We met in front of our respective computers on Sunday night in Japan time and Saturday morning in U.S. time, crossing the borders of the time zones between the U.S. and Japan. “It’s been a while,” smiled Kazunori Nemoto, Yutaka Kubosawa and Ai Minakawa at the screen. The three members of the same generation have known each other since university and recently started an online meeting to read academic books and discuss various topics. Kazunori Nemoto teaches at a special school in Fukushima, and Yutaka Kubosawa works in Osaka helping deaf children acquire JSL. Ai Minakawa is a researcher at Gallaudet University in the U.S., working on health disparities among deaf people. All three were born to deaf parents, grew up using JSL, and now work as professionals in education or health care.
Nemoto is a communicator who introduces a wide range of books in sign language through some social media. He is originally from Fukushima Prefecture. He was born of deaf parents, graduated from a school for the deaf, and left his hometown to go to the university. He is now working as a teacher at a special needs school in Chiba. He has always been a book lover and has kept reading books in his spare time.
Hitoshi Nagai is now teaching philosophy at Nihon University. He is a leading philosopher and very popular among people with a strong bent for philosophy in Japan. Since he released his first book, The Metaphysics of I!, when he was 34 years old, he has published a book per year on average.
2015年5月21日
On a sunny Monday on June 23rd 2014, a zazen session was held at the Chizanso in Hayama-cho, Kanagawa Prefecture.
In 31 March 2015, the latest vol.6 has been released. As a special issue in this volume, the editorial team discussed about a well-known Japanese philosopher, Hitoshi Nagai and the influence of his philosophy on the wide range of practice fields including psychiatry, Buddhism, and education.
2014年5月29日
I studied piano at university but last spring I enrolled in the Graduate Program of the Department of Philosophy. The reason for my decision was not that I wanted to search for some fundamental truths about the nature of music that would help me play the piano.
Motoki Fujii teaches disaster prevention at the Department of Education of Shizuoka University. During his undergraduate studies he did research on Kant and after he took up his post at Shizuoka University, he became involved in ethics education.
Koji Tachibana is a working adult student majoring in cultural anthropology at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Immediately after graduating from the School of Agricultural Sciences, he was hired by a company making equipment used in biotechnology research.
Fukumi Shimura encountered Goethe by a happy chance. She had become involved in the Japanese folk art movement Mingei, started by Soetsu Yanagi and after much agonising had become a textile-dyeing artist. On the recommendation of the poet Makoto Ooka, and through the philosopher Yoshito Tanaka, Goethe’s Theory of Colours landed in her the hands.
Thirty-one-year-old Taka Fujii has an unusual background. She was born in Kumamoto Prefecture and currently teaches bioethics at the Medical Department of Saga University. Taka Fujii, a licensed physician, has just completed her PhD in philosophy while continuing to work part-time as a physician.
2014年5月24日
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.
2014年5月20日
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 […]
2014年5月20日
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 […]
2014年1月28日
http://philosophy-zoo.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/Rikio_Imajo_20121212_m.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSSRikio Imajo, who used to work as a photojournalist, is a keen reader of Enjoyable Philosophy. He was born in Taiwan in 1939 and when World War II ended, he was 6 years old. Since he was a junior high-school student, he started to take photos with a German-made camera with his father’s encouragement. He learned about monochrome development by developing his own photographs. At that time, it took about one hour to develop and wash a photograph. He went on to major in Photograph at the Technical Junior College of Chiba University, and he learned about the mechanical engineering […]
2010年11月13日
http://philosophy-zoo.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/chomsky20101123.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSSInterview : Saori Tanaka In the office of Dr. Chomsky, we saw a small dog with curly grey fur. Apparently it belonged to his secretary. Visitors were constantly coming in and out of Dr. Chomsky’s office and every time the door opened, the dog started running in circles in the open space in front of the office. One of the visitors before us was wearing a black cowboy hat. While waiting, I started petting the dog who immediately rolled over exposing his tummy. When the visitor with the cowboy hat was about to leave, the dog blocked his way, so […]
