Every year, Ireland congratulates itself on its commitment to inclusion and child-centred education. Yet step inside almost any post-primary school and a different reality emerges. The gap between what is promised publicly and what is delivered in practice is now so vast that it can no longer be dismissed as an administrative imperfection or a work in progress. It has become structural.

Recent reports from teacher unions and international bodies reinforce what teachers observe daily: Ireland’s educational commitments are not aligned with Ireland’s educational structures. This is not a matter of opinion; it is increasingly a matter of record.

Promises Made, Resources Denied
Ireland’s framework for inclusive education recognises that some students require additional supports to participate in learning on equal terms with their peers. These needs span literacy, working memory, sensory processing, physical challenges, emotional regulation, attentional differences, and more.

Yet multiple recent evaluations show that the resources necessary to honour these commitments have not kept pace with demand:

• The ASTI has reported that many second-level schools lack adequate staffing, training, therapeutic supports, and funding to meet the needs of SEN students.
  
  
• A 2024 OECD review of Irish educational resourcing highlighted significant capacity and infrastructure challenges, particularly at the post-primary level, where rising need is colliding with static or insufficient provision.
  
  
• National inspectorate findings indicate that additional teaching allocations meant for SEN students are frequently redirected into mainstream timetabling just to keep the system functioning — not out of neglect, but out of necessity.
  
  

In other words, the rhetoric of inclusion has expanded, but the resources underpinning inclusion have not.
Schools attempt to stretch what they have, but stretching is not the same as meeting need.

Internal Exams and the Real Exam Gap
This systemic shortfall becomes most visible around internal examinations. Students who qualify for state examination accommodations — laptops, readers, scribes, separate centres, extra time — often sit every in-school test without those supports. They experience the pressure of assessment in June under conditions that do not reflect their actual needs or legal entitlements.

Accommodations are not ceremonial acknowledgements; they are tools. Tools require familiarity, practice, and confidence. No student adapts smoothly to a laptop, a scribe, or a supervised room when their first meaningful encounter with these supports occurs during a high-stakes national exam.
The result is predictable: the support exists in theory, but its effectiveness is undermined in practice.

The system thus offers the appearance of fairness, not fairness itself. It promises access but does not supply the rehearsal conditions required for access to function.

Leadership in an Impossible Position
It is important to emphasise that this shortfall is not due to weak school leadership. Principals and senior teams consistently operate under constraints that make their position untenable. They are tasked with sustaining a full curriculum, providing comprehensive timetables, maintaining subject staffing, organising internal exams, and delivering pastoral care — all while ensuring SEN provision is intact.

The difficulty is not reluctance. It is a structural impossibility.

When the inspectorate notes that SEN resources are routinely reallocated into general teaching simply to keep timetables operational, the issue is not poor management. It is the inevitable consequence of a system in which responsibilities grow, but resourcing does not. Leaders are left carrying accountability for outcomes they do not have the tools to deliver.

What Inclusion Looks Like When It Works
It is essential to clarify what genuine inclusion looks like — because it is neither mysterious nor impractical.

Inclusion, when it functions well, appears ordinary:

• A student uses their laptop for internal assessments as naturally as any other tool.
• A quiet supervised space is available for November, March, and May exams — not just June.
• Accommodations are woven into the rhythm of the school year, not saved for ceremonial use during state examinations.
• Teachers engage with accommodations as part of routine pedagogy, not as exceptional interventions.

Inclusion feels unremarkable when it is working. That ordinariness is the goal.

The problem in Ireland is not ignorance of what good practice looks like. It is the absence of the resourcing required to make good practice possible.

A Broader Pattern: Gaps, Backlogs, and Systemic Under-Resourcing
The shortcomings visible around exams reflect a wider national pattern:

• Schools struggle to secure appropriate placements for students with complex needs.
• Waiting lists for assessments remain long.
• Access to therapeutic or psychological services is inconsistent.
• Assistive technology is provided unevenly and often without the staff capacity to integrate it meaningfully.
• SEN teams carry caseloads that exceed what any realistic model of inclusion could absorb.

The national narrative continues to celebrate inclusion, but inclusion without infrastructure is not inclusion — it is performance.

Rhetoric Must Not Replace Coherence
It is easy to articulate commitments to inclusion. It is far more demanding to construct the staffing, training, facilities, planning structures, and timetables that make inclusion real.
When what is promised and what is delivered diverge, confidence in the system erodes. Students feel the consequences of this gap long before adults acknowledge them.
Support that appears only at exam time is not support. It is administrative compliance masquerading as inclusion.

This is not a philosophical disagreement; it is a structural misalignment.

