Nanzan University

This study empirically investigates the major factors determining user satisfaction with counter services at local government offices in Japan. Data were collected via on-site surveys on user satisfaction with the local government office counter services using an original three-category questionnaire scale tailored to fit local administration characteristics in Japan. A total of 1000 questionnaires were distributed at the city hall during August 23–26, 2021; a total of 537 valid responses were received (response rate: 53.7%). Regression analysis indicated that the independent variables of category C (service delivery) were the most influential, followed by the B (human-related factors) and A (office hardware) categories (adjusted R² value: 0.58). Results showed that the human factor is a key factor in counter service in terms of user satisfaction. The human factor was found to be a statistically significant explanatory variable in two on-site surveys at Higashihiroshima City and Internet surveys of ward office users in Osaka City and the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. These findings align with the conclusions of implementation research, which first emerged in the 1970s. For instance, street-level bureaucracy research has highlighted the importance of frontline administrative officials. For service delivery (C), identified as the most important factor, promptness of service delivery and a short waiting time do not necessarily affect user satisfaction positively. Moreover, this study identified two important factors for the counter-staff responses and human-related factors category: (1) speed with which the attending counter clerk speaks and (2) atmosphere and kindness of the attending counter clerk.

Résumé Dans son livre Étude sur le bien (1911), Nishida s’inspira de William James, de Gustav Theodor Fechner et d’Ernst Mach pour développer son concept d’expérience pure. Or, il s’avère que ces trois scientifiques professaient ouvertement le panpsychisme, théorie selon laquelle les minéraux, les plantes et les animaux sont vivants et possèdent une nature psychique analogue à celle de l’être humain. Cet article s’attarde surtout aux relations entre Fechner et Nishida, de même qu’à leurs conséquences possibles sur le développement d’un panpsychisme explicite dans l’ Étude sur le bien . Dans ses écrits subséquents, Nishida cessa d’accorder l’esprit aux minéraux et aux plantes. Par contraste, il maintint le panpsychisme dans le cas des animaux car, disait-il, l’esprit est la chose la plus répandue dans le règne du vivant. Nishida passa ainsi d’une conception panpsychiste du monde à une conception quasi-panpsychiste.

The Nadler–Tushman congruence model stands out as a well-known and effective framework for navigating organizational change (Nadler & Tushman, 1989, 1997). Despite the prevalent discussions on organizational ambidexterity in recent years, few people are aware that both of these concepts originated from the same researcher around the same period. Although these ideas followed separate developmental paths, their shared origins underscore a common research interest. This paper aims to explore Tushman's research and respond to the convergence of these two concepts after approximately 30 years. Based on Tushman's suggestion that the integration of multiple logics through an overarching identity is necessary, this paper considers and suggests a new integrated model. This model can help formulate a paradigm for dynamic organizational change that aligns with today's organizational environment.

We address a path planning problem for heterogeneous multi-robot systems under specifications consisting of temporal constraints and routing tasks such as package delivery services. The robots are partitioned into several groups based on their dynamics and specifications. We introduce a concise description of such tasks, called a work, and extend counting LTL to represent such specifications. We convert the problem into an ILP problem. We show that the number of variables in the ILP problem is fewer than that of the existing method using cLTL+. By simulation, we show that the computation time of the proposed method is faster than that of the existing method.

The present research used archaeological data, i.e., the data obtained from kamekan jar burials in the Mikuni Hills of the northern Kyushu area in the Middle Yayoi period, to test the parochial altruism model. This model argued that out-group hate and in-group favor coevolved via prehistoric intergroup conflicts. If this model is accurate, such an out-group hate and in-group favor could be reflected in the archaeological remains, such as pottery making; the more frequent intergroup conflicts are and the more each group is opposed, the more independent and coherent each group will be and more evident cultural identity could be established within each group. We employed an elliptic Fourier analysis for the shapes of kamekan jar burials. We examined whether frequent intergroup conflicts in the period influenced kamekan jar pottery between subareas of the Mikuni Hills. The results suggested that the shapes of kamekan jar burials after the KIIIa type are slightly different between subareas, which is partially consistent with the model. However, the results do not support the model directly.

