Community Safety Maps for Children in Japan: An Analysis from a Situational Crime Prevention Perspective

Recent years have witnessed several major crimes against children both inside, and in the vicinity of, schools in Japan. These criminal incidents have heightened parental and community concerns regarding the safety of children in school. From the perspective of situational crime prevention, this study attempts to examine the nature and characteristics of community safety maps designed for children. It assesses the potential benefits of these maps and analyzes the structural and cultural obstacles for their implementation. This paper calls for more research into further innovative crime prevention strategies that can be used in Japanese schools so as to prevent children from becoming victims of crimes.     

A comparative study of racial justice in English and Japanese prisons

The world‐wide advancement in transportation and telecommunications has brought about tremendous human exchange across international boundaries. As a result of a huge influx of people of different ethnic origins, confrontations between ethnic majorities and minorities are taking place in many countries around the world. Because a prison is a society in miniature, it is not free from the ills from which the society as a whole suffers. That is why prison administrators are tackling the problem of racial justice. As the character of society varies from country to country, so the methods of prison administration vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Therefore, studies of racial justice in one national prison system may not automatically be applicable to another system. However, it is also true that an understanding of the nature of racial justice in the prisons of different countries may provide us with a fresh theoretical perspective on this subject and provide clues as to how to solve the problems of our own country. It is because we believe that the comparative approach is of great value that we discuss this subject area in this essay.     

Japan and Asian-Pacific security: regionalization,entrenched bilateralism and incipient multilateralism

This paper traces the formal and informal aspects of Japan's robust bilateralism on issues of external and internal security and discusses a variety of embryonic multilateral arrangements that have sprung up in the 1990s. Asian-Pacific multilateralism is not yet a strong and unquestioned collectively held norm in either Tokyo or any of the major capitals in the Asia-Pacific. What matters instead are political practices shaped by a strong tradition of bilateralism and, only very recently, by an incipient multilateralism.     

Changing Japan and its ties with Australia

In his assessment of Japan‐Australia relations, Former Ambassador to Australia and IIPS President Yoshio Okawara emphasizes that both countries have vital roles to play in the Asia‐Pacific cooperation process. While Australia was instrumental in APEC's 1989 launch, now Japan must give momentum to its development at the upcoming Osaka APEC meeting. President Okawara originally gave this speech at the Japan‐Australia Relations Symposium in Canberra shortly before the 50th anniversary of WWH's end. In addition to his term in Australia, President Okawara has served as Ambassador to the United States and is currently Executive Advisor to Keidanren.     

Phylogenetic relationship of psychoactive fungi based on rRNA gene for a large subunit and their identification using the TaqMan assay (II)

"Magic mushroom (MM)" is the name most commonly given to psychoactive fungi containing the hallucinogenic components: psilocin (1) and psilocybin (2). We investigated the rRNA gene (internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and large subunit (LSU)) of two Panaeolus species and four Psilocybe species fungi (of these, two are non-psilocybin species). On the basis of sequence alignment, we improved the identification system developed in our previous study. In this paper, we describe the new system capable of distinguishing MMs from non-psilocybin Psilocybe species, its application data and the phylogeny of MM species.