What Must Change
If Ireland is to move from rhetoric to reality, several structural reforms are essential:

1. Adequate, ring-fenced funding for SEN provision at the post-primary level — staffing, training, therapeutic input, assistive technology, coordination time.
2. Timetabling and staffing models that allow SEN support to coexist with mainstream provision instead of competing with it.
3. Routine use of accommodations throughout the school year, moving them from exceptional interventions to normalised practices.
4. Long-term national planning that matches rising SEN need with rising capacity — not reactive patchwork solutions.
5. A coherent accountability structure to ensure that the commitments of inclusion translate into actual experiences for students.

Without these reforms, inclusion remains a word. With them, it becomes something students genuinely feel.

Conclusion — A Literary Warning from History
Hope is necessary in education; the work does not function without it. But hope must coexist with realism. And realism demands that we name the misalignment honestly: what Ireland says and what Ireland does regarding its most vulnerable students are not aligned.

When a nation claims to offer support but does not resource the structures required, there are only a few explanations left: hypocrisy, mismanagement of national priorities, or a refusal to acknowledge the scale of the problem. No gentler interpretation survives scrutiny.
Students perceive this misalignment long before adults admit it.

And so I end, as before, with Stephen Dedalus’s cold observation from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“Do you know what Ireland is? … Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
It is a harsh metaphor, but metaphors endure because they contain a warning. A society can claim to cherish its young while simultaneously failing to provide the structures necessary for their flourishing.

If Ireland is to avoid fulfilling Joyce’s metaphor, the solution is clear: align what we say with what we do. Anything less is performance.
Our young people deserve a system that keeps its promises — not one that merely articulates them.

​​日本語要約（概要）
アイルランドは毎年、「インクルージョン」と「子ども中心の教育」を重視していると自賛する。しかし、多くの中等学校の現場では、その理念と実際の教育環境のあいだに深刻な乖離が存在している。最近の教員組合の報告や OECD の調査結果も示すように、アイルランドの教育方針と教育制度の実態は整合しておらず、この問題はもはや個々の学校の課題ではなく、構造的な問題となっている。

特別支援教育（SEN）が必要な生徒に対して追加の支援を提供する制度は整備されているように見えるが、実際には人的・財政的資源が追いついていない。ASTI の報告では、多くの中等学校が人員不足、訓練不足、専門支援の欠如、財源不足に悩んでいることが指摘されている。また OECD のレビューでも、需要の増加に対して教育インフラが対応できていないことが明確になっている。

この不足は、特に校内試験で顕著に表れる。国家試験では配慮（パソコン利用、リーダー、書記、別室受験、延長時間など）が認められている生徒でも、校内試験ではほとんどの場合それらの配慮を受けられない。配慮は単なる「制度上の特典」ではなく、日頃から慣れ、練習を通して効果を発揮するべき「道具」である。高リスクの本番で初めて使用しても、十分に機能するはずがない。

学校リーダーの責任ではない点も強調されるべきである。校長や教員は意欲を持って支援を提供しようとしているが、限られた予算、人員、時間割の制約のなかでは制度上不可能な場面が多い。支援が他の業務と競合し、十分に機能しないのは、管理不足ではなく、国家の教育資源配分の問題である。

本来あるべきインクルージョンは「特別」ではなく「日常」であるべきだ。学年を通して配慮が自然に組み込まれ、教師も生徒もそれを当たり前の要素として扱える環境こそが望ましい。しかし現在のシステムには、その「普通」を支える資源が不足している。

検査待ちの長期化、専門スタッフの不足、不均等な支援技術の提供など、問題は試験に限らず広範に及んでいる。理念だけが先行し、インフラが伴わない「インクルージョン」は実質的に機能しない。

このギャップを埋めるには、SEN のための予算確保、人員配置の改善、年間を通した配慮の実施、長期的な国家計画、そして制度と現実を一致させる監督体制が不可欠である。改革がなければ、「インクルージョン」は言葉だけの存在になってしまう。
最後に、ジェイムズ・ジョイスの言葉が警鐘を鳴らす。
「アイルランドとは何か？ … 自分の子を食い殺す老いた雌豚だ。」
厳しい比喩ではあるが、若者を大切にすると言いながら、その発達を支える構造を整えない社会への警告として、今なお重みを持つ。
​
アイルランドがこの比喩を現実にしないためには、言葉と行動を一致させることが不可欠である。

Kill Bill Expectations vs. Real Budō
A few mates—firm believers in Kill Bill physics—recently asked me to demonstrate the sharpness of my Japanese sword. So I drew an envelope lightly along the blade.
It didn’t slice.
It nicked, then quietly slid away.
At first, mild disappointment. But quickly, something far more critical emerged. The sword had behaved perfectly. What failed was only the expectation.
The blade is not the master.
The swordsman must be.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⚔⎯⎯⎯⎯
🎬 What Films Suggest (But Budō Rejects)
Films tell us:
• Swords cut anything
• Gravity alone makes a cut
• The blade does the work
• Mastery is instant
• Speed = skill
But cinema is theatre. True budō is not theatre — it is discipline, breath, precision and physics made real through repetition.

