Japanese Clocks and the History of Punctuality in Modern Japan

Although punctuality is well attained in present Japan, many foreign engineers who arrived in Japan from the mid 19th century observed that Japanese were seemingly indifferent to the clock, which leads us to a question about the origin of punctuality in modern Japan. The present paper first explains the time system and clocks in the Edo period, and then follows the origin and the evolution of punctuality in various sectors of Japanese society. Introducing the historian Sakae Tsunoyama’s two-layer theory to explain the origin of punctuality in modern Japan, the paper explores a question about when punctuality was attained and society accelerated in postwar Japan.

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Japanese Abstract  時間規律は現代の日本社会ではよく確立されている。 しかし、19 世紀末に日本に到来した多くの外国人技術者にとっては日本人が時計には無関心であるように思えた。このことは、近代日本における時間規律の起源という歴史的問題に導かれる。本稿は、最初に江戸時代における時刻制度と和時計について説明し、続いて日本社会の各領域における時間規律の起源と発展について追いかける。近代日本における時間規律の起源に関する歴史家角山榮による 2 層理論を紹介した上で、戦後日本における時間規律の達成、社会の加速化について検討する。

     

Nectar secretion pattern of the dish-shaped flower,Cayratia japonica (Vitaceae), and nectar utilization patterns by insect visitors

Summary We studied the relationship between the diurnal nectar secretion pattern of flowers ofCayratia japonica and insect visiting patterns to these flowers. Flower morphology ofC. japonica changed greatly for about 12 hours after flower-opening and the maximum duration of nectar secretion was 2 days. The nectar volume peaked at 11∶00 and 15∶00, and declined at night and at 13∶00 regardless of time elapsed after flower-opening. The nectar volume at the two peaks was, on average, 0.25 μl on bagged inflorescences and 0.1μl on unbagged inflorescences (both, sugar concentration=60%). The flower secreted nectar compensatory when the nectar was removed. This means that insects consume more nectar than the difference of nectar volume between bagged and unbagged flowers. Apis cerana is a primary visitor of this flower, and was the only species for which we confirmed pollen on the body, among many species of flower visiting insects to this flower.Apis cerana visited intensively at the two peaks of nectar secretion. Visits of the other insects were rather constant or intensive only when there was no nectar secretion. Thus flowers ofC. japonica with morphologically unprotected nectaries may increase likelihood that their nectar is used by certain pollinators, by controlling the nectar secretion time in day. In this study the pattern of nectar secretion allowedA. cerana maximum harvest of nectar. Contribution to the ecological and bioeconomoical studies of the pollinator community in Kyoto I.     

战后日本交通基础设施发展与地区间收入差距问题研究

战后,日本经济经过了恢复、增长、飞速发展的这样一个轨迹,其中交通基础设施的发展也是关系到日本全国经济发展的一个重要因素。本文旨在探讨战后日本交通基础设施建设的同时,试图从原有的地区间的收入问题、日本政府所采取的政策,以及地区间收入差距与交通的关系中梳理出交通基础设施建设对于促进日本经济发展及其在缩小地区间收入差距所起到的作用。     

Equivalence of Nash implementability and robust implementability with incomplete information

This paper is concerned with the design of robust mechanisms which are applicable to a wide class of possible information structures of agents. We examine a society consisting of several groups such that (i) there are at least three agents in each group; and (ii) each agent knows the preferences of the agents in his group but has incomplete information about the preferences of the agents outside his group. We show that for a large class of information structures, a social choice set (SCS) is implementable for each possible information structure if and only if it is Nash implementable. In other words, the class of robustly implementable SCS's is identical to the class of implementable SCS's in the complete information setting.This paper is a substantially revised version of a chapter of my dissertation submitted to the University of Rochester (Yamato [25]). I thank Professor William Thomson for his invaluable advice and suggestions. Detailed comments and suggestions of an anonymous referee were very helpful for further revision of the paper. I also acknowledge comments from Professors Randall Calvert, Luis Corchon, Glenn MacDonald, Eric Maskin, Lionel McKenzie, Ryo-Ichi Nagahisa, Koji Okuguchi, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortin, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Ken-Ichi Shimomura, Tomas Sjöström, Yoshikatsu Tatamitani, and seminar participants at Harvard University, the 1992 Meeting of Kobe Summer Seminar in Economics of Organization and Game Theory, Tokyo Metropolitan University, and Toyama University. This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education in Japan, the Nomura Foundation for the Social Sciences, and the Tokyo Center for Economic Research.     

Pollination of strawberry by the stingless bee,Trigona minangkabau, and the honey bee,Apis mellifera: An experimental study of fertilization efficiency

Summary To know basic information about the stingless bee,Trigona minangkabau, and the European honey bee,Apis mellifera, as pollinator of strawberry, we set three greenhouse areas: the honey bee introduced area, the stingless bee introduced area and the control area. Foraging and pollination efficiencies of the two bee species were studied comparatively. During the experimental period (10 days), the stingless bee foraged well and the nest weight did not change, though the honey bee often foraged inefficiently and the nest weight decreased by 2 kg. The average nectar volume of a flower was lower in the honey bee area (0.02 μl) and nearly the same in the other two areas (0.1 μl). We make a numerical model to describe pollination and fertilization process. This model shows that one visit of the honey bee pollinated 11% of achenes and one visit of the stingless bee did 4.7% on average and that 11 visits of the honey bee or 30 visits of the stingless bee are required per flower to attain normal berry (fertilization rate, 87%). In this study, the rate of deformed berries in the stingless bee area (73%) was lower than that of the control area (90%), but higher than that of the honey bee area (51%). From our numerical model, we conclude the stingless bee could pollinate strawberry as well as the honey bee if we introduced 1.8 times of bees used in this experiment.     

Quantitative analyses of misclassification rates in the hazard classification of environmental chemicals: Evaluation of procedures for deriving predicted no-effect concentrations in the Chemical Substance Control Law in Japan

The quality of chemical management depends more or less on practical procedures used to assess chemicals. This study quantitatively assessed the efficacy of a derivation procedure for calculating no-effect concentrations for screening assessment of environmental hazards under the Chemical Substance Control Law in Japan. We first evaluated the derivation procedure by applying a series of test ecotoxicity datasets to the procedure and calculating the resulting misclassification rates of the hazardous class of chemicals. In this study, a chemical was deemed to have been misclassified if its classification differed from its classification based on the full dataset (chronic toxicity data for three trophic levels), which was defined as the correct assignment. We also calculated the effects of additional uncertainty factors to decrease the variance (i.e., to improve the consistency) of the misclassification rates among cases with different data availability in the derivation procedure. The results showed that the derivation procedure resulted in very high rates of misclassification when only particular sets of ecotoxicity data were available (e.g., only chronic toxicity data of algae were available). Our analyses also showed that the use of additional uncertainty factors improved the consistency of the misclassification rates within the derivation procedure. Our study presents a broadly applicable calculation framework for quantifying error rates in assessment procedures and serves as a case study for future development and reforms of chemical assessment processes and policies, while additional analyses using more extensive ecotoxicity data with various modes of actions are needed in the future.