This article sheds light on the understudied significance of Islam, Communism, and global politics in defining what constituted an acceptable “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) in wartime Japan. An analysis of the Japanese Imperial Diet’s debates on the place of Islam in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939, which defined state-sanctioned religious organizations, reveals that Muslim attention from around the world, international politics, the global spread of Communism, and the relatively short history of Islam in Japan, affected politicians’ decision not to mention Islam as a religious organization in the law. While previous literature on the Religious Organizations Law has not adequately addressed the significance of international and non-Euro-American transnational influences, this article argues that lawmakers viewed the power of transnational Muslim and Communist networks as crucial when defining both officially acceptable “religion” and the Shrine (jinja 神社), or Shrine Shinto, as the national core to be protected under this law. The debates surrounding Islam offer fertile ground for examining the significance of global affairs in determining acceptable forms of “religion” in Japan, as well as the broader implications of what Japanese state officials called “religion” and “thought” (shisō 思想) in wartime Japanese and world politics.

Published in 1744, Musicaliske Elementer, eller Anleedning til Forstand paa De første Ting udi Musiquen (Musical Elements, or A Guide to Understanding the First Things about Music) is the first music textbook to have been published in Norway (then part of Denmark–Norway) and the first of its kind in the Danish language. It is an important document in the history of music theory in Scandinavia. Its author, Johan Daniel Berlin (1714–1787), was the ‘privileged town musician’ (stadsmusikant) in Trondheim and a central figure in the musical life of eighteenth-century Norway. Berlin was remarkably well-read on contemporary German music theory, owning an impressive collection of then-current theory texts. This article explores Berlin’s textbook through the theoretical-methodological perspective of intercultural transfer and positions its music-theoretical contents in relation to both contemporaneous continental European music theory and later Norwegian and Danish sources. In addition to highlighting possible paths of transfer from German sources to Norway, the article discusses points of local Norwegian difference, such as Berlin’s surprisingly positive attitude towards quintuple metre and the way of naming pitches in Norwegian sources from the eighteenth century.

Silvennoinen (2025) analyzes the stored sequence going forward as an adverb that inherits adverb-class morphosyntax. This reply challenges that categorization on empirical grounds. The construction fails the key distributional test for adverbs: it cannot occur in integrated-medial position between subject and verb (*We going forward will prioritize replication), the diagnostic slot for core adverbs (We certainly will prioritize replication). Analysis of Silvennoinen’s corpus (n = 1,517) confirms this restriction – apparent ‘medial’ tokens prove either to be NP-internal modifiers or parenthetical supplements, never integrated clausal constituents. Instead, going forward patterns with PP adjuncts, occurring clause-initially, clause-finally, or as supplements. Internally, deverbal going heads the construction and licenses a directional complement forward(s), parallel to established deverbal prepositions like according [to …] and depending [on …]. The construction thus projects PP, not AdvP, aligning with The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’s flexible-complement analysis of prepositions. This case demonstrates that storage and semantic specialization do not force categorical reanalysis.