In this essay, to make the best use of the limited space available, I concentrate on elements that have not yet received much attention in English, particularly the aspects that scholars outside Japan have found bewildering and the ones that I have knowledge of myself. 1 Thus after sketching in a cursory way the earlier stages of Japanese sinology, I focus on the last forty years. I also look primarily at the study of history, largely leaving to the side the study of literature, philosophy, and the social sciences. Readers who want to know more about earlier stages of Japanese Sinology can turn to many informative and insightful works on the subject.

Intelligence, as measured by grades and/or standardized test scores, plays a principal role in the medical school admissions process in most nations. Yet while sufficient intelligence is necessary to practice medicine effectively, no evidence suggests that surplus intelligence beyond that threshold is correlated with providing higher quality medical care. This paper argues that using perceived measures of intelligence to distinguish between applicants, at levels that exceed the level of intelligence required to practice medicine, is both unfair to applicants and fails to serve the interests of patients.

This article investigates the role that Italian food companies like Barilla pasta played in creating narratives of East African empire at the apex of the Fascist ventennio. It aims to use the commercial remnants of Fascist empire to provide a more thorough accounting of how colonialism shaped the modern cultural history of Italian pasta. To do so, I analyze the paper ephemera, that is, the pasta advertisements and packaging, that connected occupied East Africa to Italy, demonstrating how regime projects to promote grain evolved into corporate projects in private industry. I argue that these two stories form a single cohesive narrative, one that can unite much of the excellent work that has been done on Fascist agriculture in empire with the transnational history of Italian food companies. East African empire, as depicted by Italian pasta shapes and advertisements, was consumable. At stake in this inquiry lies the shifting question of Italian national identity, framed by food products in global contexts.

On 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Achille Occhetto, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), announced that the Party needed to transform itself, implicitly including changing its name. His announcement launched a 15-month-long process that culminated in the dissolution of the PCI and the rise of a new political organisation, which became a member of the Socialist International. Drawing on the individual and collective memories of former Turinese PCI officials, this essay examines the complex, tortuous abandonment of the communist reference and the disintegration of the political community surrounding the Party. Because of their highly varied reactions, the dissolution of the PCI caused fragmentation of the subsequent careers and paths of former Party ‘comrades’. To this day, the 1989 turning point continues to inspire highly diverse memories among former Italian communists.

This article presents a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of constitutions: ‘constitutional institutionalism’. Conventional approaches in law, philosophy or political science tend to reduce constitutions either to their formal, factual or ideal aspects. The constitutional-institutionalist approach, by contrast, seeks to integrate these aspects into a more general perspective by focusing on the dynamic interplay between constitutional actors and constitutional norms. It understands constitutional norms as binding institutions that shape and constrain political action, but never fully determine it. Constitutional institutionalism furthermore asserts that constitutional norms, whatever form they take, only have meaning in relation to other constitutional norms as well as to constitutional actors, who impose meaning on these norms. Therefore, constitutional phenomena ultimately require interpretive explanations. This article concludes with a brief constitutional-institutionalist research agenda.

This paper explores the process from museumization to decolonization through an examination of a Haida eagle mask currently on display in the Exploring Medicine gallery at the Science Museum in London. While elements of this discussion are well developed in some disciplines, such as Indigenous studies, anthropology and museum and heritage studies, this paper approaches the topic through the history of science, where decolonization and global perspectives are still gaining momentum. The aim therefore is to offer some opening perspectives and methods on how historians of science can use the ideas and approaches relating to decolonization in other fields, and apply them constructively to the history of science, particularly in museum settings. Decolonization is a complicated process and the focus of this paper is squarely on the preliminary steps of its implementation. To understand this process fully, the paper will recontextualize the Indigenous history of the Haida eagle mask at the Science Museum through a careful reconstruction of its provenance record. Through this process it will expose the politics of erasure and hidden voices in museum collections.

This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103–1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo, from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the “historic assessment” of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments’ navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China.

For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards into the social sciences in the early 2000s has led applied linguistics as a field to experience what Haggerty (2004) termed ethics creep, a simultaneous expansion and intensification of external regulation of research activities. The aims of these ethical review boards are: (a) to evaluate the types and risk of harm to participants as a result of research activities, (b) ensure that participants can give informed consent to be part of the research activities, and (c) provide oversight on researcher procedures to maintain participant anonymity/confidentiality (Haggerty, 2004).

States and institutions often narrate their histories in one of two ways: underscoring continuity with the past or proclaiming rupture from it. This article studies the case of two research institutions in independent Mozambique to show that the history of rupture that some postsocialist political and academic actors claim has a more complex history. That history is related to other African independence struggles and newly independent states and is also embedded in the shape of postsocialist life. Focused on a brief period in time and on two research institutes, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to institution building, postcolonial universities and education, and the networks of the global 1960s, as well as those of socialist states during the Cold War.

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after decades of negotiations. Despite forty years of resistance from governments who were reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty to a supranational body, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. How did the ACtHPR end up with an expansive jurisdiction that is unprecedented among regional courts? This analysis proposes that legal experts’ ability to capture control over vital stages in the drafting of the African Charter and Protocol, thus limiting the influence of political advisors, yielded an institutional design that facilitated the ACtHPR's unique mandate. Furthermore, colonial legacies in newly-independent states pushed the founders of the African human rights system to envision an innovative, post-colonial human rights framework that integrated a wide-reaching spectrum of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

One way of understanding the significance of Christina Van Dyke's book A Hidden Wisdom is as a plea for the recovery of an ideal of philosophy as, in part, ‘a way of life’, and for a reintegration of that ideal into current philosophical practice. In this review, I consider how this proposal might be developed.

