THE NEW BUSINESS OF BUDDHISM

This paper examines the recent phenomenon of Japanese Buddhist organizations engaging in economic ventures such as restaurant businesses. Although most people in Japan still practice some religious activities, their level of engagement has declined, and Japan’s population is shrinking. As a result, traditional Buddhist temples face an existential crisis. This article shows how this crisis has forced those institutions to turn to new economic strategies. While these businesses have been fairly unsuccessful economically, they have helped the organizations invent new ways to engage with people, exposing them to the principles of Buddhism and nurturing a new generation of patron

Ordering Spaces, Making Places: Women’s Uses of Non-Domestic Spaces in Tokyo, Japan, 1868–1937

This dissertation explores Japanese women’s uses of non-domestic spaces in the modern period (1868–1945), focusing on the transformations that were occurring in the new capital city of Tokyo. After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a modern government took over in place of the Tokugawa shogunate, the feudal military government that had ruled Japan for nearly three centuries, based on a hereditary status-based system. The fall of Tokugawa social order liberated Japanese people from the principle that John W. Hall famously called “rule by status.” Yet, it also complicated the ways in which the society was organized. Because the status system had defined where people lived and visited on an everyday basis, the mechanisms for ordering spaces in cities also drastically transformed after the fall of the Tokugawa regime. In this time of instability and negotiation, women began venturing outside of the familiar spaces of home. At the same time, various male stakeholders with social, political, and economic power – such as national government officials and corporate managers – employed multiple strategies to establish a new socio-spatial order across the city of Tokyo. It was men who, for the most part, designated which spaces were to be used and how, according to what they deemed appropriate. Yet, I argue that women played limited, but surprisingly active roles in contesting these mechanisms. Through three case studies of incidents that involved women venturing into non-domestic spaces, I show how women worked with and against these forces, inventing alternative uses of non-domestic spaces of their own. To examine some of the forces propelling women’s increasing presence outside of the home, this dissertation builds on two methods for understanding cities and architecture: an approach that examines urbanity as a process and the ethnography of architecture. Using the urbanity-as-a-process approach, this dissertation interrogates modern Tokyo as an ongoing, complex project that was constructed by multiple stakeholders and forces, rather than designed merely by professionals, such as architects, planners, and policy makers. Drawing on the ethnography of architecture approach, the chapters also privilege interpretations that emphasize the uses and perceptions of specific spaces, rather than their forms and construction. Each case study focuses on what was at the time a new kind of urban space, whose spatial mechanisms for gendering were still flexible and unstable. The first case study traces the development of the campus for Tsuda College – a women-only school in Tokyo – from 1900 to 1931. It shows how Tsuda College students, teachers, and administrators contested the exclusionary system of higher education in Japan by identifying and scraping up alternative resources. The second case study looks into the process by which two women’s organizations – Tōyō Eiwa Girls’ School Alumnae Association and Japan Women’s Association for Education – expanded their spatial networks for socializing between 1873 and 1912, focusing on their uses of parks. The national government intended to push violent and noisy men, who met in the parks for political gatherings, out of the parks to achieve their purpose of having regular gatherings. This chapter demonstrates how socializing women took advantage of the national government’s need to achieve their purpose of having regular gatherings. The third case study explores how managers at the flagship location of Mitsukoshi Department Store used female employees as what I call “sensory capital” from 1900 to 1924. This chapter demonstrates that managers constantly manipulated the bodies of saleswomen, through complex strategies to ensure their coexistence with male employees at work and separation outside work. It also shows how saleswomen subverted the systematic management of their bodies. Taking all these case studies together, I suggest that it was not only women who were gauging their changing place in the city and in Japanese society after the collapse of the Tokugawa social order; this process was also significant for the elite men who established most of the gendering systems. In doing so, this dissertation complicates traditional historical narratives of architecture and urban spaces in modern Tokyo; namely, it reconceptualizes the modernization of the built environment in Tokyo as an unstable, inconsistent process of exploration and negotiation, rather than a perfectly calculated process of progress and development. More broadly, by using materials that have not traditionally been deemed as architectural evidence, this dissertation offers a model for how to excavate the spatial interactions of under-documented, marginalized populations. By demonstrating that people can make architectural contributions even without engaging in the physical construction of buildings, the dissertation promotes a more democratic view of architecture and its significance in everyday life

