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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