The literature suggests that expressed gratitude improves the interpersonal relationship between a beneficiary and a benefactor. However, there is little research that has explored why thanking provides these positive effects, so this study investigated thanking mechanisms to explain reasons why people feel close to a beneficiary who expresses gratitude. This study also examines the effects of apologies, which are sometimes used to show gratitude in Japan. In this experimental study, 671 Japanese participants reported their perceived closeness, warmth, conscientiousness, and agreeableness to a hypothetical beneficiary who expressed gratitude, apologies, or both after a benefit was provided. The results revealed that benefactors who received a message indicating gratitude and both gratitude and apologies reported higher levels of closeness toward a beneficiary than those who received a message with only apologies and a message without either gratitude or apologies. A structural equation model further indicated that warmth and conscientiousness mediated the link between expressed gratitude/apologies and perceived closeness.

Background and purpose Given that chronic pain has become a major problem in recent years, affecting approximately 30% of the general population, this study used the Japanese version of the Short Form-8 (SF-8) to investigate (1) the quality of life (QOL) of patients with burning mouth syndrome (BMS) or persistent idiopathic facial pain (PIFP) (compared with a Japanese control group) and (2) whether therapeutic intervention improves the QOL and reduces pain (comparison between 0 and 12 weeks) of patients with BMS or PIFP. Materials and methods A total of 63 patients diagnosed with either BMS (n=45) or PIFP (n=18) were included in this study. The diagnostic criteria for BMS and PIFP were established based on the third edition of the International Classification of Headache Disorders. Results Our study results showed that while Physical Component Summary (PCS) in patients with BMS or PIFP improved with treatment, it did not improve to the national standard value (NSV) after 12 weeks of intervention. In contrast, the Mental Component Summary (MCS) improved to the same level as the NSV after 12 weeks of intervention. Conclusions We found that therapeutic intervention improves MCS and reduces pain; however, improving PCS requires time.

This study examines the relationship between e-commerce development and the intensity of commodity tax competition under two tax principles for goods purchased online: the destination principle and the origin principle. The main findings are as follows: Given that origin-based tax is applied to purchases made in brick-and-mortar stores, (i) tax competition under destination-based taxation on e-commerce is more intense than tax competition under origin-based taxation; and (ii) the expansion of the online market intensifies destination-based tax competition while easing origin-based tax competition. The main factor leading to the results is that replacing the choice of “where to purchase” goods, consumers will have a new choice of “how to purchase” when online purchasing becomes available, and destination-based taxation distorts the latter choice, while origin-based taxation is neutral.

Objectives Few studies have used rigorous causal analysis to examine the difference in health effects between abrupt and gradual transitions from full-time employment to full retirement. Methods Data were obtained from 10,253 individuals aged 50 years and older from the 2005–2019 Longitudinal Survey of Middle-aged and Older Adults conducted in Japan. An instrumental variable approach was used to determine the causal relationship between retirement pathways and health by exploiting the public pension eligibility age as the instrument. Results Abruptly retired individuals were more likely to have physical limitation and less likely to have depression than those not yet retired. In contrast, those who fully retired through a gradual transition were less likely to have physical limitation and more likely to have depression than those not yet retired. Discussion Retirement pathways have different effects on physical and mental health, providing important implication for labor and health policies in aging societies.

The integration of small cell architecture and edge intelligence is expected to make high-grade mobile connectivity accessible and thus provide smart and efficient services for various aspects of urban life. It is well known that small cell architecture will cause high inter-cell interference since the adjacent cells share the same frequency band. One of the most promising techniques to mitigate inter-cell interference is beamforming, however, how to coordinate the beamformers in a multicell dynamic network to reach a global optimum is an extremely challenging problem. In this paper, we consider analog beamforming with low-resolution phase shifters, and propose a distributed learning and multicell coordination based energy efficient beamforming approach for multiple-input and single-output (MISO) small cell system. The goal is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the whole system by jointly optimizing the beamformer and transmit power. We perform extensive simulations in both static and dynamic scenarios, and validate the performance of the proposed approach by comparing with baseline and existing schemes. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline and existing schemes with an significant improvement in terms of EE for both static and dynamic network settings.

