The magazine of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan

August 2018 · Volume 50 · No. 8

Back in the Day:
Covering East Asia
from Japan
Memoirs:
Mr. Smith Goes toTokyo (Part 5)
Record Flight:
The Original
Kamikaze Story

Exploring
Other Worlds

JAXA’s Hayabusa2 Space Probe
Reaches Asteroid Ryugu

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AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 03

In This Issue
August 2018 · Volume 50 · No. 8

Publisher FCCJ
Editor Albert Siegel
Fuku Nabe Bugyo Geoffrey Tudor
Art Director Kohji Shiiki
Editorial Assistant Naomichi Iwamura
Photo Coordinator Akiko Miyake
Publications Committee Members
Albert Siegel
Geoffrey Tudor
Martin Koelling
Ayako Mie
Emiko Jozuka
Johann Fleuri
Tomomi Yokomura

Front Page
• From the President by Peter Langan• Concern about health of Japanese journalist held hostage in Syria
by Reporters Without Borders

04

From the Archives
Sadaharu Oh—Home-Run Kingby Charles Pomeroy

05

FCCJ BOARD OF DIRECTORS

President Peter Langan, Freelance
1st Vice President Abigail Leonard, Freelance
2nd Vice President Robert Whiting, Freelance
Secretary Daniel Hurst, Freelance
Treasurer, Willem Kortekaas, Associate Member
Directors-at-Large Khaldon Azhari, PanOrient News
Daniel Sloan, Nissan Motor/Freelance
Mary Corbett, Professional Associate Member
Milton Isa, Associate Member
Kanji Kazuo Abiko, Freelance
Associate Kanji Makoto Honjo, Associate Member

FCCJ COMMITTEE CHAIRSAssociate Members Liaison Milton Isa
Compliance Kunio Hamada, Yoshio Murakami
DeRoy Memorial Scholarship Abby Leonard,
David SatterwhiteEntertainment Sandra Mori
Exhibition Bruce Osborn
Film Karen Severns, Yukie Kito
Finance Willem Kortekaas
Food & Beverage Robert Kirschenbaum,
Mehdi Bassiri
Freedom of Press Khaldon AzhariHouse & Property Peter Langan, David Satterwhite
Human Resources Willem Kortekaas
Information Technology Albert Siegel
Library, Archives & Workroom Koichi Ishiyama,
Suvendrini Kakuchi
Membership Andrew Horvat, Peter O’Connor
Membership Marketing Anthony Rowley
Professional Activities Fred Varcoe, Ayako Mie
Public Relations Rosa Argyropoulos
Publications Gavin Blair, Geoffrey Tudor
Special Projects Haruko Watanabe
Foreign Press in Japan Robin Harding

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan
Yurakucho Denki Building, North Tower 20F,
1-7-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0006.
Tel: (03) 3211-3161 · Fax: (03) 3211-3168 · fccj.or.jp
Published by the FCCJ All opinions contained within
Number 1 Shimbun are those of the authors. As such,these opinions do not constitute an official positionof Number 1 Shimbun, the editor or theForeign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
Please pitch and send articles and photographs,
or address comments to no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp
Read the Number 1 Shimbun online:
fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun
Cover Photo: JAXA

Features
Exploring Other Worlds with JAXA’s Deep Space Fleet
by John Boyd

06

Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo (Part 5)by Charles Smith

08

Back in the Day: Covering East Asia from Japan
by Donald Kirk

10

Record-Breaking Flight Japan-To-Europe
by Geoffrey Tudor

13

Trade: Deal with the Fundamentals
by Anthony Rowley

14

Last Month in Photos

16Club NewsDOUDOU BEACH ------------- Poetry of Sand ------------photography by Yoshimitsu Yagi
• New in the Library• New Members

15
18

PITCH US YOUR STORY
Please send your story ideas tono.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp,
and be sure to note whether you have (orhave access to) visuals. Our rates are ¥20 per
published word, ¥20,000 for a front cover photo.
Photo essays: ¥15,000 for full-page photos and¥5,000 for smaller shots.
All payments will be made in credit
to your member account.

04 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

Front Page

From thePresident
Dear FCCJ members,I

write this as July’s prolonged and deadly
heat wave finally broke after setting
temperature records, only then to befollowed by a typhoon. This of course on topof the devastating and also deadly floods inwestern Japan. I’m sure you will join me inextending all our sympathies to those who lost
loved ones, homes and livelihoods in thesenatural disasters.
Such events remind again of the important
public service provided by news organizations. News flashes and bulletins assist emergency services to warn the public, update
developments, and provide guidance on how
to get assistance.
Later analysis of such events allows reporters to speak with survivors, officials and a variety of experts to present ideas and reports on
how to mitigate future calamities.
This is where the FCCJ’s Professional Activ-

ities Committee also plays a role in hosting
speakers of all different stripes for press conferences. PAC is discussing an event to bringin flood control experts to offer an analysis ofwhat happened in western Japan.
Other PAC events in July brought speakers
on Cambodia’s elections, Japan’s casino plans,and space exploration, to mention just a few.
This is a platform we need to broaden anddeepen.
On July 18, the newly elected Board met for
its first official gathering. Here is a snapshot of
the discussions:
General Manager Marcus Fishenden updated the Board on the search for an F&B provider and the preparations for the Club’s move,
including furniture selections (some examples
are on show in the Library to try out and give
feedback).
Also note that the office is organising visits
to the new Club premises before the official
move in October. Please contact the office if
you would like to attend a tour, though understand that numbers are limited while the building is still in the construction stage.
Treasurer Willem Kortekaas provided an
update, reaffirming many of the points hemade to the recent General Membership
Meeting regarding the impact of the move on
the club and the ways and means to rebuild
our finances.
As mentioned before, this will include membership drives, particularly on the back of
having a brand new facility. Willem separately
noted that we have had a positive response

to our call for donations and he offered his
thanks for the generosity of the membership.
Donations offer an important means tokeeping the club financially viable. Hence, wehave also kicked off an initiative to approachnon-members for donations to support the
FCCJ and its role in promoting freedom of thepress. (As an aside, The Economist magazine
reports that Asia has a population of 4.5 billion
but only Japan and Taiwan are considered tohave a free press. Whatever one thinks of thatdefinition, it’s a sobering thought that again
highlights the role of the FCCJ.)
The Treasurer also led a discussion on thedraft five-year business plan, an attempt toprovide a long-term vision for the club’s future
and to serve as a springboard for further conversations. Willem has broken down the plan
into targeted chunks and the Board intends to
put specific items on the agenda for meetings
throughout the coming year. Hopefully thiswill help focus and decision-making.
The Board also discussed the role of thevolunteers on the Club’s various committees,
which provide invaluable support to the club’s
operations.
One goal is to revitalise the role of board
liaisons for committees to help improve communications. In that respect, committee chairs
and deputies have been invited to an eveningof drinks and conversation on August 1 todiscuss how the Board can help committees
better do their job and vice-versa.
I also plan to invite committee chairs tofuture Board meetings to get direct feedback

