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Posts Tagged Japan Times

Radiation in food: Radish Boya to Set Its Own Cesium Standard | EX-SKF.

Sep 6

Posted by sheffner in food + health, news | Comments off

The bottom line is forcing more and more businesses to take matters into their own hands instead of relying on the government.  The rice farmers of Fukushima, judging by this unconfirmed but unfortunately not implausible story, apparently don’t need to worry about the bottom line.

Radish Boya, an online grocer who first alerted Shizuoka Prefecture that one of the Shizuoka contained radioactive cesium exceeded the provisional limit by its own testing, is going to set its own standard for cesium in food and drinks that it sells, which is one-tenths of the national provisional standards.

via Radiation in food: Radish Boya to Set Its Own Cesium Standard | EX-SKF.

See also this June blog entry,  quoting a Japan Times article about online mail-order food-delivery companies promising pesticide-free, organic food: Irradiated food poses moral dilemmas.

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Taming the yen | The Japan Times Online

Aug 8

Posted by sheffner in economic and political philosophy, news | Comments off

Why I don’t read newspapers, reason #4 trillion something: you don’t learn economic principles from reading articles such as the following. You are left as confused as before.

Thanks to the market intervention, the dollar at one point rebounded to near ¥80. The question is whether the trend of a cheaper yen will last.

via Taming the yen | The Japan Times Online.

Has such intervention worked in the past?  Has such intervention created lasting trends in the past? Why does the writer not investigate this? Given the financial crisis in Europe, the downgrading of the U.S. debt by Moody’s, and the massive damage to the Japanese economy from the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis, all situations which preceded the intervention and which will continue from the foreseeable future, what do you think, dear reader? Do you think the cheaper yen trend will last?

HA! It didn’t last 24 hours! I was watching the Yen/Pound sterling rate closely. It went from 125 to 130 (briefly) before dropping to 128 where it has hovered since.

This is a currency war, with each country’s government and central bank working together to try and make THEIR currency cheaper than the others. It’s a zero-sum game.

The writer finishes with,

To dispel deflation, vigorously pushing reconstruction from the March 11 disasters is imperative.

Really? How will cheaper prices (deflation) for essential consumer and capital goods hinder reconstruction? Surely an argument can be made that it would help.

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Japan, the Twitter nation | The Japan Times Online

May 18

Posted by sheffner in news, science & technology | Comments off

twitter logo

twitter logo

I recently joined Twitter, after learning that a relative in Tokyo had found it very useful on March 11th to get info about what was happening, at a time when cell-phones were unable to connect or even send or receive text messages.

According to Twitter’s official blog blog.twitter.com, when the clock stuck midnight last New Year’s Eve, Japanese Twitter users went crazy, recording 6,939 tweets per second—a new record at the time. In fact, globally 14 percent of all tweets are in Japanese—second only to English, with 50 percent—which explains why Japanese was the second language to be added to twitter menus. And according to Virginia-based research firm ComScore, 20 percent of all Japanese are using Twitter, while only 8 percent of people in the United States are users. Twitter has grown so much in Japan that it now has more visitors than Japan’s most well-known social network service, Mixi. And last month, Twitter appointed their first international manager outside the U.S—in Japan. But why has Twitter been embraced so rapidly here?

…

loose control may also have allowed “bot” culture to flourish in Japan. Twitter-bots are small software programs that are designed to mimic human tweets.

…

Not surprisingly perhaps, the most popular fully automated bot these days is @earthquake_jp which tweets earthquake alerts, and was part of the huge surge in popularity of Twitter just after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake on March 11.

via Japan, the Twitter nation | The Japan Times Online.

The article goes on to compare Facebook with Twitter, pointing out that at the time of the earthquake only 2% of people in Japan were using Facebook. As people discovered that Twitter was a good alternative means of communication at this time, the word spread. The media got on it. Eventually the Prime Minister’s Office, Tepco, Japan’s SDF and other public organizations opened Twitter accounts.

Interestingly, the article lists @DruckerBOT as a popular Twitter bot in Japan! There’s a story in that, but maybe another time. Meanwhile, here’re a couple images of books in Japanese about Twitter:

"Learn English through Twitter"

Twitter job-hunting

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Evacuation turns into chance to help victims | The Japan Times Online

Apr 9

Posted by sheffner in announcement, news | 1 Comment

More on the “fly-jin”. I don’t think this is a clear-cut, black-or-white matter, that those who “flew” were irrational cowards while those who stayed were hard-headed realists loyal to Japan, their families and their jobs. Comments below the quotes.

