In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute’s summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word ‘donation’ generated higher revenue than the use of ‘contribution.’ While the individuals receiving the donation framing gave substantially larger amounts, those receiving the contribution framing responded more strongly to reward thresholds and suggestions. An additional survey experiment on MTurk indicated that the term ‘donation’ triggers more positive emotional responses and that emotions are highly correlated with giving. It appears that making a donation is perceived as a more voluntary act and is thus more successful at generating warm glow than making a contribution. We surmise that this extends to other funding mechanisms.

As China's financial commitments in Latin America grow, so does its influence. But some countries resent Beijing throwing its weight around

Over the past two decades, China has become a significant player in Latin America. The process began slowly, but as the Chinese economy began to hit spectacular levels of growth in the 1990s, it drove the price of several key raw materials higher. China became the leading buyer of many commodities produced in the region, making it an influential player in Chile (copper), Argentina and Brazil (soybeans), Peru (mining), as well as Ecuador and Venezuela (petroleum).

In recent years, Japan has been labeled an “environmentally backward country.” Yet Japan's integration of decarbonization and all-hazard-resilience is more advanced than critics generally admit. The evidence shows that, when compared to its peer countries, Japan is achieving significant climate mitigation and adaptation via a multilevel industrial policy. Moreover, Japan's synergistic integration of mitigation and adaptation to climate is important for the 2030 Agenda, which comprises the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. That is not to say Japan's present pace of reductions in emissions and waste, increased resilience against climate and other hazards, and performance on other metrics is sufficient to meet the goals of the 2030 Agenda. However, the evidence assessed in this paper suggests that Japan deserves closer scrutiny for potential lessons in collaborative, cost-effective and equitable mitigation and adaptation.

This long, collaboratively written article interweaves several narratives: the 25 yearlong history of an activist group concerned with Ushiku Detention Center against the broader history of detention centers in Japan; description of the detention center system in Japan against an account of daily life at the Ushiku Center and visitations; and sketches from the lives of three detainees, including one man's satirical cartoons.

Focusing on Ōnobu Pelican's play Kiruannya and U-ko-san (2011), this article analyzes documentary theater from the area afflicted by the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. Kiruannya and U-ko provides a rich tapestry of the multiple and often contradictory features of Fukushima Prefecture in the aftermath of the Fukushima calamity, weaving a dense fabric of fictional material, newspaper clippings, and reality. I show that Ōnobu's play opposes national discourses of a spatially limited disaster, and that it offers keen insights into the highly ambivalent and emotional landscape of those residents of Northern Japan, whose homeland was turned into a disaster zone and/or radioactive wasteland after 3.11.

The Mainichi is holding an international essay contest on the theme of Inoue Hisashi's play, “The Face of Jizo,” for young people. To commemorate this contest, we have asked the play's translator and long-time friend of the late playwright to write about him. We publish that here, together with Inoue's prologue, the first part of the play and profiles of both playwright and translator.

Details of the essay contest and information for participants may be seen here.

The present study explores the value of machine learning techniques in the classification of communication content in experiments. Previously human-coded datasets are used to both train and test algorithm-generated models that relate word counts to categories. For various games, the computer models of the classification are able to match out-of-sample the human classification to a considerable extent. The analysis raises hope that the substantial effort going into such studies can be reduced by using computer algorithms for classification. This would enable a quick and replicable analysis of large-scale datasets at reasonable costs and widen the applicability of such approaches. The paper gives an easily accessible technical introduction into the computational method.

On December 19, 2014, South Korea's Constitutional Court delivered an unprecedented ruling to dissolve the opposition Unified Progressive Party and disqualify all five of its representatives from the National Assembly.

The ruling was in response to a petition filed by the Park Geun-hye government in November 2013 to dissolve the party based on allegations that it was under orders from North Korea to subvert the South Korean state through violent revolution. The government filed the petition two months after it arrested UPP lawmaker and National Assembly member, Lee Seok-ki, who is currently behind bars on charges of inciting an insurrection and violating the National Security Law (NSL).

Despite being a party to the Refugee Convention since 1981, Japan has historically admitted very few asylum seekers. However, recently the country's total protection rate has increased, from 2.3% in 2020 to 52% in 2022. This article explores this seemingly dramatic shift in Japan's refugee policy, tying the increased rate of asylum admissions to the country's broader foreign policy in the face of recent geopolitical challenges in Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, while outlining the diverging pathways of admission utilized in each case.

