The sky’s the limit

EARLIER this week, Japanese politicos filled their Twitter litter boxes with tweets of chirping delight about their VIP preview visit to the Tokyo Skytree, which opened to the public on Tuesday. Now the world’s largest tower, Skytree will be used for television and radio broadcasts. As with the tower it replaces — the Tokyo Tower — it is also expected to become a tourist destination and a symbol of the city.

The Christian Science Monitor and others, however, couple the news with the observation that building projects of this immensity might also be an indicator of impending economic decline. It’s based on a theory called the Skyscraper Index, and they explain it this way:

The skyscraper index works because developers tend to make ambitious gambles with huge new towers at the point of the business cycle when interest-rate and price signals can get distorted, wrote Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, in a 2005 research paper.

On the Mises Institute website, Mr. Thornton adds:

It is a broadcasting and observation tower and so it does not qualify as a skyscraper and therefore it does not signal a global economic crisis. However, with regional records being set in the Pacific Rim, China, India, and Europe, as well as a new world record skyscraper in development in Saudi Arabia, it reinforces the warning signals from the Skyscraper Index.

Here’s the Wikipedia explanation, which in this case is acceptable as something other than a collection of links. When Mr. Thornton refers to skyscraper development in China, he’s talking about the developments described in this article, which contains the following quote:

Investors should therefore pay particular attention to China – today’s biggest bubble builder with 53% of all the world’s skyscrapers under construction…

China will complete 53% of the 124 skyscrapers under construction over the next six years, expanding the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by a staggering 87%. China’s skyscrapers are not only increasing in number – it now has 75 completed skyscrapers above 240m in height – but the average height of the skyscrapers that it is building is also increasing as past liquidity fuels the construction boom.

For a more visually arresting and concentrated report on the Chinese high-rise boom, try this video report from Reuters. (I wanted to embed the video, but couldn’t figure out how to appease the cranky WordPress software.) This is not your average uptick in construction activity.

That would explain the data points on this chart of cement consumption from Goldman Sachs via ZeroHedge:

*****

George Gershwin composed the theme music for this manic erection of phallic cement and steel long ago — little more than a year into the Great Depression. His working title was Rhapsody in Rivets, suggesting his inspiration was the skyscrapers sprouting in the rocky soil of Manhattan during the Roaring 20s. The final title was the Second Rhapsody.

¿What are these people thinking?

IT’S impossible to scan the news articles either on paper or in pixels without seeing several that make one wonder, “¿What are these people thinking?” “These people” can refer either the subjects or the authors of the reports, and often both. Here are three examples involving Japan from the past week alone.

Socialism in action

Japan on Tuesday warned French president-elect Francois Hollande to keep the nation’s fiscal discipline in place amid worries that the new leader will overspend in a bid to boost the economy.

Of course no one can expect the capital-S-socialist-and-proud-of-it M. Hollande to have the first idea of how an economy functions — even socialists know that’s not the point of socialism. But the last thing the French need is advice from a news reader-turned-politician serving as the Finance Ministry press secretary, who knows less about finance than a teachers’ union apparatchik selected at random from a May Day parade, and who represents a government that wouldn’t know fiscal discipline if it walked up to them wearing a name tag that read, “Hello! My name is Hayek”.  The Noda administration managed to avoid a third consecutive record-high budget this year only because they shifted some expenditures to “special accounts”. Government debt instruments still account for half their revenue.

He’s worried about the French overspending? That’s all the DPJ’s been doing since they took office in 2009.

In Tokyo Finance Minister Jun Azumi told a regular news conference…”We want (France) to do what has been decided so far, and I’d like to tell them about that if there is the opportunity,” he added, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

The Dow Jones Newswires did not report if there was any snickering among the reporters present.

“I don’t know whether Mr Hollande will immediately act on what he has said in heated debates during the election campaign…

Now Mr. Azumi is talking about a subject on which he has some expertise — the winning party in a national election reneging on the campaign promises that got them voted into office.

“…but realistically, I think it is impossible (for European nations) to give up on fiscal-rebuilding efforts,” the finance minister said, adding that he was “convinced (Hollande) will respect this movement.”

Realistically, it is very possible that several European nations will give up on “fiscal-rebuilding efforts”, whatever it is he means by that term.  Any conviction he has about what M. Hollande might or might not respect is derived entirely from the script his Finance Ministry aides wrote for him.

Hollande ousted conservative Nicolas Sarkozy from the Elysee Palace on a platform promising growth rather than further cuts, which has worried many European leaders who fear it will lead to another region-wide crisis.

Growth? ¿What are these people thinking? Economic growth would be an excellent way to solve France’s — or anybody’s — fiscal problems, if it were real growth created by the private sector.  The Europeans and the people reporting on them seem to have created a new political pidgin in which “austerity” means something other than what it really means — not spending so bloody much — because French government spending has risen every year from 2002 (€816 billion) to 2011 (€1.1 trillion). It has a budget deficit closer to that of Spain than to Germany.

What they are pretending is “growth” is the public-sector spending of borrowed money of the mind on infrastructure projects. The new French president also wants to hire 60,000 new teachers, 1,000 new police a year, and create (Abracadabra!) 150,000 state-funded “jobs” for youth.

In other words, he thinks Mr. Obama’s policies worked out very well for the United States and wants to try them in France.

Well, to be fair, those policies did work out, if hobbling private enterprise and the free market was the goal. Considering the backgrounds of the two men, that cannot be dismissed out of hand.

For example, what Mr. Hollande means by “raising revenue” in the new political pidgin is to place a tax on financial transactions and increasing the tax on dividends and rich people, thereby ensuring there will be fewer of all of them. He’s got to conjure up some kind of revenue to pay for this government spending, to which will be added the bill for rolling back a Sarkozy reform and reducing the retirement age to 60 from 62.

And he thinks this will result in an extra €29 billion? No wonder people are worried. Especially Japan:

But Japan and China — which hold huge amounts of European debt — raised concerns about the region’s future policies.

By huge, they mean:

Tokyo bought 13.0 percent of the eurozone rescue fund’s bond sale in December, worth about 260 million euros ($338.0 million), while purchasing 10.0 percent, or 300 million euros worth, in November. That was lower than the average 20.0 percent purchased in three other bond sales from the start of the year.

There’s been a lot speculation about why the Japanese and Chinese bought all that European debt issued to allow taxpayers the privilege of bailing out European banks. The people at Seetell wonder if Japan’s real objective was to prop up American banks, rather than European ones.  That explanation would work just as well for the Chinese too.

Meanwhile, what are all of these people thinking?

In communist China Monday the state-owned Global Times, which is known for its nationalistic tone, said the anti-incumbent results in France and Greece bore out the dangers of democracy running to “extremes”.

If you’ve read anything in the Global Times, you know that the newspaper’s tone is better described as jingoistic rather than nationalistic. Media consumers also know that a presumed connection between nationalism and a criticism of democracy is a non sequitur, but newspapers are full of those, starting with “All the news that’s fit to print”.

And what would anyone at the Global Times know about democracy, much less what constitutes an extreme form of it? But then the Chinese have a political pidgin of their own.

Still a colony after all these years:

Japan Post Insurance Co., one of the key arms of the government-backed Japan Post Holdings Co., will delay its entry into the cancer insurance field amid the U.S. industry’s misgivings about such a move, a Japan Post official said Wednesday.

Japan Post’s envisaged entry into the domestic cancer insurance market, which is dominated by U.S. insurers, “must not obstruct” Japan’s participation in U.S.-led multilateral talks on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade pact, the official said. Participation in the TPP talks requires consent from all countries involved.

So: A Japanese enterprise, partially owned by the Japanese government, chooses not to sell a product in the Japanese market because the government of the companies now dominating that market won’t like it and might not let Japan participate in discussions that Japan hasn’t officially decided it will participate in?

¿What are these people thinking?

This time we have a good idea what they were thinking. The DPJ needed the votes to get bills passed in the upper house after they formed a government in 2009, so they created a coalition government with two small, incompatible parties. One of them was a reactionary splinter group that thinks only the government is capable of delivering mail, offering savings deposits, and selling life insurance, and that city dwellers should pay higher prices for mail delivery to offset the costs of delivering it to people who choose to live on out-of-the-way islands.

Well, that and using the money in those accounts to buy 20% of Japanese government debt so it isn’t sold overseas at higher interest rates and really screw up the calculations of Azumi Jun’s tutors.

Also, some people pretended to be concerned that foreigners would buy a controlling interest in the bank (even though government approval would be required), which would mean foreign countries would have an unacceptable presence in the Japanese financial and insurance sector.

You know, like if they dominated the cancer insurance market…

Given the situation, Japan Post Insurance will concentrate on improving its educational endowment and other existing policies for the time being, according to the insurer. The arm has extensive nationwide access to potential customers in the over-the-counter market.

And it will voluntarily relinquish that extensive nationwide access in one sector to prevent the Americans from raising their voices.

On April 27, the Diet enacted a law to rethink the full privatization of government-backed postal services. The revision to the 2005 privatization law stipulates that the banking and insurance entities can launch new services after the government sells half of its shareholdings.

Which they have no intention of selling. The politicos’ “rethink”, by the way, is of a policy that won its advocate, Koizumi Jun’ichiro, 70% approval ratings.

