Luján (1987, 1999), Montalbetti (1984), Rigau (1986, 1988), and Rizzi (1997). Rothman (2009) argues that the employment of overt subject pronouns in Spanish is pragmatically unusual, except in select discursive situations when their existence contributes more to semantic interpretation than just agreement features. In Japanese, null forms of pronouns are more common than overt pronouns, as observed by Martin (1976). However, like Spanish, the distribution of pronouns in Japanese is influenced by both syntax and pragmatics. In pro-drop languages, overt pronouns, as well as lexical subjects, have the role of resolving any potential uncertainties that may occur when new referents are introduced in a conversation.

Jingtong Kuang

: This paper is based on the politeness theory of language application that Brown and Levinson proposed in 1987. Both China and Japan belong to the Oriental civilization, and there is a certain similarity between Chinese and Japanese. This paper studies how face theory is embodied in Chinese and Japanese. It can be concluded that the expression of positive face in Chinese and Japanese is roughly the same. For the negative face, although Matsumoto (1988) and Mao (1994) have made criticism. However, negative face does exist in Chinese and Japanese, but the revealed phenomenon is not regarded as the meaning of face in Chinese.

A. N. Vylegzhanin, M. R. Yuzbashyan, M. E. Muntian

Japan’s advancements in technology and its strategic focus on space policy have driven swift advancements in the field, attributed to Japan’s ability to balance scientific exploration, industrial growth, and national defense. This article examines Japan’s national legal framework governing space activities. The key pieces of legislation analyzed are the Law Concerning Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency of 2002, the Basic Space Law of 2008, the Act on Launching of Spacecraft, etc. and Control of Spacecraft of 2016, the Act on Ensuring Appropriate Handling of Satellite Remote Sensing Data of 2016, and the Act on the Promotion of Business Activities for the Exploration and Development of Space Resources of 2021. The analysis of these activities is conducted in accordance with the relevant international space legal framework. The article delves into the shift in Japan’s space policy from “non-military” to “non-aggressive” in 2008 and its impact on national legislation. An examination is provided of the fourth law in the world (following similar actions by the USA, Luxembourg, and the UAE) concerning the exploitation of natural resources of celestial bodies, enabling private entities to conduct exploration and extraction activities. This is especially noteworthy given the lack of direct international legal oversight on space resource utilization. This article also examines Japan’s international legal space policy, including the Japan-U.S. Framework Agreement on Cooperation in the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies 2023, in light of the particularly close Japan-U.S. cooperation in space exploration and use. Japan’s enactment of a law regarding the exploration and exploitation of natural resources of celestial bodies, along with Japan’s participation in projects such as Artemis, Lunar Gateway, and Hakuto-R, demonstrates its growing role in international space projects and its pursuit of the closest possible cooperation with the United States in ensuring national security through the use of outer space. The conclusion offers summarizing statements.

Yikun Sun, Zhen Wan, Nobuhiro Ueda et al.

The creation of instruction data and evaluation benchmarks for serving Large language models often involves enormous human annotation. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when rapidly developing such resources for a non-English language like Japanese. Instead of following the popular practice of directly translating existing English resources into Japanese (e.g., Japanese-Alpaca), we propose an efficient self-instruct method based on GPT-4. We first translate a small amount of English instructions into Japanese and post-edit them to obtain native-level quality. GPT-4 then utilizes them as demonstrations to automatically generate Japanese instruction data. We also construct an evaluation benchmark containing 80 questions across 8 categories, using GPT-4 to automatically assess the response quality of LLMs without human references. The empirical results suggest that the models fine-tuned on our GPT-4 self-instruct data significantly outperformed the Japanese-Alpaca across all three base pre-trained models. Our GPT-4 self-instruct data allowed the LLaMA 13B model to defeat GPT-3.5 (Davinci-003) with a 54.37\% win-rate. The human evaluation exhibits the consistency between GPT-4's assessments and human preference. Our high-quality instruction data and evaluation benchmark have been released here.

Preferred Elements, :, Kenshin Abe et al.

We introduce PLaMo-100B, a large-scale language model designed for Japanese proficiency. The model was trained from scratch using 2 trillion tokens, with architecture such as QK Normalization and Z-Loss to ensure training stability during the training process. Post-training techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning and Direct Preference Optimization, were applied to refine the model's performance. Benchmark evaluations suggest that PLaMo-100B performs well, particularly in Japanese-specific tasks, achieving results that are competitive with frontier models like GPT-4. The base model is available at https://huggingface.co/pfnet/plamo-100b.

