Looking at feminist fictional writings since the time of Charlotte Gilman's Herland from the perspective of how they dealt with the issue of reproduction, one can find a group of works using unisexual reproduction as the central theme or as an important motif. This paper examines one of them, Marginal (1985), a girls'manga (comic) by Moto Hagio. Girls' manga are an important source of insight into Japanese women's views on their gender, and this paper outlines the history of girls' manga in comparison with the boys' counterpart, which provides a clue as to what made Hagio use the theme of unisexual reproduction inMarginal, in which she attempted to examine the concept of maternity.
In the first phase of manga's development from the late 1960's up to the 1980's, both girls' and boy's manga were based on illusions about the opposite sex. Boys in girls' comics were either dashing gentlemen or handsome rebels aching for maternal love, whereas boys' comics were interested in girls only as the object of the macho hero's desire. However, from the late 1980's, while Boys' manga stayed with its fantasies of women as mere recipients of the male sex drive, girls' manga started to see men in a more sober light. The gap between the ideal of equal partnership and reality began to feature strongly, and themes such as homosexuality, transsexualism and transvestism have been given a serious examination.
This shift was a result of a significant change in Japanese women's view on reproduction. As women acquired education and financial independence, they rejected the notion that a woman's happiness lies in love, marriage and childbearing ; the link between marriage and motherhood was broken. Stories centring on the theme on unisexual reproduction appeared in girls' manga amidst this tidal change.
Marginal is a sci-fi manga set in 2999A.D., when Earth is a polluted and diseased planet long deserted by most humans after a pandemic viral infection 700 hundred years earlier made all women infertile. A company that runs an economic empire across the solar system maintains experimental colonies on Earth where no babies can be born and all inhabitants are men. The company supplies the colonies with test-tube children through a pseudo-religious system, but inhabitants live under a dark shadow of apocalyptic pessimism. Hagio examines maternity in an imaginary world where, in the absence of women, motherhood is artificial and there are no heterosexual relationships.
A scientist who has been running illegal reproductive experiments in a hideout on Earth is killed by the company, and a product of his experiments, a telepathic hermaphrodite with the ability to tune into other people's dreams and wishes, survives the attack and encounters colony men. The psychic child causes a catastrophic flood when he responds to the wishes of colony dwellers who dream their doomed world to end, but in a dramatic climax, he empathizes with the Earth's dream of ancient blue seas that nurtured life, a dream of life.
The ambiguous ending ofMarginal seems to support conventional praise of maternity, but here the hope of regeneration comes not from the child's ability to conceive but through restoration of the Earth's productive potential. Hagio sees maternity as something more fundamental than the materialistic notion of baby-making; to her, restoration of the fertility of the Earth, the source of life itself, is the paramount concern.

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特撮を誘致資源とした観光現象である「特撮ツーリズム」は、特撮作品の撮影で使用された着ぐるみやミニチュア等の「物品」を活用したイベントや地域振興が主流であった。しかし新たなレジャー活動の形である仮想現実 (VR) や拡張現実 (AR) といった「仮想空間」を活用した新技術が当観光現象に導入された結果、その開催事例が国内外で複数開催されるようになった。また既存の「物品」を活用した特撮ツーリズムと、新技術を用いた特撮ツーリズムとの最大の違いは、VR 技術を用いたイベントが同様の催事内容を国内外の複数の場所で開催可能なことにあった。

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In this study, the authors intend to clarify the teacher trainees ability to observe the flame of the candle. The followings are the major findings: (1) The teacher trainees’ observations of the structures of the flame of the candle can be divided into six categories. (2) 30% of the teacher trainees cognized the structure of the flame of the candle as three concentric circles. One of the causes for this is that they learned about the flame of the candle at elementary school by using science textbooks which included some errors in the description. (3) At least about 39% of the teacher trainees make ‘a theory-dependent observation’ rather than ‘a naively inductive observation.’

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近年、ゲーム市場に大きな影響を与えている「ソーシャルゲーム」の従来のゲームとの大きな違いは、ゲームの面白さの評価軸に「持続可能性」が加わったことがある。そのため、これまでのゲームになかった、リアルタイムの「運営」の良し悪しがゲームのサービス存続に大きな影響を与えていると考えられる。本研究では複数のソーシャルゲームのSNS運営を調査・比較し、ゲーム運営におけるプラスの行為やNG行為を模索する。

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The major purpose of this research is to compare the focus points on “kawaii character” between manga creators and readers. In order to find that what does manga creators focus on when they create “kawaii characters”, we interviewed 6 manga creators who are excel at “kawaii characters”. And for the readers, we conducted a survey using the Chi-squared test to find out which part of the characters is the readers most focus on when they judge a character as “kawaii character”. Through the research, we found that when manga creators create “kawaii characters”, they often pay more attention to the characteristic of the characters as the readers often focus on the characters’ faces when they judge a character as “kawaii character”.

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PLANET is a powder neutron diffractometer dedicated to high-pressure experiments. By combining the intense neutron source of J-PARC and the high-pressure devices designed for time-of-flight powder neutron diffraction, precise structure analysis of crystal, liquid, and amorphous solids is possible over wide pressure and temperature range of 0～20 GPa and 77～2,000 K. This beamline is effective for various studies in geophysics, planetary science, physics and chemistry. This paper overviews the beamline and introduces recent results obtained at PLANET.

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Correlation between VLSI and crystal technology is comprehensively reviewed for crystallogra-phers who are not necessarily familiar to semiconductor devices. Questions such as “Why are VLSI devices produced by high-quality CZ Si single crystals?”and“Why is an epitaaial wafer necessary for VLSI?”are answered. Importance of wafer flatness in the fabrication of VLSI devices, and microdefects in CZ Si and their application to intrinsic gettering are also included. Moreover, it is emphasized that advanced techniques of material characterization, which will be indispensable to VLSI in the near future, are earnestly desired in the VLSI field. [J. Cryst. Soc. Jpn. 28, 72 (1986) ] .

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