Neo-Luddism

Last weekend, the last operating nuclear plant in Japan shut down for regularly scheduled maintenance, meaning no nuclear plants were operating in the country.  It was easy to see what many in the media were thinking from their choice of language and focus on one aspect of the closure. This from the Independent in Britain:

Activists celebrate as Japan is nuclear-free for first time in 42 years

Will they celebrate after an extended period  of “nuclear-free” power generation results in several other –free conditions, namely “economic growth-free”, “prosperity-free”, and “employment-free”?

Those neo-luddites just got to be free!

Thousands marched through the streets of Tokyo yesterday to celebrate the closure of the last of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors. The switch-off meant the country, for the first time since 1970, was being electrified without the use of atomic power.

Campaigners said it was fitting that the day Japan stopped using nuclear power coincided with the nation’s annual Children’s Day, because of their concerns about protecting children from radiation, which Fukushima Dai-ichi is still releasing into the air and water.

Yoko Kataoka, a retired baker and grandmother in a T-shirt with “No thank you, nukes,” handwritten on the back, said: “Let’s leave an Earth where our children and grandchildren can all play without worries.”

Since they’re only children, their play won’t be disturbed by having to worry about coming up with the average 10.28% increase in household electricity bills for those receiving power from Tokyo Electric, starting in July. Or that the replacement for nuclear energy at Japanese power plants is oil, which produces nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane, mercury compounds, and other air enhancers that are not healthy for children and other living things. The tots also won’t be the ones who have to work nights or weekends at factories rescheduling their shifts to reduce large-scale demand at peak periods.

Before the crisis, Japan relied on nuclear power for a third of its electricity needs. The crowd at the rally, estimated at 5,500 by organisers, shrugged off government warnings about a power shortage. Activists said the shutdowns had proved the country could live without nuclear technology.

True, all but 30 countries live without nuclear technology, but most of them in the industrial world are small and/or functional economy-free, such as Portugal, Greece, and Italy. The singular exception is Australia, a continent with a widely dispersed population roughly that of metro Tokyo-Yokohama.

And even then, the organizers — if they are to be believed — thought it was a mighty big deal that 5,500 celebrants from the megalopolis showed up to rejoice and congratulate themselves for royally screwing up everyone else’s lives. They added:

Electricity shortage is expected only at peak periods, such as the middle of the day in hot weather, but critics of nuclear power say the proponents are exaggerating the consequences to win public approval to restart reactors.

We’ve already seen that noxious pollution, significantly higher electric bills, and social disruption are some of the consequences of a nuclear-free Japan. That last is unlikely to bother most of the demonstrators. If any of them are working nights, it’s at convenience stores rather than factories.

There’s more, however: Kyushu Electric Power just announced a loss of JPY 166.3 billion for the fiscal year ended March 2012, after recording a profit of JPY 28.72 billion the previous year. Kyushu Electric attributed the loss to the delay in restarting the idled nuclear reactors and the additional fuel costs for operating their thermal power plants. The costs associated with the idled nuclear reactors runs to several billion yen per day. As a result, the utility’s stock price is below JPY 1,000 for the first time since 1984.

Even then, summer temperatures at 2010 levels could cause power shortages of as much as 10%, the utility said last week. (The figures for the Kansai area are even worse.)

Combine that with a continued high yen, as economic craziness continues to masquerade as sanity in the United States and Europe, and even more Japanese companies will find it in the interests of their survival to shift production overseas.

Meanwhile, an article appeared on the same day in the Yomiuri Shimbun that suggested the youth of Japan will have more to worry about than the absence of fatalities from a once-in-a-millennium combination of circumstances:

More than 80 percent of people aged 15 to 29 are very concerned about whether they can earn enough money or receive public pensions after retirement, according to a draft of an annual government report.

The draft of the government’s white paper on children and young people for fiscal 2012 shows that younger generations are not optimistic about the future due to unstable employment conditions amid the nation’s aging population.

Also:

Although the overall unemployment rate was only 4.5 percent in 2011, it remained disproportionately higher among young people. The jobless rate was 9.6 percent for people aged 15 to 19, 7.9 percent for people aged 20 to 24 and 6.3 percent for people aged 25 to 29.

A few years ago, WHO compiled a report on the deaths attributable to the Chernobyl accident, which was much worse than the one at Fukushima. They found:

As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004.

There were also 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer found as a result of the accident, but the survival rate is 99%.

In contrast, the death toll from the Fukushima accident now stands at one: a worker cleaning up at the plant who collapsed from overexertion.

More important, the report also stated:

Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas.

The problem with the 5,000 or so Tokyo celebrants is the opposite. They weren’t suffering from a paralyzing fatalism last Sunday. Their excitement stemming from a belief in the myth of nuclear danger rendered them oblivious to the potential paralysis of their country.

¡What are these people thinking!

*****

After all the lights go out, this will be about the only thing left.

Japan’s back pages

THE Japan that emerges in stories printed below the fold and in the back pages of newspapers, or on less frequently accessed news websites, is a different place than that presented in the industrial mass media. Here are some stories that demonstrate why.

Water business

The phrase “water business” in Japan is usually a euphemism for the enterprises conducted in entertainment districts at night, particularly drinking establishments.

But most people outside the region are unaware that Japan is a global leader in another sort of water business — that for the technology used in water supply and sewage systems. In fact, a paperback was published a few months ago with the premise that Japan is the global leader in water technology systems. Whether that claim is true or not, several entities in the country have established a reputation for expertise in the sector, and they are working to expand their operations.

For example, the Fukuoka City government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for joint research in water supply and treatment.

The Kyushu city developed the technology for reusing waste water from the necessity to deal with its own chronic water shortages. They became so successful that they now want to make a paying business of it. Fukuoka City was also the first municipality in Japan to process waste water for use as water in the toilet, and they also are known for building a network of tunnels that carry off the water from the heavy summer rains to prevent flooding.

Meanwhile, the growth of the economy and the population in Vietnam strained that nation’s water systems infrastructure, and they chose to look to Japan for help. In fact, the city of Haiphong is already working with the city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka City’s neighbor, to prevent leakage from their water supply systems.

Kitakyushu has been active in this sector in Cambodia for some time. As of last December, they were serving as the technical consultants for water technology in nine Cambodian cities, and last month they began helping two other cities in that country to expand their water supply systems.

Fukuoka City is also involved in the water business in Burma. The Water Department dispatched a technician to Rangoon last month to conduct surveys and provide guidance, and they’ll send a full team later. The Burmese government also sent one of their technicians to Fukuoka City for training.

Apart from altruism, one objective is to increase the opportunities for local businesses to receive contracts from the Southeast Asian countries for infrastructure improvements. The Fukuoka City project in Burma is being conducted in tandem with the UN Habitat Fukuoka office. That organization is particularly interested in water purification and desalinization systems.

Rare Earth

The temporary Chinese suspension of rare earth metal exports during the standoff over the Senkakus in the fall of 2010 certainly got the attention of Japanese industry.  They wasted no time to start looking for new sources for the metals that couldn’t be used as a political weapon. For example, it was announced earlier this week that imports of rare earth metals would soon begin from India. Also, Mitsui Mining and Smelting Co. and Kurume-based Shibata Sangyo have teamed to launch the world’s first business for recovering and recycling the rare earth metal tantalum from discarded electronic products. Tantalum is used primarily as a material for condensers in PCs and Smartphones, but all of it is imported. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimates that recovering the tantalum from products discarded in Japan in a year would yield about 64 tons, accounting for 14% of the amount used here annually. Fukuoka Prefecture and Mitsui plan to commercialize the recycling technology and to create a structure that enables electronics parts manufacturers to procure the metal without concerns of interrupted supply.

More than a year ago, Japanese researchers announced they had produced the first artificial rare earth metal, an alloy similar to palladium. That metal is essential for making electronic parts, and is also used as a catalyzer to clean exhaust gas. While their method is not feasible for the commercial production of palladium, the researchers intend to apply it to create other alloys as rare earth substitutes. They say they’ve begun joint research projects with automobile manufacturers, but are keeping the details under the hood for now.

Power

A ryokan, or Japanese-style inn, in Yufuin, Oita, will generate electricity from the hot springs on the site using a 70 kW generator that Kobe Steel put on the market last fall. They plan to sell some of the power generated to Kyushu Electric Power through the system for the sale of renewable energy at a fixed cost that will begin in July. Kobe Steel says that if the power is sold at JPY 20 per kW, the spa could recover the costs by 2015.

Space

Japanese astronomers using a Hawaii-based telescope said last month they had discovered a “proto-cluster” of galaxies 12.72 billion light-years away from Earth. They claim that’s the most distant cluster ever discovered, which would also make it one of the first structures formed by the Big Bang.

“This shows a galaxy cluster already existed in the early stages of the universe when it was still less than one billion years into its history of 13.7 billion years,” the team of astronomers said in a press release.

But the discovery may already have been superseded.

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have previously announced the discovery of a possible cluster of galaxies around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, but that has not yet been confirmed, the Japanese researchers said.

Vanity

What Japanese women call with a smirk the “bar code” — the hair style created by follically deficient men, otherwise known as a combover in the English-speaking world — may, along with toupees and implants, be obsolete a decade from now:

Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by Professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.

The process has the potential for applications greater than flattering oneself in the mirror, however:

Tsuji and his researchers found hair follicles can be grown with adult stem cells, the study said.

