A critical recuperation of Watsuji’s Rinrigaku

Watsuji is recognised as one Japan’s foremost philosophers. His work on ethics, Rinrigaku, is cosmopolitan in engaging the Western philosophical tradition, and in presupposing an international audience. Yet Watsuji’s ethical thought is largely of niche interest outside Japan, and it is critiqued on the ground that it ratifies totalitarianism, demanding individuals’ unquestioning subordination to communal demands. We offer a reading of Rinrigaku that, in attempting to trace the text’s intention, disputes these arguments. We argue that Rinrigaku makes individual autonomy central to ethical action, despite the fact that its treatment of coercion may lead one to think otherwise; that it does not reduce ethical obligations to whatever demands any given society imposes on its members; that it draws a distinction between socio-ethical orders that are genuinely ethical and those that are not; and that, in insisting on the grounding of individuals in the Absolute, it makes adequate room for individuals’ resistance to unjustifiable socio-ethical demands

DTT - Divertor Tokamak Test facility: A testbed for DEMO

The effective treatment of the heat and power exhaust is a critical issue in the road map to the realization of the fusion energy. In order to provide possible, reliable, well assessed and on-time answers to DEMO, the Divertor Tokamak Test facility (DTT) has been conceived and projected to be carried out and operated within the European strategy in fusion technology. This paper, based on the invited plenary talk at the 31st virtual SOFT Conference 2020, provides an overview of the DTT scientific proposal, which is deeply illustrated in the 2019 DTT Interim Design Report

DTT - Divertor Tokamak Test facility - Interim Design Report

The “Divertor Tokamak Test facility, DTT” is a milestone along the international program aimed at demonstrating – in the second half of this century – the feasibility of obtaining to commercial electricity from controlled thermonuclear fusion. DTT is a Tokamak conceived and designed in Italy with a broad international vision. The construction will be carried out in the ENEA Frascati site, mainly supported by national funds, complemented by EUROfusion and European incentive schemes for innovative investments. The project team includes more than 180 high-standard researchers from ENEA, CREATE, CNR, INFN, RFX and various universities. The volume, entitled DTT Interim Design Report (“Green Book” from the colour of the cover), briefly describes the status of the project, the planning of the design future activities and its organizational structure. The publication of the Green Book also provides an occasion for thorough discussions in the fusion community and a broad international collaboration on the DTT challenge

Japan and the Great War

East Asia, and particularly Japan, is often omitted from both popular and academic accounts of the First World War. This is evident not just in the Western historiography of the conflict, but also in the Chinese and Japanese histories of the war. Yet, if the First World War is to be truly understood as a ‘world war’, it has to be seen in its global context. The events in the East Asian theatre and the ways in which the conflict profoundly influenced its political, economic and socials histories in both the domestic and international spheres therefore have to be looked at and analyzed accordingly. This is particularly relevant because, as specific memories of the conflict have receded into time, the orthodox factual and ethical foundations of the Western interpretation of the war are crumbling on different fronts and the stress on the military aspects alone is broadening out; thus new aspects of the conflagration can now be identified. Both Japan’s experience within the war and its observations of the impact that the conflict had others were major catalysts for change and that its effects went beyond merely the further expansion of Japanese political and military influence in continental East Asia. The conflict, for example, provided a major stimulus to the Japanese economy by creating fresh export markets and forcing the country to establish new import-substitution industries, in areas such as chemicals and optics, to make up for the loss of trade with Germany. In doing so, it also stimulated the rise of a credit boom that would mean that Japan entered the inter-war period with an over-extended and unstable banking system. In the realm of governance, Japan was faced with the question of how it should respond to the great expansion of state activity that the war had precipitated in Europe in regard to both economy and society. Then there was the challenge in the world of ideas where the Bolshevik Revolution and the Allied victory brought it with cries for democracy and greater labour rights at home (even to the extent of calls for female suffrage) and internationalism abroad. In order to look at some of these issues, nine scholars who are experts on Japanese and Asian history have come together as a working group to look at various aspects of the Japanese experience during and after the First World War. The topics covered are original and include innovative methodological approaches. In overall terms, the working group members have focused their attention on the way in which Japan and the Great Powers responded to the extension of hostilities to East Asia, as well as how the war influenced the evolution of social and economic policy within Japan and its empire