In Japan, the issue of protecting abandoned animals has not yet been fundamentally resolved, and business models that treat dogs and cats as “commodities” have been increasingly criticized. Although acquiring pets through animal rescue and adoption organizations rather than pet shops can help save animal lives, such adoption pathways remain insufficiently recognized by the public. Accordingly, this paper addresses the following research question: How can adoptions facilitated by animal rescue organizations be more effectively promoted? The study employs surveys, interviews, and fieldwork. The results indicate that promoting adoption organizations requires stimulating latent interest in adoption, providing high-quality and interactive information through digital channels, and ensuring a sense of trust and reassurance through face-to-face matching conducted by professional staff. These factors are essential to the decision-making process of prospective adopters.

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This study empirically examines the information behavior of young adults (university students) from a utility perspective, drawing on prospect theory. It focuses on three components: (1) the shift from experienced utility to decision utility, (2) current satisfaction as a reference point, and (3) loss aversion. Perceived utility is compared across intellectual, sensory, and emotional types of information. The results indicate that informational utility among young adults is generally high, with particularly strong satisfaction for sensory information. Sensory information also exhibits a larger shift from experienced to decision utility and greater consistency between past impressions and current evaluations. These findings suggest that young adults derive enjoyment and self-fulfillment from information itself and sustain their information behavior while avoiding declines in perceived utility.

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Pedestrian mobility around major transport hubs is shaped by the joint effects of transport connectivity and the spatial arrangement of commercial cores, and it is progressively reconfigured through urban redevelopment. Around Shinjuku Station, the opening of Shinjuku Takashimaya in 1996 enhanced the attractiveness of the South Exit area, while the 2016 development of Bus Terminal Shinjuku strengthened its role as a regional interchange. Ongoing redevelopment after 2025 at the West Exit is expected to further promote a shift toward a more polycentric structure. This study partitions the Shinjuku Station area into several zones and models inter-zonal movements as probabilistic state transitions within a Markov chain framework. The paper compares the resulting flow structures across key redevelopment phases and discusses their implications for urban circulation.

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This study, in collaboration with a local bakery, developed a machine learning-based sales forecasting program. Traditional forecasts relied on craftsmanship experience, making judgment difficult in the artisan’s absence. By incorporating weather, day of the week, and past production data, the program enables store staff to perform sales forecasting without relying solely on artisan expertise. A graduating student with little coding experience used enerative AI in development, highlighting the potential for participation by non-experts. By attempting to formalize periencedependent decision-making in local retail bakery, the research is situated within the broader context of food loss reduction and may provide foundational knowledge for future initiatives.

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This study uses the WRIME dataset from Suzuki et al.(2022) to quantify emotional resonance between writers and readers in Japanese text communication. 'Resonance distance' is defined as the Euclidean distance between the emotion vectors of the writer and reader. The results show that stronger emotional expressions tend to increase resonance distance, indicating a reduced emotional match. Writers with lower resonance distances used significantly more negative expressions, suggesting that emotional intensity and negativity can hinder mutual emotional comprehension.

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This study examines how the concept of Chiiki Kyōsei Shakai (Community-based Symbiotic Society) has been articulated in the Japanese National Diet and how its lexical structure has evolved over time. Speech records containing the term were extracted from Diet proceedings from 1947 to 2025, and frequency analysis, period-based comparison, and co-occurrence network analysis were conducted using KH Coder. The findings indicate that the concept developed through three phases: a conceptual and exploratory phase, a phase of institutionalization and legal reform, and an operational and implementation phase. Across these stages, the associated vocabulary shifted from value- and ideaoriented expressions to terminology linked to systems and institutional arrangements. Words such as support and community consistently appeared throughout the period, suggesting that the concept was not confined to a specific target group. Overall, the results suggest that Chiiki Kyosei Shakai has been used in connection with different policy contexts over time within parliamentary discourse.

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Music streaming has grown rapidly and is expected to play a central role in the digital music industry. However,　the sustainable development of the music industry requires support for emerging artists who remain unknown but have strong potential. In the digital era, users can directly support such artists. This study examines the potential of direct user　support through a persona-based analysis and visualizes the user experience using a customer journey map. The findings　indicate that user support behavior is not spontaneous but develops through stages of awareness, interest, usage, and　empathy. Furthermore, a questionnaire survey (N = 190) shows that when implementing direct support　functions, it is　crucial to lower barriers to participation and clearly communicate the tangible benefits users can obtain through　supporting artists.

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In this paper first summarizes prior research on M&A, then empirically demonstrates the position of M&A intermediary firms within the service industry, and finally provides a theoretical analysis of how this position is established. In analyzing the position of M&A intermediary firms within the service industry, both hierarchical and non-hierarchical cluster analyses were employed to demonstrate that M&A intermediary services occupy a distinct position within the industry characterized by high profitability and safety. Regarding the construction of M&A intermediary firms' positions, using repeated game theory, we showed that when both buyer and seller firms prioritize the future and corporate valuation knowledge accumulates within private firms, leading to minimal divergence in their anticipated transaction prices, M&A intermediary firms can capture buyer firms. We further demonstrated that this capture enables the establishment of a position characterized by high profitability and safety.

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This study examines the controversy over McDonald’s Pokémon Happy Meal in Japan and visualizes the gap between corporate response/apology statements and consumer reactions in Yahoo! News comments through quantitative text analysis. We scraped corporate statements and user comments and analyzed them with KHCoder using co-occurrence networks and correspondence analysis. The corporate corpus predominantly used procedural vocabulary such as restrictions, operations, countermeasures, and implementation, whereas the comment corpus centered on evaluative terms including resale, disposal, food loss, children, and fairness. In the integrated correspondence analysis, the two vocabularies were separated within the same lexical space. This pattern indicates a legitimacy gap arising from mismatched problem framing between the organization and the public. Accordingly, the findings suggest that crisis communication should, before announcing operational measures, articulate the public’s salient concerns in shared language and employ an empathetic message design that reconnects actions with values for credible recovery of reputation and trust.

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