In the interwar period, R. H. Tawney became a leading British proponent and expositor of welfare society. Observing the world moving towards secularisation, he attempted to conceive a social thought that would be compatible with this. In the second half of the 20th century, the limits of the welfare state led many British to advocate its modernisation. Yet today, the limitations of neoliberalism occasion renewed attention to Tawney's social thought. This study focuses on Tawney’s Christian socialist ideals underpinning the establishment of the British welfare state.

In Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1867), blind persons often practiced acupuncture and moxibustion. In the Meiji Period (1868-1912), acupuncture and moxibustion declined more than traditional herbal medicine. After WWII, some scholars attributed this greater decline of acupuncture and moxibustion to discrimination against its blind practitioners. This study reconsiders that position through a review of the historical literature. Traditional medicine took a holistic organic view of the body as energy (qi), but Western theories introduced in the Meiji Period took a more mechanistic view of the human body. This dominance of the mechanistic over the holistic organic view of the body temporally coincided with the rise in evolutionary views that disparaged the visually impaired. The tendency of Japanese eugenic policies to view humans as tools to serve the nation-state is what led people to stigmatize the blind (cf. Goffman).

In cases of the reincarnation type, the person in question not only makes statements concerning his/her past life, but he/she often shows related phobias, philias, skills, and other features. In international cases in which a given person claimed to have past-life memories as a person living in a foreign country, he/she often shows desire to go to the country, adores the country and its cultures, and has skills related to the culture of the country. This article reports a case of a Russian woman with Japanese past-life memories, which has the following three notable features: (1) it is an adult case; (2) she has unusually deep affections toward Japan and Japanese cultures; and (3) shows outstanding skills in Japanese arts such as calligraphy, composing Japanese poems, Nogaku and Aikido, let alone a good command of the Japanese language.

Currently, one of the most popular methods of determining family names in Japan is based on the number of strokes in their Chinese characters. This method is said to have originated in "The Mystery of Family Names" (1929, Jitsugyo no Nihonsha) by Ken-o Kumazaki (1881-1961). However, a close reading of "The Mystery of Family Names" raises five serious questions. First, although his book discusses "innate luck" and "acquired luck," it is ambiguous in its understanding of "innate luck” and incorrect in its understanding of "acquired luck." Second, Ken-o Kumazaki unconsciously inherited the belief that words carry spiritual force. Third, it is founded on a mixture of ancient Shintoism and the ten signs of the zodiac, and uses the Chinese five elements and the ten signs of the zodiac as the basis for ascribing good fortune to the ancient number spirits. Fourth, Kumazaki does not correctly understand the I-Ching, Yin-Yang, nor the Four Pillars of Life. Fifth, he does not indicate good fortune or bad fortune statistically,merely giving examples of famous people to whom his theory applied, but he is unclear what constitutes "happiness or unhappiness" or "success or failure.In light of the above, the modern basis for judging family names by strokes is ultimately based on the belief that words have spiritual force, to which the ten signs of the zodiac have been added, and therefore lacks credibility. Rather, it would be better to use the Zhouyi interpretation,which goes back to the original I-Ching, to achieve a more accurate analysis of family names.