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jp0000001

2013/03/17

World records no joke to frustrated Pakistanis

ISLAMABAD - One young contender created the world’s largest sequin mosaic using 325,000 of the sparkly discs. Two other youths achieved 123 consecutive badminton passes in one minute. And 1,450 participants broke the record for the most people arm wrestling. Such are the skills that Guinness World Records are made of in Pakistan, where thousands of young people are groomed to establish their unique feats for posterity. Last week, the contestants came together for the annual Punjab Youth Festival to show their stuff — many in athletics, but others in downright quirky displays, including one young boy who achieved fame by kicking 50 coconuts from on top of the heads of a row of people. It seems Pakistan has become a world record-creating machine, with the coordinated effort reaping an impressive 23 world records, event organizers boasted. The push for inclusion of Pakistanis in the venerable Guinness World Records entries (which began in book form in 1955) stems in part from festival organizers’ desire to boost the image of a country often associated with militancy, religious strife and economic decline. There is a patriotic element, as well: Last October, for instance, 42,813 Pakistanis got together in a Lahore hockey stadium to belt out the national anthem and create yet another world record for the most people singing their country’s anthem. Days later, another 24,200 people held green and white boxes — the colors of the national flag of Pakistan — to set the world record for creating the largest human flag. Although some of the records might seem amusing to others — coconut kicking champ Mohammad Rashid of Karachi last week claimed his fourth world record by breaking 34 pine boards in 32 seconds with his head — the competitions were no laughing matter to participants. Usman Anwar, director of the Punjab Youth Festival, explained that the kids have been training for eight months. “We started at the neighborhood and village level so that children could come out and participate,” said Anwar. “Our main objective was to inculcate interest for sports in the public.” Young people from over 55,000 neighborhood and village councils vied for a chance to compete in the games. “We were able to select the best of the best to train for the world records,” said Anwar. Because of terrorism, political upheaval and widespread unemployment, many young people appear to have little hope for the future, says Hafeez Rehman, a professor in the anthropology department at Quaid-i-Azam University in the capital, Islamabad. Sports competitions, Rehman said, create an opportunity for youth to excel personally and also to improve Pakistan’s image. “We have energetic youth. Pakistan has more than 55 million young people. It becomes an asset for the country,” he added. The festival itself has become part of the record-setting mania. It was recognized for having more participants — 3.3 million, most of whom registered online, according to Anwar — constituting a world record for sporting events.

india;pakistan;guinness

jp0000004

2013/03/13

Photo report: FOODEX Japan 2013

FoodEx is the largest trade exhibition for food and drinks in Asia, with about 70,000 visitors checking out the products presented by hundreds of participating companies. I was lucky to enter as press; otherwise, visitors must be affiliated with the food industry — and pay ¥5,000 — to enter. The FoodEx menu is global, including everything from cherry beer from Germany and premium Mexican tequila to top-class French and Chinese dumplings. The event was a rare chance to try out both well-known and exotic foods and even see professionals making them. In addition to booths offering traditional Japanese favorites such as udon and maguro sashimi, there were plenty of innovative twists, such as dorayaki , a sweet snack made of two pancakes and a red-bean filling, that came in coffee and tomato flavors. While I was there I was lucky to catch the World Sushi Cup Japan 2013, where top chefs from around the world were competing … and presenting a wide range of styles that you would not normally see in Japan, like the flower makizushi above.

japanese food;japan pulse;foodex

jp0000005

2013/03/25

'Abenomists' beware: Rising prices just one pitfall of spiraling yen

The Bank of Japan on Wednesday installed a new governor and two deputy governors who — in line with the wishes of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — are advocates of ultra-easy monetary policy. Attention is now focused on what specific policy actions the new central bank team will take. But while benefits, including a weaker yen and rising share prices, have materialized in anticipation of further easing, drawbacks are also starting to emerge — most notably in the form of rising prices. In a sign that a mini bubble may be at hand, condominiums in suburban Tokyo are being marketed for nearly ¥100 million per unit. Some may argue that rising prices are just part of the journey needed to end deflation. But while automakers may be offering higher bonuses to offset the rise in household expenses, employees at small and midsize companies who cannot harbor the same expectations as their bigger counterparts are going to suffer right along with those depending on pension benefits. Instead of simply raising salaries to reflect the benefits that the weak yen is bringing to their exports, automakers should try to pass along those benefits to their subcontractors — the same people they demanded price cuts from during the tough times when the currency was ascending — so the benefits of the yen’s fall can spread to wider segments of the economy. The yen was trading at ¥81.10 to the dollar when the Lower House was dissolved for the general election on Nov. 16, 2012. It has since fallen by about 20 percent, sending prices for imports, which until October had fallen for six consecutive months year on year, soaring. Import prices rose 13.2 percent in February alone. We need to realize that the falling yen is bringing both benefits — in the form of higher exports — and drawbacks, in the form of a higher cost of living. It is therefore essential that the pros and cons be weighed and compared. For households, which can’t realistically hope for substantial wage gains due to tough competition from overseas labor, the lower import prices caused by the strong yen were a blessing that strengthened their purchasing power. In macroeconomic terms, private-sector consumption and imports combined outweighed the value of exports. Failing to pay sufficient attention to the drawbacks of the yen’s fall might turn out to be the pitfall of “Abenomics.” It has to be noted that a weaker yen will also further worsen Japan’s trade balance. This is primarily because 61.6 percent of the nation’s export transactions and 77.1 percent of its import transactions were carried out in foreign currencies, according to Finance Ministry data as of January. The weaker the yen gets, the more Japan’s foreign currency-denominated trade deficits will continue to grow, prompting further outflows of Japanese income overseas. The high share of foreign currency-denominated transactions in Japan’s imports is mainly because international commodities, such as crude oil and wheat, are traded in dollars. Japanese demand in such products is reflected in international prices via the dollar. Commodity trade inside Japan is of course carried out in yen, but it has little international impact because foreign participation is so low. This situation must be quickly rectified. Other things needing rectification are the deep-rooted beliefs within the business community, especially among stockbrokers, that a lower yen automatically translates into higher share prices, or that a weak yen is good and a strong yen is bad. Right after Japan lost World War II, there was a time when we were unable to use yen to buy goods from overseas because the nation’s credibility was at rock bottom. It was crucial for Japan to accumulate dollars, which would be gladly accepted by anybody. When I landed my first job in 1956, Japan’s foreign currency reserves stood at roughly $2 billion. Earlier, they had dropped so sharply Japan could only pay for only three months’ worth of imports; they later grew to about $2 billion, thanks to special demand related to the Korean War. It was conditions like these in the postwar era that helped form Japan’s export-oriented policies and belief in the weak yen. Today, having undergone full economic development, Japan is awash in foreign currency reserves. In fact, a much of them have gone stale in the sense that the value of the dollar has shrunk from ¥360 in the early 1970s to around ¥90 now. While many people continue to believe in the benefits of a weak yen, they need to realize that under Japan’s current trade structure, its deficits increase the lower the yen drops against other currencies. What is needed is a change in mindset to the idea that both trade and overseas investment must be conducted on a yen-denominated basis. If import and export transactions are carried out in yen, there will be no need for Japan to worry about every little up and down in the exchange rates. Japan’s bid to drive the yen lower was one of the hot behind-the-scenes issues at the G-7 and G-20 meetings in Moscow in February. The G-20 statement issued on Feb. 16 made it clear that a currency depreciation war, in which countries compete to drive their own currencies lower, needs to be avoided, noting that the objective of monetary policy should be to improve economic growth. Such reactions seem natural, given that Abenomics will purportedly put an end to deflation and the strong yen. No such suspicions would emerge if Japan conducted all its trade in yen. It is essential for the government to recognize, in a balanced manner, the positive and negative effects of both a strong yen and a weak yen, and to flesh out Abenomics with concrete actions that can promote economic growth.

boj;abenomics;economics;weak yen

jp0000007

2013/04/16

Google Street Views goes inside a Fukushima school

As everyone knows, Google Street Views lets you wander around 3D visualations of remote locations, giving you that You Are There sort of experience. Last year, the Street Views team traveled to Fukushima’s Namie-machi, making it possible for everyone to experience Japan’s no-go zone. Straying from the usual Street View approach, the Google team actually went inside a building for this expedition. One of them is Ukedo Elementary School, and the images of its abandoned school rooms are heartbreaking. Namie-machi was evacuated right after the explosion of the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. The location, which suffered heavy damage from the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, is now a ghost town. Fortunately, all 77 students Ukedo Elementary school, located 500 meters from the coastline of Fukushima, were evacuated safely. Messages, probably written by students or teachers before leaving the area, can be seen written on the school’s whiteboard. This last photo shows the school gym with a banner hung to to celebrate graduation day. If you want to explore the no-go zone yourself, head over to Google Street Views.

fukushima;tsunami;earthquake;3.11;japan pulse

jp0000008

2013/04/16

The 5 p.m. bell

Dear Alice, I live in a medium-size city in Saitama Prefecture and am puzzled by a speaker system mounted on a huge pole right outside my apartment. Every evening at 5 p.m., music plays from the speakers for 20 or 30 seconds and then stops. It’s the same song every day, which I don’t recognize, and it’s really, really loud. Occasionally, there is also a public announcement from the speakers. Even if my Japanese was up to the challenge, which it’s not, I doubt I’d understand what they are saying because the sound quality is pretty bad. But it’s the music that’s really got me wondering because it comes at the same time every day, like clockwork. My Japanese coworker told me it’s so children know it’s time to stop playing and go home, but all the kids I know go to cram school and don’t head home until well after dark. So, what the heck is that music? Belinda, Saitama Prefecture Dear Belinda, What you’re hearing is colloquially referred to as the goji no chaimu (the 5 p.m. bell) but the proper term is more of a mouthful: shichōson bōsai gyōsei musen hōsō (local government disaster administration wireless broadcast), or bōsai musen (disaster wireless) for short. That naming alone should tip you off that there’s more to the music than your coworker seemed to realize. Your little evening concert is actually a daily test of an emergency broadcast system to alert citizens of dangers such as tsunamis and industrial accidents. More than 90 percent of cities, towns and villages in Japan have similar systems, but the timing of the daily test varies as does the music played. Many jurisdictions have one daily test at noon, for example, or run test broadcasts twice a day, at, say, noon and 6 p.m. in the evening. The thinking is that as long as there’s going to be a daily test, it may as well be timed so it serves some other purpose, and reminding kids to head home before dark is a popular one. In many localities the evening broadcast is timed to 5 p.m. in the winter months and 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. as the days get longer. The horn-shaped speakers may look low-tech, but in fact they are linked to a national system that can transmit warnings to local governments throughout the country in as little as seven seconds. The nationwide disaster-warning network was launched about 50 years ago, following a major earthquake in Niigata Prefecture in 1964, and has received changes and improvements over the years. The current focus is on upgrading equipment to newer digital systems. To find out more, I paid a visit to the headquarters of Fujitsu General, one of the largest manufacturers of bōsai musen systems. Sales director Tadashi Maekawa explained that the latest digital systems can do a great deal more than simply send broadcasts to speakers like the ones outside your apartment. They can also transmit simultaneous alerts to mobile phones, fax machines and devices for the hearing-impaired; insert messages into radio and television broadcasts, and even automatically post information on the local government’s Web page. Local systems can also be linked to the central government’s satellite-based J-Alert system, which was launched in 2007 to directly inform the public of various threats, including the launch of missiles by North Korea. “With the older analog systems, local governments can transmit but they can’t receive,” Maekawa explained. “But digital systems make it possible for citizens to report in via wireless telephones that are mounted on the speaker poles, for example. This can be a big help in accounting for people’s safety and directing emergency responses.” Yet only 30 percent of existing systems have been upgraded to digital, according to statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. While emergency broadcasting is the raison d’être for bōsai musen, most local governments also use them for public announcements. Where I live we get occasional announcements such as reminders to vote on election days. But apparently some local governments overuse the systems, bombarding citizens with information they’d rather receive via quieter means. “The noise of the outdoor broadcasts is definitely an issue,” Maekawa told me. Complaints dropped off after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, when people were feeling the importance of emergency broadcasts, but the noise can be bothersome, particularly for people who work at night and sleep during the day. While researching your question, I stumbled onto a website operated by an irate citizen who is chronicling the broadcast’s overuse in the town of Anamizu in Ishikawa Prefecture (population: 9,700). Every morning at 7 a.m. the town plays the following announcement: “Ohayō! Kyō mo ichinichi ganbarimashō!” (“Good morning! Let’s do our best today too!). That alone would be enough to make me move, but the town also broadcasts reminders to dispose of garbage properly, sign up for health examinations and speak kindly to children. In some cases announcements are repeated as many as five times a day, according to the site owner, who complained, “Who said living in the countryside is peaceful?” But let’s get back to music. Fujitsu General offers 32 different standards, for which they pay appropriate royalties, and will load special music on request. Top favorites for bōsai musen include “Yuyake Koyake,” a Japanese folk song, but Western numbers also rank. The town of Amakusa in Kumamoto Prefecture, for example, plays “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.” (In case you’ve forgotten, the first stanza of that American folk song ends, “Her old gray goose is dead.”) Someday, the sounds of bōsai musen may be heard outside of Japan, as manufacturers and disaster-management experts are looking at its export potential. As we unfortunately learned in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, not all governments have the means to warn their citizens quickly,. Emergency broadcasting is one area in which Japan has special expertise. I think it would be nice if that could be made available to the world.

5 p.m. chime;disaster warning

jp0000009

2013/04/28

Disaster long lurked amid Japan's isolation

“The evolution of political thought in this relatively isolated island nation during the period in question is unique to the point of being somewhat freakish.” This gives a reader pause. Freakish? The judgment is historian Hiroshi Watanabe’s in “A History of Japanese Political Thought, 1600-1901,” his 2010 book whose title defines “the period in question.” “Nor,” he adds, “did it (Japanese political thought) have much impact on thought outside the Japanese archipelago. In this sense, it may call to mind the strange animals of the Galapagos Islands, pursuing their own evolutionary path.” Japan, Galapagos: The association seems irresistible and recurs frequently, expressing bewilderment, frustration, amusement, sometimes admiration at Japan’s tendency, even today, to be startlingly different from other “Western” developed democracies. Early-modern Japan was truly a political and cultural Galapagos. Apart from a handful of Chinese and Dutch traders restricted to an island off Nagasaki, it was a “closed country”; Japanese could not leave, foreigners could not enter — on pain of death. Seventeenth- and 18th-century Japan to all intents and purposes was not part of the world. It was a world unto itself. The Tokugawa shoguns, its rulers from 1603 to 1867, were acting in self-defense against foreign powers they saw, reasonably enough, as predatory — not that Japan was a shining live-and-let-live exception, as its 1592 invasion of Korea showed; but the issue was practical, not moral. Isolation, deemed the best defense, was ruthlessly imposed. In a sense it came naturally. Geographical isolation helps explain why Japan circa A.D. 300 had barely graduated from the stone age to primitive agriculture. That might have sounded a warning, had the shoguns been historians. Isolation has a price: backwardness. Inevitably? Perhaps not. Was Tokugawa Japan backward? To U.S. sailors who came in “black ships” to pry it open in the 1850s, it seemed so; they vaunted their “triumphant revelation to a partially enlightened people of the success of science and enterprise.” On the other hand … there is always an “other hand.” Tokugawa Japan was in intellectual ferment, but one occurring in a vacuum. These years correspond to Europe’s Age of Reason, its Enlightenment. Fresh air! Experiment, observation, free thought. A thing was no longer true merely because Aristotle or the Church had said it. Philosophers began by doubting everything they thought they knew. They sought new knowledge. They went back to square one. They challenged each other, spurred each other on, built on each others’ findings. This was an intellectual, created “new world” to match the physical, discovered New World: America. All this Japan missed. “Ours is a world in which living things are confined and regimented as if dead things” — so wrote a despairing artist, scholar and samurai named Watanabe Kazan, one whose restlessness in the shuttered little world he was born into led to his suicide in 1841 at age 48. In 1821, while traveling on domain business, he stopped at the island of Enoshima off present-day Kanagawa Prefecture, and wrote in his diary: “How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!” Kazan was one of a coterie of “Dutch scholars” — so called because the Dutch traders and Dutch books were their prime sources — who congregated in Edo (now Tokyo) to share what little they knew of Western science, gunnery, medicine, history, geography and politics. Their talk was considered subversive by an absolutist regime determined at all costs to remain absolute. Watanabe barely escaped execution — he was rusticated instead. He and his friends of course represented the future, though few at the time would have seen that. To most of its subjects, Tokugawa rule must have seemed unshakable. What preoccupied the intellectual mainstream? This question in particular: Is the nation’s true path the Confucian Way, or the Japanese Way? Watanabe, the historian, has a beautiful passage about time machines: “Investigating the past, one is often seized with the desire to board a time machine to walk the city streets and meet the people of some specific period. … In fact we already have a highly advanced time machine: the written word.” Reading past thinkers’ works is a salutary reminder of how the world is subject to wildly varying interpretations. Was Confucius a fool, and his Tokugawa followers dupes for believing all problems were at bottom moral; that disasters natural, political and economic occurred only when sage-rulers failed to govern according to rites and music? Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725), a shogunal adviser and great Confucian thinker, wrote: “Rites and music are not properly practiced, and there are places where the qi (spirit) of heaven and earth is disturbed. Thus, without the assistance of the gods and spirits, it is possible that the principle of germination cannot be achieved” — an admonitory reference to Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune’s failure to produce an heir. But the swelling ranks of anti-Confucian nativist thinkers sneered at this Chinese frippery. One, Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714), wrote, “The path of the soldier is a deceitful one. Depending upon the circumstances of the moment, one might trick or betray one’s allies, usurp the spoils won by others, or throw the land into turmoil and seize it from above: As a matter of military tactics, there is nothing wrong with this. It is the way of warfare in Japan. If one adopted the Chinese Way, it would be difficult to conduct warfare in the Japanese manner. Japan is a martial nation; it would be impossible to triumph here following the undissembling and soft customs of the Chinese.” So much for rites and music. The trouble was, Tokugawa Japan was a martial nation at peace . It’s an impossible contradiction. The looming crisis was unseen but inevitable.

japan;disaster;galapagos;isolation

jp0000011

2013/04/30

J-blip: Taro Aso 'gang style' t-shirts

When Finance Minister Taro Aso set off for a G20 meeting earlier this year, he did it in style, sporting a natty felt hat, pulled rakishly down over one eye. No sooner had he stepped out in public in this getup than Twitter was abuzz with comments celebrating the finance minister’s “gangster style.” Now the outfit has even been immortalized on “Gang Style” t-shirts , sold by Osaka-based brand t-shirts Trinity . The t-shirts have been a big hit, inspiring the company to bring out Taro Aso “gang style” sweatshirts and tote bags. The t-shirts are only ¥2,980, but if you’d like to get your hands on a hat similar to the one Aso wore, you’re going to have to shell out quite a bit more. Business Media reported that sources close to Aso have said that the hat is probably made by Italian brand Borsalino . The company itself says that a hat in a similar style to Aso’s retails for around ¥90,000. It seems that gangster style comes at a hefty price!

taro aso;t-shirts;japan pulse

jp0000012

2013/04/08

Team Abe's grand plan leaves ghosts in charge of a haunted house

As I observe Team Abe in action at the helm of the Bank of Japan and elsewhere, a rather terrifying passage from a poem by William Hughes Mearns comes to mind: “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away . . .” There were no surprises in the BOJ’s announcement last week about the new monetary policy package formed at its Policy Board meeting. Quantitative easing will be carried out on an unprecedented scale. Buying up of Japanese government bonds will also take place at record-breaking levels. That buying will find new focus on the longer end of the yield curve spectrum. For all intents and purposes this is no longer a central bank. This is an agent of the government studiously intent on securing its master’s approval. An additional worry in this context is that the BOJ Policy Board’s decision to go for Team Abe’s gung-ho approach to monetary management was apparently unanimous. Was there not one person among the policymaking body who felt inclined to contest the Team Abe approach? We do indeed live in sad and strange times if that was the case. The more we discover about Team Abe’s approach to economic management, the stronger my image grows of the man on the stairs who wasn’t there. For there is a curious touch of unreality in all of the measures and pronouncements that emanate from these people. They seem to have no feel for what is actually happening on the economic ground. All that they are concerned about is how to “regain” Japan. This is very backward-looking of them. The Japan that they seem to want to regain belongs in the 1960s. Thus preoccupied with the past, they are incapable of placing themselves in the here and now. Hence, they are the people on the stair who are not there. The “there” they occupy is not the same as ours. Because the people who are not there are out of touch with real people, their only partner in dialogue is the markets. No wonder the not-there people are so intent on appeasement. They seem to be confusing market-pleasing with policymaking. The markets know this and will always be clamoring for more. The more you give them, the greedier they get. The not-there people have allowed themselves to be taken hostage by the gluttonous. It is a frightening thing to have to place economic management in the hands of people who are not there. Not being there, they cannot know what people are really feeling, what their real problems are and how they are trying to deal with them. Not being there, they cannot feel other people’s pain. There is something altogether heartless in what they say and seem to want to do. Mindlessness has always been a problem with Japanese politics, and there is no reason to assume otherwise about this government. The almost automatic resort to Rip van Winkle economics testifies to that effect. To this great tradition has now been added the element of heartless unconcern that exhorts self-help and looks coldly on a caring society. Mindlessness is a misfortune but heartlessness is sin. To be saddled with a government that is equipped with both is sheer disaster for a nation. Yet what else can one expect from people who are not there? If only we could wish them away. William Hughes Mearns received inspiration for his piece from a reputedly haunted house where the man who wasn’t there was supposed to make his nonappearance. Japan is now that haunted house.

boj;bank of japan;abenomics;central bank

jp0000013

2013/04/01

April Fool's in Japan — the joke's on you

April Fool’s Day doesn’t have very deep roots in Japanese culture, but obviously branding creatives and open-minded corporations are seeing the potential benefits of making potential customers laugh. Rather than pulling a fast one, these pranks put their silliness up-front and center. > Introducing the iKA Organic Ebook from publisher Kodansha. Drawing its power from the squid’s natural bioenergy, there’s no need to recharge the batteries. The iKA’s long tentacles serve as a handy neck-strap, it glows in the dark and has endless supply of ink. The iKA is provided via a subscription service, which delivers a fresh squid each week (note: size and weight may vary). You get the added bonus of being able to cook and eat the old one (special squid dish recipe available to early buyers!). How’s that for eco-friendly technology? Don’t you hate how unwieldy pizzas can be? Dominos’s new canned pizza is not only compact, it’s long-lasting, so you can stock up your bomb shelter and never go without a slice! Need something with a bit more substance? How about Hanamaru Udon ‘s giant squid, caught daily by harpoon fishing and fried up as tempura, from That will be ¥87,000, please. Taking aim at Line, the runaway hit app of the past year, search site Goo offers Silky , the old favorite for free and simple communication. And you can send silly stamps too! And yes, it’s biodegradable tech, too? We have to give full props to Eiga.com , a movie info site, for its execution of Yoda’s account on Forcebook. They got every detail right … from George Lucas friending J.J. Abrams to Anakin Skywalker changing his account name to Darth Vader to R2D2 denial of Jar Jar Bink’s friend request. One ad shows has Imperial Storm Troopers raising funds to rebuild Death Star. May the forceful guffaw go with you. By the way, did you spot this one in The Japan Times . I mean we highly admire professor Mogura Tataki’s mission to eliminate society’s bias against lefties but something tells us we’re being pawned. (Research by Shinjin Ono and Kazuhiro Kobayashi)

smartphones;phones;au;pizza;ebooks;japan pulse;e-readers

jp0000014

2013/04/14

Casting a little light on fireflies

If dragonflies are the insects of Japan’s day, then the mysterious, magical fireflies are its bugs of the night. About now, firefly grubs will be emerging from rivers around the country. They’ve been living in the mud in larval form for the last year, and are ready to start the final, crucial part of their lives. They will pupate, and in June the chrysalis will split and the adult firefly — actually a beetle, because like all beetles they have a hard wing case while flies don’t — will emerge. Fireflies have an unmistakable and quite beautiful feature: They generate their own light source through a process known as bioluminescence. This phenomenon is actually a means of communication between male and female fireflies — but what no one knew until now was that, in Japan, it is the females who call the shots. In North American species, a male advertises for females by flashing his light on and off. However, in the case of the Asian firefly (Luciola parvula) — the one found in Japan — it is the females who do the advertising. It would be going too far to draw any parallels with human sexual behavior in North America and Japan, for instance, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone does: Fireflies cause more buzz, much of it ill-informed, than most insects in Japan. The two main species here, known as the Genji firefly and the Heike firefly, are named after two clans (aka Minamoto and Taira, respectively) who fought the Battle of Dannoura at sea off the southern tip of Honshu in 1185. The souls of the dead samurai were supposed to have transmuted into fireflies of the two different species. Not a bad place to go, I suppose, and quite samurai-like, as the adults live brief lives of only two weeks or so. That they are deeply loved in Japan is nicely illustrated in a new study on firefly communication. The first author, Hideo Takatsu, is a member of the Aichi Fireflies Society — indeed, that’s the official affiliation given on the paper. His co-authors, more conventionally, are affiliated with Keio and Shizuoka universities. Takatsu and colleagues suspected that female Heike fireflies signal to males, and set about building an electronic firefly to test the idea. By mimicking female flashing behavior with their fake firefly, Takatsu’s team showed that females specifically flash to attract males (Journal of Ethology, DOI: 10.1007/s10164-012-0332-2). In other species of firefly, biologists know that females choose males on the basis of the signals the males send. This sets up opposing evolutionary pressures on the males. Natural selection acts to try to reduce the amount of light the males emit, as predators use the light to locate the insects and eat them. But sexual selection works in the other direction, to increase the light in order to attract more females, have more sex and sire more offspring. Sexual selection, in this case, turns out to be more powerful, and signaling by phosphorescent light has evolved despite the dangers of predation. Sexual selection usually acts strongly on males because they have more to gain from mating many times, whereas the benefits to females from multiple sexual partners are less obvious. In the famous example, it’s why male peacocks are colorful and elaborate but the females are drab. So what’s happening here? For one thing, the study shows the diversity of behavior in these Asian insects. Females seem to be actively encouraging males to approach. They can even mate without the male signaling in response. “Spontaneous female flashes can lead to copulation without male flashes,” Takatsu and colleagues write. Why would they do that? Could it be that they are more desperate to mate than other species of firefly? One reason may be food, or more precisely, resources. Fireflies sip dewdrops of water from plants but don’t eat for the short time they are adults, relying on the stores of fat they laid down when they were larvae. (Gruesome aside: The larvae feed on mud snails, biting the snails and injecting digestive juices.) Additionally, however, males offer some valuable victuals in the form of a nutritious protein capsule that they transfer along with their sperm when they mate. Females can turn the capsule into eggs, and increase their output by doing so. So females have good reason to want to attract males. It doesn’t take much energy to produce a flash of light — it’s made by a chemical in the abdomen called luciferin which is stored in cells lined with a reflective layer of crystals. And though there is the risk of attracting predators, there is the potential reward of a rich male. It’s no surprise that fireflies are so loved in Japan. There are firefly-watching events and, as we have seen, firefly societies. High school students sing “Hotaru no Hikari” (“Glow of a Firefly”) on graduation — to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The words to “Hotaru no Hikari” relate how ultradiligent students work by the light of the firefly, but no doubt the ephemeral nature of the animal — burning bright for a short time before dying — also appeals to emotional teenagers. It certainly appeals to me. I once tried to learn a little of the language of the firefly — you could call it “fireflyese” — and shared a magical moment with some in the wilds of Ibaraki Prefecture. If come June you are lucky enough to see these most beguiling of insects, try “talking” to them with a small flashlight. Even without a dialogue, it’s a marvelous sight. How much more intriguing to imagine the evolutionary pressures and struggles — the romance and battling — behind the beautiful display. And as is so often the case in stories like this, it ends with a warning. Overuse of pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, together with habitat loss, has hit populations of fireflies hard. They need clean water and undisturbed streams to live and grow. See them while you can.

battle of dannoura;firefly;hoteru

jp0000015

2013/05/03

J-blip: The secret behind Disney + Gogo no Koucha

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nf5kCEOYpg Kirin is currently collaborating with Disney to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Disneyland. Not only are they giving away a grand prize of a 30-night stay for four at the DisneySea Hotel Miracosta, year-long passes to both parks and a resort giftcard worth a million yen, but each flavor of their popular Gogo no Koucha (“Afternoon Tea”) features a different character on the package: the straight tea has Mickey Mouse; lemon has Winnie the Pooh; and milk has Donald Duck. Recently, an observant fan noticed there are different numbers on each bottle and decided to investigate. To his delight he found 60 numbers on the the straight tea version and 18 on the lemon tea and milk tea. His interest piqued, he bought all of them and took photos of each in sequence. Although it is hinted at on Gogo no Koucha’s site , only a clever and dedicated tea drinker would go to all this trouble. By lining up each “frame” in video form, he revealed short animations of each character. While we’d like to praise this creative campaign, it’s a bit ironic considering Disney just laid off nine veteran hand-animators .

animation;disney;kirin;japan pulse;gogo no koucha

jp0000016

2013/05/05

Yakuza links put nation at added nuclear risk

On April 15, two alleged terrorists in Boston killed three people, injured more than 170 others and terrified a nation — for about $100 it cost them to modify pressure cookers into bombs. We should be glad they didn’t come to Japan, where they may have been able to explode a ready-made nuclear dirty bomb, kill untold thousands, render huge swaths of the country uninhabitable — and get paid by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) in the process. I wish I were kidding. Japan has more than 50 gigantic nuclear “pressure cookers” ripe for exploitation by terrorists. And they wouldn’t even have to lay siege to the facilities. Instead, they could just walk into a nuclear plant and leave with enough weapons-grade plutonium for a small atomic device — which later could be detonated wherever they chose. How? In Japan, getting access to a nuclear power plant is very simple: fill out a job application. It is now more than two years since the start of the nuclear crisis following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, and there are still no mandatory background checks for workers at its nuclear facilities. After the three reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear complex in March 2011, it became clear that Tepco, the plant’s operator, was allowing members of Japan’s organized crime groups, the yakuza, to staff the well-paid cleanup — just as they had been allowed into plants long before then. Indeed, members and associates of the Sumiyoshi-kai (Kanto) and Kudo-kai (Kyushu) mobs have been arrested for their roles supplying labor to Tepco and its Kansai cousin, Kepco. So the dirty secret that yakuza-linked workers and companies have long sustained Japan’s nuclear industry — along with yakuza members themselves, ex-convicts, wanted criminals, and drug addicts working there — is now public knowledge. Although many yakuza groups claim to have a protective role in society, most of their members are sociopathic felons who would commit theft, assault or murder to make a little money. And if you consider the black-market value of a little plutonium, you may feel a tad uneasy knowing such people have long had access to it — and can still get their hands on nuclear materials. Don’t worry, though: Last month the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said a panel will be set up to discuss atomic energy security issues, and it will consider introducing a system to investigate the backgrounds of workers to avoid acts of terrorism at nuclear plants. Specifically, it seems the panel will examine ways to check whether nuclear facility employees are drug addicts or have a criminal record, among other issues, in order to screen out anyone who could potentially get involved in terrorism. The panel will comprise NRA Commissioner Kenzo Oshima and outside experts. However, one expert who will not be on the panel is Haruki Madarame, former chief of the now-dissolved Nuclear Safety Commission. He is currently being investigated by prosecutors for alleged criminal negligence. But hey, let’s not dwell on the past. The good news is that the NRA is thinking about making nuclear plants safer in the future. They may even reach the same conclusions that the Nuclear Security Expert Commission of the Atomic Energy Commission announced … in September 2011. Of course, why take action when you can spend more time debating about taking action? The AEC makes recommendations for nuclear energy policy. However, that 2011 report, titled “Basic Nuclear Security Assurance,” doesn’t give a positive view of Japan’s countermeasures. There, the words “internal threats” appear five times in 14 pages of attached materials. And, in a section headed “Lessons of Fukushima,” it notes: “It is clear there were defects in the management of those leaving and entering the site from the start of the accident. … Licensed (nuclear facility) operators need to first strictly enforce measures to keep suspicious persons from sneaking into the facilities and strengthen countermeasures against threats from within.” The report, without irony, also notes that criminal acts such as the theft of nuclear materials to build a dirty bomb, or the destruction of facilities, “should be detected, prevented, and stopped so as to cause as little negative impact as possible to life, physical health, property, society and the environment.” It also recommends that law enforcement, regulators and the power plant operators share information to make sure that thieves, saboteurs or criminals do not have access to the plants or related facilities. But it stops short of mandating background checks. The United States has long had a screening system in place, but Japan has delayed taking similar measures due to privacy concerns and “respect for human rights.” Meanwhile, Tepco is still unable to locate scores of workers who entered the disaster zone. Maybe, though, we shouldn’t worry so about criminals gaining access to nuclear plants. After all, the National Diet of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission report in 2012 established Tepco’s responsibility for the triple meltdown. Then months later Tepco admitted it consciously ignored the threat of a tsunami-related disaster. So perhaps the lesson to be learned is that the greatest threat of “nuclear terrorism” Japan faces is from criminally negligent power companies and a government that fails to punish them. Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn’t worry at all about criminals gaining access to the nuclear power plants. As the Tokyo Prosecutor Office’s investigation into the top executives of Tepco for professional negligence resulting in injury and death grinds on, it seems more and more likely that criminals have been running the plants for a very long time — they just don’t all have tattoos. When it comes to the nuclear security in Japan, the U.S. comics “swamp critter” Pogo Possum would tell you: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Let’s hope no other enemies decide to join the party — because if they do, Japan’s nuclear negligence may become the world’s problem as well.