“Our current study thus demonstrates the potential for not only hair regeneration therapy but also the realisation of bioengineered organ replacement using adult somatic stem cells,” it said.

Stop the snickering, ladies — before long another recent discovery in Japan might produce more satisfying answers when you interrogate the mirror about the fairest of them all.

Two different teams of university researchers have found the gene that causes freckling and skin blotches after exposure to the sun. One team was from Osaka University (working with cosmetics manufacturer Kanebo), and the other team, using different methods, combined researchers from Nagasaki and Kumamoto universities.

Both groups focused on ultraviolet hypersensitivity, a rare condition of which only five cases are known in the world. The condition was first identified in 1981 in Japan, but little effort was put into treatment because the only problem it causes is sunburn. The Osaka-Kanebo group inserted mouse chromosomes in the nuclei of cells from two patients with the condition to determine which would provide better protection to ultraviolet rays. Exposure to the rays would prevent multiplication of the cells, which would die after six weeks, but cells with the new chromosome were resistant to ultraviolet rays.

Crab computing

Here’s a story that made a lot more sense after spending the past week trying to make sense of the functions on my new PC:

A team of scientists from Japan and England have built a computer that uses crabs as information carriers, to implement basic circuits of collision-based computing.

The explanation:

Researchers at Japan’s Kobe University and the UK’s University of the West of England, Bristol, found that when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means that swarms of crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment.

And:

The swarms were placed at the entrances of the logic gates and persuaded to move by a shadow that fooled them into thinking a predatory bird was overhead. Results closely matched those of the simulation, suggesting that crab-powered computers are possible.

The experiment builds on a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls.

That set the author of the article to wondering:

The paper’s authors did not say whether public money was used to fund their experiments.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem as if the experiment would be so expensive that a university couldn’t fund it on its own. The author might be suggesting that futzing around with crab-powered computers is a frivolous enterprise with no apparent application, but there might be some there there.  Explains Josh Rothman:

What’s the point? Increasingly, computer scientists are interested in the ways that natural systems solve computing problems. Often, they do so in surprising (and surprisingly effective) ways. Other researchers have investigated the ways in which honeybees compute the most efficient route through a field of flowers (see a well-reasoned take on that research here); one of the crab-computer researchers, Andrew Adamatzky, has been exploring the possibility of slime-mold computing. Future generations of computers, they argue, may well be inspired by nature.

Kampai!

The Moji Customs Office in Kyushu reports that the value of beer exported through the Port of Hakata in 2011 totaled JPY 1.225 billion, an increase of 6.3 times from the previous year. The volume of exports totaled 10,960 kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 9.2 times. That set a record, and it was the first new record in 10 years. South Korea accounted for 57% of the exports, and there’s a story behind that. Premium Japanese beer has become popular in that country, which is closer to the Port of Hakata (also in Kyushu) than to Tokyo. Sapporo also established a sales company in South Korea last June. And don’t forget that the Japanese built the first breweries on the Korean Peninsula to begin with when the two countries were merged a century ago.

Does this mean tastes are changing in South Korea? The mass market beer in that country may be even weaker and thinner than the adult soft drink that pretends to be beer in the United States. That’s perhaps due to the robust and hearty nature of Korean food, with its industrial grade spices. It would make sense that people preferred something less intense to wash it all down with.

Hand grenade hotline

To conclude, here’s something I’ll bet nobody expected. The Fukuoka police became the first police department in the country to institute a hot line for tips on hand grenades. They’ll pay JPY 100,000 for each hand grenade found or confiscated as a result of a tip.

Concerns have been growing lately over the use of hand grenades to attack companies or in gang fights. Hand grenades were used in six incidents in the prefecture last year, the most in the country. Rewards will also be given for the discovery of homemade bombs. They’re serious — the police have printed 2,000 posters and 5,000 flyers.

They’d better be serious if gangs are bringing grenades to a gunfight.

Afterwords:

This clip of an English-language news report provides further info on the changing Joseon tastes for beer. They mention that 60 brewpubs have been established (by then) in South Korea since laws were relaxed in 2002. Pardon the goofiness with the Youtube link.

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Considering (a) that microbrewing had already taken off in Japan at that time, and (b) the substantial but largely unacknowledged influence that Japan still has on Korean culture, it is quite possible that the Korean laws were changed after the Koreans sampled some of the Japanese beverages.

Not that they’d ever admit it.

*****

Here’s another change: When I arrived in Japan in 1984, most funerals were still conducted in the home of the deceased. Now, however, they’re usually held in funeral parlors.

I attended a funeral in one of those establishments a week ago today for a pleasant man who passed away at the age of 86. I’ve been to enough of them by now to be familiar with the customs, but I was intrigued when I recognized the song the pianist was playing just before the service started: Hana (Flower), by Okinawan roots rocker Kina Shokichi. It is interesting to reflect on which things eventually become accepted as part of the common culture. No English translation can do the lyrics justice, so I won’t even try, but the song works in that context.

Here are three different versions spliced into one video.

 

Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (4)

JUST because the warts of the overseas media and the commentator-bloggers who rely on them think their folderol is insight doesn’t mean you have to fall for it. The national decline of Japan, if it exists at all, is greatly exaggerated. Here are a few short snorts testifying to the national vitality. The first is a translation of a brief article, while the rest are summaries.

Island hopping

Japan Air Commuter, a small Kagoshima-based airline serving the prefecture’s outlying islands, has hired its first female pilot, Hamada Eri (29). Her maiden flight was as co-pilot on two round-trip flights between Kagoshima Airport and the islands of Amami and Tokunoshima. After returning in one piece, Hamada said, “It was different from training. I sensed the weight of the responsibility for carrying passengers. I was very nervous, but it was a lot of fun and I was relieved when it was over.”

Hamada Eri

Her ambition to become an aviatrix originated when she was a student at Ryukyu University (Okinawa). While flying on commercial airlines to her home in Sendai (the northeast part of the country), “I discovered I liked the scenery from the cabin window and wanted to see the view from the front.” She enrolled at a flight school in Miyazaki City after graduation. She chose to work at JAC because she enjoyed her many flights over Kyushu during training, and because she wanted to repay the many people in the industry in Kyushu for their help.

The flights to the outlying islands are a lifeline for the people living there. “I was spurred by a desire to be of service on these flights, which are so important for their daily life.”

The Tohoku earthquake struck while she was still in training. The family home was washed away by the tsunami. While her parents were safe, a grandmother living in an institution died in the wave. She wanted to be near her family, but her parents encouraged her by saying, “We’re fine. You work hard in flight school.”

“I’m far from the stricken area (about 740 miles), but I decided to put forth my best effort along with all the people who suffered as they head toward recovery.”

Ms. Hamada is the 13th female pilot in the JAL group. “I intend to gain experience and become a full pilot, not only for my benefit, but also for the women who follow.”

—————–
A Japanese sentiment permeates every sentence of that article. For contrast, imagine how much self-importance it would have contained had the story originated in the Anglosphere instead of Kagoshima.

Tokushima seaweed comes home

Last year’s Tohoku disaster was also a disaster for Sanriku wakame, a noted product of Miyagi. To help rebuild the industry, a Tokushima Prefecture maritime research institute in Naruto sent local fishing co-ops some wakame spores last October that the Miyagians raised in Kessennuma Bay. The first harvest was last week.

It was a homecoming in a sense for the wakame because the folks in Miyagi shipped the Tokushima institute some of theirs in 2004 for cross breeding. The spawn from that mating is what Tokushima sent back. The spores grew to a length of two meters, though the water temperature this winter was lower than ideal. The quality, color, and thickness of the seaweed is good enough for it to appear on your dinner table soon. Local watermen harvested 400 kilograms on the first day. The harvests will continue until the beginning of April, when they expect to have hauled in a total of 3,400 tons.

Off to see the Iyoboya

The big maritime product in Niigata is salmon. The Niigatans like it so much, in fact, they established the nation’s first salmon museum in Murakami called the Iyoboya Museum.

Niigata was the Murakami domain during the Edo period, and it was there that salmon were first successfully bred in Japan. Since then, salmon has been an important part of local culture. Iyoboya is the name for the fish in the local dialect.

Iyoboya fanciers say the best part of the museum is the mini-hatchery. Starting at the end of October, the museum recovers salmon eggs and fertilizes them. The eggs hatch two months later. Visitors get to see the fingerlings, and if they’re lucky, the hatching itself. The museum is now raising 50,000 fish, give or take a few, which it plans to release in the Miomote River at the beginning of next month. The museum also offers views of the river through glass windows.

There’s a restaurant on the museum premises. Guess what’s on the menu!

Snow fun in Kamakura

The Kamakura winter festival has been underway since 21 January at the Yunishikawa Spa in Nikko, Tochigi. The event is held in small snow huts in a gorge along the banks of the Yunishi River, which sounds like just the ticket for those who get off on nose-rubbing. This is a hot spring town, so visitors can enjoy both the hot and the cold of it, dipping in the spa waters for relaxation after all the fun with snowmen, snow slides, snow hut barbecues (reservations required) and musical performances. If you’re in no hurry for spring to start, the festival will last until 20 March.

Let 100 dragons soar

There’s a lot of snow in Hokkaido, too — probably more than in Nikko — but that didn’t stop Sapporo kiters from holding their 35th annual kite-flying contest in the city’s Fushiko Park. The winner this year was Tanaka Mitsuo, whose design featured a 100-meter-long chain of 100 linked kites.

