Background: Late-onset Pompe disease (LOPD) is caused by a deficiency of acid α-glucosidase (GAA), leading to progressive muscle and respiratory decline. Cipaglucosidase alfa (cipa), a recombinant human GAA naturally enriched with bis-mannose-6-phosphate, exhibits improved muscle uptake but is limited by inactivation at near-neutral blood pH. Miglustat (mig), an enzyme stabiliser, binds competitively and reversibly to cipa, enhancing its stability and activity. Methods: In dose-finding studies, Gaa-/- mice were treated with cipa (20 mg/kg) +/- mig (10 mg/kg; equivalent human dose ~260 mg). Clinical study methodologies have been published (Schoser et al. Lancet Neurol 2021:20;1027–37; Schoser et al. J Neurol 2024:271;2810–23). Results: In Gaa-/- mice, cipa+mig improved muscle glycogen reduction more than cipa alone and grip strength to levels approaching wild-type mice. LOPD patients (n=11) treated with cipa alone showed dose-dependent decreases in hexose tetrasaccharide (Hex4) levels by ~15% from baseline, decreasing another ~10% with added mig (260 mg). In a head-to-head study, cipa+mig had a similar safety profile to alglucosidase alfa. Among 151 patients (three trials), mig-related adverse events occurred in 21 (13.9%), none serious. Conclusions: Mig stabilised cipa in circulation, improving cipa exposure, further reducing Hex4 levels and was well tolerated in clinical studies in patients with LOPD. Sponsored by Amicus Therapeutics, Inc.

The murders committed by AUM Shinrikyo guru Asahara Shoko and his henchmen may be the most malevolent crimes in Japanese history. March 20, 1995 was Japan's 9/11, and but for a little dumb luck—including the failure to puncture all the bags of sarin that were planted in the subway trains—the death toll could have been much higher than 13 and the number of persons injured might have reached five digits instead of the true total of 6300.

The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons. This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia. That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).

The future looked grim for Abdy Ismail when his criminal trial started in Osaka District Court on January 17, 2011. Prosecutors believed Ismail was the drug lord who had masterminded the smuggling of 4 kilograms of methamphetamines—with a street value of 350 million yen ($4.2 million)—from Istanbul to the Kansai airport on July 18, 2009, and they wanted to imprison the 42-year-old Iranian for the next 18 years of his life.

In April 2010, The People's Republic of China executed four Japanese citizens who had been convicted of trafficking methamphetamines. They were the first Japanese to be executed in China since the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1972. At the time of their demise the condemned men—Akano Mitsunobu, Takeda Teruo, Mori Katsuo, and Ukai Hironori—were ages 65, 67, 67, and 48, respectively. All were killed by lethal injection in a province (Liaoning) that borders North Korea—the nation which may have been the source of the drugs—and all were either members of the yakuza or drug mules for them.

On August 3, 2009, Japan began a new trial system in which ordinary citizens sit with professional judges in order to adjudicate guilt and determine sentence in serious criminal cases. This change injects a meaningful dose of lay participation into Japanese criminal trials for the first time in 66 years. Japan had a jury system of sorts from 1928 to 1943, but it was suspended during the Pacific War for various reasons: because defendants who chose a jury trial had to give up rights to appeal; because the jury only answered a set of interrogatories framed by a judge who could reject its findings of fact; because jury trials were expensive and difficult to administer; and because (some analysts claim) a Japanese cultural preference for hierarchy caused defendants to prefer judgment by professionals rather than peers. Notably, the old jury system generated much higher acquittal rates than those that prevailed before or since—15 percent for the nation as a whole, and more than 60 percent in some cities—leading some prosecutors and judges to welcome the demise of an institution that made it more difficult for the state to convict.

I really agonized. I cried many times during the trial, and now when I recall it I still shed tears. I want you to understand this.

Man in his fifties who served on the first lay judge panel that imposed a death sentence in Japan (press conference after the trial of Ikeda Hiroyuki, November 16, 2010)

Does capital punishment do justice? We the people who constitute society have entered an era in which we must directly confront the death penalty and answer this question.

Tokyo Shimbun (November 17, 2010, p.26)

There are two ways in which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan—culture become a burlesque…Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Neil Postman (1985)

Minister of Justice opposes capital punishment or does not want to participate in state killing, he or she can prevent executions simply by not signing execution warrants. A few years ago Minister of Justice Hatoyama Kunio of the LDP (who authorized 13 hangings while serving as Minister for less than a year in 2007-08) suggested that the execution process should be made more automatic by abolishing the Minister's discretion to make these life and death decisions. The execution process should be like a “conveyor belt”, he said, and the Minister should not be allowed to turn the switch off.

