Violence and Atonement in the Postindustrial Age: Minamata Patients, Hongan no Kai, and the Carving of Jizō Statues

Presented at the Numata Conference in Buddhist Studies / “Violence, Nonviolence, and Japanese Religions: Past, Present, and Future,” held in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 20–21, 2014This paper explores patients’ responses to the Minamata disease, which resulted from the water’s contamination with methyl mercury, a substance released from the Chisso factory between 1937 and 1968. Methyl mercury is produced in the process of making plastic products and tends to accumulate in the brain, affecting the nervous system and often leading to death. First, I discuss Hongan no kai, a Minamata patients’ group, whose members carve bodhisattva statues out of stone and place them as tokens of atonement on land reclaimed in the city. This follows the account provided by this group’s leading figure, Ogata Masato. Then, I analyze Ogata’s religiosity as observed in his thoughts about “life-ism,” which he explains as, “reverence for, and a sense of humility toward, all life.... something larger than ourselves, a force before which we can only prostrate ourselves and pray” (Ogata Masato, Oiwa Keibo. Rowing the Eternal Sea, 164). While it is necessary to impute legal responsibility to the corporations that discharged hazardous substances into the environment, I also suggest that the ethical examination of environmental disasters should not be confined to the judicial process. I rather argue that we need to take into consideration the ways in which the patients deal with the disaster. Since their thoughts and actions provide insight into the form of violence done to their body, to the environment, and beyond, this appears to provide a more constructive path toward environmental justice

Metamorphic conditions of garnet-bearing gneisses from Niban Rock in the Lutzow-Holm Complex, East Antarctica

The Tenth Symposium on Polar Science/Ordinary sessions: [OG] Polar Geosciences, Wed. 4 Dec. / Entrance Hall (1st floor), National Institute of Polar Researc

ErbB2 directly activates the exchange factor Dock7 to promote Schwann cell migration

The cellular events that precede myelination in the peripheral nervous system require rapid and dynamic morphological changes in the Schwann cell. These events are thought to be mainly controlled by axonal signals. But how signals on the axons are coordinately organized and transduced to promote proliferation, migration, radial sorting, and myelination is unknown. We describe that the axonal signal neuregulin-1 (NRG1) controls Schwann cell migration via activation of the atypical Dock180-related guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) Dock7 and subsequent activation of the Rho guanine triphosphatases (GTPases) Rac1 and Cdc42 and the downstream c-Jun N-terminal kinase. We show that the NRG1 receptor ErbB2 directly binds and activates Dock7 by phosphorylating Tyr-1118. Dock7 knockdown, or expression of Dock7 harboring the Tyr-1118–to–Phe mutation in Schwann cells, attenuates the effects of NRG1. Thus, Dock7 functions as an intracellular substrate for ErbB2 to promote Schwann cell migration. This provides an unanticipated mechanism through which ligand-dependent tyrosine phosphorylation can trigger the activation of Rho GTPase-GEFs of the Dock180 family

Highly porous melamine-formaldehyde monoliths with controlled hierarchical porosity toward application as a metal scavenger

We report a new synthetic strategy for melamine-formaldehyde (MF) monoliths with controlled hierarchical porosity toward metal-ion scavengers. The obtained MF monoliths possessed micro-, meso- and macroporosity, which allowed efficient adsorption performance of precious metal ions in water. Applications such as recovery/removal of metal ions are expected