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Moving from “Engineering” oriented R&D being characterised by research aimed at meeting immediate market needs, Japanese companies are developing new organisational and administrative structures to permit original R&D. They are also forced to solve problems of growing labour‐costs and shortages of managerial posts stemming from the ageing of the workforce. Within this wider process, reforms of the personnel administration of R&D are being initiated. The key characteristics lie in the fact that such modifications as expansions in the scope of rotation and clarification and diversification of career paths are common to engineers/scientists of all levels. This being the case, one can expect that the Japanese style of personnel administration system will change along the lines of one which emphasises uniformity among employees both in terms of career path and method for determining reward. Within the ongoing fundamental reform, a new model of creative and original R&D is expected to emerge in Japan.

This paper aims to further improve the efficiency of multi-objective optimization design of synchronous reluctance motors (SynRMs) using the level set (LS) method, which has the advantage of obtaining a practical shape. The solutions obtained by gradient methods tend to be local ones due to the multi-modality of the objective function, especially when multiple objective functions. A huge number of trial calculations are required to obtain a high-quality and broadly distributed Pareto front. Therefore, it is indispensable to effectively get out of the local solutions in the optimization process with the LS method.

The authors propose a novel method appropriately switching multiple objective functions with high independence of sensitivity information. The authors adopt highly independent mathematical expressions for the objective functions of the average torque and torque ripple. In addition, the authors repeatedly perform the optimization while appropriately selecting the sensitivity information of one objective function from multiple ones, which enables the authors to effectively break out of local solutions in the optimization process.

The proposed method was applied to the shape optimization of SynRM flux barriers and successfully searched a more extensive and advanced Pareto front in comparison with the conventional method.

The proposed method adopts search spaces with mathematical high independence for average torque and torque ripple. In the optimization process, when the solution search is judged to get stuck by several criteria, the search space is alternately switched to effectively get out of local solutions.

Japan is home to a relatively conservative and group-oriented culture in which social expectations can exert powerful pressure to conform to traditional patterns of behaviour. This includes gender norms, which have long been based around the common stereotypes of men as breadwinners and women as housewives. Social liberalisation and economic change in the late 20th century saw these patterns change as more women entered the workforce and, despite Japan's dismal standing in global equality rankings, began to make inroads into some positions of political and corporate leadership. Yet, the way in which women are treated by men is shaped not only by female gender norms but also by the social factors that determine male patterns of behaviour. This chapter considers how Japan's male gender norms, particularly the focus on man as economic labourers rather than active members of the family unit, have damaged many men's ability to connect, on an emotional level, with the women in their lives. It looks at the issue of misogyny; what is known as the Lolita Complex; the growing trend of herbivore men; and the concept of Ikumen, men who are active within the family. While some of these patterns of behaviour can be harmful – for women on the individual level, and for Japan as a whole, on the social level – there are some trends which suggest that gender norms in Japan can be directed in a manner which will allow for much healthier emotional relationships to develop between the genders in a manner that will help build a society that is more cognisant of and attentive to the needs of women.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce eddy current loss in a wire that is affected by an alternating field passing through it. This allows the efficiency of transformers to be upgraded and the quality factor in coils to be increased.

The use of a magnetoplated wire (MPW) is proposed to reduce eddy current loss in a wire. An MPW is a copper wire (COW) whose circumference is plated with a magnetic thin film. In additional, the theoretical equation for eddy current loss in an MPW is derived for ease of analysis.

The eddy current loss in an MPW is calculated as a function of the relative permeability and resistivity of its magnetic thin film to reduce the resistance due to the proximity effect of a coil. The eddy current loss in an MPW whose magnetic thin film has a relative permeability of 500 and a resistivity of 0.12 μΩm can be reduced to 4 percent that of COW at a frequency of 1 MHz.

The use of MPW can be expected to upgrade the efficiency of transformers and to increase the quality factor in coils.