Discrimination between biological interfaces and crystal-packing contacts

A discrimination method between biologically relevant interfaces and artificial crystal-packing contacts in crystal structures was constructed. The method evaluates protein-protein interfaces in terms of complementarities for hydrophobicity, electrostatic potential and shape on the protein surfaces, and chooses the most probable biological interfaces among all possible contacts in the crystal. The method uses a discriminator named as “COMP”, which is a linear combination of the complementarities for the above three surface features and does not correlate with the contact area. The discrimination of homo-dimer interfaces from symmetry-related crystal-packing contacts based on the COMP value achieved the modest success rate. Subsequent detailed review of the discrimination results raised the success rate to about 88.8%. In addition, our discrimination method yielded some clues for understanding the interaction patterns in several examples in the PDB. Thus, the COMP discriminator can also be used as an indicator of the “biological-ness” of protein-protein interfaces

Meson Acceleration and Handling

The fundamental engineering techniques, such as high electric field produced by rf systems or lasers, strong magnetic field produced by the MegaGauss techniques and the various methods for high-energy particle handling, have been promoted rapidly, and the fields have been improved drastically. Those techniques are expected to explore the new frontier by using elementary particles for industrial applications. One of the scenarios to accomplish the application trials by elongation of the short lifetime of mesons is described in this paper

24-hour intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients randomized to receive dorzolamide or brinzolamide in combination with latanoprost

Yoshimi Nakamura, Shusaku Ishikawa, Yuko Nakamura, Hiroshi Sakai, Ichiko Henzan, Shoichi SawaguchiDepartment of Ophthalmology, University of the Ryukyus Faculty of Medicine, Okinawa, JapanPurpose: To investigate the efficacy of dorzolamide 1% (bid or tid) or brinzolamide 1% bid on 24-hour intraocular pressure (IOP) control as well as patients’ preference for either drug when added in combination with latanoprost against glaucoma (IOP, ≥18 mmHg).Methods: In this randomized crossover study patients were assigned to receive latanoprost plus either dorzolamide or brinzolamide for four weeks. Thereafter, patients underwent 24-hour IOP monitoring while continuing to receive dorzolamide (for two successive days/nights: at first bid then tid) or brinzolamide bid (once overnight). They were then switched over to receive the other test medication for a further four weeks and subsequently reexamined for 24-hour IOP. A questionnaire survey on treatment satisfaction was performed.Results: In 20 patients dorzolamide bid or tid or brinzolamide bid exerted significant (p < 0.001) reductions of IOP from baseline at all time-points over 24 hours; no difference was detected among the treatment regimens. Significantly (p < 0.05) more patients preferred dorzolamide (n = 9) over brinzolamide (n = 2), whereas nine patients gave a neutral answer. Conclusion: Dorzolamide bid or tid and brinzolamide bid when combined with latanoprost therapy elicited significant IOP reduction for 24 hours. It is rational to consider patients’ preference of therapeutic regimen especially long-term users such as those with glaucoma.Keywords: glaucoma, brinzolamide, dorzolamide, latanoprost combination therapy, 24-hour intraocular pressure (IOP), questionnaire surve

PreBI: prediction of biological interfaces of proteins in crystals

PreBI is a server that predicts biological interfaces in protein crystal structures, according to the complementarity and the area of the interface. The server accepts a coordinate file in the PDB format, and all of the possible interfaces are generated automatically, according to the symmetry operations given in the coordinate file. For all of the interfaces generated, the complementarities of the electrostatic potential, hydrophobicity and shape of the interfaces are analyzed, and the most probable biological interface is identified according to the combination of the degree of complementarity derived from the database analyses and the area of the interface. The results can be checked through an interactive viewer, and the most probable complex can be downloaded as atomic coordinates in the PDB format. PreBI is available at

Interoception is associated with the impact of eye contact on spontaneous facial mimicry

自分の身体の中の感覚に気づきやすい人ほど、表情模倣が起こりやすく、他人の視線にも敏感であることを解明. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2020-12-03.Interoception (perception of one’s own physiological state) has been suggested to underpin social cognition, although the mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. The current study aimed to elucidate the relationship between interoception and two factors underlying social cognition: self-other boundary and sensitivity to social cues. We measured performance in a heartbeat perception task as an index of interoceptive accuracy (IAc), the frequency of spontaneous facial mimicry (SFM) as an index of self-other boundary, and the degree of the effect of eye contact on SFM (difference in SFM between conditions in which models’ eyes were directed to and averted from participants) as an index of social-cue sensitivity, and tested correlations among these measures. The results revealed that IAc and SFM were positively correlated only in the direct gaze condition. The extent of the effect of eye contact on SFM (difference in frequency between direct vs. averted conditions) was positively correlated with IAc. These overall findings were also observed in separate analyses of male and female participant groups, supporting the robustness of the findings. The results suggest that interoception is related to sensitivity to social cues, and may also be related to the self-other boundary with modulation by social context