nuclear;terrorism;yakuza;bomb

jp0000018

2013/05/20

Utility, ubiquity playing key roles in corrupting policymakers' thinking

Two mind-sets seem to be catching on in Japan these days. They worry me. One is the notion that something has to be useful to be of value. The other is that anything is justifiable on the grounds that everybody else is doing it. The theory of usefulness is driving the Abe government’s promotion of better working conditions for women. They deserve longer maternity leave because they constitute an as yet inadequately utilized source of economic growth. To the extent that women are useful to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new growth strategy, they will be placed at the center of the government’s concerns. But there might just possibly be an ulterior motive to all of this. Abe could well be looking at his extended maternity leave campaign as a useful way to keep women at home for longer parts of their lives. This government’s conservative heart yearns for the revival of traditional family values, and they might be hoping to make good strategic use of the let’s-be-nice-to-women campaign as a means to that end. Of even greater concern is that the utility theory appears to be putting pressure on people who are neither obsessed with grand growth strategies nor holders of sinister ulterior motives. I was recently asked by campaigners against Japanese constitutional reform whether an economic case could be made in support of retaining the pacifist Constitution as it is. The argument would be that a peaceful nation would have access to greater economic gain than an antagonistic one because the rest of the world would be more willing to trade with peaceable people who have vowed not to wage war against anybody. Thus, it could be said that abandoning war is useful to enhancing the welfare of the nation. “Would this logic hold water?” they asked. My heart goes out to those campaigners. They are facing an uphill job if they have to resort to notions of economic utility to convince people of the importance of remaining peaceful. You uphold peace because that’s the right thing to do. You secure better working conditions for women because they have a rightful claim to such treatment. No other reasoning or justification is necessary to do something that is decent and just. Yet it increasingly seems to be the fashion of the day to demand “results.” To weigh costs against benefits. To uphold usefulness as the ultimate source of legitimacy. The other idea — that if everybody else is doing it, you should, too — is often called upon to justify the Bank of Japan’s huge monetary easing. The Americans are doing it. The Europeans are doing it. Japan has been persistently falling behind. It’s time we caught up with everybody else. The BOJ is culpable for deflation. They should get on with the job of doing what everybody has been doing all this time. So goes the argument. There is not one iota of concern in this line of reasoning, however, over what central banks were made for in the first place. Their role as defender of the currency is being quite studiously ignored. As for the idea that the use of “comfort women” has always been standard practice in times of war and Japan should therefore not be singled out for bashing, the whole mind-set is beneath contempt. However widespread it may be, a despicable deed is ever a despicable deed. There is no strength in numbers where questions of human dignity are concerned. You do not violate human rights even if you are in a minority of one. However useless, you do what is right. However lonely, you keep away from indecency. End of story.

shinzo abe;ldp;abenomics;policymaking;japanese perspectives

jp0000019

2013/05/10

How signs of a 'lost continent' came into JAMSTEC's underwater view

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Brazilian government recently announced the discovery of a large mass of granite on the seafloor off Rio de Janeiro — a landmark finding that suggests a continent may have once existed there because granite normally forms only on dry land. Experts say it’s far too early to conclude this is evidence that the legendary island of Atlantis existed. This is because the seabed where the granite mass was found is estimated to have sunk into the sea several tens of millions of years ago, much earlier than legend has the island disappearing beneath the sea. But how did the Japanese agency get involved in this intriguing discovery in the first place? Following are some facts regarding the organization and its activities: What is the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology? Headquartered in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, the agency conducts research and development in marine sciences. Formerly known as the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, JAMSTEC was launched in April 2004 as an independent administrative agency administered by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry. What was JAMSTEC doing off the east coast of Brazil? The agency sent a mission to the area as part of its one-year around-the-world voyage project dubbed “QUELLE2013,” which stands for Quest for the Limit of Life. “Quelle” also means “roots” or “origin” in German. The yearlong mission involves exploring hydrothermal vent fields, submarine seepage sites, deep-sea trenches and other extreme environments to explore the habitable limits of life and its unique survival strategies. They set out Jan. 5 on the support vessel Yokosuka, heading for the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the South Pacific Ocean. So was it just happenstance that JAMSTEC was involved in the recent discovery? According to a JAMSTEC official, the finding was “not totally a coincidence.” They had been aware that Brazilian scientists had collected what appeared to be granite in the area, but it remained a mystery whether the granite was intrinsic or whether it had been dropped by ships passing through, the official said. The discovery was made by a deep-submergence vehicle called the Shinkai 6500, owned by the agency. One researcher who had been aboard the sub was quoted by the official as saying they were admittedly “somewhat skeptical about granite being there.” What is the Shinkai 6500? The submersible was developed “to study seafloor topography and geology and research deep-sea organisms” in the sea not only around Japan but in the oceans around the world. As the name implies, the Shinkai 6500 can dive to depths of up to 6,500 meters with two pilots and one researcher aboard. It entered service in 1991 and had made 1,300 dives as of 2012. During the round-the-world project, the manned submersible is to be in the Caribbean Sea from June to August. After temporarily returning to Japan for a battery replacement from August to September, it is scheduled to travel to the Tonga and Kermadec trenches in the South Pacific and to finish the journey in December. What other kinds of research does the agency conduct? It has several institutes and projects. For example, the Research Institute for Global Change observes, analyzes and predicts global environmental changes, while the Institute for Research on Earth Evolution explores the interior of the Earth to develop a comprehensive understanding of our planet. The agency has also set up a project to do research on earthquakes and tsunami for disaster prevention. Who heads the agency, and how big is it? The president is Asahiko Taira, a former chairman of the Geological Society of Japan. Taira, whose field of research includes marine geology and plate tectonics, received the Japan Academy Prize in 2007 for research on the formation of the Japanese archipelago. The agency has a staff of 1,055, including 383 researchers. The initial budget for the current fiscal year stands at ¥40.2 billion.

atlantis;jamstec

jp0000021

2013/05/07

Sub discovers signs of legendary Atlantis

RIO DE JANEIRO - A large mass of granite has been found on the seabed off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, suggesting a continent may have existed in the Atlantic Ocean, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Brazilian government announced. A Brazilian official said the discovery of the granite — which normally forms only on dry land — is strong evidence that a continent used to exist in the area where the legendary island of Atlantis, mentioned in antiquity by Plato in his philosophical dialogues, was supposedly located. According to legend, the island, host to a highly developed civilization, sunk into the sea around 12,000 years ago. No trace of it has ever been found. The finding was made using a Shinkai 6500 manned submersible operated by the Japanese agency. The seabed where the granite mass was discovered is estimated to have sunk into the sea several tens of million years ago. No man-made structures have been found there. It is the first time such research using a manned submersible has been conducted in the South Atlantic. In late April, the agency used the device to explore the Rio Grande Rise, a seabed more than 1,000 km southeast of Rio de Janeiro. At a depth of 910 meters, it found a rock cliff around 10 meters in height and breadth. After analyzing video data, the agency concluded it was granite. Also discovered in the area around it was a large volume of quartz sand — which is also not formed in the sea. The bedrock is believed to consist mainly of basalt rock. The rise itself stretches around 1,000 km at the widest point, and is considered part of the continent left behind when South America and Africa split apart more than 100 million years ago. The agency said it assumes the area was above sea level until about 50 million years ago but became submerged over a period spanning several million years, based on fossils found in the nearby seabed and other data. According to the agency, the Rio Grande Rise is the only plausible area that could possibly have been dry land in the past. Despite the latest discovery, however, experts remained cautious about jumping to conclusions about Atlantis. Shinichi Kawakami, a professor at Gifu University versed in planetary sciences, said the granite could have been a part of a big continent before it separated into what is now Africa and South America. “South America and Africa used to be a huge, unified continent. The area in question may have been left in water as the continent was separated in line with the movements of plates,” he said. Kawakami said researchers must look further into the composition of the granite and see if it matches the granite now found in Africa or South America. “The concept of Atlantis came way before geology of the modern age was established. We should not jump to the Atlantis (conclusion) right away,” he said.

atlantic;continent;deep-sea probe;discovery;japanese scientists

jp0000022

2013/05/15

Monju: Generating only misfortune

The troubled Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor made headlines again when the Nuclear Regulation Authority said it apparently plans to ensure the facility remains idled after announcing that the Japan Atomic Energy Agency failed to properly inspect some 10,000 components, including critical ones. Following are questions and answers regarding the problem-plagued Monju program, which has so far cost some ¥1 trillion: Where is Monju located and when was it built? Monju is on the Sea of Japan coast in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture. Preparatory construction began in January 1983, and the site was completed in April 1991. The reactor reached initial criticality for the first time in April 1994, but the event was short-lived. What was Monju’s role? Monju was to serve as a research facility on so-called dream technology that was supposed to resolve Japan’s shortage of clean energy sources. The plan was for the fast-breeder reactor to use spent nuclear fuel from other atomic plants in the form of a plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. “The basic principles of the Monju plant are very simple,” JAEA states on its website. If the recycling sequence goes as planned, it would mean “fast reactors could extend the energy output from the world’s uranium fuel reserves 25-fold.” MOX, however, which is used in nuclear weapons, is highly dangerous. How has Monju fared since the 1994 criticality test? Accidents, a coverup attempt and other woes and malfunctions have keet the reactor effectively idled since its initial tryout. A sodium coolant leak and fire in 1995 became a huge scandal after it was revealed that the operator tried to cover up details of the incident from the public. In 1996, an official appointed to the internal investigation of the case committed suicide. The official’s next of kin subsequently sued the operator for damages, claiming he killed himself after being pressured to lie to the media. The Supreme Court last year rejected the suit and ruled in JAEA’s favor. Fukui residents meanwhile sued the state, claiming the reactor is unsafe. The Supreme Court in 2005 overruled a lower court ruling and dismissed the suit. What happened after the sodium leak? Monju was suspended for 14 years and five months after the leak, until May 2010. The JAEA website states that Monju restarted its System Start-up Test on May 6, 2010, hoping to accomplish the program’s original mission of demonstrating the facility’s reliability and establishing sodium handling technology. It failed to do either. On Aug. 26 that year, a 3-ton fuel-loading device fell into the reactor vessel and caused operations to halt again. Recovery of the device proved time-consuming and was only completed in June 2011, 10 months after the incident and shortly into the biggest nuclear plant calamity to hit the world since Chernobyl, namely the triple-meltdown crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant. It cost more than ¥1.7 billion to repair the Monju damage. A JAEA official in charge of the recovery project committed suicide before the fuel-loading device was retrieved. What other troubles stand in Monju’s way? Like most nuclear plants in Japan, Monju is believed to be sitting on a fault, although JAEA in April sent a report to the NRA claiming the fault is inactive. The JAEA has also said the reactor can withstand the strongest temblor that could possibly hit the site, as well as tsunami of up to 21 meters. The NRA is expected to visit Fukui and survey the fault soon. What does “monju” mean? According to JAEA, Monju derives from the Japanese translation of bodhisattva Manjusri, which is associated with perfect enlightenment and wisdom. Buddhist temples, including Eiheiji in Fukui Prefecture, have protested the use of the holy name for such a tarnished project. What’s next for Monju? Reports say Monju costs ¥10 billion to ¥20 billion annually just to maintain even while idled. The government originally intended to start commercial use of the reactor by 2050, but the latest development will likely put the nuclear fuel-recycling goal on indefinite hold. Despite widespread public opposition to nuclear power since 2011 and calls by pundits that Monju be scrapped, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party appears reluctant to do this. How is JAEA reacting to the latest scandal? In a Chunichi Shimbun interview published on May 1, JAEA chief Hiroshi Hiroi acknowledged the agency failed to properly check some 10,000 components. “Due to a lack of communication between the managers and onsite workers, our revised rules weren’t completely followed, and we didn’t share a common understanding of when to start the checks,” he claimed. JAEA seeks to correct the problem by adding 13 more employees to the repair unit, creating better information management and educating its workers. “We will make a safe, rational maintenance program in about a year,” he told the newspaper.

nra;monju

jp0000023

2013/05/12

Japan's Suzaku satellite shows how all bets are off around Cygnus X-1

This month, the Vermillion bird of the South — which is currently flying 550 km above Earth — meets an astronomical swan some 6,000 light-years away. In Eastern mythology, the Vermillion bird of the South represents fire — it is a spirit creature renowned for its elegance and power. Its Japanese name, Suzaku, is also that of an X-ray-detecting satellite launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2005. Now Suzaku’s eyes have been trained on one of the most famous objects in the galaxy — the black hole in the constellation Cygnus (meaning “Swan”), which is also sometimes known as the Northern Cross. What Suzaku has seen there is arguably more wondrous than the most fantastical mythological story: It has observed the swan at dinner; the black hole swallowing dead stars. Black holes are strongly embedded in our culture. We refer to them metaphorically (“that business was a black hole for money”), while the best-known of many mind-boggling facts about black holes — that nothing, not even light, can escape them — is probably familiar to most of us even if we don’t really understand what it means. All that is to say it’s easy to take black holes for granted. But in fact, while astronomers strongly suspect they must exist, that suspicion is maddeningly hard to prove. Strictly speaking, the things we think of as black holes are only black hole candidates . However, Suzaku is armed with telescopes that, instead of picking up visible light, detect X-rays, which are more powerful than visible light. And now, its observations have provided good evidence that these most mysterious of astronomical objects are real. Shin’ya Yamada and colleagues at the Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science at Wako in Saitama Prefecture directed Suzaku’s telescopes at an enigmatic object named Cygnus X-1. Discovered in 1964, this is one of the strongest known sources of X-rays in our Milky Way galaxy, and has long been a suspected black hole. (It was the subject of one of the most famous bets in science, as we’ll see.) Cygnus X-1 is a remarkable object. Its mass is 15 times greater than that of our sun, but it is far more compact. The diameter of our sun is 1.4 million km, while that of Cygnus X-1 is only 52 km. Earth’s diameter is 12,700 km. So in Cygnus X-1, a gigantic amount of matter has been compacted down into an incredibly small space. The more massive an object, the stronger its gravitational pull, which means that Cygnus X-1 has irresistible suction power. Anything that gets close is sucked in. Black holes accumulate massive amounts of matter — dust, gas, rocks, even bits of planets and stars — in a huge disc that orbits the black hole, gradually getting closer. This is called the accretion disc, and it is from this that powerful X-rays are emitted as the gravity of the black hole crushes the matter in the disc. Once stuff gets too close, however, it can never break free. The point of no return is called the event horizon. What the Riken astronomers observed is gas being sucked across the event horizon and into oblivion. Suzaku measured the temperature of the gas as it fell into the black hole, and recorded a heat spike of more than 1 billion degrees Celsius in the last few milliseconds before it vanished. This, they report in Astrophysical Journal, is strong evidence that Cygnus X-1 is indeed a black hole (DOI reference: 10.1088/2041-8205/767/2/L34). For at least 20 years, most physicists have been happy to accept that Cygnus X-1 is a black hole. Indeed, that was what the bet was about. In 1974 the English cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his similarly renowned U.S. colleague and friend, Kip Thorne, were arguing about this faraway object. Hawking wagered that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole — but in 1990, he finally conceded he was wrong. The Hawking-Thorne wager can be seen as the end point in a longer debate among scientists about black holes. Albert Einstein, whose work showed among other things that gravity could influence light (and even bend it), himself did not believe that black holes could exist. But theoretical work supporting the idea of a super-dense object that warps space-time continued to build, and by the 1960s it was generally accepted that black holes should exist. Some physicists credit the discovery of Cygnus X-1 as the first time a black hole was found. Incidentally, the terms of the Hawking-Thorne bet shed interesting light on the reading habits of these famous scientists. If Hawking had won, his reward would have been a four-year subscription to the fortnightly Private Eye, Britain’s foremost satirical magazine. Thorne requested, and hence received, a year’s subscription to Penthouse, a U.S. monthly that may euphemistically be termed a “men’s magazine.” (Hawking reported that Thorne’s wife was not happy with her husband’s winnings.) Meanwhile, Suzaku continues to look deep into the galaxy. Last year, after its X-ray scopes were directed at the constellation of Orion, it observed an usually bright patch of cosmic dust known as McNeil’s Nebula. This region turned out to be a protostar, a region of space where the magnetic fields are so intense that they are heating the surrounding area and emitting X-rays. Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said he suspected that the protostar, which is still swaddled in its birthing cloud, is a mere baby in astronomical terms at younger than a million years old — but not the sort of babe Thorne was seeing when he won his bet.

black hole;suzuka x-ray satellite

jp0000024

2013/02/03

J-Blip: Mini kotatsu a cozy spot for singles

The humble domestic kotatsu is enjoying something of a revival since the disaster at Fukushima made the nation painfully aware of the need to conserve energy. The device is a table with a heating element underneath and a warm blanket draped over it keep one’s legs nice and toasty; without using up excess energy, the kotatsu has been keeping families huddled together in the winter months since its charcoal forerunner first warmed feet in the 14th century. But what about those living alone, who want to bring down their electric bill but might not have room for a large kotatsu table? Enter the mini kotatsu heater from

power;winter;singles;setsuden;japan pulse

jp0000025

2013/02/04

Abe's 15-month reversal budget fudges cost of swapping people and butter for concrete and guns

The government of Shinzo Abe has just unveiled its budget for fiscal 2013 starting in April. Abe’s stated intention was to “radically reset” spending priorities. He is indeed a man of his word. For this is a budget that is truly awesome for its radical step backward into the past — a past where every public spending project would do wonders to boost economic growth. It is also a past where a cheaper yen would bring unmitigated benefits to Japan’s exporting industries. None of it is really true anymore. Public works do indeed do wonders in boosting growth when there is nothing there to begin with. But in a mature and well-developed economy like ours, which is already so well equipped with all the necessities of modern life, they can at best have only a one-off effect in creating jobs and demand. And in this globalized day and age, an exporting industry imports almost as much as it exports. No longer do we live in a world where a carmaker makes everything within the borderlines of its nationality. Abe’s radical reset has just as much to do with philosophy as with timelines. Three phrases come to mind as I try to put this budget in a nutshell. They are: “from people to concrete,” “from the regions to the center” and “from butter to guns.” The previous government led by the Democratic Party of Japan declared that it would put people before concrete. No more building of ever-empty concert halls and useless multiple amenity centers where nothing ever happens. More money would be spent on helping people escape their economic difficulties. They would give more power to the regions so they could decide for themselves what was really good and worked for the local community. Guns would most certainly not take precedence over butter. Or rather over the low-fat butter alternatives popular in these more health-conscious times. All of this has been completely reversed in Abe’s fiscal 2013 budget. Public works spending is scheduled to go up by more than 15 percent while subsistence payments for people on welfare will be thrashed to the tune of more than 7 percent. If implemented, this will be the largest cut ever in welfare assistance. The previous government set aside a lump sum to be transferred from the central government’s coffers to regional municipalities to be spent at their own discretion on local projects. This sum will now be clawed back into the central government’s own public works program. The planned increase in spending on guns is admittedly small: a 0.8 percent increase over the fiscal 2012 initial budget. It is nonetheless the first increase of its kind in 11 years. And given the thrashing being dealt to welfare spending, the shift in emphasis from butter to guns is clearly apparent. One of the Abe government’s boasts is that it will manage to hold down the overall size of the budget in comparison with fiscal 2012. The other one is that it will raise more revenues from taxes rather than borrowing. True enough on the face of it. But one has to remember the very big supplementary budget that the government intends to push through for the remainder of fiscal 2012. The money for that program will come mostly from borrowing. Since the government is talking about a “15-month budget” that “seamlessly links up” the fiscal 2012 supplementary and fiscal 2013 initial budgets, they should talk in the same vein about the size of their spending and the borrowing needed to accommodate the whole 15-month package. It will not do to smother the big reset with a big coverup.

shinzo abe;budget

jp0000026

2013/02/20

Writer Donald Richie dies at 88

Long-term Japan resident, writer and critic Donald Richie, who through dozens of books and articles published from the late 1940s until the last decade helped introduce Japanese film and culture to the world, passed away in Tokyo on Tuesday, according to his long-term editor, Leza Lowitz. He was 88. Richie, who was born in Lima, Ohio, on April 17, 1924, first came to Japan with the U.S. Occupation force in 1947. He soon began working for Pacific Stars and Stripes, where he gained a reputation as a prolific writer of film reviews. After a stint back in the United States, he returned to Japan and began writing regularly for The Japan Times in 1954. Richie wrote hundreds of articles for the newspaper, covering not only film, but his other passions of theater, literature and art. He continued to write for the newspaper through 2009. Richie also published many books, including “The Japanese Film: Art and Industry,” which he coauthored with Joseph Anderson in 1959. Between 1969 and 1972, Richie was in New York, working as a curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art. He is also known for his travel writing. “The Inland Sea,” a memoir of his journey to the Seto Inland Sea that was first published in 1971, is considered a classic of the genre. Richie suffered several heart attacks in the past decade. He is survived by his sister, Jean Reuther, who lives in the U.S. Below are interviews with Donald Richie over the years as well as Asian Bookshelf book reviews dating back to 2001. Life in the land where boredom is not an option Films, Zen, Japan Donald Richie offers history lesson A lifetime’s observations How Lon Chaney led to lifetime of Japanese film Archive of The Asian Bookshelf book review

donald richie;japanese cinema

jp0000028

2013/02/17

Tokyo Station nears completion, Hitler lauds Japan, high-schools surge, Constitution to keep Article 9, PM declares

100 YEARS AGO Sunday, Feb. 2, 1913 Tokyo Central station nears completion The Tokyo Central Railway Station, now under construction at Eiraku-cho, Kojimachi Ward [a now-defunct ward spanning much of present-day Chiyoda Ward], will, when completed next year, make one of the finest structures of the metropolis. The station is expected to be ready for general use by June of next year. It is the authorities’ intention that the station, which is being constructed on a 65,300- tsubo (21-hectare) plot of land east of the Imperial Palace, will be made the terminus of the Tokaido Line and also that of the Central Eastern and Sobu lines. The new station building features state-of-the-art materials. It is hardened by concrete and the building itself is made of steel. Brick and stone are applied to cover the steel framework and the floor is built of fireproof ferroconcrete. The price of land in the neighborhood has risen considerably. Mitsubishi Co., a large landowner in that area, expects to take this opportunity to make a big fortune. It is its intention to make a couple of private roads off the grand highway that will be made leading westward from the station, and that the lands the company owns along these new roads will be let in not less than 600-tsubo (2,000-sq.-meter) plots. It is expected these plots will be occupied by large commercial and banking corporations, such as seen in the West and it is not difficult to predict there will be built a sort of “Imperial Bazaar” and “International Buildings.” There will also be put up various kinds of hotels, clubs and restaurants. 75 YEARS AGO Monday, Feb. 21, 1938 Hitler lauds Japan; hails Manchukuo Formal German recognition of Manchukuo [the Imperial Japanese puppet state established in 1932 in northeast China and Inner Mongolia] was announced by Reichsfuehrer Adolf Hitler in his much-awaited speech before the Reichstag this afternoon, declaring that whatever the outcome of the Sino-Japanese conflict may be, Germany regards Japan as the defender of Western civilization in the Far East. Openly supporting Japan for the first time since the start of the crisis, the Chancellor, in his 2 hr. 55-min. pronouncement of domestic and foreign policy, condemned the Soviet Union as the “incarnation of the urge to destruction.” Declaring that Germany does not want any international institution to impose upon her an attitude which does not resemble an attitude taken by reasonable persons, the Chancellor briefly stated that Germany will recognize Manchukuo. “I believe that defeat of Japan in the Far East would solely profit the U.S.S.R.,” he shouted, adding that “the greatest Japanese victory would be much less dangerous for world culture than a Bolshevik victory.” He also announced Germany’s decision never to return to the League of Nations, which, he said, always threatens to involve Germany in disputes in which she has no vital interests. The Chancellor’s speech was unprecedentedly violent. He repeatedly attacked the French and British press for hindering the peaceful German relations with neighboring countries. He warned that if ever international agitation against Germany manages to upset the European peace, that “iron and steel will speak.” 50 YEARS AGO Thursday, Feb. 7, 1963 High-schools surge Only a few prefectural governments will be able to meet the April deadline for expanding public high-school capacity in order to accommodate the large 1963 class, which is estimated to number 1.5 million students in comparison with the 1 million in 1960, it was learned recently. Tokyo is the best prepared, with figures from the Metropolitan Office of Education showing its public high schools will have to take 52,343 students in 1963. It will thus be necessary to add 341 more 50-student classes than in 1960. For this purpose, the office has decided to build 25 new high schools for 183 classes and to enlarge the existing 119 schools to handle the remaining 158 classes. All but one of the new schools is set to be finished by the start of the new academic year in April. In Kanagawa and Niigata prefectures, only two of seven new schools will be ready by April. Fukushima, Yamagata and Ibaraki prefectures are also behind schedule. Due to the shortfalls, officials are thinking of using gymnasiums and renting classrooms in junior high schools. Increasing class sizes from 50 to 55 is also part of the Education Ministry’s plan for coping with the situation. 25 YEARS AGO Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1988 Constitution to keep Article 9, PM declares Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita told the House of Representatives’ Budget Committee session Monday that his government would not propose to amend Japan’s four-decade-old Constitution. Noting that the Constitution, drawn up under U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the allied powers occupying Japan, was once called a “translated Constitution,” Takeshita said, “As a young man, I had a sense of reservation toward (accepting) it. But I do not intend at all to put a Constitutional amendment on our political schedule.” He said “no one” would think of changing the war-renouncing Article 9 or the democratic principles. However, the party platform of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which he heads, aims to develop an “independent Constitution.” In the same session, Takeshita also confirmed that the “three non-nuclear principles” — of not making, not having and not introducing nuclear weapons into Japan — is a fundamental policy of his government. However, he refused demands from the floor for Japan to make a formal inquiry with the United States on the possible introduction of nuclear missiles into U.S. bases in the country.

hitler;tokyo station;manchukuo

jp0000029

2013/02/10

Fugu reveals its simple gender switch

It’s the most celebrated and notorious fish in the world, certainly in culinary circles. Now the puffer fish — one of Japan’s most enigmatic creatures — meets some of biology’s deepest questions: Why did sex evolve? Why are there two sexes? Why is the male sex chromosome such a puny little thing? I’ll admit right away that the puffer fish, better known in Japan as fugu, won’t provide answers to these questions. But just the story of why an animal usually discussed in sushi shops is the subject of research by a Nobel Prize-winner and scientists at the University of Tokyo is interesting enough, without having to solve deep evolutionary problems. Kiyoshi Kikuchi at the Fisheries Laboratory in the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences works on the tiger puffer fish (torafugu; Takifugu rubripes) . This, among several species of fugu, is the one most often eaten, and most often used by scientists. The tiger fugu, as we’ll call it (“fugu” literally means “river pig,” which seems an inelegant name for such a graceful, maneuverable animal), is loved by researchers because it has a small genome — its total amount of DNA is unusually little. This means it’s relatively easy to use the tiger fugu to identify important genes. Its genome was the second vertebrate genome to be sequenced, after that of humans. Like almost all fugu, the tiger puffer fish is chock full of a poison that is one of the most potent found in nature. Tetradoxin is hundreds of times more deadly than the equivalent amount of cyanide, and the average puffer fish contains enough to kill 30 adults. Almost as famous as the fish are the requirements chefs must fulfil to be able to prepare it. It takes two years of training, and an exam that a third of chefs apparently fail, to gain a license to prepare fugu. Not to diminish their skill, but most of the poison is contained in the gonads, the liver, the skin and the intestines, so it’s largely just a question of removing those bits safely. Part of the thrill in eating the fish is that small amounts of toxin remain in the flesh, and you may be able to feel a tingling on your lips as you consume it. If the tingling gets too much, you could be in trouble. And if the tingling thrill isn’t enough, you may be tempted to eat more dangerously. In 2011, a woman in a restaurant in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district demanded to be served fugu liver. The chef — in defiance of strict regulations — complied, and a few hours later the woman was hospitalized with tetradoxin poisoning. She was lucky — she survived. Less fortunate was Bando Mitsugoro VIII, a famous kabuki actor who, in 1975, demanded four fugu livers, no less, in a Kyoto restaurant. He died as a result. Anyway, Kikuchi’s team has studied fugu more even than the most diligent sushi chef. Their interest concerns the sex chromosomes of the fish, which, as with humans, come in two forms: X and Y. Fish (and people) with two X chromosomes are female, those with an X and a Y are male. In humans and most other mammals, the Y chromosome is a sorry chap, a diminutive stump of DNA in comparison with the mighty X. The Y is just one-third the length of the X chromosome, but it punches above its weight: It carries the all-important gender-determining genes. Fugu have the same X-Y arrangement, but Kikuchi’s team found a crucial difference. Rather than having lots of DNA in the form of genes that need to switch on to determine gender, as in humans, the gender of a fugu is determined by the simplest possible DNA difference between X and Y — such that only one “letter” of DNA is different. Each chromosome is made of 15 million letters of DNA called nucleotides, and in fugu just one change in that 15-million-letter sequence makes the difference between male and female. “We have provided evidence showing that the gender of fugu is most likely determined by a one-nucleotide difference between the X and Y chromosome,” said Kikuchi. The result is significant because it shows an extremely simple example of genetic gender determination. When animals began having sex, they used an environmental method to make males and females. Eggs incubated at a warm temperature might become females, and those kept slightly cooler might become males, for example. That’s all very well, but if you want to be able to retain more control over the gender of your offspring, it’s better to have a genetic switch. The fugu has the simplest possible genetic switch. It represents the starting point on the evolutionary trail that led to the human situation of a specialized Y chromosome. The results are published in the journal PLoS Genetics (DOI reference: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1002798). As well as being of evolutionary interest, the authors say that the finding may provide a simple way of determining a fugu’s gender. That might help protect them in the wild. One of the co-authors on Kikuchi’s paper is Nobel Prize-winner Sydney Brenner. He won his gong for work on something called programmed cell death — which is the regulated, genetically programmed death of cells. In the 1950s, he was working at the University of Oxford, and was one of the first people to see Watson and Crick’s model of the structure of DNA. I could not confirm whether Brenner enjoys fugu in the dining room as well as in the lab.

genetics;fugu;blowfish;x chromosome;y chromosome

jp0000030

2013/02/19

Nori

Dear Alice, I was out for a walk with my camera the other day and came across a puzzling scene. I saw people putting what I thought were squares of dark paper onto easels in the sun, as if to dry. But when I went closer, the squares actually seemed to be nori seaweed sheets, the type used to make sushi rolls. Can you find out what the heck I saw? I eat sushi all the time but I realize I have no idea how nori is made. It would be great if you could explain that too. Duncan L., Tokyo Dear Duncan, By plugging the date and coordinates of your walk into my secret decoder ring, I was able to deduce that you stumbled onto a noritsuke taiken , a make-your-own nori workshop at the Omori Nori Museum. This relatively new educational facility, which opened in Tokyo’s Ota Ward in 2008, runs nori-making workshops on some weekends from January to April. The purpose is to share a fascinating piece of local history, which is that for about 200 years, until the early 1960s, Omori was a thriving center of nori cultivation and manufacture. “Nori” is the Japanese name for a group of edible algae that grows naturally on rocks in shallow areas of cold-water oceans. In English, this type of seaweed is called laver, and it is collected and eaten in some coastal parts of the British Isles. (In Wales, you can still get breakfasts featuring laver bread.) But most English-speakers know this seaweed first and foremost because of sushi, and they are much more likely to understand “nori” than “laver.” In Japan, people have gathered the wild plant off rocks for thousands of years, using it for both food and fertilizer. When Edo (present-day Tokyo) was settled, it was discovered that the tasty sea plant grew in abundance in the nearby bay and up the mouths of rivers that connected to it. In Edo, this seaweed was called “Asakusa” nori, for the place along the Sumida River where it was often collected. Edo fisherman noticed that nori reproduced well around the stakes they drove into the shallows to hold their nets, and by the early 18th century a primitive method of cultivating the seaweed had been devised. Cultivators drove the ends of bamboo sticks into the seabeds at the mouths of rivers near the bay, creating production beds with tidy rows of upright stakes on which the algae could attach and reproduce. To harvest, growers would row out to the beds and laboriously pull the nori off the stakes and into their boats. After a while, it was discovered that the spores did their best reproducing in salty waters, yet bloomed better in water with lower salinity. So villages around the bay began to cooperate to seed stakes in places with salty water and then transplant them to mixed-water shallows near river mouths. Nori had always been eaten wet in Japan, but as cultivation methods improved growers wanted a way to preserve their production. Some clever person, whose identity has unfortunately been lost to history, drew on techniques used in traditional paper-making to come up with nori as we know it today — paper-thin dried sheets that keep well and are perfect for wrapping around rice. From 1894 to 1939, Tokyo was the number-one nori-producing area in Japan, ahead of competitors such as Chiba, Aichi and Hiroshima prefectures. But Tokyo’s industry gradually fell victim to land-reclamation, dredging and pollution. In 1962, the national government offered compensation to fishing cooperatives and nori cultivators to give up their rights in the bay, opening the way for further port development. Today, nori is still cultivated on the far side of Tokyo Bay in Chiba Prefecture, but the most important production areas in Japan are in Kyushu, around the Ariake Sea; in Mie and Aichi prefectures around Ise Bay, and in the Seto Inland Sea. By this point in my research I wanted to see for myself how nori is made, so I signed up for a workshop. Volunteers who had grown up in nori-making households were on hand to take us through the traditional process, showing us how nori was chopped, by hand or using a meat grinder, then mixed with water to make a kind of slurry. Then we got to step up and make sheets for ourselves, which is done by pouring a measure of the slurry into a mold held over a woven, slatted mat. The water drains away, the mold is removed, and what’s left on the mat is a thin layer of chopped seaweed. We then hung our mats on easels in the sun to dry, which is the point in the process at which you must have wandered by. Another interesting fact I picked up is that virtually all nori cultivators in Japan now grow the same variety, a hardy transplant from Hokkaido called susabinori ( Porphyra yezoensis ). Even so, the taste, color and texture of the finished sheets varies widely, depending not on differences in production but rather on the temperature and salinity of the seawater in which it is grown. The sheets of nori you get in stores have been crisped over heat to bring out the flavor, and are called yakinori (“ yaki ” in this case means “toasted”). You can also buy ajitsukenori (flavored nori), which is spiced up with soy sauce, sugar and other seasonings, although I personally prefer the plain. And while I will say that it was interesting to eat nori I made myself, in the future I’m leaving it to the pros. In fact, I’m all fired up to sample products from various regions and explore the differences. Fortunately, nori is an affordable, healthy food, loaded with protein, fiber and beneficial nutrients, including calcium, beta carotene and folate. All that and hardly any calories! Or as an expression I found on a nori wholesaler’s website put it: “ Ichinichi nimai isha irazu ” (“Two sheets a day keeps the doctor away.”)

