Japan's original incense culture is attaining a new understanding in recent years. Accordingly, we would like to clarify the notion of “the way of incense”, at this juncture, how it developed within culture of Japan and how it changed in societies of these historical times. We will further consider what possible roles “the way of incense” might be expected to play within not only Japanese but also international post-modern societies.

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We aimed to establish an animal model of olfactory hypersensitivity to volatile organic compounds (VOC) and to apply the model for pathophysiological understanding of VOC-related human disorders such as sick house syndrome or multiple chemical sensitivities. The first step of our attempts was to develop a system for evaluating olfactory detection threshold of VOC gas in mice. We attached odor-presenting hardware composed of an odor-sniffing glass port, solenoid valves, diaphragm pumps and polyethylene gas bags to a standard operant chamber, and we developed software for controlling the equipments. Male mice (C3H/He) were trained for the task of pressing the lever (right or left one) corresponding to sniffed gas (VOC-mixed air or clean air), and then they performed multiple operant learning tasks to discriminate between toluene gas with various concentrations and clean air. We found that the detection threshold of toluene gas in mice is less than 5ppb.

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