The description and delineation of trematode species is a major ongoing task. Across the field there has been, and currently still is, great variation in the standard of this work and in the sophistication of the proposal of taxonomic hypotheses. Although most species are relatively unambiguously distinct from their congeners, many are either morphologically very similar, including the major and rapidly growing component of cryptic species, or are highly variable morphologically despite little to no molecular variation for standard DNA markers. Here we review challenges in species delineation in the context provided to us by the historical literature, and the use of morphological, geographical, host, and molecular data. We observe that there are potential challenges associated with all these information sources. As a result, we encourage careful proposal of taxonomic hypotheses with consideration for underlying species concepts and frank acknowledgement of weaknesses or conflict in the data. It seems clear that there is no single source of data that provides a wholly reliable answer to our taxonomic challenges but that nuanced consideration of information from multiple sources (the ‘integrated approach’) provides the best possibility of developing hypotheses that will stand the test of time.

The arrest and prosecution of Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, together with his dramatic flight from Japan, have focused unprecedented attention on Japan's criminal justice system. This article employs comparison with the United States to examine issues in Japanese criminal justice highlighted by the Ghosn case. The criminal charges and procedures used in Ghosn's case illustrate several serious weaknesses in Japanese criminal justice—including the problems of prolonged detention and interrogation without a defense attorney that have been characterized as “hostage justice.” But in comparative perspective, the criminal justice systems in Japan and the U. S. have some striking similarities. Most notably, both systems rely on coercive means to obtain admissions of guilt, and both systems have high conviction rates. The American counterpart to Japan's use of high-pressure tactics to obtain confessions is a system of plea bargaining in which prosecutors use the threat of a large “trial tax” (a longer sentence for defendants who insist upon their right to a trial and are then convicted) to obtain guilty pleas. An apples-to-apples comparison also indicates that Japan's “99% conviction rate” is not the extreme outlier that it is often said to be. Commentary on Ghosn's case emphasized the weaknesses in Japanese criminal justice. Those weaknesses are real and important, but by many criteria, such as crime and incarceration rates, Japan outperforms the U.S. As for Ghosn's case in particular, this article explores four scenarios of what might have happened to him if his case had occurred in the U.S. It is not obvious that he would have fared better under American law, nor is it obvious that justice would have been better realized.

The Asia Pacific Journal presents a link to an extraordinary 12-minute video by Matthew Carney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation discussing the death penalty and the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. This video explains what went wrong in three cases involving men who were victimized in the worst kind of way by Japan's criminal justice system, and it raises the possibility that these cases could stimulate reform in Japan's system of capital punishment and in the criminal justice system more generally.

A criminal case can go wrong in two main ways. A person who committed a crime can escape punishment, or a person can be convicted and punished for a crime he or she did not commit (Simon, 2012, p.4). Every criminal justice system makes mistakes of both kinds, but most cultures and criminal justice professionals believe that the worse mistake is the false conviction of a person who is actually innocent (Huff and Killias, 2008). As jurist William Blackstone observed, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” An aversion to convicting the innocent is also well established in Japan's legal culture. Indeed, the main proximate cause of Japan's high conviction rate may be the institutionalized caution of Japanese prosecutors about charging cases with evidence that could lead to an acquittal (Johnson, 2002, p.237). On this view, the criminal justice system in Japan might convict fewer innocent people than do systems in countries that adopt more aggressive charging policies (Sasaki, 2000).

In September 2024, after 56 years under a sentence of death, Hakamada Iwao was acquitted in a retrial in Japan. This article summarizes what went wrong in his wrongful conviction case and what should be learned from it. The Shizuoka District Court's retrial decision concluded that police and prosecutors conspired to frame Hakamada with evidence they had fabricated, but there is more to the case than that. This tragedy occurred because of mistakes and misconduct that were exacerbated by underlying weaknesses in Japan's criminal process. To prevent a recurrence, many things need to change in Japanese criminal justice. The conclusion identifies five priorities for reform.

This article focuses on the criminal justice consequences of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima that was precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Through a process of “mandatory prosecution” initiated by Japan's unique Prosecution Review Commissions, three executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company were charged with criminal negligence in 2015-2016. They were acquitted at trial in 2019 when the Tokyo District Court concluded there was insufficient evidence to convict. Following this verdict, Japanese prosecutors essentially said “we told you so – these cases should not have been prosecuted.” But we argue that a courtroom loss does not mean that the case should never have been brought, for the TEPCO trial and the criminal process that preceded it performed some welcome functions. Most notably, this criminal case revealed many facts that were previously unknown, concealed, or denied, and it clarified the truth about the Fukushima meltdown by exposing some of TEPCO's claims as nonsense. At the same time, this case study illustrates the limits of the criminal sanction and the difficulty of controlling corporate crime in the modern world.

