This paper argues that China’s exchange policy played a critical role in its FDI boom. Yuan’s devaluation and the pegging yuan to the dollar policy not only offset the pressure of rising real wage due to sustained economic growth in the last two decades, but also improved China’s competitiveness in attracting global FDI. Examining the hypothesis in the context of Japanese FDI in China’s nine ma...

The recent US Institute of Medicine (IOM) report about the future of nursing highlights the areas where nurses can serve, contribute, and move forward to improve health care in the United States. Japanese nursing scholars examined the IOM report for its implications in the Japanese context and explored the future of nursing in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to provide support for the premi...

This paper describes Fujitsu’s online handwritten character recognition (OLCR) technology and some application software that adopts this technology. Fujitsu’s Japanese OLCR has the highest level of performance among Japanese OLCRs and is based on two of our unique character recognition technologies: hybrid character recognition and bigram-based context processing. To realize more effective and ...

The current study explores the potential influence of an L2 on the acquisition of L3, in the context of English speaking learners of Japanese (the L2) and Korean (the L3). As a mean to assess the degree of influence of the L1 accent and L2 accent in L3 production, an experiment involving the perceptual judgment of a foreign accent was developed. Two groups of native English speakers [(i) five w...

This article focuses upon a game known as gateball which is popular among older Japanese. The game is described and patterns of social behavior among gateball players are also discussed. Using data collected from an open-ended questionnaire, participant observation on a gateball team, and a series of semi-structured interviews with older people living in a rural region of Japan, some of the rea...

In this work, we examine a context in which a conflict arises between two roles that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays: making language structure salient and modeling the adult form of a language. Vowel devoicing in fluent adult Japanese creates violations of the canonical Japanese consonant-vowel word structure pattern by systematically devoicing particular vowels, yielding surface consonant ...

This paper presents a method to construct Japanese KATAKANA variant list from large corpus. Our method is useful for information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, and so on, because KATAKANA words tend to be used as “loan words” and the transliteration causes several variations of spelling. Our method consists of three steps. At step 1, our system collects KATAKANA words fr...

Despite documented cross-cultural variability in autonomy and relatedness, relatively little is known about how these characteristics of self are socialized. This study, a secondary analysis (Dennis et al., 2002), explored this question by examining sequential verbal exchanges between Japanese and U.S. mothers and children during play and a challenging wait (N = 60, M age = 55.8 months, SD = 4....

This study investigates the cross-language coarticulation patterns in Australian English and Japanese. F2 trajectories between the vowel target and vowel onset/offset in the context of /d/ were plotted and locus equations were fitted to the datapoints to capture the degree of coarticulation. Three talker groups were considered: native talkers of Australian English (AE), L2 English talkers (L1 J...

AIM Assessing social competence is important for clinical and preventive interventions of depression. The aim of the present paper was to examine the factor structure of the Japanese Interpersonal Competence Scale (JICS). METHODS Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the survey responses of 730 participants. Simultaneous multigroup analyses were conducted to confirm fa...