Saturday, September 15, 2012

"Go thy way" - 100 Year Old Japanese


100 Year Old Japanese

There lives a man near Fukushima Daiichi who became 100 years old this April.

He lived in Okuma Town where the Fuksuhima Daiichi nuclear power plant is situated.

Mr. Yoshida now lives in complex housing in Aizu-Wakamatsu City, Fukshima Prefecture, 100 km west of the crippled nuclear power plant.

When Mr. Yoshida was an elementary school boy, he moved to Tokyo with his family from Okuma Town.  Then he experienced the historic 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that took on tens of thousands of Tokyo citizens.  So, he grew up in Tokyo to become an English teacher and get married.  However, he was  drafted to be sent to Manchuria in 1941 when the Second World War started.

As air raids by US air forces were intensified in Tokyo, his wife decided to move to Fukshima Prefecture though it was not easy to get a ticket of a train going out of Tokyo at the time.  In February 1945, she got a chance to get on a train for Fukushima; it was one month before the Great Tokyo Air Raid where 100,000 Tokyo citizens were killed by bombing from B29s.  She now thinks that if her trip had been delayed, she should have been killed.

When the war was over, Mr. Yoshida was taken captive by Russian troops.  He was forced to work in mines in Siberia for three years.  But he had a luck to return to Japan in 1948.  He started to teach English in school in Fukshima City, 70 km west of Fukushima Daiichi.  After retirement, Mr. Yoshida moved to Okuma Town, his home town, where he started to spend the rest of his life with his 75-year old son and great-grandchildren.  Then, in March of the last year, the nuclear power station in Okuma Town got into a big trouble within an hour of an M9.0 earthquake; the Fukushima Daiichi plant invited a huge nuclear accident when it was attacked by 15-meter-high tsunamis.

When the big earthquake occurred, Mr. Yoshida was in his home.  A tsunami drove sea water up to a location 100 meters from his home.  But he had to leave his home due to the nuclear accident leaving his estate behind.

Nonetheless Mr. Yoshida plans to go back to Okuma Town if it is more than five years from now that he is allowed to return to his home so close to Fukuhshima Daiichi.

As of September 2012, there are 51,376 people in Japan who are 100 years old or older.  Mr. and Mrs. Yoshida are two of them.

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Friday, September 14, 2012

"he saw a great multitude about them" - Dangerous Syria

Dangerous Syria

A Japanese journalist Junpei Yasuda flew to Syria to cover the civil war.

His reports are recently introduced in various TV programs in Japan.

In terms of trade of Syria, the European nations of Germany, Italy, France, and Spain accounted for 30% of the total Syrian export value.

Global Exports in 2008 by SyriaMarket Value: 13,300 (millions)
Exports ToTrade ValueShareGrowth
(thousands)(%)(% 5yr)
 Saudi Arabia911,2316.85155.52
 United States375,8222.83107.13
 United Kingdom173,9081.3181.77
 United Arab Emirates125,2230.94157.11
 Republic of Yemen121,6300.91443.67

These nations now occupying the land area of the ancient Roman Empire have a strong tie with Syrian businesses and officials.

If they think ending the civil war in Syria is good for them, they will be fully engaged in promoting the settlement of the internal armed conflict within Syria.

But, if they have no room in their diplomatic and political capability, they would just stand aside from Syria in the tragedy.  As the Greek Crisis and the euro crisis have taken their energy for so long, it looks very difficult that the descendants of the ruler of the Mediterranean embark on fixing the bloody calamity on the east end of the great sea.

However, in terms of import, a different aspect of Syria surfaces.  Russia and China have loomed as major partners of Iran.  Including Ukraine, too, they accounted for almost 40% of the total Syrian import value.

Global Imports in 2008 by SyriaMarket Value: 15,060 (millions)
Imports FromTrade ValueShareGrowth
(thousands)(%)(% 5yr)
 Saudi Arabia609,8384.0584.63
 South Korea544,3103.6183.77

Taking them together, it can be said that as the concerned European nations are so busy now in tackling their own financial and economic problems and thus have no time to interfere in the Syrian civil war, Russia and China are taking advantage of the tragic situation in Syria for their global strategy.

Put simply, Syria looks like a victim of struggling for supremacy between the West and the East (Russia and China).

In this context, the state of Syria might be close to the Vietnam War that continued through 1950s to 1970s.

(to be continued)

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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

"then came the twelve" - Somalia



In Somalia, a boy was abducted by insurgents.

He was trained in a camp; they seemed to plan to use the boy as one of young soldiers who were to be ordered to carry out a suicide attack.

But finally, his mother came to rescue the boy.  She paid about $400 to Islamic insurgents.  The boy was freed.

This is the most moving story I found today.

More specifically, the Somalian boy was about 15 years old when he was taken captive by al-Shabaab.  In the training camp where he was forced to live and fight, there were many youths aged between 12 and 15.  And it was three months after that his mother could finally rescue him.  But the lucky boy recalled that 20 of his friends were killed in battles, including his best friend.  Now he has started to go to school as he wants to be an architect.  

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European companies use the sea off Somalia as an unregulated dump yard.

They load dangerous industrial wastes in ships which sail to Somalia.  Then they dump every kind of dangerous factory wastes into the sea.  They just pay $3 per ton of wastes to Somalian persons of influence or military cliques while it would cost $1000 in Europe.

However some Somalian people living on the shore came to become ill for unknown reasons.  It is apparent that they were damaged and harmed by poisonous chemicals and components included in the dumped industrial wastes.

Especially after the 2004 Great Indian Ocean tsunami, many Somalian people started to develop a radiation disease.  Actually 300 Somalians died.  The UN found that European ships disposed of radioactive wastes in the sea off Somalia.  

