Osaka sets up council to bid for hosting 2008 G-8 summit
In a move boosting cooperation among the Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo prefectures in their bid to host an annual G-8 summit in the Kansai region in 2008, an organization has been set up in Osaka City to add fuel to the campaign. The body is known as the Council to Promote the Bid for the 2008 Summit in Osaka/Kansai, jointly launched by the Osaka Prefectural Government, Osaka Municipal Office, Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Kansai Association of Corporate Executives and Kansai Employers' Association. Governor Fusae Ota of Osaka Prefecture has been named president of the council.Also in Kyoto, various organizations, including the Kyoto Prefectural Government, Kyoto Municipal Office and Kyoto Chamber of Commerce and Industry, have jointly launched a bidding campaign. The 2008 summit venue will be chosen around spring next year.
For inquiries, please contact Secretariat, Council to Promote the Bid for the 2008 Osaka Summit (within Kansai Summit Promotion Div., Dept. of Dynamic Osaka Promotion, Osaka Prefectural Gov't) (Tel: 06-6944-6623) URL:http://www.pref.osaka.jp
Japan's 1st company-owned high school opens
Wits Aoyama Gakuen Senior High School, Japan's first corporation-owned boarding high school, opened in April in a government-designated special zone for education in Iga City, Mie Prefecture. The new high school, run by Wits Co. consists of two courses - night and correspondence schools. The night high school is a boarding school, which uses the building of a primary school closed recently, where teachers and students live together. Students not only take lessons in classrooms but also learn farming and engage in voluntary activities outside the school in cooperation with local people. The school's basic objective is to let students acquire abilities to make choices and decisions at their own will. Iga City's educational special zone is based on the Structural Reform Special Zone Law enacted in December 2002.For inquiries, please contact Wits Aoyama Gakuen Senior High School (Tel: 0593-53-1190) URL: http://www.i-iku.com.feature/
Artist Senju speaks at Kansai Press Club
Hiroshi Senju, a famed Japanese-style painter and vice president of Kyoto University of Art and Design, was a guest speaker at a regular luncheon held by the Kansai Press Club at Hilton Osaka Hotel on March 30. In his speech, Senju expressed his belief that arts produced humans, not vice versa, and proposed to consider the 21st century on the basis of culture instead of civilization.Senju, based in New York and engaged in various artistic activities internationally, regarded arts as a means for communicating with other people. Referring to Japanese culture, he said that nowhere in the world seasons change so clearly as in Japan and that Japanese culture based on such a climate is appealing enough to the world.
Senju, who served as artistic director of Toyota Motor Corp.'s European campaign for its Lexus luxury car, said that as shown by cave wall paintings dating back to the Old Stone Age, the essence of human nature may lie in arts and that civilization of the 20th century appears to have neglected the importance of arts. He wished to pursue arts as one of the guiding principles of the new century and to get engaged in a wide range of artistic activities in that direction.
Winners of biomedical award unveiled
Organizers have announced the first winners of the Nature Medicine - AnGes MG BioMedical Award, aimed at honoring scientists who accomplished distinguished achievements in the biomedical field. The award was established last December jointly by AnGes MG Inc., a gene medicine development company based in Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture, and U.S. medical journal Nature Medicine.The winners of the Main Award are Kunio Matsumoto and Toshikazu Nakamura, who are conducting research on molecular regenerative medicine at the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine.
The Under 40 Award, given to researchers below 40 in age, went to Seiji Nakagawa, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
A memorial symposium will be held at Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo on May 29. A summary of symposium lectures will be carried on the June issue of Nature Medicine's global edition.
For inquiries, please contact Business Planning Division, AnGes MG (Tel: 03-5730-2481) URL: http://www.anges-mg.com/
Speaker with bamboo diaphragm developed
A team of researchers has jointly developed a high-fidelity speaker having a diaphragm made of bamboo fiber. The team comprises researchers from Electronic Devices Co., a subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., and the Research & Development Center of Bamboo Resource of Doshisha University in Kyoto.High-tech fibers such as carbon fiber and wood pulp such as Scandinavian conifer pulp have been used as main materials for the diaphragm of high-fidelity playback devices. However, the development of natural fibers that can be reproduced sustainably had long been sought since high-tech fibers stop short of producing high-quality sound as do natural materials and it takes many years to grow trees for high-quality lumber, according to the joint development team. The new speaker with a bamboo diaphragm meets these needs because bamboo grows fast and is light as is the case with natural materials.