The release of Hakamada Iwao from death row in March 2014 after 48 years of incarceration provides an opportunity to reflect on wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. My approach is comparative because this problem cannot be understood without asking how Japan compares with other countries: to know only one country is to know no country well. Comparison with the United States is especially instructive because there have been many studies of wrongful conviction there and because the U.S. and Japan are the only two developed democracies that retain capital punishment and continue to carry out executions on a regular basis. On the surface, the United States seems to have a more serious problem with wrongful convictions than Japan, but this gap is more apparent than real. To reduce the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice, reformers must confront a culture of denial that makes it difficult for police, prosecutors, and judges to acknowledge their own mistakes.

Ion cyclotron resonance heating is a versatile heating method that has been demonstrated to be able to efficiently couple power directly to the ions via the fast magnetosonic wave. However, at temperatures relevant for reactor grade devices such as DEMO, electron damping becomes increasingly important. To reduce electron damping, it is possible to use an antenna with a power spectrum dominated by low parallel wavenumbers. Moreover, using an antenna with a unidirectional spectrum, such as a travelling wave array antenna, the parallel wavenumber can be downshifted by mounting the antenna in an elevated position relative to the equatorial plane. This downshift can potentially enhance ion heating as well as fast wave current drive efficiency. Thus, such a system could benefit ion heating during the ramp-up phase and be used for current drive during flat-top operation. To test this principle, both ion heating and current drive have been simulated in a DEMO-like plasma for a few different mounting positions of the antenna using the FEMIC code. We find that moving the antenna off the equatorial plane makes ion heating more efficient for all considered plasma temperatures at the expense of on-axis heating. Moreover, although current drive efficiency is enhanced, electron damping is reduced for lower mode numbers, thus reducing the driven current in this part of the spectrum.

The global population and status of Snowy Owls Bubo scandiacus are particularly challenging to assess because individuals are irruptive and nomadic, and the breeding range is restricted to the remote circumpolar Arctic tundra. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) uplisted the Snowy Owl to “Vulnerable” in 2017 because the suggested population estimates appeared considerably lower than historical estimates, and it recommended actions to clarify the population size, structure, and trends. Here we present a broad review and status assessment, an effort led by the International Snowy Owl Working Group (ISOWG) and researchers from around the world, to estimate population trends and the current global status of the Snowy Owl. We use long-term breeding data, genetic studies, satellite-GPS tracking, and survival estimates to assess current population trends at several monitoring sites in the Arctic and we review the ecology and threats throughout the Snowy Owl range. An assessment of the available data suggests that current estimates of a worldwide population of 14,000–28,000 breeding adults are plausible. Our assessment of population trends at five long-term monitoring sites suggests that breeding populations of Snowy Owls in the Arctic have decreased by more than 30% over the past three generations and the species should continue to be categorised as Vulnerable under the IUCN Red List Criterion A2. We offer research recommendations to improve our understanding of Snowy Owl biology and future population assessments in a changing world.

The purpose of this study is to analyze agricultural producers’ willingness to adopt regenerative cover crop practices in their operation and the effects of producer and farm characteristics on willingness to accept (WTA) values. The paper utilizes the double-bounded contingent valuation method to analyze survey responses submitted by producers and non-operating landowners in the Texas and Oklahoma portions of the Southern Great Plains. Results showed an average WTA of $26.38/acre for producers to adopt cover crops and that programs aimed at increasing adoption rates may require more substantial investment compared to those focused on continuity with current adopters.

The gut microbiome is impacted by certain types of dietary fibre. However, the type, duration and dose needed to elicit gut microbial changes and whether these changes also influence microbial metabolites remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of supplementing healthy participants with two types of non-digestible carbohydrates (resistant starch (RS) and polydextrose (PD)) on the stool microbiota and microbial metabolite concentrations in plasma, stool and urine, as secondary outcomes in the Dietary Intervention Stem Cells and Colorectal Cancer (DISC) Study. The DISC study was a double-blind, randomised controlled trial that supplemented healthy participants with RS and/or PD or placebo for 50 d in a 2 × 2 factorial design. DNA was extracted from stool samples collected pre- and post-intervention, and V4 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to profile the gut microbiota. Metabolite concentrations were measured in stool, plasma and urine by high-performance liquid chromatography. A total of fifty-eight participants with paired samples available were included. After 50 d, no effects of RS or PD were detected on composition of the gut microbiota diversity (alpha- and beta-diversity), on genus relative abundance or on metabolite concentrations. However, Drichlet’s multinomial mixture clustering-based approach suggests that some participants changed microbial enterotype post-intervention. The gut microbiota and fecal, plasma and urinary microbial metabolites were stable in response to a 50-d fibre intervention in middle-aged adults. Larger and longer studies, including those which explore the effects of specific fibre sub-types, may be required to determine the relationships between fibre intake, the gut microbiome and host health.