Kurashi - News From Japan

Kenichi Horie "waved" a fond Aloha to Hawaii at 11:00 AM Sunday (local time) and is now riding the waves to Japan on a new aluminum catamaran that is powered by wave action. The 3 ton boat, Suntory Mermaid II, is crafted of recycled aluminum and is 9.5 meters long (31 feet). Propulsion is provided by two fins mounted at the bow of the boat which flap as wave action acts upon them through a set of levers and springs. It doesn't matter what direction the wave comes from. The max speed is 5 knots and average cruise speed just 3 knots (about 3.5 mph), so it will take until late May for Mr. Horie to reach Japan. Electricity to run cabin and navigation lights, a shortwave radio, and laptop computer, comes from deck mounted solar panels. Horie, who is 69 years old, is no stranger to ocean crossings. Since 1962 he has made solo ocean crossings every few years and two solo round the world trips. In 1962 he sailed his 19 foot boat Mermaid from Nishinomiya, Japan to San Francis...

NHK has a fun show with the tema Worst! Until recently, the worst river in Japan was Harukigawa in Ichikawa, Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo. Many homes have no plumbing for kitchen waste or laundry, and unless cooking oil is kept out of the sink and detergent use reduced, it all goes straight into the river - and further downriver into Tokyo Bay. Rivers are measured according to a pollution scale and clearly, something had to be done about this issue. Now, people say the water is no longer black but becoming bluish. After a local campaign, it now ranks third, having reduced the pollution index from 14.0 to 11.4 BOD which is not great, but a lot better than a year ago. The average BOD in river water in Japan was reduced from 3.3 in 1979 to 1.6 in 2003, so Harukigawa still has a long way to go. How to get ordinary people to care about the environment? One of the campaigners went around to households, talked to them, and got about 15,000 people to pledge to reduce their kitchen water pol...

A gold-coated wooden Buddha sculpture set a new world auction record for Japanese art when it was sold for $14,377,000 at Christie's in New York, according to Reuters . The newly discovered sculpture of Dainichi Nyorai, the supreme Buddha, attributed to the sculptor Unkei, was bought by Mitsukoshi Department Store at Christie's sale of Japanese and Korean art on Tuesday. "History was made today," said Katsura Yamaguchi, Christie's International Director of Japanese and Korean Art. "We witnessed enormous interest from clients worldwide who traveled from near and far to ... participate in this landmark sale." The 70 cm seated Buddha is believed to be the work of Unkei, considered one of the great carvers of the early Kamakura period of the 1190s. Part of a family collection in the northern Kanto region, before which it was kept in a Tochigi prefecture temple in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, its existence was unknown until it was sold to a Buddhis...

In Japan, most corn processors have used only non-GMO crops to produce corn starch and corn syrup, used as a sweetener, as most customers, mainly beer and drug makers, refuse to use GMOs. Risa Maeda at Reuters notes that beer makers so far are resisting price hikes in corn starch, an important ingredient for beer, or a shift to GMO. "Lack of public acceptance means we don't consider it," said a spokesman at Kirin Holdings, which seven years ago led its peers to use only non-GMO corn starch for Japanese beer. Kirin notes genetically modified foods, allergic foods, food additives, chemical residues in food, endocrine disrupters, beef (BSE), irradiation, and mycotoxins as items with "high customer interest" in its 2007 CSR Report (pdf), prompting the company to create special quality guidelines to deal with these difficult problems. Also, the introduction of IP handling, HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) and ISO9001 certification by food manufactu...

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As I open my front door, this is the view - plum trees in full bloom.

Swans at Kussharo Lake in Hokkaido, northern Japan. From Janne in Osaka , with an accute eye .