Of course, Somalia is full of pirates.  But they are under threat of radioactive contamination.

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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

"and I received sight" - Portents

Tokyo Station...


On September 11, 2001, acts of terror fell in New York and around Washington DC, which changed the landscape of the US forever.

On March 11, 2011,  an act of God befell Japan, which changed the mind set of the Japanese people forever in terms of safety from a big tsunami and nuclear power plants.

The number 11 seems just coincidental.  But, if the God has intention to make people think of these tragic incidents together in a certain way, it is reasonable for Him to have set the dates of the two incidents with the number 11 as a key for connection.

Indeed just nine and a half years after the 9/11 Terror, the great M9.0 earthquake occurred in the North Pacific Ocean off Honsyu, the main island of Japan, being accompanied by 15-meter (45 foot) high tsunamis and the subsequent nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima Daiichi.

And between these two historic incidents, there happened the 2004 Great Indian Ocean Tsunami from an M9.1 earthquake that occurred off Sumatra in the Christmas season of 2004.  This Tsunami took more than 220,000 lives, while the 3/11 tsunami took on about 20,000 Japanese.

As the US Government failed in taking effective preventive measures against AlQaeda, terrorists could easily hijacked commercial jet planes in the US.  It was a human-generated calamity.

So, Japanese Government and parties concerned with the nuclear energy sector of Japan also failed in learning lessons from the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami as well as from the 9/11 Terror.  A natural disaster and a human-generated calamity together resulted in the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident of Japan.  Japanese Government and parties concerned with the nuclear energy sector of Japan should have fully examined their regime, regulations, and systems to manage risks on nuclear power plants and study a possibility of occurrence of a great tsunami in the scale of the Indian Ocean one as all of the Japanese nuclear power plants face the sea.

If Japanese lawmakers, experts, bureaucrats, and executives of utility companies had humbly checked their way of preventing a nuclear accident in Japan that could be triggered by a great natural disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident should have been prevented.  In fact, the God gave two warnings to Japan with the 9/11 Terror in 2001 and the Indian Ocean tragedy in 2004.

And, in turn, if the world does not fully regard the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, other nuclear accidents might happen in South Korea, China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Russia, Europe, North America, etc.

Pu simply, from a Japanese point of view, the 9/11 Terror in 2001 and the 2004 Indian Ocean natural calamity could portend the 3/11 accident in Fukushima Daiichi.  And, the 3/11 accident in Fukushima Daiichi of 2011 could be an advance notice for other future nuclear accident worse than Fukushima Daiichi.

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Monday, September 10, 2012

"the rising from the dead" - The Season of Election

Around the National Diet Bldg., Tokyo

The Season of Election

This summer was hot like last year.

But, politics in the US and Japan is also hot this year.

There is a kind of similar movement in politics between Japan and the US.

In 2008, Mr. Barack Obama was elected as US President, a revolutionary movement after the era of conservative Mr. W. Bush.  In 2009, a drastic regime change occurred in Japan from the conservative Cabinet mainly formed by the LDP to the liberal and socialistic Cabinet led by the DPJ.

As the US regime change in 2008 preceded the Japanese 2009 regime change, the Japanese politics was somewhat influenced by the great change in the American politics.

During the era of Mr. W. Bush, Japan had a very pro-American prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. The two leaders shared the same capitalistic view to cooperate in the War on Terror.  And in these three years when liberal Mr. Obama has occupied the White House, the Prime Minister Office in Tokyo was commanded by three prime ministers from the liberal DPJ: Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, Mr. Kan, and Mr. Yoshihiko Noda.

Even during the era of Mr. Bill Clinton who was also liberal, most of the Japanese Cabinets that had power in 1990s were rather liberal, socialistic, and moderately pro-Chinese though the pro-American LDP was in charge of national governance in most of the period.

Now, in 2012, the US has to choose liberal Mr. Obama or conservative Mr. Romney as new president.  In Japan, the LDP is to hold its presidential election in this September; the DPJ also plans to call an election where the new head of the party is to be elected though incumbent Prime Minister Mr. Noda is one of the most hopeful candidates.  And, after the elections in both the major parties, it is expected that a general election is to be held at any time.

It is because Prime Minister Mr. Noda promised Mr. Tanigaki, the President of the LDP, to hold a snap election as Mr. Tanigaki wishes in exchange of help from Mr. Tanigaki and his LDP to pass a critical bill for PM Mr. Noda.  Noda has made it his big agenda to pass a bill to increase the rate of the consumption tax from 5% to 10% in a few years.

However, Mr. Tanigaki today announced that he would not run for the presidential election of the LDP.  On the other hand, Mr. Noda now faces three rivals in the election of his party.  So, the first stage in this election season in Japan has just started.

But, it is most likely that the general election in Japan will be held after the 2012 US Presidential Election.  Accordingly, who will be elected, Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney, as the next US President must have a deep influence on the minds of Japanese voters.

If Mr. Obama wins, the liberal DPJ, presently a major ruling party in Japan, might not lose so badly the coming general election for new members in the Lower House of the National Diet.    

If Mr. Romney wins, the capitalistic LDP, presently a major opposition party in Japan, might also win the coming general election for new members in the Lower House of the National Diet.       

(From surveys conducted by the Media, it is expected that the very pro-American LDP will take over power from the very pro-Chinese/Korean DPJ in the coming general election.  So, from the Japanese point of view, the Republican candidate Mr. Romney is expected to defeat the Democratic candidate Mr. Obama in the American Presidential Election.)

If the season changes to the fall, the atmosphere around the Japanese parliament will continue to be hot.

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