Kurashi - News From Japan

According to The Inquirer , The United Nations Commission on Human Rights is backing the Philippine campaign against international milk formula companies. These are the companies that sell so-called infant formula (ever wondered what that is really made of?) and spend massive amounts on advertising, to get young mothers to buy the stuff. Jean Ziegler, the commission’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has written to congratulate the Philippine government’s effort in the face of “increasing internal pressures.” She cited the revised implementing rules and regulations of the new Milk Code, which has been under attack from the US Chamber of Commerce (pdf) and foreign companies, such as Wyeth and Nestlé. Baby Milk Action , the NGO supporting breast feeding, also has updates on the murder of Assistant Solicitor General Nestor J. Ballocillo, the lawyer who worked on introducing the breast feeding code in the Philippines. Photos from a demonstration and a press release can be found he...

Japan for Sustainability makes really great websites, also for kids. Their latest deals with food (one of my favourite topics!) so of course I'm happy to share it with you: Kids, create your future Let me know if it is useful - if you are a teacher, for example, or if you have kids or grandchildren :)

Mainichi says Japan's Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa has apologized for calling women "birth-giving machines." He now thinks the description was "too uncivil," and has retracted the remarks. Yanagisawa made the gaffe while giving a speech on Japan's declining birthrate on Saturday. His quirky comment was also picked up by the BBC . Update: Mizuho Fukushima, leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party, called Sunday for Yanagisawa to step down. "I demand the resignation of the welfare minister because he made awful remarks that he should have never made," she said. Fukushima is currently the only female leader among the major parties. She told The Asahi Shimbun that women are not merely machines for producing future sources of revenue for the pension program. "Yanagisawa's remarks were tantamount to telling women to give birth for the nation," Fukushima said. Yukio Hatoyama, secretary-general of the main oppo...

This is a great clip with a full orchestra performing John Cage's famous piece called 4'33'' . I had never actually heard it (or seen it) so this YouTube video made me very happy. It is stunning. BBC Four is ecstatic at the end! John Cage put his Zen Buddhist beliefs into practice through music. His favorite Japanese Zen Buddhist saying was Nichi nichi kore ko nichi -Every day is a good day. Cage’s discovery of Taoism and ultimately Zen Buddhism, introduced to him by the Japanese scholar DT Suzuki, had a great effect on him. Wikipedia has more details. Cage visited Japan several times, to meet DT Suzuki, and his An Autobiographical Statement was written for the Inamori Foundation and delivered in Kyoto as a commemorative lecture when he received the Kyoto Prize in November 1989. PBS made a documentary about John Cage with clips as part of its American Masters series. Enjoy the silence.

NHK, Japan's broadcasting corporation, is putting a series of videos about the ongoing Tuna conference in Kobe on its website. Click on the players at the NHK Feature column. Update: IHT says a plan to slow the decline in tuna catches was adopted on Friday, while NHK notes that the plan is non-binding. Was that the best they could do? Kobe Tuna Meeting previous

I am following the news from the tuna meeting in Kobe. Kyodo reports that they will agree to evaluate the world's five tuna conservation bodies. Five different systems? No wonder tuna stocks are diminishing: As the meeting ran into a second day, the five bodies, gathering together for the first time, studied the differences in their historical backgrounds and past achievements in ensuring the sustainable use of the world's tuna stocks, which have increasingly fallen prey to overfishing. Reuters has better reporting, quoting WWF officials who called the gathering an important first step but said regulators needed to set quotas based on scientific data and combat illegal fishing: "For the first time, there's a general agreement by the governments that something significant has to be done," said Alistair Graham, High Seas Advisor for WWF International. "One of the key decisions they have to make is to stop ignoring scientific data and to put in place catch lim...

Kansai Telecasting Corp. (KTV) on Sunday night aired an apology for a program that falsely claimed natto, fermented soybeans, helps people lose weight, according to Mainichi : KTV's show, "Hakkutsu! Aru Aru Daijiten II," was aired on Jan. 7 and promoted the health benefits of eating natto. In a bid to show natto's potential to help people lose weight, the program used photographs of people who were actually not on a natto diet. It also fabricated some of comments from a professor in the United States. Fictitious data were also aired during the program. "We regret that it betrayed viewers' trust in us," an announcer said during the special apology aired on Sunday night. Obviously, natto producers are rather miffed ... Reuters takes the entire affair very seriously, and listed the news on its "World Crises" page!