Concern about Health of Japanese Journalist
Held Hostage in Syria
by REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERST

he Japanese phone and Internetcompany Nifty said in a note on its
website today that a newly emerged
video of Jumpei Yasuda, a Japanese journalist
kidnapped in Syria three years ago, has fueledhopes that he is still alive, although a comment
has raised concern about his health.
Nifty, which has not posted the video itself,
said it was filmed last month, is 15 seconds

long and contains a comment suggesting that
Yasuda’s health has deteriorated.
“If the video’s existence and the date it wasfilmed are confirmed, it reinforces our hope of
seeing Jumpei Yasuda alive again,” said Cédric
Alviani, the head of the East Asia bureau ofReporters Without Borders (RSF). “More thanever, we urge the Japanese authorities and theinternational community to work to obtain thisjournalist’s release before it is too late.”
On 6 July, the Japanese TV channel Nippon
News Network broadcast a video dated 17

October 2017 showing Yasuda in apparently
good health and saying that he was “doingOK” and hoped “to see his family again soon.”
According to various sources, Yasuda was
kidnapped in 2015 by an armed Islamist group,
the same group that held three Spanish journalists who were kidnapped the same year
and were freed after ten months.
Ranked 177th out of 180 countries in RSF's
2018 World Press Freedom Index, Syria is
the world’s most dangerous country forjournalists.

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 05

From the Archives
and look at how committees can help withmembership initiatives and expanding revenue streams.
In addition, the Board discussed a resolution
at the most recent General Membership Meeting (GMM) regarding a member’s expulsion.
Upon investigation by the Kanjis and Parliamentarian, it was advised that this resolution
was out of order as it violated Paragraph 8-9of the FCCJ Bylaws and Robert’s Rules (page308, lines 24-30 of the 11th edition).
Hence, I ruled as president that the resolution is void and the expulsion stands. Thisruling was unopposed by the Board.
For updating diaries, the Board has set
its meeting dates for the rest of the year as
follows: August 10, September 6, October 9,
November 9, and December 10.
I also have weekly meetings at the Club with
the Treasurer and the General Manager to try
and keep ahead of the move and fund-raisingchallenges we face. Other Board members
attend these informal sit-downs as available.
If you wish to bring anything to the Board’s
attention at these meetings or have questions,the next gathering is August 6 at 3pm.
Finally, a key tuxedo date to note is November 22. That will be the day of the Gala Opening of the new Club. The office will provide
updates of that event as details are firmed up.
See you in the Club.
Best wishes,● Peter Langan

Screenshot taken from Reporters Without Borders

Sadaharu Oh—Home-Run Kingby CHARLES POMEROYS

adaharu Oh of the Yomiuri Giants,
whose prowess in hitting home runs
brought him baseball fame, spoke at
a Club luncheon on October 17, 1977. That
was the year he hit 50 homers following
on his earlier 51 in 1973 and his record 55
in 1964, the seasonal highs in a career thatwould total a lifetime world record of 868
home runs. Another high point was a 1974
home-run derby with Hank Aarons, the man
who had just broken Babe Ruth’s recordof 714 career home runs (Aarons 10, Oh 9).
Shaking Oh’s hand at the luncheon is Frederick “Ted” Marks (UPI), FCCJ president.
The son of a Chinese (Taiwan) father anda Japanese mother, Oh was born on May 20,
1940, in Tokyo, where he was also raised andeducated. While still a high-school student,
he made news nationwide as the pitcher
who won Japan’s annual Koshien tournament in 1957 by continuing to hurl balls overfour days despite painfully injured fingers.
In 1959, the Yomiuri Giants signed him on
as a pitcher, but soon switched him to firstbase and a focus on batting skills that saw
his home runs jump from seven in 1959 to
17 in 1960. Although 1961 was an off-year at
13 homers, Oh’s hitting prowess rebounded
to figures of 38 and then 40 over the next
two seasons. These were followed by hisrecord 55 homers in 1964, making him Japan’s
home-run king. Seasonal homers during his
career were mostly in the mid- to high-40s
range, marred by an off-year of 33 in 1975 andthen in the 30s range in his final three years
as a player.
Retirement as a player in 1980 saw Oh’stransition to assistant manager for the
Giants in 1981, then manager in 1984, with apennant win in 1987 before he retired in 1988.
Although controversy had arisen in 1985,
when his pitchers repeatedly walked Randy
Bass of the Hanshin Tigers to prevent Bassfrom tying or breaking Oh’s seasonal homerun record, Oh denied any involvement. He
returned to baseball in 1995 to manage the
Fukuoka Daiei Hawks and lead that team tothree pennants and two titles. Controversies resurfaced in 2001 and 2002 when his
pitchers, contrary to his orders, repeatedly
walked foreign batters who threatened tobreak Oh’s seasonal record of 55 homers. He
managed that team (re-named the Fukuoka
SoftBank Hawks in 2005) until his retirement in 2008.
Although his seasonal record was broken by
Wladimir Balentien of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows with 60 home runs in 2013, Oh’s career
total of 868 home runs remains a world record.
● Charles Pomeroy is editor of Foreign
Correspondents in Japan, a history of the clubthat is available at the front desk.

