Cesium exceeding new limit detected in 51 food items in nine prefectures
Kyood
Radioactive cesium was detected in 51 food
products from nine prefectures in excess of a new government-set limit
in the first month since it was introduced April 1, according to data
released by the health ministry Tuesday.
The limit was exceeded in 337 cases, or 2.4 percent of 13,867 food samples examined by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
Cesium exceeding the previous allowable limit
of 500 becquerels per kilogram was detected in 55 cases, while the new
limit of 100 becquerels was exceeded in 282 cases.
By prefecture, there were 142 cases in Fukushima,
69 in Tochigi, 41 in Ibaraki, 35 in Iwate, 32 in Miyagi, 13 in Chiba,
two each in Yamagata and Gunma, and one in Kanagawa.
Mushrooms and other agricultural products
containing cesium in excess of the tougher limit were involved in 178
cases, while 156 cases pertained to fishery products such as flat fish
and bass. In addition, two cases involved black bear meat and one case
fried "moroko" fresh water fish.
An Urgent Request on UN Intervention on Stabilization of the Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Nuclear Fuel
Recently, former diplomats and experts both in Japan and
abroad stressed the extremely risky condition of the Fukushima Daiichi
Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool and this is being widely reported by
world media. Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS), who is one of the best-known experts on spent nuclear
fuel, stated that in Unit 4 there is spent nuclear fuel which contains
Cesium-137 (Cs-137) that is equivalent to 10 times the amount that was
released at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Thus, if an
earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain, this could
result in a catastrophic radiological fire.
"Pour répondre à l'intérêt croissant des lecteurs francophones à l'égard du Japon, l'équipe du
journal OVNI s'est mobilisée et a décidé de créer un nouveau mensuel gratuit : ZOOM Japon.
Vingt pages réalisées avec le même esprit qui anime depuis 30 ans la rédaction d'OVNI, c'est-à-dire
offrir l'essentiel de l'actualité japonaise au Japon et en France avec un souci de clarté et le
désir de montrer ce qu'est le Japon du moment."
"One Piece Exhibition: Original Art × Movies × Experience One
Piece"
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the popular
"Weekly Shonen Jump" manga "One Piece", the Mori Art Center
Gallery is collaborating with its illustrator and writer Eiichiro Oda for a
special exhibition that is sure to please fans.
The manga follows the adventures of a teenage boy,
Monkey D. Luffy, and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, as he searches for the
"One Piece," a special treasure that will allow him to inherit the
status of King of the Pirates.
This exhibition showcases an eclectic collection of
original art, large character models and interactive attractions, and includes
brand-new never-before-seen artwork from Oda; till June 17.
Info:
Mori Arts Center Gallery; (03) 5777-8600; 52F Roppongi Hills Mori Tower,
6-10-1 Roppongi, Tokyo; 4-min. walk from Exit 3 of Roppongi Station, Toei Oedo
Line, 8-min. walk from Exit 4 of Azabu Juban Station, Tokyo Metro Nanboku Line.
10 a.m.- 8 p.m., Wed.-Mon. (Tue. till 5 p.m.). ¥1,800. Closed Wed
Yoji Yamada's ''Where Spring Comes Late'' is an epic about one
man's family's journey to discover the new Japan. They are Seiichi
Kazami, a young, out-of-work coal miner; Tamiko, his wife; their two
small children, and Genzo, Seiichi's old father.
Yoji Yamada's ''Where Spring Comes Late'' is an epic about one man's
family's journey to discover the new Japan. They are Seiichi Kazami, a
young, out-of-work coal miner; Tamiko, his wife; their two small
children, and Genzo, Seiichi's old father.
With high hopes and borrowed funds, the Kazamis set out from their
village in southern Japan to become dairy-farming pioneers on the
northern island of Hokkaido. In 1970, when the film was made, Hokkaido,
to most Japanese, was still a chilly, unknown land, an underpopulated
frontier territory.
''Where Spring Comes Late'' opens today at the Public Theater as part of
the current retrospective devoted to the films of Shochiku Studios.
At first, everything is splendidly new and promising to the Kazamis.
They pass through bustling Nagasaki, the largest city any of them have
ever seen, and move on to Fukuyama, on the Inland Sea, where they expect
to leave old Genzo with Seiichi's brother. In the course of one edgy
night with the brother's family, during which everyone is crowded into a
tiny house filled with tense adults and noisy children, Seiichi and
Tamiko realize that they'll have to take Grandpa with them.
They continue, changing trains at Osaka where they spend a few
marvelous, exhausting hours at Osaka's Expo 70, before proceeding to
Tokyo. It is there that events turn grim and the scheme of the movie
begins to show. In a movie of this sort, one death is acceptable and two
suggest a plague.
In its first half, ''Where Spring Comes Late'' has a lot of the grit,
pathos and humor of an Italian neo-realist comedy of the late 1950's.
Even the ample soundtrack music sounds Italian, though with a Japanese
intonation. After Tokyo, as the Kazamis journey farther and farther
north, the movie seems to melt into upbeat sentimentality.