nori;seaweed;ajitsukenori;yakinori

jp0000031

2013/02/08

Chinese smog bomb floats toward Japan

OSAKA - Smog in China has reached alarming levels as its rapid industrialization spews ever-more toxic particles into the air. Over the past month or so, the problem has become particularly acute, raising health concerns in neighboring parts of Asia, including Japan. Following are questions and answers about China’s smog problem and its possible effects on Japan. How and when did China’s smog problem begin? The beginning of China’s current air pollution problem that affects Japan has been traced back to early January and centers on Beijing and areas east of the capital. As smoke from coal-burning power plants combines with vehicle exhaust and factory emissions, it produces a toxic smog that can become especially bad in winter. In recent years, the smog has been getting worse because of the rising popularity of driving in China, which is adding about 15 million cars to its roads each year. In a normal winter, smog would usually be dissipated by the prevailing winds. This year, however, the winds haven’t been as strong, allowing a huge toxic cloud to form. This cloud is now drifting slowly over much of eastern and southeastern China, and is even encroaching on parts of western Japan. I often see the term “PM2.5” used in reports about air pollution. What does it mean? PM stands for “particulate matter,” and 2.5 refers to particles in the air that are 2.5 microns in diameter — about 1/30th the diameter of a human hair. Particles of this size can only be seen through an electron microscope and are easily absorbed by the lungs. PM2.5 particles are generated by burning fossil fuels, wood, and using pesticides. They contain nitrates, sulfates, organic chemicals, metals, soil and dust particles, as well as pollen fragments and mold spores. There is a significant association between exposure to PM2.5 particles and premature death from heart or lung disease. They also can increase the risk of heart attacks, asthma attacks and bronchitis. What are the environmental standards for PM2.5 particles? Different countries have different standards. In 2009, Japan declared that the annual average concentration of PM2.5 particles in air must be less than 15 micrograms per cubic meter, and that the daily average concentration must be less than 35 micrograms/cu. meter. In the United States, the annual and daily standards are the same as Japan’s. In the European Union, however, new PM2.5 regulations were put into force in 2010 that limit the annual mean concentration to 25 micrograms per cubic meter, with no daily standard. What about China? China’s national standard for PM2.5 is 75 micrograms per cu. meter daily and the government is aiming to establish an average of 35 micrograms annually. In heavily polluted Beijing, which far exceeds these levels, efforts are under way to reduce annual PM2.5 concentrations to 60 micrograms per cu. meter by 2015 and 50 micrograms by 2020 in order to meet the national standard by 2030. On Jan. 12, Beijing recorded PM2.5 levels of more than 900 micrograms/cu. meter. What effect has China’s pollution had on Japan? So far, western Japan has taken the brunt of the pollution. Fukuoka has reported that PM2.5 levels exceeded the daily maximum of 35 micrograms/cu. meter on three days in January. Western Honshu, including Hiroshima, Okayama and the Kansai region, also saw raised PM2.5 levels last month. In late January, parts of the city of Osaka logged a daily average of 63 micrograms and Kobe saw 41 micrograms. The Tokai and Hokuriku regions have also reported fairly high PM2.5 levels, as has the Tokyo metropolis. Chinese pollution in Japan is hardly a new phenomenon. Why is it now suddenly an issue? Attention is higher partly because of the severity of the cloud thoroughly engulfing Beijing this time. There is also more information on what’s happening now since the Chinese have recently stepped up their PM2.5 monitoring efforts. But in western Japan, many people believe attention is high because the smog has finally reached Tokyo, drawing the attention of national politicians and the media, unlike past instances where Chinese smog was restricted mostly to Kyushu and western Honshu, How is Japan attempting to deal with the problem? PM2.5 concentrations are likely to remain high going into March, just when the pollen season hits, the government warns. But there is little China’s neighbors can do besides monitor the air quality and issue public health advisories. At the same time, howver, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is sending out contradictory messages on the issue. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters last week that the Environment Ministry would conduct an investigation yet was quick to add that “no immediate effects” on health were likely — at least at this point. Media pundits, however, noted that this Japanese expression was exactly the one used by the government when the Fukushima nuclear crisis erupted, and was unlikely to reassure the public.

china;pollution;air

jp0000032

2013/02/01

Sales surge for men's fashion magazines

An unexpected surge in sales of fashion magazines aimed at men in their 30s and 40s has taken the magazine industry by surprise. Bucking the general downward trend in sales for print magazines, titles like Leon have been getting snapped up by style-conscious guys over the past two years. According to the National Publication Association’ s Publishing Research Institute, sales of men’s magazines for the 30-40 age bracket began to rise around 2010. Sales of these magazines were up a whopping 38.3% from Jan. to Nov. in 2012 compared to the same period the previous year, climbing from 2.66 million copies sold in 2011 to 3.68 in 2012. Just five magazines fit into this niche market, with Leon taking the largest slice of the market share, accounting for a third of sales. The other magazines are Oceans , Uomo , Men’s Ex , and 2nd . Though Leon was responsible for creating the concept of the “ choi waru oyaji ” — which roughly translates as “bad-ass middle-aged dude” — personified by fashionable middle-aged guys like Italian heartthrob Panzetta Girolamo , this does not appear to have been the trigger for the trend. It’s more likely that the recent women’s magazine concept of the “ ikedan ,” or cool husband, has inspired women to buy men’s magazines for their husbands in an effort to get them to improve their appearance. For single men in their 30s and 40s, it may have been the explosion in en masse dating activities, such as machi kon events, that drove them to the magazine racks for tips on sharpening up their looks, making them better equipped to duel it out with younger, more fashionable rivals. According to J-Cast , these guys aren’t a bunch of aging rams dressed up as lamb, they’re simply men who would like to take care of their looks, whether to score a date or simply to score brownie points with the wife. The trend has, of course, had a positive impact on the clothing industry. Yano Research Institute reports that in 2011, sales for menswear (including suits, western clothing, and accessories) were up 2% on the previous year. Meanwhile, the Japan Department Stores Association reported a 1.7% rise in the sale of men’s suits in 2011 compared to the previous year. Furthermore, the men’s department of Isetan in Shinjuku reported that sales of suits and western clothes were up 2% for the period between April and September in 2012. The growing market has inspired Hankyu department store, which previously concentrated on women’s clothing, to open up Hankyu Men’s Tokyo in Yurakucho in Oct 2011. Since then, they’ve clocked in impressive sales of over 12 billion yen. We expect to see other department stores follow their lead.

fashion;men;publishing;magazines;japan pulse;oyaji

jp0000035

2013/11/05

More businesses admit misrepresenting menu items

Major department store chains Takashimaya Co. and Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Stores Co. separately said Tuesday that some of their restaurants and stores misrepresented items on their menus, becoming the latest in a string of companies to own up to food fraud. Takashimaya said the misrepresentations involved 62 menu items at five of its department stores and a shopping center, including those in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi and Shinjuku districts, Yokohama, and the city of Okayama. Mislabeled items included black tiger shrimp passed off as Japanese “kuruma” shrimp and “steak” that was actually processed meat with beef fat added. Separately, Daimaru Matsuzakaya announced the same day that “osechi” traditional boxed food for New Year’s it sold last year in Aichi and Fukuoka prefectures actually contained black tiger shrimp labeled as kuruma shrimp. At a news conference in Tokyo, Yutaka Masuyama, a Takashimaya executive, apologized “from the bottom of my heart” for misrepresenting the ingredients but denied it was intentional, claiming it was due to “lack of proper attention, and that’s what we need to remedy.” Takashimaya will refund customers confirmed to have consumed the food. The incident follows recent revelations of false menu descriptions across the country, involving Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co., the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Osaka, which is under the umbrella of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., and the Renaissance Sapporo Hotel in Hokkaido. Masuyama said the black tiger shrimp labeled as kuruma shrimp resulted from staff failing to change the package labels after the latter ingredient was replaced with the former in sold products. “It slipped their mind,” said Masuyama. “The price tag was lowered, and there was no intention on our part to make extra money out of this.” The company also has admitted to using processed meat without properly labeling it even though the staff actually knew it was, but Masuyama said they “didn’t know doing so was necessary.” Later in the day, more businesses spilled the beans. Tokyu Hotels Co. reported false labeling of shrimp and beef steak at restaurants and banquet halls at 20 of its hotels. Hotel Keihan Co. said Hotel Keihan Universal Tower and two others in Osaka among its hotels in Japan failed to authentically describe steak made from processed meat with added beef fat. Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise, an aquarium, reported that its restaurant had sold processed meat with beef fat as steak.

food;scandal;hotels;takashimaya;hanshin;mislabeling;hankyu;menu

jp0000036

2013/11/05

Chef declines 'role model' medal

In light of the food mislabeling scandal at Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co., the head chef of the company’s Chinese food division declined a Medal of Honor from the government he was soon to receive, company sources said. The sources quoted Seiji Oishi, 63, as saying he declined the Medal with Yellow Ribbon “because I disturbed the public.” The Medals of Honor conferred in the fall, including the Yellow Ribbon, were awarded Sunday. The sources said Oishi was to receive the medal, which, according to the Cabinet Office, is “awarded to individuals who, through their diligence and perseverance, became public role models.” Oishi notified the Cabinet Office of his intention two days after the firm announced Oct. 22 that its hotels had served food different from what was boasted on their menus. One item, Vannamei shrimp, was falsely touted as more upmarket Shiba shrimp. At a news conference Oct. 28, at which President Hiroshi Desaki expressed his intention to step down, Oishi explained, “Our understanding was that in Chinese cooking Shiba shrimp was a general term referring to small shrimp types.” It is unclear if the top chef had played any role in the mislabelings. The hotelier has so far only blamed lower-ranking employees.

food;restaurants;mislabeling

jp0000038

2013/11/18

Bachelet tops Chile presidential vote, but fails to avoid runoff

SANTIAGO - Michelle Bachelet won nearly twice as many votes as her closest rival in Chile’s presidential election Sunday, but she fell short of the outright majority needed to avoid a Dec. 15 runoff. With more than 92 percent of votes counted, the moderate socialist Bachelet had nearly 47 percent, to 25 percent for conservative Evelyn Matthei. Seven other candidates trailed far behind. Bachelet predicted she would win big in the second round and push forward major social reforms. “We’re going to have a decisive and strong victory that backs up the transformation program that we have been building,” she said. Matthei’s campaign celebrated getting another try at Bachelet, this time in a one-on-one race. “Going into a second round is certainly a triumph,” an exultant Matthei told supporters. Bachelet, 62, left office with an 84 percent approval rating after her 2006-10 presidency despite failing then to bring about major changes in society. This time, she has taken up the cause of protesters, vowing to revamp the constitution, raise corporate taxes to fund an education overhaul and reduce the wealth gap. But Bachelet’s center-left New Majority coalition failed Sunday to win the supermajorities in Congress needed to make those changes. Matthei, 60, an outspoken former labor minister, says Chile must continue business-friendly policies she credited for fast growth and low unemployment under center-right President Sebastian Pinera. She favors funding programs through improved economic growth, not by raising taxes. Bachelet and Matthei were childhood friends and neighbors, but found themselves on opposite sides after Chile’s 1973 military coup, when Matthei’s father ran the military school where Gen. Alberto Bachelet was tortured to death for remaining loyal to ousted President Salvador Allende. Both families have said Gen. Matthei had no direct involvement in Bachelet’s father’s death and the two women have remained cordial over the years while they rose through political ranks on the right and left. Chile is the world’s top copper producer, and its fast-growing economy, low unemployment and stable democracy are the envy of Latin America. But millions of Chileans have taken to the streets in recent years, venting frustration over the huge gap between rich and poor and the country’s chronically underfunded education system. Many voters blame free-market policies imposed during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship for keeping wealth and power in very few hands. He sold off water services, undid land reforms, privatized pensions, cut wages and slashed trade barriers. Chile’s schools also were free before Pinochet pushed privatization and ended central control and funding of primary and secondary schools. “I’m voting for the first time in my life,” said Alvaro Torres, a 32-year-old warehouse worker casting his ballot at a school in the wealthy Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes. “I voted for Bachelet because she represents change. I hope change comes, especially in education.” “I voted for Evelyn Matthei because this is an historic moment and we need someone like her,” said Norma Sunkel, a 64-year-old sociologist. “I hope that she’ll force a runoff, but I have to admit that it’s very hard that she’ll win the presidency.” This was Chile’s first election after making voter registration automatic, increasing the rolls from 8.2 million to 13.5 million. But the new system also eliminated penalties for not voting. Pinera said late Sunday that he was sorry turnout was so low, with 44 percent of registered voters staying at home. With all 120 seats in the lower House of Congress and 20 of 38 Senate seats at stake, the low turnout probably didn’t help Bachelet’s efforts to gain super-majorities for her New Majority coalition. Under electoral rules imposed by Pinochet to frustrate change, the losing party gets half the seats in each region if the winning party fails to secure more than two-thirds of the votes. The dictatorship-era rules also require voting majorities in Congress of 57 percent for educational reform, 60 percent for electoral reform and nearly 67 percent for constitutional changes. But with most of the votes counted, Bachelet’s coalition had 51 percent in the Senate and 48 percent in the lower chamber. “You almost feel sorry for her because she’s going to be stuck between the future and the past,” said Peter Siavelis, a political science professor at Wake Forest University and author of “Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition.” “There all these demands in the streets for constitutional reform, but she’s facing a Congress that’s going to be elected by the binominal elections system,” Siavelis said. “There’s not going to be a majority there. So the influence of the dictatorship is going to impact on her reforms.”

elections;chile;michelle bachelet

jp0000039

2013/11/18

J-blip: Tsutaya launches one-stop 'lifestyle' bookshop

Following on the success of Daikanyama T-Site , an upmarket complex targeted at an older demographic of book lovers and one that included satellite boutiques for cameras, bikes and pets, bookselling behemoth Tsutaya has opened a new similar envelope-pushing book store in Honjō-Waseda, Saitama. By offering objects for sale related to a particular hobby or interest, the concept of the new store, which opened its doors on Nov. 2, is to sell not only books, but also a new lifestyle and, of course, to maximize profits. Make no mistake, though. The lifestyle being hawked here is a far cry from the tony Daikanyama T-Site. Catering to a more suburban and middle-class set, the store is divided into seven zones: cookery, interior decorating, beauty, kids, business, the arts and travel. In the cookery zone, cooking utensils and tableware are laid out next to cookbooks and in-store cookery demonstrations should further whet consumer’s appetite for purchasing more than just a recipe book. As more entertainment content — be it books, DVDs or games — becomes digitized and downloadable, could this mark the final chapter of the bookstores? The writing is on the brick-and-mortar wall.

books;tsutaya;japan pulse

jp0000041

2013/11/27

U.S. bombers cross China's claimed air defense zone

NEW YORK - Days after China asserted greater military control over a swath of the East China Sea to bolster claims to a cluster of disputed islands, the U.S. defied the move Tuesday as it flew two B-52 bombers through the area. The U.S. said what it described as a training mission was not flown to respond to China’s latest military maneuver, yet the dramatic flights made clear that the U.S. will not recognize the new territorial claims that Beijing laid out over the weekend. The two unarmed U.S. B-52 bombers took off from their home base in Guam and flew through China’s newly designated air defense zone, then returned to base, U.S. officials said. The bombers were in the zone for less than an hour, thundering across the Pacific skies during midday there, the officials said, adding that the aircraft encountered no problems. While the U.S. insisted the training mission was long-planned, it came just days after China issued a map and a new set of rules governing the zone, which includes a cluster of islands that are controlled by Japan but claimed by Beijing. U.S. officials would not publicly acknowledge the flights on Tuesday, but State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said China’s move appeared to be an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea. “This will raise regional tensions and increase the risk of miscalculation, confrontation and accidents,” she told reporters. China said Saturday that all aircraft entering the new air defense zone must notify Chinese authorities and are subject to emergency military measures if they do not identify themselves or obey Beijing’s orders. U.S. officials, however, said they have received no reaction to the bomber flights from the Chinese. The bomber mission underscores Washington’s immediate rejection of China’s new rules. The U.S., which has hundreds of military aircraft based in the region, has said it has zero intention of complying. Japan likewise has called the zone invalid, unenforceable and dangerous, while Taiwan and South Korea, both close to the U.S., also rejected it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest would not specifically comment Tuesday on the military flights. “It continues to be our view that the policy announced by the Chinese over weekend is unnecessarily inflammatory and has a destabilizing impact on the region,” he told reporters traveling with Obama in Los Angeles. China’s move to further assert its territorial claims over the islands is not expected to immediately spark confrontations with foreign aircraft. Yet it fits a pattern of putting teeth behind China’s claims and could potentially lead to dangerous encounters depending on how vigorously China enforces it — and how cautious it is when intercepting aircraft from Japan, the U.S. and other countries. While enforcement is expected to start slowly, Beijing has a record of playing the long game, and analysts say they anticipate a gradual scaling up of activity. The declaration seems to have flopped as a foreign policy gambit. Analysts say Beijing may have miscalculated the forcefulness and speed with which its neighbors rejected its demands. At least in the short term, the move undermines Beijing’s drive for regional influence, said Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It doesn’t serve Chinese interests to have tensions with so many neighbors simultaneously,” she said. Denny Roy, a security expert at the East-West Center in Hawaii, said China’s enforcement will likely be mostly rhetorical at first. “The Chinese can now start counting and reporting what they call Japanese violations, while arguing that the Chinese side has shown great restraint by not exercising what they will call China’s right to shoot, and arguing further that China cannot be so patient indefinitely,” Roy said. China also faces practical difficulties deriving from gaps in its air-to-air refueling and early warning and control capabilities, presenting challenges in both detecting foreign aircraft and keeping its planes in the air, according to Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore. Despite that, Beijing has shown no sign of backing down, just as it has continued to aggressively enforce its island claims in the South China Sea over the strong protests from its neighbors. Tensions remain high with Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea called Senkaku by Japan and Daioyu by China. Beijing was incensed by Japan’s September 2012 move to nationalize the chain, and Diaoyutai by Taiwan, which also claims them. Since then, Chinese and Japanese coast guard ships have regularly confronted each other in surrounding waters. Japan further angered Beijing last month by threatening to shoot down unmanned Chinese drones that Beijing says it plans to send on surveillance missions over the islands. Beijing’s move was greeted rapturously by hard-line Chinese nationalists, underscoring Beijing’s need to assuage the most vocal facet of domestic public opinion. Strategically, it also serves to keep the island controversy alive in service of Beijing’s goal of forcing Tokyo to accept that the islands are in dispute — a possible first step to joint administration or unilateral Chinese control over them. Beijing was also responding in kind to Japan’s strict enforcement of its own air defense zone in the East China Sea, said Dennis Blasko, an Asia analyst at think tank CNA’s China Security Affairs Group and a former army attache in Beijing. The Japanese zone, in place since the 1960s, overlaps extensively with the newly announced Chinese zone. Japan, which keeps a public record of all foreign incursions into its zone, actually extended it westward by 14 miles (22.5 km) in May.

senkakus;adiz;b-52s

jp0000042

2013/11/16

Think caviar but brace for caveat

In one of the most memorable scenes of the late, and sorely missed, Juzo Itami’s classic 1985 film “Tampopo” (“Dandelion”), Japanese businessmen enter a French restaurant. Confused by the exotic items on the menu, the elderly members of the party stick to what they know: sole meuniere, consomme soup and Heineken beer. The youngest member of the group, however, breaks the harmony by ordering quenelle, Boudin-style, like they serve it at the Taillevent restaurant in Paris, escargot wrapped in pastry with a fond de veau sauce, and an apple and walnut salad. The waiter is thrilled somebody in the room truly knows fine food, while his older colleagues fume with anger and embarrassment. Nearly three decades later, that scene looks less like a parody of high-end diners ignorant of gourmet food and more, as the recent food misrepresentation scandal shows, as a prescient profile of today’s finicky foodie who reads the menu carefully and knows which South African wine goes best with the Kobe beef or Okinawan pork. The revelation in October that eight hotels belonging to the Hankyu Hanshin group in Osaka, as well as the Ritz Carlton Osaka, had mislabeled about 50 food items on the menus of nearly two dozen restaurants and banquet halls turned out to be the tip of a very large iceberg. To date, in addition to Osaka-area hotel restaurants, a Tokyo Disneyland hotel and the Hyatt Regency Tokyo are just two of the many prominent names that have gotten caught up in the scandal. While the president of Hankyu Hanshin Hotels resigned to take responsibility for, among other things, claiming frozen fish as fresh and regular onions as a famed Kyoto variety, it was the Ritz Carlton Osaka’s president who created outrage when he said he originally thought there was no reason to announce one of the restaurants in his hotel was doing such things as using a different kind of shrimp than the one on the menu. Talentless “tarento” expressed shock that the famed Ritz was putting on its customers. Reporters scrutinized leather-bound menus of other Michelin-starred restaurants with a fine-toothed comb for lies, distortions, omissions and exaggerations. Suddenly, everybody was a food critic. Upscale Tokyo pundits assigned blame to the usual suspects — a sensationalist media, a few greedy corporations, and poor quality control by the line cooks. One restaurant industry source, speaking to the Asahi Shimbun, blamed the problem at the Ritz on a translation error. In Osaka, however, talk centered on the traditionally tightfisted, bargain-hunter culture of the natives toward spending money in a manner Tokyoites considered normal, even proper. The cost of living is 15 to 20 percent cheaper in Osaka than in Tokyo. Historically, Osakans, no matter their income level, have always been vocal in their demands for the lowest possible price for everything, especially in the service industry, regardless if certain sectors of it may be considered “high-end” elsewhere. This means even highly respected Osaka restaurants and hotels must go to extraordinary lengths to trim costs. Combine that with weak consumer protection laws and a hesitancy to question the waiter’s recommendation and you have an atmosphere ripe for abuse by those writing today’s specials on the chalkboard— at least until somebody in the know complains, is rebuffed by management and decides to blow the whistle. The young protagonist in “Tampopo” may have been showing off. But he instinctively understood the ancient concept of caveat emptor. As the food labeling scandal shows, today’s customers need to also heed the term’s gourmet cousin, which might be rendered as “caviar emptor.”

restaurants;hotels;hanshin;hankyu;ritz-carlton;menu falsifications

jp0000046

2013/11/17

Japan meets Kyoto goal via credit buys

WARSAW - Using the fiscal 1990 baseline, Japan achieved an 8.2 percent cut in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fiscal 2008 to 2012, meeting a 6 percent target under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on curbing global warming, government sources said Saturday. The preliminary figure shows Tokyo managed to fulfill its obligation during the first commitment period under the Kyoto pact due to a plunge in emissions in fiscal 2009 caused by a global financial crisis as well as forest absorption and the country’s purchase of emissions credits from overseas, the sources said. Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara is set to announce the nation’s achievement of the 6 percent cut target at the ongoing U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, they said. But greenhouse gas emissions in Japan have been rising since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, which left most of Japan’s nuclear plants offline and revived thermal power generation. Tokyo has decided not to join an eight-year second commitment period from 2013 for the Kyoto Protocol, saying the framework lacks effectiveness as major gas-emitting countries such as the United States and China are not part of the reduction efforts. On Friday, Tokyo set a new target of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 3.8 percent in fiscal 2020 from fiscal 2005 levels, assuming nuclear power plants in the country remain offline. But the revised goal has immediately drawn criticism as it represents an rise of about 3 percent in emissions from the Kyoto Protocol base year of fiscal 1990.

nobuteru ishihara;kyoto protocol;greenhouse gas

jp0000048

2013/11/19

Consumer body wants local-level food scrutiny

Responding to recent food frauds committed by hotel and department store operators, the Consumer Affairs Agency is aiming to amend the products labeling law to let prefectures issue improvement orders to businesses that violate the law, government sources said Monday. Under the existing Act Against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, only the Consumer Affairs Agency has the authority to order firms to stop misrepresenting items on their menus or to take steps to prevent further violations. But in practice, it is not possible for the agency to keep tabs on all the eateries and restaurants nationwide. The recent revelations of misrepresentations have triggered calls from the ruling bloc and prefectural and municipal governments to give local governments more authority. As things now stand, prefectural governments are allowed to inspect companies and instruct those linked to food fraud to stop breaking the law, or ask the Consumer Affairs Agency to issue orders. But the local governments have no legal grounds to issue such orders themselves. The Act Against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations prohibits attempts to mislead consumers by representing products as more expensive or better than they actually are. Violators are issued improvement orders, which if they fail to heed could result in imprisonment of up to two years or a fine not to exceed ¥3 million. The Consumer agency has 50 staffers who deal with issues related to the labeling law. However, since the agency’s establishment in September 2009, only four firms caught mislabeling food have been ordered to stop. Food fraud cases are expected to soar if local governments are authorized to go after violators.

consumer affairs agency;mislabeling;food labeling;menues

jp0000049

2013/11/19

Firms tap apps that 'augment reality'

Smartphone applications featuring “augmented reality” are being used by an increasing number of companies to promote their products. Ikea Japan K.K., the Japanese arm of the Swedish furnishing giant, launched a service in August that gives customers a virtual preview of how a piece of furniture will look in their home, with the help of a printed catalog, a smartphone or tablet and a mobile app. Customers first open the catalog at the selected product page and point the smartphone or tablet camera at a cross at the bottom of the page. This gives them access to augmented reality mode. Next, they close the catalog and place it on the spot where they intend to place the new piece of furniture. A virtual image of the selected sofa, bed or other furniture item will then be shown on the device’s screen with the room in the background. Customers can reposition the virtual furniture simply by touching the screen. About 90 kinds of furniture items can be viewed via augmented reality, which helps customers avoid buying the wrong size, shape or color by enabling them to picture the product in place first. “We want customers to know that purchasing furniture is easy and enjoyable too,” said Yuki Murata of Ikea Japan. A 30-year-old man who was visiting the Ikea outlet in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, along with his wife, said, “It is always a challenge to go and buy furniture, but by using this app we can see how it looks at home before actually coming to the store.” In another example, this winter, Sanrio Co. is selling two kinds of greeting cards, at ¥483 each, using augmented reality technology. It is the first time for the Tokyo-based character goods maker to sell the cards. One of the cards features four Santa Clauses that pop up when the card is opened. When the recipient holds a smartphone or tablet over the card, 11 Santa Clauses appear on screen, playing musical instruments. In the other card, Sanrio’s popular character Hello Kitty dances on the device screen and the recipient can even be in a photograph with Kitty. “We believe the cards combine the warmth of handwritten letters and the latest information technology,” said Shingo Yasutomo, a Sanrio official who developed them. Publishing firms also seem interested in products using the technology. Tokyo Shoseki Co. in August published a picture book for ¥1,995 about 33 species of animals at Asahiyama Zoo, a popular tourist draw located in Asahikawa, Hokkaido. By overlaying a smartphone on the book, a reader can view a virtual image of a bear swimming on the screen or a magnified image of the rarely seen cheek teeth of the Yezo deer. An official at Tokyo Shoseki said sales of the book are on the increase and the company has received favorable comments from readers, one of whom said, “It’s like being at the zoo.” Augmented reality technology is also used by many tourist spots and museums to offer visitors digital guidance, as well as in product ads on vending machines.

sanrio;ikea;augmented reality;tokyo shoseki

jp0000050

2013/11/07

Hotel Okura latest to own up to fraudulent menus

Hotel Okura on Thursday became the latest in a seemingly endless string of established hotels and department stores to admit to misrepresenting the items on its restaurant menus. Hotel Okura Co., the operator of the landmark hotel in central Tokyo and others nationwide, said 13 hotels and three restaurants under its wing had misrepresented 235 menu items. According to the hotel chain, a total of 386,000 dishes stemming from false menu descriptions, amounting to ¥870 million, had been sold since 2007. Separately, JAL Hotels Co., a unit of Hotel Okura, reported similar menu misrepresentations at its 13 hotels that amounted to 130,000 dishes worth ¥200 million since 2006. Hotel JAL City Tamachi Tokyo in Minato Ward, for example, served barnacle rock shell as premium “awabi” abalone. Also served was shark fin soup using fins made of artificial ingredients. Okura’s announcement came just a day after Japan’s three leading department stores — Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings Ltd., Sogo & Seibu Co. and Odakyu Department Store Co. — admitted using ingredients different from those listed on their menus. Though all three claimed the food fraud was committed by tenants, they’ve nonetheless taken heat for lack of oversight. Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings said that 14 restaurants in its group nationwide served misrepresented items. The fraud involved 52 menu items at eight department stores and one shopping mall, included the mislabeling of Vannamei shrimp as more expensive Shiba shrimp and processed beef as steak, Isetan Mitsukoshi said. In other cases, the origin of the food was false, such as pork raised in Iwate Prefecture being sold as from Miyazaki, and chestnuts from China baked into cakes labeled from Europe. Isetan Mitsukoshi said it will give refunds for those items. Meanwhile, Sogo & Seibu Co. admitted to misrepresenting 13 items at seven restaurants in its group stores nationwide. At a Sogo Tokushima restaurant in Tokushima Prefecture, for example, Awa beef, a local delicacy, was listed on the menu, though the beef was in fact from Kagoshima Prefecture. Odakyu Department Store Co. also acknowledged the same day that it had falsely represented dishes, including a product that claimed to contain prawns, not the tiger shrimp it actually did. “It’s the department stores’ responsibility to check how their tenants are managing food. Otherwise, they should not let (those restaurants) use their space,” said Yasuko Kono, director general of the National Liaison Committee of Consumer’s Organization. “The department store business, after all, is built on trust. And as a consumer, I am fuming by knowing the reality.” The Consumer Affairs Agency is studying whether the food fraud falls under the scope of the competition and policy law, which forbids mislabeling of any product, an agency official said. If it determines there were violations, it will order those companies to take preventive steps toensure they never happen again. Regardless of what the agency decides, the industries must stick to their own rules and guidelines to regain consumer trust, Kono said. “They are convicted criminals. They are professionals and there is no way they couldn’t have realized (the items were mislabeled). Their management culture has a huge problem and it needs to be changed,” Kono said. She also stressed that Japan needs to establish systems to track ingredients to their source. “At the moment, there is almost no such tracking system in Japan,” she said. The Consumer Affairs Agency instructed the hotel industry on Wednesday to take steps to correct its conduct. The agency handed written requests to representatives of the Japan Hotel Association and two other hotel industry groups. The groups received explanations of the law for preventing misleading representations of goods and services, and were shown past instances of menu descriptions found to violate regulations. The agency is currently discussing handing out similar requests to department stores, an official said. Companies implicated in the scandal include Prince Hotels Inc., Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co., the Ritz-Carlton Osaka and department store operator Takashimaya Co. Information from Kyodo added

restaurants;hotels;mislabeling;menu;misrepresentation;food fraud

jp0000051

2013/11/30

The secret of keeping official secrets secret

“He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep,” says Sir Humphrey Appleby, permanent secretary to the Department of Administrative Affairs, a fictitious branch of the British government. He is one of the main characters in the highly acclaimed 1980s BBC television series “Yes Minister” and its equally phenomenal sequel, “Yes Prime Minister.” Sir Humphrey’s axiom would surely be readily shared by current real-life Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he bulldozes his bill for the protection of special official secrets through parliament. The bill would meet with Sir Humphrey’s high approval not least because it keeps secret what secrets it deems especially secret. People who supposedly violate the regulations set down by the legislation would never be sure what secret it was that they failed to keep secret. Civil servants would become even more secretive than they already are because they fear a potential 10-year imprisonment for divulging secrets whose degree of secrecy they are secretly never quite sure of. Their unwritten code of secret conduct would ultimately be: “When in doubt, keep secret.” Such a mindset would also be very much after Sir Humphrey’s own heart. Not only the civil service but ordinary citizens would also walk in fear of breaking the law whose notions of secrecy are shrouded in secrecy. The whole nation would turn into a secret society in which people’s lips are sealed because they do not know what secrets they may be unwittingly sharing with each other. The foregoing words of Sir Humphrey’s appear in an episode called “A Question of Loyalty” in the “Yes Minister” series. Sir Humphrey’s political master, Jim Hacker, is minister for administrative affairs at that point. By a quirk of fate and some astute political moves Hacker goes on to become prime minister. Sir Humphrey also moves up to the top of the administrative ladder and joins Hacker as chief secretary to the Cabinet. Enemies in friendly disguise as much as friends in seeming hostility, the two of them come up against some intriguing issues of secrecy in their respective top jobs in government. “Official Secrets” is an episode that crops up about two-thirds of the way into the prime ministerial series. Clearly neither fact nor fiction concerning government and politics can proceed without touching on the theme of secrecy. On this occasion, an increasingly power-conscious Prime Minister Hacker tries to suppress the publication of a chapter of his predecessor’s memoirs because it says a lot of very unkind things about Hacker’s conduct when he was still in charge of the Department of Administrative Affairs. The solicitor-general, who is the top civil servant in charge of legal interpretation, complains that the chapter cannot be suppressed on grounds of official secrecy because the criticisms against Hacker, while possibly libelous, are not a security risk. The outburst indicates how easily the prime ministerial job can go to somebody’s head. Hacker, as political head of government, now considers himself leader of the nation, whereas the government is actually there to serve the nation and not the other way around. This is the misunderstanding of a weak mind with strong delusions. To the owner of such a mind and such delusions, every nasty thing that is said against them becomes actionable as a breach of official secrecy. Freedom of speech would disappear from the radar screen of democracy. It could just as easily happen in real life as well as in television. Noriko Hama is an economist and a professor at Doshisha University Graduate School of Business.

shinzo abe;secrecy;state secrets;state secrets bill

jp0000052

2013/11/30

Japan: The new Uzbekistan of press freedom in Asia

If you’re living in Japan, you may be surprised to know that your right to know has been replaced by the right to remain silent. Shhh … don’t protest. It’s practically a done deal. The first rule of the pending state secrets bill is that a secret is a secret. The second rule is that anyone who leaks a secret and/or a reporter who makes it public via a published report or broadcast can face up to 10 years in prison. The third rule is that there are no rules as to which government agencies can declare information to be a state secret and no checks on them to determine that they don’t abuse the privilege; even defunct agencies can rule their information to be secret. The fourth rule is that anything pertaining to nuclear energy is a state secret, which means there will no longer be any problems with nuclear power in this country because we won’t know anything about it. And what we don’t know can’t hurt us. The right to know has now officially been superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know. Welcome to the new Dark Ages of Japan, brought to you by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, Komeito and Your Party. If the economy and the actions of the government and its politicians seemed opaque up to now, the ruling bloc is making sure that it’s very solid obsidian. Every major news organization in Japan opposes the bill. Last week, thousands of ordinary citizens took to the street to protest the proposed legislation. The LDP — ever sensitive to the will of the people — took decisive action to address the issue last Tuesday. A debate was held in the morning and televised by state broadcaster NHK. As soon as NHK cut off the broadcast, the LDP ended the debate and rammed the bill through the Lower House. Democracy in action. Only the Upper House remains. The law has been compared to the pre-World War II Peace Preservation Law, which was used to arrest and jail any individual who opposed the government party line. “Japan already has a very weak freedom of information act which this will cripple,” said Yutaka Saito, a member of the Japan In-House Lawyers Association task force. “The bill takes everything bad about national security laws in the U.S. and then removes all the safeguards and checks.” According to one survey, more than 80 percent of the public feels that the new law will be misused by the government to coverup scandals, corruption and troubling information. That mistrust in the government is well founded: the Minamata disease coverup on behalf of corporate interests in the ’60s; the HIV-tainted blood scandal in the ’90s; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s moves to bury a whistle-blower report on nuclear safety problems at Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants in 2000. Abe has assured us that the regulations for the bill clearly state that a third party organization should be put in place to keep checks on the system. Should . Should is an interesting word. You should brush your teeth. You should pay your taxes. You should believe Prime Minister Abe when he tells that he doesn’t know notorious yakuza financier Icchu Nagamoto — even though he had his photo taken with him in 2008 . We should believe Abe and yet I don’t. Japan should have a society where people have a right to know what their government is doing and where freedom of the press is guaranteed. Abe’s suggestion that there should be oversight does not mean that there will be. And judging by recent history, even if a token oversight committee is created, it will be about as effective as protecting the public’s right to know as the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency was in preventing a triple nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. On Nov. 27, Reporters Without Borders condemned the legislation cogently. “How can the government respond to growing demands for transparency from a public outraged by the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear accident if it enacts a law that gives it a free hand to classify any information considered too sensitive as a ‘state secret’?” the organization said. “By imposing heavy penalties on those who obtain classified information . . . and then publish it, Parliament is making investigative journalism illegal, and is trampling on the fundamental principles of the confidentiality of journalists’ sources and ‘public interest.’ ” Reporters Without Borders also noted that Japan’s ranking in the press freedom index had taken a record fall of 31 places from its position in 2012 to a new low of 53 out of 179 countries. If the state secrets law is passed, Japan’s press freedom ranking next year is expected to sink to nearly Uzbekistan or China levels. Welcome to the land of the setting sun. Let’s see how much darker it will get.