06 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

FeatureExploring OtherWorlds with JAXA’s
Deep Space Fleet

by JOHN BOYD

T

raveling more than three billion kilometers in order to grab a bunch ofrocks from a small diamond-shaped
asteroid and then returning home
to complete a six-year round trip can only bedescribed as one audacious adventure. Thatadventure, still in the making, began when Japan
Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the
Hayabusa2 space probe on an H-2A rocket from
Tanegashima Space Center in 2014.
After 1,302 days speeding through space,
the probe arrived at the target asteroid, named
Ryugu, on June 27. Currently, the spacecraft isslowly descending to observe Ryugu’s surface
from as close as five kilometers. By the end of
August JAXA will decide on a suitable place forthe explorer to touch down and in Septemberor October the delicate maneuver of landing
Hayabusa2 on the dusty, boulder-strewn surface will begin.
What could go wrong? The asteroid’s
weak gravity could see the craft bounceback into space. But if all goes according
to plan, Hayabusa2 will land and take off up
to three times on Ryugu during a period of
18 months. This will enable it to study conditions at different locations as the asteroid
orbits around the Sun.
After the craft completes its long sojourn ofpicking, prodding and probing the asteroid’s
surface, it will head back home. As it approaches Earth in late 2020, a capsule carrying its
valuable crustaceous cargo will detach itself

from the spacecraft and a parachute will
deploy at an altitude of 10 kilometers to makea soft landing, perhaps in Australia if JAXA cannegotiate permission. Meanwhile, Hayabusa2
will swing by our planet and continue travelingin space, possibly for eternity.
But why go to all this trouble, not to mention
US$300 million in travel expenses, for only ahandful of rocks? The answer is that asteroids
happen to be some of the most primitive
objects in our neck of the universe. So thesamples brought back could tell us a lot about
how our solar system was formed. Even more
enticing, Ryugu is a Type C asteroid apparently packed with carbon and other organic
materials containing water; consequently, this

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 07

Featurebunch of rocks might also help us learn howlife on Earth came into existence.
The Hayabusa2 mission began four years
after the first probe, Hayabusa (Japanese for
peregrine falcon) returned to Earth in 2010.
Hayabusa made two landings on anotherasteroid named Itokawa — this despite experiencing a series of equipment glitches, including problems with all four of the spacecraft’s
engines; the failure of two of its three reaction
wheels used to orientate the spacecraft; anda disappointing malfunction of the samplingmechanism, which limited the collecting ofsamples to mere grains rather than rocks.
Nevertheless, despite these issues, JAXA
deemed Hayabusa an impressive achievement, for it was still able to limp back with1,500 particles from Itokawa — the first timeasteroid samples had been captured andbrought back to earth for analysis.
According to Hitoshi Kuninaka, vice president and director general of JAXA’s Institute ofSpace and Astronautical Science, the agency
learned much from that first operation. After
Hayabusa2 rendezvoused with Ryugu, Kuninaka came to the Foreign Correspondents’
Club of Japan in July to brief the press on
the new mission and to describe some forthcoming expeditions JAXA is planning. He wasjoined by Makoto Yoshikawa, mission manager of the Hayabusa2 project.
To strengthen the reliability of the craft andhopefully score even greater success thanachieved by the first expedition, JAXA has
modified several parts of Hayabusa2 and added new equipment. As a result, Hayabusa2 tips
the scales at 609 kilograms, about 100 kilos
heavier than its predecessor, though its 1 x 1.6
x 1.25-meter dimensions are not much larger
than those of the first probe.
While chemically fueled rockets have traditionally powered spacecraft, they require
extravagant amounts of propellant. Given thesmall sizes of the Hayabusa and Hayabusa2,such a means was unfeasible from the start.
Instead, JAXA has developed its own electric
propulsion ion engine. Microwaves are used
to generate ions (charged atoms) from xenon
gas. The ions are then accelerated using anelectric field and expelled at high speed to provide the thrust that propels the craft forward.
Kuninaka noted that although this typeof propulsion provides less raw power thanstandard chemical propulsion — each probe
required a rocket to launch it into space — it ishighly efficient and can maintain acceleration
for a long time on relatively little propellant.
Following JAXA’s improvement of Hayabusa2’s engine and durability, “the system can
now achieve a velocity of over 30 kilometers asecond compared to five kilometers a second
for conventional chemical propulsion,” says
Kuninaka. “So Hayabusa2 is able to reach theasteroid Ryugu and return to earth on just
60 kilograms of propellant — one-tenth theweight of the craft.”Concerning the craft’s communications
with Earth, mission manager Yoshikawa notesthat the first space probe employed a large,
bulky parabolic X-band antenna. This has been
replaced with two smaller but equally powerful
planar antennas that use different wavelengths
that are better tailored for the different kindsof data being transmitted back to Earth. What’smore, this new set-up has the advantage ofproviding Hayabusa2 with a communications
fallback should one of the systems fail.
Other important equipment packed on
board includes a suite of cameras, a near-infrared spectrometer, a laser altimeter to measure the distance between probe and asteroid,
asteroid sampling devices, and three smallrover robots — compared with one rover on
the first probe that was never deployed.
Two new additions are a novel impactor anda small lander containing several scientificinstruments.
The impactor will release a high-speed projectile composed of an explosive copper plate
to smash into the surface of Ryugu and form
an artificial crater. JAXA then hopes to land the
Hayabusa in the crater or close to it and pickup samples of the asteroid’s internal makeup– an enterprising experiment worthy of highpraise if it succeeds.
The small lander was created jointly by theGerman Aerospace Center and the French
National Center for Space Studies. Dubbed
the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT),
it will change location once by jumping. It
carries a wide-angle camera, spectroscopic
microscope, thermal radiometer and a mag-netometer to study composition of the asteroid’s surface.
The craft’s electric power is generated bya two-winged solar array paddle system consisting of three panels per wing. This produces
1,460 watts to charge eleven inline-mounted
13.2 Ah lithium-ion batteries that supply power
to onboard equipment as needed.
JAXA aims to have three traveling robots
explore Ryugu’s surface: Rover-1A, Rover-1B,
and Rover-2. They will be deployed via a
MINERVA-ll minilander. Each of the first twoconcentric robots weighs approximately 1.1
kilograms with dimensions of 18 x 7 centimeters. Each contains a wide-angle and a stereo
camera; a temperature sensor and photodiode; and an accelerometer and gyro. Power is
supplied by solar cells, movement by means ofinternal flywheels.
The optional Rover-2 is some 45 percent
taller than its two counterparts and contains
similar equipment but also incorporates
four types of mobility systems: two kinds ofbucking mechanisms, an eccentric motor
micro-hop mechanism, and a permanent magnet-type impact generation mechanism.
While all this is going on, JAXA is planningto launch several more space expeditions. On
October 19, JAXA and the European Space
Agency (ESA) will jointly launch two spacecraft — JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MIO) and ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter(MPO) — from French Guinea on an Ariane 5
rocket. The two agencies will cooperate tolearn more about Mercury. MIO will study
the planet’s mysterious magnetic field andhow it interacts with harsh solar winds, given
its proximity to the Sun, as well as study theplanet’s magnetosphere. MPO will observe theplanet’s surface and internal composition.
Then around 2020, just as Hayabusa is on
its way home, JAXA will send its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM) to themoon. With SLIM, JAXA hopes to demonstrate
pinpoint lunar landing techniques to pave thewave for future exploration missions on themoon and on other planets.
And possibly in 2024, we will see the launchof the Martian Moon Exploration Mission(MMX). JAXA aims to have MMX visit the two
Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, landon one of them, collect samples and returnto Earth in 2029. Such samples could help
astrophysicists understand how these moons
originated.

