This article is a case study of the U.S. defense budgeting for fiscal year 1991. The Cold War had just ended and the United States had to reconsider its defense strategy and budget due to this substantial change in the security environment. Moreover, financial constraints promoted political arguments between the George H. W. Bush Administration, the House of Representatives, and the Senate over the defense budget. My research questions are as follows: How do the political actors (administration and Congress) of the United States move for formulating the defense budget when there is a significant change in the security environment? Has the Congress assumed a lesser role in defense budgeting, especially since World War II, as most researchers, such as Samuel P. Huntington (in his well-known book The Soldier and the States), say? This article is a descriptive analysis of how the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991 (NDAA 1991) was established. The bill was deliberated from January to November of 1990; analysis revealed that the Congress did play a leading role in establishing the defense budget when the security environment around the U.S. largely changed. This finding refutes the widely accepted theory that the Congress assumes a reserved attitude to defense budgeting.

In the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, the shortage of petroleum products lasted about 1 month not only in the affected area but also in the Kanto area. In the affected Tohoku area, the fuel shortage had been finally solved after both of the shipping channel to Sendai-Shiogama Port and the coastal oil terminal recovered. This research clarified how the recovery of the channel and the oil terminal contributed to the resolution of the fuel shortage. As a result, it turned out that there are two important factors for predicting the supply of petroleum products and the impact by its shortage at the time of a disaster. Those factors are “shipping capacity (kl / day) of oil terminals” and “the situation of electric power supply.” TEPCO generates 66% of the electricity from LNG thermal power, which indicates the inherent weakness in LNG thermal power generation after a disaster.

In many places of Canton, China, barbecued pork, Char sui, is greatly favored, and is loved much more deeply than Siu mei, that baked pork, goose, or duck which has been popular and prevalent in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macao and other cities of Canton. In Japan, Cha shu, also barbecued pork that came from China, is a side dish like boiled or grilled pork and yet is now much different from the Chinese original. By surveying Chinese cuisine books published in Japan, this study examines how the original pork cooking has been rearranged to meet the needs of Japanese palate.

The recent emerging 'Net Right-Wing' became an important variable in the new trend of conservative swing and hate speech in both Japan and South Korea. This study analyzed “2Channel (rebranded as“5Channel”in October 2017)¹⁾” and “ILBE” bulletin boards, which have recently created a threatening and hostile atmosphere in both countries. The results of the study show that at the root of conservative swing and hate speech lies the frustration of Japan's post-war democracy and of Korea's 1987 system.

This study utilizes time-series data on the excess influx of population to the Greater Tokyo Area (Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa Prefectures) as well as indices of income per capita of this same region to conduct an analysis of the causal relationship between inter-regional income disparity and domestic demographic shift. Data from 1972 to 2014 were analyzed using the Granger causality test, which revealed the existence of a causal effect of inter-regional income disparity on demographic shift but not vice versa. This result suggests that this population influx into the Greater Tokyo Area could be motivated by higher income in that region. The data also revealed that the higher income was brought about by the concentration of industries with high labor productivity in the Greater Tokyo Area, particularly in Tokyo itself.

How old are Japanese nurses-to-be when they enter nursing school? Are they enrolled as future nurses immediately after graduating from high school? Are there a number of aged freshpersons who choose a career of nursing after they have worked in other fields? This paper tries to make clear current situations in which Japanese nurses have to take into account their age and educational backgrounds when they choose a nurse training institution. By an examination of reports by Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the following comes out. In 4-year university course and 3-year junior college program most enrolled students are under the age of 20. On the other hand, in the 3-year program of nursing school, while a greater part of new students are under 20, the years of age of the others range widely from 20s to 30s. This group also includes graduates of 4-year universities who studied other subjects. The oldest student that entered the 2-year nursing course was over 40 years old. From this result, it is inferred that such age-specific differences will appear from economic reasons related to the number of years of study and tuition and scholastic ability.

Concerned with the question of religious awareness in the thought system of Kant, this essay considers his philosophical position in the Critiques in reference to the situation where humans are brought face to face with God. Lots of students have attempted to examine Kant's own standpoint about the relationship between human beings and God; especially those academic works which concentrate attention on the teachings of Critique of Practical Reason stress that his theoretical position is one of ethical, not religious, apparatus of discovering God by way of moral aspects of human beings. Yet, in spite of their findings, many of those theoretical and terminological inconsistencies about basic character of human beings which are found in Kant's own system of ideas remain unaccounted for. In this essay the author tries to open up a new perspective in which to grasp Kant's own view of the limited nature of human beings as finite beings with innate depravity, and of a necessary logical shift from ethics to religion.