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This article considers the treatment of commuter train suicides in Tokyo's commuter train network in an effort to think critically about the lived experience mediated by theories of emergence materialized through 'smart' infrastructures. In so doing, it embarks from the question of how the commuter train network thinks the disorder of the commuter suicide in relation to how the network has been restructured in recent decades to handle irregularity as regular. This restructuring, I demonstrate, works to corporealize the network in accordance with an understanding of the body as a paradigm of decentralized complex emergence, which is a concept with roots in cybernetics and artificial life but which has also been adopted in recent political theory to rationalize social, economic, and environmental instability. Materialized in the commuter train network, this concept asks us to think the system as a kind of machinic life that, while generating the potential for new forms of value creation, potentially encourages the experience of commuter suicides as a necessary and recursive process of metabolic renewal within a totalizing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of digital pets can be found in Japan, from virtual pets on palm-top game screens to physical entertainment robots. They are success ful because they succeed in promoting a s ense of reality in users' minds. While visual reality is a familiar element of realism, a subjective sense of reality can also prove effective. By designing interaction in a mode that takes users' psychology into account, such a sense of reality can be enhanced, especially when a user perceives an independent personality in his/her digital pet. Japanese traditional culture, which allows treating animals on an equal basis with human beings, is behind this psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses his interactions with robotic researcher Takashi Gomi during their meetings at conferences in the U.S. and other countries. Topics include Gomi's involvement in a survey conducted by the author for Nippon Telegram and Telephone (NTT), his association with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, International (ATR), and the Artificial Life (AL) group. An obituary for Takashi Gomi by the author is presented.