Issey Sukeda

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) and the scaling law has led to a widespread adoption of larger models. Particularly in the healthcare industry, there is an increasing demand for locally operated LLMs due to security concerns. However, the majority of high quality open-source LLMs have a size of 70B parameters, imposing significant financial burdens on users for GPU preparation and operation. To overcome these issues, we present a medical adaptation based on the recent 7B models, which enables the operation in low computational resources. We compare the performance on medical question-answering benchmarks in two languages (Japanese and English), demonstrating that its scores reach parity with or surpass those of currently existing medical LLMs that are ten times larger. We find that fine-tuning an English-centric base model on Japanese medical dataset improves the score in both language, supporting the effect of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. We hope that this study will alleviate financial challenges, serving as a stepping stone for clinical institutions to practically utilize LLMs locally. Our evaluation code is available at https://github.com/stardust-coder/japanese-lm-med-harness.

Kota Tanabe, Masahiro Suzuki, Hiroki Sakaji et al.

We construct an instruction dataset for the large language model (LLM) in the Japanese finance domain. Domain adaptation of language models, including LLMs, is receiving more attention as language models become more popular. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of domain adaptation through instruction tuning. To achieve this, we propose an instruction tuning data in Japanese called JaFIn, the Japanese Financial Instruction Dataset. JaFIn is manually constructed based on multiple data sources, including Japanese government websites, which provide extensive financial knowledge. We then utilize JaFIn to apply instruction tuning for several LLMs, demonstrating that our models specialized in finance have better domain adaptability than the original models. The financial-specialized LLMs created were evaluated using a quantitative Japanese financial benchmark and qualitative response comparisons, showing improved performance over the originals.

Alexis Goli

Background. The adoption of the TOEIC Listening and Reading test as the main English competency measurement instrument for Japanese businesses has lead Japanese business people to invest in courses specialized in test-taking strategies which seem to improve test scores in the short term. Nevertheless, there is pressing need to adopt more reliable instructions for reading ability development. Translanguaging pedagogy, an instruction method that urges L2 learners to make use of all languages in their linguistic repertoire, has rapidly gained the interest of language researchers and educators worldwide. Various studies have been conducted at all level of formal education, from elementary to tertiary education, to evaluate how it could help learners develop their proficiency in the target L2, including reading comprehension ability. However, no study on translanguaging in continuing education in Japan could be found in the literature. Purpose. This paper presents an investigation to assess the effectiveness of translanguaging pedagogy in nurturing the reading comprehension of a group of Japanese EFL learners in a continuing education context. Methods. The study adapted a quasi-experimental design with a control and an experimental group, as well as a reading comprehension improvement intervention course between pre-test and post-test. The experimental group received instruction based on translanguaging pedagogy, and the control group was restricted to using only English in their classes.  Results. It was found that both the control and experimental groups improved their reading comprehension, but improvement in the experimental group was moderately more substantial. This finding contributes to the literature on translanguaging pedagogy in Japan, especially in the context of continuing education. Conclusion. Due to the small number of participants, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to EFL education in continuing education. Further research with a substantial number of participants and treatment over a longer period could help confirm that translanguaging pedagogy can effectively be implemented in this setting to assist learners become proficient in the target L2.

Azizia Freda Savana, Ayu Gardenia Lantang

The research discusses Japanese and Indonesian expressions of hospitality at hotels. It is necessary to know how to use Japanese and Indonesian expressions in hospitality, how to welcome guests in time of check-in check out in Japanese and Indonesian. The students can better understand their use when working in Japanese hotels. In addition, this research can provide knowledge to the students when participating in Japanese language professional certification competencies. The method used in this research is the descriptive qualitative method and the research aims to find a systematic, factual, and accurate pictures of the use of expressions in Japanese and Indonesian in the scope of hospitality at hotels; for welcoming hotel guests:  Asisatsu no hyogen and Yobikake no hyogen,  for serving guests check-in; Aisatsu no Hyogen, Irai no Hyogen, and Gimon no Hyogen and Aisatsu no Hyogen, for serving guests check-out. There is a slight difference between the expressions used in Japanese and Indonesian. In Japanese, they use Hantei Youkyuu no Hyougen to welcome guests to a hotel, but in Indonesian such expressions are not used. In Indonesian, the expression Hantei Youkyuu no Hyougen when serving guests to check-in is not used in Indonesian version.