Agriculture and Law in Japanese Society

This study analyzes the changes in farmland system in Japan. The main policy of post-World War II Japan was regulation of the transfer lease or ownership of farmland, and the conversion of agricultural land into non-agricultural land considering the importance of farmlands. Paradoxically, this policy created some problems, such subdivision of farmland and ownerless lands. To address these problems, the Farmland Intermediary Management Institution was established in 2014 to accelerate farmland concentration and intensify the power of core farmers. In 2016, The Agricultural Land Act was reformed to make it easier for stock companies to own farmland. And, ICT has enabled us to visualize and verbalize tacit knowledge. This study explores the outcomes of these reforms and other unanswered issues.

Life-Cycle Assessment on Nickel-Metal Hydride Battery in Hybrid Vehicles: Comparison between Regenerated and New Battery

To reduce air pollution and avoid petroleum exhaustion problem, many advanced countries, especially Japan installed Hybrid Vehicles (HV). As the use of HV popularizes around the world, there will be a huge amount of End-of-Life HV in the near future, and the proper treatment of these End-of-Life HVs, especially the waste NiMH (Nickel-Metal Hydride) batteries, will become a serious problem. Currently, the recycling of NiMH battery is gaining substantial attention. However, instead of recycling waste NiMH batteries directly, regenerating and reusing a used NiMH battery for a secondhand HV will largely reduce waste battery generation and demand for new NiMH battery. However, the environmental impact of regenerating and reusing a waste NiMH battery was not clear and has not been compared with the situation when using a brand-new NiMH battery. The purpose of this research is to compare the environmental performance (CO2 emission) of regenerated NiMH battery and brand-new NiMH battery in an HV from their production to usage stage and to discuss the validity of using a regenerated NiMH in Japan and in other countries using the Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. This research analyzed the composition of a NiMH battery and the CO2 emission during the manufacture, transportation, regeneration and usage process of a NiMH battery. The data used in this research was collected from reports and data published by the government of Japan, vehicle makers and previous studies. Original field survey and interview research on battery regeneration operators were also performed. The result showed that there is not a big difference in environmental effect. Moreover, by doing so, a huge amount of resource will be saved from battery manufacturing process while reducing waste generation. It is recommended that waste NiMH battery should be regenerated and reused in HV instead of being recycled directly in the future.

Comparative Analysis of ELV Recycling Policies in the European Union, Japan and China

This research aims at revealing the current status of the End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV) recycling systems in the European Union (EU), Japan and China which are known to have big vehicle manufacturers. The purpose of this research is to clarify their characteristics and issues, such as existing ELV recycling policy, limitations of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and environmental problems caused by secondhand car export. Japanese ELV recycling system will be analyzed as a specific example. Automakers’ effort to improve ELV recycling rate and the potential influence on recycling policy from large secondhand car export and Next-Generation Vehicle’s (NGV) popularization in Japan will be discussed and generalized. In addition, interview investigation for vehicle makers and government agencies has been conducted to have a comparative analysis of stakeholders’ (mainly automakers) attitude towards current ELV recycling law and future plans which can support Next-Generation Vehicle recycling well, as well as cross-border environmental/international resources recycling problems caused by secondhand car export.

Current Status of and Challenges in Regional Policies in Japan

This study aims to explain current regional policies in Japan and to explore challenges in relation to the same. Specifically, I will focus on regional revitalisation policies implemented by the Abe cabinet since 2014 and examine whether grants for regional revitalisation policies are distributed in a way that political scientists have disputed for a long time. From the perspective of public policy analyses in political science, I will conduct statistical analyses by using aggregated data of local municipalities in Japan. Thus, I will clarify the current status of and challenges related to regional policies in Japan.

Our Second Son is Number One: Numbers in Recent Japanese Given Names

Japanese given names reflect through their kanji selection particular perceived or anticipated aspects concerning their bearers, providing an insight into the changing values of Japanese society. In the past, numbers were used in names mainly to refer to the order of birth, the time of birth, or, in the case of large numbers, to express a wish for longevity. Within the larger historical context, this paper focuses on the use of kanji representing numbers in the names of children born in the last ten years (2008–2017), exploring the recent reasons for their choice and what values and priorities of recent Japanese parents they reflect.

'To be tensed or not to be tensed?' The case of Vietnamese

In this paper, we scrutinise the interpretation and distribution of a number of morphemes that serve as means of expressing temporal/aspectual relations in Vietnamese, investigating whether they should treated as genuine tense and aspect markers. The main goals of the study are two-fold: (i) empirically, to offer a comprehensive description of Vietnamese tense and aspect, in both pre-verbal and post-verbal domains; (ii) theoretically, to offer new pieces of evidence supporting the claim that Tense and Aspect exist as independent functional categories in Vietnamese.

Simpler semantics for computational and cognitive linguistics

Certain consequences are considered regarding a simpler, more cognitively plausible treatment of semantics in SignBased Construction Grammar, a cognitive, unification- based theory of language. It is proposed that a construction grammar may be able to improve its coverage of core linguistic phenomena in line with minimalist goals (Chomsky 1993). Suggestions are offered regarding relative clauses and wh-expressions to show that a more straightforward account is available, one that allows a unified treatment of scope for quantifiers and wh-expressions.

Who I am asking about: What the sentence endings imply about the unexpressed subjects in wh-questions

This study demonstrates that the sentence endings of Korean and Japanese wh-questions can be analyzed as serving to evoke and, in a weaker sense, to mark an unexpressed verb subject. This study further contends that the endings are not complex forms with successive morphemes each contributing to the whole meaning but rather simplex forms each of which has its own meaning and function. This study argues that pragmatic groupings of event participants help the sentence endings to mark subjects in the Korean and Japanese languages as well as other languages of the world.

Quality of commitment: Japanese daroo as a speech act operator

This paper proposes a compositional analysis of the meaning of Japanese daroo-utterances with declarative and interrogative force, and final rising and falling intonation. Daroo is analyzed in a framework for speech act felicity as an operator lowering the quality threshold for felicitous assertion. The conveyed meanings of conjecture, confirmation, and doubt uses of darooutterances are predicted from modification of the respective speech act types’ felicity conditions by daroo.

Nominalization in Koro

Koro is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the East Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. The present paper deals with the nominalization processes in Koro. Two types of nominalizing strategy is seen in Koro: derivational and clausal. Derivational nominalization derives a noun from a non-nominal lexical root (a verb or adjective) as [V-NMZ]N or [ADJ-NMZ]N. In clausal nominalizations, the nominalized clause is subordinate to the matrix clause. Koro employs the morphological marker –gõ to derive nouns from action verbs. The clausal nominals do not take any nominalizer marker but display nominal markers like number, definite articles, case on the verb.