In recent years we have seen a worldwide increase in debates surrounding memorials that celebrate historical personalities. In the United States, statues of generals who commanded the troops of the Confederacy in the Civil War (1861-65) have been demolished or strongly criticized as inappropriate. In Oxford, students have demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) because of the role he played in British imperialism and his advocacy of racist ideology, which is today widely considered offensive. In 2015, the University of Cape Town removed a statue of Rhodes, which had been erected in 1934 near the entrance to the campus. In Namibia, the statue of a German colonial soldier was demolished in 2009 and later re-erected at a less prominent position, only narrowly escaping complete destruction. In some cases, the controversies around these monuments have led to violent clashes between those who consider them remnants of a former age, out of sympathy with the twenty-first century zeitgeist, and those who either favor their preservation as part of the country's “culture and heritage” or who continue to espouse the ideologies the statues represent.

This is the English translation of the original Japanese letter to Emperor Akihito written by Yuki Tanaka. The letter was sent to Emperor Akihito on January 6, 2019 under two names - Yuki Tanaka, as the representative of the annual conference of “August 6 Hiroshima Assembly for Peace,” and Kuno Naruaki, a committee member of the same conference.

z-Tree (Zurich Toolbox for Ready-made Economic Experiments) is a software for developing and conducting economic experiments. The software is stable and allows programming almost any kind of experiments in a short time. In this article, I present the guiding principles behind the software design, its features, and its limitations.

In the six decades of division since the Korean War ended in a “cease-fire,” the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule have used various causes such as anti-communism, liberal democracy, regionalism, and Christian values to cement their status as a cornerstone upholding the system of the North-South division. In this context, the task to eradicate the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators must target the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” in every aspect, rather than just the “vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators.” Furthermore, the “vestiges of Japanese colonial rule” must be clearly understood and addressed in light of their fundamental role in maintaining the division of North and South Korea. We must carefully observe how the political activities of sovereign citizens will affect the candlelight government's efforts to complete the imminent tasks to seek reform and to eradicate the vestiges of Japanese colonial rule that remain a cornerstone of vested interests based on the North-South division.

This story was first published in the February 1976 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō and later anthologized in the Collected Works of Hayashi Kyōko (Hayashi Kyōko zenshū) (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 2005). The original title, Nanja monja no men, draws on the Kantō area dialectal expression “nanja monja,” a contracted form of “najō iu mono ja” (What sort of thing is this?), referring to a large, legendary tree.

This article considers the experiences of Dutch and Indonesian women in enforced prostitution for the Japanese military during World War Two and the activism of prominent survivors and their supporters from the 1990s. It highlights how and why Japanese activists have continued to support these women and why Dutch and Indonesian women have rarely engaged in joint activism. It analyses how Dutch and Indonesian women's stories are presented together in a 2015-2016 exhibition at the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo and how women's and soldiers' testimonies are used to advocate further redress from the Japanese government and to challenge military sexual violence against women. The article assesses how a sustained focus in transnational activism on Japanese responsibility and the Japanese imperial context potentially leads to overlooking how localised forms of patriarchy and the specific context of this former Dutch colony affected women's experiences and their post war treatment.

On the basis of evidence of past oligopoly experiments, we argue that there is often significantly more tacit collusion in Bertrand price-choice than in Cournot quantity-choice markets.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

Chiri Yukie (1903-22) was born in Noboribetsu, Hokkaido to Chiri Takakichi and Nami. Nami was the daughter of a Hokkaido Ainu grandsire, Kan'nari. Yukie was the older sister of the linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-61). When she was five and six years old, she lived in Horobetsu with her grandmother, the great bard Monashinouku. Yukie grew up listening to recitations in the oral tradition as narrated by Monashinouku and later also by her adoptive mother Kan'nari Matsu (1875-1961), Nami's sister. Starting in 1909, she and Monashinouku lived with Matsu at the Episcopal Church compound in Chikabumi in the suburbs of Asahikawa in Hokkaido. After a total of seven years of normal and higher normal school education, she attended Asahikawa Girls Vocational School for three years, graduating in 1910.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) occupies an integral position in the memory politics of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In recent years, dominant representations of the war create a memory discourse which portrays the heroic triumph of the Chinese people led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Japan. This article shows how the war has been remembered from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the present in the PRC. It contributes to the debate on the effectiveness and limitations of the monopoly of war memory by the CCP.