From Intellectual Co-operation to International Cultural Exchange: Japan and China in the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations, 1922-1939

Along with the recent rise of new historical narratives of the League of Nations, growing attention has been paid to the International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC) as a pionner international organization for cultural exchange preceding UNESCO. Motivated by the new approach of Transcultural History, this thesis examines the ICIC as an international stage where various actors such as intellectuals, private organizations, governments and the ICIC itself come into conflict over the idea of intellectual co-operation, and it places an emphasis on the ICIC’s historical process of transformation. In so doing, the thesis firstly employs the distinction of two cultures: the universality of culture based on Western civilization and the particularity of culture based on national cultures. Secondly, it places a great emphasis on the involvements of non-Western countries in the ICIC’s work of intellectual co-operation, particularly Japan and China. Thirdly, it employs the empirical historical method and pursues a multi-archival approach in order to examine the transcultural relationship between the ICIC, Japan and China. In these respects, this thesis demonstrates the process of the establishment of the ICIC with special reference to the Union des Associations Internationales, stressing that the ICIC began with the universalistic idea of intellectual co-operation based on Western civilization. Turning its focus toward Japan and China, the thesis argues that the primary purpose of Japan’s intellectual co-operation was to introduce Japanese culture in the West in close conjunction with the Japanese government, while discussing that China’s intellectual co-opeartion was implemented as part of the governmental policy for its national reconstruction. Returning its attention to the ICIC again, the thesis reveals the ideological shift of the ICIC’s idea of intellectual co-operation in the 1930s. In particular, it argues that, confronted with backlashes from Japan and China, the ICIC in the 1930s shifted its emphasis in the idea of intellectual co-operation from the universality of culture based on Western civilization to the particulality of culture based on national cultures

Evolution of String-Wall Networks and Axionic Domain Wall Problem

We study the cosmological evolution of domain walls bounded by strings which arise naturally in axion models. If we introduce a bias in the potential, walls become metastable and finally disappear. We perform two dimensional lattice simulations of domain wall networks and estimate the decay rate of domain walls. By using the numerical results, we give a constraint for the bias parameter and the Peccei-Quinn scale. We also discuss the possibility to probe axion models by direct detection of gravitational waves produced by domain walls.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures; revised version of the manuscript, accepted for publication in JCA

Axion cosmology with long-lived domain walls

We investigate the cosmological constraints on axion models where the domain wall number is greater than one. In these models, multiple domain walls attached to strings are formed, and they survive for a long time. Their annihilation occurs due to the effects of explicit symmetry breaking term which might be raised by Planck-scale physics. We perform three-dimensional lattice simulations and compute the spectra of axions and gravitational waves produced by long-lived domain walls. Using the numerical results, we estimated relic density of axions and gravitational waves. We find that the existence of long-lived domain walls leads to the overproduction of cold dark matter axions, while the density of gravitational waves is too small to observe at the present time. Combining the results with other observational constraints, we find that the whole parameter region of models are excluded unless an unacceptable fine-tuning exists

Production and evolution of axion dark matter in the early universe

The axion arises as a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson from the spontaneous breaking of a hypothetical global Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry introduced to provide a solution to the strong CP problem of quantum chromodynamics. Due to the weakness of the coupling with ordinarymatters, the axion is regarded as a viable candidate of dark matter of the universe. In this contribution, we discuss the cosmological aspects of axion dark matter. The estimation of the axion dark matter abundance is not so straightforward if we follow the evolution of the axion field in the context of inflationary cosmology. In particular, if the PQ symmetry is restored after inflation, topological defects such as strings and domain walls are formed, and they produce significant amounts of cold axions. As a result, the prediction for the mass of axion dark matter depends strongly on the early history of the universe according to the detailed construction of underlying particle physics models. We review recent developments of the theoretical estimation of the axion dark matter abundance and discuss their implications for present and future experimental tests