shinzo abe;press freedom;secrecy;state secrets;state secrets bill

jp0000053

2013/11/30

In rare move, new medical department to be set up at university in Tohoku

The government will permit a university in Tohoku to establish a new medical department, education minister Hakubun Shimomura said. To be launched as early as spring 2015, it will be the first medical department to open in the country since the University of the Ryukyus established one in Okinawa Prefecture in 1979, Shimomura said Friday. The education ministry has not approved the creation of new medical departments in recent years to prevent an oversupply of doctors, but the latest move aims to assist the regeneration of Tohoku following the March 2011 quake, tsunami and nuclear disasters. The government has yet to decide which university will get to open the medical department. The new facility will be required to train doctors capable of contributing to the recovery of Tohoku by studying medical therapies to assist those suffering as a result of the disasters. It will also be urged to establish a scholarship for students who commit to working in the region after graduating from university, the ministry said. The university chosen to host the medical department will be banned from recruiting as faculty members doctors and nurses from nearby areas so as not to disrupt the regional health care infrastructure. Currently, Tohoku Fukushi University and Tohoku Pharmaceutical University, both based in Sendai, have expressed willingness to open a medical department.

education;tohoku;universities;doctors;mext;medical schools

jp0000054

2013/11/30

Inokashira park to open, Yangtze mine sweeping detailed, Kennedy eulogized, Japan-U.S. visa pact begins

100 YEARS AGO Sunday, Dec. 21, 1913 Tokyo’s Inokashira gets new park The proposal of providing a large public park at Inokashira for the benefit of the people of Tokyo has been approved by the Municipal Council. The Emperor has graciously offered the use of an extensive lot in that locality for that purpose. The park will be constructed with the pond at Inokashira as its center, extending to all directions. It will be only a few minutes’ walk from Kichijoji Station on the Central Railway Line about five miles west of Shinjuku. The pond is large enough to afford the pleasure of rowing boats. Almost the entire lot is under the shade of luxuriant trees. The Imperial gift to the park in extensive wooded land will make it one of the greatest attractions for pleasure-seeking persons of the capital. 75 YEARS AGO Sunday, Dec. 21, 1938 Captain details mine sweeping on Yangtze Captain Tokuji Mori, former Commander of the Japanese fleet on the Yangtze River, returned to Tokyo Monday to assume his office as the Chief of Staff in the Auxiliary Naval Station at Ominato. Spending nearly six months in sweeping numerous submarine mines, his fleet reduced the enemy’s strategic positions along the river one after another and made a triumphant entry into Hankow (Hankou) on October 26. Captain Mori had experience in sweeping mines in the Dardanelles in the Mediterranean as an officer of the Japanese destroyer Kashiwa during the World War. Captain Mori told the press: “I had made notes on the number of mines swept away until we approached Kiukiang (Jiujiang), but there were so many there that I became tired of this task. It was indeed a hard task to find the mines. “Encouraged by the nation’s support behind the guns, we were all in high spirits during the fight, however. Surrounded by the enemy’s mines and fortress cannons, we could not advance even a single step for five days in front of Kiukiang. “An American gunboat and a British gunboat were quietly watching our struggling. And we shed tears of joy when we captured this most important strategic position of the enemy.” 50 YEARS AGO Wednesday, Dec. 18, 1963 Nation’s leaders eulogize Kennedy The nation’s leaders assembled at Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo Tuesday to express their deep mourning and sense of loss at the death of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The memorial meeting, the first such public meeting held in Japan since Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, was attended by more than 2,000 people of all ages and walks of life. The meeting, held under the joint sponsorship of a national committee organized for the memorial gathering and the America-Japan Society, began at 1:30 p.m. with the playing of national anthems of the two countries. After a minute of silent prayer, the gathering heard the nation’s political, business and religious leaders deliver messages of condolence. They all identified themselves with the ideals Kennedy stood for and pledged their efforts to participate in the continuation of his unfinished work. In both English and Japanese, American Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer expressed thanks for the messages of condolence from the Japanese people and gave assurances that the work of the late president has been taken up by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his message, Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda said the Japanese people must realize that they have both the duty and the responsibility to keep working for peace and social justice in honor of the soul of the late U.S. president. Socialist Chairman Jotaro Kawakami said that although his party was opposed to U. S. Government policy toward Japan, Kennedy’s death was to be regretted because he died at the hands of an enemy of democracy “just as our late Secretary General Inejiro Asanuma did.” Asanuma was assassinated by an ultra rightist three years ago while delivering a campaign speech on the same stage of the hall. The NHK Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Wilhelm Loibner, played the second movement from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 and Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” the latter a favorite of the President. 25 YEARS AGO Friday, Dec. 16, 1988 Japan-U.S. visa pact goes into effect A Japanese-U.S. agreement exempting tourists and business people from visa requirements went into effect Thursday. U.S. Consulate, Japanese immigration and airline officials attended a ceremony at the Osaka International Airport to send off the first group of Japanese passengers to the United States. “This agreement will promote tourism between the two countries. And with greater exchanges will come greater mutual understanding,” said U.S. Consul General John R. Malott. Of the 300 passengers who left for the U.S. Thursday, 30 chose to go without visas. Japanese and American travelers, however, must fill out a visa waiver form, which is available from airlines, travel agents, embassies and consulates. The waiver is a considerably simplified version of the visa process, said Dennis Ortblad, who is in charge of the consulate’s visa section. Under the agreement, Japanese citizens carrying valid passports can enter the U.S. for holidays or business travel without visas. The agreement allows travelers to remain in the country for up to 90 days. No extensions of changes of status are permitted.

visas;john f. kennedy;inokashira park

jp0000055

2013/11/24

Secrets bill raises fears among nuclear foes

OSAKA - In late 2005, U.S. government officials, invited by Japan, observed a counterterrorism drill at the Mihama nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture and came away worried about the security situation at the complex. Some 2,000 police officers, firefighters, nuclear power officials, local authorities and residents were involved in the exercise, in which the plant comes under attack by foreign terrorists who entered the harbor by boat. The focus of much of the drill was on evacuating residents, but the U.S. officials were more concerned about what they felt were security gaps. This led Washington to push Tokyo to pay more attention to physically protecting the facilities. Today, as the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito ruling bloc prepares to enact a new state secrets law, the question of what happens to information about nuclear plant security is being batted about, especially in Kansai. Fukui Prefecture is home to 13 commercial reactors, all of which, before the recent shutdown, provided power to distant Osaka and Hyogo prefectures, as well as neighboring Kyoto and Shiga. It is also home to the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor. Originally designed to burn plutonium, Monju has been idle for nearly two decades after a sodium leak from a cooling unit and the resulting fire on Dec. 8, 1995, made headlines, along with the attempt to cover it up. Video shot inside the plant by the operator showing the extent of the damage was initially hidden, leaving it to the prefecture to uncover the truth. “In 1995, Fukui Prefecture courageously entered the Monju fast-breeder reactor accident site and videotaped the damage, thus revealing the coverup undertaken by the owner/operator. Passage of the state secrets bill would inhibit or prevent local authorities from taking such action again,” said Kyoto-based anti-nuclear activist Aileen Mioko Smith. The government says the purpose of the secrets bill is to prevent damaging leaks of information vital to national defense and diplomacy, and to prevent spies and terrorists from acquiring such sensitive information. In a blog, Upper House Councilor Yosuke Isozaki of the LDP recently took a jab at people who are concerned that information related to nuclear power plants would be classified. “Under the basic law, information can be classified to prevent terrorism. This means information related to the investigation of terrorist activities. Even people who have just a little bit of knowledge about the law should instantly understand when they read the (secrets bill) that it doesn’t apply to nuclear power information,” Isozaki wrote. But that raises the fundamental question of who, exactly, gets to judge what constitutes a terrorist activity at a nuclear plant and how they would make decisions about classifying information based on that judgment. In late October, at a meeting of opposition lawmakers, Ken Hashiba of the Cabinet Office said at a public hearing on the bill that it was possible information related to the security of nuclear power facilities could become classified. This appeared to be a more general statement than Isozaki’s. For their part, many in the Kansai region and elsewhere remain concerned. “There have already been 359 instances where the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has used the excuse of protecting nuclear materials (to not release information) and 449 cases where the Nuclear Regulation Authority has designated documents as secret,” the daily Kyoto Shimbun said in a recent editorial. The paper warned there was lots of room for the government to expand the “terrorism-related” category to things like evacuation plans or the routes to be used when nuclear fuel is transported by land or sea, often through crowded municipalities. Anti-nuclear activists often keep track of fuel shipments to and from the Fukui plants. The worries in Kansai were heightened in early October when the Fukushima Prefectural Assembly warned it was possible that, under the guise of preventing terrorism, the government would use the new law to designate atomic plant problems or information that could protect residents as classified, especially in an emergency. “Because information from the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) network was not appropriately disclosed (after the 3/11 quake), some of the residents in Namie were evacuated to an area with high radiation,” the assembly said in a statement, referring to one of the Fukushima Prefecture towns contaminated by radioactive fallout from the March 2011 core meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. The SPEEDI network is a series of monitoring stations around the country that sound the alarm when large amounts of radioactive material are emitted by power plants or other atomic facilities. In an emergency, METI, the NRA and local governments would be responsible for warning residents about dosage levels. Officially, however, local government heads in the Kansai region have yet to address the issue. Most remain focused not on the secrets bill or nuclear power itself, but on what they will have to do to deal with an emergency involving Fukui’s reactors. Shiga Prefecture recently simulated a nuclear accident at one of the Fukui plants and learned that there might not be enough fresh water in storage to cope with the loss of a fallout-tainted Lake Biwa, which provides drinking water for 14.5 million people. Other Kansai governments, however, are more concerned about a bigger question: how to coordinate a widespread evacuation. While the apparent lack of transparency on nuclear safety measures under the secrets bill has been widely discussed, receiving less attention is the question of whether ordinary citizens who are involved in anti-nuclear protests might be targeted and investigated under the new law, or whether the heads of local government that host reactors will find their demands for data on plant operations or costs blocked in the name of “terrorism.” “In the past, Japanese utilities cooperated with the police to identify, isolate and observe members of the Japanese Communist Party and their supporters. But most of these efforts at ideological discrimination were ruled to be in violation of the Constitution,” Fukui Prefectural Assemblyman Masao Sato of the JCP wrote on his official blog. Many nuclear power employees either belong to, or support, the JCP. They have often helped bring to light information about problems at the plants. Saito fears the new secrets bill will empower the police to crack down further on their efforts. “It’s clear that security information at nuclear power plant facilities will be classified as secret. But it’s also possible that under the pretext of doing a background check, the families and friends of nuclear plant workers will be tracked and the information gathered on them will be kept secret,” he said.

terrorism;nuclear power;state secrets;secrets bill

jp0000056

2013/11/24

Bullet trains on a pro-nuclear curve

OSAKA - In the debate over the future of nuclear power, which provided about a third of Japan’s electricity needs before the Fukushima disaster began in 2011, commentators for and against resuming its use have argued their case. Experts on both sides often rely on arguments couched in status-quo assumptions or general platitudes. Serious discussions are backed by mind-numbing details on endless PowerPoint slides, requiring the patience of Buddha to endure, let alone comprehend. But in the Kansai region, which relied on nuclear power for nearly half of its electricity before the three core meltdowns in March 2011, and in Fukui Prefecture, where 13 reactors supplied it, one reason for going back to nuclear requires neither a degree in economics nor nuclear engineering to understand. It’s just good old-fashioned pork-barrel politics. This involves the future of trains. Specifically, the future route of the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line, which, if all works out, will link Nagano with Osaka, via Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, sometime in the middle of the century. The question for Kansai’s nuclear industry, however, is whether the central government will ensure Fukui gets a good chunk of the route and whether it will run down the eastern or western side of Lake Biwa, in Shiga Prefecture, to get to Osaka. Three routes have been proposed, including one that would take bullet trains through southern Fukui, where the reactors are. Kansai’s leaders are well aware of how important the Hokuriku line will be to Fukui and strongly support extending it southwest to Osaka. But for economic reasons, they want it to go from Tsuruga to JR Maibara Station, on the eastern side of the lake. That means that it would bypass other towns in the southern part of Fukui that host reactors. The third proposed route would take the line along Lake Biwa’s western shore, keeping it in Shiga. Fukui’s pro-nuclear governor and the towns hosting its reactors want, of course, for the line to pass through their backyards so they can take advantage of the extra new passengers it would provide and lots of central government subsidies. What if Tokyo picks a different route? Well, although not required by law, local approval is a de facto condition for restarting idled reactors. If the shinkansen don’t pull into their stations with cash subsidies, or if the people don’t indirectly benefit from the line somehow, Kansai may find Fukui’s mayors and governor suddenly less cooperative about approving restarts. In the meantime, Toyama and Ishikawa prefectures are sending signals that the shinkansen project is related to nuclear power. At a meeting last week, the heads of the three prefectural assemblies agreed on extending it to Osaka and on restarting the reactors as soon as possible. At the end of the day, the financial concerns of Fukui and the Hokuriku region are going to influence Kansai’s energy policy. The Hokuriku Shinkansen Line is a major bargaining chip for Fukui, Kansai and the central government in reaching a deal on just how those concerns can be addressed.

nuclear;shinkansen;fukui

jp0000057

2013/11/22

In Thai capital, 852 schoolchildren set human Christmas tree record

BANGKOK - Christmas is not a holiday in predominantly Buddhist Thailand, and its palm trees outnumber pines, but the country still set a world record with its holiday spirit. One of the country’s largest shopping malls arranged a publicity stunt involving 852 schoolchildren dressed in green and red hoodies to break the Guinness world record for the largest human Christmas tree. They outdid a German record of 672 participants in 2011. To the relief of parents, and the chagrin of a few teenagers, the children were not hoisted onto a human pyramid shaped like a conifer. It was more an exercise in crowd control, grouping the assembled 6- to 15-year-olds into a treelike formation on the ground. “I kind of thought we’d get to stand on each other’s shoulders,” said Nattakit Liewkulnattana, 13. Like most participants at the event, he doesn’t celebrate Christmas. He wasn’t sure whose birthday the holiday marks — “Santa Claus?” he asked — but was excited to take part in a world record, and maybe get something in return. “I want presents!” the teen said. All participants got to keep their hoodies. The record was set in 15 minutes, 29 seconds. Guinness World Records representative Fortuna Burke certified the feat, counting on a clicker as children filed onto an outdoor verandah at Siam Paragon mall, the event’s organizer. Once in place, the children waved as a drone flew overhead to capture aerial images. Although Christmas does not appear on Thai calendars and is a regular workday, hotels and shopping malls decorate starting in mid-November for what is a big shopping season during Thailand’s peak tourism months. Thais set a number of other off-beat records this year. On Valentine’s Day, a couple broke the record for the longest kiss —58 hours, 35 minutes and 58 seconds — while in February, nearly 4,483 participants swung hula hoops for seven minutes, a record for the most people dancing with hula hoops simultaneously in one place.

thailand;yearend;festivals;records

jp0000058

2013/11/25

ADIZs common but China's is worrisome

China’s announcement Saturday of its establishment of an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea that includes the Japan-controlled Senkaku islets has worsened already tense bilateral ties. From 10 a.m. Saturday, China said any aircraft entering the ADIZ must obey its rules or face “defensive emergency measures.” Japan does not recognize the new Chinese claim, and government officials have lodged a protest with Beijing and demanded an end to the zone. What exactly is an air defense identification zone, and how legitimate is a country’s claim? Here are some details about ADIZs: What is an ADIZ? Established beyond national airspace, the zone is a defensive perimeter to monitor incursions by suspicious aircraft. The zone gives the military time to determine whether a foreign aircraft approaching territorial airspace is friend or foe. Zones are set up according to a country’s domestic laws. Many countries have established ADIZs, including Japan and the United States. China had none until Saturday. Japan’s ADIZ was originally set up by the Occupation forces after World War II. Based on its contours, Japan established its own zone in 1969, according to the Defense Ministry. Because ADIZs are based on domestic law, Japan has no legal grounds for preventing China from establishing an ADIZ over the Senkakus, which it claims, as does Taiwan. Do foreign aircraft need permission to pass through a country’s ADIZ? Under international law, aircraft have the right to fly freely in airspace over the high seas, where ADIZs are usually set up, thus no permission is required. However, because the ADIZ is set up to prevent unknown aircraft from entering its territorial airspace, Japan requests flight plans for all foreign aircraft entering the zone if the intention is to continue flying toward Japanese territory. What happens if an aircraft enters Japan’s ADIZ without a flight plan? Fighter jets are scrambled if an unknown aircraft enters the zone without advance notice and is approaching Japanese territory. The Defense Ministry declined to give further details for reasons of national security. The Air Self-Defense Force scrambled jets 80 times between July and September in response to Chinese aircraft, according to the ministry. So what’s wrong with China setting up such a zone? Is it any different from Japan’s ADIZ? One thing is that China’s ADIZ includes Japanese territorial airspace over the Senkaku Islands and that it theoretically forces Japan to obey its rule when flying in the zone. In a statement issued Sunday, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida accused China of designating the airspace over the uninhabited islets as if it is China’s territorial airspace. Beijing is also violating the right to fly freely over the high seas, based on the guidelines it released Saturday, Katsunobu Kato, deputy chief Cabinet secretary, said Monday. While Japan only “requests” that foreign aircraft submit flight plans in advance if entering its ADIZ to approach its national airspace, China is demanding that all aircraft “must” report flight plans to the Chinese Foreign Ministry or the civil aviation administration of China, a ministry official said in Beijing. The Chinese demand affects even aircraft passing through the zone, heading away from Chinese territory, the official said. Foreign aircraft must also maintain radio communications and transmit transponder signals and registration ID clearly indicating its nationality, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Aircraft that fail to obey face “defensive emergency measures” by China’s armed forces, it reported, details of which are unknown.

china;adiz

jp0000059

2013/10/05

Has business blackballed the yakuza? Don't bank on it

The Financial Services Agency (FSA) publicly spanked Mizuho Bank last month by slapping it with a “business improvement order” for letting Japan’s organized crime groups use its facilities. At least $2 million in illegal transactions were cited. Mizuho had been warned about the same thing in 2010 but didn’t do anything. It is quite a scandal. Even the venerable Nikkei Shimbun scolded Mizuho. Shocking. Appalling. But links between Mizuho and the mob date back longer than that. In February 2006, an executive in the bank’s business inspection department was arrested and confessed to having sold data on more than 1,250 customers to a yakuza front company. It was his department that was supposed to investigate and weed out yakuza clients, not sell them information. Oops. To be fair, though, despite Mizuho’s sordid history with yakuza finance, it was Citibank that used to be known in the underworld as 893 Ginko (893 Bank), since 893 can be read in Japanese as “yakuza.” The term comes from a losing hand in Japanese cards; many yakuza groups were originally federations of gamblers. Gamblers like banks. In 2009, the FSA ordered Citibank Japan to suspend its retail banking operations for a month after they found its system for monitoring crime syndicates and other antisocial organizations was not being updated. In addition, Citibank Japan was revealed as having maintained several hundred accounts for people affiliated with “antisocial groups” including yakuza bosses. Yeah, that was when we really knew the mob was non grata in the financial sector. Sorry, I forget: 2009 was the second time Citibank had been sanctioned. For similar reasons, its private banking division was closed down in 2004. Among its clients then was Saburo Takeshita, a notorious financier for the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime group. However, Citibank has cleaned up its act these days. Of course it helped that, in February 2012, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Yamaguchi-gumi. The smarter gangsters all closed their remaining Citibank accounts immediately — some even before the announcement. (Go figure.) If the goal of the sanctions was to get yakuza money out of the U.S. economy or any U.S. connected financial entity, it seems to have had an impact. But back to the Mizuho Bank and that business improvement order — a measure whose timing was probably not random. In fact, it was likely the government’s way of celebrating Oct. 1, 2013 — the second anniversary of the Organized Crime Exclusionary Ordinances (OCEOs) going national in Japan. From then, it essentially became a crime to pay off the yakuza or share any profits with them. The results have been significant and the FSA would have timed things to remind people of that. A somewhat unexpected side effect of the OCEOs has been to largely drive individual yakuza — not just the mobs’ business — out of local banks, because almost every banking contract in Japan now has an “ordinary crime exclusionary clause” (OCEC). That simple but effective provision was the brainchild of an anti-yakuza crusader, the late Toshiro Igari. A former prosecutor, Igari came up with the idea after consultations with the Westin Hotel in Tokyo, which had had serious problems getting a senior gang boss named Tadamasa Goto to kindly vacate their premises after he had checked in. In fact the hotel found it had no legal grounds on which to kick him out — until Igari thought of a way to ensure such problems would henceforth be avoided. Now included in many contracts, the clause requires signatories to affirm they are not members of any “antisocial forces” — aka yakuza. If they are, but sign anyway, not only can the institution unilaterally invalidate the contract — but yakuza members can be (and now often are) arrested for fraud. Consequently, readily visible yakuza — those with tattoos and/or missing fingers — are now finding themselves unable to maintain a savings account or even rent an apartment. The magic cocktail of OCEOs, OCECs — and more stringent national anti-organized crime laws — have squeezed the yakuza harder than 1,000 arrests. In fact by 2013, the mobs’ membership, which had hovered around 80,000 for 16 years, was down to roughly 63,000 according to National Police Agency data. One group, the Kyushu Seido-kai, even disbanded this year, leaving only 21 designated organized crime groups out there. However, the Democratic Party of Japan, which was ousted from power in a landslide last December, had the open backing of two major crime groups, as I’ve written before. Indeed, its Minister of Justice, Keishu Tanaka, even had to resign because of his alleged ties to the Inagawa-kai crime group. But the bold actions of the FSA should let everyone know the game has changed. Doing business with the yakuza at any level will no longer be tolerated. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s as clean as they come; he’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of the now-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Okay, there was that picture of him with Icchu Nagamoto, a Yamaguchi-gumi financier, published in the Shukan Post news weekly last year — but Mr. Clean said he didn’t really know him. And it was also reported that, after visiting the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant’s disaster zone on the 19th of last month, Abe had a covert meeting with the head of a major entertainment firm who is under investigation for organized crime ties. But hey, in order to root out the bad guys you have to know who they are. Right? So now it’s a new day in Japan. With Tokyo chosen to host the 2020 Olympics, the police are definitely feeling an impetus to remove the yakuza from public view. In addition, a movement to make casinos legal in Japan is also bad news for the yakuza, since illegal gambling is one traditional source of their income. However, the government will try to make sure the cops and politicians, not the yakuza, run the new legal racket. So the push is on. Yep. There’s a new sheriff, heat from the police, moves to cut the yakuza off from gambling money — and to kick them out of the financial sector as well. This time it looks to be curtains for the tattooed gangsters of old. But I don’t think I’d bet on it.

mizuho bank;tadamasa goto;citibank;financial services agency

jp0000060

2013/10/20

JAL rehab a lesson for possible Tepco failure?

Since the start of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant crisis, debate has raged over whether the government should have Tokyo Electric Power Co. go bankrupt. Even though the financial crises facing Tepco are far greater than those Japan Airlines Co. faced, one question that crops up is why the state won’t let Tepco fail like JAL did in 2010, after which the government stepped in and restructured the carrier. Observers say if Tepco goes bankrupt, the government would have to directly pay the trillions of yen it will cost to compensate disaster victims who had to evacuate their homes and abandon their livelihoods, to decontaminate the areas hit by radioactive fallout and to scrap the Fukushima plant. The government is reluctant to assume those costs, which would be akin to the state accepting the blame for the triple meltdown crisis, the observers say. “If Tepco goes bankrupt, there would be discussions over who should pay the compensation. It would have to be the government. It’s a matter of how to take responsibility, and the government wants that to fall to Tepco,” said Eiichiro Kume, a former JAL employee who unsuccessfully ran in the Lower House election in December 2012 from Your Party. Kume is now a secretary to Kenji Nakanishi, an Upper House lawmaker from the party, which wants Tepco broken up. Tepco is presently paying redress to the victims of the meltdowns, but it has to tap the state-backed Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund because the compensation is so vast. The fund has so far paid out more than ¥3 trillion in compensation, meaning the government is in reality footing the bill for the redress of victims, even though it appears like Tepco is directly in charge of making the payments. Another factor making it difficult for the government to liquidate Tepco is the cost to decontaminate the areas near the plant, said Shuya Nomura, a professor at the Chuo Law School. “In JAL’s case, it was possible to recover the taxpayer money if JAL made a successful comeback and profited,” said Nomura, who was on a Diet panel that investigated the Fukushima disaster. “In the case of Tepco, the government would be paying for things outside the utility’s main brief, including decontamination. It is unclear how much it would amount to and whether the money would ever be recouped,” he said. Nomura noted that JAL failed because of mismanagement but that Tepco was doing fine before monster tsunami from the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, overwhelmed the insufficiently protected power plant. Bankruptcy would force shareholders and creditors to eat the loss too, which they would find unfair considering a natural disaster was the main cause of Tepco’s problem, Nomura said. Others, however, argue that Tepco could have prevented or at least mitigated the crisis, but managers and now-disgraced government regulators with cozy ties to the power industry failed to ensure the plant was adequately protected despite long being aware of the tsunami threat. Financial market players have been pressuring the government to keep Tepco from failing, claiming that a bankruptcy may lead to a default of the utility’s corporate bonds and bring chaos to the credit market, he said. Kume and Nomura both feel the government should scrap Tepco because under the current situation, it is required to turn a profit as a private firm and cover the costs of compensation, decontamination and decommissioning. “No matter how much profit Tepco makes, it will all go to compensation,” Kume said. “Do you think employees can keep their motivation in such a company?” Indeed, hundreds of employees have left the utility every year since the disaster started, including 712 who quit in fiscal 2012 and 465 in fiscal 2011, compared with just 134 in fiscal 2010, which ended on March 31, 2011. Kume warned that if the situation continues as is, Tepco may not retain the ability to provide a stable power supply. Kume said one lesson learned from JAL that can be applied to Tepco is that undergoing bankruptcy could enable the utility to have a fresh start and improve employee morale. Kume, who worked for JAL for more than 20 years and left the airline right before it went bankrupt, said he has met his former colleagues since the bankruptcy and their morale was much higher than before. Nomura said that another lesson to be drawn from the experience with JAL is that the government should have a firm vision of the future of the company and the overall industry if Tepco were to go bust. “The government had to build a basic policy for Japan’s airline industry in the process of reconstructing JAL,” Nomura said. Some argued that JAL did not have to survive because All Nippon Airways could be expanded to compensate for its disappearance. But JAL staged a comeback because the government decided the nation’s airline industry needed the flagship carrier, Nomura said. “This lesson indicates that a basic energy policy needs to be established (before any Tepco bankruptcy), otherwise, it would be hard to come up with a vision of a new Tepco,” he said, noting any new Tepco must embody that new energy policy. The government is currently reviewing its long-term energy policy, specially focusing on what to do with nuclear power and renewable energy.

jal;tepco;bankruptcy

jp0000064

2013/10/27

The method behind the brashness

Osaka While his inflammatory comments have made headlines and his combative, argumentative style has shocked and enraged those who take comfort in the traditional politician’s art of discreet ambiguity, there is method behind Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s perceived rhetorical madness. Since coming to power in 2008 as the governor of Osaka, no Japanese politician has more effectively used TV and social media, especially Twitter, to his advantage. But whether the subject is municipal services, budget cuts or the policies of his Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party), Hashimoto’s rhetoric often takes a recognizable path. First, he makes his point even if it isn’t related to the question (“Well, yes, bureaucratic reform in Osaka Prefecture is important. But, ultimately, this is about the need to eliminate bureaucratic waste by merging the city and prefecture of Osaka.”) Second, he identifies what he sees as the problem (“We’re in this mess because of lazy bureaucrats and greedy unions”). Third, he makes the case for change (“We have to compete with Tokyo and change the educational system so generations of Osakans develop the skills needed to compete internationally”). At that point, no matter the issue, Hashimoto will likely refer to the same basic set of pro-corporate solutions for bringing about change: budget and personnel cuts, union curbs and privatization plans, while of course demanding clear rules and a level playing field. Such talk warms the hearts of not only Osakans worried about their city falling behind Tokyo and East Asia economically, but also corporate supporters and some in foreign business community who, until his “comfort women” comments in May made him an international pariah, saw the 44-year-old populist as the best hope for leading Japan into a new era of prosperity. To get his message out, Hashimoto, a lawyer, uses news conferences to conduct trials in the court of public opinion so that he, the defense attorney (for the city), can do battle with the prosecution (the media, his enemies in the bureaucracy) using a direct debating style to win over the jury (the voters). Thankfully, his remarks are usually free of the vague euphemisms that more senior politicians use, and spiced with an occasional bon mot that ends up in the news. A logical argument in clear, direct Japanese is the only way to convince voters, he says. Hashimoto’s style also differs in that his rhetoric and media strategy are aimed at a new generation of Japanese who do not trust newspapers. The TV and Internet are his preferred media, and many of his appearances are online in unedited form. This allows him to repeat his points endlessly in front of the cameras and revise them, knowing it will all be publicly available, especially if —after followup questions — he believes TV producers will use an earlier sound bite that he does not like. Is this rhetorical style and media strategy working? Recent polls show Nippon Ishin has a popularity rating of about 1 percent. Yet the mayor himself still has a strong base, although many have doubts about his specific goals, like the city-prefecture merger. As long as Osakans continue to understand what he says, it seems, he will always have a political home, regardless of what happens to his political movement.

media;toru hashimoto

jp0000065

2013/10/11

Hokuriku line bullet trains christened

East Japan Railway Co. and West Japan Railway Co. have named four bullet trains that will run on the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line, which will connect Tokyo and Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, via Nagano, from spring 2015. The names — Kagayaki, Hakutaka, Tsurugi and Asama — were selected among proposals submitted by the public. Kagayaki will be used for the fastest trains, which will stop only at major stations between Tokyo and Kanazawa, while Hakutaka shinkansen will stop at more stations on the line. Trains shuttling between Toyama and Kanazawa will be named Tsurugi, while those running on the Nagano Shinkansen Line will retain the name Asama.

names;bullet train;jr east;jr west;hokuriku shinkansen

jp0000066

2013/10/29

SDP woos Koizumi to lend clout to anti-nuclear drive

If only briefly, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi raised hopes he will stage a comeback as an anti-nuclear crusader when he met Tuesday with the head of a minor but like-minded opposition party. But, during their 45-minute meeting, Koizumi declined Social Democratic Party chief Tadatomo Yoshida’s request to cooperate with his five-Diet-member party’s push to abolish nuclear plants. According to Yoshida, Koizumi argued that it was the duty of each party and politician to appeal separately and directly to the public. “I asked him to cooperate, but he said that each party, which has its own arguments, should try to realize the abolition of nuclear power plants,” Yoshida, who took charge of the SDP earlier this month, told reporters after the meeting. Koizumi also insisted he is not planning to form a new party or a political force centered on anti-nuclear policy, Yoshida, said, noting Koizumi told him he will continue to seek to change public opinion, which will eventually influence the government. Once the most powerful opposition party and a longtime foe of Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party, the SDP has advocated a nonnuclear energy policy for years. It is now a minor party, with five Diet members. Koizumi met Yoshida at the Center for International Public Policy Studies in Tokyo, where Koizumi serves as an adviser. After stepping down as prime minister in 2006, Koizumi, 74, largely withdrew from the public eye, rarely remarking on politics. That changed earlier this year when he began calling for the abolition of nuclear plants after visiting a final disposal site in Finland that is supposed to store spent fuel up to 100,000 years. The SDP is attempting to expand its political clout by calling on antinuclear political forces, such as Koizumi. Officials at the prime minister’s office appear worried about Koizumi’s anti-nuclear call. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has pledged to restart any of the now-shut 50 nuclear plants that pass Nuclear Regulation Authority safety tests.

fukushima;sdp;nuclear energy;junichiro koizumi;political alliance

jp0000067

2013/10/29

Hotel's misleading menus leave bad taste

OSAKA - Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co., under fire for deceiving consumers by misrepresenting items on its menus, is drawing sympathy from some in the food and hotel industries. According to people involved in the food service industry, false advertising of this kind “happens quite often, and the company might have not intended to falsify the menus.” During a news conference Monday, Hankyu Hanshin Hotels President Hiroshi Desaki claimed that touting Vannamei shrimp as Shiba shrimp is a customary practice among people in the industry. Desaki also said the company did not feel it necessary to inform customers it was using a cheaper type of scallion than “kujo negi,” a traditional Japanese scallion mainly grown in Kujo, southern Kyoto. He said the scallions were served as “a side dish.” Desaki claimed that although lying about the nature of the items on the menus was far from a simple mistake, the company never intended to profit from the misrepresentations. He admitted, though, that it was a mistake “for which we have already received a severe rebuke.” According to sources in to the food industry, Shiba shrimp is available only in small quantities and at high prices. The sources said that a Chinese restaurant in the city of Chiba resolved the problem by offering “ebi” chili (stir-fried shrimp in chili sauce) as two different menu items. The price of the item named Shiba ebi chili sauce, apparently using Shiba shrimp, is 1½ times higher than for the item named ebi chili sauce. Desaki was criticized, however, by a man who has worked for Hankyu Hanshin Hotels restaurants and other eateries. “If a hotel with such a strong brand image labels an item as Shiba shrimp, everyone will be deceived,” he said. “All restaurants that I worked at had different policies, but the only difference was whether the owners advertised the items (with cheaper and more expensive ingredients) separately.” Amid the mounting criticism, a 53-year-old owner of a Chinese-style eatery in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, expressed understanding for the misrepresented fare. “When I entered this business, we used to call all small shrimp ‘Shiba shrimp,’ ” the owner said. “For people of my age, it can happen.” An owner of a restaurant in the Kinki region that serves dishes using kujo negi said: “We inform our customers” if ingredients have to be replaced due to a typhoon or in other similar situations. “In this business, (false labeling) is very common,” he said. “The point is whether the issue will come to light or not.” There are those who worry that the scandal, which involved eight restaurants run by Hankyu Hanshin Hotels, may spread to other companies. The hotel operator decided at a board meeting Tuesday to appoint Kazuhide Fujimoto, a managing executive officer of the Osaka-based company, to take over as president from Desaki, who will resign to take responsibility for the scandal. Fujimoto will succeed Desaki on Friday when Mitsuo Nozaki, a board member of parent company Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., will become part-time chairman of the hotel chain. Fujimoto, a 63-year-old career hotelier, will be tasked with strengthening the company’s management and restoring customer trust.

hotels;hanshin;mislabeling;hankyu;menu;falsifications

jp0000068

2013/10/10

Psssst! Wanna bottle of fresh air?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLAxtYxUuLI Frisk is taking the phrase “like a breath of fresh air” quite seriously — or rather not seriously at all. The breath-mints brand’s latest online campaign involves a lottery to win a grand prize of seven bottles filled to their brim with exotic air (or, if you’re a cynic, seven completely empty bottles). The Frisk Select World Fresh Air Collection campaign is promoting the introduction of the brand’s newest flavor — Fresh Herb Mint — as well as the return of Frisk Spearmint. And, doing what must be one of the most enviable jobs, one Frisk employee is being sent to seven scenic destinations across the world, just to pump air into glass bottles. So far he’s been to Waipio Valley in Hawaii to collect air of a “mysterious atmosphere.” You can watch a rather exhilarating video of the process. Yes, who wouldn’t want this man’s job? He’s being jetted around the world to simply don a lab coat and white gloves, and then stick an air-compressor tube into a bottle for 15 seconds. His next destination will be Canada’s glacial Moraine Lake for some “romantic” air, which will be followed by South America’s Iguazu falls (healing air), England’s Oxford (intelligent air), Matterhorn of the Northern Alps (freezing air), Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro (wild air) and finally Tasmania (beautiful air). To prove that the air really has been obtained and make anyone with a desk job feel completely inferior, sad and jealous, a video of the air-collection at each destination will be uploaded onto the campaign site. The Frisk Select World Fresh Air Collection is being described as a gift for people suffering the daily stress of modern life. Quite how it will help, though, is unclear. Perhaps it’s just a case of positive thinking: The bottles are NOT empty, they are full! Five sets of bottles can be won, as well as 50 original Frisk gift boxes. To enter the lottery, you just fill out the form here . And do it before 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 31, when the opportunity to win will vanish . . . into thin air.

japan pulse;frisk

jp0000069

2013/10/19

Will Olympic glory carry beyond Tokyo?