Mao Zedong once said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom”, but that’s got to be easier than getting 100 kites up in the air. Each of the hundred was 60 x 42 centimeters, made of bamboo and washi (traditional Japanese paper), and designed to look like a dragon. This is Dragon Year in the Chinese zodiac.

Rebuild it and they will come

They’ve been repairing the Izumo Shinto shrine in Shimane lately, the first major renovations in more than 60 years. The local carpenters know just how to go about it, too — the Izumo shrine has been rebuilt 25 times, the last in the 18th century, and also moved several times.

It’s the oldest shrine in the country, but ranks only number two in order of importance. (The enshrined deity is Okuninushi no Mikoto, the nephew of the Sun Goddess.) There’s still a fence around one part where mortals may not enter.

The repairs are being made in conformity with the original construction techniques. That includes softening thin sheets of Japanese cypress by soaking them in water, and then using them to thatch the 600-square-meter roof with bamboo nails. Preparations began in 2008 and the work won’t be finished until next year, though the current phase ended in February. Had I finished this post when I intended, readers nearby might have been able to glimpse the main hall. Alas, I was sidetracked by other work and projects, and now the hall won’t be on view for another 60 years. Attendance also required a dress code: t-shirts, sweatsuits, or sandals will not do for a visit to the abode of Okuninushi, even though the divinity was moved to a temporary site on the premises in 2008 for the duration.

Leg room

Naruse Masayuki of Tamana, Kumamoto, has presented a paper on the safety of his single pedal automobile system to the Society of Automotive Engineers in the United States. Mr. Naruse operates a company that makes industrial materials, one of which is One Pedal. That’s an all-in-one pedal for controlling the gas and the brake to prevent accidents caused when drivers step in it by stepping on the wrong one. There’s an attachment on the right side of the floor pedal for acceleration, which drivers hit with the right side of their foot to move forward. Stepping on the floor still brakes the car.

The pedal’s been around for awhile — the old Transport Ministry conducted trials that demonstrated its safety. Mr. Naruse has custom-fitted nearly 200 cars in Japan with the device, but the major automakers don’t seem interested. Said Toyota, “Technicians have studied it, but we have no plans to adopt it now.” One complaint is that it’s more difficult to keep one’s foot against the gas pedal to maintain a constant speed than it is to downpress a pedal. Nevertheless, SAE plans to hold trials in Tamana with 70 drivers of all ages and foot sizes.

Hokkii rice burger

Tomakomai in Hokkaido has the largest haul of the surf clam — that’s the spisula solidissima for you shellfish enthusiasts — in Japan. They’ve got to eat them all somehow, so they’ve begun promoting a clam rice burger made with what’s called a hokkii, which is also the city’s “image character“. (The name isn’t derived from the hockey puck shape.) It was created by college students who liked the clam and made it for their school festival, and used rice for the bun instead of bread. City officials must have stopped by for a taste, because they adopted the idea and sold 1,600 at a three-day event last year. They then conducted trial tastings and questionnaires to get the perfect recipe, and shops around town began selling it in mid-December. There are several varieties with different condiments, but most sell for around JPY 400 yen, which is not a bad price. The idea is to get more people to come to Tomakomai.

Goya senbei

They’ve got as many goya in Kagoshima’s Minamiosumi-cho as they have surf clams in Tomakomai, so a local hot spring resort developed a way to incorporate them in senbei rice crackers. They slice and dice them and knead them into the batter. Reports say they give the crackers a slight bitter taste. That makes sense — the goya is also called the nigauri, which means bitter melon. Several groups in the city, including the hot spring resort and the municipal planning agency, created the snack as a way to use non-standard goya and gobo (yeah, that’s a vegetable) that can’t be sold on the market. They’re cooked by Yamato-ya, a Kagoshima City senbei company, and 40-gram bags are sold for JPY 315 yen. That’s a bit steep, but some of the proceeds go to local welfare services. Give them a call at 0994-24-5300 to see if they have any left.

Strawberry sake

Instead of clams or goya, Shimanto in Kochi has a strawberry surplus. That was the inspiration for a sake brewer in the city to combine the berries with their sake and create a liqueur with two varieties, one dry and one sweet. The employees even filled the 500-milliliter bottles by hand, and you’ve got to wonder if they had the temptation to sample some. There were 1,000 bottles of the sweet stuff and 2,000 of the dry type going for JPY 1,600 apiece. The idea is to sell it to “people who normally don’t drink sake”, which is code for young women. They’re even selling it outside of the prefecture, so if the idea of strawberry sake appeals to you, input 0880-34-4131 into your hand-held terminal and ask for some.

Extra credit

The more serious drinkers in Aira, Kagoshima, don’t fool around with fruity beverages, and demonstrated it by starting shochu study sessions last month. Some stalls specializing in that particular grog have been set up near the Kagoshima Chuo station, and the people who will operate the stalls attended three training sessions. One of them included lessons in the local dialect for dealing with customers. (Kagoshima-ben requires listeners to pay close attention, and even then you’re not going to get all of it, sober or sloshed. That includes their Kyushu neighbors.) The scholars also examined the traditional process for distilling it, listened to lectures on the origins of satsumaimo (a sweet potato variety) and how it came to be used in the local shochu, and visited the Shirakane brewers. Now that’s dedication for being a liquor store clerk. There’ll be 50 of them working in 25 shops at the stall complex.

Really high

If the last story didn’t convince you that Kagoshimanians are serious about shochu, this one will. They’ve just marketed a new brand called Uchudayori, or Space Bulletin, made with malted rice and yeast carried aboard the international space station Endeavor last May for 16 days. It was developed by researchers at Kagoshima University and the Kagoshima Prefecture Brewers Association. (The university has a special shochu and fermenting research institute for students, and I sniff a party school subtext.) There are 12 different varieties because 12 companies used the base materials to distill their own well-known products, including those made with satsumaimo and brown sugar. Those interested in getting spaced out can buy a set of 12 900-milliliter bottles for JPY 24,000 yen, which is reasonable considering the transportation costs for some of the ingredients. Sameshima Yoshihiro, the head of the research institute, says it has a better aroma than normal. No, he didn’t say it was “out of this world”.

This'll beam you up.

Exotic booze

Did that space travel bring back an alien life form? The shochu kingdom of Kagoshima is about to get its first locally brewed sake in 40 years. Hamada Shuzo of Ichikikushikino (try saying that after a couple of hits of shochu) announced they have started brewing the beverage. They’re the only sake brewery in the prefecture, and the first to go into the business since the last one shut down in 1970.

That's where they make it, you know.

Hamada Shuzo remodeled their shochu plant last year by adding facilities for producing 60 kiloliters of sake annually. An affiliated company used to make sake in Aichi until 1998, so they’ll blow the dust off the old notebooks and apply those accumulated techniques and expertise. A Shinto ceremony was held to receive the blessing of the divinities before they began fermentation with 20 kilograms of rice from other parts of Kyushu. (Kagoshima rice doesn’t work so well.) The company hopes to cook up 800 liters by March.

The company says Kagoshima’s higher temperatures — it’s Down South — make sake brewing difficult, and the shochu culture took root several hundred years ago. I have first-hand experience that Kagoshimanians drink shochu in situations where other Japanese drink sake, and it took about a week to recover. Statistics from the Tax Bureau support that anecdote. They say 36,767 kiloliters of shochu were consumed in the prefecture in 2010 compared to 1,379 for sake.

The company’s idea is to use sake brewing techniques for shochu product development. They might begin full scale production later, but the sake is now being brewed primarily for research. Didn’t I tell you these guys were serious? They’ve also got a restaurant/brewpub on the premises, and they hope it attracts customers who’ll also take a shine to their shochu. Sales in the restaurant begin in May, and in shops after that.

Build it and they will come

The slender, the fat, and the shapeless

Former sumo grand champion and now slimmed down stablemaster Takanohana announced he was starting a program to build sumo rings throughout the country to promote the appeal of sumo. The first will be in Shiiba-son, Miyazaki Prefecture. (Takanohana’s wife, the former newscaster Hanada Keiko, is a Miyazaki girl.) Mr. T believes that sumo helps build character, and he wants to see the rings restored at primary schools and other sites around the country. The Shiiba-son municipal government will contribute funds to the project and manage the ring once it’s built. The construction will be handled by the local Itsukushima Shinto shrine under the guidance of the Japan Sumo Association.

Mr. and Mrs. T sometimes visit a local juku that seems to be more of a character training institute than an academic enhancer. When they were in town to make the announcement about the sumo ring, they attended a lecture by the head of the juku on the Yamato spirit. (Yamato is the older name for the original ethnic group of Japan.) The lecture included this message:

Live as the cherry blossom, blooming vividly with full force and quickly falling from the branch.
We cannot see the color, shape, or size of the spirit, but a person’s spirit manifests in his way of life, deeds, and words.
There are three important things in the way of the rikishi and the way of sumo: form, greetings, and etiquette.

That old time religion is still good enough for plenty of Japanese, and not just old guys who drink shochu and watch sumo. This month, a team from Saga Kita High School in Saga City was one of two selected for the grand prize in an annual calligraphic arts competition in Nagano conducted for high schools nationwide. It was the 17th year the sponsoring organization held the event, and the 17th straight year Kita High School won the grand prize. Kita students also won 11 of the 65 awards in the individual division. Teams from 273 schools participated and submitted 15,420 works.