🧭 What Budō Requires
Reality demands something very different:
• Angle, tension and timing
• Sliding “draw cut” rather than a chop
• Breath and body alignment
• Resistance in the target
• Thousands of hours of training
That is why we never drop objects onto blades in tameshigiri. Tatami is held under tension so the blade can enter. Without resistance, there is no cut — only contact.
Cutting is not proof of sharpness.
It is proof of alignment.

🧪 Why the Envelope Survived — The Physics.
A blade is not magical. It obeys physics. And physics always demands conditions.
• Momentum (needs speed + mass)
• Pressure (needs force focused on a small area)
• Shear force (must exceed material resistance)

Here’s how physics explains what happened:
Momentum:
p=m×v
Small mass + slow motion = almost no momentum → no cut.

Pressure (force over area):
P=A/F​
Light contact spreads force → low pressure → fibres remain intact.

Shear force must exceed resistance:
F shear​>F material resistance
​
The envelope flexed away from the edge → no resistance → nothing to cut into.
Real sword technique uses a draw cut, adding horizontal motion:
F effective​=F downward​+(m×vdraw​)
This is why real cutting feels quiet — the physics aligns rather than collides.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⚔⎯⎯⎯⎯
Simple truth:
• Low momentum = no power
• Low tension = no cut
• Technique aligns force
• That is why training takes years

🏗️ Why Real Blades Aren’t Razor-SharpIf a sword were sharp enough to cut floating paper, it would be too brittle to survive combat. A living blade must balance:
• Hardness — to maintain an edge
• Toughness — to survive shock & bone
Japanese swordsmiths solved this with differential tempering — a hard edge and a softer spine — so the blade could flex rather than break.
A razor cuts paper.
A sword must survive bone.
A blade is only as strong as the body that wields it.

🧘 Technique: Why It Costs YearsThe first time I cut tatami, I assumed power mattered. It didn’t. The cut failed. So my teacher had me practise footwork—for months. Only when the body learned stillness did the blade begin to work.
That is budō:
• Breath before strength
• Balance before power
• Posture before speed
Anyone can hold steel.
Few move in harmony with it.
Technique is not a trick — it is knowledge carried in the body.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⚔⎯⎯⎯⎯
⚠️ Can You Grab a Sword With Your Hand?
Cinema says instant loss of fingers. Reality says “it depends.”
A static sword can sometimes be grabbed by the flat side, perhaps with minor cuts. The edge is dangerous — but only if force is applied with the correct shearing angle.
Physics again explains it:
[F_{\text{shear}} > F_{\text{tissue resistance}} \Rightarrow \text{cut}]
No shearing force = no cutting.
But if the blade is moving with speed — injuries will occur.
Some kata even use controlled blade contact on the mune (back of the sword), but this is never casual — never cinematic. Only possible through precision and timing.
Budō teaches risk — never recklessness.

🧭 The Real Question
So the question was never:
“Why didn’t the sword cut the envelope?”
The true question is:
“Why did we ever assume it would?”
The sword obeys physics.
The swordsman must first learn to.
That is budō. That is training.
And in that quiet truth — cinema finally steps aside.

🌸 日本語の要約（Japanese Summary）
映画では刀が何でも切れるように描かれますが、現実の武道では「刀が切る」のではなく、**「技を身につけた人間が切る」**のです。封筒が切れなかった理由は、切るために必要な条件――角度・速度・張力・意図――が揃っていなかったからです。
さらに、紙を落とすだけで切れるほど鋭い刃では、実戦では脆すぎて役に立ちません。日本刀は骨や衝撃にも耐えるため、「硬さ」と「粘り強さ」の両方を持つ構造になっています。
「素手で刀を掴めば必ず指を失う」とは限りませんが、動いている刃を無防備に掴めば大きな怪我につながります。武道とは、無謀ではなく正確な判断と身体理解を求めるものです。
真に切るのは刀ではなく、
刀を通して鍛えられた人間である。
それこそが武道の核心であり、静かに受け継がれてきた真実です。

🕯️ Final Reflection
A sword does not demand belief.
It quietly waits for understanding.
Technique begins
where spectacle ends.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⚔⎯⎯⎯⎯

For Teresa, whom I only understood through a rear-view mirror.
​
My understanding of autism did not begin in professional development or university reading. It started in real schools — living, breathing schools — where students’ minds moved in ways I had not been trained to interpret.

