The 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake forced many residents to evacuate to Special Needs Shelters (SNS)—facilities designed to accept individuals requiring special consideration, such as older adults and those with sensory disabilities. This case report describes a woman in her 90s with untreated cataracts and hearing loss, who was neglected and abused by her son. After evacuation, she was diagnosed with cataracts at the shelter and referred for surgery, significantly improving her vision and her ability to undertake activities of daily living. SNS can serve as a gateway to medical services for those deprived of adequate health care. Integrating medical services into disaster response plans and deploying professionals at these shelters is crucial for improving health outcomes and quality of life for vulnerable individuals. This case highlights how appropriate shelter services with seamless medical care connections can enhance evacuees’ long-term well-being beyond the immediate disaster response.

Eddy currents play a significant role in the evolution of tokamak plasmas and must therefore be correctly taken into account in time-dependent simulations. In this paper, a computational method for solving the evolution of tokamak plasma considering eddy currents utilising VMEC (Hirshman & Whitson, Phys. Fluids, vol. 26, 1983, pp. 3553–3568), a commonly used static magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium solver, is proposed. This method is convenient since it does not modify the equilibrium solver internally and achieves convergence calculation through external processing. By allowing the components of the magnetic field to be treated separately, this method provides convergence for cases with displacements in arbitrary directions, which has been difficult to achieve with the previous methods.

Events such the Great East Japan Earthquake or 3.11 force us to rethink our ways of life in relation to nature. Even in the midst of disasters, people have the desire to create and to express themselves—as does nature. How can we understand relational creativity in the aftermath of such disasters, and how might creative works assist recovery processes? This article focusses on the “Lost Homes” Scale Model Restoration Project. The project, initiated and led by architect Osamu Tsukihashi of Kobe University and his students, is a collaborative community project with residents in the disaster region as well as with students and professors of architecture across Japan.

Although B vitamins have been shown to play beneficial roles in bone health, the effects of vitamin B1 in humans are still unclear. This study aimed to investigate the effects of vitamin B1 supplementation on middle-aged and older adults. This single-armed trial study included community-dwelling adults in Japan and used a pre- and post-test design. The participants were given 28.0 mg of vitamin B1 supplementation per day for 1 month in addition to their daily usual diet. The effect of this treatment on bone turnover markers and metabolism was evaluated at baseline and after 1 month. Forty-two participants were enrolled (mean age, 58.6 ± 10.4 years; 36 women). The vitamin B1 levels in whole blood increased significantly from baseline after vitamin B1 supplementation. The level of serum tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b (TRACP 5b), a bone resorption marker, reduced significantly (378 ± 135 vs. 335 ± 120 mU/dL, p < 0.001), while the level of N-terminal propeptide of type I procollagen (P1NP), a marker specific to bone formation, did not change. Moreover, the serum phosphorus and parathyroid hormone (PTH) concentrations did not change, whereas the corrected serum calcium concentrations increased and vitamin D concentrations decreased. The serum TRACP 5b levels decreased after vitamin B1 supplementation in the middle-aged and older adults. Further definitive trials are needed to determine the efficacy of vitamin B1 in improving bone health.

It all began on July 18th, 2001, when I made a visit to reconstruct the clinic in Darya-ye Nur. It was the first time for me to enter Afghanistan since the Taliban had come into power. It had been a while since I last crossed the Khyber Pass. I went around each PMS clinic in Darya-ye Nur, Daraye Peech and Nuristan Wama, which are in the back region along the Kunar River, upstream from Jalalabad.

Iwabuchi Nobuteru has visited New Guinea more than 200 times over the past 40 years –not to relax on a tropical beach but to look for human remains.

The divided East Indies island – the west half Irian, Indonesia, and the east half Papua New Guinea – saw heavy fighting between Japanese and Allied forces during World War II. Thousands of soldiers died there, and Iwabuchi's father, Keiji, was one of them.

Life sometimes takes a curious turn. At exactly the moment that The Okinawa Times asked me to write this essay, I received a letter from a former patient who had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. She wrote to thank me for the medical care I had given her then. A native of Okinawa and a survivor of the Himeyuri (Lily) Corps, the woman also added some personal reflections in a calm fashion.

She wrote, “On this earth, where living creatures move, we see one horrible event after another. I fear more than anything else war that can easily be triggered by people who know nothing of war …. Yamato culture has disappeared, and with it the soul, spirit and pride of the Japanese people. I feel deeply sorry for our ancestors, who worked hard to build a country beautifully dotted with rice fields.”

Lee Hak Rae was a Korean youth who went to work at age fifteen supervising prisoners of the Japanese mobilized to build the Burma-Thailand Railway. Hintok, where he served, was the most dangerous place along the railway. Prisoners called it “Hellfire Pass.” Of approximately 700 Australians, 100 died there, mainly from overwork and diseases such as dysentery and cholera. Lee was indicted by an Australian court in Singapore on September 25, 1946, but on October 24 his case was dismissed. In Hong Kong, en route to Japan, he was again forced to return to Singapore. On March 10, 1947 he was indicted for a second time.

