Hesitant Madams in a Global City: Japanese Expat Wives and their Global Householding in Hong Kong

Care work, once a sanctioned labor of love, is increasingly commodified in transnational contexts. The picture of migrant women shouldering the housework and child care of local professonal women may seem like a mutually beneficial arrangement—matching the “needs” of the haves and have-nots—, but the global care chain ultimately works to maintain the traditional gendered division of labor as well as global inequality. To this trend of globalization of care work, Japan has been an exception; however, how much longer it will be so is now in a question, as the government paves the way for importing domestic labor from abroad. This article focuses on Japanese expat wives in Hong Kong in order to locate Japanese women vis-à-vis the global care chain. The narrative analysis on how they decide whether to hire a domestic worker in their home away from home highlights the sociopolitical nature of their supposedly private choices. Some drew on cultural ideal of wifehood and motherhood to rationalize their choice while others referred to racialized or even overtly racist and classist images of foreign domestic workers. A few women spoke against the system itself, showing awareness of its inherent social injustice. All such narratives are never purely personal; their decisions and the rationalization behind them sustain the prevailing discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and class, which, in turn, envelop their attempts at global householding.     

Pitch and Communicative Intent in Mother's Speech: Adjustments for Age and Sex in the First Year

This study investigated pitch and communicative intent in mothers' infant‐directed speech spoken to their infants at birth, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. Audio recordings of mothers (6 with female, and 6 with male infants) talking to another adult and to their infant at 5 ages were low‐pass filtered and rated by 60 adults on 5 scales (Positive or Negative Affect, Express Affection, Encourage Attention, Comfort or Soothe, and Direct Behavior). Mean fundamental frequency (F₀) and pitch range of utterances were also measured. Utterances associated with positive affect tend to peak at 6 and 12 months, whereas more directive utterances peaked at 9 months. Mean F₀ followed the age trend for affective utterances, and pitch range followed the trend for directive utterances. The results suggest mother speech patterns reflect, complement, and perhaps facilitate infant development.     

Inequality and education decisions in developing countries

In this paper we analyze the effect of inequality on school enrollment, preferred tax rate and expenditure per student in developing countries; when parents can choose between child labor, public schooling or private schooling. We present a model in which parents make schooling decisions for their children, weighing the utility benefit of having a child with formal public or private education versus the forgone income from child labor or household work. Parents vote over the preferred tax rate to finance freely provided public education. The utility benefit of an educated child is proportional to expenditure per student, so that there is congestion in public school. We find that when parents can send their children to work or to private school, high inequality leads to exit from public education at both ends of the income distribution. Thus high inequality reduces the support for public education, leading to a low tax rate and expenditure per student. Exit from public education results in both high child labor and a large fraction of students attending private school. In fact there is a threshold level of inequality above which there is no longer support for public education. In addition we explore the implications for the design of foreign aid. The results suggest that foreign aid policies should focus on promoting school attendance rather than increasing school resources, as the later policy might be offset by a reduction in the recipient country’s fiscal effort, with little impact on outcomes.      

Implications of urbanism for the use of local news media: effects of population concentration on types of news acquisition in Japan

The Internet, a global computer network enabling people to send and receive information anywhere in the world, also functions as a local medium of communication. This study focuses on the role of the Internet in transmitting local news and examines the effects of community population concentrations as socio-ecological environments on the use of local news media consumed online and offline. Data from 1367 respondents across 156 Japanese communities were used to analyze the relationships between type of community and type of news source. The findings suggest that people who live in highly populated communities tend more often to use the Internet to access local news, whereas those in less populated communities tend to use more traditional mass media. However, the results of this study did not show a relationship between population concentrations within communities and the acquisition of international news, nor did the social features of residents adequately explain the effects of population concentration on the acquisition of local news. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions based on network externalities, urbanism, and collective action. The findings indicate that local news consumption is embedded in local social contexts in a way that international news is not, reinforcing the importance of urbanism in the information age.     

On the Asymptotic Optimality of Empirical Likelihood for Testing Moment Restrictions

We show by example that empirical likelihood and other commonly used tests for moment restrictions are unable to control the (exponential) rate at which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero unless the possible distributions for the observed data are restricted appropriately. From this, it follows that for the optimality claim for empirical likelihood in Kitamura (2001) to hold, additional assumptions and qualifications are required. Under stronger assumptions than those in Kitamura (2001), we establish the following optimality result: (i) empirical likelihood controls the rate at which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero and (ii) among all procedures for which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero at least as fast, empirical likelihood maximizes the rate at which the probability of a Type II error tends to zero for most alternatives. This result further implies that empirical likelihood maximizes the rate at which the probability of a Type II error tends to zero for all alternatives among a class of tests that satisfy a weaker criterion for their Type I error probabilities.     

A longtidunal study on the effects of team building for univesity baseball team in Japan: from the view point of team-vitalization

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect in the experience of TB among university baseball team from the view point of team-vitalization. We carry out one university baseball team (102 males, 6 female). The average age of the participants was 19.99 years (SD = 1.41). Then, using Check List of Team- Vitalization that was developed by consulting firm in Japan, we examined the degrees of team-vitalization. The answers of this investigation were collected from the participants at fifth times (before intervention of TB, immediately after TB, after three months of TB, before intervention of follow-up training of TB, and immediately after follow-up training of TB). This study for eight months provided the following three conclusions; 1) University baseball team was vitalized through the experience of TB. 2) Team-vitalization was higher than before TB experience, but this effect of the TB did not seem to be permanent. 3) To keep intervention of TB was very important.     

Robustness,Infinitesimal Neighborhoods,and Moment Restrictions

This paper is concerned with robust estimation under moment restrictions. A moment restriction model is semiparametric and distribution‐free; therefore it imposes mild assumptions. Yet it is reasonable to expect that the probability law of observations may have some deviations from the ideal distribution being modeled, due to various factors such as measurement errors. It is then sensible to seek an estimation procedure that is robust against slight perturbation in the probability measure that generates observations. This paper considers local deviations within shrinking topological neighborhoods to develop its large sample theory, so that both bias and variance matter asymptotically. The main result shows that there exists a computationally convenient estimator that achieves optimal minimax robust properties. It is semiparametrically efficient when the model assumption holds, and, at the same time, it enjoys desirable robust properties when it does not.     

作为教育机关的大学之硬件与软件

当今日本大学的各种设施、设备之完备令人惊叹,但大学生学习能力低下、求知欲减退、读书量减少等问题越来越引起人们的关注。大学如果没有各种设施设备的话,其教育机能是无法实现的;但如果这些手段不与学习、教育机能相结合,未被用于提高教师的教学努力和学生的学习欲望,也就无法达成大学作为教育机关的目的。设施、设备等硬件只有有了软件的支持才能产生效果。