During the last decade or more, there has been a series of Scientific investigations conducting evidence-based scientific investigations of the health benefits of Taiji and Qigong. The objective is to do experiments that can be duplicated with results that are quantitative and explanations that may be understood to a scientific audience. Although the research findings may need to be repeated in more laboratories and with larger sample sizes, we think the evidence is pretty impressive and moving us in the direction that hopefully in another 20 years or so of more research, we will have a significantly better scientific explanation of the health benefits of Taiji and Gigong. Read More »
A Conversation with Tamaki Matsuoka: “The Conscience of Japan”
June 2022
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Before I show the conversation with Tamaki Matsuoka, I want to provide a little background on the woman who has spent more than 30 years of her adult life finding out what happened in Nanking during the Nanking Massacre of 1937/1938. Among other things, she interviewed over 250 former Japanese soldiers who were stationed in Nanking during that period and over 300 Chinese survivors of the Nanking Massacre. By correlating their stories, she established irrevocably that the Nanking Massacre was one of the most horrific atrocities ever occurred in the history of the human race. During an approximately six-week period beginning on December 13, 1937 just in the city of Nanking, the then capital of China, the Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered approximately 300,000 Chinese (most were civilians, including women and children) and raped approximately 20,000 women and girls (including great grandmothers and young girls less than 10 years old).
She started on this project on her own when she was an elementary school teacher in Osaka, Japan. At first working alone on this project on weekends, holidays, summer breaks with funds initially from her own savings. Eventually, she wrote several books, including the 2002 book The Battle of Nanking – Searching for Forbidden Memories, which was awarded the “Japan Congress of Journalists Prize” that is given to distinguished journalists, and the 2016 book Torn Memories of Nanking that summarized her lifelong work. She also produced numerous documentaries, including the award winning documentary with a title “Torn Memories of Nanjing,” similar to the title of her later 2016 book.
Below is a conversation capturing hours of discussion that I had with Tamaki since we became friends 12 years ago. My questions are in regular font, and Tamaki’s answers are in slightly bigger font in Italics.
More Speculative Thoughts on Qigong
March 2022
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Physics is based on explanations of observable phenomena as well as predictions of not yet discovered observations. The question then is whether the field concept of Qigong can lead to some explanations of observable phenomena and predictions of not yet discovered observations. This article discusses some speculative thoughts on this question.
In the March 2021 issue of my website, I made some speculative thoughts on the scientific basics of Qigong. [1] The idea is based on the concept of “fields” which is so prevalent in physics in describing what matter is made of, or the fundamental building blocks of matter. [2] Until recently, there are four fundamental fields in physics, corresponding to the four forces of nature: the gravitation force, the electromagnetic force, the strong force, and the the weak force. Since the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2013, now a fifth field, the Higgs field, has been added. [3] Historically, the reason of introducing the concept of fields is to remove the need to answer the question, e.g., of instantaneous action at a distance. Instead of saying that an object of mass M exerts instantaneously a force on any other object in the universe, we say that the object of Mass M creates a gravitational field that permeates all of space, then any other object in the universe will be affected by the presence of that gravitational field. Thus we don’t have to explain “action at a distance”, i.e., how does the object of mass M instantaneously affect any other object in the universe no matter how far away that object is from the object of mass M.
Tale of Two Standards in World Politics – Part I
The central image of the U.S. government of itself is that it is a model government for the world to admire and mimic. It is a gold standard in terms of governance of the country with respect to democracy and human rights, and in terms of world peace and addressing the world’s critical problems. In a sense we as Americans as well as the people of the world have more of less accepted this characterization of the U.S. and the American people, because for more than half a century from the end of WWII to about the beginning of the 21st century, so many of us in the U.S. and in the rest of the world have often tried to pursue this so-called American dream without seriously thinking what was this American dream, whether reality matches this depicted dream, whether it has been achieved, and more importantly how far is the actual U.S. government from this gold standard.
This article looks more carefully into the American government and its actual practice during its existence in the last 250 years so that we can have a better benchmark to assess the actual American government. For our assessment, we will consider the following metrics:
Part I of this two-part article discusses the first two metrics of democracy and human rights. Part II discusses the other two metrics of peace and addressing world problems. Read More »