If Tokyo’s reaction to winning the 2020 Olympics, especially among the cash-strapped TV stations and other media types who rely on bread and circuses-type events to pay the bills, made you feel like Alice in Wonderland or a character in a Samuel Beckett play, you’re not alone. Well beyond the drawbridge of Old Edo, where the other roughly 90 percent of the country lives, the general feeling was a mixture of “Good for you” and “Don’t forget the victims of Tohoku and that problem in Fukushima. You know, the one you told the world was under control?” The triumph also came with contradictory feelings about the alleged benefits for the rest of the country. There is hope that the boastful predictions — all from Tokyo-based pundits, of course — about the Olympics being of great benefit to local economies will turn out to be something other than wishful thinking or cynical propaganda. However, there is also fear that the end result will be an even further shift of wealth and power to the capital, while the rest of the nation is left to grow older and poorer, withering in decaying towns and villages whose infrastructures age as rapidly as their remaining residents. A Hokkaido Shimbun editorial summed up the concerns of many local governments around the country, arguing that pouring national funds into Olympic-related construction that further promotes concentration in Tokyo at the expense of local finances is not acceptable. Or, as a Kyoto Shimbun editorial asked, why was Tokyo really chosen? For the reconstruction of Japan or for the revitalization of Tokyo? The editors added that the Tokyo that boasted of its compactness, vibrant youth culture, food and environmental safety, and ability to raise ¥400 billion in donations for the Summer Olympics, appears to be located in a different world from the one most Japanese inhabit. To be sure, parts of Japan may benefit from Olympic-related tourism. Kyoto, even as its newspaper editors protest, is no doubt calculating how many foreign tourists will visit the ancient capital between now and 2020. Sapporo, which has indicated an interest in hosting a future Summer Olympics (it already hosted the 1972 Winter Games), hopes visitors, after sweltering in Tokyo’s summer heat during the games, will cool off by traveling to Hokkaido. In Osaka, despite the city’s losing bid for the 2008 Games, Mayor Toru Hashimoto is dangling the prospect of an Osaka Olympics to push his agenda of unifying the city and prefecture. And you can be sure that local government officials and Diet members from all 47 prefectures are wondering how they can get a piece of the Olympic action. History, of course, is not going to repeat itself. In 1964, when Tokyo last hosted the Summer Games, Japan was a smaller, younger country of just less than 100 million people, a mere 6.3 percent of whom were 65 years or older. In 2020, nearly 30 percent of a population of about 124 million will be senior citizens. A decade later, in 2030, 20 percent of the population in 43 prefectures will be 75 years or older. The four exceptions include Tokyo. Thus, it is not spite or envy outside Tokyo that is driving Olympic criticism, but cold hard facts about unavoidable local demographic changes ahead, and the political, economic and social changes they will bring. Local leaders cannot afford, literally or figuratively, to sit back and let the Mad Hatters in Tokyo hold their nostalgic tea parties because they know that, at some point and in some form, they, too, will be asked to chip in to help cover the bill.

osaka;tokyo 2020;2020 olympics

jp0000070

2013/10/26

Flip a skirt a month in 2014

The original run of Kari Kato ‘s “Skirt Flipping Calendar” did so well that it’s back this year in two colors: While the thrill of most novelty calendars is spurred by anticipating what the next month’s image will be, in this case, every month looks more or less the same… …which is not to say there’s no thrill here, because when all 12 skirts are flipped — well, you’ll have waited for all year, so let’s not spoil it. If you want to see how 2013 was rung in, check here . The new sticky notes seem even more fun. Gigazine ‘s example cracked me up, but really, I can’t think of a place to stick these that wouldn’t be entertaining. The calendars run ¥2,100, while the sticky notes are ¥680 for 20. They’re available through Village Vanguard or directly on Kaori Kato’s site . It’s amazing how design can take something that would be totally inappropriate in real life and make it not only whimsically cute, but functional. Anyone planning on watching the days go by with one of these pin-up girls?

japan pulse;kaori kato

jp0000071

2013/10/26

Oh, to be blissfully unfree in Nippon's isles . . .

“Freedom.” “Liberty.” Ringing words. Better than any other, they define modern times. They sparked three early-modern revolutions — England’s “Glorious Revolution” (1688), the American Revolution of 1776-83, and the French Revolution beginning around 1789. Japan then was a “closed country” — had been since 1638, would be until 1854, its citizens barred from leaving and almost all foreigners barred from entering, both on pain of death. While freedom was being born in the West, or being seized from recalcitrant rulers, a very different ideal was maturing in Japan — the ideal of submission. Absolute, total, unquestioning submission. Article 97 of Japan’s postwar Constitution declares, “The fundamental human rights by this Constitution guaranteed to the people of Japan are fruits of the age-old struggle of man to be free.” That and similar passages betray the document’s foreign origins. The “struggle of man to be free” does not shine in the Japanese tradition. What does is a diametrically contrary struggle — the struggle of man to be unfree. It boggles the modern mind, Japanese scarcely less than foreign. Prodigies of obedience, servility, self-surrender — heroic or abject, call them what you will! — characterize Japanese history and literature. They are held up as models of the highest conduct, epitomes of the loftiest aspirations. In his English-language classic “Bushido” (1900), the Christian scholar Inazo Nitobe tells with unconcealed admiration of a samurai lord who, falling into disfavor, fled into rustic exile. His son, still a child, became the object of pursuit by those bent on wiping out the entire clan. A retainer had a son of the same age who bore a striking resemblance to the hunted child. Duty spoke clear — the lower-ranking child must be sacrificed, his head presented to the authorities as proof of mission accomplished. Neither mother nor child hesitated for an instant. The retainer’s child was killed; the authorities were fooled; the young lord lived on; honor was served. The novelist Kikuchi Kan (1888-1948), in a short story titled “On the Conduct of Lord Tadanao” (1918), relates in fictional form the historical dispossession and banishment, in 1623, of the lord of Echizen (present-day Fukui). Lord Tadanao was (as we would say today) emotionally disturbed. His mad outrages grew scandalous. The authorities at last felt compelled to intervene. Kan describes the aftermath of a drinking party: “Lord Tadanao was in an unusually cheerful mood. His favorite page boy, Masuda Kannosuke, ventured to make a remark while replenishing his lord’s great wine cup. ” ‘Why have we not seen your lordship lately in the military drill hall?’ he asked.” Taking offense for some reason, “Lord Tadanao went white with rage. Seizing a tray for wine cups … he hurled it with the speed of an arrow toward Kannosuke’s face. The violence was unexpected, and Kannosuke blanched; but, rigidly trained as he was in the code of loyalty, he made no attempt to dodge. He took the impact of the tray full on the front of his face and fell prostrate where he was …” There was only one thing for Kannosuke to do and, that night, he did it: He disemboweled himself. The submission ethos reaches an apex (or nadir) with junshi , the custom of committing suicide upon the death of one’s lord. Of what value is life to a loyal retainer bereft of his lord? Though formally outlawed in 1663, the practice flourished almost into modern times, its last famous exemplar being Gen. Maresuke Nogi, hero of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, the general and his wife committed suicide in their Tokyo home. “The relationship between lord and vassal should be like that of lovers,” says the 18th-century “Hagakure,” a compendium of samurai ideals. “Whether (the vassal) is or is not loved by the lord, or may even be unknown to him, this makes not the slightest difference; he is continually grateful for his lord’s benevolence to the very marrow of his bones and weeps tears of gratitude as he devotedly renders him service.” Imagine Nitobe’s samurai, or Kannosuke — or Nogi, for that matter — reading the present-day Constitution. Would they not be puzzled? “We, the Japanese people … do proclaim that sovereign power resides with the people …” They would hardly recognize this as Japanese thinking. They would be right. It was crafted under the auspices of the postwar U.S.-led Allied Occupation and reflects Western, not traditional Japanese, ideals — a fact that has rankled the ruling Liberal Democratic Party since its founding in 1955. Last year a resurgent LDP issued a draft plan for revision of the Constitution. Conspicuous among its proposals is the deletion of almost all references to the universality of freedom, equality and human rights. Instead, the draft explains, “Rights are gradually formulated through the history, tradition and culture of each community. Therefore we believe that the provisions concerning human rights should reflect the history, culture and tradition of Japan.” To lovers of freedom, that is very ominous language. The “history, culture and tradition of Japan” boast peaks that enrich and inspire the world — in literature, painting, theater, sculpture, architecture, landscape gardening, anything you like, but not in freedom, at least not as we understand the word today. Understood differently, perhaps Japan can make a case for itself. The modern Zen master Daisetz T. Suzuki, in “Zen and Japanese Culture” (1959), says, “We talk very much these days about all kinds of freedom, political, economic and otherwise, but these freedoms are not at all real … The real freedom is the outcome of enlightenment.” The LDP draft Constitution does not call for a return to the ethics of the “Hagakure.” But it does unapologetically subordinate “freedoms and rights” to “duties and obligations.” That accords with Japanese tradition — not, however, with what to a modern mind seems best in it.

japanese constitution;daisetz t. suzuki;hagakure;emperor meiji

jp0000073

2013/10/31

'Autograph-seekers' throw bucket of feces into Taiwan pop star's van

TAIPEI - Taiwanese pop star Jam Hsiao said he’s outraged by an alleged attack in which two apparent autograph-seekers threw a bucket of fecal matter into his van. The 26-year-old singer told reporters Tuesday that two motorcyclists approached his van asking for autographs before the attack. He said his driver was hit and suffered bruises while pursuing the motorcyclists, but Hsaio himself was unharmed. Hsiao said he was outraged by Monday’s incident and called on the authorities to find the culprits, saying “I demand an answer.” He said the attackers asked if it was his car, so he believes they were looking for him, but he said he had no known enemies and did not know who would want to harm him. “I hope whoever hired these two men gets the harshest punishment,” Hsiao said. “I hope whoever was paid to do this . . . I want them to know, they will regret it.” Police are investigating but have taken no one into custody. Known for his explosive high notes, Hsiao rose to Mandarin pop prominence after appearing on the “Super Star Boulevard” talent show in 2007.

celebrities;music;taiwan

jp0000074

2013/10/30

JT to cut 1,600 jobs, close four plants

Japan Tobacco Inc. is cutting 1,600 jobs and closing four domestic factories as part of its plan to boost competitiveness at home and profitability. The job cuts will be made through a voluntary retirement program that will be offered to eligible employees in the domestic tobacco business and corporate functions, JT said in a statement Wednesday. “Our Japanese domestic tobacco business operates in an increasingly challenging environment, mainly due to consecutive tobacco tax increases, tightening of smoking-related regulations, growing health consciousness and an aging society,” the company in a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Asia’s largest listed tobacco maker, JT faces declining demand in the home market amid the shrinking population and has been expanding overseas to offset this weakness. The ratio of smokers in Japan has fallen 4 percentage points to 20.9 percent over the last four years, according to the company’s website. Overseas revenue accounts for about half of JT’s sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The most recent voluntary retirement program was in the year that ended in March 2005 and 5,796 employees accepted that plan, spokesman Hisashi Sekiguchi said before the announcement. The company cut jobs at that time to increase competitiveness, he said. JT shares climbed 3.65 percent to ¥3,550 after NHK reported the company plans to shed 20 percent of its workforce and close some factories. In April, JT forecast net income will climb 21 percent to ¥415 billion while sales will gain 12 percent to ¥2.37 trillion in the year ending on March 31. A weaker yen is boosting the value of revenue from tobacco operations overseas. The government, which had owned 50 percent of the company, cut its stake to 33 percent in March to help pay for reconstruction in the Tohoku region.

japan tobacco;tobacco;job cuts

jp0000075

2013/10/30

Anti-nuclear Koizumi agitating for comeback?

Long silent and out of the public eye, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s recent rumblings against nuclear power are causing many to wonder if the most popular leader of recent decades is laying the groundwork for a political comeback. The 74-year-old Koizumi has met separately with two opposition party heads — Tadatomo Yoshida of the Social Democratic Party and Yoshimi Watanabe of Your Party — to discuss his mission to rid the nation of all 50 of its nuclear reactors. A visit to a spent-fuel disposal site in Finland following the 2011 Fukushima crisis converted him to an anti-nuclear activist, Koizumi claims. Recent speeches given at closed-door meetings made the headlines of gossip magazines. Now Koizumi is stepping up his anti-nuclear campaign. On Oct. 16, for the first time he allowed TV cameras from media outlets to shoot an anti-nuclear lecture in its entirety in Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture. Next up, Koizumi is scheduled to hold a news conference at the Japan National Press Club on Nov. 12, where he will face senior reporters from all the major news outlets for the first time since stepping down as prime minister in 2006. “He has great power to send messages to the public. That’s what I felt today,” Yoshida of the SDP said after meeting Koizumi on Tuesday. While serving as prime minister, Koizumi was often touted as a powerful communicator, a telegenic genius of the sound bite. Critics called him a political agitator who labeled his foes “anti-reformers.” But his popularity with voters carried the Liberal Democratic Party to a landslide victory in the 2005 Lower House election, in part due to his quest to privatize the postal system. In office, Koizumi rose above his party, a “lone wolf” who relied on communication skills to achieve his popularity. It is this approach, rather than by forming an alliance with a political force, that he appears to be adopting again to get his message across to the public. During Tuesday’s meeting, Koizumi declined Yoshida’s offer to team up on the abolition of nuclear plants. Instead, Koizumi stressed that each party and politician should make their own appeals to the public, and denied any intention to form a new political party, as gossip magazines have speculated, according to Yoshida. It’s possible that Koizumi sized up the SDP and other anti-nuclear suitors and decided an alliance would not benefit him. The SDP and Seikatsu no To (People’s Life Party) — the only parties to advocate for the immediate abolition of all nuclear plants — performed poorly in the latest Lower House election, in July, and their public support rates have remained below 1 percent all year, according to NHK polls. Another hurdle to an alliance: The two share few views with Koizumi other than the anti-nuclear stance. The SDP and Seikatsu no To support big government with increased spending on social security, while Koizumi was a champion of small government and free markets. An advocate of pacifist policies, the SDP calls for cutting back U.S. military bases in Japan, while Koizumi was an earnest supporter of the Japan-U.S. security alliance. “Nobody believes the SDP and Mr. Koizumi agree on (various policy issues.) They never agree on security issues, either,” LDP Secretary-General Shigeru Ishiba said Tuesday. Still, officials at the prime minister’s office appear worried about Koizumi’s potential to sway the public. Many LDP lawmakers have pushed long and hard for nuclear power plants to be built in their constituencies. And Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to restart any of the 50 reactors that pass Nuclear Regulation Authority safety tests. At the end of last month, Abe’s Cabinet appointed Shinjiro Koizumi, a son of the former prime minister, as parliamentary secretary at the Reconstruction Agency. This appointment was widely seen as an attempt to keep the young Koizumi, who is also popular with voters, under control, to prevent him from emerging, like his father, as a rising star of the anti-nuclear movement. As a senior official at the Reconstruction Agency, the son is now obliged to toe the government line, including its energy policies. On Wednesday, facing an opposition lawmaker during a Diet session for the first time, he was asked to explain his nuclear stance. He simply responded that he would concentrate on urgent issues related to the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, such as the problems of radioactive water and compensating local residents. “I’m a parliamentary secretary and a member of the government,” he reportedly told the Diet session.

sdp;junichiro koizumi;antinuclear activists;political comeback

jp0000077

2013/10/23

China cracks down on 'American Idol'-style shows

BEIJING - Chinese authorities are cracking down on how often broadcasters can air reality, dating and talent shows such as the Chinese versions of “American Idol” and “The Voice,” which draw huge audiences. Provincial broadcasters show such programs, which are cheap to produce and earn a lot of advertising revenue, on satellite channels seen around the country. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that the “American Idol” kind of talent shows now need approval from the body that oversees broadcasting, which will license one such program per channel each quarter for prime-time viewing. It also reported that new regulations require satellite channels to allocate no less than 30 percent of their weekly airtime to topics including news, economics, culture and science from next year. There have been repeated efforts to limit U.S.-style reality TV and other light fare shown on satellite TV, or push them out of prime-time viewing, with stated reasons including the need to stop vulgar content and promote more efficient use of resources. The State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television reportedly issued the latest regulations. Liu Shanying, a political scientist at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said he suspected the new regulations were due to satellite channels taking too much audience away from national broadcaster China Central Television. The Communist Party administration “is helping CCTV, the TV broadcaster that has the main task of carrying forward the government’s message,” said Liu, who used to work for CCTV. “The local stations have more freedom to attract audiences with entertainment shows. And that takes away too many viewers from CCTV and they are afraid that no one will pay attention to the government’s tune.” The restrictions are expected to drive still more viewers online — where they can watch the same types of prerecorded shows — and away from state TV.

china;music;u.s .

jp0000079

2013/10/25

Hotelier lays food scam to staff ignorant of law

Hankyu Hanshin Hotels Co. has been misrepresenting items on its menus for seven years at eateries in at least four prefectures, possibly scamming some 79,000 patrons in the process, and management is blaming the misdeeds on employees ignorant about the law. The hotelier said Friday it is being inundated with calls from irate customers seeking reimbursement for their meals. The wrongdoing, which according to media reports included claiming on menus that frozen fish was fresh, prepared chocolate was hand-made, and boasting a prestigious red caviar that turns out was flying fish eggs, started in March 2006 and ended last month. As of Thursday morning, the firm had reimbursed 3,480 customers to the tune of ¥12.2 million. The company estimates the final amount of compensation may reach ¥110 million. According to media reports, no patron has fallen ill from eating any of the food items. Hiroshi Desaki, president of the hotelier, told reporters Thursday the firm never intended to fabricate its menus, laying the litany of mislabelled fare on workers who lacked legal knowledge. Although employees in most cases thought misrepresenting food was highly unethical, they failed to realize they were acting illegality, a spokesman for the hotelier claimed Friday, fiercely denying the firm ever set out to hoodwink its customers. “Our employees, be they chefs or salespeople, just didn’t understand the standard laws concerning food labeling. So even in finding menus that lied about the fare, they just didn’t know they weren’t allowed to serve the (misrepresented food),” the spokesman said, lamenting the fact that because no worker ever dared to openly question the scam and explore its possible illegality, hordes of astonished reporters are now sneering at what they see as the firm’s absolute lack of moral fiber. During the press conference Thursday, Desaki apologized for betraying the public’s trust. “We never intended to rake in profits by (misrepresenting food),” he said, expressing the firm’s determination to get to the bottom of the misdeeds. Six menu items will be subject to scrutiny, including pork dishes in which the origins of the meat were falsified. The firm admitted it was wrongfully calling a ready-made chocolate sauce its own. “It appears our employees were touting the sauce as handmade because they thought that would make the (item) sound more attractive,” board director Masanobu Morimoto explained at one point during Thursday’s press conference. When asked if that amounted to deliberate fabrication, he repeated it happened due to “employees’ lack of knowledge.” Such false labelling has so far been detected at 23 restaurants and other venues operated by the firm, including eight hotels in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo prefectures. A total of 10 executives, including Desaki, will face pay cuts as punishment, with the president’s salary subject to a 20 percent cut for the time being. Kazuo Sumi, president of Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Inc., will voluntarily return 50 percent of his salary.

food;restaurants;hotels;hanshin;mislabeling;hankyu

jp0000080

2013/07/04

Marketing that enters your brain through your nose

On Meiji Dori, between Harajuku and Shibuya, I recently came across a tall futuristic titanium-silver contraption staring down at the street with what looked like six portholes. When I got closer, I found it had a window display of small bottles with three signs below saying “touch here!” Being the tragically curious Alice in Wonderland type, I did. As soon as my hand passed over a sensor, a cool fragrant mist drifted out from a blower above and descended over my head. Naturally, I touched the other two panels . . . And then the first one again . . . and then the other ones again . . . then the first one yet again — and I was just considering doing it all again, despite how daft I looked with my nose in the air, when it happened . . . I discovered how scent-marketing works: I saw the store behind the silver machine and walked straight in. This is how @aroma , an aromatherapy and scent-marketing company, is enticing customers into its first Tokyo store. And once you’ve been lured you in, there’s a whole range of essential oils for you to explore — this time invoked by 15 buttons. Japan has no shortage of retailers selling essential oils, but @aroma has a few things that puts it notch above. First is its gadgetry — the outdoors Aroma Shower mega diffuser is a novelty and staff will also let you test the store’s range of sleek personal diffusers (battery and USB powered). But most impressive is its Aroma Oil Blender. Hooked up to 15 different bottles of essential oils, you can push a few buttons of your choice to create your own blend and it will be dispersed in a mist above your head. If you like your custom scent, the staff will make it on the spot for you to purchase (allow for a 30-minute wait, though). @aroma products are marketed with a design-conscious consumer in mind; no flower-child or pot-pourri aesthetics going on here. The packaging is simple and brightly color-coded, while the naming of the essential-oil ranges is no nonsense — Design Air, Clean Air, Botanical Air or Eco Air. And, as a Japanese company, it also focuses on native fragrances with three of its lineups. Botanical Air Japan includes a woody Mount Koya scent, a Kyoto cedar one and a Japanese citrus yuzu one. Sense of Japan uses fragrances associated with the country — including hinoki wood, perilla and sandalwood — and is named with words associated with Japanese tradition, such as Sei (purity) Miyabi (Kyoto aesthetics) and Iki (Edo aesthetics). The Message Aroma range uses Japanese phrases as names, including the virtually untranslatable Otsukaresama (the thing you say when you finish work — a concoction of hinoki , pine, marjoram, sandalwood, clary sage, and kopa iba) and Gambate (try hard! — spearmint, rosemary, niaouli, tea tree and lime). But what about the aromas that lured me in the first place? It started with a floral Stylish Glamour, followed by an original blend called Scent of Tokyo. And when the real smell of Tokyo returned, the minty Eco Air -2 Cool Feel was enough to make me want to follow my nose into the store. A whiff of scent marketing in Japan Japan, it appears, is at the forefront of scent marketing . At least, plenty of scent marketers like to quote Japanese companies on the subject. Skyword Scent Strategy states research carried out by fragrance producer Takasago . When computer users worked with different fragrances, it found the following: 20% fewer typing errors with lavender-scented air 33% fewer errors with jasmine-scented air 54% fewer errors with lemon-scented air Micro Fragrance is rolling out Japan’s largest-ever scenting program and using thousands of Prolitec diffusion systems to pump a Pomegranate Fusion fragrance into possibly the smelliest places in country — every single Maruhan pachinko parlor. Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology announced in April that it’s working on a Smelling Screen display system, which will release different odors depending on what is being shown on the screen. Japan’s household goods market is seeing a boost in scented goods, particularly fabric-softeners, which some people are preferring to the smell of perfume. Lenor is even suggesting you mix laundry scent boosters to create your own personal aroma.

marketing;aroma;scents;japan pulse;fragrance

jp0000081

2013/07/05

India's 'miracle rooster' further complicates chicken-and-egg dilemma

NEW DELHI - The question has long been, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The apparently insoluble puzzle has become further complicated in India, where a rooster in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has been laying eggs. According to a report in the The Asian Age newspaper, people are thronging the house of the rooster’s master and some are even offering money, considering it to be a God-sent creature. Local veterinarians have suggested the “miracle cock” should be handed to a veterinary research institute where the doctors would try to find out how a male bird can lay eggs, but it is as yet unclear if that will happen. The report said Ramhet Rawat, a resident of Dharkuiyyan in the state’s Barabanki district, bought the miracle rooster two weeks ago with the intention of cooking it. For a night, he kept it under a basket with the intention of slaughtering and cooking it the next day. But when he lifted the basket in the morning, to his utter surprise, he found the rooster had laid an egg. The bewildered Rawat called his neighbors and they investigated if it was actually a rooster or a hen. Everyone, the newspaper reported, agreed the bird is indeed male, and Rawat decided not to slaughter it immediately. Three days later, the cock again laid an egg. Since then, it has been laying an egg every third day. News of the miracle spread like wildfire, and curious onlookers are still converging at Rawat’s house to get a glimpse of the country’s “miracle cock.”

india;animals

jp0000082

2013/07/20

Tokyo homeless, Olympics cancelled, medals given for kindness, Mandela's birthday feted

100 YEARS AGO Wednesday, July 23, 1913 Tales of woe abound among Tokyo jobless Summer is generally a good season for employment-seekers of the laboring classes. This summer, however, there are twice as many unemployed men as usual. The Free Lodging House of Honjo, Tokyo, for instance, generally takes in about 20 lodgers nightly during the hot months, but this season some 45 are finding shelter there every night. Mr. Ito, director of the establishment, tells some interesting facts about its residents. “In summer, the gas and electric companies require a larger force of hands,” he says, “and these places are generally sought by fewer men than in any other season. Things are quite different this summer. “Men in the prime of life come here every day starving and fagged out. The majority are from the country. They come to the city with high ambition, and write home exaggerated accounts of their success. A few years later, they go back to their homes, with borrowed money, rigged up in royal style to impress their folks and friends. When they return to the city, their debts leave them in more trouble than before. These young men generally begin as hard workers or ambitious students, then as cheap laborers or coolies, and finally loafers, sheltered in the Poor House.” Among the more interesting free lodgers there is a young man who had a highly commendable record at the Osaka Hygienic Laboratory and was once recommended to go abroad to finish his studies. Deprived of his work, he wandered around in vain in quest of employment and finally, as a day laborer, came to the brink of starvation in the Free Lodging House. 75 YEARS AGO Saturday, June 16, 1938 ‘Wartime’ precludes 1940 Tokyo Olympics The Cabinet decided this morning to urge the Olympic Organizing Committee to return the 1940 Tokyo Games to the International Olympic Committee. The Welfare Ministry decided there should be no Tokyo Olympic Games in 1940 due to the present wartime circumstances. That decision was formally submitted to the Cabinet meeting today. While the Olympic Games have been awarded to the city of Tokyo and not to Japan as a nation, the O.O.C. is expected to comply with the request. Not only financial difficulties but also the psychological effects that the Games would have on the people — of whom a higher grade of concentration is now required on the fighting in China — were given by Welfare Minister Koichi Kido as reasons for his Ministry’s decision. “If Tokyo cancels the Olympics, it will cause considerable repercussions abroad,” he admitted. “But I think it is advisable to decide our national attitude over the Games now. At this time when the nation is required to endure material hardships, we may incur disdain from abroad if we are excited over the Olympics. Some people may argue that returning the Games may discourage physical culture, but I believe such an eventuality is forestalled by holding Meiji Festival sports meets on a larger scale or by sponsoring other national sporting events.” Matsuzo Nagai, Secretary-General of the O.O.C. reported the Welfare Ministry’s decision to Mayor Itta Kobashi of Tokyo Friday afternoon. Still reluctant to abandon the Games, the mayor the same day visited several Cabinet members. “I have done all I could for retaining the Olympics and am awaiting the Cabinet’s decision,” he said. “Even if the Games are cancelled, I wish to complete Komazawa Stadium for the sake of the health of Tokyo citizens after peace is restored in China.” Those who will be deprived of work as a result of returning the Games include three German Olympic technical advisers, who have been in Tokyo nearly one year on a three-year contract. 50 YEARS AGO Friday, July 5, 1963 100 given medals for their kind deeds On Wednesday, 100 persons were awarded the first Kind Behavior Badges by the Be Kind to Others Campaign headquarters in recognition of their acts of kindness. Seven of the 100, who were chosen from among the 210 recommended to the headquarters, attended the awarding ceremony held in Tokyo. Two of the seven were small primary school pupils. One of them, an 8-year-old girl, won the award for picking up a baby’s hat near her home and promptly handing it to the baby’s mother. Among other kind deeds recognized were guiding 14 blind masseuses to safety every day and lending a bus fare to a stranger who lost his wallet. The campaign was launched by Seiji Kaya, president of the University of Tokyo, early this year to make society better. 25 YEARS AGO Wednesday, July 13, 1988 ANC Tokyo group to fete Mandela’s 70th The Tokyo branch of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s anti-apartheid organization, will hold a rally Saturday to celebrate the 70th birthday of their leader, Nelson Mandela, and to demand an end to his imprisonment, which has lasted 25 years. Jerry Matsila, representing the ANC Tokyo Office, said at a news conference Tuesday that the rally will be held at the Yamanote Church in Shibuya, Tokyo, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Ambassadors from black African nations have been invited to speak at the gathering and a film depicting the situation in South Africa will be shown, he said. “Mandela means our hope. The name Mandela means freedom for us because of his contribution to the struggle against apartheid,” Matsila said. There have been similar gatherings and concerts in all parts of the world, including London, East Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, to fete Mandela’s birthday and demand his release.

poor house;wartime

jp0000083

2013/07/27

What if Columbus had reached his goal: Japan?