The Kita girls have been getting ready since October. They practiced every day after school until 7:30, and voluntarily give up their free Saturdays. Said second-year student Koga Misaki, the calligraphy club leader, “We encouraged each other while being aware of the heavy pressure of tradition, and I’m happy we achieved our goal.”

*****
And don’t forget Okinawa!

Corrupt

Corrupt: 1. orig., changed from a sound condition to an unsound one; spoiled; contaminated, rotten 2. deteriorated from the normal or standard; specif., a) morally unsound or debased; perverted; evil; depraved…c) containing alterations, errors, or admixtures of foreignisms; said of texts, languages, etc.
- Webster’s New World Dictionary

THE Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a panel consisting of 30 “university professors, lawyers, and journalists”, released its report this week on the response of the Japanese government and industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster last March.

The coverage of that report by some elements of the mass media, both in the Anglosphere and Japan, can only be described as corrupt.

The foundation’s founder, Funabashi Yoichi, is the former editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun. The New York Times’ Martin Fackler writes the following in his article on the release of the report:

“(Mr. Funabashi) said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the government’s own investigation into the accident, which were released in an interim report in December. A big difference involved one of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked nuclear plant.

“The government’s investigation sided with Tepco by saying that Mr. Kan, a former social activist who often clashed with Japan’s establishment, had simply misunderstood the company, which wanted to withdraw only a portion of its staff. Mr. Funabashi said his foundation’s investigators had interviewed most of the people involved — except executives at Tepco, which refused to cooperate — and found that the company had in fact said it wanted a total pullout.

“He credited Mr. Kan with making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon the plant.

“‘Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses,’ Mr. Funabashi said, ‘but his decision to storm into Tepco and demand that it not give up saved Japan.’”

Ah, so. Kan Naoto is the savior of Japan.

The AFP news agency report identifies Kitazawa Koichi as “the panel head” and contains the following passage:

“The panel said as the situation on Japan’s tsunami-wrecked coast worsened, Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) had wanted to abandon the plant and evacuate its workers.

“But the utility, which refused to co-operate with the study, was ordered to keep men on site by then prime minister Naoto Kan.

“Experts concluded that if the premier had not stuck to his guns, Fukushima would have spiralled further out of control, with catastrophic consequences.

“‘When the prime minister’s office was aware of the risk the country may not survive (the crisis)…TEPCO’s president (Masataka) Shimizu….frantically called’ to tell the premier he wanted his staff to leave the crippled nuclear reactor, panel head Koichi Kitazawa told a news conference.

“Kitazawa said Kan threatened to break up the powerful utility if the company insisted on pulling its men out.

“He said Kan’s refusal to bow to TEPCO’s demand had averted a worse crisis.

“Kan told Shimizu: ‘It’s impossible. If you withdraw staff, TEPCO will be demolished,’ according to Kitazawa.”

That last sentence is a mistranslation, perhaps deliberate, but we’ll get to that later.

“‘Consequently, it’s Mr Kan’s biggest contribution that the Fukushima 50 remained at the site,’ added Kitazawa, referring to dozens of operatives who worked to contain the accident and were feted as heroes.”

In their haste to set the agenda and disseminate their narrative, both the New York Times and AFP omitted some details.

For example, here is what Mr. Kitazawa actually said, from the original Japanese:

“(Mr. Kan) himself rushed into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters, which had requested that they be allowed to leave the site. In the end, 50 workers remained on the site. It is thought by some that this ultimately averted the worst-case scenario and was a great achievement. However, most of the excessive intervention on the site by the Kantei (i.e., Japan’s equivalent of the White House or 10 Downing St.), including the former prime minister’s involvement — down to the size of one of the batteries at the site — cannot be praised. In addition, the prime minister’s information disclosure was a failure and caused a sense of mistrust to spread among the people. We have no choice other than to say that overall, their response was a failure.”

(N.B.: The second use of the word failure was fugokaku, which has the sense of failing a school examination.)

Of the English-language reports that I read, only Reuters conveyed the panel’s conclusion that Mr. Kan was a failure, and then only on the second page of the website report I saw (The Chicago Tribune).

Fackler and the New York Times quotes Mr. Funabashi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. No Japanese media report I’ve seen — and I’ve read several — has quoted that statement. Of course they quote extensively from the report on the behavior of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, but the tone is quite different.

Some direct quotes from the report follow. In regard to the intervention of Mr. Kan and the Kantei:

“It is not clear that it was useful in preventing the spread of the damage, and it undeniably increased the risk of needless confusion and the further development of the accident.”

And:

“The prime minister and the Kantei command center fell into an abnormal state of tension and confusion.”

That allows you to put into context the breathless “reporting” in the West, such as this from AFP:

“A worst-case scenario sketched out by the Japanese government foresaw the end of Tokyo in a chain of nuclear explosions as the Fukushima crisis erupted, an independent panel said.

“Chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano told investigators: ‘I had this demonic scenario in my head’ that nuclear reactors could break down one after another. If that happens Tokyo will be finished’.

“Plans were drawn up for the mass evacuation of the capital as Edano — the government’s point man on the nuclear crisis — fretted that reactors all along the coast could go into meltdown and engulf the city of 13 million people.”

No excerpt of the official report I read contained the conclusion that Tokyo was in danger of being “finished”. They did say that Mr. Kan and Mr. Edano had lost their heads, however. Though the AFP calls Edano Yukio the government’s “point man”, it does not mention that Mr. Edano’s sole professional experience before becoming a politician was that of a lawyer specializing in the defense of labor union radicals.

The portions of the report the Anglosphere media omitted present a rather different picture of events. Such as this in regard to the venting of Reactor #1 on the night of 11 March and the morning of 12 March:

“At a minimum, it cannot be recognized that the decision of the Kantei, the order of the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and the prime minister’s demand were useful in promptly achieving the venting.”

In regard to the decision to insert seawater into the reactor on the evening of the 12th:

“The debate at the Kantei had no effect in the end, but if the Kantei’s (Kan’s) order to stop the insertion had been obeyed, it would have resulted in a dangerous situation with the possibility that the work would have been delayed.”

In regard to the insertion of seawater in Reactor #3 on the 13th:

“The Kantei expressed the opinion that fresh water should be preferred to seawater, and that opinion was conveyed from Tokyo Electric to (Fukushima plant manager) Yoshida….the switch to fresh water in the end brought about little or no improvement in conditions. The change in course had the possibility of needlessly exposing the workers to radiation. Not only did the Kantei’s instructions delay the work, there are suspicions that it increased the danger of failure of the water insertion into the reactor.”

There’s more:

“There are few examples in which the Kantei’s intervention into accident management on-site were an effective response to the accident. In most cases, it had absolutely no effect, or it increased the risk of worsening the situation due to needless confusion and stress.”

And:

“The risk involved in the leader of government intervening on-site in the response to the nuclear disaster should be an important lesson from the Fukushima accident to be shared by all.”

And:

“The Kantei’s initial response after the Fukushima accident was a series of crises. During the systemically unexpected developments, the core (of those responding) consisted of a handful of politicians without specialized knowledge or experience. Their grandstanding response continued as the crisis unfolded. It cannot be said that (this response) was at all sophisticated. Rather, this was immature and slapdash crisis management.”

Remember, these are direct quotes from the report.

On Mr. Kan specifically:

“The excessive involvement and intervention under Kantei leadership was criticized for its micromanagement. The Prime Minister was deeply involved in accident management, and it is undeniable that he was negligent in providing sufficient attention to overall crisis management.”

But wait: Martin Fackler and the New York Times quoted Funabashi Yoichi as saying that Kan Naoto saved Japan. In fact, Fackler also wrote:

“Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected public intellectuals.”

Keep in mind which newspaper that respected public intellectual edited as you read the following website commentary by Abiru Rui of the Sankei Shimbun. Mr. Abiru begins by noting that every major Japanese newspaper extensively quoted the report’s criticisms of Mr. Kan and used that criticism for their headlines.

Except one.

He explains the reason for that:

“Though all of the newspapers accurately reported the private sector panel’s severe criticism of Mr. Kan and the Kantei, the Asahi did not include any of these problems in its headlines. The text of the articles does not refer to them at all. The newspaper ignored them completely. This can only be said to be abnormal.

“The Asahi (previously) ran a series of articles titled The Trap of Prometheus. They praised Mr. Kan to an unbelievable degree, and continued to beautify his behavior to the extent it sets one’s teeth on edge…Of course, the Sankei will insist on its own viewpoint, and it can be understood that the Asahi will do the same. But to go to this extent to avoid writing about Mr. Kan’s problems, and not informing its readers of the facts, is to betray its subscribers.

“The articles in The Trap of Prometheus are written as if Mr. Kan’s behavior was calm and collected from start to finish, but the panel’s report says that he panicked. Were the circumstances inconvenient for them? In any event, (the articles in) The Trap of Prometheus had the appearance of thoroughness — they even captioned a photograph of a sandal of Terada Manabu, one of the prime minister’s aides.

“The chairman of the group that conducted this investigation was the Asahi’s former editor in chief, Funabashi Yoichi. It seems as if they didn’t care what anyone unconnected with the company had to say. Rather, it was a case of “We will convey the Asahi’s strong determination and resolve to protect Mr. Kan.”