Mr. Yamada, who wrote and directed ''Where Spring Comes Late,'' was
considered one of Japan's most promising new directors in the late
1960's, but then became sidetracked, to his own immense financial gain,
by the hugely popular series of ''Tora-san'' comedies.
His talent is certainly evident in ''Where Spring Comes Late.'' The film
is handsomely shot in Cinemascope (called ''Shochiku Grandscope'' in my
credits), which Japanese film makers used with a poetic authority not
matched by directors anywhere else in the world. The large cast,
including Chishu Ryu as Genzo, performs with reticent skill.
As long as it is attending to the commonplace details of family life,
''Where Spring Comes Late'' has real power. As soon as it begins to
attend to its epic concerns, the film itself becomes commonplace.
Itō Chūta (伊東忠太) (1867–1954) was a Japanese architect, architectural
historian, and critic. He is recognized as the leading architect and
architectural theorist of early twentieth-century Imperial Japan.
Second son of a doctor in Yonezawa,
present-day Yamagata Prefecture, Itō was educated in Tokyo. From 1889 to 1892
he studied under Tatsuno Kingo in the Department of Architecture at the Imperial
University. Josiah Conder was still teaching in the department, while Ernest
Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō were also influential in the formation of Itō's
ideas. For graduation he designed a Gothic cathedral and wrote a
dissertation on architectural theory. His doctoral thesis was on the
architecture of Hōryū-ji. He was professor of architecture at the Imperial
University from 1905, then of Waseda University from 1928.
Itō travelled widely, to the Forbidden City
with photographer Ogawa Kazumasa in 1901 and subsequently, after fourteen
months in China, to Burma, India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Europe and the United
States. Later he was involved in the planning of Chōsen Jingū in Seoul and a
survey of the monuments of Jehol in Manchukuo. He incorporated elements of the diverse
architectural styles he encountered in his many writings and approximately one
hundred design projects.
Itō helped formulate the Ancient Temples and
Shrines Preservation Law of 1897, an early measure to protect the Cultural
Properties of Japan. He is also credited with coining the Japanese term for
architecture, namely kenchiku (建築) (lit. 'erection of buildings') in place of
the former zōkagaku (造家学) (lit. 'study of making houses'). A member of The
Japan Academy, in 1943 he was awarded the Order of Culture. Itō has more
recently been criticised, with specific reference to his writings on Ise Grand
Shrine, for having 'blurred a religio-political discourse with an architectural
discourse'.
Those brought up on the energetic diet of American cinema may find it
hard to appreciate the quietist art of the great Japanese director
Yasujiro Ozu. He has been called the poet of family life, capable of
taking the seemingly trivial and making great drama of it. Nothing was
too small to be significant.
Ozu steadfastly peers into the
hearts and minds of his characters until we feel we know them
intimately. And the loyalty of those who love his work is as absolute as
his own conviction. The number of film-makers who have made pilgrimages
to his grave (marked simply by the Japanese word for nothing) runs into
dozens.
Ozu started making films in 1927 and was one of the
last to forsake the silent cinema. Much of this early work has been lost
or destroyed. But we know from examples that he wasn't always as calmly
contemplative as he was in his late work, which reached the west only
in the 60s. He could make boisterous comedies and earthy chronicles of
family life, containing outrageous sight gags. In the last stretch of
his life, however, he had refined his art so much that it hardly seemed
like art at all.
His most famous film, and certainly one of his
masterpieces, is Tokyo Story. In it an elderly couple are taken to visit
their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the
children pack them off to a noisy resort. Returning to Tokyo, the old
woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the
old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realise they
are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can.
By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when
their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after
attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: "Be
kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach
beyond the grave." The last sequence is of the old man alone in his
seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town
and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.
The film
condemns no one and its sense of inevitability carries with it only a
certain resigned sadness. "Isn't life disappointing," someone says at
one point. Yet the simple observations are so acute that you feel that
no other film could express its subject matter much better.
Ozu
shoots his story with as little movement of the camera as possible. We
view scenes almost always from the floor, lower than the eye level of a
seated character. He insisted that no actor was to dominate a scene.
The balance of every scene had to be perfect. Chishu Ryu, who often
played the father in Ozu's films about family life, once had to complete
two dozen devoted to raising a tea cup.
Tokyo Story was
followed by eight other films, all of them as masterful, and a group
named after the seasons, including Early Spring and An Autumn Afternoon.
Each was about the problems of ordinary family life. While their
conservative nature made younger more polemical Japanese directors, such
as Imamura and Oshima, impatient, their universality has come to be
recognised the world over. Ozu was the most Japanese of film-makers, but
his work can still cross most cultural barriers.
"Ainu" means "human". The Ainu people regard things
useful to them or beyond their control as "kamuy"(gods). In daily life,
they prayed to and performed various ceremonies for the gods. These
gods include : "nature" gods, such as of fire, water, wind and thunder ;
"animal" gods, such as of bears, foxes, spotted owls and gram-puses ;
"plant" gods, such as of aconite, mush-room and mugwort ; "object" gods,
such as of boats and pots ; and gods which protect houses, gods of
mountains and gods of lakes. The word "Ainu" refers to the opposite of
these gods.