Herbert Blomstedt was born in the USA to Swedish parents. He attended the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Uppsala University and studied contemporary music at Darmstadt and Baroque music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, also continuing his conducting studies with Igor Markevitch in Salzburg, and with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center. Since 1986, he is Honorary Conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra here in Tokyo, and you often see him on TV in Japan. The history of the NHK Symphony Orchestra goes all the way back to the New Symphony Orchestra, Japan’s first professional orchestra, established on October 5, 1926. Its name was changed to Japan Symphony Orchestra, and the orchestra has received full financial support from NHK, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, since 1951. For the 2007 calendar , you will find other great conductors, such as Charles Dutoit, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Matthias Bamert, Lawrence Foster, Pascal Rophé, Yuri Simonov, as well as Ja...

Members of an animal rights group kiss as part of an event to draw attention to health problems posed by eating meat. And apparently that is French for, "Vegetarians are better lovers." Nice.

A toxic haze enveloped the Korean Peninsula on Wednesday after industrial pollutants from China accumulated in the sky due to high temperatures and weak winds, says Chosun Ilbo . According to South Korea's Environment Ministry, the pollutants began blowing in from China on Monday to pervade the sky over the entire peninsula: Fine dust density in Songpa-gu, Seoul soared from 42 ㎍/㎥ on Jan. 13 to 189 ㎍/㎥ on Wednesday. The environmental standard is less than 100 ㎍/㎥ daily average. That morning, Bangi-dong at one stage saw 257㎍/㎥, while Nonhyon-dong in Incheon saw 323 ㎍/㎥. The ministry advised the sick and elderly to stay indoors if the daily average density exceeds 200 ㎍/㎥, and everyone to refrain from outdoor activities if the density exceeds 300 ㎍/㎥. The satellite image is striking and I hope it makes people think about their lifestyles. As more and more products are produced in China, this problem will get worse. Our consumption habits are the source of this, and lets not blame any...

Tests have confirmed that bird flu detected in chickens in southern Japan was the virulent H5N1 strain, according to the Japanese Agricultural Ministry. About 4,000 chickens died last week at a farm in Kiyotake town in Miyazaki prefecture. On Tuesday, further tests by the National Institute of Animal Health in Tsukuba identified the virus as H5N1, Agricultural Ministry official Hiroyuki Ozono said. The government has banned the shipment of eggs and nearly 200,000 chickens at 16 farms within about a 6-mile radius of the affected farm, where local authorities were to take further disinfectant measures Tuesday. NHK also reports that Hong Kong has banned imports of chicken from Japan. It is Japan's first confirmed case of the H5N1 strain since 2004, when the toxic virus killed poultry in Yamaguchi, Oita, and Kyoto prefectures. The deadly bird flu strain has been spreading mainly in Asia, but has also been detected in Africa and Europe.

NHK reports that Al Gore has urged Japanese business leaders to play a leading role in the fight against global warming. Mr Gore, who "used to be the next president of the United States", is in Tokyo to promote his documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth , which deals with global warming. The film will be released on January 20 in major Japanese cities: In a lecture on Monday, he told some 400 Japanese business leaders that the crisis is not political problem, but a moral one. Mr Gore urged Japanese companies to help boost worldwide action against global warming, saying that Japanese private firms have cutting-edge technologies for environmental protection and energy conservation. Al Gore in Japan and global warming previous

Several food safety issues are appearing daily in the news these days. Fujiya and Dunkin Donuts are both dealing with consumer complaints, and it seems the latter is doing the right thing, while the former tried to cover up its mess. The Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry is not happy and Fujiya might even lose its ISO certification, according to the Yomiuri: Due to public concern over food safety prompting food makers to obtain ISO certifications, the suspension or revocation of Fujiya's certification would be detrimental for the company. Through the Japan Accreditation Board for Conformity Assessment, the ministry asked a private certification organization that certified Fujiya to examine the confectioner's ISO certifications. The organization, which is said to have already begun the check, will ask Fujiya to take remedial measures, temporarily suspend its certification or revoke the certification, if it determines the confectioner has problems.