With so much information available and even governments disagreeing on the best course of action, many residents of the affected areas understandably became worried about the safety of staying in their homes as the nuclear crisis unfolded. Though their Sendai home is technically just outside the official evacuation area, British-born Dominic Jones chose to evacuate with his Japanese wife and two young children as soon as the British government recommended leaving the already shaken area. “They were saying that the situation on the ground was much more serious, in fact, on par with Three Mile Island. They also said its ongoing, so it might even get worse.”

It is, however, clear that because of discrepancies in the way that information is being interpreted, foreign nationals living in Japan are under a lot of pressure from family and friends overseas to leave the country.

“I found news reports conflicting,” explains one Nagano Prefecture resident, who will be called Emma for this story. She extended a holiday in Australia because of radiation worries.

“U.S.-based channels like CNN were screaming ‘meltdown’ and Japanese stations remained calm and collected. Some of our friends, particularly those who have lived in Japan a long time, stopped watching CNN and sensationalized foreign news and reverted to Japanese and English updates and embassy reports due to the drama and fear-mongering of foreign channels. But for non-Japanese speakers, one problem was that Japanese channels only had limited news in English so most foreigners had to rely on overseas channels. If I had not already booked flights home, I am sure I would have experienced a lot of stress with pressure from my family and friends from home, to come home.”

via Evacuation turns into chance to help victims | The Japan Times Online.

There seem to be several factors in play here: Read the rest of this entry »

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To stay or to go? Different value systems

Apr 5

Posted by sheffner in culture and communication | 1 Comment

This is not a news update but a commentary.

In the early days following the earthquake and as the Fukushima crisis was evolving and information was still hard to come by, many foreigners fled Japan. Many also stayed, and some of them have berated the ones who left. Recently, some Japanese have been chiming in, too, although generally Japanese are more forgiving in such matters, as this mild yet damning blog post reveals:

That the foreigners fled instantly, before any consultations or warnings from the government, show us that they don’t care about the group so they do not intend to be a part of Japanese society…  That’s okay. Hence, all the people I talked to were of the opinion that foreigners are just that; We can’t expect them to be responsible to anyone except themselves. Most of them certainly do not understand what the responsibility to us (Japanese) means.” (See here for more details.)

In today’s Japan Times is an article by a man who did leave Japan but rather against his will, and not because of his fears for his personal safety. I strongly relate to this, as I also got similar daily phone calls from my parents in Europe.

The truth is, I had no intention of leaving Tokyo on March 18 for a long weekend in Osaka, where I observed the crisis from a safe distance, a reluctant “fly-jin” (apparently what they call us) taking advantage of a distant perch. In my layman’s judgment, at 225 km from the Fukushima No. 1 plant, Tokyo was far enough away from the unfolding nuclear disaster for me to feel secure. But it was the seven or so phone calls I received the day before from my parents — who nearly broke down in disbelief that I would be risking my life for my job and my adopted country — that made me reconsider.

“That’s not your home, Darek. Your home is here,” my mother said, on the verge of tears. “My hair is turning gray.”

“Why?” I asked, naively. “From old age?”

“No, because I am worried about you.”

Well, that did it. I was out of there.

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Spare us shoganai as we face an ominous spring | The Japan Times Online

Mar 27

Posted by sheffner in announcement | Comments off

“Shoganai” (also “shikataganai”) means “it can’t be helped”, and is used in the face of unavoidable imponderables or acts of God, but also used to refer to acts of man. This phrase is almost guaranteed to bring a snarl of annoyance and contempt from many Westerners, as it smacks of that terrible crime, fatalism. The article below is written (surprise, surprise) by a Westerner.

So as Japan rebounds and rebuilds, one multi-billion-dollar question that must be answered is this: In a society that is totally dependent on electricity and has become wedded to the notion that convenience is the backbone of modernity both now and in the future, how will Japan satisfy its energy needs in the decades to come? U ntil now, about 60 percent of Japans electricity has been generated using fossil fuels, while about 30 percent has come from nuclear power, and about 8 percent from hydro power. Other renewable sources provide only 2 percent.Eager to stabilize and reduce carbon emissions, and because fossil fuels, in particular oil and gas, will inevitably become less abundant and more expensive worldwide as time goes on, Japan has been aiming to raise nuclear power generation to 40 percent of its overall power-supply mix.

via Spare us shoganai as we face an ominous spring | The Japan Times Online.

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