Every school child knows that in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Every school child knows wrongly. When the Genovese explorer’s three ships sailed westward from Palo de la Frontera, Spain, on Aug. 2, 1492, he was bound, he thought, for “the noble island of Cipangu” — Japan. Cipangu would be his gateway to “the Indies,” then the term for Asia — land of gold, spices, silks, perfumes, jewels. Columbus made four trans-Atlantic voyages, and died in 1506 certain he’d been on the fringes of Asia. That elusive land, with its riches, exotic civilizations and cities teeming with souls ripe for conversion to Christianity, would be just over the horizon, just a little farther ahead. America? He never heard of it, never imagined it. The truth would have shattered him — a vast continent and a boundless unknown ocean, the Pacific, lying between Europe and its golden dreams! What was “noble” about Japan? Wealth — fabulous wealth; or tales of it. No European in Columbus’ time had ever set foot there. Few knew it existed. Asia itself was scarcely known. Its luxuries were purveyed in Europe by Venetian traders who dealt with Arab middlemen in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. That’s as far east as they got. Europe’s prime source on Asia was Marco Polo’s “Travels,” published around 1300. Polo (1254-1324) was a Venetian trader, one of a handful of European missionaries and merchants who, in the 13th and 14th centuries, took advantage of a brief opening of overland trade routes before they closed when the immense Mongol empire in Asia crumbled. Polo gained the trust of Kublai Khan (1215-94), the Mongol ruler in China, and remained 24 years as his adviser and emissary. He had never been to Cipangu (the name derives from “Jipen,” the Chinese reading of “Nihon”), but he had heard a great deal about it from Muslim traders in China — who hadn’t been there either. In the absence of facts, rumor is king. “Cipangu,” Polo wrote, was “most fertile in gold, pearls and precious stones, and they cover the temples and royal residences with solid gold. People (there) have tremendous quantities of gold. The King’s palace is roofed with pure gold, and his floors are paved in gold two fingers thick.” That’s where Columbus was bound in 1492, with results every school child knows. How did Japan — Spartan, resource-poor Japan — acquire such a gilded reputation? Ancient Japan did experience a modest gold rush. Gold discovered in 749 at Oshu — present-day Hiraizumi, Iwate Prefecture — was used to adorn the Nara Great Buddha, completed in 752. It was an impressive piece of statuary — 15.8 meters high and glittering with 440 kg of gold. Word got around, as it did concerning the 12th-century Chuson-ji Temple in Oshu, with its Golden Hall. There was also Kyoto’s Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, built by Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1397 — too late for Polo’s book, so Columbus knew nothing of it. Three stories high and entirely covered in gold leaf, it dazzles tourists to this day. That is about the extent of gold-encrusted Japan. Oshu gold was never much by world standards, and petered out in the 16th century. Columbus, we know, got no closer to Cipangu than Cuba, the Caribbean Islands and the northeast coast of South America. But supposing he had made it to Japan? Japan in 1492 was temporarily at peace, following the brutal and chaotic Onin War (1466-77); by 1500 it was descending into a century of the chaotic Sengoku Jidai civil war. Historians despair of making sense of it all; land-hungry warrior-baron fought land-hungry warrior-baron. From this distance it looks like carnage pure and simple. Shogun as the Onin War began was Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-90) — “the worst shogun ever to rule Japan,” writes Donald Keene, his latest biographer, in “Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion” (2003). A despairing letter Yoshimasa wrote to his son conveys pathetic helplessness: “The daimyo (feudal barons) do as they please and do not follow orders. That means there can be no government.” There was none. In 1473, as the war raged, Yoshimasa abdicated and turned to what he loved and knew best: art. Japan’s most characteristic art forms — tea-ceremony, noh drama, 31-syllable poetry, linked verse, flower-arranging, moon-viewing, monochrome painting, calligraphy, landscape gardening — all bear Yoshimasa’s stamp. “No man in the history of Japan,” writes Keene, “had a greater influence on the formation of Japanese taste. The worst of the shoguns was … the only one to leave a lasting heritage for the entire Japanese people.” The Higashiyama culture he spawned draws its name from the Higashiyama Hills of Kyoto, where in retirement he built a palace he named Ginkaku-ji (Temple of the Silver Pavilion). Starkly, almost startlingly austere, its name is misleading — not a description (there is no silver) but a mocking rejection of the golden opulence his grandfather Yoshimitsu embodied in the Kinkaku-ji. Raised in luxury himself, accused by contemporary chroniclers of callous indifference to the suffering of the poor, Yoshimasa went on to fashion at Ginkaku-ji an artistic legacy that sought beauty in simplicity, fulfillment in poverty, happiness in sadness. The Japanese word that expresses these qualities is wabi — the spiritual peace of material renunciation. What would Columbus have made of this — or Yoshimasa of Columbus, and of Europe’s rapacious avarice, insatiable curiosity and globe-girdling restlessness? Yoshimasa died in 1490, two years before Columbus’ first voyage to what he thought was Japan, land of gold. Would Columbus have appreciated the “silver” of wabi?

donald keene;mongol empire;kublai khan

jp0000084

2013/07/11

Japan by the numbers (07.11.13)

90.8% of people in Japan do not know what a “smart TV” is , although some of that percentage had heard the term before, according to goo research. 84.5% of men who answered a poll by the Communication Design Research Institute said they are more attracted to women who eat a lot (note: most men said they prefer to see women eat healthy foods such as salad). 79% people in Japan agree with the idea of charging a fee to climb Mount Fuji , according to research conducted by Yamatokeikokusha Company. 63% of junior high and high school female students polled by Fumi Communications said they plan to vote when they reach the voting age of 20 . 56.8% of people who own digital devices such as tablets and smart phones use security software to protect their private information . 45% of single women between aged 25-29 want to have a baby within the next three years . That percentage is larger than that for married women in same age range, according to research by Dentsu Souken Mamalabo.

mount fuji;voting;smart tv;japan pulse

jp0000085

2013/07/29

Cinderella stories inspire women to find their prince on social networking sites

According to a recent study by Trend Soken , the phenomenon of the “Social Cinderella” is one of the driving forces behind changing attitudes towards internet dating among young women. “Social Cinderellas” are women who snag “high spec guys” (i.e. well-educated, good-looking men with high salaries) via social networking sites. As stories about these fairy-tale romances spread, more and more women have begun to warm to the idea of internet dating. Out of the 500 single women in their 20s and 30s interviewed for the study, 81% said that they felt had few chances for romantic meetings in their daily lives and 58% believed that social media was an effective tool for finding their dream man. Columnist Ai Azawa states in the report that modern Japanese women are throwing themselves into their work and are also really into self-improvement, as a result, they’ve got higher standards and are not particularly interested in settling for the men in their immediate social circle. Azawa says that she often hears Social Cinderella stories. But how common are they in practice? Out of the 61.4% of respondents who claimed to regularly use social media, 16% said that they’d encountered a dreamy guy in this way and 9.4% said they’d even managed to strike up a friendship with the guy in question. The study uses the term social-networking services to loosely refer to a whole slew of sites, from professional matchmaking websites to social networking sites like Facebook and Mixi, so it’s important to bear in mind that women are not necessarily signing up for dating services. One 26-year-old women questioned for the study mentions attending “meetings of social networking communities.” This could mean joining a group of people who meet over shared interests. Not necessarily aimed at encouraging people to hook up, social clubs tied to a hobby may be one of the ways that women are using the web to widen their social network as they fish around for potential partners. There are also matchmaking sites linked into Facebook. — sites like Omiai , which currently has 270,000 registered members. Omiai caters to the Cinderella element by boasting that 2,313 of the members are guys who have annual earnings of over ¥10 million. As many are cautious about the perils of online dating, the company highlights its safety policy which allows users to remain anonymous while chatting with a potential partner. Safety and privacy is a huge concern for Japanese women, so other social networking dating clubs take the risk out of going to meet with a stranger by bulking up the numbers. Pairs of friends who sign up for the rather unfortunately named Nikukai (meat club) service can go on double dates together at yakiniku (Korean barbeque restaurants). Nomitomi (drinking buddies) is a service that holds group mixers for singles, meaning singles don’t have to risk it alone with an unknown person.

matchmaking;konkatsu;social network;japan pulse;social cinderella

jp0000086

2013/07/17

Body fat sheds calories when chilled

WASHINGTON - Transforming fat cells into calorie-burning machines may sound like a fantasy — the ultimate form of weight control — but the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Unexpectedly, some fat cells directly sense dropping temperatures and release their energy as heat, according to a new study, and that ability might be harnessed to treat obesity and diabetes, researchers suggest. Fat is known to help protect animals from the cold, and not only by acting as insulation. In the early 1990s, scientists studying mice discovered that cold temperatures trigger certain fat cells, called brown adipose tissue, to release stored energy in the form of heat — in other words, to burn calories. Researchers have always assumed this mechanism was an indirect response to the physiological stress of cold temperatures, explains cell biologist Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School. The activation of brown fat seems to start with sensory neurons throughout the body informing the brain of a drop in temperature. In response, the brain sends out norepinephrine, the chief chemical messenger of the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilizes the body to cope with many situations. In experiments with animals, stimulating norepinephrine receptors triggered brown adipose tissue to release its energy and generate heat, while animals bred to be missing these receptors were unable to mount the same fat-cell response. People also have brown adipose tissue that generates heat when the body is cold. And unlike white fat, which builds up around the abdomen and contributes to many disorders including heart disease and diabetes, this brown fat is found in higher proportions in leaner people and seems to actively protect against diabetes. With brown fat, the heat-generating process depends on a protein called UCP1; the protein is also thought to be central in preventing diabetes. Researchers are exploring ways of activating this molecular pathway. But in trying to figure out exactly how fat cells respond to the body’s being cold, Spiegelman and colleagues made some discoveries about white fat cells. In a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers exposed various kinds of fat cells to cold temperatures directly. “We were a little surprised that no one had tried this before,” Spiegelman says. The researchers cooled several types of lab-grown human fat cells — brown, white and beige (white adipose tissue with some brown cells mixed in) — to temperatures between 27 and 39 degrees for four hours, eight hours or up to 10 days. White and beige cells responded in dramatic fashion. Their levels of UCP1 doubled within eight hours of the treatment. The change in UCP1 also proved to be reversible: Its level returned to normal once the cells’ temperature was set at 37 degrees. But in brown fat cells, no induction of the protein was observed, indicating that cold temperatures don’t mobilize these cells by flipping this particular switch. The researchers also found that white fat cells obtained from mice lacking receptors for norepinephrine were still able to respond to cooling by turning on UCP1 — showing that the heat-generating pathway is both specific to those fat cells and independent of the sympathetic nervous system. The finding won’t lead to an anti-fat pill any time soon, Spiegelman says, but it does give scientists new avenues to explore. “It’s a piece of the basic science, adding to an evolving awareness that fat cells have many lives that we never knew about. Now we know they can sense temperature directly. The next question is: How do they do it, and can that ability be manipulated?” “The paper is filling in an emerging picture that adipose tissue can be a more flexible, adaptive organ than we once thought,” said Sven Enerback, a physician and adipose tissue researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “The finding raises the question of whether this new pathway has widespread effects on the animal as a whole.”

food;diet;obesity;diabetes;fat;temperature;heat;insulation;calories

jp0000087

2013/07/26

Yamaguchi murder suspect nabbed

YAMAGUCHI - Police said Friday they have arrested the 63-year-old man sought in connection with the Sunday-Monday slaying of five people and the torching of two of their homes in the hamlet of Shunan, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The suspect, identified as Kosei Homi, was found barefoot and wearing only his underwear on an unused mountain trail Friday near Shunan. Upon being taken into custody, he confessed to the slaying of his five neighbors and the two cases of arson, the police said. Police launched a major manhunt for Homi after finding the five corpses, three of which were in the gutted homes. After the police found a cellphone and a shirt that apparently belonged to Homi at around 3 p.m. Thursday, they started combing the immediate area. Despite some scratches, Homi was in good health, the police said. When they found him, Homi confirmed his identity and reportedly told them: “I wanted to die, but I failed.” The police suspected Homi in connection with the crimes, because he had not been seen since Sunday and he lived next door to one of the victims. The bodies of Makoto Sadamori, 71, and his wife, Kiyoko, 72, and that of Miyako Yamamoto, 79, were found in their homes, which had been gutted. The two houses, about 80 meters apart, both started to burn at around 9 p.m. Sunday. Homi lived next door to Yamamoto. The police suspected the two homes were torched soon after the victims were killed. On Monday, police found two more bodies, those of Satoko Kawamura, 73, and Fumito Ishimura, 80, in their homes, even though they had reportedly confirmed that Kawamura was safe Sunday night. All of the victims died instantly of blunt-force head trauma. The police searched Homi’s house for evidence. Earlier they found two cars in his garage, leading them to believe he had fled on foot. It was earlier reported that the police also found a message in a form of a haiku inside a window of Homi’s house that read: “Tsukebishite kemuri yorokobu inakamono.” (“Setting on fire, smoke gives delight, to a country fellow.”) The hamlet where Homi and the five victims lived consisted of only eight households and 14 residents. According to other neighbors, Homi did not interact well and once left the community to live in Kawasaki. After he returned, he would not exchange in any form of greeting, they said. Homi reportedly proposed a project to develop the area, but his plan was rejected by his neighbors. Some also said he had troubles with them over his dog. During the 2011 New Year’s holiday, Homi reportedly complained to police, saying, “I’m being bad-mouthed by other people in the community and feel isolated.” After having a conversation with officers for over an hour, he said he felt relieved and returned home, the police said. According to sources, instead of trying to improve relations with others in his community, Homi installed a fake security camera and pretended to be monitoring the home of Yamamoto. He also hung the malicious haiku.

yamaguchi;shunan

jp0000088

2013/07/21

Beware your heroes and heed the lesson of stargazer Galileo Galilei

A scene from “The Life of Galilei” seems to encapsulate the dilemma Japan faces as it gropes for new leadership. “Woe betide a nation without heroes.” “Not so. Woe betide a nation in need of heroes.” This exchange from the play by anti-establishment German playwright Bertolt Brecht is a traumatic one in which Galileo Galilei returns from his encounter with the Grand Inquisitor. (The production I saw was in Japanese. The translations are my own.) The latter has managed to convince the scientist to rescind his views on celestial dynamics and shut up about the earth moving round the sun. It turns out that even the great Galileo is susceptible to threats when they are accompanied by a display of the latest advances in torture tools. The above lament over the lack of heroes is an utterance of Master Galileo’s foremost student, who did not believe even for a moment that his great tutor would capitulate. Master Galileo may or may not be just another coward. He may or may not have been putting on a show of compliance to ensure he could continue making his discoveries in secret. We never quite find out. Either way, his view on heroes is not wrong. It is highly astute. There seem to me to be two types of nations that feel a need for heroes. Neither variety is a happy one. First, there are nations whose people are oppressed. When people are being deprived of their basic human rights, arrested without proper reason, detained without trial, put to torture and massacred en masse, they are indeed in need of heroes who can come to their rescue. Unfortunately, there are still far too many nations around the world that fall into this category. That is why human rights activists have to be active and people have to revolt. Second, there are nations who have lost their self-confidence. They are confused. Nothing seems to go right for them anymore. They do not know what to believe. They do not know what to do. They keep looking back into the past in quest of an image of themselves they are comfortable with. They cannot face reality because it does not have a face that they recognize. They want somebody to tell them what to do. Japan seems to me to fall into this second category of hero-seeking nations. Thus people are apt to bemoan the lack of leadership and the absence of leaders in politics as well as management.¥ This mentality is dangerous. When people are in this frame of mind, they fall prey to charlatans and populists. Master Galileo’s warning against heroes sounded particularly pertinent to our situation as we went to the polls on Sunday. Toward the end of Brecht’s play, I was struck by another series of utterances by Master Galileo that seemed to reach out to the Japanese condition. “It is my belief,” says the Master, “that science exists for the single purpose of making the condition of survival less painful for the human race. Should scientists be goaded by greedy leaders into pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, science will become maimed and all the new machinery you make might merely end up creating more pain. . . .” When one thinks of how painful survival has become for so many in the aftermath of 3/11, it is easy to realize how words like these would resonate severely with a Japanese audience. The powers that be who are in such a hurry to restart the nation’s nuclear power plants would do well to heed Master Galileo’s words. If a visit to the theater can deliver a dose of common sense to all aspiring heroes in need of enlightenment, they just might be in for a surprise.

ldp;nuclear power;upper house election

jp0000089

2013/07/31

Ailing utility resumes offering jobs to new graduates for first time since 2011

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has resumed offering jobs to prospective graduates for the first time since the Fukushima nuclear crisis started in March 2011. Tepco officials said Tuesday they plan to hire about 100 new recruits next April. They will be students due to graduate in March from technical high schools, universities and graduate schools. Some offers have already been made, the officials said. The utility had hired up to about 1,000 new recruits every year through fiscal 2011. But after the Fukushima No. 1 catastrophe, Tepco refrained from hiring new employees two years in a row. Meanwhile, 1,177 employees, mainly executives and employees tasked with key operations, left the company between the start of the crisis and the end of fiscal 2012. Aside from the planned hiring of 100 new graduates, Tepco is set to offer about 50 jobs in Fukushima as part of its effort to help improve employment conditions there. Tepco had planned to hire about 500 new graduates next April 2014. But because the utility was required to further streamline operations before increases in household electricity rates were approved, it decided to limit new hiring mainly to essential technical personnel. As Tepco has been cutting wages sharply and its business prospects remain uncertain, there is a possibility that students may spurn any job offers. “I am worried how many will actually join, but hope as many people as we need will enter our company,” a senior official said.

tepco;new recruits

jp0000090

2013/07/31

Lincoln statue vandal suspect is Chinese national

WASHINGTON - Moments before District of Columbia police found Jiamei Tian hiding in a bathroom stall at Washington National Cathedral, a family of tourists had spotted her in a back pew of the Children’s Chapel guarding two bags and muttering softly in a foreign language. Tian’s unsettling behavior continued Tuesday, when the 58-year-old Chinese national made her first appearance in D.C. Superior Court to face charges in connection with a string of vandalism in which churches and tourist attractions across the city were spattered with green paint. Tian refused to cooperate with the D.C. police department’s Asian Liaison Unit, according to officials at her court appearance. She wouldn’t say where she stayed in Washington. She told police that she had lived in Los Angeles, but prosecutors said they could find no evidence of that. She speaks little or English. Her visa to visit the United States expired three days ago. As authorities investigate crimes that marred the Lincoln Memorial, a statue of the Smithsonian’s first secretary and sanctuaries in two churches — one with a toxic mixture of paint, urine and feces — it may be as challenging to understand who Tian is as it will be to determine a motive for the vandalism. D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said Tuesday the suspect may have “mental health issues.” D.C. Magistrate Judge Lori Parker ordered Tian to remain in jail until her next hearing Aug. 2; so far, she faces a single charge of defacing property for an attack on National Cathedral, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine up to $5,000.

china;courts;police;scandals

jp0000091

2013/07/31

Tepco trying to keep radioactive water from reaching sea, but can it?

Tokyo Electric Power Co. only recently admitted radioactive water is flowing from its crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant into the Pacific. Although Tepco is giving assurances that it is taking and planning steps to prevent more tainted groundwater from reaching the sea, it’s unclear how effective those efforts are, considering the difficulty of even pinpointing the problem. Here are questions and answers regarding the tainted flow. When was the leak noticed? According to Tepco, the utility began more closely monitoring the radiation levels of groundwater in wells 25 meters from shore in May. In June, the utility announced it had detected high levels of radioactive material in the groundwater taken from the wells near the reactor 2 turbine building. Though the groundwater flows toward the sea, Tepco initially ruled out the possibility it was reaching the Pacific. Last week, it finally changed its tune. The firm said data showed the well water levels were changing with the tides, indicating the seawater and the groundwater are intermingling. How did the groundwater become radioactive? Inside trenches connecting the reactor 2 turbine building and a pump room right by the shore, there are pipes to carry seawater for cooling as well as electrical cables. Since the start of the Fukushima crisis, tainted water has accumulated in these trenches, which rest on highly permeable gravel. Experts believe radioactive water is leaking from cracks in the trenches and passing through the rushed rock, reaching the groundwater. “It’s very important information that there is crushed rock (under the trenches),” Kunihiko Shimazaki, a commissioner at the Nuclear Regulation Authority, told an NRA meeting last week. Tepco also suspects that residual water from a leak of highly radioactive water that reached the Pacific through a section of the trenches in April 2011 may be a source of the groundwater contamination. A sample taken last Friday from the trench contained 750 million becquerels of cesium-134, 1.6 billion becquerels of cesium-137 and 750 million becquerels of other radioactive substances, according to Tepco. A sample from April 2011 contained 1.8 billion becquerels of both cesium-134 and cesium-137 per liter. Meanwhile, the basement of the turbine building is flooded with the tainted water from a leaking containment vessel. Radioactive water there is possibly leaking into the trenches connected to the basement. How much radioactive water has flowed into the sea? Tepco said it is unclear how long tainted water has been leaking into the sea — or how much. It continues to claim that the contamination of the sea is limited to the plant’s port. What is Tepco doing to stop the flow? Tepco is trying to remove the source of contamination and block the flow of the tainted groundwater. It is currently injecting liquid glass between the reactor 2 turbine building and the sea, hoping the glass will serve as a wall to stop the groundwater from reaching the Pacific. Tepco also plans to build a wall in the immediate harbor to contain the radioactive water. Its construction won’t be completed until September 2014. The utility is also planning to remove and process the tainted water in the trenches and backfill a part of them with filling materials. Are such measures enough to end the problem? Experts remain uncertain. “The underground situation is complex. It’s not necessarily easy to figure out,” said Shigeaki Tsunoyama, president of the University of Aizu, one of the NRA panel members monitoring the Fukushima No. 1 plant. “Building walls seems simple in a drawing, but when you think about a complex underground structure, it won’t be that easy,” he said, adding that it is still not certain where exactly the contamination is coming from. Although it is a difficult job, Tsunoyama said Tepco should try to figure out what is really going on underneath the plant. The NRA also urged Tepco to dig more wells to determine how far the radioactive groundwater has spread. Reactors 1, 2 and 3 all suffered core meltdowns, and unit 4’s building was destroyed in a hydrogen explosion, exposing its spent-fuel pool. There are monitoring wells around the other damaged reactors, but unit 2 appears to so far be the only area where radioactive groundwater is showing up.

fukushima no . 1;tepco;radioactive water

jp0000092

2013/07/08

Lightning kills one as rainy season's exit kicks up storms

Two lightning strikes left a man dead and a woman injured Monday as the sudden departure of the rainy season and a high-pressure system from the Pacific sent temperatures soaring in much of the nation. In Tokyo, three men in their 50s and 60s were struck by lightning near the Arakawa River in Kita Ward after a thunderstorm developed, leaving one dead, police said. According to witnesses, the three were hit while sheltering under a tree at around 3:50 p.m. Police are still trying to identity the dead man. A woman in nearby Saitama Prefecture was later knocked unconscious in a separate lightning strike in Tokorozawa at around 5:15 p.m. The woman, 53, was struck while working on a farm and remains unconscious, police said. The Meteorological Agency said temperatures soared well into the 30s in much of the nation after active convection currents near the Philippines stimulated a high-pressure system in the Pacific earlier than usual. It also said the rainy season had come to a premature ending virtually nationwide, two days after declaring it over in the Kanto-Koshin region, which includes Tokyo. Areas in the north, the northeast and the Sea of Japan side of central Honshu are still getting rain. In regions southwest of central Japan, the rainy season ended six to 13 days early. Predicting highs of over 35 in many places, the weather agency issued a high-temperature advisory warning people to stay hydrated and to use air conditioning to prevent heatstroke. By Monday morning, the mercury had hit 36.2 in Kamikitayama, Nara Prefecture, 36 in Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture, 35.8 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and 35.7 in three cities in Yamanashi, Kyoto and Tottori. On Sunday, the heat wave caused the death of a 50-year-old man and sent at least 740 other people to the hospital due to overheating. The man who died was in the city of Shikokuchuo, Ehime Prefecture, when he was taken to a hospital. He apparently died of heatstroke. Heatstroke can usually be confirmed by a core body temperature above 40.5 degrees, but fainting may also be a symptom. Other clues include headache, dizziness, failure to sweat, cramps or nausea, rapid pulse or breathing, or even seizures. According to local police and fire stations, 10 junior high school students taking part in a baseball game in Saitama Prefecture were taken to a hospital on Sunday after exhibiting symptoms of heatstroke. Marathoners were also affected, with six runners in Aomori Prefecture and others in Tottori hospitalized. Off the coast of Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, a 15-year-old boy drowned, while in the city of Gero in Gifu Prefecture, a 10-year-old girl and her 4-year-old brother were swept away by the Hida River. Both siblings were washed away when the girl tried to rescue her brother after he slipped into the river.

temperature;heat stroke;heat

jp0000094

2013/07/12

Cashing in on Fuji fever

Since the announcement that Mount Fuji, Japan’s most iconic landmark, had finally won World Heritage status on June 23 , Fuji fever has swept the nation. As souvenirs commemorating the event hit the shelves, sales of Fuji-themed merchandise were brisk. Stores selling climbing gear to those who have been inspired to make the pilgrimage up Fuji have also been doing well. Loft in Shibuya reported that sales of Fuji merchandise, which had been growing steadily prior to the announcement, suddenly shot up by 150% — the bestselling item being a Fuji-san folding fan that retails for ¥2,100. They’re not anticipating a downturn in trade either: When the shop gets a refit in September there’s going to be a special area in the new “Japan Souvenir” floor dedicated to Fuji souvenirs. New products also went on sale to commemorate the occasion. Among these is a Mount Fuji wooden cup and ball game that costs a rather eye-watering ¥6,090, and a rubber stamp that incorporates elements of the famous 36 views of Mount Fuji , which would set you back ¥3,360. In addition, blue traffic cones with a snow capped peaks have suddenly popped up in car parks around the country. Formally sold mainly to businesses in the area around Mount Fuji, 300 of these cones were sold in the last month, three times the amount of typical annual sales. The climbing season for Mount Fuji began this month and shops selling climbing equipment have been cashing in. Sales have also been boosted by the inspiring news back in May that 80-year-old Yuichiro Miura managed to scale the summit of Everest . Mizuno outdoor sports told Sankei Biz that sales of hiking gear for women are almost double that of last year, an indication that the yama girl trend is continuing to climb. Mizuno outdoor sports store also runs hiking schools and a trip to Mount Fuji for July sold out almost as soon as it went on sale. But hordes of hikers heading for the mountain are putting a strain on local infrastructure. The authorities of Fujinomiya, one of the gateways to the mountain, have announced that the toilet facilities available will not be sufficient to deal with the increased volume of hikers and are asking climbers to take their own portable toilets with them. While toilets will be in short supply, Wi-Fi access in the area ought to be excellent. As of June, Yamanashi, one of the prefectures Fuji is located in, has 933 free Wi-Fi spots . Visitors surfing the web might want to download a free new app from Fuji-san Beno , which tells you what events are going on in the area during the day of your visit. More info can be found at Fujiyama Navi . The site launched July 8, and offers tours, hotels, and, of course, Fuji-themed merchandise. More Fuji goods on our Pinterest board: Mount Fuji mania Read more about the economics of becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site at our sister blog, Yen for Living. Photo by Midori via Wikicommons

mount fuji;loft;yamanashi;unesco;wifi;japan pulse;yama girls

jp0000095

2013/07/13

Effects will become more obvious as Japan's climate changes

Residents of Japan’s big cities, and of Tokyo in particular, are well aware of the heat-island effect — especially now with the onset of summer. The effect occurs because concrete and asphalt retain radiant energy, making the whole city a vast absorber and then emitter of convected heat, which creates powerful thermals that trigger sudden “guerrilla storms” — and renders the nights barely more agreeable than the stifling, claggy days. And if you think summers have been getting worse — you’re right. Figures from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) show that annual average air temperatures nationwide rose by a rate equivalent to 1.15°C per century between 1898 and 2010. This is considerably higher than the global average temperature rise of 0.74°C over the last century (according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers”). Not only have temperatures been rising in Japan, but they’ve been rising faster here than they have elsewhere — with some of that difference accounted for by the heat-island effect found in cities and dense urban areas. I’ve just been looking at the first comprehensive report into the impacts of climate change in Japan. A few points jump out: Plants are flowering earlier each spring and, counterintuitively, insects are appearing later — perhaps because their pupal stages need a certain period of chilling in order to develop, so with winters getting warmer they take longer to develop. In addition, species’ ranges — the physical areas they inhabit — are expanding northward by between 18 km and 140 km per decade. That report’s lead author is Yuko Ogawa-Onishi, who works at my old research base, the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, and at the University of Oxford. Ogawa-Onishi, with colleague Pam Berry at Oxford, reviewed as many publications as they could about observed and projected impacts of climate change in Japan, using both local and international publications. By reviewing JMA weather-station data, the pair found evidence that the heat-island effect also occurs in relatively small cities. However, they point out that urban and industrial areas of Japan cover only 5 percent of the land area, while mountains, forests and agricultural regions account for more than 80 percent — so heating due to urbanization can only have a limited effect. As for future conditions in Japan, they found some predictions suggest that, by 2100, temperatures are likely to increase by 2°C to 3°C (relative to a baseline average temperature between 1981 and 2000) — with summers getting wetter, and other seasons drier. That’s bad, but a more pessimistic prediction — and by that I mean a mathematical model, not something someone has read in their tea leaves — has Japan’s mean temperature increasing by a whopping 4.8°C by 2100, with a 10 percent increase in rainfall. Ogawa-Onishi and Berry’s report appears in the journal Biological Conservation (DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2012.06.024) — but what do its findings mean for iconic Japanese natural phenomena? For cherry blossom, we’re looking at flowers coming 2.2 days earlier per decade. The first cicadas will sing 2.5 to 4.3 days later per decade. The Great Mormon swallowtail butterfly ( Papilio memnon , okay so it’s not really iconic, but I like it) will move 130 km north per decade. Likewise, Sika deer (of Nara photo-op fame) will move northward. “Plants and animals can adapt to climate change, but there is a limit,” says Ogawa-Onishi. “In southern Japan, we have already witnessed cherry trees not blooming after extremely warm winters, which indicates the limits to their adaptive capacity.” Most people in Japan are very aware of the changes in natural events, in particular, the flowering of cherry trees. Similarly, seasonal food is popular with most people in Japan, and they are aware that the availability of seasonal vegetables and certain fish at particular times of the year has changed. Some species can adapt, others can not adapt as well, says Ogawa-Onishi. Some things important to Japanese culture will certainly change. But the changes that Ogawa-Onishi and Berry explore aren’t just important for pretty national emblems. Japan is a biological hotspot. With more than 90,000 species of fauna, flora and fungii in an area of 380,000 sq. km, it is a globally important biological region (which was one of the reasons I went to study insects in Japan — there are so many of them, and there are some very cool ones). However, a major impact will be on the rice harvest, which will suffer a decrease of up to 40 percent in central and southern Japan. So rice imports will increase. And, although if you travel around Japan you will find a profusion of paddy fields in rural areas, specialist foods everywhere you go, and every town seemingly famous for a certain fruit or fish — some 60 percent of the nation’s food is actually imported — and that proportion is set to rise. For comparison, the United Kingdom imports about 25 percent of its food, and the United States exports more food than it imports. In the face of this sort of ominous news, Oxford scientist Berry says there are easy ways to get involved and influence things for the better. She cites both the kind of steps that help reduce (mitigate) our impact, and ones that help adjust to the effect of climate change. “There are simple mitigation actions that involve the use of less fuel, for example turning down the thermostat in winter or using less air conditioning in summer,” she says. Such advice may sound obvious, but a difference of 1°C can save about a ton of carbon emissions a year. Meanwhile, switching off electronic devices rather then leaving them on standby can save 15 percent of a household’s energy bill. “Every little helps, and if enough people did these things there could be a real difference,” says Berry. And there are ways to help species adapt to the effect of climate change. “People can help biodiversity by leaving some wild areas in their garden or planting wildflower mixes,” says Berry. And she calls for us to make sure there are “permeable” areas in our towns and cities, and to plant trees and generally “greenify” our urban jungles.

cherry blossom;heat-island effect;sika

jp0000096

2013/09/05

Data show twisters form over Kanto in September

Damage to people and property by tornadoes made headlines over the past week, with the latest in Tochigi Prefecture injuring three people while destroying houses and other buildings. Here are some questions and answers regarding twisters: Are twisters common in Japan? About 17 were observed each year between 1991 and 2006, according to statistics compiled by the Meteorological Agency. That number is just a mere fraction of the roughly 1,300 that typically form every year in the United States, but when taking into account the amount of area covered, it would be inaccurate to say tornadoes are rare in Japan, the agency warns. Although Tochigi, Saitama and Chiba prefectures, all located in the Kanto region, were struck by tornadoes in the past week, twisters have occurred from Hokkaido to Okinawa. The tally from 1961 and 2006 shows that September is the peak month, with 1 p.m. being the most likely time of day for a tornado to strike. Geographic and weather conditions in the Kanto region are favorable for tornadoes. The mountainous region to the west, the humid hot air coming in from the Pacific and cooler wind coming in from the north this time of year all help. The Meteorological Agency has confirmed that weather conditions were nearly identical when the tornado touched down in Saitama and Chiba on Monday and when the Tochigi tornado hit Wednesday. Have there been more tornadoes in Japan recently? The Meteorological Agency states it is difficult to tell whether tornado counts have risen in recent years because the survey methods continue to change. Occurrences also vary every year and there are no consistencies. There were 28 tornadoes and/or microbursts, a strong, localized downdraft also known as wind shear, in 2012, 15 in 2011, 37 in 2010 and 23 in 2009, according to the agency. How do tornadoes form? The agency said that because they form so suddenly, the mechanism of how they are created is still not completely known. A collision of warm, humid air with a cooler, dry front causes a spiral ascension of the wind. Soaring cumulonimbus clouds also play a role in the formation of tornadoes, especially supercells with mesocyclones. Because atmospheric conditions are the key ingredient, twisters can form not only over open land but also in areas like Tokyo with skyscrapers. What are supercells? A supercell, which spawned Monday’s tornado, is a giant cumulonimbus that is capable of causing massive damage. Supercells are so huge that they differ “from ordinary thunderstorms in that the rotation of their updraft enables them to overcome the self-limiting mechanisms that bring demise to regular storms,” according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Has Japan seen any particularly devastating tornadoes? On November 7, 2006, a tornado touched down in Saroma, Hokkaido, at about 1:30 p.m. It struck buildings near a construction site, lifting some into the air and killing nine people. What is the Fujita scale? The Fujita scale is a measurement of tornado intensity created by the late meteorologist Tetsuya Fujita, a Japanese native who did his research at the University of Chicago. The New York Times wrote in Fujita’s obituary in 1998 that he “devised the standard scale for rating the severity of tornadoes and discovered the role of sudden violent downbursts (microbursts) of air that sometimes cause airplanes to crash.” Fujita, who died at age 78, was known to many as the Tornado Man or Mr. Tornado, according to the article. Fujita linked the damage caused by a tornado with its wind speed in his scale. According to his hierarchy, an F0 tornado boasts a wind speed of 17 to 32 meters per second and is strong enough to bend antennas or small branches on a tree. The strongest tornado on the scale is an F5, which can obliterate houses and lift automobiles and train cars with wind speeds that can reach 142 meters per second. The 2006 tornado in Hokkaido that killed nine people was classified as an F3. No F4 or F5 tornado has ever been recorded in Japan, according to the Meteorological Agency. Can the government issue better and quicker warnings for tornadoes? Signs that a tornado may be forming include darkening skies, hailstorms and even a jetlike roar. But some reports said fair conditions continued Wednesday until 10 to 20 minutes before the Tochigi tornado formed, so prediction remains difficult. The Meteorological Agency has been using radars to track wind movements inside clouds and began providing new forecasts for tornadoes and microbursts in 2008. However, records show that the agency has been able to accurately predict a tornado only 5 to 10 percent of the time.

weather;meteorological agency;tornado;q & a

jp0000097

2013/09/02

Summer heat killed 87 in 2013

Record-high temperatures this summer caused at least 87 deaths from heat-related maladies and record-breaking downpours that triggered landslides across the country. According to the Meteorological Agency, temperatures from Kyushu to the Kanto-Koshin region began climbing between July 6 and 8, when the rainy season ended unusually early. During the three-day period from July 10 to 12, the mercury exceeded 35 degrees at more than 100 of the 927 observation points across the country. The heat wave subsided in late July but resumed on Aug. 7 — the first day of autumn under the lunar calendar — and continued for 16 days with temperatures above 35 degrees at more than 100 points. The hottest day of the summer was Aug. 11, when temperatures in 297 places topped 35 degrees. On Aug. 12, the mercury hit its highest ever in Japan — 41 degrees — in Shimanto, Kochi Prefecture, which baked above 40 degrees for four days through Aug. 13. In step with the elevated temperatures, the number of people hospitalized for heat stroke also rose. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said there were 87 deaths among the 54,000 treated for heat exhaustion in the three months from late May.

weather;temperature;heat stroke;heat wave;summer

jp0000100

2013/09/07

Fukushima: health disaster or PR fail?

