This paper develops a novel argument to show that prospective research subjects can validly consent to participate in a study without understanding (most of) the content of the required disclosure. Its point of departure is the right subjects standardly have to waive (most of) the investigator’s duty to disclose. Things get worse for autonomy based defences of informed consent because this right to waive is very well grounded in an individual’s autonomy.

he historiography of postwar Japan often tells the stories of those with the status and power to make themselves remembered – usually those who were members of elite families or institutions, with social, political or financial power. They were, moreover, often male. Yet we have ignored many other submerged voices which tell a qualitatively different story. Historians have never seen these figures as providing an intellectual or coherent response to the conditions of postwar Japan, perhaps because they did not belong to institutions or recognized organizations and movements.

The burgeoning social scientific debate about urban commons rarely focuses on the visual aspects of public space, the most elementary shared good in cities. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, however, the townscape has been intensely debated over the last decades. Reacting to widespread discontent with the previous laissez-faire policy, the city now boasts one of the strictest building codes of the nation.

In 1988, the Japan Foundation expressed concerns that as a symptom of declining interest in Japan among American readers, sales of Japanese literature in translation were falling. Thirty years later, following the reintroduction of the National Book Awards for Translated Literature in 2018, two titles originally published in Japanese (The Emissary and Tokyo Ueno Station) received the top prize while a third (The Memory Police) reached the shortlist.