広島被爆70年、日米学生に悲惨さ語り継ぐ By YUKA HAYASHI 2015 年 8 月 5 日 11:33 JST Ms. Kondo’s brief appearance in the book “Hiroshima,” by journalist John Hersey, set her on a path to become a messenger from ground zero. 米国のジャーナリスト、ジョン・ハーシー氏が原爆投下直後の広島の様子を描いた著作「ヒロシマ」に近藤さんは短く登場している。この本に採り上げられたことで、近藤さんは広島の使者としての道を歩むことになった。
Ms. Kondo’s father, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, was a U.S.-educated minister at a church in Japan. When Mr. Hersey visited Hiroshima in the spring of 1946, Mr. Tanimoto shared with him a detailed account of the horror and chaos he witnessed. In the book, Mr. Tanimoto is described as passing by “rank on rank of the burned and bleeding,” scurrying to find water for dying victims, and removing a dead body from a rowboat to carry those who were still alive, after apologizing to the dead man for doing so. 近藤さんの父親、谷本清氏は米国で教育を受け、日本の教会で牧師をしていた。ハーシー氏が1946年春に広島を訪れたとき、谷本氏は原爆投下直後の恐怖と混乱を詳しく語ってくれた。ハーシー氏の「ヒロシマ」には、「やけどをした人、血の流れる人の列また列」の脇を通ったり、死にそうな人たちのために水を探し回ったり、舟の上で死んでいる男性にわびてから遺体を移動させて生存者を運んだりした谷本氏の姿が描かれている。
Ms. Kondo and her mother were buried under the parsonage of her father’s church. Her mother managed to hoist her out of the rubble after chipping away at “a chink of light” that they could eventually fit through. When Rev. Tanimoto was reunited with his wife and baby, he was “so tired that nothing could surprise him.” Mr. Hersey wrote in his account, which first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in August 1946, a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the first and only cities in history to experience a nuclear bombing. 近藤さんは母親と共に牧師館の下敷きになった。隙間から差し込む「一筋の光」を見つけた母親が30分ほどかけて穴を開け、近藤さんは外に押し出された。ハーシー氏の記述によると、谷本氏は妻子と再会しても、「気分的に疲れきっていたので、もう何事にも驚かない。夫人を抱きよせもせず『ああ、無事だったか』といっただけである」。「ヒロシマ」は1946年8月にニューヨーカー誌に初掲載された。広島と長崎が世界で唯一の被爆都市となった翌年のことだ。
イギリスでもこのHiroshimaという本が再刊されるようです。
AUTHORS Hiroshima: the true account of hell on earth Martin Chilton 5 AUGUST 2015 • 2:09PM "Every positive value has its price in negative terms; the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima," said Pablo Picasso. On August 6 – at 8.15am local time, to be precise – It will be exactly 70 years since a uranium gun-type atomic bomb (nicknamed Little Boy by the American bombers) was dropped on Hiroshoma, killing more than 100,000 Japanese men, women and children instantly. To mark the anniversary, Penguin has republished an account written in the immediate aftermath and first published in the New Yorker in 1946. What a grimly fascinating and moving read this 98-page account from John Hersey is; it's easy to see why it was adjudged the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a panel from New York University. Hersey, who was 32 at the time, has an eye for detail and a novelist's sensibilities. This son of a pair of missionaries was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel A Bell for Adano and served as secretary to the Nobel winner Sinclair Lewis. He talked to survivors of the bomb: six for whom fate, chance, whatever you wish to call it, was on their side.
Aug. 2, 2015 This week, Arthur C. Brooks discusses “The Conservative Heart”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Susan Southard talks about “Nagasaki”; readers offer changes to the literary canon; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.
In all the cant that will pour forth this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs—that the U.S. owes the victims of the bombings an apology; that nuclear weapons ought to be abolished; that Hiroshima is a monument to man’s inhumanity to man; that Japan could have been defeated in a slightly nicer way—I doubt much will be made of Fussell’s fundamental point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just terrible war-ending events. They were also lifesaving. The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists.
