After I published an article on foreigners and organ transplants last time, I got a question from a reader asking whether foreign people living in Japan really can be organ donors or recipients.

          

Since I started to edit Enjoyable Philosophy both in Japanese and English, I’ve become aware of my poor English ability, and that made me enter the English conversation school in Shibuya, Tokyo from this April.

          

After our coffee break, we moved on to talking about the philosophy of the word “unexpected”. When we asked for examples of uses of the word ‘unexpected’? we got 3 responses as follows. 1. The cause of the Internet system crash was unexpected. 2. The 15m tsunami was unexpected. 3. This kind of dialogue was unexpected. Then we asked about what you would use to replace the word ‘unexpected’ we received the word ‘unanticipated’. So we took a look at the three examples and for 2 & 3 it seemed to fit, but with 1 it would give the statement a different meaning. We then went on to ask what […]

          

On the 7th of December, to mark the publication of the latest issue of Enjoyable Philosophy, the editorial team held a “Disaster Prevention Philosophy Café” (DPCC) at MoonLight Book Store in Nishi-Chiba. As a guest, we invited Mr. Koji Tachibana who is a professional working on science communication and has organized more than 30 science cafes throughout Japan. In total, 9 people who were mainly from the local neighbourhood participated in the cafe. The DPPC was a normal philosophy café event but also involved us making a hazard map. The procedure in the first half of making a hazard map is this: we mark on a transparent sheet covering the […]