Minoru Matsui

Criminal liability for omission causing death depends not only on whether a defendant had a duty to act, but also on what timely intervention could still have achieved when that duty should have been performed. In medical cases, retrospective focus on death may obscure the transition from recoverability to irreversible dying. This paper uses the concepts of a life-preservable clinical state (LPCS), medical recoverability, the irreversible dying transition (IDT), and the irreversible dying process (IDP) to clarify that structure. Medical recoverability exists while at least one medically reasonable restorative pathway remains; loss of recoverability occurs when the final such pathway disappears, and IDT marks the temporal boundary of that loss. The paper distinguishes omissions occurring while recoverability remains, omissions contributing to loss of recoverability at IDT, and omissions occurring only after IDT. Loss of recoverability is not proposed as a new offence or independently punishable result, but as a medically significant intermediate causal fact connecting an earlier omission to a later death. IDT likewise does not determine duty, causation, fault, or guilt; it identifies what medicine could still have changed at the legally relevant time. After IDT, causation does not end, but the relevant counterfactual shifts from restoration to matters such as prolongation of life, acceleration of death, suffering, or manner of dying. The framework aims to improve the temporal and causal precision of criminal omission analysis without replacing criminal doctrine with medical judgment.

Human societies are characterized by pervasive practices of accumulation: People accumulate wealth, status, credentials, moral merit, experiences, reputations and even forms of absence such as simplicity or purity. While sociology has extensively analysed capital, institutions and value, it has lacked a unified theoretical account of why accumulation itself so consistently generates meaning across domains. This article introduces Accumuland Theory , a structural model of value formation that explains how accumulation organizes motivation, identity and social order. An accumuland is defined as any entity designated as a target of increase or preservation such that actions and experiences are evaluated in relation to its trajectory over time. The central claim is that accumulation is not merely domain-specific behaviour but a general mechanism of meaning-making: Dispersed actions acquire significance when they are interpreted as contributing to the continuity, growth or protection of an accumuland. This explains why heterogeneous objects—money, credentials, religious merit, social metrics or symbolic absence—can function as comparable anchors of value. The article further conceptualizes institutions as macro-level regulators that define legitimate accumulands, specify accumulation practices and project future horizons. From this perspective, phenomena such as hoarding, credential inflation, compulsive achievement, moral scrupulosity and digital metric dependence are understood as structural imbalances of accumulation rather than domain-specific pathologies. By reframing accumulation as a core architecture of meaning-making, Accumuland Theory provides a unified framework for analysing value, commitment and institutional power in modern societies.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into medical decision-making, often framed as a supportive tool that enhances accuracy while leaving final judgment to clinicians. This paper argues that such framing obscures a deeper structural shift: medical action may proceed without any judgment ever occurring. AI systems do not judge; they generate outputs through statistical transduction. Clinicians, under institutional and legal pressures, may relay these outputs without regenerating them as their own reasons. When neither AI nor clinician generates judgment, decisions are enacted without a judging subject. While judgment without a judging subject may be sustainable elsewhere, medicine renders this absence unsustainable. Medical practice is characterized by irreversibility, case-specificity, meaning-demand, and relational accountability—features that presuppose judgment as a human act. Even clinically correct outcomes do not guarantee that patients will recognize a decision as right for them. When judgment disappears, informed consent persists only as a procedural ritual, simulating understanding without grounding it. To make this absence explicit, the paper introduces Metaqualia Theory (MTQ), distinguishing patient experience (Q), technical transduction (T), and judgment as meaning-generating endorsement (M). This leads to a prior ethical question: Is there an M here? This question precedes concerns about explainability and helps clarify the conditions under which consent and responsibility remain meaningful. The analysis suggests that when AI outputs are not regenerated as human judgment, their role in medical practice raises structural limits that cannot be addressed by transparency alone.