I had the privilege of serving as principal of several secondary schools in Japan, where I also taught History and oversaw curriculum design. In that environment, I encountered students whose ways of perceiving and processing the world were different — often quieter, sometimes more precise, frequently more intense. At first, I could not read these traits clearly. Years later, I understand that those students shaped me as an educator, a leader, and a thinker.

A Paradigm Shift
A key influence on my thinking was a male SEN colleague who once said to me:
“Autistic students are not necessarily struggling — many are thinking deeply. Often, we are the ones moving too quickly to meet them.”
He challenged me to stop “fixing” learners and instead learn how they were thinking. That conversation altered my practice — and, more importantly, my assumptions.
He also suggested something that felt almost radical at the time:
“If you approach it properly, autism can operate as a cognitive superpower — particularly in history, analysis, ethics, problem detection and deep research.”
It was not a romantic claim. It was a professional observation — and in time, research would confirm it.

What Practice Revealed — Before I Had the Vocabulary
Long before I knew the theory, I observed patterns across different classrooms:

• intense focus
• powerful recall of detail
• low tolerance for superficial explanations
• discomfort with ambiguity
• a preference for logic over social convention

At first, I saw them merely as “habits”. Later, I realised they were forms of cognition. And when I adjusted structures rather than students, learning improved for everyone.

Eventually, formal terminology caught up with what practice had already shown me:
🔍 Monotropism — Focus as Strength
The ability to hold a single idea intensely. In chaotic spaces, this can be overwhelming — but in research, source analysis or chronology work, it becomes a genuine asset.
🌐 Weak Central Coherence — Detail Before Big Picture
Some students notice inconsistencies quicker than teachers do. They often require the “big picture” to be made explicit — but once given, it unlocks high-level thinking.
🧠 Pattern Recognition — Problem Identification
Not just problem-solving, but early detection of problems — before most people see them. A valuable skill in history, coding, economics and policy.
🤝 The Double Empathy Gap
Miscommunication is often relational, not one-way. When I changed my communication style, clarity increased significantly. The gap shrank.
These traits do not suggest a deficit.
They suggest difference — and often, potential.
But potential requires design, not pity.
It requires:

• clearer instructions
• predictable structures
• reduction of noise and clutter
• space for deep work
• respect for preferred modes of expression

If I had judged these learners solely by social standards, I would have missed their intellectual strengths entirely.

Years before I had vocabulary, practice was already teaching me. It still is.

Ireland — Promise and Tension
When I later moved to Ireland, I was encouraged by the SEN language used in schools: professional, respectful, and grounded in care. Linguistically, inclusion is taken seriously.
Yet a structural tension remains.

What the Exam System Often Misses
Many autistic students do not struggle with learning — they struggle with speed, volume, auditory overload, and the pressure of verbal recall under time constraints. In short, they struggle with the format, not the content.

High-stakes exams often reward fluency over clarity, speed over precision, and verbal expression over analytical depth. In some cases, this disadvantages precisely the students who are capable of higher-level thought.

Our fastest learners are not always our deepest thinkers.
Some of our deepest thinkers may never appear fast in a verbal exam.
The issue is not intelligence — it is assessment design.

The Real Risk
Research suggests that roughly 2–3% of students may be autistic learners with high academic potential. These are precisely the minds who may enrich engineering, policy, science, economics and innovation. Yet they may go unnoticed — not because of inability — but because education sometimes measures the wrong qualities.
This is not an appeal for lower standards.
It is an appeal for refined standards.

What Leadership Can Do — Without System Reform🧭 Observe Function, not Diagnosis
Watch how the student responds to transitions, sensory load and ambiguity — not only to worksheets.
🧩 Make Context Explicit
If weak central coherence is present, frame the big picture visually or sequentially before analysing parts.
📝 Vary Output Modes - Allow timelines, annotation, mapping or visual reasoning—not just verbal responses.
🔕 Protect Cognitive Energy - Reduce visual noise and unnecessary sensory load. Create conditions for clarity to emerge.
🤝 Honour the Double Empathy Gap - Change how we communicate before assuming disengagement. Often, the response is startlingly clear.

These are not remedial techniques.
They are forms of sophisticated pedagogy.