Human-rights activists, antiwar campaigners, left-wing politicians and others argue that Japan was about to surrender and that therefore it was morally wrong to deploy this most destructive of weapons against unarmed civilians. Some even deny that many American lives would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Yet in his memoirs, “Year of Decisions,” Truman wrote that he believed an invasion of Japan would have cost half a million American lives. This estimate was considered too conservative by both Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of State James Byrnes, who in their own memoirs estimated one million casualties overall. These high figures are backed up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff study of August 1944, which projected that an invasion would “cost half a million American lives and many more that number in wounded.”
Japan’s surrender saved us. The dropping of the bombs, as Emperor Hirohito himself acknowledged, was the only thing that made that surrender possible. As he explained to his subjects, “Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.” The bombs’ indiscriminate, total devastation, as no battle or bombing before it, showed the consequences of trying to fight to the end. The bombings destroyed hope and glory, past and future.
One event during WWII – the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 – has long divided Americans and Japanese. Americans, in surveys with similar wording, have consistently approved of this first and only use of nuclear weapons in war and have thought it was justified. The Japanese have not.
In 1945, a Gallup poll immediately after the bombing found that 85% of Americans approved of using the new atomic weapon on Japanese cities. In 1991, according to a Detroit Free Press survey conducted in both Japan and the U.S., 63% of Americans voiced the view that the atomic bomb attacks on Japan were a justified means of ending the war; only 29% thought the action was unjustified. At the same time, only 29% of Japanese said the atom bombing was justified, while 64% thought it was unwarranted.
In the current Pew Research Center survey, 56% of Americans still believe the use of nuclear weapons was justified; 34% say it was not. In Japan, only 14% say the bombing was justified, versus 79% who say it was not.
Not surprisingly, there is a large generation gap among Americans in attitudes toward the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven-in-ten (70%) Americans 65 years of age and older say the use of atomic weapons was justified, but only 47% of 18- to 29-year-olds agree. There is a similar partisan divide: 74% of Republicans but only 52% of Democrats see the use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII as warranted. Men (62%) more than women (50%), and whites (65%) more than non-whites (40%), including Hispanics, say dropping the atomic bombs was justified.
Despite this lingering disagreement over the justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few Americans or Japanese believe Japan owes an apology for its actions during WWII.
It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.
An education The world can no longer afford to support learning systems in which only the most capable students can thrive. 15 July 2015 One of the subjects that people love to argue about, following closely behind the ‘correct’ way to raise children, is the best way to teach them. For many, personal experience and centuries of tradition make the answer self-evident: teachers and textbooks should lay out the content to be learned, students should study and drill until they have mastered that content, and tests should be given at strategic intervals to discover how well the students have done.
And yet, decades of research into the science of learning has shown that none of these techniques is particularly effective. In university-level science courses, for example, students can indeed get good marks by passively listening to their professor’s lectures and then cramming for the exams. But the resulting knowledge tends to fade very quickly, and may do nothing to displace misconceptions that students brought with them.
BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY SCIENTIST For generations, classes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have been built around a steady diet of lecture-based learning. Soft skills, such as creative problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration, are often given short shrift. Now educators and education researchers are calling for change. They argue that a slew of ‘twenty-first-century skills’, which include creativity, persistence and motivation, can and should be taught and fostered through well-designed courses. Focusing on these skills enhances students’ abilities to master and retain knowledge, and many hope that it will help to curb the alarming rate at which students who start off in STEM abandon the subjects. Nature in collaboration with Scientific American is taking a look at the promise and challenges of bringing STEM education in line with decades of education research.
A half-century ago in his famous "Two Cultures" speech, C.P. Snow defined the growing rift between the world of scientists (including, increasingly, the commercial world) and that of literary intellectuals (including, increasingly, the humanities). It's hard to imagine the sciences and the humanities ever having been united in common cause. But that day may come again soon.