● John Boyd covers the SciTechBiz scene inJapan as well as current events.

08 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

FeatureMr. Smith Goes
to TokyoPART5by CHARLES SMITH

KOHJI SHIIKI

When Charles Smith arrived inTokyo in 1973 as Financial Times
bureau chief, he had no idea hewould end up spending most of
the rest of his life here. Reaching
80 and having been diagnosed
with malignant lymphoma, he set
about writing his memoirs. Whenhe finished the project recently
Charles – still an enthusiastic
FCCJ member – consented toshare with us some memories
from the FT Tokyo segment of
his long and interesting career.
The series began running in the
April issue. On May 18 Charles
died, at age 82. A Club memorial
evening was held July 11. In thispenultimate installment he tells
us about covering trade disputes
and their adjustments in the
1970s.

N

akasone- and Ohira-watching wereamong the lighter-weight pleasures of covering Japan during myfirst few years in Tokyo. A heavier-weight job was keeping up with the changing economic and political interfaces between
Japan and the West.
Change was certainly the word. At one pointin the mid-1970s a surcharge was imposed on
supposedly risky Japanese bonds issued in
London’s capital market. A year or two later
Japan was being asked to accept “voluntary”
restraints on exports of some “too successful”
goods to western markets.
What was going on? It seemed that neither
risky Japanese borrowers, nor too-successful
Japanese exporters were acceptable as regularmembers of the community of advanced countries. And perhaps Tokyo really was an irregularcase. Japan’s economy had been re-launchedafter World War II using a development model
provided by the Occupation, which recommended the aggressive use of exports to help

create a modern industrial economy while
being ready to protect weak sectors.
I believe open markets weren’t part ofthe (then) US model, and perhaps there wasno generally accepted code for world trade
behavior when the Americans gave Japan theiradvice. Also, thanks to Washington, Japan had
entered the 1960s with what quickly became
an undervalued exchange rate ($1=yen 360).
An eminent American economist had set thatrate with the stroke of a pen.
I didn’t know any of this in 1968-69 when
I first heard diplomats at the US Embassy inTokyo expressing anger about Japan’s selfish
trading practices. But it was clear that the
picture was many-sided. Japan’s remarkable
array of non-tariff barriers could be seen as
making it a delinquent in a world of supposedly well-behaved traders. It didn’t seem tocount that Tokyo was doing all too thoroughly
what Washington had told it to do (althoughperhaps staying too long with the original
recovery package).

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 09

FeatureAt the back of all that, there were politicalquestions. When it came to foreign policy,
was Japan a too-passive – and therefore lessthan full – member of the club of advanced
nations? Should it have worked out its own
policies towards Asia instead of automaticallyfollowing the American lead on, for example,
China and Taiwan? In the case of Europe
were Japanese politicians still thinking onlyof country-by-country relations when theyshould have noticed that they were watchingattempts to create the world’s biggest economic and political bloc?
In the mid-to-late 1970s being the FT’s Tokyo
reporter was like being a child on the lower
reaches off a climbing frame, hoping to get a
step up without shedding too much blood.
I had a lucky day in the summer of 1978
when Endo-san, a friendly but not particularly senior member of the MITI PR division,phoned to tell me that “Sir Michael” (a.k.a
British Ambassador Sir Michael Wilford) had
been seen in the building on the way to what
seemed to be a personal meeting with MITI
Minister Toshio Komoto.
As a follower of UK-Japan trade relations I
thought I could guess what this meant: Britain
had finally decided to ask Japan to formally limit its fast-rising motor vehicle sales. The British
request (which was duly turned down by MITI)
came after three years during which The Japan
Automobile Association (JAMA) and Britain’s
Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders(SMMT) had been holding meetings at which
JAMA “forecast” the level of Japanese car sales
in the UK six months or so ahead.
These diplomatically correct discussions(correct because a formal promise by Japanto cut exports would have broken the rules of
GATT and upset other members of the European Economic Community) were not working.
The JAMA forecasts were based on solidcommitments by Toyota Motor Corporation
and Nissan Motor Company, the two largest
Japanese vehicle builders, but three smaller
companies didn’t see why they should be
stopped from selling in the juicy UK market, so
there were some rough edges. By the time thethree outliers had been forced into line a year
or so later there had been an unforeseen jumpin car sales to Britain.
Then came a time when British Leyland
couldn’t meet demand in its home market
anyway because of difficulties with some newmodels. So the UK had felt it had to act. Japan
said no, but officials promised “somehow” toget Japan’s car exports reduced from a fastrising 13 percent of the UK market to a more
sober 10 percent.