The objective of this study is to understand features of Japan’s public administration research and the changes it has undergone, by using content analyses. To this end, this study quantitatively explains research trends in postwar administrative studies in Japan by statistically analyzing article titles from the Public Administration Review Quarterly over the course of nearly 40 years. Co-occurrence network and correspondence analyses revealed the changes in research interests. There was substantially more research on administrative reforms through the postwar Showa and Heisei eras. The configuration of the correspondence analysis indicates that the first dimension is concerned with administrative reforms, the second with historical events or administrative systems, and the third with evaluations and kaizen . The co-occurrence network analysis show that two extracted compound words—the United States and the United Kingdom—were very common in studies during the Showa era (1978–1988). This suggests that Japan’s public administration was influenced by the West during this period. Japan’s policies and institutions became a feature of these studies during the Heisei era (1989–2018). The results of this analysis is partially similar to the author’s previous studies on another Japanese administrative studies journal. One commonality of the results of the analysis is that the dimension related to administrative reform was found in the correspondence analysis. In this study, the first principal component was administrative reform, and Moteki’s (Hiroshima Law J 43:205–235, 2020) correspondence analysis also found “reform,” “policy evaluation” and “governance” as characteristic extracted terms in the 2000s.

In vibrotactile stimuli, it is essential to reproduce realistic tactile sensations to enhance the immersiveness of applications. To reproduce more realistic tactile experiences, various tools have been proposed to fine-tune and design vibrotactile sensations. Considering the situation where users adjust parameters manually, providing tactile sensations with fewer parameters is desirable. This study examines the coarsest resolution in the time and frequency dimensions necessary to present tactile sensations as realistic as vibrations recorded by the sensor. Time and frequency are fundamental parameters to express vibrations as a spectrogram, and we considered it important to investigate how much coarser the resolution could be without changing perception. We focus on the textural vibrations and the preliminary experiment compared actual texture vibrations with the reconstructed vibration as coarse as possible in the frequency dimension. The result showed that the frequency resolution above 172 Hz makes it difficult to distinguish between the vibrations. The main experiment, a similar discrimination experiment, verified the time resolution using the averaging filter of vibration intensity over time. The results indicate that with the update interval set to 30 ms, the discrimination rate compared to the original vibration is approximately 60%. This percentage is below the chance level of 75%, indicating that distinguishing between the two is difficult. Based on our experiments, it is necessary to have a frequency resolution of at least 172 Hz and a time resolution that updates intensity at a rate of 30 fps or higher to recreate tactile sensations comparable to actual vibrations.

Carbon storage processes in mangrove ecosystems are summarized and future research directions are discussed based on findings from our long-term monitoring studies on Pohnpei Island in the Federated States of Micronesia. On Pohnpei, where coral reef-type mangrove forests dominate, Rhizophora communities maintain their habitat by accumulating mangrove peat at over 5 mm year-1 in response to rapid sea-level rise, but surface erosion is progressing in communities where the tree density of Rhizophora spp. has declined through succession. However, high-resolution aerial photographs taken by drones have identified trees with reduced vigor even in Rhizophora forests, and if sea-level rise occurs at a rate close to the IPCC's maximum prediction, then Rhizophora forests, which are valuable carbon storage sites due to mangrove peat accumulation, are likely to disappear. The impact of relative sea-level rise is determined by the sum of the rate of ground-level change by the external sediment budget and the rate of ground-level rise with mangrove peat accumulation. In the future, each region will need to conduct its own quantitative evaluation.

This study investigates how international students’ identification with various social groups they belong to influence their (mal)adjustment to the host country. One hundred and forty-three international students were asked to report their identification with people from their home country, international students, and foreign people, as well as their perceived discrimination, homesickness, and loneliness. The results revealed more harmful effects of group identification than protective effects. Identification with people from their home country was positively associated with homesickness, but slightly buffered the harmful effect of discrimination on loneliness. Identification with international students was negatively associated with loneliness, but strengthened the harmful effect of discrimination on homesickness. Identification with foreign people was positively associated with discrimination and loneliness and also strengthened the harmful effect of discrimination on homesickness and loneliness.

This study examines the relationship between the development of e-commerce and the intensity of commodity tax competition under two different tax principles on goods purchased online: the destination principle and the origin principle. Our main findings are as follows: Given that origin-based tax is applied to purchases made in brick-and-mortar stores, (i) tax competition under destination-based taxation on e-commerce is more intense than tax competition under origin-based taxation; (ii) tax competition under origin-based tax on e-commerce generates higher tax revenues; and (iii) the development of e-commerce raises the tax rate and tax revenues under origin-based taxation but lowers them under destination-based taxation. The main factor leading to these results is that replacing the choice of “where to purchase” goods, consumers will have a new choice of “how to purchase” when online purchasing becomes available, and the destination-based taxation distorts the latter choice, while the origin-based taxation is neutral to it. Tax competition between asymmetric regions has also been analyzed, showing that both principles result in higher tax rates and greater tax revenues for large regions than for small ones. JEL Classification Codes: H21; H71; H87