Anti-Christianity and Funerary Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan

Life free of Buddhism was almost impossible in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), where Buddhist temples covered every comer of the country. It is estimated that, by the late seventeenth century, there were at least more than 100,000 Buddhist temples, and this number remained undiminished until the early Meiji years when an anti-Buddhist movement, known as "abolish the Buddha and discard Śākyamuni" (haibutsu kishaku), swept the country.U Morethan 100,000 temples (probably about 200,000-250,000 when subtemples such as jiin, tacchil, anshitsu, and the like were all individually counted and included) in a country whose population was grown from around twelve million at the turn of the sixteenth century to around thirty million by 1700 and stabilized thereafter, or where there were about 73,000 administrative units (about 63,000 village [mural units and 10,000 ward [machi] units) meant that, on average, 300 people (or sixty households on the assumption that each family unit has five members), or each village or ward supported at least oneor two temples.U This is what the Tokugawa Japanese had to shoulder inaddition to regular tax obligations and corvee duties to the government and to the ruling class

歴史の復権と非文字資料

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Predicting the protein-protein interactions using primary structures with predicted protein surface

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many biological functions involve various protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Elucidating such interactions is crucial for understanding general principles of cellular systems. Previous studies have shown the potential of predicting PPIs based on only sequence information. Compared to approaches that require other auxiliary information, these sequence-based approaches can be applied to a broader range of applications.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This study presents a novel sequence-based method based on the assumption that protein-protein interactions are more related to amino acids at the surface than those at the core. The present method considers surface information and maintains the advantage of relying on only sequence data by including an accessible surface area (ASA) predictor recently proposed by the authors. This study also reports the experiments conducted to evaluate a) the performance of PPI prediction achieved by including the predicted surface and b) the quality of the predicted surface in comparison with the surface obtained from structures. The experimental results show that surface information helps to predict interacting protein pairs. Furthermore, the prediction performance achieved by using the surface estimated with the ASA predictor is close to that using the surface obtained from protein structures.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This work presents a sequence-based method that takes into account surface information for predicting PPIs. The proposed procedure of surface identification improves the prediction performance with an <it>F-measure </it>of 5.1%. The extracted surfaces are also valuable in other biomedical applications that require similar information.</p

Mortuary Practices, Buddhism, and Family Relations in Japanese Society

Mark Rowe. Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp. $91 (cloth),$29 (paper).Satsuki Kawano. Nature’s Embrace: Japan’s Aging Urbanites and New Death Rites. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. 232 pp. $47 (cloth),$27 (paper).In Bonds of the Dead, Mark Rowe, who focuses on “the grave as the center of the ancestral orbit” in Japanese mortuary practices, observes that, due to the gradual loss of its gravitational pull, “the economic and social bedrock of temple Buddhism in Japan has eroded to the point where even its continued existence is publicly called into question” (222). Here, Rowe speaks to the decline of what is commonly known as the danka system. In contrast, in Nature’s Embrace, Satsuki Kawano finds that the dominance of Buddhist death-related rituals couched in the tradition of the danka system remains by and large intact..