Spinal Tap is a hilarious UK movie from 1984 about the, hrm, ultimate band experience. If you have ever been trying to make rock music with other people, "Listen to the Flower People" is the song for you! And what does this have to do with Japan, you might ask, if you haven't seen the epic film. Well, Spinal Tap does end with a performance in Japan - with a new drummer (all the seven others have mysteriously died). Ah, how I sometimes long for the good old 1980s! Bonus: ....when we need that extra push over the cliff.... we go to 11!

Bruce Wallace at LA Times describes why Japanese consumers might not be so impressed by the new iPhone. The iPhone is 'business as usual' in a country where the mobile features announced by Steve Jobs and Apple already are so advanced. In Japan, barely a ripple "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," Jobs said as he unveiled the iPhone on Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. But the revolution is already well underway in Japan, where cellphones are used for everything. Besides downloading music and surfing the Net, Japanese use their cellphones to navigate their way home by global positioning system, to buy movie tickets and to update personal blogs from wherever they are. They have been a natural extension of daily life here for the last few years, spurred by Japan's decision to be the first country to upgrade to third-generation mobile-phone networks, or 3G, which increase broadband capabil...

Al Gore's documentary about global warming will premiere on January 20 here in Japan, so I expect more debate about this topic during 2007. Also, in 2008, Japan will host the G8 meeting, and it has been decided that CO2 emissions will be discussed. My concern is that governments and the nuclear industry are using this debate to justify the construction of more and bigger nuclear reactors , certainly not a "sustainable" alternative. Mainichi: Japanese cite global warming as top environmental problem More people in Japan think global warming is the most serious environmental problem, a survey by the National Institute for Environmental Studies has shown. Twenty-seven percent of respondents in the survey, conducted in 2006, said that global warming was the most serious problem: In the previous two surveys, "waste" was the top answer, selected by one in four people. The national research institute has conducted surveys on environmental problems about once every four...

North Korea appears to have begun a program to breed rabbits for food, using animals from Germany, as a step to alleviate its acute food shortage, according to NHK. A German farmer says officials from the North Korean embassy in Berlin visited his rabbit farm in December to buy some male and female rabbits. The farmer also told NHK he arranged to ship the rabbits to North Korea by air. During World War II my grandfather kept rabbits in Lund, Sweden as a source of meat for his family. I remember my father saying he liked the cute rabbits, and felt sorry when granpa had to kill them. Not sure how NHK got this story, or what it is supposed to mean, except that North Koreans in crisis are trying to be creative about their food supply. However, a huge problem with rabbits is that they multiply a lot and if the get out in the wild, they will wreck havoc with the local ecosystem - in Australia rabbits are seen as environmental vandals . Marauding rabbits? No thanks. Meanwhile, South Korea...

On a cold day like today, my gas stove is keeping me warm. I wish I had a kotatsu ! A problem with the housing here is that all windows are single glass only, while in Sweden we usually have 3 layers of glass to keep the cold out. Japan uses less energy per unit of gross domestic product than any other country. This is one result of its energy conservation measures following the oil crises of the 1970s. Japan Times notes that Japan is helping other parts of Asia, including emerging powerhouses China and India, to curb coal consumption. The effort is not altruism, it is a bid to bolster Japan's own energy security: Japan's clean coal push self-serving as well Every year, Japan invites about 60 engineers and managers from the coal industry of seven Asian nations -- China, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and India -- to instruct them in the use of "clean coal technology," or CCT, which aims to improve the mineral's efficiency while reducing ca...

Treehugger , a blog I like, has an update on a new law in China to control pollution from electronic products. The Chinese law will come into effect on 1 March, 2007. It will target the same six hazardous substances which are regulated by EU and Japan, namely the heavy metals cadmium, lead, mercury, and hexavalent chromium as well as two flame retardants, PBB and PBDE: The main means of control will be a mark which must be affixed by suppliers to the device sold, or clearly printed in papers accompanying the supplied goods if marking is not possible. The green e with two arrows chasing each other in a circle is the mark of equipment which is free of the targeted substances. The orange symbol exemplifies the marking of the product's "environmentally friendly use period". Japanese manufacturers have begun phasing out lead and other harmful materials, and Japan does have a marking requirement called J-MOSS, wich came into effect on 1 July, 2006, on many electronic products. ...

This week, you can listen to a radio program in English from NHK World about New Year celebrations and organic rice farming. But first they introduce Lake Izunuma in Miyagi Prefecture, a paradise for water birds such as geese and swans. A New Year Full of Earth's Blessings (38'46") (Photo from the Miyagi Prefecture website )