Do I need to mention that the New York Times, the Asahi Shimbun, and Kan Naoto share the same political philosophy?

The sober and steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state

You also won’t read that when Kan Naoto “ordered” the Tokyo Electric Power officials to keep personnel on the site, he had no authority to issue an order to them, as a private-sector company, to do anything at all. There are only glancing references to his threat to dismantle the company if they didn’t listen to him (which he also has no authority to do). His threat to break up the utility was the mistranslated part of the AFP piece.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of information that you won’t read in these accounts — That Mr. Kan did order the Self-Defense Forces to leave the site when he thought it was too dangerous. (Government employees should be saved, but private-sector employees should be sacrificed?)…That Mr. Kan told Tokyo Electric that employees “60 years old or older” could be sent to the site (Younger employees should be saved, but older employees should be sacrificed?)…That it is widely suspected Mr. Kan promised to save Tokyo Electric if the utility started contributing to his Democratic Party instead of the opposition LDP.

The Japanese mass media — other than the Asahi — didn’t miss any of that.

It is curious. Many news media consumers in the Anglosphere would never take at face value anything the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox News, or the BBC had to say about Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or the EU, to cite a few of many examples.

Yet they think that turning the cyberpage somehow waves a magic wand of objectivity and credibility over the cesspool. For some reason, the readers swallow it whole and start “retweeting” and “liking” and getting all social media about everything. You know — “having their say”.

More than 60 years ago, former U.S. President Harry Truman said that he felt sorry for the average citizen who wakes up in the morning, reads the newspaper, and thereby thinks he knows something of what is happening in the world.

Sixty years and many revelations later, however, I am not inclined to be so generous.

It is no longer possible to be sympathetic to people who accept without reservation the work of those who are so clearly corrupt.

Afterwords:

Tokyo Electric Power officials chose not to be interviewed by the panel. The panel thinks there is insufficient evidence for the utility’s claim that it did not intend to fully withdraw from Fukushima. While agreeing that the panel could very well be correct, some people in Japan are now wondering if that conclusion was influenced by the statements of Mr. Kan and other government officials, who might have gotten carried away by their panic and mistrust of the utility. They are even finding some evidence to suggest that might have been the case. But this post is long enough already…

As always, links are only for the legit. Certainly not for the corrupt.

UPDATE: The Asahi English edition finally has an article on line that is critical of Mr. Kan and his government’s response. Some of the Japanese to English translation is amusing. For example:

“He cannot be given a passing grade from the overall perspective of his handling of the crisis,” Kitazawa said.

As I noted above, Mr. Kitazawa clearly said “He failed”.

Also:

The report quotes Kan as saying: “How large is the battery that you need? What are the dimensions? Weight? Can it be transported by helicopter?”

One participant who overheard the exchange told the investigative committee: “I became somewhat frightened when I thought about whether it was good for the nation to have the prime minister looking into such details.”

“Somewhat frightened”, eh? The original was zotto shita. That means “I shuddered to think that…” It can even be rendered in more intense language, such as “It made my flesh crawl”, “I was horrified to hear”, or “It made my blood run cold”.

But in Asahiworld, that’s “somewhat frightened”.

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The Kobot

WHEN the Segway hit the market 10 years ago next week, some people viewed it as a revolutionary product with the transformational potential of the Internet. Rather than transforming anything, however, after a decade down the road the device has become a SWPL toy for a certain type of status-seeking urbanite who wants to differentiate himself from the bicycle crowd. They’re the same sort of folks who go out of their way to pay through the nose for a mug of designer coffee at a trendy shop rather than a regular cup of Joe.

The adult two-wheeler hasn’t even got that far in Japan, where only about a thousand have been sold. Here, they’re used exclusively by corporate employees on larger tracts of private property, such as production plants or theme parks. The Nagasaki resort Huis ten Bosch, for example, has 10 of them.

Those looking for an intermediate alternative to the automobile and the bicycle might be interested in test driving a new transportation device jointly developed by the robot manufacturer tmsuk (yes, that’s how they spell it) and pharmaceutical/industrial equipment manufacturer Kyowa. It’s called the Kobot, and they’re touting it as the next-generation electric personal vehicle. The public will get a chance to see it up close for the first time when it’s exhibited in this year’s Tokyo Motor Show, which opens in the first week of December.

The two companies have a vision for the Kobot similar to that people once had for the Segway. They see it as a car that will change the shape of the future – the shape of vehicles, the shape of transportation, and the relationship between people and their cars. Indeed, the car itself is capable of changing shape. One of the three models can be folded in a manner similar to a cellphone to reduce its size by about 25% for storage.

As you can see from the photo, it is compact and shaped somewhat like a bean, or at least that’s what the promo material says. At present, there are two one-person models and one two-person model. Kyowa/tmsuk are projecting speeds of 45-80 kilometers per hour, and they’re working to give it the capability of traveling for up to 100 kilometers on one charge.

In addition to use by a single owner, the developers anticipate the increasing popularity in Japan of car-sharing schemes in condos and other urban neighborhoods will create another niche for the vehicle. If things fall into place, it could be commercialized and placed on the market next fall.

If that happens, perhaps they could use this as a tip for their TV ads.

Small beer for small government in Japan

THIS summer, the Diet passed legislation that included special measures for power companies to purchase renewable energy. Here are some comments from Ikeda Nobuo.

*****
(The passage) was very welcome if only because the prime minister (Kan) will now resign, but I was concerned with the self-congratulation from Kono Taro, Seko Hiroshige (both LDP), and others who declared this to be an epochal event. I’m in basic agreement with their (classical) liberal policies, but this bill is in contradiction to that philosophy.

The government’s feed-in tariff regulating the purchase price of power is a measure beloved by the European social democratic parties. Even Bill Gates has pointed out that it will cause the energy industry to degenerate into a heavily subsidized sector.

That’s fine if all you’re thinking about is getting your hands on plenty of subsidy money. It’s even clever. A lot of subsidies are being distributed, even though it isn’t economically rational. In fact, 90% of the subsidies are allocated to building facilities. The same is true for Europe and the United States. Very little is allocated to R&D.

The renewable energy bill anticipates setting the purchase price below JPY 20/kWh. For solar power, this is incompatible with profitability. In a different context, the price of JPY 40 for 20 years that Son Masayoshi dreams of isn’t possible. He’s very bright, so he’s already begun shifting his interest to natural gas. Selling the inferior electric power generated by inexpensive solar cells will also be regulated, so making a killing will be out of the question. In the end, nothing will result from the renewable energy bill.

Also, Matsuda Kota (Your Party) introduced his bill for a national referendum on nuclear power. The reason these Diet members, seen by the public at large as reformers, are so enthusiastic about the ill-defined idea of reducing reliance on nuclear energy is that it is a buzzword accepted by the public. They lack a strong electoral base, so policy is their only road to popularity. “Eco” is the perfect image strategy.

Of course, gaining popularity through policy is preferable to the LDP political style of winning elections by spreading benefits to local supporters, but in the end, these MPs have become mass media zokugiin. (N.B.: That term is usually applied to MPs who represent the vested interests of individual ministries.) Their objective is to win the acclaim of mass media, particularly television. Yamamoto Ichita (LDP), a key member of the ruling/opposition party council that worked out the legislation, is also one of the principal members of the Diet members’ group supporting special designation for newspapers — from which he receives political contributions.

The ones beyond redemption are the members of the generation following the current baby boomers. There seems to be a consensus for small government among that generation, but many of them make an exception for regulating the economy for energy and environmental policies. That will exacerbate the structurally high costs of the Japanese economy and pass the bill on to future generations. When will they realize that this is just as bad as the Democratic Party’s pork barrel social welfare schemes?

(end translation)

Afterwords:

Ikeda Nobuo didn’t like the bill, but the Japanese branch of the World Wildlife Federation was thrilled about it.

Matsuda Kota was the man who brought Starbucks to Japan, got rich, sold his stake in the business, and got elected to the upper house last year as a Your Party PR candidate. I sometimes follow his Twitter account. He’s intelligent and energetic, but he also really needs someone to tell him to put a lid on it every once in a while.

Prof. Ikeda identifies Kono Taro as a classical liberal, and Mr. Kono identifies himself as an advocate for small government. I wonder. Among his other dicey ideas, Mr. Kono supports ending foreign aid and replacing it with an international tax on financial transactions. The revenue would be given to some undefined international organization to dispense for development purposes.

Regardless of the merits or demerits of that idea, if Mr. Kono thinks that’s classical liberalism or small government, his compass is broken. Either he’s trying to fool us, or he’s already fooled himself.

Plankton picture book

WHAT other country’s knowledge and appreciation of marine life can match that of Japan on a national scale? Sushi and sashimi have become international cuisine, they’ve made seaweed of all sorts palatable and its cultivation quite profitable, they’ve prepared the potentially poisonous fugu as a dish for gastronomes for centuries, the appreciation of carp and their breeding is an elegant pursuit, carp streamers are part of the national culture, and their expertise on the best ways to eat whale and dolphin drive some people to spittle-flinging rages.

They also know a thing or two about plankton.