One thing about having a nuclear accident in a rich country is that at least there is going to be good medical care and long-term monitoring. The repair and clean-up operation is another matter, of course — which is why Japan is currently under pressure to accept help from abroad in fixing the appalling mess caused by the three reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. But having great monitoring, assessment and medical treatment of citizens is one thing. It is quite another making sure information is communicated to the public clearly and openly. That is something at which neither the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), nor the Japanese government have succeeded at all well. And without good communication, fear and misinformation about radiation can understandably grow. I was talking about this last week with Gerry Thomas, who runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank (CTB) at Imperial College London. The CTB collects and analyzes samples of tissue from people exposed to radiation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the USSR (present-day Ukraine) in 1986, and monitors the occurrence of thyroid cancer in contaminated areas. About Fukushima, she is dismissive of the health risks. That might seem cavalier to people in the Tohoku region of northeastern Honshu who are worried about radiation contamination, but Prof. Thomas has seen what happened in Chernobyl — which released far more radiation than Fukushima has to date. “Fukushima is nothing compared to Chernobyl,” she told me. “It really is nothing, it’s a tenth of the dose of cesium.” (For the World Nuclear Association report on this, see bit.ly/17urZKd ) The problem in Japan, she says, is more one of communication than public health. “They’ve got a huge problem out there — largely a PR problem; it’s not a health problem because none of this is going to do anything health-wise,” the professor said. Our conversation came about because I’d seen a news clip on NHK reporting 18 cases of thyroid cancer in a monitored population around Fukushima. Fukushima Medical School monitors some 360,000 people who were aged 18 or younger at the time of the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. What you might conclude from the report — but you’d be mistaken — is that there is a direct link between the cases of cancer and the release of radioactive material following the meltdown. I asked for Thomas’ opinion. What we don’t know, she told me, is whether these thyroid cancers are to do with the environment in Fukushima — or whether there is something about the genetics of the people monitored. We also don’t know, she pointed out, whether the frequency is similar to that seen in other areas of Japan. In Chernobyl (where children were exposed to more than 100 times the maximum dose of radioactive iodine seen after Fukushima), thyroid cancers did not present themselves until four or five years after the disaster. “Given what we know about radiation dose and time elapsed since the accident,” says Thomas, “I personally cannot see how this finding can be related to the radiation — the doses were too low and the time too short, based on what we know from Chernobyl.” She directed me to a recent scientific paper reporting the results of radiation monitoring of adults and children around Fukushima. The paper, published in Proceedings of the Japanese Academy, Series B (which you can see for yourself; DOI reference: 10.2183/pjab.89.157), reports on the whole-body radiation screening of nearly 33,000 people. “Internal exposure levels of residents are much lower than estimated,” write Ryugo Hayano and colleagues of the University of Tokyo. In the town of Miharu, about 50 km from the stricken power plant, Hayano’s team monitored 95 percent of schoolchildren (aged 6-15). The radioactive cesium in the bodies of all the children was below the detection limit. In other words, they are emphatically not eating food contaminated with radiation. This sort of nonsensational, reassuring result isn’t something that will generally get reported by NHK or other media outlets. We are all exposed to radiation, all the time (this fantastic dose chart makes it clear: xkcd.com/radiation ) There is, however, a special fear of radiation that is introduced to the environment by human activities. But that fear can get out of hand. Far more radiation was released in the Chernobyl disaster than has been so far from the Fukushima plant, but even the Chernobyl disaster — the world’s worst — can be put into context. “If you compare Chernobyl with what we allowed to escape into the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, that was far, far more than Chernobyl,” Thomas says. “We’ve got a short-term memory about things like this. Instead of looking back and saying, ‘What do we know from exposures in the past?’ we just panic about the next one.” Her advice: Talk to people. The Japanese authorities — whether officials from Tepco, the government or monitoring agencies, or academics — ought to be open and learn to communicate better. As Thomas puts it: “They have got to talk to the local population, they have got to talk to the fishermen, and they’ve got to make people understand that low levels of radiation don’t matter because we’re all exposed to it all the time.”

fukushima;great east japan earthquake;nuclear energy;radiation leak

jp0000101

2013/09/01

Pax No Man's Land needs more than Fed's tapering to smooth things over

U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke hints at policy change. He is looking for an exit from quantitative easing whereby he has been buying financial assets to the order of $85 billion per month since the end of last year. He has emphasized the exit shall be a “tapering” procedure — no abrupt moves, no jumping on the brakes. Everything will be nice and gradual. Believe me. You really won’t see me go. I shall just fade away. And yet for all the care that has been taken to massage the markets’ fears, emerging economies are in turmoil. Capital is leaving their shores. Their stock markets have plummeted. Their bonds are losing value and their exchange rates are falling. There is much tension building in global financial markets, and it seems poised to snap once the summer holidays come to an end and people start getting back to work. Is this just one more case of America sneezing and everyone catching a cold? Are we still living in a world where “the almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion” (Washington Irving) swings us about with its every move? So it seems, at first glance. And yet a more careful inspection suggests otherwise. John Connally, who was treasury secretary in the Nixon administration, famously remarked that “The dollar is our currency but your problem.” He said this to a bunch of grumpy European finance ministers who had come to complain about U.S. dollar policies and their inflationary effects on the rest of the world. That Connally felt he could say such things with impunity tells us a lot about how things stood back then. Mind you, he was not able to be so blase about his dollar policies for long. Shortly thereafter, the United States was forced into terminating the dollar’s gold convertibility. At that point, the dollar became at best a first among equals, rather than that “object of universal devotion” Irving remarked upon. Be that as it may, the point is that there was indeed a time when the U.S. could afford to stare the rest of the world down in the face of complaints and say “it’s your problem.” Those who are the center of their universe can say that sort of thing. Kings and princes can just go ahead and do whatever they like, and to hell with the consequences. People just have to cope. ‘Tis mine not to worry about others, yours not to tell me what to do but to take my actions as given. That is what living in Pax Americana was all about. But now we are living in a global era. This is Pax No Man’s Land. It is a place where if anybody sneezes, everybody catches pneumonia. The very fact that Bernanke has to talk about tapering and go to great lengths to ease market jitters points to the altered state of affairs: Bernanke cannot just say “your problem” any more, because if he stirs up too much commotion in the emerging world, the ripple effects will only too quickly come back to strike the U.S. economy — with a vengeance. Pax No Man’s Land is a precarious place. Nobody is really safe, but everybody has to have a hand in keeping it safe. The other alternative is for everyone to stop minding each other’s business. Everyone could impose capital controls, chase foreign capital — perhaps even foreign people — off their shores and be done with it. That would spell the end of Pax altogether, never mind whose. But that would never do. All currencies are now everybody’s problem. Everyone beware.

fed;noriko hama;ben bernanke;taper;emerging markets

jp0000102

2013/09/12

Students suggest policies to increase female scientists

A group of university students on Wednesday handed the government some policy proposals for achieving its stated goal of increasing the ratio of female scientists in Japan to 30 percent by 2020. Eight science majors, including five past winners of fellowships from UNESCO and Nihon L’Oreal K.K., the Japanese unit of the world’s largest cosmetics maker, L’Oreal S.A. of France, presented the policy proposals to Masako Mori, minister for gender equality, at an awards ceremony for this year’s winners at the French Embassy. The proposals include obliging science faculties across Japan to employ at least one female professor to increase the number of female role models in science, creating more suitable environments for women at research laboratories and better informing potential science major candidates about life in research. Mori said it is “indispensable to boost the number of role models and mentors” for female scientists and pledged to carry out measures to help women continue pursuing their careers after giving birth. At present, women make up just 13.6 percent of the scientists in Japan, the lowest among 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based club of economically advanced nations.

masako mori;scientists

jp0000104

2013/08/04

Japan increases TPP possibilities but not its own competitiveness

Japan finally entered the trade talks for hammering out the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement during the 18th round last month in the Malaysian resort of Kota Kinabalu. The delegates joined the talks on the afternoon of July 23 after Japan’s participation was cleared by the U.S. Congress. The TPP is a framework that aims to liberalize trade in the pan-Pacific region. It started as an accord that was signed in June 2005 (and took effect in May 2006) by Singapore, Brunei, Chile and New Zealand with the goal of eliminating trade tariffs virtually without exception. Later, other countries including the United States, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Peru negotiated to join, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced in March that Japan would take part as well. The international talks revolve around the conflicting interests of the parties. Resistance lingers in each to give up vested interests, and protections for Japanese farmers and U.S. automakers are two areas where the most heated debates are anticipated. Detroit’s recent bankruptcy filing, the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history, could cast a shadow over the talks. On the other hand, consumers benefit a lot from being able to buy imported products on the cheap after tariffs are eliminated. It also must not be forgotten that Japan’s participation provides the following benefits to all parties. First, the sheer expansion in market size. With Japan’s entry, the combined gross domestic product of all the negotiating parties jumps from $18.8 trillion to $24.3 trillion. The bigger the market, the larger the opportunities to expand trade. Second is the expansion in potential benefits to the United States. Of the combined GDP of the 11 parties who entered the TPP talks before Japan, the U.S. accounted for a dominant share of 75.8 percent, followed by Canada (8 percent), Mexico (5.8 percent), Australia (5.4 percent), Chile (3.1 percent) and Malaysia (1.2 percent). The other five combined account for less than 1 percent. With Japan’s participation, America’s share drops to 58.5 percent, which means more opportunities for the U.S. to trade with the other TPP members. Third, participants other than the U.S. will now have a larger say in the negotiations. A country with a larger GDP share in the TPP market will have more influence over the negotiations, and the non-U.S. participants now account for 41.2 percent, compared with 24.2 percent before Japan entered. This is perhaps what everyone outside Uncle Sam expects Tokyo to bring to the talks. The fourth benefit is stability in the Asia-Pacific region, including China. Southeast Asia is becoming wary of China’s rapid ascent, which is being led by its military strength. At the moment, China, despite having the world’s second-largest GDP, is not qualified to take part in the TPP because of its various regulations, such as foreign exchange control. The expansion in the free trade bloc afforded by Japan’s entry will shed light on China’s true power and could ultimately press China to transform itself into a market economy with the same qualities as the TPP economies. Balancing the different interests of the negotiating parties will not be easy, but those obstacles need to be overcome in light of the benefits to be gained from a TPP deal. Last but not least, it must be noted that Japan, in order to actually join the TPP, needs to become more competitive. Each country’s requests for exceptions to the TPP’s overriding negotiating principle reflects their lagging competitiveness in the fields being protected.

tpp;trade;competitiveness;kota kinabalu

jp0000105

2013/08/02

J-blip: Bandai's smartphone panties

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muobpsb_5PI A new line of smartphone underpants has recently gone on sale. The mini panties, made by Bandai, are worn at the base of the smartphone, covering the home button. A home button sticker is also provided to protect your phone’s most thumbed area when the knickers have been removed. Aimed at teens of 15 years and above, the first range was introduced in March this year and sold so well that a brand new line has just gone on sale. You can find them in Gashapon machines. Costing just ¥200, the new styles include Mount Fuji, a banana print and lurid pink. To see the full range check out Fashion Snap’s gallery .

smartphones;mobile phones;iphones;japan pulse

jp0000108

2013/08/10

Koda's baby gaffe may find different reception now

Five years ago, singer Kumi Koda caused an uproar when she joked on a late-night radio show about how a woman’s amniotic fluid ( y ō sui ) becomes “spoiled” as she gets older. The subtext of the comment was the advantage of having babies at a younger age, but those quick to ridicule Koda’s lack of gynecological expertise (including this column ) fixated on what they saw as a swipe at women who put off having children due to careers and other exigencies of life. If Koda made the remark today, she might not receive such a negative response. Though amniotic fluid does not “spoil” as one gets older simply because it does not remain in a woman’s body over time, the notion that it is more difficult for older women to have children is now an intensely discussed health issue in Japan, where the birthrate continues to decline. And while Koda’s grasp of biology was flawed, her premise — that an essential feature of a woman’s ability to procreate becomes obsolete with age — wasn’t far from the mark. Ovarian follicles, which produce eggs for reproduction, are present in a female’s body before birth, and decrease in number as she gets older. Scientists estimate that the average girl has about 300,000 follicles at the onset of puberty, and thereafter loses about 1,000 with each menstrual cycle. When the number reaches 25,000, the chances of becoming pregnant drop considerably, which happens at about age 37, depending on the individual. This past spring, the government announced it would produce and distribute a handbook about pregnancy and childbirth for teenage girls in order to get them thinking about having children, but women’s groups objected to the implication that women’s only value to society lies in their ability to reproduce. The plan has since been shelved, but in a sense it had the desired effect, and not only on the targeted demographic. According to a recent article in Aera, an increasing number of working women in their 20s are seeking advice on in vitro fertilization later in life. Interest in the procedure was sparked by an NHK documentary aired late last year about the difficulties experienced by women over 35 when they try to conceive and bring a child to term. Aera says this interest has boosted the profiles of services that offer to freeze eggs. Women who think they may want children someday have their eggs extracted and stored so that they will have viable material if and when they do decide to become mothers. The government has not weighed in on these services, but a health ministry advisory panel is currently working on new guidelines for fertility treatments, which are not covered by national health insurance. However, the government does provide partial subsidies to married couples who undergo such treatments. At present there is no age limit for receiving the subsidy, only an income ceiling (¥7.3 million a year), and a couple can be reimbursed for up to 10 treatments over a period of five years. Subsidies were first made available in 2004, when 17,000 were granted. Last year, 135,000 payments were made for a total of ¥20 billion. The maximum amount of a single payment is ¥150,000, while the cost of IV fertilization is between ¥300,000 and ¥400,000. Since 2010 only 29,000 babies were born as a result of IV procedures covered by the subsidy. The new guidelines will take into consideration the effects of aging on childbearing. A woman’s chances of conceiving a baby drop from 1 in 5 at age 32 to 1 in 50 at age 43. In addition, the rate of miscarriage increases by 50 percent after 35. Consequently, the panel is recommending an age limit of 42 for the subsidy. Asahi Shimbun reports that the panel originally wanted to set the limit at 39, but 30 percent of subsidies now go to women over 40. In addition, the number of subsidies allowed for one couple would be cut from 10 to six, but the time period will be removed. The purpose of the revisions is to persuade couples to have children earlier, whether it be by natural or artificial means. But the operative word is still “couples,” and while the implied inclusion of men in the decision-making process might placate people who think that too much of the burden for increasing the birthrate is being shouldered by women, limiting the discussion to married people has had an effect the government probably didn’t intend. In all the Aera interviews, young women say they are interested in egg storage as a fallback measure. They want to do something now to increase their chances of conceiving later in life, but none are married. Nor do they have boyfriends (one does, but she doesn’t consider him husband/father material). Though they attend matchmaking sessions and are on the lookout for potential mates, they are too busy with work, and Aera implies this isn’t going to change. For one thing, men know about this biological-clock problem, too, and those who associate marriage with families are looking for younger mates, which would seem to mean the older these women become, the less their chances of getting hitched. If they still want to take advantage of their stored eggs when they’re older, many may end up doing it alone. Dr. Yasunori Yoshimura, a health ministry advisor, tells Aera that women need to be better informed of the drawbacks of the technology, but he also says the government has to look at the issue in a larger context. Sex education should not just be about contraception and STDs. It should also be about the “social environment” of having children, including a woman’s choice to give birth without a partner, something the government discourages by limiting subsidies to married couples. And according to a survey carried out by Asahi, many doctors advocate using national health insurance to pay for such treatment, though, of course, given the probability of success such a move would benefit health-care professionals more than it would the government. In the cold terms of cost-performance, maybe having kids isn’t worth it.

fertility;in vitro;kumi koda

jp0000109

2013/08/19

Murayama: SDP must find allies to stay in game

The Social Democratic Party doesn’t have a future and should consider disbanding and uniting with other opposition forces to create a united front to protect the war-renouncing Constitution and rid Japan of nuclear power, said former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who remains an SDP member. “Parties should join hands on issues like (opposing plans to) amend the Constitution that would decide the fate of the nation, and create a single party,” Murayama said Sunday on moves by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party to go after war-renouncing Article 9. He said the SDP can offer its nationwide network of local chapters to support a campaign to form a unified opposition bloc to counter the LDP. Earlier in the day, Murayama said on a TV program that it is important to create an opposition force that will keep the LDP’s “monopoly” in check until the next Lower House election. He also criticized Abe for omitting words of remorse for Japan’s wartime aggression during the ceremony last Thursday to mark Japan’s surrender in World War II. In the 1990s, as prime minister, Murayama issued a war apology that used terms like “remorse” — wording that subsequent prime ministers, including Abe from 2006 to 2007, annually voiced.

sdp;tomiichi murayama

jp0000110

2013/08/21

Texts alleging forced observance of anthem, flag axed

YOKOHAMA - A Japanese history textbook that takes a critical look at the national anthem and flag controversy has been dropped for use at public high schools in Kanagawa Prefecture starting next school year at the prefectural board of education’s request. The unusual intervention by the board drew flak from teachers and publishers. Prefectural high schools texts are typically selected by the schools themselves, subject to board approval. The board took issue with two textbooks by Jikkyo Shuppan Co. In explaining the flag and anthem law, the books say: “The government made it clear through Diet deliberations that the public is not mandated to raise the national flag and sing the national anthem. However, there are moves to force this on public employees in some local governments.” Kanagawa prefectural board of education chief Koji Gushiken told reporters the texts “contained lines not necessarily compatible with the thinking of the prefecture” and the board showed “good judgment” in curbing their use. The board has repeatedly said that raising the flag and singing the anthem are “obligations” for teachers, “(who are) not coerced.” Teachers nationwide, however, have been punished for not observing the national symbols during school ceremonies, and have sued. Jikkyo Shuppan’s textbooks have also been questioned by other boards of education, including in Tokyo, which said they are “inappropriate for use,” and Osaka, which claimed their “descriptions are one-sided.” Of Kanagawa Prefecture’s 144 high schools, 28 picked Jikkyo Shuppan’s book. The board requested their principals rethink the use of the textbooks, saying they would not get board approval because they are not in line with the prefectural policy. The 28 schools eventually opted for other textbooks. “The result of more than one month of deliberations was overturned in one day. Are we at the mercy of the prefectural board of education?” a social studies teacher in his 50s at one of the schools that dropped a Jikkyo Shuppan textbook asked. Last year, the board approved one of the Jikkyo Shuppan history books with an identical description about the issue and five schools are currently using it. The change in the board policy may be largely due to a Supreme Court ruling in April, one board official said. The court rejected a suit by Kanagawa teachers challenging on privacy grounds the prefectural policy of requiring principals to report teachers who do not stand when the anthem is sung at school ceremonies.

history;textbook;kanagawa prefecture

jp0000111

2013/08/21

Hiroshima, Nagasaki warn Obama on plutonium tests

HIROSHIMA/NAGASAKI - The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki separately sent letters of protest to President Barack Obama on Tuesday after the United States revealed it had conducted an experiment using plutonium to examine the capabilities of nuclear weapons between April and June. “I just can’t stop being angry,” Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui said, pointing out that Obama two months ago in Berlin proposed reducing stockpiles of U.S. nuclear weapons by up to one-third. Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue said in his letter that the latest testing “let down a lot of people and hurt the sentiment of the bombed places.” He then called on the United States to stop all nuclear tests and take the initiative in abolishing nuclear weapons. Hiroshima Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki also sent a letter of protest to Obama saying the United States is supposed to play a leadership role in worldwide efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, but its action disrupts those efforts. Regrettable comment JERUSALEM JIJI Israel has expressed regrets over comments by a senior official that he was sick of “self-righteous” memorials for the victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese and Israeli officials said Tuesday. Yaakov Amidror, Israeli national security adviser, phoned Ambassador to Israel Hideo Sato and expressed regrets over the comments, said officials at the Japanese Embassy in Tel Aviv. According to Israeli government sources, Amidror told the Japanese side that the senior official’s comments do not represent the opinion of the Israeli government.

israel;nagasaki;hiroshima;atomic bombings

jp0000112

2013/08/21

'Barefoot Gen' pulled as anti-war images strike too close to home?

The decision by the board of education of Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, to limit students’ access to the manga series “Hadashi no Gen” (“Barefoot Gen”) at school libraries continues to cause a stir. While some support the move, others say it disrespects the best-selling anti-war classic, which tells the story of a young boy who survives the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Meanwhile, it was reported Wednesday that a public library in Tottori Prefecture had also pulled the series from its shelves a few years ago over concerns about its graphic content. Here are some questions and answers regarding “Hadashi no Gen” and the controversy surrounding it: What’s the history of “Hadashi no Gen”? The series, by the late Keiji Nakazawa, first appeared in Shukan Shonen Jump, a weekly comic magazine, in 1973. While most of the comics in the magazine depicted giant robots and other flights of fancy, “Hadashi no Gen” was the gut-wrenching survival story of a 6-year-old boy during and after the war, focusing on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. “Hadashi no Gen,” which concluded in 1985, has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted into TV series, plays, feature movies and musicals. Nakazawa himself was a hibakusha, having survived the 1945 Hiroshima bombing. He lost his father and two siblings that day. “I still remember the weight I felt when I picked up my younger brother’s skull,” Nakazawa said during a speech in Tokyo in 2007. “My wish is that the readers of the book continue their efforts to create a world without war and nuclear weapons,” he added. Nakazawa died of lung cancer last December. Why did the Matsue board of education limit access to the series? It began with a petition by city residents last August. Although “Hadashi no Gen” offers an anti-war message, it also contains graphic drawings of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, including rapes and beheadings of Chinese. Though the board’s decision was not unanimous, one member felt the series “escalates as it proceeds and starts to contain extremely violent sentences and graphics,” according to the transcript of one meeting. “It may not be the proper way to describe it, but (“Hadashi no Gen”) could be considered an inappropriate book.” Another member of the board disagreed, saying the manga “depicts the tragedy of war and importance of peace” and therefore should be available at anytime for anyone to read. According to a Kyodo report, a majority of the 49 elementary and junior high school headmasters in Matsue told the board they thought “Hadashi no Gen” was appropriate for school libraries. Nevertheless, the board decided to remove the series from library shelves and curb student access to it. What else about “Hadashi no Gen” is considered controversial? Gen and other characters in the series are often critical of the Emperor, at times calling him “a murderer.” They hold the late Emperor Hirohito responsible for the deaths of millions in Japan and across Asia. Gen at one point even goes so far as to say that if it weren’t for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Emperor and other leaders wouldn’t have ended a war already known to be lost. Was this the author’s belief? Criticizing the Emperor makes one an easy target of conservatives and right-wingers, but Nakazawa was known to make even bolder comments in real life. “I wanted to jump on him, considering that he killed my father and did so many things to us,” Nakazawa said in an interview with Hiroshima City University in 2007 describing how he felt when Emperor Hirohito visited the city in 1947. “I absolutely cannot tolerate the Imperial system. We need to question its existence,” he said. How has the author’s family reacted to the controversy? Nakazawa’s widow, Misayo, recently told the Saitama Shimbun that she was “surprised” by the actions taken by the Matsue board of education. The book was written “with utmost consideration to what should be read by the children,” she said, adding there “is no way to depict the war without any graphic images.” How has Hiroshima reacted to Matsue’s decision? Hiroshima Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki was quick to criticize the move, telling reporters Tuesday it is “unnecessary” to regulate “Hadashi no Gen” and the series “has been read by many people for a long period of time as a reference on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.” Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui has also said that it is “important for the readers to witness the horrible drawings of atomic bombings and understand the need to prevent it from ever happening again.” Meanwhile, since its launch on Aug. 16 on Change.org , over 17,000 supporters have signed an online petition to reinstate “Hadashi no Gen” in Matsue libraries. What is likely to happen? The city of Matsue may not backtrack on its decision but is scheduled to hold a meeting with the board Thursday. Jiji reported Tuesday that the Matsue board of education may consider various options, including withdrawing the restriction to access the series, given the objections from various corners, quoting one of its board members, Nobuo Shimizu.

hiroshima;hadashi no gen;matsue;barefool gen

jp0000113

2013/08/09

Cyberterror threat stalks Japan's high-end toilet users

Cyberterrorists could strike at your most vulnerable and least expected moment because of a glitch in a smartphone-controlled high-tech toilet system manufactured in Japan. According U.S. security firm Trustwave, high-end Lixil Corp. toilets, which can be controlled with Android smartphones, could easily be hacked to allow anyone to “activate the bidet or air-dry functions, causing discomfort or distress to the user” via remote access. The glitch can further empower hackers to “unexpectedly open/close the lid,” the security firm warned. The latest toilet sold under Lixil’s Satis brand, which comes with a price tag of around ¥350,000, includes state-of-the-art technology for its heated seat, adjustable bidet and a built-in speaker. The product went on sale in February. Users can download to their smartphones the My Satis application, which enables them to control multiple functions — including the bidet location and power — while a Bluetooth connection can stream music from their phones over the toilet’s speaker. The toilet even enables users to keep a record of their bowel movements in a diary format “which will make it possible to easily comprehend your health status every month,” Lixil stated. But the bug discovered by Trustwave in the My Satis app means any third party could hijack the toilet’s functions. A spokeswoman for Lixil, based in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, said Friday that there is no need to raise the alert level, assuring the glitch does not pose an imminent threat. For cyberterrorists to capitalize on the application flaw, they must first be able to pair their smartphone with the target toilet, and then remain a few meters close by to access its control system. A Satis toilet also doesn’t activate unless someone is seated on it, meaning a hacker wouldn’t be able to wastefully hose bidet water around while no one is using it.

toilet;lixil

jp0000114

2013/08/31

Japan's nuclear comedy just goes on and on

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 1:9 These words are said to have been penned by King Solomon around 3,000 years ago. Perhaps they were an augury of Japan’s nuclear industry. I’m sure somewhere there’s an original text that reads, “In the Land of the Melting Sun.” Here’s the basic pattern: An accident occurs in Japan’s nuclear industry; those in charge fail to deal with it well; people suffer; those in charge lie to the public; finally they admit it and apologize profusely. Then the cycle is repeated. The latest revelations of leaks from at least one of more than 1,000 storage tanks being used to store radiation-contaminated water at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) are really nothing new; it’s just another in a series of follies being handled in an irresponsible and short-sighted way. True to form, while the media had been reporting on the problem for weeks, Tepco had denied it. Finally — and oddly, just after July’s Upper House elections — there was the admission, the obligatory apology, and an announcement by the Japanese government that it would come to the rescue. They say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it — yet the patterns of mishaps in Japan’s nuclear industry that I write about are so reproducible as to give me a strange sense of déjà vu. We have been here before. The explosions and meltdowns of three reactors at Tepco’s Fukushima facility in March 2011, leading to massive leaks of radiation, comprised the world’s worst nuclear disaster since a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the USSR (present-day Ukraine) in April 1986. In the northeastern Tohoku region of Honshu, where the Fukushima plant is located, more than 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate due to high radiation levels and the cleanup will likely take at least 40 years. Tepco at first blamed the accident on “an unforeseen massive tsunami” triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Then it admitted it had in fact foreseen just such a scenario but hadn’t done anything about it. A Special Diet Commission reporting in July 2012, and other studies, concluded that the earthquake alone probably damaged the cooling system of the Fukushima plant’s 40-year-old Reactor 1 so badly that, even before the tsunami, meltdown was inevitable because it would overheat so much. In other words, some of Japan’s nuclear power plants may be unable to withstand an earthquake. Not a comforting thought in a country that has constant seismic activity. Of course, “nuclear meltdown” itself was denied for months. Even up to May 2011, while the foreign media had long labeled the Fukushima disaster “a triple meltdown,” Tepco — and the national government — stonewalled, insisting that meltdown had not been confirmed. Then finally, just a week before members of an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation team were to arrive in Japan, the government and Tepco admitted the facts — with the usual ritual apologies. The current leakage problems at the Fukushima plant are even more baffling to those of us blessed with a memory. That’s because, in December 2011, the government announced that the plant had reached “a state of cold shutdown.” Normally, that means radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point. Great! Mission accomplished! Let’s go home. Unfortunately, though, if Tepco stops pumping coolant into the reactors to keep their temperature down, then they won’t be in “a state of cold shutdown” anymore. And thanks to the haphazard cleanup at the plant, even just a few rats can jeopardize that shutdown. Yes, rats — not Tepco executives, but real furry rodents. The plant is being run on makeshift equipment and breakdowns are endemic. Among nearly a dozen serious problems since April this year there have been successive power outages, leaks of highly radioactive water from underground water pools — and a rat that chewed enough wires to short-circuit a switchboard, causing a power outage that interrupted cooling for nearly 30 hours. Later, the cooling system for a fuel-storage pool had to be switched off for safety checks when two dead rats were found in a transformer box. Perhaps there’s a secret Tepco PR manual 101: When in doubt, blame the rats. However, the words of a top Tepco exec should be of some comfort: “I wish to express regret for the recent cases of misconduct at our company, which eroded public confidence in the nuclear power industry. We will do everything … to prevent similar incidents and to maintain safety. We will promote release of information in order to reassure the general public that we are making sincere efforts, and to convince them that ‘Tepco is trustworthy’ again.” All very well — but those remarks were made in 2003 by then Tepco Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata after the company admitted to extensive falsifying of safety records for more than a decade. The coverups included dangerous problems in a number of its aging nuclear power plants. At that time, the entire nuclear industry came under great scrutiny. Reform had come. And just to show lessons had been learned, there were further apologies in 2004, when five workers at Kansai Electric Power Co.’s Mihama nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture were scalded to death by steam leaking from a corroded pipe that hadn’t been inspected since 1976. Well, apologies are cheap; safety is expensive. Do you see the pattern? My guess is there is only one way to stop it, and that’s to finally pull the plug on Japan’s nuclear energy industry. We can only trust them to do one thing: place profits first, wreak havoc, lie about it and then apologize. But I don’t think that works so well anymore.

fukushima no . 1;tepco;nuclear power plant;tsunehisa katsumata

jp0000115

2013/08/24

Only in Japan could a sword be 'life-giving'

Few countries have broken with their past as sharply as Japan did. That was the price it paid for modernity. Japan in the mid-19th century had a beautiful, deep, highly refined culture that reached far down the social scale — but it was an ancient culture, not a modern one, artistic rather than acquisitive, helpless against encroaching Western powers that had already colonized much of the non-Western world and were hungry for the rest. Japan had only to look next door to China to see its own ghastly fate if it failed to match the West strength-for-strength. And so the past was shed. Japan became strong, rich — “Western.” When was the boundary crossed between Japan’s Oriental past and its “Western” future? A strong case could be made for the year 1876 — when the modernizing Meiji government (1868-1912) passed an edict banning the wearing of swords in public. “The sword is the soul of the samurai” — such was the proud declaration down the centuries. It is a weapon common to most early civilizations, but “there is no country in the world where the sword has received so much honor and renown as in Japan,” wrote Yokohama-based English diplomat Thomas McClatchie (1852-86), one of the first foreign students of Japanese martial arts. The sword figures in the earliest myths. Susano’o, the storm god, slays a people-devouring monster, extracting from its forked tail the sacred sword that became, together with a sacred mirror and a sacred jewel, one of the regalia of Imperial authority bestowed by the gods upon the nation’s first human ruler. Down to modern times, “The swordsmith was not a mere artisan,” wrote the Christian scholar Inazo Nitobe in “Bushido” (1900), “but an inspired artist, and his workshop a sanctuary. Daily he commenced his craft with prayer and purification.” The Japanese knew of firearms as early as the 1540s, when Portuguese traders brought them and did a very brisk business selling them. In Japan, though, the gun never displaced the sword, as it did in the West. Why? Numerous material factors can be cited — the shortage of firearms relative to the number of fighters; the unrelenting warfare of the time that favored tried and true techniques over uncertain experimental ones; the inconvenient length of time it took to reload a gun between firings. But the sense of the sword as more than a weapon — as a “soul” — was surely decisive. Old Japanese literature — philosophical, religious and military — refers frequently to “the life-giving sword.” Why “life-giving”? The sword is a lethal weapon, none more so than the Japanese sword, whose technical excellence is the marvel of connoisseurs worldwide. No one talks of the life-giving pistol, the life-giving atomic bomb, the life-giving drone. Where is the life in a death-dealing sword blade? The modern mind struggles to understand. Religion and martial ardor meet in the person of a Zen priest named Takuan Soho (1573-1645). An accomplished swordsman himself, he served as spiritual guide to the outstanding martial artists of his day, whom he taught along such lines as these: “The enemy does not see me. I do not see the enemy. Penetrating to a place where heaven and earth have not yet divided … I quickly and necessarily gain the desired effect.” That “desired effect” can only be the death of his opponent, but the death of a master swordsman at the hands of a master swordsman, tradition has it, is not death — certainly it is not murder — because the religious enlightenment that is prerequisite for true mastery places one beyond the illusory distinction between birth and death. “As long as a student of Zen entertains any kind of thought in regard to birth-and-death, he falls into the path of the devil,” explains a Zen master quoted anonymously by Zen priest Daisetz T. Suzuki (1879-1966) in “Zen and Swordsmanship.” Foremost among Japan’s master swordsmen is Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), who lives on long after death in kabuki, bunraku (puppet theater), novels, manga, movies and television dramas. Musashi fought his first duel at age 13 and spent much of his life roaming the country matching skills with other masters. Japan’s centuries of civil wars were over by 1615. Peace held until 1894. But the “life-giving sword” was not to be suppressed by peace. Musashi fought 60 bouts in all, most of them fatal to his opponents. Does that make him a killer? Emphatically yes, in the eyes of some. He “elevated killing to a fine art,” writes historian Beatrice Bodart-Bailey in “The Dog Shogun” (2006). “His famous ‘Book of Five Rings’ consists of detailed instructions on how to kill quickly and effectively.” Bodart-Bailey will have none of the “life-giving sword” mysticism — but Musashi himself wrote, “I was unbeaten because I gave no thought to my life.” He was a dedicated student of Zen; also a poet, tea master, landscape gardener, town planner, writer and painter. To him, the artist was in a state of religious transcendence and all arts were one. Swordsmanship, to Musashi, and indeed to all swordsmen, was an art. In the Japanese tradition there is no “Thou shalt not kill.” If the 1876 anti-sword law stripped the samurai of their soul, it did not — nor did it intend to — pacify the national spirit. The notion of the “life-giving sword,” extended to embrace modern weaponry, survived into the 20th century. “There is no choice,” wrote Zen scholar Tomojiro Hayashiya (1886-1953) in 1937, “but to wage compassionate wars which give life to both oneself and one’s enemy.” We who can look back on World War II know what kind of “life” that meant.

zen;miyamoto musashi;daisetz t. suzuki

jp0000116

2013/08/13

Former leader of Japan's ruling party against raising defense profile

Ahead of the anniversary Thursday of Japan’s surrender in World War II, former Liberal Democratic Party President and noted dove Yohei Kono expressed his views on constitutional revision proposed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other issues. Kono, 76, who was known for being the most dovish among LDP lawmakers, held such key posts as chief Cabinet secretary, foreign minister and Lower House speaker before retiring from politics in 2009. Abe is keen on revising the Constitution. The LDP, now headed by Abe, in its draft proposal defines the Self-Defense Forces as a national defense force, while allowing Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense. What is your take on this? I do not see the need for revisions. If Japan modifies its Constitution to position the SDF as a national defense force and changes its defense guidelines to allow increased defense equipment, this would be encouraging neighboring nations to alter their defense programs. There is absolutely no need to set the stage for a never-ending arms race. There are views that the security environment surrounding Japan is changing, but this is exactly the time when more diplomatic efforts are needed. I understand that you have previously written about your wartime experiences, such as running to bomb shelters during air raids and your memory of listening to the broadcast of the voice of Emperor Hirohito (declaring Japan’s defeat). They are unforgettable experiences. Time has passed since the current Constitution was written and I now see a trend that takes (the war-renouncing) Article 9 lightly. We must go back to the basics and think properly as to why this kind of Constitution came to be. We must not forget the devastation and tragedy caused by the war. Article 9 demonstrates the fundamental spirit of Japan. There used to be LDP lawmakers who were opposed to constitutional revisions, but there seems to be no opposition these days. Why is this? What has made a big impact is that the Lower House is comprised of people elected in single-seat districts. Under such an election system, lawmakers can’t be endorsed by the party if they do not strictly adhere to the party’s pledges. Abe has recently indicated he supports changing the government’s interpretation that Japan can’t exercise the right to collective self-defense. What is your view on this? At first, the direction was to modify the Constitution (and enable exercising the right to collective self-defense). But since constitutional revision is not an easy task, it is now shifting to the reinterpretation of the Constitution. The procedure to change the interpretation can be done by a Cabinet decision, but wouldn’t that mean holding the Diet and the people in low account? It would inevitably lead to engaging in war if we exercise the right to collective self-defense, and it deviates significantly from the spirit of the Constitution. Voices are growing in the LDP criticizing the 1995 statement issued by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama apologizing for Japan’s wartime aggression in Asia. What do you think about that? They must be asserting that the previous war was not a mistake, but such an argument can’t be accepted at home and abroad. It will raise Japan’s position in the international community if we admit what was wrong.