Today, the "two cultures" not only rarely speak to one another, but also increasingly, as their languages and world views diverge, are unable to do so. They seem to interact only when science churns up in its wake some new technological phenomenon—personal computing, the Internet, bioengineering—that revolutionizes society and human interaction and forces the humanities to respond with a whole new set of theories and explanations.
少し前までは2年くらいかけて製品を作っていたのが、今はソフトウエアの時代となって世界中からプログラマーを集めれば2週間たらずでできてしまう。しかし、難しいところは投資家や提携先、もしくは求職者にその製品の重要さを伝えないといけない。しかも、その製品が存在しない段階でそれをしなければいけない。どうすればいいのか。 Santosh said, "Are you kidding? English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for." He explained: Twenty years ago, if you wanted to start a company, you spent a month or so figuring out the product you wanted to build, then devoted the next 10 or 12 months to developing the prototype, tooling up and getting into full production.
These days, he said, everything has been turned upside down. Most products now are virtual, such as iPhone apps. You don't build them so much as construct them from chunks of existing software code—and that work can be contracted out to hungry teams of programmers anywhere in the world, who can do it in a couple of weeks.
But to get to that point, he said, you must spend a year searching for that one undeveloped niche that you can capture. And you must also use that time to find angel or venture investment, establish strategic partners, convince talented people to take the risk and join your firm, explain your product to code writers and designers, and most of all, begin to market to prospective major customers. And you have to do all of that without an actual product.
"And how do you do that?" Santosh said. "You tell stories." Stories, he said, about your product and how it will be used that are so vivid that your potential stakeholders imagine it already exists and is already part of their daily lives. Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. "That's why I want to meet your English majors," he said.
彼の答えは"You tell stories."だそうですね。エンジニアは誰でもできることだけど、物語を語ることに関してはto storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talentと誰でもできることではないと言います。まあ、それが英文学を専攻しているからできるというのは少し短絡的かもしれませんが（苦笑）
この記事でもジョブズの以下のことばを引用していました。 It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough — it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.
とはいえ、かつてのhumanitiesではなく21世紀のマルチメディアに対応したものでなくてはいけなくて、そのような変革を遂げないと大学の文学部は生き残ることができないのではと語っていました。 Could the humanities rebuild the shattered bridge between C.P. Snow's "two cultures" and find a place at the heart of the modern world's virtual institutions? We assume that this will be a century of technology. But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.
The demand is there, but the question is whether the traditional humanities can furnish the supply. If they can't or won't, they will continue to wither away. But surely there are risk-takers out there in those English and classics departments, ready to leap on this opportunity. They'd better hurry, because the other culture won't wait.
使う言語が「世界の見え方」を決めている：研究結果 2015.5.18 MON 「言語が変われば周りの世界も違って見える」ということが証明された。同じ人でも、そのときに使っている言語によって物事の捉え方が変わってくるのだという。 TEXT BY SIMONE VALESINI TRANSLATION BY TAKESHI OTOSHI
Abstract People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.
To state the obvious: What we think influences what we say. Less obvious is the converse: namely, the possibility that the language we speak or our chosen words shape, facilitate or constrain thinking. This question might seem abstract, but it seems to affect—among other things—the public response to hurricane alerts.
Psycholinguists have long focused on the subject of words influencing thoughts. It’s rooted in the question of whether we can think without language. The topic has generated some silly, New Agey views—for example, the urban myth that the Hopi language has no words for time and, as a result, Hopi speakers are especially good at understanding the time dilation predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Words also shape thoughts in languages with grammatical gender systems, where some nouns are masculine, others feminine. The results can be nutty. In French, for example, “kidney” is masculine, but the place where it sends its urine, the “bladder,” is feminine. Do gendered nouns shape thought? Ask Germans and Spaniards to describe a bridge. Germans, with a feminine word, tend to emphasize a bridge’s beauty and grace; Spaniards, with their masculine word, tend to focus on its strength and construction.
