James W. Heisig is a permanent research fellow of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (Nagoya, Japan), where he has been since 1978 and which he served as director from 1991 to 2001 Helmut Morsbach is a social psychologist by training who has been involved with the study of Japanese for most of his academic career. In 1993 he left his post of Reader in Social Psychology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, to become Professor of Intercultural Communication at Shiga National University in Hikone, Japan. Now retired, he continues to write and to work on "Seminars for Intellectual Pleasure" Kurebayashi Kazue obtained her Master's Degree in Comparative Education at the University of Glasgow, Scotland and has had extensive experience in teaching English and Japanese.