TDA Names Seven to New External Advisory Panel on the Windows — Kajiura of Wan'yo University to Chair

At a briefing on the morning of the 25th, the Dimensional Survey Division announced the composition of the external advisory panel it had flagged on Sept. 8. The chair will be Etsuko Kajiura, 58, a professor at Wan'yo University specializing in information and bioethics, who has long worked on the question of "how much of what we happen to see, we are entitled to keep watching." Also on the panel is Ikuko Tatewaki, 51, the constitutional law professor at Tokei Law University who has appeared in these pages before, along with one window-keeper representative from the Dimensional Survey Division, one appraiser from the Third Appraisal Center, and two citizens chosen through public recruitment. At their own request, the names of the window keeper, the appraiser, and the two public members are being withheld for now.

The Dimensional Survey Division laid out four items for the first meeting's agenda: the tower structure at Window 2, "the Sea of Mechanisms," which split from one into two on the 17th and was later recorded in "call-and-response" on the 23rd; the individual known as "the Watcher" at Window 3, "the Slime Marsh," which approached the boundary glass more closely than ever on the night of the 18th, its color fading and then flickering; the settlement whose shadowy figures at Window 4, "the Giant Plains," moved north and appeared to complete a relocation on the 15th; and the resemblance, still unresolved, between a drift object recovered at Window 5, "the Sword Country," and the "ritual tablets" of Lineage 7, "the Lit City." A division official told this reporter, "From this summer into the fall, we kept accumulating cases where the result wasn't 'now we understand' but 'now there's more we don't understand.' We judged it was time to discuss them together rather than handle each one separately."

Kajiura, speaking after the briefing, said, "I think this panel's job is less about deciding things than about setting up a process that keeps us from deciding too quickly." Asked about the ethics debate at the center of this beat — whether it's right to keep watching — she said, "The fact that we have no evidence the other side recognizes us is, I think, already an answer of sorts. The moment we get a real answer, this beat stops being what it currently is." Asked how she came to be approached for the role, she laughed and said, "There are other people with a similar specialty. I suspect I was just someone who seemed unlikely to say no."

Beyond the ethics questions, the panel will also take up the commercial line-drawing around window observation — the opening of the previously reported window-side café and the problem of unlicensed knockoff window merchandise. The division has been considering guidelines for private use of its materials, and the official said, "Before we write guidelines, we needed a venue to first sort out what actually needs protecting." TDA Director Makoto Hiura commented, "I understand this as a structure for not rushing to call something understood before it is."

A specific date for the first meeting is still being arranged and is unlikely to be confirmed before October. Analysis of the Window 2 and Window 3 recordings remains with outside research institutions, and the division said, "Some material will be ready in time for the panel, and some won't." What is actually happening on the other side of the five windows remains, today, still mostly unknown. Even so, the official closed the interview by saying, "I don't think it's entirely a bad thing that the unknowns keep growing. It's also evidence that the world is wide."