dai 1-kan. Nishida Kitarō -- dai 2-kan. Keiken to jikaku -- dai 3-kan. Basho -- dai 4-kan. Zen, kongenteki ningen -- dai 5-kan. Zen no fūkei -- dai 6-kan. Dōtei "Jūgyūzu" o ayumu -- dai 7-kan. Maisutā Ekkuharuto -- dai 8-kan. Hi shinpi shugi -- dai 9-kan. Kokū/Sekai -- dai 10-kan. Jiko no genshōgaku -- dai 11-kan. Shūkyō to wa nani ka.

Since the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990' s, the Japanese economy has only recovered slightly. This has direct implications for employment. Both the seniority wage system and the lifetime employment system, which were popular during the period of economic growth in Japan, unavoidably changed to an outcome-wage system. Now there is greater mobility in employment, increased use of nonregular employees, and diversed working patterns. The problem of karoshi – a potentially fatal syndrome resulting from long work (...) hours – has been known since the early 1980s. This problem has become more serious in recent years. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the economic and employment conditions in Japan, as well as to examine the working lifestyle of Japanese men and its connection to "karoshi." It is argued that the long work hours are not the preference of individuals, but rather the result of the adaptation to the work environment, and; solving this problem requires re-conceptualization of workers' human rights on the part of both companies and the society as a whole. (shrink)

This book offers inspiration and support to female faculty members in higher education who are at various stages of their professional development. Twenty-four educators share both their intuitive voices and practical knowledge on the topics of career development, balancing personal and professional life, cultural and individual identity, and spirituality.

In April of 2006, the prominent cultural anthropologist Noriyuki Ueda sat down with the Dalai Lama for a two day conversation. This book is based on that long and lively conversation in Dharamsala.

Tracing key biblical topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, The Sovereign and the Prophetsexamines Spinoza's Old Testament interpretation in the Theologico-political Treatiseand elucidates his effort to establish what Hobbes could not adequately offer to the Dutch: the liberty to philosophize. Fukuoka develops an original method for understanding seventeenth-century biblical arguments as a shared political paradigm. Her in-depth analysis reveals the discourses that converged on the question, 'Who stands immediately under God to mediate His will to (...) the people?' This subtly nuanced theme not only linked major theoreticians diachronically--from the Remonstrants such as Grotius to the anti-Hobbesian jurist Ulrik Huber (1636-1694)--but also synchronically built the axis of resonances and dissonances between Leviathanand the Theologico-political Treatise. (shrink)

1. IntroductionHaving been adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Silence is Shūsaku Endō’s most famous novel outside of Japan. Initially published in 1966, the novel is about seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries who secretly make a voyage to Japan in search of their spiritual Father who has reportedly renounced his faith after being tortured by local authorities. In his foreword to Endō’s Silence, Scorsese, a devout Catholic and long-standing admirer of Endō’s work, claims that the novel is “about the (...) particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.”1 Not only did Endō acknowledge an inevitable conflict between experience and belief, but he also creatively adapted his faith for a different reality. Endō described Catholicism as “Western clothing my mother gave me,” which, throughout his life, he tried to tailor into a Japanese kimono that would fit him.2 Suffering from an unhappy marriage, his mother turned to Catholicism, and Endō followed her in this pursuit at the age of eleven. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important (...) points of affinity between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ateleological moment of learning through imitation. In general, we can learn something new through imitating models we are given, which embody the values of our own society, culture and institutions. This means that imitation is understood in terms of the representation or reproduction of original models. In this understanding of imitation, however, the creative aspect of imitation is missed. In relation to this I shall, first, consider learning through imitation in terms (...) of Walter Benjamin’s theory of mimesis discussed in his essay, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty.’ It begins by examining general understanding of the concepts of experience and writing. Second and third, while reconsidering the idea of imitation, I shall bring out the difference between mimesis and copying, based on Plato and Aristotle, and I shall examine the former, especially its involuntary aspect. Fourth, in order to consider the ateleological moment of learning through imitation as mimesis, I discuss the relation between mimesis and the chance event. Fifth, Benjamin’s allegorical ‘anti-autobiography’ entitled ‘A Berlin Childhood around 1900’, which ponders the idea of childhood as otherness is considered in order to explore what is happening in the very moment of writing, driven by the chance event. To conclude, I shall show how the very moment of writing involves an unceasing transformation of the self. (shrink)

The Japanese marker _-te-i-_ can have progressive, resultative, and existential perfect readings and has often been regarded as ambiguous. This paper shows that there is no clear evidence that _-te-i-_ is ambiguous. It proposes a monosemous analysis of _-te-i-_ that unifies its multiple readings and shows how progressives and perfects can form a natural semantic class. Within the context of a Discourse Representation Theory, I propose that _-te-i-_ consists of an imperfective operator _-te-_ and a stativizer _-i-_. The imperfective operator (...) _-te-_ takes an eventuality as its argument and outputs a subpart of the eventuality, which precedes a reference time interval. Secondly, a stativizer _-i-_ maps the subpart of the eventuality, i.e. _-te-_'s output, onto a state which overlaps with reference time and whose category is semantically underspecified and is determined via pragmatic inferences. The vague output of the imperfective operator, i.e. whether it is a proper subpart or nonproper subpart of an eventuality, leads to the contrast between progressive readings and perfect readings of _-te-i-_. (shrink)

This article explores the question of how malaria “ends” in Myanmar, since malaria has been categorized both as an epidemic and as being endemic on seemingly countless occasions. The example of malaria reveals some of the limitations of understanding a disease within a single category of experience, such as an “epidemic.” In the case of malaria, epidemic is a shifting term that is best understood as being the point at which health authorities decide to intervene in the disease, rather than (...) as a clear and absolute measure of the scale or intensity of the threat. The identification of malaria as epidemic may thus be better understood as a political choice rather than as a precisely defined medical category. This article thus discusses what it means to end malaria in Myanmar, what kind of ending has been envisaged, and by whom. As this article demonstrates, policy makers have at various points aimed for the “elimination,” “eradication,” and “control” of malaria. Unlike the local population, who seem to have a rather nonchalant attitude toward malaria since malaria has long been familiar to them, international partners and the government have been shaping the narrative toward elimination with the aim of obtaining the World Health Organization's malaria-free certificate. Despite a number of political, social, and environmental obstacles, they believe that elimination can be achieved by 2030. However, unexpected political events such as the military coup in 2021, as well as the emergence of another pandemic, demonstrates that the “end” of malaria is a fragile concept. (shrink)

When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted (...) with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short or a long time. In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of (...) the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language. (shrink)