Given that the practices and institutions of knowledge production commonly referred to as ‘science’ are believed to have ‘Western’ origins, their apparent proliferation entails negotiations and power dynamics that shape both science and diplomacy in specific locales. This paper investigates a facet of this co-production of science and diplomacy in the emergence of knowledge infrastructure in Japan during the Allied Occupation. It focuses on the 1947 delegation from the United States National Academy of Sciences to Japan and its role in creating the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). While historians view this mission as having been dispatched to provide advice on the foundation of the SCJ, it was in fact an unintentional outcome. The original plan was to recruit long-term scientific advisers on science policy to Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. The creation of the SCJ was not the brainchild of any individual but the result of an unforeseen alteration of the original idea through negotiations among various actors. By examining the transnational aspects of this process and the complex social process underlying it, and drawing on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory, this paper proposes the concept of ‘techno-diplomatic assemblage’ for understanding the transnational construction of knowledge infrastructure such as the emergence of the SCJ.

Human germline gene editing constitutes an extremely promising technology; at the same time, however, it raises remarkable ethical, legal, and social issues. Although many of these issues have been largely explored by the academic literature, there are gender issues embedded in the process that have not received the attention they deserve. This paper examines ways in which this new tool necessarily affects males and females differently—both in rewards and perils. The authors conclude that there is an urgent need to include these gender issues in the current debate, before giving a green light to this new technology.

Cerebral organoid models in-of-themselves are considered as an alternative to research animal models. But their developmental and biological limitations currently inhibit the probability that organoids can fully replace animal models. Furthermore, these organoid limitations have, somewhat ironically, brought researchers back to the animal model via xenotransplantation, thus creating hybrids and chimeras. In addition to attempting to study and overcome cerebral organoid limitations, transplanting cerebral organoids into animal models brings an opportunity to observe behavioral changes in the animal itself. Traditional animal ethics frameworks, such as the well-known three Rs (reduce, refine, and replace), have previously addressed chimeras and xenotransplantation of tissue. But these frameworks have yet to completely assess the neural-chimeric possibilities. And while the three Rs framework was a historical landmark in animal ethics, there are identifiable gaps in the framework that require attention. The authors propose to utilize an expanded three Rs framework initially developed by David DeGrazia and Tom L. Beauchamp, known as the Six Principles (6Ps). This framework aims to expand upon the three Rs, fill in the gaps, and be a practical means for assessing animal ethical issues like that of neural-chimeras and cerebral organoid xenotransplantation. The scope of this 6Ps application will focus on two separate but recent studies, which were published in 2019 and 2020. First, they consider a study wherein cerebral organoids were grown from donors with Down syndrome and from neurotypical donors. After these organoids were grown and studied, they were then surgically implanted into mouse models to observe the physiological effects and any behavioral change in the chimera. Second, they consider a separate study wherein neurotypical human embryonic stem cell-derived cerebral organoids were grown and transplanted into mouse and macaque models. The aim was to observe if such a transplantation method would contribute to therapies for brain injury or stroke. The authors place both studies under the lens of the 6Ps framework, assess the relevant contexts of each case, and provide relevant normative conclusions. In this way, they demonstrate how the 6Ps could be applied in future cases of neural-chimeras and cerebral organoid xenotransplantation.

Possession Island was one of the first landing places in the Antarctic region, now more than 180 years ago, yet there is little scientific knowledge of this island archipelago in the western Ross Sea. Although the islands are often passed and have been landed on for a few brief hours a number of times, the area is a challenging environment to visit or work in, as weather, sea and ice conditions can be unpredictable.

This paper documents the discovery of the islands, and their history of exploration, the broad range of fleetingly conducted science endeavours, weather and climate and since the 1990s, eco-tourism visits. The islands deserve to be better known, and their rich history provides a foundation for future research and eco-tourism.

This article explores blacklisting practices following the massive 1886 Southwest strike staged by the Knights of Labor (KOL) against Jay Gould's railroad empire. It focuses mostly on strike leader Martin Irons and blacklisting advocate and newspaperman J. West Goodwin. The strike, which started in Sedalia, Missouri, before spreading to other states, was a disaster for the KOL. The union declined in its aftermath chiefly because of the repression unleashed by public and private forces, including businessmen-led Law and Order Leagues. After the strike, employers blacklisted many, including strike leader and Sedalia resident Martin Irons. Irons, constantly on the move, suffered from joblessness, underemployment, arrests, and broken health before he died in central Texas in 1900. Few blacklisting advocates wanted Irons to suffer more than J. West Goodwin. The Law and Order League leader and newspaperman repeatedly wrote about what he considered Martin Irons's moral lapses and shortsightedness. By focusing on Goodwin's promotion of blacklisting and Irons's post-strike struggles, this essay helps us better appreciate the underexplored dimensions of this form of punishment.

Joanna Leidenhag has written a ground-breaking book arguing that the concept of panpsychism can solve several problems facing present-day humans. It can motivate greater commitment to concern for earth's diverse environments and the life forms that inhabit them. And it can solve theological problems connected with human consciousness, notably, how consciousness and matter coexist and interact. This article summarizes and comments on Leidenhag's arguments, then suggests several paths forward for those inspired by Leidenhag's ideas and arguments who wish to explore them and related notions in greater depth.

Capacity evaluation has become a widely used assessment device in clinical practice to determine whether patients have the cognitive ability to render their own medical decisions. Such evaluations, which might be better thought of as “capacity challenges,” are generally thought of as benign tools used to facilitate care. This paper proposes that such challenges should be reconceptualized as significant medical interventions with their own set of risks, side effects, and potentially deleterious consequences. As a result, a cost–benefit analysis should be implemented prior to imposing such capacity challenges, and efforts should be made to minimize such challenges in situations where they are unlikely to alter the course of treatment.