Conclusion — Inclusion and Innovation
Autistic students did not make my work harder. They made it more human. They made history sharper, leadership more reflective, and education more real.
They were not problems to solve.
They were potentials waiting for structure.
If Ireland is serious about building a knowledge economy, it must recognise that:

• depth does not always move quickly
• clarity does not always arrive verbally
• some brilliant minds simply need structured doorways — not lower expectations

Inclusion is not about weakening the bar.
It is about reducing noise so the clearest minds can be heard.

I remain deeply grateful to the students — in Canada, Japan and Ireland — who taught me to see the world more intensely, and with greater respect, than before.

🧠 教育と自閉スペクトラム：日本とアイルランドの経験（要約）私は日本の高校で校長・歴史教師として働いた経験を通して、自閉スペクトラム（ASD）の生徒たちから多くの学びを得ました。彼らは「問題」ではなく、むしろ深い集中力と鋭い視点を持っていることに気づかされました。

特にSENの同僚からの言葉に影響を受けました：
「彼らが理解できないのではなく、こちらがもっと明確に伝える必要があるだけです。むしろ私たちより深く考えていることがあるのです。」
研究もこれを裏付けています。

モノトロピズム・弱い中心性・ダブルエンパシーギャップなどは「欠如」ではなく、思考の特徴であり、学びの環境を整えれば力に変わります。

アイルランドではSENの理念は強く感じますが、高い言語負荷と時間制限がある試験形式では、ASDの生徒の強みが発揮されにくい可能性があります。
教育の目的は全員を同じ形に揃えることではなく、それぞれの思考の形が生きる空間を設計することです。

日本でもアイルランドでも、その考え方を大切にしながら教えていきたいと思っています。

The False Soul of Budō: Ilyenkov, Jacobs, and the Myth of Moral Transformation
Dedicated to all who journey toward—and help to form—the soul of budō
“One is not born a person but becomes one.” — Evald Ilyenkov (in Jacobs, 2024, p. 4)
Across the global martial arts community—from the dōjō of the Japan Karate Association to the worldwide branches of Aikikai—one promise unites otherwise divided organisations: training will make you a better person. Promotional brochures speak of “character,” “discipline,” and “respect” as natural consequences of practice. Yet such rhetoric, however well-intentioned, has long since ossified into ideology. The ethical claim of budō has been reduced to a consumer guarantee, a marketing slogan assuring parents that violence will ennoble their children. What remains is a mask of morality, not its substance.
Masks and Faces
Isabel Jacobs’ essay On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality (2024) offers a remarkable lens through which to re-examine this moral mythology. Drawing on the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, she reminds us that “a person is not born with inherent qualities; their body and mind are formed through experience and social activity” (p. 1). In Ilyenkov’s dialectical anthropology, personality (lichnost’) is not a private moral kernel but a social creation--“a knot of relations that arise between individuals in collective activity” (p. 4). An ethical being is therefore never an inner possession; it is a mode of participation. By that measure, the idea that budō can individually bestow Virtue is an illusion. A karateka does not “become good” through repetition of kata any more than a bureaucrat becomes just by memorising a code of conduct.

Ilyenkov’s image of the mask (persona) and face (litso) is particularly apt. “And it also happens that the mask becomes so firmly affixed,” he wrote, “that [one’s] former personality slowly atrophies from disuse” (p. 1). The modern martial arts world is filled with such masks—ritual bows, moral slogans, the façade of humility—beneath which lie ordinary rivalries and commercial ambition. The tragedy is not hypocrisy per se but alienation: when gestures meant to express ethical life harden into empty performance, the face of practice disappears. What survives is the moral costume of budō.

The Soul of the Dōjō
Contrast this with the ethical seriousness of the ancients whom modern budō so readily invokes. Confucius warned, “To see what is right and not do it is want of courage” (Analects 2:24). Virtue (ren) was never politeness or docility; it was courageous moral discernment enacted through right relationship. Likewise, Takuan Sōhō, in The Unfettered Mind, cautioned the swordsman that “the mind must not be fixed anywhere”—ethical freedom being inseparable from mental clarity. Both thinkers understood self-cultivation as ceaseless labour, the ongoing negotiation between impulse and reason, self and other. By comparison, the modern dōjō’s moral instruction—“be respectful,” “show spirit”—appears thin, procedural, and essentially detached from reflection on what goodness entails.

Jacobs’ discussion of Ilyenkov’s concept of the soul illuminates why this hollowness matters. “The soul,” she notes, “is located not inside an individual body, but precisely outside it—in the system of real relationships … binding them as if into one body” (p. 6). The true “soul” of budō, then, is not hidden in the heart of the lone practitioner but emerges in the relational field of training: senpai and kōhai, teacher and student, attacker and receiver, all joined in the dialectic of embodied trust. Yet under capitalist conditions, that collective soul is commodified. The dōjō becomes a service provider; the practitioner, a consumer of Virtue. In Ilyenkov’s terms, this is pseudomaterialism—a mechanical imitation of ethical practice divorced from the labour of mutual recognition.