This paper addresses the longstanding ambiguity of terms such as self, identity, and subjectivity in psychology and philosophy. Rather than adding yet another definition, it introduces Metaqualia Theory (MTQ) as a structural grammar that generates these notions as derivative effects of the Q–M–T cycle: Qualia (Q) as raw experiential material, Metaqualia (M) as interpretive stances, and Transduction (T) as the stabilization of experience in social and communicative fields. Within this framework, “self” is not an intrinsic entity but the retrospective label applied when an active M is stabilized through T; “identity” denotes the socially recognized continuity of such stabilizations; and “subjectivity” is the conventional name given when Q is framed by M. MTQ thereby systematically distinguishes between self, identity, and subjectivity, while avoiding homuncular explanations. It also differentiates itself from dialogical and constructivist models by specifying structural conditions under which these labels arise, rather than assuming them as givens. The result is a coherent conceptual lexicon that integrates existing insights without collapsing into definitional disputes. MTQ thus offers psychology a grammar of consciousness capable of clarifying key terms and situating them within a unified structural account.

This paper proposes a structural reframing of criminal complicity through the lens of Metaqualia Theory (MTQ), a cognitive model of subjective agency originally developed to analyze internal modes of action. Drawing from the theoretically sophisticated yet underrecognized doctrines of Japanese criminal law, particularly its treatment of seihan ishi (principal intent) and kyōbō kyōdō seihan (conspiracy-based joint liability), the paper argues that complicity should not be reduced to observable acts or explicit agreements. Instead, the paper introduces a structural framework based on the interplay between Metaqualia (M)—the self-referential mode by which an agent adopts an action as “their own”—and Field (F)—the intersubjective context in which action becomes viable. Using this M–F model, the paper reclassifies five major types of complicity and introduces the concept of Resonant Metaqualia (Resonant M) to explain ambiguous or tacit forms of participation. A Japanese Supreme Court decision from 2018 is analyzed to demonstrate how criminal responsibility can emerge from mutual resonance, even in the absence of explicit coordination. The paper then applies this structural framework to sentencing decisions, offering a matrix for assessing degrees of involvement. The proposed model provides a new theoretical foundation for criminal responsibility—one that captures the graded, often invisible structures by which individuals become entangled in collective action. It also offers practical applications for judicial reasoning, legal defense, and preventive ethics.

Background: The formation of long-term memory (LTM) and the late phase of long-term potentiation (L-LTP) depend on macromolecule synthesis, translation, and transcription in neurons. vesl-1S (V ASP/E na-related gene upregulated during s eizure and L TP, also known as homer-1a) is an LTP-induced immediate early gene. The short form of Vesl (Vesl-1S) is an alternatively spliced isoform of the vesl-1 gene, which also encodes the long form of the Vesl protein (Vesl-1L). Vesl-1L is a postsynaptic scaffolding protein that binds to and modulates the metabotropic glutamate receptor 1/5 (mGluR1/5), the IP₃ receptor, and the ryanodine receptor. Vesl-1 null mutant mice show abnormal behavior, which includes anxiety- and depression-related behaviors, and an increase in cocaine-induced locomotion; however, the function of the short form of Vesl in behavior is poorly understood because of the lack of short-form-specific knockout mice. Results: In this study, we generated short-form-specific gene targeting (KO) mice by knocking in part of vesl-1L/homer-1c cDNA. Homozygous KO mice exhibited normal spine number and morphology. Using the contextual fear conditioning test, we demonstrated that memory acquisition and short-term memory were normal in homozygous KO mice. In contrast, these mice showed impairment in fear memory consolidation. Furthermore, the process from recent to remote memory was affected in homozygous KO mice. Interestingly, reactivation of previously consolidated fear memory attenuated the conditioning-induced freezing response in homozygous KO mice, which suggests that the short form plays a role in fear memory reconsolidation. General activity, emotional performance, and sensitivity to electrofootshock were normal in homozygous KO mice. Conclusion: These results indicate that the short form of the Vesl family of proteins plays a role in multiple steps of long-term, but not short-term, fear memory formation.