Seeking A Reevaluation of Ramon

Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1883-1963), Spanish awant-garde writer, went into exile in Argentina in 1936, not returning to Spain until 1949. Upon his return, intellectuals of General Franco\u27s party invited Ramon to a welcome reception that, in a typical display of his apolitical nature, he attended, and never spoke out against Franco\u27s regime. This action-standard for a man who believed politics corrupted writers-offended many writers, poets, and critics in Spain and Latin America who oppose Franco. They came to think of Ramon as not only apolitical, but as a conformist locked in an "ivory tower", a perception that hurt his reputation despite his diverse contributions to Spanish-and world-literature. During the Spanish Civil War (fought from 1936 to 1939 between Republicans and Franco\u27s Nationalist Forces), Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Andre Malraux jointed the International Brigades that were fighting for the Republican Popular Front; Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by Franco\u27s facists; the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, the composer Manuel de Falla, and the poets Antonio Machado and Pedro Salinas fled from their country; and Pablo Picasso painted Guernica to denounce the horrors of war. It was a difficult time to be accepted who did not espouse Republican values or at least sympathize with the Republican cause. I cannot help but think that Ramon was victimized because of his apolitical indifference, thereby stunting his reevaluation. Such a reevaluation of Ramon-in Japan as well as in Spain and Latin America-is overdue. In this paper, I will make a case for Ramon, who, in my opinion, played the most significant role in bridging the divide between the poetic reform movement of Modernismo (championed by poets like Nicaraguan Ruben Dario from 1880s to the mid 1910s) and modern poetry

Enrique Gómez Carrillo, pionero hispánico de crónicas internacionales, buscador errante de prestigio social

Esta tesis está compuesta de cinco capítulos que son : historia personal de Enrique GómezCarrillo desde su nacimiento, su leyenda negra personal, mujeres atractivas que le sedujeron (Aurora Cáceres, Raquel Meller, Consuelo Suncín, etc.), El Japón heroico y galante, primer reportaje del país del sol naciente escrito por un autor hispánico después de San Francisco Javier y el nacimiento de un cronista internacional. Se trata de aclarar hasta qué punto era esnob Enrique Gómez Carrillo y cómo llegó a ser un periodista internacional reconocido

El verdadero diálogo sobre Salomé entre Oscar Wilde y Enrique Gómez Carrillo

En El simbolismo y el arte finisecular (Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhunderwende) de Hans H. Hofstätter está incluido como uno de los seis datos un artículo llamado \u27Gomerz Carille\u27. Es citado de \u27Salomé\u27 publicado en el anuario alemán Insel del año 1906. Al juzgarlo por el contenido, se trata de la reproducción de \u27La concepción de Salomé\u27, uno de los capítulos de En plena bohemia, memorias escritas por Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Comparando la traducción japonesa de \u27Gomerz Carille\u27 por Suehiro Tanemura, un famoso germanista, con el texto original de \u27La concepción de Salomé\u27, se ve que hay demasiadas equivocaciones, partes de traducción muy libre y otras omitidas. Es una gran negligencia por parte del traductor que no podemos pasar por alto. Y es cruel maltratar de esta manera al autor. Si yo no trato el problema en este tesis, se quedará sin saber el verdadero diálogo sostenido por Oscar Wilde y Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Por eso, aquí voy a aclarar las diferencias que se encuentran entre la traducción japonesa y el texto original de español, aunque se interpone la traducción alemana.研究論

Financial Market Imperfections and Aggregate Fluctuations

Thesis advisor: Susanto BasuThis dissertation examines the fluctuations of the aggregate economy when frictions in financial markets are present. I focus on the the asymmetric information problems between creditors and debtors on the quality of debtor's projects and I analyze how these frictions cause the fluctuations in aggregate economy which is potentially inefficient. The first chapter examines the interaction between the perverse incentives and the general equilibrium effects of misallocated bank credit. This essay is intended to elucidate the mechanism of zombie lending in Japan. By incorporating a soft budget problem into a neo-classical dynamic general equilibrium model, the model shows that an inefficient zombie lending regime can be selected as an equilibrium. In this equilibrium, the incentives and the general equilibrium effects are interdependent. The inefficient use of resources crowds out investment when banks have incentives to bail out insolvent firms. On the other hand, the general equilibrium effects give rise to the perverse incentives endogenously through the formation of the liquidation value and the continuation value of insolvent firms. In the worst case, agents fail to resolve non-performing loan problems, and the model economy permanently falls into an inefficient regime. The second chapter proposes a model that generate boom-and-bust cycles by securitization of subprime mortgages. I construct a dynamic housing choice model in which mortgages are financed by securitization and I assume that creditors have errors in measuring the default risks of subprime mortgages. With this setup, the resource availability for housing fluctuates endogenously and it causes the boom-and-bust cycles. Particularly, there are two channels that change the resource availability: the security design of the securitized assets and the evolution of house price inflation. I illustrate that subprime mortgages can be cheaply financed by securitization when creditors mismeasure the quality of the subprime mortgages. This ignites a boom in the model. However, the boom can be terminated as the profitability of securitization declines along with the decline in the expectation of house price inflation. This is because the house price inflation is tied with the liquidation value of the defaulted mortgages. As the expectation of the house price inflation slows down, the subprime mortgages become more risky and the securitization becomes less profitable. Eventually, issuers of securitized assets withdraw from the securitization market and the boom collapses. The last chapter explores the transmission mechanisms of international business cycles when the borrowing capacity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is limited. I embed MNEs that face borrowing constraints in a two-country international business cycle model. I show that the net worth of MNEs plays a significant role in generating the international business cycle co-movement: the wealth effect in response to the change in MNEs' net worth has a strong multiplier effect on domestic and foreign investment of MNEs. Output moves in the same direction between the two countries due to the synchronized investment. The model is also able to generate reasonable cross-country correlations in real estate price and consumption.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics

Climatology of Precipitation during the Passage of the Double Cyclone

The double-cyclone type is considered to be one of the most important pressure patterns around Japan as it is known to cause severe weather such as heavy rain and strong winds in various parts of the country. In this study, double cyclones are classified into the following three types\u27 Heishin type; Nihonkai-L main type! and Nangan-L main type. They are examined in a climatologic context to assess the regional charac teristics of precipitation amount and intensity, and snowfall after the passage of double cyclone. Furthermore, precipitation characteristics of each type of double cyclone, the Nihonkai and Nangan lows are examined. Precipitation from the NihonkaHow main type tends to be weak, although the precipitation caused by the double cyclone is strong along the southern coast and the Hokuriku region of Japan. For the Heishin type, precipitation is observed at nearly 90% of observation points in the whole country. The ratio of observation points with precipitation is greater in eastern Japan for the NihonkaHow main type. Compared to the Nihonkai low and the Nangan low, the double cyclone tends to cause snowfall more frequently in the whole country. The mean total snowfall amount is the greatest for the Nihonkai-low main type among the threetypes of double cyclone. The Heishin type and the Nihonkai-low main type have a tendency to cause snow storms in the Tohoku region and in Hokkaido. The Nangan-low main type may cause relatively calm snowfall nationwide and even bring snowfall to the southern part of Kanto. Heavy precipitation events tend to occur when the southern low moves nearer to the Japanese islands for all of the three types of double cyclone. Moreover, the southern cyclone tends to be stronger than the northern cyclone

A Japanese Translation of Selected \u27Greguerias\u27 by Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Daigaku Horiguchi (1892-1981), a poet and translator, had a strong interest in the Spanish literature besides his specialty of French literature. It was he who introduced Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1888-1963), a Spanish avant-garde writer in the early 20th century, to Japan before anyone else did. He translated his \u27Senos\u27 (1917), a collection of erotic short stories, into three parts, \u27Miscellaneous Thoughts on Breasts\u27 (1969), \u27Selections from Breasts\u27 (1979), and \u27New Selections from Breasts\u27 (1980). Another important work of Ramon, \u27Greguerias\u27, was also published in the same year as \u27Senos\u27. Influenced by the Avant Garde movement surging in Europe, he aimed at the reform of the old traditional literature, and defined it as \u27humor+metaphor\u27. \u27Greguerias\u27 is often talked about as similar to Jules Renard\u27s well-known \u27Histoires naturelles\u27. But there are big differences between the two even in the objects of study. Renard\u27s work is titled as Natural histories, but it mostly deals with animals to the extent that it could be titled as histories of animals. On the other hand, a significant portion of \u27Greguerias\u27 also deals with animals, but it mainly deals with still life. In \u27Greguerias\u27, the works dealing with still life draw our attention because they show his love of still life in the daily life. He paid attention to the trifles that poets had not, and expressed them in \u27Greguerias\u27. As a result, the sphere of poems was expanded. After \u27Greguerias\u27, the importance of metaphor was reevaluated in Spanish poems, and it should be recognized as one of Ramon\u27s achievements.ラモン・ゴメス・デ・ラ・セルナ 作、平田渡　編

Thioredoxin-1 maintains mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) function during oxidative stress in cardiomyocytes

Thioredoxin 1 (Trx1) is a 12-kDa oxidoreductase that catalyzes thiol-disulfide exchange reactions to reduce proteins with disulfide bonds. As such, Trx1 helps protect the heart against stresses, such as ischemia and pressure overload. Mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a serine/threonine kinase that regulates cell growth, metabolism, and survival. We have shown previously that mTOR activity is increased in response to myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury. However, whether Trx1 interacts with mTOR to preserve heart function remains unknown. Using a substrate-trapping mutant of Trx1 (Trx1C35S), we show here that mTOR is a direct interacting partner of Trx1 in the heart. In response to H2O2 treatment in cardiomyocytes, mTOR exhibited a high molecular weight shift in non-reducing SDS-PAGE in a 2-mercaptoethanol-sensitive manner, suggesting that mTOR is oxidized and forms disulfide bonds with itself or other proteins. The mTOR oxidation was accompanied by reduced phosphorylation of endogenous substrates, such as S6 kinase (S6K) and 4E-binding protein 1 (4E-BP1) in cardiomyocytes. Immune complex kinase assays disclosed that H2O2 treatment diminished mTOR kinase activity, indicating that mTOR is inhibited by oxidation. Of note, Trx1 overexpression attenuated both H2O2-mediated mTOR oxidation and inhibition, whereas Trx1 knockdown increased mTOR oxidation and inhibition. Moreover, Trx1 normalized H2O2-induced down-regulation of metabolic genes and stimulation of cell death, and an mTOR inhibitor abolished Trx1-mediated rescue of gene expression. H2O2-induced oxidation and inhibition of mTOR were attenuated when Cys-1483 of mTOR was mutated to phenylalanine. These results suggest that Trx1 protects cardiomyocytes against stress by reducing mTOR at Cys-1483, thereby preserving the activity of mTOR and inhibiting cell death