Hands, Labour, and Phronesis
For Ilyenkov, thinking and becoming are hand-work. “It is not the brain that thinks,” he writes, “but an individual entwined in a net of social relations, always mediated by material objects” (p. 13). In this light, kata and kumite—understood here not as competitive sparring but as any moment of training with another, any time two hands meet—are not moral rituals in themselves; they are opportunities for phronesis—the practical wisdom Aristotle described as the capacity “to decide what to do in light of what there is most reason to do” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.5). The bow, the strike, the parry, the shared rhythm of breath and timing—all are ethical materials through which reason can take form, but only if the practitioner engages them consciously and collectively. Without that dialogue, movement decays into etiquette, and etiquette into spectacle.

Toward the Soul of Budō
The ethical promise of budō has never been about moral elevation but about encounter—an unending practice through which one meets both the world and the self without illusion. Read through Jacobs’ Ilyenkov, this practice becomes a kind of phronesis: the lived, practical wisdom that arises only in relation, through the collective shaping of body, mind, and circumstance. Moral growth in martial arts is neither automatic nor inward—it is dialectical, a social and material creation born of struggle, reflection, and care. To practise budō ethically is to work, hand and mind together, within a community of others striving toward what Confucius called yi—rightness of action, not righteousness of appearance.

Budō will not make us better people on its own. But practised as the collective labour of recognition—as an art of relation rather than a commodity of Virtue—it may still teach us to see, in Ilyenkov’s words, “through the eyes of another person, through the eyes of all other people” (Jacobs, 2024, p. 14). Only there, in that mutual gaze, does the true face of budō appear.

Postscript
This idea has been germinating in my mind since my budō teacher, Miyase-sensei, first planted it there over fifteen years ago. Sensei is gone, yet I continue to learn from the kindness he embodied and from his unwavering commitment to excellence. What he taught through presence, patience, and precision remains a living reminder that the soul of budō is formed not in words, but in the quiet discipline of care.

References

• Aristotle (2011), Nicomachean Ethics. London: University of Chicago Press.
• Confucius (2017). The Analects, trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Jacobs, I. (2024). On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality. Berlin: Brill.
• Takuan Sōhō (1986) The Unfettered Mind, trans. William Scott Wilson. Tokyo: Kodansha.

日本語要約（要旨）本稿は、イリェンコフ（Evald Ilyenkov）の人格論をイザベル・ジェイコブズ（Isabel Jacobs, 2024）の解釈を通して再読し、「武道を学べば人間的に成長できる」という現代武道の道徳的神話を批判的に検討するものである。
多くの武道団体や道場は、稽古によって「良い人間」になれると主張する。しかし、著者はそれを理念的・商業的なスローガンに過ぎないとみなし、倫理的実践の空洞化を指摘する。イリェンコフによれば、人間の人格（личность）は生まれつき備わるものではなく、社会的活動のなかで形成される「関係の結び目（knot）」である。したがって、徳や人格は個人の内面にあるのではなく、他者との共同的な行為を通して生まれるものである。
この観点からすれば、武道の本質的な修行とは、孤立した自己鍛錬ではなく、関係的・社会的な実践である。型（kata）や組手（kumite）は、競技的な技術ではなく、二人の身体と心が交わる瞬間、つまり「二つの手が出会う」場として理解されるべきである。そこにおいて初めて、アリストテレスが説いた実践的知（phronesis）——状況に応じて最も妥当な行為を判断する知恵——が生まれる。
また、孔子の「義（yi）」や沢庵宗彭の「心はどこにも止まってはならぬ」という教えを引用しつつ、著者は古代思想における道徳的修養の深さを現代武道の表層的な「礼節」教育と対比する。真の「武道の魂」は、個人の内面に宿るのではなく、師弟・先輩後輩・稽古相手など、他者との関係性のなかで形づくられる「共同的思考の身体」であると結論づける。
本稿は、武道を「より良い人間になる手段」としてではなく、人間と人間が共に人格を形成し合う社会的・倫理的な営みとして再評価するよう呼びかける。著者は、武道が「他者の眼を通して世界を見る」力を与えるときにこそ、その真の顔—--the true face of budō——が現れると説く。

How Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek shaped the earliest Christian names — and what is lost and found in translation.
When I was growing up in 1970s Catholic Ireland, our First Communion preparation was steeped in rhythm and repetition. We learned the “three prayers before” and the “three prayers after” Communion — short, heartfelt acts of faith, hope, and thanksgiving, recited in the half-whispered piety of school chapels. I remember them vividly still. There was a sense of order in those prayers, a linguistic and spiritual patterning that made the sacred familiar. In many ways, those childhood cadences shaped how I later came to think about language itself — how words, repeated and translated, form bridges between worlds.