constitution;revision;yohei kono

jp0000117

2013/01/19

Man survives train fall, redistribution of resources Japan's mission, GSDF adopts local guns, chandelier falls

100 YEARS AGO Wednesday, Jan. 29, 1913 Man survives train fall Tamejiro Kawai, aged 48, a milk-hall keeper in Yamashita-cho, Yokohama, while going by rail from Tokyo to Yokohama a little after midnight Jan. 27, fell between the cars. A by-stander sounded the alarm, the engineer stopped the train, and an examination was made. Upon being informed that a man had fallen, all thought that he must have been killed or run over by the train. But fortunately, the man was not only not dead, but unhurt, as he fell just between the rails flat upon the ground and the train passed over him without touching him. 75 YEARS AGO Tuesday, Jan. 4, 1938 Yamato race must redistribute resources By Ryutaro Nagai, Communications Minister — The new idea that “a state is not a body comprising various factions with complicated and conflicting interests but a body with a common aim of fulfilling a noble cultural mission, and that a nation is not a mere materialistic existence chasing after its own interests but a spiritual existence obliged to make contribution for the welfare of humanity” seems to have penetrated through the minds of the people dissatisfied with a materialistic civilization. The supreme and noblest spirit manifesting the nucleus of “Japan Spirit” is the very basis of the national livelihood. The nation intends to adopt Western science, and systematize and adjust it with the spirit peculiar to Japan, thereby contributing much to the interest of the world. The mission of the Yamato race, I am fully convinced, is to work for the redistribution of the natural resources of the world and thereby prevent the majority of the people from falling into poverty and despair, as well as to emancipate humanity from the Communist menace now threatening the world. Communists always take advantage of the dissatisfaction arising from poverty. For the manifestation and enhancement of the “Japan Spirit” abroad, however, there is something to be done beforehand in this part of the world — the Orient. That is to reconstruct and rehabilitate the stricken Asian continent. We must first strengthen cooperation among Japan, Manchukuo and China, bound together as they are with a common civilization, establish a basic principle of sufficing one another from the standpoints of national defense and industries, check others’ malicious activities in the Orient and eventually build a new land for co-existence and co-prosperity among the three countries. It is exceedingly regrettable, however, that China under the Nanking regime has not only betrayed the other two in that great task but has also resorted to a policy of anti-Japanese resistance. Such being the situation, Japan was compelled to take arms against it. This is the origin of the current Sino-Japanese hostilities. Japan’s enemy, therefore, is not the Chinese people but the Government under General Chiang Kai-shek, who is dead to all sense of the shame of selling his country to others. Japan must continue its fight in China till it can stabilize the foundation of that nation. As for the Japanese people, they must be prepared to endure whatever sacrifice the country demands. [Nagai, who had served as a Diet member since 1920, died on Dec. 4, 1944, during the Tokyo air raid.] 50 YEARS AGO Monday, Jan. 7, 1963 Small arms to be made locally The Defense Agency will begin this year mass production of small firearms to replace U.S.-made carbines, rifles and machineguns used by the Ground Self-Defense Force, it was learned Sunday. The mass production plan grew out of recognition that U.S.-made arms are too large for Self-Defense Force personnel and most are now obsolete. These arms were said to be inconvenient, especially where ammunition was concerned, because of the large variety of U.S. weapons. A new machinegun developed by the Technical Research Headquarters of the Defense Agency was claimed to be better than the U.S.-made models A4 and A6 now in use by the GSDF. A new rifle, tentatively known as model 64, also has been developed and is expected to be adopted officially by the defense forces next year. [The new machinegun mentioned here was eventually manufactured by Sumitomo Heavy Industries and thus became known as the Sumitomo Type 62. “Model 64” later became known as Howa Type 64. Both weapons became standard issue in the GSDF and continue to be used to this day.] 25 YEARS AGO Wednesday, Jan. 6, 1988 Two killed by falling disco chandelier Two women were killed and 15 others, including 11 women and four men, were injured when a two-ton chandelier fell on dancers at a disco in Tokyo’s Roppongi Tuesday night, the Tokyo Metropolitan Fire Board reported. The women were identified as Akemi Mizobe, 21, and Keiko Takagi, 26. When the rectangular-shaped chandelier fell around 9:40 p.m., about 200 guests at the Roppongi disco Turia were sent into mass pandemonium, an employee there said, adding that some of the victims were pinned under the light, while others caught fragments of flying glass. The chandelier, measuring three meters by two meters by one meter thick, fell about 10 meters, from the second floor ceiling to a basement where about 100 guests were dancing. The disco, located near the Defense Agency, is known for its selectiveness, with a video camera that monitors guests to determine fashionability.

self-defense force;chiang kai-shek;sumitomo heavy industries

jp0000118

2013/01/13

How Japan's teens can avoid sleep demons

Have you ever woken up but been unable to move; felt a powerful pressure holding you down, gripping you tight? Haruki Murakami has, and he describes it like this: “I was having a repulsive dream — a dark, slimy dream. … After I awoke, my breath came in painful gasps for a time. My arms and legs felt paralyzed. I lay there immobilized, listening to my own labored breathing, as if I were stretched out full-length on the floor of a huge cavern.” In this excerpt from the short story “Sleep” from his “The Elephant Vanishes” collection, Murakami is describing an episode of sleep paralysis, which is better known in Japan as kanashibari (literally, “bound in metal”). In other cultures, the experience has been attributed to a ghost (China and Korea), a demon feeding on the living (Fiji) and, in the southern United States, to a witch. People all over the world experience kanashibari, but with accounts going back at least as far as the kaidan (ghost stories) of the Edo Period (1603-1867), it has a particularly Japanese flavor. In Japan, too, the phenomenon seems to disproportionately affect young people, while homegrown horror films often play on a psychological fear of ghosts manifesting in the real world. It’s no surprise that these movies depict young people as being disproportionately affected by these apparitions. Fiction that may be, but in fact a nationwide survey of junior and senior high school students in Japan conducted in 2011 by Yoshitaka Kaneita of Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo, and colleagues, found that of the 90,081 questionnaires analyzed, 35.2 percent of respondents reported having nightmares, and 8.3 percent experienced kanashibari — compared with 6.2 percent of the general population in the United States who separate studies have found to report instances of kanashibari. The results of the Japanese survey — as reported in the journal Sleep Medicine (DOI reference: 10.1016/j.sleep.2010.04.015) — show that Kaneita and his team found a number of factors that seem to increase the chance of having a nightmare or experiencing an episode of kanashibari. For nightmares, they are: drinking alcohol, having trouble going to sleep, poor mental health — or simply being female, though there is little to be done about this factor. For kanashibari, males were found to be more susceptible than females, with their odds of affliction shortening more due to taking a long daytime nap, having an early or late bedtime — and again, having difficulty going to sleep and/or poor mental health. Kaneita’s team concluded that regular sleep habits are important to help prevent nightmares and episodes of sleep paralysis. However, Japanese high school students are often cited as being overloaded with work to the point that they have to get by on as little as four hours’ sleep a night. Indeed, in a separate survey of 3,478 Japanese high school students aged 16 to 18 (equivalent to 10th- through 12th-graders), researchers found that on average they slept for 6.3 hours, going to bed at 00:03 and rising at 06:33. As the evidence suggests that teenagers in both Japan and South Korea are more sleep-deprived than those in Western countries and China, Kaneita and his coauthors recommend that health education about regular sleep habits should be promoted among Japanese adolescents. Kanashibari — attributed to supernatural causes for centuries — may even shed light on the surprising mysteries of that most ubiquitous, beguiling and enjoyable of experiences: sleep. By monitoring volunteers in sleep labs, scientists have found that episodes of sleep paralysis occur when rapid-eye-movement (REM) stages of sleep overlap with waking stages. Nonetheless, for something so intrinsic to the human condition, sleep remains poorly understood. There are many explanations, and probably many are correct. Sleep has numerous functions. It helps regulate emotions (we’re invariably in a better mood after a good sleep); it helps us recharge and conserve energy; it helps the brain to process memory. Sleep also helps the automatic functioning of the body — the heart rate, breathing and hormone production. What seems to happen in kanashibari is that the person starts to wake up while REM sleep is still continuing. This leads to a situation where you are aware but “trapped” in a frozen body — because during REM sleep the muscles are paralyzed. We’ve all probably experienced moments of this intriguing and (to me) pleasurable feeling of the consciousness “floating,” unmoored to the body. But it’s only ever been a few seconds for me. If the feeling lasted for minutes or even hours, as it does for some unfortunate people, I can see how if could generate panic. It turns out that the brain becomes hyper-vigilant during these episodes, and can hallucinate a presence — a supernatural being, it may seem — holding them down. For some people it’s an evil cat, or a witch, or the bedclothes appear to become the twisted limbs of a dead body pressing on top of them. But let’s not end on such a horrific note. Consider, for instance, dolphins and seals: When they sleep, half the brain is dormant while the other half stays alert. What on Earth does that feel like? Perhaps dolphins have nightmares — being trapped in a cove by Japanese drive fishermen armed with spears, for example — but whatever their experience, it doesn’t last long: The sleep of marine mammals tends to occur in short bursts. Sweet dreams to all in this new year of 2013!

sleep;teens

jp0000120

2013/06/18

Okigusuri

Dear Alice, I was on a two-week home stay in the countryside of Japan when a visitor came to the house. I don’t think he was expected, but my home-stay mother greeted him like an old friend and fetched a plastic drawer-box from the kitchen, which seemed to contain packaged medicines. While they chatted over tea, he went through the drawer counting packages and checking something on each package. He replaced certain products and seemed to recommend others, some of which went into the box. In the end, my home-stay mother paid what seemed to be a very small amount of money considering the amount of product left behind. They parted warmly and the box went back into the kitchen. She confirmed the products are medicine but otherwise couldn’t explain what the heck was going on. Can you? Gary K, Hong Kong Dear Gary, You witnessed a sales call for okigusuri , a uniquely Japanese method of marketing medicine, and one that has a history of well over 300 years. Here’s how it works: A variety of medicines are brought to your home and entrusted to you without any deposit or advance payment. You are given a free case in which to store them. There’s no obligation to buy anything but the medicines are there if you need them. And should the need arise, you may use anything from the box on the understanding that the next time the sales representative comes around, you’ll pay for only what you’ve actually used. In Japanese, this way of selling is called seny ō k ō ri (use first, pay later). Today, it is most strongly associated with medicine manufacturers in Toyama Prefecture, which together supply more than half of all okigusuri. This part of the country, located on the Japan Sea coast in the central part of the country, has had a high concentration of medicine makers ever since the Edo Period (1603-1867), when the area was called Etchu province. By the early 18th century, medicines from Etchu were sold throughout Japan, no small feat given the distances and strict restrictions at the time on travel and trade. The story goes that in 1690 the feudal head of the province, Masatoshi Maeda (1649-1706), was on a formal visit to Edo Castle when another lord fell seriously ill with a stomach complaint. Maeda immediately offered a remedy from his region, which he always carried with him, and it almost instantly relieved the man’s suffering. Impressed, the many lordly witnesses to this speedy recovery spoke to Maeda afterwards, asking that the medicine be made available in their own domains. Thanks to this official support, it became possible for medicine sellers from Etchu to enter other domains to peddle their products. The industry cooperated on distribution, dividing the country into 18 to 22 territories and assigning routes. Salesmen typically made two trips a year, carrying products in a set of nesting woven baskets tied to their back with a large cloth. To gain consumers’ trust for an unfamiliar medicine, they left their products with no advance payment and no obligation to use it. People often assume that the Etchu medicine manufacturers pioneered the “use first, pay later” method of sales, but recent research has confirmed that it was used even earlier for a variety of products, including cooking pots, hoes and mosquito nets. To find out how the okigusuri industry works today, I set up an appointment with Masao Inoya, immediate past chairman of the Tokyo-to Iyakuhin Haichi Kyokai (Tokyo Metropolitan Medicine Placement Association) and an okigusuri salesman with more than 60 years in the business. Inoya says he places medicines in both homes and offices, and generally visits each client two or three times a year to replenish supplies and collect payment for product used. When I asked what the salesman you observed was looking for on the packages, Inoya said he was checking the expiration date, because unopened but out-of-date product is removed and replaced at no charge. The average okigusuri box, which is called a haichi-bako or azuke-bako , he said, is kept stocked with 15 to 20 products worth something in the range of ¥7,000 to ¥10,000. Inoya said his rate of collection is very nearly 100 percent, and the industry has few problems with customers disappearing with the goods or refusing to pay. The actual selection of products varies by distributor and customer preference, but the typical okigusuri box will contain pain relievers, cold medicine, throat lozenges, stomach remedies and bottled health tonics. It usually also includes first-aid supplies such as bandages, disinfectant and shippu , which are packaged hot or cold compresses that may be treated with analgesics or anti-inflammatory drugs. Inoya told me his particular area of strength is health-promoting medicines that people use even when they aren’t experiencing any particular symptoms. “I’m not selling medicine; I’m selling health,” he asserted. “So I have to be healthy myself.” And to show me just how healthy he is, Inoya, who is 77, got down and did the splits, sitting with his legs flat to the floor and straight out to the sides. That alone would have impressed me, but then he bent forward and touched his head to floor. Such health and flexibility must serve him in good stead, because he now has to travel a much wider area in order to maintain sales. “Unfortunately, sales of okigusuri are down,” Inoya explained. “When I started in the business, someone was home during the day in most households. And there were fewer stores in neighborhoods. But now more women work outside of the home, and there’s a drugstore on every corner. People just have more options for buying medicine.” Interestingly, the “use first, pay later” system has been introduced in developing countries to improve access to health care. With support from the Nippon Foundation, programs in Mongolia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam provide rural families with health education and cases of locally manufactured traditional medicines. The participating families can use the medicine if they need it, and pay only for what they use.

medicine;okigusuri;tokyo-to iyakuhin haichi kyokai

jp0000121

2013/06/09

Unraveling the mystery of male birds' missing members

How the chicken lost its penis: It sounds like a weird cousin of one of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories for Little Children” from 1902, which featured “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “How the Camel Got His Hump.” But weird or not, this month we explore why almost all birds lack that flagpole of masculinity: the penis. Back when I was a postgraduate student, a biologist in the department where I worked had a quiet word with my adviser: “Your student,” he said, “is obsessed with animal genitalia. There’s something wrong with him.” My professor laughed it off. “That’s part of his PhD,” he said. “I’d be worried if he wasn’t thinking about sex all the time.” I’ll happily accept that there may well be something wrong with me. After all, I did spend several years looking at the sperm and the genital morphology of many different kinds of animals. But in my defense I’d say this: If that’s the case then there’s also something wrong with most evolutionary biologists. The evolution of sex, of male and female genders — and of the organs that accompany the act of procreation — pose fascinating questions for biologists. So they think about it a lot. That’s their excuse, anyway. I was reminded of that episode last week when I came across a scientific paper reporting on a study of how birds lost their penises. And yes indeed, in 97 percent of bird species, the males don’t have a member. It’s a vexing question for biologists, let alone our feathered friends. Nonetheless, these individuals are just as randy and strutting as males of other more well-endowed species — though the poor wretches have to make do with a cloaca, which is basically just an opening where you’d expect to find a penis. Now Martin Cohn and Ana Herrera of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and colleagues, have found that chickens possess normally developing penises as early embryos. But then, as the birds develop, a genetic program swings into action and effectively chops off their little budding appendages. Think of it as a grim reaper just for males — though it’s achieved through the programmed, deliberate dying-off of cells. “Our discovery,” says Cohn, “shows that reduction of the penis during bird evolution occurred by activation of a normal mechanism of programmed cell-death in a new location, the tip of the emerging penis.” You may well ask: Why do we care? Well, it’s important to understand how this automatic cell-death mechanism operates because, if it fails to work when needed in the human body, it can lead to excessive or unregulated cell growth — and this can spell cancer. And there’s another reason: We care because we are “ obsessed with animal genitalia” and quite simply want to understand why birds don’t have penises. Herrera, the grad-student lead author of the study, who probably has a fixation like the one I had, says it’s not clear why chickens and other birds would have lost their penises. It might be down to aerodynamics: A flapping male phallus would not help in graceful flight. But Herrera has another interesting idea. It may be, she says, that the loss of a penis gives hens greater control over their reproductive lives. The natural evolutionary selection of females of the many species may, in other words, have driven the loss of the male’s pride and joy. How can that be? To find out, let’s turn to ducks. As alert readers will have noticed — and will likely be troubling over right now — I said that most male birds don’t have a penis. Some do — and boy, do they. Male ducks have giant, corkscrew-shaped penises. They use them to force females into having sex — you might have seen mallards chasing females of their species and jumping on them — which is what happens when the drake has an organ he can forcibly insert into the female. There’s not much a female duck can do to avoid a drake’s penetrative intentions, but over evolutionary time they have come up with something very clever to inhibit them. Hence the female’s reproductive tract is also corkscrew-shaped — but it twists the other way: The penis twists counter-clockwise, the vagina goes clockwise. So the females have evolved some measure of control over exactly where the male can put his penis, even if she can’t stop him inserting it in the first place. That’s because there are pockets and dead-end alleys inside her that prevent the penis growing to its full size. (If you’re a female duck you really don’t want that, as some drakes’ “manhood” can be as long as their body.) So female ducks have evolved quite elaborate countermeasures in response to the questing, unwanted penis. Yet how much easier if there wasn’t a penis at all! That is the case in the vast majority of bird species. Herrera and Cohn found that chickens have a gene known as Bmp4 that switches on at a certain stage in embryonic growth and culls the bird’s penis. In ducks and other enpenised avians, this gene stays switched off — as the results of their work, published in the journal Current Biology, show (DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.062 ) It appears that Bmp4 operates in mammals, too. What would happen — oh, horror — if it were switched on in the development of a human male? One can imagine a kind of reverse of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” — a version in which some crazed ruling class of women would have activated Bmp4 in men, causing them to lose their penises. The plot could center on a group of rebel women genetic engineers who restore men to their natural glory. I’d enjoy such a book — just as long as it remained in the realms of fiction.

sex;cancer;cell-death;bmp4;procreation;penis

jp0000122

2013/06/23

The 'barbarians' were coming — like it or not

‘Sonn ō j ō i!” : “Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians!” The writing was on the wall long before the wall crumbled. Japan’s splendid isolation — splendid in its own eyes — would no longer be accepted. The outside world was growing restless. Nations were reaching out, testing their strength, harnessing new technologies, trading, expanding, colonizing. Could Japan remain haughtily aloof? An official sakoku (closed-country) policy had been in place since the early 17th century, when Christian missionaries, active in the country for 100 years, began to seem to the ruling shoguns like an advance guard for European imperialists. Up went the drawbridge. Japan became an impregnable fortress — or a black hole, strictly off-limits to all but a handful of Dutch and Chinese traders confined to specific parts of Nagasaki. “Let us trade, too!” pleaded a party of 61 China-based Portuguese envoys who landed in Nagasaki in 1640. Their arrest and summary beheading was the shogun’s crisp, clear response. It got the point across. Traders, whalers, diplomats, explorers all kept their distance — for a time. The first to come cautiously knocking, a century and a half later, were Russians. They had been quietly settling parts of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido), then largely unclaimed, and in 1791 a Russian naval officer appeared in Matsumae, Ezo, with a letter from the czar, Catherine the Great. Politely rebuffed, he left peaceably, his letter undelivered. But he too got a point across, to those with eyes to see it: Japan’s seclusion was wearing thin. The following years saw numerous intrusions, courteous or truculent, by British, American, French and Russian ships. Some demanded supplies, others wanted to trade; one or two carried Japanese castaways for repatriation. The world was shrinking; here it was at Japan’s gates, and what was Japan going to do about it? The harshest prod of all was the Opium War (1839-42), in which Britain wrested Hong Kong and various trading privileges (notably the right to deal in opium) from a decadent China. Would this be Japan’s fate as well? In 1844, King Willem II of Holland sent Shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi a friendly warning: “The intercourse between the different nations of the Earth is increasing with great rapidity. An irresistible power is drawing them together. Through the invention of steamships distances have become shorter. A nation preferring to remain in isolation at this time of increasing relationships could not avoid hostility with many others.” The next act in the drama is well known: U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry; the “Black Ships”; the “opening of Japan.” That was in 1854. Japan under duress signed a series of “unequal treaties” (1854-58), first with the United States, then with Britain, Holland, Russia and France. Japanese ports, long closed, were opened to international commerce. Foreign nationals were granted rights of residence. Foreign consuls arrived. Tariffs were set low, to Japan’s disadvantage, Japan powerless to raise them. Foreigners were subject not to Japanese law but to the laws of their home countries. This was “extra-territoriality,” the most galling insult of all. Japan’s is a martial culture. A government submitting to terms like these had better watch its back. Long before Perry, the shogunate faced internal challenges. Broadly speaking they were of two kinds — progressive and conservative, as we would say today. The progressives knew something of Western science, medicine and government and saw in them Japan’s only hope against “barbarian” powers that preyed on the powerless. To conservatives, this was to accept barbarization. Japan would triumph not by brute power but by innate spirit. But what spirit — Confucian, or Shinto? Confucianists looked to ancient Chinese sages as the source of the moral Way. Nativists turned to their own country’s past. Why look further? Was Japan not “the land of the gods”? A sense of partaking in divinity is the most uncompromising of incentives. It bred in Japan a group of mostly low-ranking samurai known as shishi (men of spirit). Their zeal knew no bounds. They would put their swords at the service of the Emperor, descendant of the Sun Goddess, and rid their divine land of the barbarians. “Sonnō jōi!” For centuries the emperors had been mere ciphers, languishing in poverty and impotence in Kyoto, the ancient capital, while the shoguns ruled in Edo (present-day Tokyo), the seat of power since 1603. Emperor Komei (reigned 1846-67) began as a puppet like his predecessors — but turned at last on the puppeteers. The opening of the ports, “be it but for a day or even half a day,” was intolerable, he wrote in a personal memorandum to the shogunate in 1859. The shishi rallied round him, their spirits burnished by an 1825 text by nativist thinker Aizawa Seishin (1782-1863): “Our Divine Realm is where the sun emerges. It is the source of the primordial vital force, sustaining all life and order. … Our Divine Realm rightly constitutes the head and shoulders of the world and controls all nations.” To the shishi he inspired, temporizers were traitors. Ii Naosuke, the shogunal minister who had signed the treaties, was cut down. Many other assassinations were plotted and a few were carried out. Chaos reigned — madness too, if a beheading in 1863 in a Kyoto temple deserves the name. The victims were three wooden statues of 14th-century shoguns deemed to have been disloyal to their emperors. The heads were displayed on the banks of the Kamo River — a warning to traitors that patriots knew how to deal with them. Five years later the Meiji Restoration overthrew the tottering shogunate and launched Japan on the most intense modernizing and industrializing drive the world had ever seen. Many of its leaders were shishi. “Sonnō jōi”? Make that … “Bunmei kaika” — “civilization and enlightenment.” It was a Meiji maxim that meant, in effect, “Westernization.” Those who damned it as barbarization were by this time quite helpless to stem the tide.

meiji restoration;perry

jp0000123

2013/06/14

Parolee in 1963 Saitama girl's slaying hits authorities for lying, forcing confessions

Investigators will lie, grill for hours on end and withhold exonerating evidence — in effect do anything — to extract a confession from a suspect they have pegged for a crime, a 1994 parolee seeking a retrial to clear his name in the 1963 kidnap-murder of a Saitama Prefecture girl said Thursday in Tokyo. Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Kazuo Ishikawa, who appeared with his lawyer, Taketoshi Nakayama, pointed to discrepancies in the kanji used in an apparent ransom demand for ¥200,000 and an earlier document he wrote and also alleged that the state looked to him as a usual suspect because of his roots in Japan’s former outcast class known as the “burakumin.” He continues to claim he is innocent. Ishikawa was arrested in 1963 for the kidnap-slaying of Yoshie Nakata in the town of Sayama. An autopsy carried out on her corpse at the time concluded she had been raped and strangled. In a notorious case that would become known as the “Sayama Incident,” Ishikawa was initially sentenced to hang. He claimed he was threatened and tricked by prosecutors into making a false confession, which he later retracted in seeking to appeal his sentence. “I was told by the police that my older brother was actually their prime suspect, and that they were planning to arrest him. But then they said that if I agreed to be his scapegoat, they would let me off the hook after just 10 years,” Ishikawa, 74, said, explaining why he decided to plead guilty during his first trial in 1964. But after being sentenced to death, he filed an appeal, professing his innocence and arguing the police had forced his confession. In 1974, the Tokyo High Court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. Dissatisfied, Ishikawa appealed to the Supreme Court but lost, and his sentence was finalized in 1977. Paroled in 1994, Ishikawa, who still must see a probation officer, called for abolishment of the “daiyo kangoku” substitute detention cells inside police stations that were originally set up in 1908 amid a shortage of prisons. The system is often denounced both in Japan and abroad because it effectively allows police to keep suspects under constant monitoring without access to lawyers. “When the clock hit about 5 p.m., the police would take away my wristwatch and just continue their interrogation until midnight. I had no way of knowing how long they had grilled me,” Ishikawa said. After Nakata disappeared and before she was slain, her family received a written ransom demand that remains the only possible clue to identify the killer. The carefully crafted letter, with bizarre kanji that some suspect was an attempt to suggest the writer was barely literate, has been used by prosecutors as the main evidence to implicate Ishikawa, whose handwriting they have claimed resembled that found in the note. Ishikawa, born into an impoverished “buraku” social outcast community, claims he never could have penned such a skilled letter, citing his near illiteracy at the time of the killing. His lawyer, Nakayama, questioned the legitimacy of the handwriting analyses by the police, pointing out they deliberately ignored obvious discrepancies that might work in Ishikawa’s favor. It was only after 47 years since Ishikawa’s arrest that prosecutors finally disclosed a petition letter he wrote that suggests his writing style differed from that of the ransom note. “How could they have kept such important evidence under wraps for 47 years?” Nakayama asked. Criticizing the prolonged unwillingness by prosecutors to make key evidence public, Nakayama claimed the police arrested Ishikawa because of his low social status. “The police basically took advantage of the deep-rooted prejudice against the outcast class to wrongfully proclaim Ishikawa a murderer. We’re now making our utmost effort to reopen his case” and clear his name, Nakayama said.

sayama incident;substitute detention

jp0000124

2013/06/25

Japan by the numbers (06.25.13)

97.4% of people use PowerPoint over other visual presentation tools, such as Prezi or Keynote, according to a poll by Goo Research . 73% of those surveyed by Goo Research said that they believe electric vehicles will continue to gain popularity in coming years . 52.3% people who responded to a poll by Asahikasei Homes said Abenomics is motivating them to spend . 49.6% of families have at least one member who owned a smartphone at the end of last year , according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Two years ago, that number was only 29.3%. 25% of blog readers polled by MyVoicecom said they have purchased something online because of a particular blog post . 23.6% of Japanese Facebook users polled by Cross Marketing said they visit the site more than one time a day , while 24.6% of users use LINE daily.

abenomics;smartphone;line;facebook;blogs;electric vehicles;ev;japan pulse;powerpoint

jp0000125

2013/12/20

FSA plans more action against Mizuho

The Financial Services Agency will soon take additional punitive action against Mizuho Bank doing business with organized crime, FSA sources said Friday. The financial watchdog first ordered the bank in September to improve operations, saying it did not take “substantial steps” to prevent or break off transactions with “antisocial forces” for more than two years despite knowing about the matter. This time, the FSA is considering issuing the business improvement order to its parent Mizuho Financial Group Inc. as well, since the holding company failed to fulfill its responsibility to oversee the bank, the sources said. The Mizuho group will thus need to improve its management system again. After receiving the order, Mizuho Bank initially said top management was not informed of the gangster loans but later reversed itself, with President Yasuhiro Sato telling a press conference that he and former President Satoru Nishibori “were in positions to know” about the issue. While a third-party investigative committee — set up by the bank — concluded it had no intention of covering up the loan problem when it submitted a false report on the issue to the FSA, the agency decided on Nov. 5 to inspect Mizuho Bank and Mizuho Financial Group to examine their conclusions.

financial service agency;mizuho bank

jp0000126

2013/12/20

Japan achieves 10 million tourist target for 2013

Japan on Friday welcomed its 10 millionth international visitor this year, achieving the government’s goal with barely less than two weeks to go. On top of the weakening yen and recovery from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tourist numbers were helped by easier visa regulations for Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, as well as the increase in budget airlines serving Japan. “It’s been 10 years since we launched the Visit Japan campaign and attracting 10 million visitors has been our genuine wish” and we have finally achieved the goal, transport minister Akihiro Ota said during a ceremony at Narita International Airport. A couple from Thailand, Praphan Pha Tra Prasit and Yu Pha Da Pha Tra Prasit, were chosen as the collective 10 millionth memorial visitors and joined the ceremony. They received goods including a plaque and lamps decorated with Japanese papers. Although a time frame has not been set, the government is now aiming to double its goal to 20 million, with a long-term goal of drawing in 30 million tourists by 2030. The goal of 10 million visitors in one year was first set in 2010, but only 8.61 million tourists showed up. While the figure may have fallen short of the goal, it was still a record that stood until this year. There was a serious decline in 2011 due to the Tohoku natural disasters and Fukushima nuclear crisis. The figure recovered last year before finally reaching the 10 million goal in 2013. According to data from the Japan National Tourism Organization, visitors from pretty much all countries increased except for China. The relaxed visa regulations paid off with tourists from most ASEAN members increasing. Between January and November, visitors from Vietnam increased 53.5 percent over the same period last year, while the figure was 36 percent for Indonesia and 69 percent for Thailand. While the government may have reached its 10 million goal, the number is not all that impressive when measuring countries and regions with strong tourism. For instance, 27 countries in 2012 drew more than 10 million visitors. France was No. 1 with 83 million while China drew 57.7 million and South Korea 11.1 million.

asean;inbound tourism

jp0000127

2013/12/28

No-frills Beijing bun shop stunned as Chinese president drops by unannounced

BEIJING - Chinese President Xi Jinping dropped in Saturday at a traditional Beijing bun shop, where he waited in line, ordered and paid for a simple lunch of buns stuffed with pork and onions, green vegetables, and stewed pig livers and intestines. Such visits are extremely rare — if not unheard of — for top Chinese leaders, who are usually surrounded by heavy security and are not known for mingling with the public other than at scheduled events. After spotting Xi, fellow diners took photos of him and shared them on China’s social media. State media re-posted the photos on their microblog accounts, and the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Xi’s lunch through its Chinese-language news site. The manager of the Qing-Feng Steamed Dumpling Shop, who gave only her family name, He, when reached by phone said Xi and a small entourage arrived at the no-frills eatery in western Beijing at around noon without prior notification. She said Xi paid 21 yuan ($3.40) for his lunch. “There was no special security measure during his stay,” the manager said. “Customers could freely enter and leave the restaurant, and many took photos with him.” In one shot, a chef posed with Xi as he continued eating his meal in front of the camera. Installed as China’s president in March, Xi has sought to portray himself as being in touch with regular people, but has done so with scheduled visits to factories and homes. In April, a Hong Kong newspaper reported that Xi had taken a cab ride in Beijing — also highly unusual for a top leader — but the excitement soon dissipated when state media denied the report. Though a socialist country in name, China has a deep-rooted hierarchy system that accords privileges to one’s official ranking. In recent years, members of the Chinese public have applauded Western leaders for their regular person style to vent their disapproval of Chinese officials’ aloofness. Some commentators have noted that Xi’s team has been savvy in building his image. Others waxed lyrical over his bun shop stop. “Had it not been for the photos, it would be incredulous to believe Xi, as a dignified president and party chief, should eat at a bun shop,” author Wu Xiqi wrote in an editorial carried by the ruling Communist Party’s official news site. “Xi’s act has subverted the traditional image of Chinese officials, ushering a warm, people-first gust of wind that is very touching indeed.”

china;food;restaurants;xi jinping

jp0000128

2013/12/21

It's business as usual 'back in the USSR'

Paul McCartney was in Japan some weeks ago. Having spent a totally Beatlemaniac four years of my pre-teen existence in the U.K., it was nice to see the erstwhile Beatle in such good form. The occasion also reminded me of the song “Back in the USSR,” a 1968 Beatles number. My fellow Beatles lovers will be very familiar with the lyrics of that piece. Just the same, let me remind you how part of it goes: “Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out. They leave the West behind. “And Moscow girls make me sing and shout. That Georgia’s always on my mind.” Here is some history for you. It is worthwhile remembering that both Ukraine and Georgia were a part of the USSR at that point. No prizes for remembering what USSR stands for, although I fear there could now be a generation of readers that must resort to the Internet to discover the answer. Both Ukraine and Georgia are independent states now. Yet it seems that given half the chance, Russian President Vladimir Putin would like to see them both pulled back into Russia’s sphere of influence. The recent turn of events in Kiev indicates Ukraine girls still need to be careful of how they tread. Putin would surely be happy to see them “leave the West behind” and rejoin him behind what is, for now, the invisible iron curtain. That would literally be a “Back in the USSR” moment for him. But there are things one hopes will never happen again in the history of any country. There are things one believes will never come back to haunt us. Nightmarish history should not, and will not, repeat itself — that is what you hope and believe, whether you are a Ukrainian girl or a Japanese citizen who lived through World War II times. Yet the hopes of both look a little bit threatened at this point. For the first time in a very long time, protesters came out in force to campaign against the recent enactment of the state secrets law in Japan. Many of them must surely be sharing the sentiments of the protesters in Kiev: This is not happening. This should not be happening. We should not need to be protesting against such things in this day and age. Never would we have thought such worries would trouble us again. Worries over freedom. Worries over threats to human rights. Worries about a state that ignores the rights and wishes of the people that it is supposed to be serving. The Beatles were never a very socio-politically conscious group. Yet the piece “Back in the USSR” is so full of interesting suggestions that one wonders where the inspiration for it all came from. Could Paul have been taking a trip across time as he set those words to music? Of course the most suggestive bit is the refrain. As we all know, it talks about “Back in the U.S. Back in the U.S. Back in the USSR.” If the U.S. is the USSR, and the USSR is the U.S., nobody needs to worry about either the fate of the Ukrainian girls or which Georgia we happen to have on our minds at any given point in time. If only the same kind of togetherness could be achieved by Japan and its neighbors, with whom our relationship seems so strained at this point. If Paul could come up with the kind of lyrics that glue us together a la “Back in the USSR,” he would be doing us all a great service. Merry and matey does it in this season of good will. Noriko Hama is an economist and a professor of Doshisha University Graduate School of Business.

vladimir putin;noriko hama;japanese perspectives;beatles;secrecy law;back in the ussr