Professor Ito is one of the most distinguished probability theorists in the world, and in this modern, concise introduction to the subject he explains basic probabilistic concepts rigorously and yet gives at the same time an intuitive understanding of random phenomena. In the first chapter he considers finite situations, but from an advanced standpoint that enables the transition to greater generality to be achieved more easily. Chapter 2 deals with probability measures and includes a discussion of the fundamental concepts of probability theory. These concepts are formulated abstractly but without sacrificing intuition. The last chapter is devoted to infinite sums of independent real random variables. Each chapter is divided into sections that end with a set of problems with hints for solution. This textbook will be particularly valuable to students of mathematics taking courses in probability theory who need a modern introduction to the subject that yet does not allow overemphasis on abstractness to cloud the issues involved.

In the twenty-first century, applications in medicine and engineering must acquire greater safety and flexibility if they are to yield better products at higher efficiency. Experts from academia, industry, and government research laboratories who have pioneered CME ideas and technologies describe its concept and research approach and discuss related hardware and software, science and technology, and medicine and engineering. This book will be invaluable to scientists, researchers, and graduates in the emerging field of CME.

In the twenty-first century, applications in medicine and engineering must acquire greater safety and flexibility if they are to yield better products at higher efficiency. To this end, complex science and technology must be integrated in medicine and engineering. Complex medical engineering (CME) is a new field that merges medical science and technology, and includes biomedical robotics and biomechatronics, complex virtual technology in medicine, information and communication technology in medicine, complex technology in rehabilitation, cognitive neuroscience and technology, and complex bioinformatics. Experts from academia, industry, and government research laboratories who have pioneered CME ideas and technologies describe its concept and research approach and discuss related hardware and software, science and technology, and medicine and engineering. This book will be invaluable to scientists, researchers, and graduates in the emerging field of CME.

At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. An Age of Melodrama examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. It then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses that surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.

Japan is a country lacking her own energy sources and other natural resource . Still, over the 4 decades since the end of World War II, she has achieved considerable economic development, a fact which highlights the success of the policies implemented by the government and their acceptance by the well matured Japanese society. At present, the world is confronted with serious environmental problems, for example, the consumption of large amounts of energy that leads to in creases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels anq subsequent global warming. After the oil crisis in the 1970s, Japan strove to reduce energy consumption, and achieved significant improvements in production efficiency in industry and in the air conditioning of homes. Another example of her success is in the automobile industry, where Japanese automobiles enjoy a good reputation for fuel efficiency. Japan has shown that environmental protection and economic development can be accomplished simultaneously, although the problems have not been solved completely. There are many areas that require further study. In this book, Dr. Helmar Krupp describes how society is organized to form a system. Then, in a unique and interesting turn, he tries to analyze the indus trial development using Schumpeter's theory. Subsequently, many leaders in the field of energy policy in Japan discuss the issues involved from a variety of viewpoints."

No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965). Over a career that spanned half a century, he explored, with both joyful fascination and ruthless insight, the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the complementary attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery over others, and the tense relationship between fantasy and the exterior world. His fiction is filled with portrayals of desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy.
In one of Tanizaki's novels, a young engineer fascinated with the West sets out to transform a Japanese bar girl into his very own version of Mary Pickford. He succeeds to such an extent that the girl, growing tired of his immutable Japaneseness, begins to take foreign lovers. Cuckolded and humiliated though his is, the engineer is unable to leave his fantasy-come-to-life and resigns himself to enslavement.
In another novel, a Westernized Japanese finds himself gradually drawn to the past. Specifically, he is attracted to his father-in-law's companion, a young woman who has been trained and costumed to play the part of an old-fashioned mistress. Though this woman is no more a flesh-and-blood embodiment of tradition than a bunraku doll, the protagonist contemplates a life with someone like her, a life defined by the pursuit of abstract, dehumanized cultural ideals.
Visions of Desire locates such novels in the shifting discourse on cultural identity and cultural aspiration that permeates Japanese life. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels do not merely end in the reification and contemplation of cultural ideals but rather problematize the desire behind such ideals. He finds in the writer's fiction a subtle understanding of cultural aspiration as a process riddled with subversions, influenced by patterns of mediation, and circumscribed by the lonely efforts of individual subjectivity. He discovers in Tanizaki's fables about the male effort to transform women into cultural icons a clear awareness of the sexual and class hierarchies that make such transformation possible.
Visions of Desire is the first book in English on a writer who is possibly modern Japan's greatest novelist. Ito has written for both the specialist and the general reader, setting his argument in a discussion both of Tanizaki's times and of the life of a writer who believed in living out the fantasies that fueled his fictions.