Plankton can be small enough to be measured in nano-units (one-billionth of a meter) or as big as a whale. Those that breed by absorbing carbon and phosphorus are classified as flora, while those that feed on the flora plankton are classified as fauna. When some types of plankton reproduce abnormally, they can change the color of the sea water. Those are the buggers responsible for red tides, which kill fish by reducing the oxygen supply in the water.

The Yuu Microlife Museum in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi, the country’s only facility specializing in marine microorganism research, published this year an illustrated encyclopedia of plankton that has generated a surprising response for a work of this type. They intended for it be of interest both to the general public as well as the specialist, and they seem to have succeeded. It’s easy to carry around and has many color photographs of plankton for quick recognition, including those that cause the red tides. Local government employees responsible for measuring sea water purity for the early detection of red tides now consider it an indispensable reference.

The 205-page book on A5-sized paper is an updated version of a similar book for the plankton of the Seto Inland Sea, which the museum published at the end of 2008. Researchers from the Fisheries Research Agency in Yokohama helped the museum put it together to present the primary 172 species of plankton inhabiting the seas around Japan.

For the hydrospace enthusiasts, there are color microscope photographs of the plankton and charts enabling the identification of species by their characteristics, including size and the presence or absence of tentacles and legs. There’s a companion DVD showing video of the plankton floating in the sea.

How often is a scientific reference book appreciated by children, research scientists, and commercial interests? This seems to be one. The museum published 2,000 copies in January, and the first print run has already sold out. Demand is such that they printed 2,000 more. Apart from the researchers and university libraries who would normally be expected to buy the book, it’s also popular among local government employees and people who just enjoy flipping through the photos.

The Yamaguchi Prefecture Maritime Research Center has issued the book to all four of its branch offices. Their employees are rotated once every two or three years, and some whose job it is to conduct periodic seawater inspections find it difficult to distinguish the different plankton species. Some were willing to drive two hours to the center just to refer to the book.

The center has also suggested that the firms breeding fish in seawater farms use the book as a reference for identifying harmful plankton and thereby minimizing losses.

If a plankton picture book seems to be just the thing for your home library, or, with Christmas on the way, you want to give a thoughtful gift to the marine biologist in your family, call the museum at 0827-62-0160 and get ready to send them JPY 2,520.

*****
Put it on the shelf next to the Dialogues.

What a dump!

IF you’ve got a world-class load of ashes to be hauled, and you’re anywhere near Komatsu in Ishikawa, you might want to take quick detour to see the world’s largest dump truck. It’s on display there at a facility built on the site of a former plant.

The world-class dumpster is the 930E model built by the Komatsu company’s American subsidiary, and it’s used for mining operations in Chile. It’s 8.6 meters wide, 15.6 meters long, and 7.3 meters high. The company says it can handle a load of about 300 tons. To put that in terms we can all relate to, Komatsu said that 7,400 primary school students could fit on the bed at the same time.

No, they didn’t round up all those kids for the facility’s opening ceremony earlier this year, but they did bring in some local grade schoolers to help. They were admitted for free and allowed to take turns sitting in the driver’s seat. Anyone else who comes by can take advantage of the same deal.

According to Komatsu, there’s more there than just one motherbruiser of a truck. They also use the site as a training facility and for other exhibitions.

Now admit it — wouldn’t you love to jump in the cab? I’d also love to start up the engine, mash whatever they’ve got for a clutch, and take it for a test drive/dump, but I’m sure Komatsu’s kindness or patience doesn’t extend that far for people who aren’t hauling a load out of a Chilean mine.

*****
Speaking of dump trucks, here’s a tag team match with the famed Dump Matsumoto. She’s the one who has bleached hair, is 5’4″, and weighs 220 lbs.

Letter bombs (21): What we have here is a failure to communicate

IT MUST BE exasperating for the self-regarding credentialed elites of politics and journalism to have to ask the approval of that recalcitrant, slope-browed mob of social inferiors — i.e., the public — once they’ve reached a consensus on how to make the world safe for social democracy and everything else that is Good and True.

European voters have rejected in at least eight national referendums measures related to EU integration, including the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties and the use of the Euro itself. The European elites’ SOP for dealing with the churlish ingrates is to make a few concessions, twist more than a few arms in the government in question, and make the people vote again until they get it right.

They’ve even lashed logic to a bench and tortured it to explain why taking any issue to the people is a bad idea. Here’s Britain’s Lord Patten (AKA Chris) in a 2003 interview with David Frost while serving as EU Commissioner for External Affairs:

I think referendums are awful…I think referendums are fundamentally anti-democratic in our system and I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. On the whole, governments only concede them when governments are weak.

Really, what is all this business about allowing the people a voice in their own governance anyway? They’d just make a mess of everything. The most recent example is the German Bundestag’s approval of a euro bailout fund. Public opinion polls show that roughly 82% of Germans opposed the bailout, but the measure passed the German legislature with roughly 84% of the delegates voting in favor.

Most of the media courtiers contributed to the cause by concealing that information (assuming they even knew). Indeed, the first sentence of the Huffington Post report is revealing:

Germany kept alive hopes that the 17-nation euro currency can survive the sprawling debt crisis when lawmakers in Europe’s largest economy voted overwhelmingly on Thursday in favor of expanding the powers of the eurozone’s bailout fund.

Keepin’ hope alive! Little did Jesse Jackson know that the EU and its supporters would commandeer his slogan after all these years!

There was no room in the reports to mention, of course, the growing apprehension that it would be difficult to keep the regional and global economies alive if the euro is kept on life support.

The same phenomenon is just as easy to spot in Japan as in the West — if not easier. The Finance Ministry has succeeded in neutering the anti-tax elements of the Democratic Party government and steering the ship of state in the direction of large tax increases. They also bullied and cajoled the local media courtiers into serving as their outsourced PR wing, and most of the national newspapers have written editorials blithely declaring, without explaining, that it is in the people’s interest to give the government more of their money.

The public bought the line at first, perhaps because everyone knows the Tohoku reconstruction/recovery will be expensive, but then the government and the bureaucrats seem to have gone a bridge too far. It didn’t take long for people to realize that the Noda government has become Kasumigaseki’s wind-up doll, and that there are other ways to foot the bill for Tohoku other than through taxes. There’s been a sharp reversal in polling numbers as a result.

It took only one month for the public to flip. Respondents in the most recent Kyodo poll were opposed to new taxes for reconstruction by 50.5% to 46.2%. The opposition was 52% to 39% in the Nikkei/TV Tokyo poll, and 58% to 39% in the Mainichi survey. Just a month ago, the Nikkei/TV Tokyo poll had the public supporting a tax increase by 63% to 28%.

If you want a prediction on what will eventually happen in the Diet, however, the Bundestag vote is probably a leading indicator.

More fascinating are the recent decisions by the voters given a chance to express their opinion on the issue of maintaining nuclear power, still just seven months after the nuclear accident at Fukushima. It was natural for public opposition to emerge after the accident, just as it is natural to expect the opposition to wane with the passage of time. The half-life of that opposition might be shorter than people expected, however.

There was a report on Sunday that traces of plutonium have been found in the soil 40 kilometers from the Fukushima plant. Here’s how the Financial Times (which requires registration) chose to present it. Notice the last clause:

Small amounts of plutonium believed to have escaped from Japan’s tsunami-crippled nuclear plant have been detected in soil more than 40km away, say government researchers, a finding that will fuel already widespread fears about radiation risk.

But as a link sent by Andrew in Ezo shows, the widespread fears of some voters just won’t be fueled again. Here’s a report of an election in Hokkaido held on the same day the FT article appeared:

The mayor of Iwanai town, Hokkaido, an advocate of restarting idled reactors at a nearby nuclear power plant, was reelected Sunday with a landslide victory over an antinuclear challenger.

When they say landslide, they mean that the winner’s vote was more than three times higher than that of the loser.

Some might argue that the residents of Iwanai were concerned about the economic effect of a plant shutdown. That might well be true, but since they’re only 10 kilometers from the facility, it can also be argued that they’re unconcerned about the possibility of any fallout from a nuclear disaster.

The Mainichi article concludes:

The election came a week after the reelection of the mayor of Kaminoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, an advocate of Chugoku Electric Power Co.’s plan to build a nuclear power plant, who also beat an antinuclear challenger.

What we have here is a worldwide failure to communicate.

The elites don’t listen to the people, and the people tuned out the elites long ago.

Afterwords:

The polls also showed a drop in the rate of support for the Noda Cabinet by about 10 percentage points over the last month, though the support is still more than 50%. It’s widely assumed that reflects public dissatisfaction with their tax policies, though the standard reversion to the mean is probably a factor as well.

Most interesting were the results for the underlying individual questions. Broken down, Mr. Noda polled more than 50% only on the question of whether people had a favorable view of him as a person. He was below 50% for every other question, such as leadership ability (roughly 39%). In other words, people support the Noda Cabinet because they are disposed to like him, not what he wants to do or what they think he is capable of doing.

*****
Once upon a time, they used to ask what the simple folk do. The solution for the modern throne folk seems to be to ignore them altogether.

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Steam cleaning

TAKING the waters at a hot spring is good for what ails you. Among the benefits are invigorated blood circulation, increased metabolism, and normalized endocrine function. With natural hot springs throughout the archipelago, the Japanese have known about and availed themselves of these properties for more than a millennium.

Now the Floricultural Group in the Agricultural Research Division of Oita Prefecture’s Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries Research Center in Beppu, the country’s unofficial spa capital, have discovered that hot springs are good for flora as well as fauna. Specifically, they’ve developed a way to use the steam from hot springs to disinfect the soil and the materials used for growing beds.