For me the Japanese car story had begun
during a summer holiday in 1970 when I spotted a small white Toyota speeding along a
country road in northeast Scotland, apparently the first of its breed. At that time Japanese
car exports to Britain had barely started. The
other end of the story came in 1986 when Nissan opened a car plant in Sunderland, northeast England, which quickly established itself
as the UK’s (and for a while the Nissan group’s)
most efficient vehicle assembler.
By the early ‘90s there were three Japanese
car assembly plants in Britain (Toyota andHonda as well as Nissan) and the UK’s nativeborn motor industry was on the way to extinction. A successor company to British Leyland
was finally placed under administration in2005. So much, I thought, for what diplomacy
could achieve when British business failed.
Nissan had finally decided to open up in
Britain three years after being urged to comeby Margaret Thatcher’s government and morethan a decade after its international business
manager, Masataka Okuma, had written off
the UK as the worst place in Europe to build
a car plant.
He told me in 1974 that Nissan couldn’t face
Britain’s stormy labor relations. That changedin the later 1970s. The UK was upgraded by
Nissan when it turned out that British blue collar workers had begun to welcome Japanesemanagers after having been accustomed foryears to being held at arm’s length by British
management.
The powerful leader of Nissan’s own company union, Ichiro Shoji, was less welcoming.
He told me in 1983 that investing in Britain
would undermine Nissan’s strength and would“never be permitted” by the union. That onlychanged after a Japanese magazine had published an illustrated story about an alleged
affair between the union leader and his mistress in Yokohama which showed the leader
falling face-down in a puddle while apparently
trying to escape a press photographer. He
resigned and the UK project went ahead.
The Nissan affair’s happy ending reminded me of a tense editorial conference at the
Financial Times several years earlier whenSony Corporation applied to open a TV factoryin Wales. The Sony proposal was the first of its
kind by a Japanese manufacturer.
Half of those present at the meeting
thought that letting in a hyper-competitive
Japanese company would spell doom for the
UK’s admittedly backward TV industry. The
other half said it would be better to have Sony
exporting TVs from Britain to Europe than theother way round. The second group won theargument. Sony came and the UK industry
survived, if it didn’t exactly flourish.
Ten years after the Sony affair, in 1977, I
made a trip to look at Japanese factories in
Europe as part of a 20-page FT survey on
relations between Japan and the EEC. I spenta week interviewing managers at five plants in
Belgium, France and Germany as well as three
in the UK, Matsushita, Sony and bearings maker Nippon Seiko (NSK).
The messages I got varied, but the moodwas upbeat. All the Japanese firms in Britain
had started out by wanting to have singlecompany unions at their plants as was standard practice in Japan but they all ended byagreeing that staff should join just one craft orindustry-wide union. This was a compromise
between Japan’s system and the usual British
practice of allowing multiple and competitive
union membership.
British component suppliers were shocked
when Matsushita said it would examine every
single component, from transistors upward,
coming from UK makers, but the quality ofcomponents soon began to improve. A company that supplied cabinets to Sony’s TV factory at Bridgend in South Wales set up a “Sonyproduction line” where, I was told, the young
female workers had acquired a “Sony spirit.”
My factory visits left me thinking that Japanese manufacturing investment-in Europe
was a triple winner. As with Sony’s early TV
investment in Wales, it was a way for Japanto partially by-pass restrictions on its exports
and for Britain to exchange trade deficits forjobs. There were other less direct benefits.
Japanese investment in Britain helped tospread the message that there might bebetter ways for management to deal withstaff than the fossilized model of bosses inbusiness suits facing aggressive unions. Japanese factories were good news for remoter
regions of England and Wales and, later, Scotland where incomes were low and employment was falling.
What I did not realise was that Japanese
investment presence in Europe in the mid1970s was a fragile beachhead for what would
become a tidal flow. In December 1975 Japan’s
offshore manufacturing investments were
worth just three percent of its GDP. At thesame time the ratios were nine percent of GDP
for the US and 17 percent for Britain.
By 1990 Japanese factories were scattered
all over Europe and the US. When Donald
Trump threatened to punish Japan in 2017 forover-exporting exports cars to the US, Toyota
was exporting 130,000 cars a year from theUnited States.

10 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

FeatureBack in the Day: Covering
East Asia from Japan
by DONALD KIRKO

nce upon a time, when the world
was young, or at least I wasyoung, Tokyo was the center ofattention in terms of covering
Asia – not counting the Vietnam War and episodic conflagrations elsewhere such as the
Indo-Pakistan War of December 1971, whichtransformed what had been East Pakistan
into Bangladesh. One reason why Tokyo wasof such overwhelming importance was that
China remained largely closed to regular coverage by Western journalists.
The Toronto Globe and Mail had had acorrespondent in Beijing for many years, butthat was a special case. Correspondents for
major American news organizations were justgetting into the country when US President
Jimmy Carter switched diplomatic recognition
from the Republic of China – that is, Taiwan – tothe People’s Republic of China, as of January
1, 1979. I was in Tokyo at the time and recall
the excitement as we talked of “getting into
China,” breaking through barriers that had
once been almost impregnable to rank-andfile reporters. Richard Nixon during his presidency forged the way, sending his secretary ofstate, Henry Kissinger, on a secret mission to
Beijing in mid-1971 and then visiting China forone week in February 1972.
I got to China for the first time in early 1978
accompanying a group of doctors on a tour thattook us to Beijing, Shanghai and one or two other
cities. Then, on assignment for the Boston Globe,
I accompanied the Boston Ballet to Beijing andShanghai in June 1980 on a whirlwind tour thatthe organizers touted as “the first by an American ballet company,” as if that were somehow amilestone accomplishment. I’m pretty sure thecompany had to pay all its own expenses for theprivilege. (The Globe covered mine.)
China was a whole lot more open by thetime of the Tiananmen Square uprising nine
years later, in June 1989, which I covered ascorrespondent for USA Today. Authorities,
after suppressing the firebrands, would begin
to revert to the habits of a bygone era, but theconstraints imposed on correspondents in
China were nothing like the old days.

Don Kirk standing between Don Oberdorfer on the left and Sam Jameson on the right.

When I was based in Hong Kong as Asia
correspondent for the Washington Star in thelate 1960s, “China-watching” was as important as sorties to Saigon and other Southeast
Asian datelines to cover the war. A number offamous correspondents operated out of HongKong. I remember them well. Stanley Karnowof the Washington Post, Seymour Topping andTillman Durdin of The New York Times, Robert
Elegant of the Los Angeles Times and Robert
Shaplen of The New Yorker all resided there,
peering across the New Territories into China,
to which they were denied access until muchlater. During a Party Congress in Beijing, theforeign editor of the Star had me filing every
day, culling quotes from Xinhya, i.e. the New
China News Agency, and “China experts,” whomight or might not have known what they
were talking about.
Soon the Red Guards were rampaging
through China, and Anthony Grey, Reuters
man in Beijing, was placed under house arrestfor more than two years. When I asked an
official from Beijing about a visa to go to China
and see for myself what was happening, hescreamed in my face. Seriously.
Ah, those were the days. For a steady base,free from wonders about getting your visa
renewed or getting kicked out or openly
harassed, you could count on Tokyo, to which

I gravitated in the fall of 1971 as far east correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. I succeeded Sam Jameson, who recommended me after
moving to the Los Angeles Times. Richard
Halloran of The New York Times, whom I had
known during a fellowship year at Columbia, kindly briefed me. The staff of Reuters,
through which I filed for the Tribune in those
pre-Internet days, were pleasant, helpful andaccommodating.
There were some pretty good stories too.
Those who were around all those years ago
will no doubt remember Rengo Sekigun, the
Red Army, whose zealots staged a numberof bloody incidents including the hijacking
while I was there in 1973 of a Japan Airlines
plane, which they blew up. So intense was the
Red Army that the group honestly gave theimpression its violent revolution, supported
by revolutionaries globally, might jeopardize
the long-ruling Tokyo establishment.
Adding to the excitement, from time totime, were mass demonstrations, sometimes
in front of American bases, staged by highlyorganized, mostly leftist groups protesting
the US role in the Vietnam War and Japan’s
involvement as a rear base area. Japan may
not have been as vital to the Americans as
it had been during the Korean War, but US
Marine Corps divisions rotated out of Okinawa

