This paper deals with what I think can be an aspect of the culture of peace, based on my own experience as a person coming from a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic African Society. It also reflects the many encounters I have had with different people as Ethiopia's former ambassador to the United Nations and now France, Spain, Portugal, the Vatican and UNESCO. During my tour of duty and presentation of credentials to heads of state, I had talks with many very stimulating people, which had an impact on my thinking. However, I would like to mention just one, because it is most relevant to this paper.

The page is defined as a textual support, whether the text be present or virtual. This phenomenon is not specific to our book- and alphabet-based civilization. The very invention of writing rests on an original means of exploiting the space inaugurated by the image, and on the questions raised by that particular kind of space. By calibrating and structuring this space, soothsayers established the laws of a system of signs specific to visual communication – divine visual communication – which was also capable of transcribing human language. Far from being the origin of writing, counting, on the other hand, was only developed and refined by being integrated into the page's space.

Research councils are under pressure and some are responding pro-actively. This has implications for their functioning as ‘aggregation machines’ taking in proposals and churning out judgements and decisions. Five scenarios of possible futures for research councils in the world of strategic science are laid out, with examples

This article highlights the position of mathematics within general culture at various stages of the development of Western civilization. Special emphasis is given to the role of mathematics in Greek philosophy, the influence of mathematics on Gothic architecture and the place of mathematics in 17th and 18th century society. Literary quotations illustrate the shifts in the view of mathematics in society.

The discovery of the inert gases is an excellent example of one variety of scientific investigation, where an increase in precision in methodology identifies a discrepancy that leads to a totally unpredicted, novel discovery.

Japanese–European relations are a case of their own. They do not fit into the conventional model of intercontinental contacts marred by colonization and one-sided exploration. Today Japan disturbs the mind perhaps more than ever, because it appears so familiar while at the same time retaining certain peculiarities. Mutual perceptions have been ambivalent, but whether we speak of a ‘clash of civilizations’ or simply of effects of globalization, Europe's and Japan's mutual images as well as their roles are subject to change. This essay frames some new approaches presented in this focus under the headings of multilateralism, consumer's identities, and, entangled modernities'. It shows that transsocietal studies such as these can contribute to theory formation in their respective disciplines, and, on a more pragmatic level, it argues that mutual relations are no longer characterized by one-sided learning processes but by ‘fuzzy learning’ where both sides profit from each other's experiences.

Until Japan opened its shores in the 1850s, images of Japan in Europe were meagre and long outdated. In Sweden, attitudes to Japan have been heavily influenced by the writings of Carl Peter Thunberg from 1793 and by the lack of imperial traditions as well as the strong national respect for equality

On the rare occasions when Japan's relations with Europe are examined, they tend to be fixed within a trilateral structure at whose apex is the United States. This triangular framework was established in the aftermath of World War II, as a result of direct American involvement in the socio-economic reconstruction of Japan and the major countries of Western Europe. The current article examines how the very nature of the triangular relationship has changed over time, with the result that the trilateralism of the 1990s – in contrast to its earlier form – has served to facilitate the development of bilateral relations between Japan and the European Union and its member states.

When a package of political reform bills was enacted in Japan in 1994, commentators predicted that Japanese politics would fundamentally change. After a series of corruption scandals, the new legislation tightened the system of legal controls, increased penalties for wrongdoing by politicians and made the flow of money more transparent. One key element of the reform package was the introduction of government subsidies for political parties. These funds were intended to strengthen the role of political parties and, at the same time, to close the gap between voters and politicians. Based on a comparison between the German and Japanese systems of political finance, this paper argues that government subsidies have not brought parties and voters closer together. While the distance between politics and big business in Japan has increased since 1994, change has come from the business side, not as a result of the new regulations. In the long run, the new Japanese political finance system will not bridge the gap between political elites and ordinary citizens.

Multinational corporations from Japan and Western countries have played an active role in the economic development of Southeast Asia and have, during this time, undergone several developments. The recent economic crisis and efforts by the countries of the region to promote economic integration have again forced corporations to reconsider their strategies. Based on an historical overview, this article examines current strategies and, in particular, addresses the driving forces that are underlying the corporate behaviour of companies from different home countries. It argues that while corporate nationality has, to some extent, been important in the past, it will lose significance as multinational corporations are increasingly developing organizational cultures of their own.

The haunting image of Nietzsche as a pre-fascist ideologist does not fit the early impression of him in Japan and Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, he stimulated young intellectuals to liberate themselves from the culture of the bourgeois. This was replaced by a Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche given in the Nazi-period, which influenced conservative circles both in Germany and Japan after World War II. There is now emerging a new interpretation of Nietzsche from the perspective of the cultural left. Considering the impressions of Nietzsche in the two cultures, the author comes to the conclusion that we must forget the old-fashioned dichotomy between East and West and speak instead of the ‘entangled modernity’.

Japanese occidentalism is characterized by the view that the culture of the Occident was seen as just as exotic to the Japanese as the Orient was to the Europeans, but it is accompanied by a feeling of cultural inferiority. This paper tries to illustrate the Japanese occidentalism in the different aesthetic perceptions of beauty, especially of female beauty, mainly in literary discourse from the late nineteenth century up to the immediate present. The notion of female beauty is formed through cultural discourse according to how the cultural inferiority is perceived. It is like the scenery without the substance and is interchangeable depending on the staging of the occidentalism.