Here’s how the system works. They start with a 1.6-square-meter steam vat surrounded by a 60 centimeter-high block wall. The hot spring steam is brought up from underneath, and the entire apparatus is covered with a sheet during the sterilization period. At 120º C, it takes 30 minutes to give the treatment to pots or seedbeds and two or three hours to soil.

The research center says this method has several advantages to the chemical method currently used. It sterilizes both the surface and the interior. The materials can be used as soon as they cool, whereas the use of chemicals requires aeration after the process to release any trapped gases. In addition to its effectiveness, it’s environmentally friendly and labor efficient. The use of the system has gradually been growing in the prefecture, and 50 farmers have adopted it in the past year. Limiting its diffusion, however, is the cost of the devices used to create the steam and the higher fuel costs.

Who knows — if they ever get those problems ironed out, it might result in the emergence of an agri-spa industry in Oita!

*****
Speaking of interesting devices, those inspired goofballs at Maywa Denki have created another new musical instrument. Polyrhythmic!

Point and counterpoint

OE Kenzaburo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, has launched a petition drive to end the use of nuclear power in Japan.

During a news conference to publicize the petition, he said:

Restoring economic life is indeed an urgent issue, but we are extremely apprehensive at the expression of opinion that holds it is necessary to resume the operation of the nuclear power plants. Is it the case that we should give priority to economic activity (and ignore) the danger to life?

In response, Prof. Ikeda Nobuo wrote:

If he is giving priority to life rather than economic activity, why doesn’t Mr. Oe call for the prohibition of automobiles? Not a single person has died from the radiation emitted from the Fukushima accident, but automobiles will kill 5,000 people a year (in Japan). I would like to see him start a movement to ban all automobiles based on the prestige from his Nobel Prize and the principle that we should not be in thrall to economic rationality and productivity.

Further, more than 110,000 people die every year from smoking. Health and Welfare Minister Komiyama Yoko has called for a target price of JPY 700 for a pack of cigarettes, but the Finance Ministry is opposed. How about supporting the Health Minister rather than create a commotion about nuclear energy, which has caused little real damage?

This is probably beyond the capability of Mr. Oe to understand, but the world operates on the tradeoff between the economy and life. Eliminating all risk would mean prohibiting automobiles and airplanes and alcohol and cigarettes. We would also have to stop all power generation using coal and oil….

…The people who hobbled postwar Japan were the perennial opposition that championed an emotionalized sense of justice. They presented no plan for securing energy to replace the nuclear power they want to abandon. That is a mistake, and Mr. Kan Naoto gave us a very good idea of how frightening that should be if they were to take power.

Oe Kenzaburo

The figure of annual automobile fatalities he provides, by the way, is the minimum. Some years the number approaches twice that amount. Prof. Ikeda also points out that support for Mr. Oe’s position in Japan is concentrated among the elderly, which is an underlying point in the last paragraph.

It is not by coincidence that the generation of people such as Mr. Noda, at age 54, and Abe Shinzo, about to turn 57, are more comfortable with both nuclear power and the responsibility for handling national defense. The generation whose growth was stunted by postwar attitudes is passing from the scene. That should lead to “the end of the postwar regime” that Mr. Abe called for.

Finally, the Oe initiative will be given significant coverage by the media (for a day, anyway) because he is a Nobel laureate, but that will cut very little ice in Japan itself. The Japanese are already familiar with his political and social ideas.

The title of Prof. Ikeda’s blog post was “Sayonara, Oe Kenzaburo”.

Addendum:

Here are some additional facts worth noting about cigarettes and taxes.

* The tax was raised by JPY 3.5 per cigarette just last October.

* The idea of this tax is to earmark the revenue for recovery expenditures.

* Ms. Komiyama is an officer of a multi-party group of Diet members that aims to sharply limit smoking.

* Japan Tobacco Inc. is the company that sells cigarettes in Japan.

* By law, 50% of JT stock must be held by the government.

* The Finance Ministry has jurisdiction over JT and the stock owned by the government.

* Three former Finance Ministry bureaucrats are now officers of JT. That is exactly what people mean when they talk about amakudari.

* Also criticizing the cigarette tax proposal were Chief Cabinet Secretary Fujimura Osamu and — wait for it — Reform Minister Ren Ho. The Finance Ministry seconds bureaucrats as senior aides to both of those ministries.

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Ichigen koji (52)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

The discussion in the style of “modern thought” that has emerged after the nuclear power plant accident is of great interest because it reveals the degeneration of the arena for critical debate in Japan. There’s the agitation of Karatani Kojin, who wants to exterminate capitalism and nuclear power simultaneously; Uchida Tatsuru, who calls for the immediate suspension of all nuclear power generation and the decommissioning of the reactors; Nakazawa Shin’ichi, who wants to end both nuclear and thermal power generation and live by photosynthesis, and Osawa Masachi, who characterizes the issue of nuclear power as a choice between “our children or our air conditioners”. They’re all very amusing as comic monologues.

I read a new book on this subject by Yamamoto Yoshitaka, the author of The Cultural Revolution of the 16th Century. I was interested in how he viewed nuclear power from the perspective of technography. Unfortunately, however, I put it on my list of Books That Must Not Be Read. The measured tone of an academic treatise is absent. It denounces the “self-justifications of the Nuclear Power Village” (the term some apply to the lobby in Japan consisting of the industries that use nuclear power, power companies, the companies that build the plants, the governmental oversight agencies, university researchers supporting nuclear power, the mass media, and trade journals). He also hurls invective at the explanations of the power companies, asking if they were of sound mind when they wrote them. It puts one in mind of the Zenkyoto (The All-Campus Joint Struggle) student movement of the 1960s.

- Ikeda Nobuo, university professor, author, and blogger

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Steam rising in Sakurajima

AFTER enjoying a visit to Kagoshima City in the southern prefecture of Kagoshima shortly after I got married, I asked my wife (who didn’t go on the trip) what she thought about moving there. She wouldn’t hear of it, for a sensible reason. The active volcano of Sakurajima in Kagoshima Bay means that the residents have to live with the semi-constant presence of volcanic ash. As she put it, “It’s impossible to hang laundry outside.”

She wasn’t exaggerating, either.

The volcano erupted twice yesterday, bringing to 550 the number of eruptions so far this year. That’s already the second-highest total recorded since the Kagoshima Meteorological Observatory began keeping track in October 1955, when the volcano became more active. The record is 896 times set last year, when 550 eruptions were recorded by 20 June.

Kyoto University maintains the Sakurajima Volcano Research Center as part of its Disaster Prevention Research Institute. Said Prof. Iguchi Masato:

The ground deformation that accompanies the magma influx has been slight, but a large amount of magma has accumulated underneath the Aira caldera (where Sakurajima is located). We must closely monitor trends in the future.

Indeed they should. Sakurajima blew its top in 1914 after lying dormant for more than 100 years, and it was the largest volcanic eruption in the country in the 20th century. There was so much lava flow the island of Sakurajima became linked to the city by land, turning itself into the tip of a small peninsula. The number of fatalities was limited because several large earthquakes had preceded the eruption, and most Kagoshimanians deemed it best to go somewhere else for a while. Here’s a post-eruption photo that ran in the London Illustrated News.

The eruption was also the inspiration for The Wrath of the Gods, a silent movie made the same year with a young Sessue Hayakawa.

It will be more difficult now for the 600,000+ city residents to evacuate than it was almost a century ago, but the municipal government does hold evacuation drills and has built shelters.

One of the common themes of the books I read about Japan when I became interested in the country is that the Japanese have a more highly developed awareness of natural disasters than do people elsewhere. As we’ve seen already this year, there’s a good reason for that.

Afterwords:

The folks in Kagoshima prefer shochu to sake when they want to work up a head of steam, and people outside the prefecture associate the Shiranami brand with the area. It’s only anecdote and not data, but every time I’ve been to Kagoshima I’ve seen more people drinking a brand called Sakurajima. People who live in Japan and are capable of navigating in Japanese can order it online.

Here’s a Japanese TV report from three years ago on the volcano and the local attitude toward the eruptions. The two older women and the uniformed man in the interview say it doesn’t bother them a bit. They’re followed by a younger man who explains that people have been living with it for 50 years. He adds that roofs are built over graves to prevent the ash from falling on the gravestones. (Regular washing of gravestones is part of the culture.) There’s also an excerpt from a local weather report that includes the wind direction in the area near the volcano.

And here are excerpts from the film The Wrath of the Gods, demonstrating that Hollywood ain’t changed a whit from a century ago.

Ichigen koji (46)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

An article titled “What to Do about Nuclear Energy” appeared in the Business section of this morning’s Asahi Shimbun (17 August). It cited seven experts ranging from Sawa Akihiro to Iida Tetsunari, who were generally in agreement that natural gas should be used to offset the loss of nuclear power. The article did not cite anyone with the opinion that “nuclear power should be eliminated without thinking whether it’s possible or not”, which the Asahi has called for in an editorial…It is interesting that everyone in the Asahi’s Business section is a realist, while those on the paper’s editorial board hysterically insist on the end of nuclear power.

- University professor and author Ikeda Nobuo, in a blog post titled “The End of the Nuclear Power Hysteria”

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