That recollection resurfaced recently when I began to think again about the names that shaped the early Church. We so often take them for granted: Jesus, Peter, James, John. Yet every one of these names is the endpoint of a linguistic journey — translated, transliterated, softened and reshaped as Christianity moved from a small Semitic-speaking community in first-century Palestine to the Greek- and Latin-speaking world of the empire. In recovering the original forms of those names, we rediscover not only linguistic history but the deep humanity of early Christianity itself: multilingual, hybrid, and ever in translation.

The Name of Jesus: from Yehoshua to Yeshua to Iēsous
The name we say as Jesus has travelled an extraordinary path. Its root lies in the Hebrew Yehoshua (יְהוֹשֻׁעַ) — “Yahweh is salvation.” That name, familiar to readers of the Old Testament as Joshua, belonged to the successor of Moses who led the Israelites into the Promised Land. Over time, in the spoken Aramaic of Galilee, the name was shortened to Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ), the everyday form that Mary, Joseph, and his neighbours would have used.

When the Gospels were later written in Greek, Yeshua was rendered as Iēsous (Ἰησοῦς), since Greek lacked a “sh” sound and required a masculine ending. Latin writers then transliterated this as Iesus, which in turn became Jesus once the letter “J” emerged in late medieval English.

Thus, the name’s lineage runs:
Yehoshua → Yeshua → Iēsous → Iesus → Jesus.
When we say “Jesus,” we are therefore speaking an English descendant of an Aramaic name, itself rooted in Hebrew. Theologically, this connection is striking. Just as Joshua of the Old Testament led God’s people into the promised land, so Jesus of the New Testament leads humanity into salvation. The name itself encodes that continuity of purpose.

In daily life, though, there was nothing exotic about it. “Yeshua” was a common Galilean name. Mary would have called across the courtyard, “Yeshua, bar Yosef!” — “Jesus, son of Joseph!” To hear the name in its original language is to recover the ordinariness of the Incarnation: divinity spoken in the language of market stalls and village homes.

Names in a Multilingual World
The same linguistic complexity shapes the names of the Twelve Apostles. Galilee in the first century was a place of overlapping tongues — Aramaic in daily speech, Hebrew in Scripture and prayer, Greek in trade and administration, and some Latin in military and legal contexts.
As a result, many apostles bore both Semitic and Greek names, reflecting the bilingual world in which they lived. Andrew (Greek Andreas) and Philip (Greek Philippos, “lover of horses”) carry overtly Greek names, while others, such as Peter (Kefa, meaning “rock”), retain Semitic roots.

The following table offers an overview of the best-attested forms:
English NameOriginal (Aramaic / Hebrew)Meaning / Note
JesusYeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ)“God saves” — everyday Aramaic form of Yehoshua.
Peter
Kefa (כֵּיפָא)“Rock.” Greek Petros is a translation of Kefa.
AndrewAndreas (Greek)
“Manly.” A Hellenised name, possibly reflecting bilingual identity.
James (the Greater)
Ya‘aqov bar ZZebdi. Literally“Jacob, son of Zebedee.” “James” evolved from Iacobus → Jacome → James.
John
Yohanan (יוֹחָנָן)“God is gracious.” Common in both Hebrew and Aramaic.
PhilipPhilippos (Greek)“Lover of horses.”
Bartholomew
Bar-Talmai (בַּר-תַּלְמַי)“Son of Talmai.” Possibly the same person as Nathanael (Netan’el, “Gift of God”).
Thomas (Didymus)
Toma (תּוֹמָא)“Twin.” Greek Didymos means the same.
Matthew (Levi)
Mattai / Mattityahu“Gift of Yahweh.” Tax collector and evangelist.
James (the Less)
Ya‘aqov bar Halfai“Jacob, son of Alphaeus.” Distinguished by family line.
Thaddeus / Jude
Yehuda Taddai“Praise” or “thanksgiving.” Sometimes “Judas son of James.”
Simon the Zealot
Shim‘on ha-Qan‘an“Simon the Zealous.” From qan‘an (“zealous”), not “Canaanite.”
Judas Iscariot
Yehuda Ish Qeriyot“Judah, man of Kerioth.” His epithet identifies his hometown.