Using a relational leadership lens, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of empathic conversations with a focus on leadership ethics. It adopts an entitative perspective in relational leadership and examines leadership conversations as a two-way influence relationship, highlighting their interdependencies and collective role in the co-construction of meaning. Data from facial expression software and perception surveys are analyzed. The results of this study reveal the influence of gendered leadership on emotions, emotional bonding moments triggered by humor, and cultural dynamics in leadership conversations. Leaders’ feeling-based questions and participants’ willingness to share their emotions, coupled with emotion synchronization, create a constructive space where both feel invited, cared for, and valued. The study shows that emotional bonds foster the expression of generosity, care, and responsibility, enhancing satisfaction for both leaders and participants. Overall, this study enriches relational leadership theory and practice by underscoring the connection between empathy and leadership ethics.

The historical experiences of Hawai'i‘s Okinawan American (Uchinanchu) community in connection with Okinawa after World War II helped to shape an understanding of their own cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, which was influenced by U.S. policies in Okinawa. In the aftermath of the war, Hawai'i‘s Uchinanchu community worked to provide relief for their brethren in the devastated islands of their homeland. Their efforts were supported and indeed encouraged by the U.S. military. As the U.S. military transformed and rebuilt Okinawa, the U.S. sought to justify the occupation of Okinawa and its concentration of military bases on the islands. One means of doing this was referring to the Uchinanchu contributions to the rebuilding of their homeland as part of the expansion of US soft power. It can be argued that the emergence of a unique Okinawa American identity in Hawai'i in the post-World War II period reflected America's Cold War “public diplomacy” within a liberal multicultural discourse.

We present a large scale study where a nationally representative sample of 1000 participants were asked to make real purchases within an online supermarket platform. The study captured the effect of price changes, and of the signposting of such changes, for breakfast cereals and soft drinks. We find that such taxes are an effective means of altering food purchasing, with a 20% rate being sufficient to make a significant impact if (and only if) the tax is signposted. Signposting represents a complementary “nudge” policy that could enhance the impact of the tax, though its effectiveness depends on the product category.

A case of hermaphrodism in a wild Pacific bluefin tuna Thunnus orientalis from the Sea of Japan is reported. Morphologically and macroscopically, the gonad seemed to have both ovarian and testicular surfaces. Histological analysis showed that the gonad consisted of only sexually mature testis in all the sections examined, suggesting that the individual was male. Genetic analysis, however, indicated that the tissue samples from this individual had no male-specific genome region, resulting in it being inferred as a female. The observed inconsistency between genetic and histological analysis could help future understanding of the sex development of tunas.

Objectives: Several studies have shown that acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) decrease delta or theta activity, increase alpha activity on Electroencephalography (EEG) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. The effects of memantine on EEG in AD patients are not as well understood as those of AChEIs. The present study investigated the electrocortical effects of 3 months memantine medication in AD patients.

Methods: EEG was recorded in 28 patients with AD (mean age 83.3 ± 4.6 years, 19 females) before and 3 months after the onset of memantine medication. Source localization was applied to the EEG using exact low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (eLORETA) in 8 frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha-1, alpha-2, beta-1, beta- 2, beta-3, gamma). Differences in source strengths from before to after memantine treatment were compared per frequency band using t-statistics (corrected for multiple testing over frequency bands and voxels).

Results: Theta activity significantly decreased in bilateral anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral posterior cingulate gyrus, right parahippocampal gyrus, right insula, right fusiform gyrus, bilateral precuneus, right uncus and right temporal gyrus. Alpha-1 and alpha-2 activity decreased in the anterior cingulate gyrus. Beta-1 activity significantly decreased in the anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus. There were no areas of increased EEG activity in any frequency bands.

Conclusions: We found that memantine reduced theta activity similarly to AChEIs. This finding may be related to the cognitive improvements of memantine. Whereas the decrease of beta-1, alpha-1 and alpha-2 activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus was different from AChEIs. Further studies are required to elucidate these differences.

Capacity development is crucial for enduring conservation success. Recent scholarship has called for a systems perspective based on input from local stakeholders to better understand and develop conservation capacity. However, few studies have adopted such an approach to explore interactions among capacities or how capacity development needs and priorities evolve. We address this gap through a case study from Bhutan, centred on perceptions from 52 local conservation practitioners, planners, funders and community members. We use mixed methods to identify which capacities have been important for conservation success, which capacities are needed for future success, which capacities are foundational and how capacities interact. We find that capacity needs have shifted from individual-level knowledge and skills to community- and societal-level capacities in response to changing political and economic dynamics. Participants identified political support and leadership, reliable and sufficient funding, strengthening the research base, and increasing community awareness and engagement as critical future needs. Investing in these capacities holds the promise of further augmenting capacity development, thus increasing the value of limited resources. Our results demonstrate that capacity development should be viewed as a dynamic process and supported by strategic investment even in countries with track records of conservation success.

We provide well-posedness results for nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) given by reaction–diffusion equations describing the concentration of oxygen in encapsulated cells. The cells are described in terms of a core and a shell, which introduces a discontinuous diffusion coefficient as the material properties of the core and shell differ. In addition, the cells are subject to general nonlinear consumption of oxygen. As no monotonicity condition is imposed on the consumption, monotone operator theory cannot be used. Moreover, the discontinuity in the diffusion coefficient bars us from applying classical results on strong solutions. However, by directly applying a Galerkin method, we obtain uniqueness and existence of the strong form solution. These results provide the basis to study the dynamics of cells in critical states.