Chapter 18 Japanese society at war

Chapter 18: This chapter presents how the war was experienced on the home front in Japan, and how that experience is remembered today. Taking an elongated periodization of the Second World War from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 to the end of the Tokyo Trials in 1948, it discusses the Japanese war experience in three main phases: early victories (to 1942); the tide turns (to 1945); and repatriations and reckonings (to 1948). The key ways in which the war affected the lives of civilians will be discussed, including war work, conscription, settler life, civilians in the battle zone (Okinawa, Karafuto), air raids, repatriation, and the struggle for survival post-defeat. By continuing the discussion up to the end of the Tokyo Trials, the chapter presents the mechanisms by which narratives of Japanese civilian victimhood became so prominent in Japanese memories of the conflict by discussing how Japanese war guilt was addressed at the Trials and beyond. Finally, the chapter discusses the contemporary representation of the civilian experience in Japanese war and peace museums

Necessary Knowledge for Communications Policy: Information Asymmetries and Commercial Data Access and Usage in the Policymaking Process

Communications policymaking increasingly relies upon research derived from large-scale databases manufactured and marketed by commercial organizations. One byproduct of this situation is that substantial inequalities in access to these data arise. These information asymmetries can result in research that fails to reflect the policy considerations of the full range of interested stakeholders. This Article explores these issues via a case study of the FCC\u27s 2003 media ownership proceeding and offers suggestions for how existing disparities in access to policy-relevant data might be addressed

Necessary Knowledge for Communications Policy: Information Asymmetries and Commercial Data Access and Usage in the Policymaking Process

Communications policymaking increasingly relies upon research derived from large-scale databases manufactured and marketed by commercial organizations. One byproduct of this situation is that substantial inequalities in access to these data arise. These information asymmetries can result in research that fails to reflect the policy considerations of the full range of interested stakeholders. This Article explores these issues via a case study of the FCC\u27s 2003 media ownership proceeding and offers suggestions for how existing disparities in access to policy-relevant data might be addressed

Coronal emission lines as thermometers

Coronal emission line intensities are commonly used to measure electron temperatures using emission measure and/or line ratio methods. In the presence of systematic errors in atomic excitation calculations and data noise, the information on underlying temperature distributions is fundamentally limited. Increasing the number of emission lines used does not necessarily improve the ability to discriminate between different kinds of temperature distributions.Comment: Accepted by ApJ, November 200

「ダーク」ツーリズムと「ライト」ツーリズムの島々 : 瀬戸内海の戦争関連コンテンツ観光

This article examines the phenomenon of war-related contents tourism on five small islands in the area of the Seto Inland Sea. While the majority of Japan’s densely populated metropolitan areas have complex war histories and networks of commemorative sites and/or tourist sites, small islands are associated with a singular war experience or memory that sustains a tourist attraction on the island. Focusing on such islands allows insights into the ways in which films, novels, games, and other forms of popular culture induce tourism to war-related sites. First, the concept of war-related contents tourism is defined via a critique of the in-vogue concept of dark tourism and its Japanese counterpart, dāku tsūrizumu. Then, the dynamics of war-related tourism are depicted in five island case studies: Ōkunoshima (Hiroshima prefecture, “Rabbit Island” and site of a poison gas factory), Shōdoshima (Kagawa prefecture, setting of the novel/film Twenty-four Eyes), Okinoshima (Wakayama prefecture, a coastal gun battery popular now as a site of cosplay), Ōzushima (Yamaguchi prefecture, a training base for kaiten suicide attack submarines), and Nōmishima (Hiroshima prefecture, site of the Etajima Naval Academy). These islands are also examples of media tourism or contents tourism, where the representation of the history in entertainment formats or the promotion of tourism for “leisure and pleasure” has made the war-related tourism seem more akin to “light/lite tourism” than “dark tourism.

Un-modern architecture of climate

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-103).Historical control of the thermal environment was a deeply cultural activity: fireplaces distributed throughout buildings needed to be fed to keep burning, drafts needed to be stopped by hanging heavy tapestries. The industrial revolution filled the air with toxic exhaust, but modernist architects promised to seal the building envelope hermetically, keeping dirty air at bay. Thermal control came to depend on the very same centralized technologies responsible for the toxic storm outside. Pumping climates throughout a building from centralized machine rooms turned the modernist building into a human vivarium: a glass box containing a strange, displaced performance of life in some consistently tempered time and place. Industrialized city-dwellers no longer seek refuge from the outside air, and the vivarium's appetite for energy has proven more than we can sustainably produce. The design project imagines shifts in attitude for architecture after the vivarium. It is a rhetorical project which proposes three main avenues of change from contemporary assumptions. First, it envisions space in which valuable "waste" heat from exhaust, occupants' bodies, and appliances is harvested to provide imperfect and limited thermal control. Secondly, it suggests cultural shifts in clothing, activity levels, and space use that would fluctuate according to season and the availability of thermal controls. Thirdly, it proposes an attitude towards the building skin which eliminates glass in favor of a greyer zone of thermal division between indoors and out. Together these strategies replace centralized and resource-hungry mechanical climate systems with a new kind of cultural acclimatization. The resulting building embraces thermal control as a new kind of luxury good: a problem worthy not only of technical concern, but also of cultural interest.by Philip Seaton.M.Arch

Understanding in-video dropouts and interaction peaks in online lecture videos

With thousands of learners watching the same online lecture videos, analyzing video watching patterns provides a unique opportunity to understand how students learn with videos. This paper reports a large-scale analysis of in-video dropout and peaks in viewership and student activity, using second-by-second user interaction data from 862 videos in four Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on edX. We find higher dropout rates in longer videos, re-watching sessions (vs first-time), and tutorials (vs lectures). Peaks in re-watching sessions and play events indicate points of interest and confusion. Results show that tutorials (vs lectures) and re-watching sessions (vs first-time) lead to more frequent and sharper peaks. In attempting to reason why peaks occur by sampling 80 videos, we observe that 61% of the peaks accompany visual transitions in the video, e.g., a slide view to a classroom view. Based on this observation, we identify five student activity patterns that can explain peaks: starting from the beginning of a new material, returning to missed content, following a tutorial step, replaying a brief segment, and repeating a non-visual explanation. Our analysis has design implications for video authoring, editing, and interface design, providing a richer understanding of video learning on MOOCs