The talk sessions of "kataribe" or narrators at Minamata Disease Museum are considered to be the place to learn about anti-discrimination. It is questionable, however, that whether these sessions function as such merely by exposing audiences to the discriminatory experience of kataribe and gaining knowledge about Minamata disease. The talk sessions of kataribe M also help us realize that the assumptions of human rights education are, in fact, incorrect. The assumption is that if one gains appropriate knowledge and eliminates one's prejudice, then discrimination will disappear. M confesses that she was not subjected to any bullying or discriminatory conduct. What she articulated destroys the canonical image of Minamata disease sufferers. The purpose of the present paper is to clarify the existing problems of human rights education by examining the interaction of the participants at M's talk sessions.

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Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech, his sole public address on race delivered in 2008, can be regarded as one of the most significant speeches in U. S. history. As Obama's second presidential term begins and communication research on this particular speech accumulates, I reexamine the meaning of this historic speech from multiple perspectives. First, I review the Jeremiah Wright controversy that urged Obama to talk about race in public, the content of "A More Perfect Union" speech, and its repercussions. Then, I critically examine previous communication research on "A More Perfect Union" in an attempt to reveal the multiple dimensions of this speech in particular and Obama's rhetoric as a whole.

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This paper reports two studies on the sexual risk of female victims of bullying in Japan and the effects of supportive communication for them. Study 1 utilized the survey data collected from 182 Japanese undergraduates and explored the associations among bullying, support, and sexual risk. Latent profile analysis (LPA) detected five distinct profiles of victims and non-victims. LPA also revealed that the victims who had received less support had higher sexual risk (i.e., earlier sexual debut and a larger number of sexual partners), whereas the type of bullying made little differences. Study 2 utilized the online survey data collected from unmarried female full-timers working at companies in Japan (N=439) and examined a mediational model wherein victims' avoidant-coping tendency and communication efficacy mediate the effects of bullying and social support on sexual risk. Victims' sexual risk was operationalized by their lifetime number of sexual partners, the experience of unplanned sex, and the experience of unprotected sex. SEM revealed that: (a) bullying was positively associated with avoidant-coping tendency and negatively with communication efficacy; (b) stronger avoidant-coping tendency and weaker communication efficacy were associated with higher sexual risk (i.e., a larger number of sexual partners, higher likelihoods of having had an unplanned sex and/or an unprotected sex); and (c) social support showed protective effects to reduce sexual risk, both directly and indirectly (via mediation by the two psychological factors). These results were discussed with reference to the literature on bullying and victims' readjustment. Theoretical speculations about the mechanism underlying the effects of bullying and support were presented in regards to the structure of the bullying phenomenon, reappraisal-based theory of social support, and the importance of the communicative environment surrounding bullied victims. Practical implications and limitations of the current research, as well as the directions for future studies, were also discussed.

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