Two Judases, Not One
The repetition of the name Judas (from Yehuda, meaning “praise”) caused early confusion. There were, in fact, two men named Judas among the Twelve:

1. Judas Iscariot (Yehuda Ish Qeriyot) — “the man from Kerioth,” remembered for his betrayal of Jesus.
2. Judas, son of James (Yehuda bar Ya‘aqov) — also called Thaddeus or Lebbaeus in some Gospel lists. This second Judas is honoured as St Jude, patron of lost causes.

Both bore the same original name; only translation and emotional history separate Jude from Judas in English. The Greek form Ioudas applied to both. Later translators preferred to reserve “Jude” for the faithful apostle to avoid association with betrayal.
This is a clear example of how translation carries memory: the same name, differently rendered, encodes two moral trajectories.

Jesus and Joshua, James and Jacob
A similar confusion surrounds Jesus, Joshua, James, and Jacob.
As noted, Jesus derives from Yeshua / Yehoshua — the same name as Joshua, son of Nun. In English, we use “Joshua” for the Old Testament figure and “Jesus” for the New Testament figure, though the original names were identical.

Likewise, James is historically Jacob. The Hebrew Ya‘aqov became Greek Iakobos, then Latin Iacobus and finally “James” through French and English phonetic shifts. Thus, both James the Greater and James the Less were literally “Jacob, son of Zebedee” and “Jacob, son of Alphaeus.” Our English Bibles preserve a double translation: “Jacob” in the Old Testament, “James” in the New, though the name itself never changed.

These linguistic quirks remind us how deeply translation shapes theology. “Jesus” and “Joshua,” “James” and “Jacob” — all are linguistic cousins, their differences the product of history rather than meaning.

“Christ Jesus” or “Jesus Christ”?
Another subtlety arises with the title Christ.
“Christ” is not a surname but a title — the Greek Christos (Χριστός) meaning “Anointed One,” a direct translation of the Hebrew / Aramaic Mashiach / Mshiha (מְשִׁיחָא) — Messiah.
In Aramaic and Hebrew syntax, titles typically precede the personal name:
Mshiha Yeshua — “Messiah Jesus.”

When the early Church translated this into Greek, the order was often reversed to match Greek idiom: Iēsous Christos — “Jesus the Christ.”

Interestingly, Paul sometimes retained the Semitic order: Christos Iēsous — “Christ Jesus” — a phrasing that appears in several of his letters. This is more than stylistic preference. It reflects Paul’s theological emphasis: he speaks from the perspective of the risen Messiah revealed as Jesus, rather than the earthly Jesus later recognised as Messiah.

Both forms are valid, but “Christ Jesus” preserves the Aramaic pattern underlying Christian confession.

Paul: Apostle, But Not of the Twelve
Paul’s own name (Paulos, Latin Paulus, meaning “small” or “humble”) illustrates yet another dimension of linguistic transition. Born Saul of Tarsus (Sha’ul in Hebrew), he was both Jewish and Roman. After his conversion, he adopted his Roman name, Paulus, as he began to preach among Greek-speaking Gentiles.

He is frequently called “the Apostle Paul”, yet strictly speaking, he was not one of the Twelve. Those twelve were appointed directly by Jesus during His ministry, symbolising the twelve tribes of Israel. Paul, by contrast, was commissioned by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus.

He calls himself “an apostle not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:1). Early Christians thus distinguished between the Twelve Apostles and apostles by vocation, such as Paul, Barnabas, and later Junia. The Greek title apostolos means “one who is sent.” In this broader sense, Paul’s apostleship is unquestioned — but he remains outside the symbolic Twelve.

Names as Carriers of Faith
To trace these linguistic paths is to rediscover how profoundly early Christianity was shaped by translation. The Gospel was born in Aramaic, written in Greek, canonised in Latin, and preached in the vernacular tongues of Europe. Each stage left traces on the words we still use.
To say Jesus Christ in English is to speak a phrase that has journeyed across four languages and two millennia. Behind it lies Yeshua Mshiha — the sound of first-century Galilee; then Iēsous Christos — the language of the Septuagint and Paul; and Iesus Christus — the Latin of Jerome and Augustine. Every layer testifies to faith translated, adapted, and handed on.

Language, like liturgy, never stands still. The prayers whispered before Communion in 1970s Ireland were already distant echoes of older tongues. Yet, just as those simple Irish devotions carried the essence of gratitude and awe, so too the translated names — Jesus, Peter, John — carry the living resonance of the originals.
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In recovering their proper forms — Yeshua, Kefa, Yohanan — we are reminded that faith is always embodied in human speech, local accents, and changing idioms. The divine Word, after all, became flesh and language.
Dr James M. Hatch
(c) 2025