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 11

Featureto Vietnam and B52s flew out of Kadena Air
Base on bombing missions.
Then too there was the economic story as
the “Nixon shokku” of August 1971 freed thevalue of the yen to the dollar, resulting in rapid
depreciation of the dollar from a solid 360 yen
through the 200s and down to the 100s on a
dizzying roller coaster ride. We all got used tonever-ending stories about American efforts toredress the yawning imbalance of trade, admit
American imports on a significant scale andtake in foreign direct investment. The numbers
and other details change, but the basic story
has remained much the same ever since.
After a while I began to get on to how deeply conservative was Japan, how driven were
the salarymen and bureaucrats who ran the
country and, eventually, how different it was,beneath superficial appearances, from anyother culture or society that I had visited orexperienced. Readers of Number 1 Shimbun
understand the often rigid, closed nature ofJapan, the difficulties of penetrating barriers,
the scarcity of real news, beyond what you’re
told by bureaucrats and professors and all
those other experts before whom journalists
wind up paying obeisance, like it or not.
Complaints about the infamous “press club
system” were as often heard then as they aretoday. Ivan Hall, in his classic Cartels of the
Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop, quotes
an instance in which the leader of a pressclub tried to block me from access to one ofthose Japanese who had emerged from thejungle decades after the end of World War II. (Imade clear the only ones who could order mearound were my editors, and I didn’t always dotheir bidding either.)
For a break from the daily tensions of uptightJapan, however, one could count on Korea. I firstcame to Seoul in September 1972 for what werecalled “Red Cross talks” – negotiations between
high-level emissaries of North and South Korea
sponsored by the Red Cross organizations ofboth Koreas. The atmosphere was charged
with excitement. Might North and South cooperate on visits between members of millions offamilies divided by the Korean War, on mail andcommerce, on cultural and athletic events?
The Tokyo press corps swarmed over thestory. Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post,
who years later drew on memories of thosetalks in writing The Two Koreas, was there, as
were Jameson and Halloran. Keyes Beech, thelegendary Chicago Daily News correspondentwhom I had first met in India during the 1962border war with China and then had often
seen in Vietnam, flew up from Saigon.
Those Red Cross talks ultimately did little if

Don Kirk, taking a break while hiking to Tiger's Nest, Bhutan.

anything to resolve inter-Korean problems. If
that scenario sounds familiar, think of all theother moments, right up to the Singapore
summit between President Trump and Kim
Jong-un, when high hopes and optimism were
dashed by incredible hassles and delays andrhetorical exchanges. Since that first taste ofSeoul, the story has only gotten better (notsure that’s the proper word) in terms of thethreat of nuclear war and long-range missiles.
In fact, on that first visit, no one realized North
Korea was going to go nuclear.
We had to wait another 20 years for a real
nuclear crisis, a challenge so grave as to get
President Bill Clinton considering an attack
on North Korea’s nuclear facilities. Jimmy
Carter in June 1994 saved the day by going
to Pyongyang and meeting Kim Il-sung on aboat on the Daedong river. I saw Carter, before
and after that mission, at the US ambassador’sresidence in Seoul. He may or may not deserve
credit for averting Korean War II, but I do havethis memory of a modest, unassuming man
who lives to make the world a better place.
Japan hovers over the region, a giant enigma
capable of upsetting or shifting the strategicbalance. But the Japanese story also gets boring. How do you penetrate the minds of people
who know where to pigeonhole you as a foreigner, to bestow little by way of real insight andinformation? Sometimes, sure, you get lucky,
but the Korean story is far more dramatic, anever-ending cycle of outbursts and recriminations, of dreams and disappointments.
Mass outpourings in central Seoul happen
every few years, governments writhe in scandal and abuse, and tensions rise and fall along
the demilitarized zone that divides the two
Koreas as surely now as it did at the end of the
Korean War. From the bloody Gwangju revolt of
1980, which I covered for British and US papers,

to shootouts in the Yellow Sea to heart-rending
tales told by defectors from the North, Korea asa story never ceases to shock and surprise.
All of us sought out Kim Dae Jung, the dissident who later became president, about whom
I wrote a controversial book, “Korea Betrayed,”citing the vast payoffs he arranged to North
Korea to bring about his summit with Kim Jongil in June 2000. Oh, yes, I also dove so deeply as
almost to drown writing books on the Hyundai
empire and the 1997-1998 economic crisis.
That’s not to say the Korea story is more
important than Japan. Unlike Japan, however,the Korean drama is there, in your face, allaround you, while Japan is so infinitely complicated and subtle that perhaps it’s not possible
to cover while running off to more alluring
datelines and headlines. In my years in Tokyo,
I got a sense of having been there and done
that, of déjà vu all over again, writing featureson the same topics, talking to the same types.
I used to say I wasn’t “covering” Japan,
really, but rather one square mile or maybe
a square kilometer of central Tokyo, ranging
from the foreign ministry to MITI, the Ministryof International Trade and Industry, to a few
corporate entities and think tanks, then backto the FCCJ to tap away in the workroom (doesanyone remember, we used typewriters inthose days?), to check out its great library, toenjoy the correspondent’s lunch and chat withfamiliar faces. As to whether I “understand”
Japan, that goal remains as elusive now as
when I first got to Tokyo decades ago.
● Donald Kirk, a member of the FCCJ in the
1970s and 1980s, has been reporting from Asia
since the Vietnam War. He’s currently basedin Seoul and Washington, reporting mainly for
CBS Radio, the Daily Beast and Forbes Asia,
among others.

Sneak Preview Screening(Wed)

August29 at 18:45“ASAKO I & II (Netemo sametemo)”
Featuring a Q&A with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi and star Erika Karata.
In Japanese with English subtitles • Japan/France 2018 119 minutes

Please make your reservations at the FCCJ Reception Desk (3211-3161) or register below.
You may attend the Q&A session without attending the screening, but you will not have seating priority.
All film screenings are private, noncommercial events primarily for FCCJ members and their guests.

