Since summer homework frequently cannot be completed within a short period of time, children make plans to complete their assignments over the summer. With elementary school students (grades 4~6) as subjects, this study surveyed whether their summer homework had been completed as previously planned. Before the summer break began, the subjects were asked about their plans, and after the long break ended, whether their plans had succeeded. The survey showed that the ratio of schoolchildren who had planned to complete their homework within the first half of the long break, but eventually failed to do so, was higher than the rest. Further, an investigation of the correlation between their approach to summer homework and the stress they felt at the end of the summer break indicated that those who dealt with their homework during the latter half experienced higher stress levels than the others.

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Today, a “rich life” is often associated with a “busy life.” It is because being busy is a means to have enough income through work and enough leisure time through consumption of goods and services. Interestingly, in the era where a busy life is taken for granted, contemporary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has achieved a global popularity by describing protagonists who are not busy. Murakami’s protagonists commonly work from home and spend decent time for cooking and housework. This paper, focusing on the way they spend time in everyday life, aims to discuss how the peculiarity of their life style reflects the author’s observation of a capitalist society.

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Modern Japanese society faces the serious issues of an increasingly aging population and a low birth rate. The risk of intractable diseases, including cancer, increases with age. When patients live longer lives, they have their share of hard times as well as good times. The desire to happily live out the rest of their life is tempered by the inevitability of death. The aim of doctors who attend to patients at this late stage of their lives is to help them overcome any feelings of despair, allowing them to feel as though they were wholly immersed in visual pleasure with the cherry blossoms in full bloom. In this regard, I feel that the insights of a Western-style or an Oriental-style philosopher may reflect those of a medical doctor who treats older patients, in that both may ponder deeply about happiness as a final goal in peoples’ lives.

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There are many drama works in the modern society including TV, the movie and drama. It is the script that makes those basic skeletons. Many playwrights of all ages and countries have operated their own stagecraft that they believe, and have written various scenarios. But they had common problems. Where are the upsurges of drama in a story put?, that is the question. The music recorded on score is time art　controlled at time, the drama recorded on a script will be also time art controlled at time. I arranged the upsurges of drama on the time axis of a play, contrived the way which becomes visual graph and tried them by several scripts. And finally, I made a temporal distribution graph of the touching scene in the script of Shakespeare plays Hamlet. As a new method of scenario analysis and script evaluation, I propose the graph creation method described in this paper.

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