In another experiment, subjects received information about an impending hurricane (its anticipated wind speed, barometric pressure and so on). They judged hurricanes with male names as riskier and rated themselves as more likely to comply with evacuation orders, given the danger. Both males and females showed this tendency. The scientists concluded that female-named hurricanes probably cause more deaths because people don’t take them as seriously as male-named hurricanes.
Abstract Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents’ preparedness to take protective action. This finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, with important implications for policymakers, media practitioners, and the general public concerning hurricane communication and preparedness.
My suspicion is that this study is a classic example of confirmation bias: The authors likely knew what result they were going for when they set out to do the study, and sure enough, they found it.
The deadliness of hurricanes is an intensely complicated problem. To generalize it down to gender stereotypes based on the name of the storm itself is a simplistic distraction at best, and a perpetuation of gender myths at worst.
To test my hypothesis that there isn’t enough data for the authors to make the claim that the gender of storm names is in any way related to how deadly they are, I used the authors’ own data (.XLS) to figure out what would happen if I removed the single remaining deadliest storm from their post-1979 dataset, Hurricane Sandy. (The authors had already removed Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Audrey of 1957 for similar reasons.) While we may think of the name Sandy as a bit gender-ambiguous, the authors categorized it as very feminine—a 9.0 on an 11.0 scale.
Here’s the correlation between the authors’ own “Masculinity-Femininity Index” (which qualitatively ranks names on an 11-point scale according to gender) and number of deaths for each of the 52 storms that made landfall between 1979 and 2012.
Singlehandedly, Hurricane Sandy switches the authors' entire premise on its head. Ignoring Sandy's outlier nature, male-named hurricanes now cause more deaths than female ones. Harold Brooks of NOAA has performed a similar analysis on this data (removing Sandy) with similar results, which he shared as a comment on Yong's blog post.
宇宙戦争 (ラジオ) 『宇宙戦争』（うちゅうせんそう、The War of the Worlds）は、オーソン・ウェルズが、H.G.ウェルズ作『宇宙戦争』をラジオ番組化したものである。
番組概要 1938年10月30日にハロウィン特別番組として、アメリカのラジオ番組『Mercury Theatre on the Air』で放送された。この生放送は多くの聴取者を恐怖させ、実際の火星人侵略が進行中であると信じさせた。 侵略がフィクションである旨を告げる｢お断り｣が何度もあったと言われるが、そのうちの1度は放送開始直後、残り2度は終了間際であったため、その間、聴取者側から見れば、混乱と恐怖のための時間が充分残っていた。
The hysteria was not “mass” in any sense—except in the press. “There were no car accidents,” Mr. Schwartz writes, “no miscarriages, no suicides. Nobody took potshots at a water tower, thinking it was a Martian fighting machine, or disappeared into the mountains, never to be seen again. And if the highways really were clogged with people trying to flee the cities, nobody said so at the time.” In fact, about a million people (out of roughly six million listeners) seem to have mistaken the drama for a news show, at least at first. Most of them appear to have missed the part about the Martians and thought that there was either a natural disaster or some sort of battle going on west of New York.
Yet if radio listeners did not panic, newspaper reporters surely did—both that night and after. The New York Daily News headline was: “Fake ‘War’ on Radio Spreads Panic over U.S.” The Boston Globe’s banner read: “Radio Play Terrifies Nation.” The News and the Globe, with other newspapers, described the car accidents, miscarriages and attempts to flee—though none of these things had occurred. Because a handful of people had acted on their fright (though no one was hurt as a result), newspaper editors threw caution to the winds, extrapolating from a few incidents and, as Mr. Schwartz says, publicizing “a nationwide panic that never actually existed.” Nor was the newspaper panic confined to the Northeast. The story was picked up by the leading wire services and landed in papers from Detroit to New Orleans, from Memphis to Los Angeles.
When Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe travels to Washington at the end of this month, he’s sure to bring with him an upbeat message about the successes of Abenomics and how he intends to have Japan make a “proactive contribution to peace.” But Americans should listen carefully to what he has to say about national security. Mr. Abe is giving Japan’s foreign policy its most extensive face-lift since Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida defined the country’s foreign policy shortly after World War II.
Viewed from Tokyo, the world today is more uncertain and dangerous than it was during the Cold War. Under that bipolar system, Japanese could be confident that any Soviet threat against them would be taken as a direct challenge to the U.S. What worried a pacifist Japanese public was not the possibility that the U.S. might abandon Japan but that the alliance might entangle Japan in conflicts it wanted no part of.
Now the stability of a bipolar world order is no more. China has arisen as a great power, intent on growing its economy, its military and its political influence. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and before long may have many more along with missiles capable of reaching not just Japan but also the continental U.S.
安倍政権の安全保障の方針を３つにまとめています。XXX has three prongs: to A, to B, and to Cといった書き方はまねできそうです。何もfirst, second, and thirdを毎回使う必要はないんですね。ただ一番言いたいことは、次のパラグラフのBut以降のようです。
The Abe national-security strategy has three prongs: to have Japan do more for its own defense, to do more to contribute to and strengthen its alliance with the U.S., and to build security ties with Australia, India, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia. If Mr. Abe were to resign tomorrow, this basic security strategy would not change. It is being driven by the imperatives generated by the international situation, not by this prime minister’s personality.
But there is something missing here, and that is a fourth prong that seeks with empathy and boldness to bring about reconciliation with China and Korea. One will find little disagreement in Asia with the argument that the U.S.-Japan alliance is indispensable for maintaining peace and security in the Asia Pacific. But long-term Asian stability and a peaceful environment are not going to be possible if Japan and China each assumes the worst about the other’s intentions and acts accordingly.
カーティスさんは過去の反省をしっかり演説に盛り込むことを期待しているようです。
It is entirely appropriate that Prime Minister Abe in his address to Congress should emphasize the successes of Abenomics and the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance. But he can move beyond that to give an important and even historic speech, saying what needs to be said about history, expressing his sense of tremendous remorse for all who were victims of Japanese aggression. He can remind his audience that the Japanese people’s rejection of militarism and authoritarianism and steadfast commitment to democracy and peaceful diplomacy for the past 70 years offers more poignant testimony to Japan’s repentance for the nation’s wartime policies than any words could convey.
The U.S.-Japan bilateral relationship is arguably in better shape now than it has ever been. The issue now is how to embed this alliance in an Asia-Pacific community that is at peace and is prosperous.
Instead, a historical talk of comfort women and visits to Yasukuni shrine threaten to reduce Asian appetites to work more closely with Japan. They also provide an opportunity for China to rally regional opposition based on a sense of shared grievance.
This would be unfortunate, especially because Japan is otherwise pushing on an open door. Most countries in Asia today seek what Japan and the U.S. also desire: a strong economic and diplomatic relationship with China secured by more capable militaries and ever-closer defense ties with each other.
The prime minister’s speech to Congress will provide a unique opportunity to sketch out a vision for Japanese leadership in Asian security affairs. By reducing the distractions and emphasizing the positive role Japan and its neighbors can together play, Mr. Abe can set an agenda for the U.S.-Japan alliance and for Tokyo’s regional ties. It’s a chance not merely to cite history, but to make it.
カーティスさんは中国との協力のためにも歴史問題と向き合うように、保守派の方は日本がリードするためにも歴史問題と向き合うように要請しているように思えます。立場は違っても、歴史問題を無視するなというメッセージは同じようです。保守派の方の最後にあったIt’s a chance not merely to cite history, but to make it.はなかなかうまい表現ですが、まさにそのような機会にしてもらいたいですね。