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 13

FeatureRecord-Breaking FlightJapan-To-Europe
The Original Kamikaze Story – Supported by Asahi Shimbun
by GEOFFREY TUDOR

V

isitors to this year’s Farnborough Air
Show in the UK – the biggest air display in the world in 2018 – will haveseen the historic, record-breaking
demonstration flights of the Mitsubishi Regional
Jet (MRJ), the first time a Japanese civil aircraft
has ever appeared at an international air event
since the 1930’s.
Unfortunately the appearance of this attractive little 90-seat passenger jet was marredby a towing accident, which put a hole in theaircraft’s nose cone. A replacement was swiftly flown in but the incident was the latest in aseries of mishaps that have plagued the makers, Mitsubishi Aircraft, since they launched the
new airliner project in 2008.
Few people at Farnborough this year realized
this was not the first Japanese aircraft to be
demonstrated in the UK. The first was an earlyversion of another Mitsubishi, the KI-15, a longrange, high-speed reconnaissance machinedeveloped by the company in the mid 1930’s.
In 1937, the Asahi Shimbun, then as now oneof Japan’s leading newspapers and a great promoter of civil aviation, acquired one of the Mitsubishi KI-15 prototype single engine airplanes,gave it the lucky name, Kamikaze-go and flew
it to the United Kingdom. The record-breaking
flight was a gesture of Japanese goodwill forthe coronation of the new British monarch,
King George VI, and to promote Japan-Europe
friendship. “Go” is a suffix used to identify Japanese aircraft, just as “maru” is used to name
Japanese ships.
Despite the aircraft’s name, it had no connection with the suicidal waves of warplanes
unleashed in 1945 by the Japanese military indesperate attempts to stem the tide of war.
Kamikaze, meaning “divine wind,” was thename given to a typhoon that saved Japan from
Mongol invasion in 1281. Kublai Khan, grandsonof Genghis, had arrived on Kyushu’s northernshore to establish a bridgehead in preparation
for invading Japan – only to be defeated by the
god-sent weather, which smashed the invasion
fleet into matchwood.
A kamikaze, it could be said, was a good thing
to have around as long as it was on your side. It

The Kamikaze-go as it arrived at Croydon Airport, London, 9 April 1937.

was, all in all, a very auspicious name for an airplane at that time.
Leaving Tachikawa Aerodrome in westernTokyo on April 6, 1937, the Kamikaze-go headedfor London’s Croydon Airport, then the aerial
gateway to the British capital. It arrived there,
after a 15,357-kilometer flight, in a total of 94
hours, 17 minutes and 56 seconds.
Actual time in the air of the media-sponsoredflight was 51 hours, 17 minutes and 23 seconds
and the average speed was 160.8 kilometers
per hour. The route taken was Tokyo-Taipei-Hanoi-Vientiane-Calcutta-Karachi-Basra-Baghdad-Athens-Rome-Paris-London.
The flight attracted huge attention worldwide, as no one had yet succeeded in establishing a successful east-west flight linking
Japan and Europe, or vice versa. It made foreign aircraft manufacturers and airlines takenote of the high level of technology achieved
by Japan’s budding aero-industry and was aneyebrow raiser among the military aviation
planners of the major global powers.
Not only was it the first all-Japanese built
aircraft to fly from Japan to Europe – it was thefirst aircraft of any type or origin to make therecord-breaking journey.
A key driver in aircraft development in Japan
at this time was the need to design and build
long=range transport types to link Japan’s mainislands with its colonial territories in Manchuria,
Taipei, Korea and the South Pacific mandate.
Included in the requirement were long-range
military aircraft such as bombers and fighterscapable of operating in transoceanic environ-ments where land-based facilities such as runways were few and far between.
Meanwhile, hailed as heroes in Japan andEurope, the two-man crew of the Kamikaze-go,pilot Masaaki Iinuma (26) and navigator Kenji
Tsukagoshi (37), found themselves the centerof attention. A trip to Paris saw the pioneering
aviators both awarded with the Legion d’Honneur and their epic flight was the first Federation Aeronautic Internationale (FAI) record tobe won by Japanese.
While in London, they helped with the filmingof a documentary of King George’s coronation
and also gave joyrides to Japanese royals Prince
and Princess Chichibu, younger brother and sister in law of the Japanese emperor, who were in
London for the UK royal wedding festivities.
After a busy month, the Kamikaze-go set off
from Croydon to return to Japan, retracing its
route across the Mediterranean, the Middle East,
India and Asia to Japan, arriving in Osaka May 20
and at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport the following day.
From here, Iinuma and Tsukagoshi, their places in Japanese aviation history assured, fly into
history. Test pilot Iinuma joined the military only
to be was killed in action near Phnom Penh in
December 1941.
Tsukagoshi continued to work on aircraft testing and development. In 1943, while attempting
to fly another prototype aircraft, the Tachikawa
Ki-77 from Singapore to Germany, he disappeared
over the Indian Ocean and was never seen again.
● Geoffrey Tudor writes for Orient Aviation,
Hong Kong.

14 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

FeatureTrade: Deal with theFundamentals
by ANTHONY ROWLEYCan Japan and the EU together save theworld trade order from destruction
at the hands of Donald Trump, who
seems intent on wrecking it in pursuit of America's national interest? Their recent
agreement to sign what would be the world's
biggest trade deal might appear to suggest so.
But the truth is that attempts by Japan's
prime minister Shinzo Abe and EU presidents
Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker to present themselves as champions of multilateral
trade are really little more than political posturing in the face of deeper challenges to theglobal economic order.
Their agreement to create a trade pact covering around one third of global GDP certainly
sounds enlightened at a time when Trump has
pulled the United States out of the Trans PacificPartnership and is threatening to walk awayfrom the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Abe meanwhile has managed to keep ascaled-down version of the TPP on the road
among eleven of the original dozen members.
This plus the Japan-EU agreement makes theJapanese leader look good at a time when China's president Xi Jinping is also billing himself asa champion of free trade.
Yet things are by no means so simple. Trump's
attempts to restore balance in US trade by levying tariffs on imports from key trading partners
appear crude and inward looking by comparison. However, the global trade system was introuble even before the American president
weighed in.
In recent years trade has been used increasingly as a strategic weapon, not least in Asia
where the TPP, for example, its goals broader
than facilitating trade, aimed at bringing together countries that subscribed to similar views
on how their economic and political systems
should be organized.
Meanwhile, increasing trade within andbetween such blocs has come at the cost ofunemployment for certain groups of workers
in advanced economies, thus contributing toincome inequality and social stresses. In turnthis helps foster popular resentment against
free markets.

