Based on the concept of elaboration likelihood continuum (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), this study constructs a best-fitting model that explains the structures of written arguments made by individuals in the context of text-based computer-mediated communication on a controversial issue. More specifically, this study explores how motivational and ability factors affect the structures of written arguments. Data were collected from Japanese college students (N=200) who participated in an online survey. As a result of testing two competing models—the simple main effects model and the intertwined model—the latter has demonstrated reasonable fit to the data. The results have been discussed and implications offered.

This study investigated how, in the national cultures of Japan and the United States, narcissism and face concerns affected the provision of comforting messages to an upset friend. This research drew on Burleson’s extensive program of research on comforting communication and used three different scenarios to test individuals’ comforting behavior. The results showed both cultural similarities and differences in the process of comforting communication. Cultural similarities were found in the relationships among narcissism, face concerns, and comforting messages. Participants of both cultural groups showed that a narcissistic personality negatively affected mutual-face concerns, which were a positive predictor to providing higher person-centered (i.e., explicit and elaborated) comforting messages. On the other hand, cultural differences were found in the level of providing comforting messages. Japanese participants generally tended to provide lower person-centered comforting messages than U.S. Americans. Perhaps the process of providing highly person-centered messages may be culture-general, and individual and relational factors may play a more significant role than cultures, but national cultures may affect the degree of person-centeredness of comforting messages.

This paper comprises two studies. The first one is aimed at developing a rubric for basic argument skills in the first year of college life; hence, this researcher collaborated with senior students to propagate this rubric as a communication tool between teachers and students. The second study is aimed at examining self-evaluation patterns by cluster analysis using the developed rubric before and after a debate tournament. The rubric consists of 25 items and was designed for argument education. Collaboration with a teacher and the past learners in designing the rubric presented this paper with the following three advantages: the teacher could grasp the scope of the knowledge of the learners, clarify the order of acquiring argument skills, and select appropriate expressions to be used in the rubric. To test the patterns of change before and after the final debate tournament, students used the rubric to self-evaluate twice—before and after a debate tournament. For the analysis, the students were divided into two groups on the basis of their scores in the final report. Consequently, on the one hand, the high-skilled students understood the following debate components even when they were not a part of the textbook content: structure, construction, refutation, and summary; further, they connected these components after the tournament. On the other hand, the low-skilled students concentrated on stating their opinions and exhibited inadequate understanding of the debate structure even after the tournament. These results can be used to improve the instruction method in teaching basic argument skills.

The Meiji Restoration was a chain of events that many scholars consider to mark the beginning of Japanese Modernization. In 1968, to honor its modern incarnation, Japan celebrated the Meiji Centennial as one of its biggest media events after World War II. The Japanese Government focused on Japan’s achievements over the past century and aimed to create a positive image by establishing Tokyo as the symbol of Japanese Modernization. It also became involved with the Meiji Centennial celebrated in Hawaii by Japanese-Americans.

For the Japanese, the meaning of the event was to show respect for ancestors who worked hard, fought for their country, and even died on the path to modernization. However, Japanese-Americans in Hawaii celebrated this event to show appreciation for their elders who worked hard to create a positive image of Japanese immigrants. They focused on their immigration history because their memories were very different from what the Japanese Government wanted to impose. Furthermore, for Japanese-Americans “The Memory of the Realm” in Japan was not Tokyo, but Kyoto. Therefore, Japanese-Americans in Hawaii used imagery from Kyoto rather than Tokyo. Thus arose a conflict in giving meaning to the Meiji Centennial, as both sides aimed to create a different memory of the past.

This study analyses the Meiji Centennial event in Hawaii and its differences from that held in Japan. It explains the meaning of the event for Japanese-Americans in Hawaii and the meaning that the Japanese Government attempted to ascribe to it. It also explains the miscommunication that occurred between Japan and Japanese-Americans. The analysis focuses on two projects (Rainbow Over the Pacific and the Byodo-in Temple) and explains differences in memories of The Meiji Restoration between Japan and Hawaii from the point of memory studies.

As a critical study of visual rhetoric, this essay offers a critical rhetoric of Baroque painting in the seventeenth century, in particular, Nicolas Régnier’s Carnival Scene as a point of departure to deconstruct the ideology underlying current studies of visual rhetoric. The challenges for current studies reside in an ideological critique of the ocularcentrism and how to critique the structural power lurking in the scopic regime of Cartesian perspectivalism. Critical rhetoric of the visual finds a possibility to critically intervene traditional understanding of rhetoric as verbal art and its structural underpinnings of the visual as the ideological experience of the modern scopic regime. Through the analysis of Régnier’s picture, this essay attempts to show that Baroque holds such critical moment not only to reveal power of the structure in the perspectivalism but also to deconstruct the perspectival vision as an apparatus by means of its immanent structural elements of anamorphosis. While perspective was a dominant mode of vision, elements of anamorphosis, another form of perspective produced as its own excess, are observed in Régnier’s tabulation. Anamorphosis brings the experience of the invisible to the viewers with uncanny feelings and it provides a critical moment to interrogate the taken-for-granted-ness of vision.