Trump came to office largely because herecognized and exploited this fact. Populist
politicians elsewhere may ride to power on his
coattails. Simply deploring this fact or rushing tocreate new trade blocs as counters to Trumpian
protectionism will not solve the problem.
The Japan-EU agreement may look good
but it adds to a proliferation of trade blocs thatin Asia alone are taking on baffling complexity.
Japan is already a member of the revised TPP(now known as the CPTPP) and will join the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership(RCEP) which includes China.
There are wider Asian free trade schemesplanned too, forming only part of a growing spider's web of such accords globally. Within these
dense networks with their often conflicting rulesof origin governing tariff treatment, highly complex manufacturing supply chains have evolved.
Rather than a spaghetti bowl of overlapping
accords, it is more a dog's breakfast. Just one ofmany problems is that the interests of businesshave often overshadowed those of labor.
Obviously what is needed if the forces of dissatisfaction driving populism and trade protectionism are not to become even more powerfuland disruptive is some rationalization of thislargely ungoverned process. There is a need toget back to basics.
For decades during the postwar period, theGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later
subsumed within the World Trade Organization)sought to further world trade through a series ofnegotiating rounds that ended in the failure of
the so-called Doha Round.
One reason it failed (apart from the sensitivity of trade in areas such as agriculture andservices) was the complexity of dealing with all
the problems that go with free trade, especiallywhen attempts are made to apply the principle
on a global basis.
Instead of grappling with these problems atthat time, a number of advanced economies
opted to walk away from the multilateral process
and to focus instead on bilateral and regional
free trade and investment agreements that werebilled as building blocks for global free trade.
The building blocks are of such varying
design, however, that they cannot easily form
part of a global free trade architecture; they
are not designed with the best interests of theProtectionist policies
should be avoided asthey are likely to havesignificant deleterious
effects on domestic andglobal growth [with]limited impact on
external imbalances.

ultimate structure in mind. The best brains andpolicies have not been deployed in their design.
Only a return to the multilateral approach(via the WTO or some new and comprehensive
organization) is likely to solve the current problems of the global trade order. And that means
looking not only at trade but also at the domestic economic factors that contribute to tradeimbalances.
The system needs a thorough overhaul rather
than quick fix, but instead the United States isapplying voodoo economics. As the IMF noted ina recent report, "protectionist policies should be
avoided as they are likely to have significant deleterious effects on domestic and global growth[with] limited impact on external imbalances."
Surplus and deficit countries alike, the IMF
concluded, “should work toward reviving liberalization efforts and strengthening the multilateral
trading system—particularly to promote trade inservices, where gains from trade are substantial
but barriers remain high."
Trump is seen as the villain of the piece in all
this but equally Japan and the EU are not serving
the cause of good international policy by trying
to present their (also rather simplistic) policies
as being antidotes to a much more fundamental
economic malaise.
● Anthony Rowley is a former Business Editor
and International Finance Editor of the Hong
Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review
and has spent some 40 years writing on Asianaffairs from Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
He currently writes for the Singapore Business
Times, among other publications.

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 15

Club NewsDOUDOU BEACH------------- Poetry of Sand ------------PHOTOGRAPHY BY YOSHIMITSU YAGI

Photo
Exhibition
Aug 4 - 31 at
the FCCJ

16 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018

Feature1

Last Monthin Photos
Club Members Share
Their Best Shots
1. July 6, 2018, Beppu, Japan - A woman looks at
Chinoike Jigoku (Blood Pond Hell), one of the hotsprings that make up the Hells of Beppu in Japan's
Kyushu region. With a temperature of 78 degrees
Celsius, this scalding pond gets it color from a rich
deposit of iron oxide. Photo by Albert Siegel
2. July 9, 2018, Yokohama, Japan - A Sanwa Koutsu
Group taxi driver dressed as ninja is seen inside his
cab in Yokohama. Yokohama-based taxi provider
Sanwa Koutsu Group launched a new service
called ''Ninja de Taxi'' to attract local and foreign
customers. Ninja costumed cab drivers provide a
unique experience to customers, showing off theirninja abilities, such as quick steps and finger signs.
The ninja taxi service started from mid-June and canbe reserved on their website (available in English,
Chinese and Japanese,) with an extra charge (1,000
JPY or 9.05 USD approximately) additional to theregular fee. Photo by Rodrigo Reyes Marin

2

3. July 7, 2018, Tokyo, Japan - Visitors enjoy the Milky Way Illumination to celebrate the annual festival of
Tanabata at Tokyo Tower. Thousands of LED lights representing the Milky Way are decorating the first floor ofTokyo Tower’s Main Deck to commemorate the annual celebration of Tanabata. According to legend, the Milky
Way separates two lovers, Orihime (Vega) and Hikoboshi (Altair), who may only meet once a year on the seventh
day of the seventh month of the calendar. Photo by Rodrigo Reyes MarinAUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 17

Feature3

18 | FCCJ | AUGUST 2018Club News

New in the Library
1.

Tanaka Kakuei no higeki:
beikoku kimitsu bunsho ga
akasu shikkyaku no shinso
Eiichiro Tokumoto
Kobunsha
Gift from Eiichiro Tokumoto

New Members
2.

Japan's population implosion:
the 50 million shock
Yoichi Funabashi (ed.)
Palgrave Macmillan

3.

Contemporary Japanesearchitects: profiles in design
Igarashi Taro; David Noble(trans.)Japan Publishing Industry
Foundation for Culture

4.

Corrections

PITCH US YOUR STORY
Patient X: the case-book of
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
David Peace
Faber & Faber

ASSOCIATE MEMBERS●● Huh Kun Yeong,Embassy of the Republic of
Korea●● Mariko Fukui, AALTInternational Japan Co., Ltd.
●● Tetsuji Iwama,
ACT Co., Ltd.
●● Noriyuki Katayama,
City-Yuwa Partners●● Takeshi Tsujimura,
AIG General InsuranceCo., Ltd.
●● Akira Tamura,
PRAP Japan, Inc.

Please send your story ideas to no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp,
and be sure to note whether you have (or have access to)visuals. Our rates are ¥20 per published word, ¥20,000
for a front cover photo. Photo essays: ¥15,000 for full-page
photos and ¥5,000 for smaller shots. All payments will bemade in credit to your member account.

Pilates●● The July cover story
incorrectly listed the author
as a club member. Kirk is aformer FCCJ member.
●● Page 3 “In This Issue” content
guide wrongly attributed
the feature “A World Class
Waste of Time and Money?”to Anthony Rowley. It shouldhave been Donald Kirk.
●● Page 16 profile of Marcus
Fishenden has incorrectly
spelled his previous employer.
It should have been Accordia.

Takae method
For a healthy life
美しさは腸からReservations

ご予約・お問い合わせsalon.de.takae@gmail.com

http://salon-de-takae.wixsite.com/takae◯ 腸セラピー◯ 美腸ピラティス◯ レイキヒーリング

AUGUST 2018 | FCCJ | 19

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