For inquiries, please contact Speaker Business Unit, Panasonic Electronic Devices (Tel: 0598-28-8168) URL: http://www.panasonic.co.jp/
Vol. 14 of "Kansai a la carte" issued
KIPPO has published Vol. 14 of its "Kansai a la carte" bilingual booklet series, aimed at sending Kansai-related information overseas at first hand with articles and photographs.The latest issue, under the theme of "Hands to nurture, hands to inherit," tells how the Kansai region is preserving its otherwise forgotten traditional lifestyle, skills, nature and traditional performing arts. The 30-page booklet, in A-4 size and with color photographs, focuses both on elder people who are striving to hand down the Kansai traditions to future generations and on young people who are learning to inherit them.
[Historic Kansai] Kyoto: Once Japan's Hollywood
By Junzo TanakaKyoto was once the largest movie town in Japan. In other words, the old city was indeed the Japanese version of Hollywood. I would like to show people visiting Kyoto this spring around various spots which bear this out. Some Kyoto people may scold me for having referred to the Kyoto movie town in the past tense. They may assert that Kyoto should still be described as the existing "Japanese Hollywood." Even now, two movie companies maintain movie studios in Kyoto. Yet, Kyoto nowadays looks a little bit desolate to those people who knew there were as many as eight movie studios decades ago and who often came across movie stars on the streets.
The city itself is not responsible for the current situation. Its decline as a movie town reflects the eclipse of the movie industry in Japan. The Japanese movie industry enjoyed golden years from its inception in the 1920s at the time of silent films through the 1980s. Japanese movies had long been unknown in foreign countries due to the language barrier. Only after Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 did the Western and Asian moviedoms begin to take interest in Japanese movies, made by such directors as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi as well as Kurosawa.
Kyoto was indeed the Japanese Hollywood then. Japanese movies are classified into two categories: contemporary dramas and period dramas, the latter set out in pre-modernization Japan. Period dramas were the mainstay of Japanese movies and most of them were filmed in Kyoto, which was a suitable location site with many old houses as well as Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Hollywood in contrast is suitable for outdoor shooting and Western movies as the town has little rain.
Above all, I would like to take Kyoto visitors to the Toei movie company's Kyoto Studio Park at Uzumasa, a movie museum full of reference materials of early movies. The museum sometimes is used for actual filming and visitors may be lucky enough to meet top stars.
As Kyoto movie studios opened about 100 years ago, there are not a few movie-related places in the city. A bronze bust of Matsunosuke Onoe (1875-1926), the first Japanese great movie star, is located in Kamogawa Park near the Shimogamo Shrine. Onoe, who starred in 1,000 movies in his lifetime, is comparable to William S. Hart (1870-1946), the great Western movie star in the U.S. The bronze bust of movie producer Shozo Makino (1878-1929), said to be the pioneer of Japanese movies, is on the compound of Tojiin Temple near the campus of Ritsumeikan University. Great star Denjiro Okochi's residence, called Okochi Villa, still remains in Arashiyama.
There is a sign of resurrection of Japanese movies lately thanks to the activities of young Japanese producers and directors. Let's hope Kyoto will once again become the Japanese Hollywood.
Kansai in Focus: Kansai is "reservoir cultural zone"
After the cherry blossom season comes the water season, according to the Japanese calendar. The word "water" reminds us of the ocean, rivers and lakes. But small artificial ponds used for rice paddy irrigation, called "tameike" or reservoirs, should not be neglected.Lately, people in the Kansai region are increasingly interested in such reservoirs, which are the symbol of rice-growing regions, and various moves are under way to rethink the relationship between people and reservoirs as well as their side ditches. This is because reservoirs and side ditches are a mine of fish and other aquatic creatures, support the lives of wild animals, birds, insects and plants, and serve as recreation sites for local residents.
Reservoirs and side ditches, on the other hand, project a negative image because accidents involving children often occur there. Due to the aging of their owners and keepers, reservoirs are left unattended and devastated by water pollution and landfills.
Reservoir fair
Against such a background, the Hyogo Prefectural Government's department in charge of the Higashi-Harima area and various municipalities in the prefecture, such as Akashi, Kakogawa, Takasago, Inami and Harima cities, established in 2001 a committee to promote the establishment of an "Inamino Reservoir Museum" and launched a campaign to resurrect reservoirs. In cooperation with reservoir owners and land improvement associations in Hyogo Prefecture, the Wild Bird Society of Japan and Hyogo University, the municipalities held a "reservoir fair" from May 2005 through last March.
The inauguration of the committee has something to do with Hyogo Prefecture's geographical conditions. The Seto inland area has few big mountains, forests or large rivers, but has more reservoirs than any other prefecture in Japan. Reservoirs in Hyogo number 44,000, more than twice those in the 2nd ranking Hiroshima Prefecture. The Higashi-Harima area, once an agricultural community, has been steadfastly urbanized and non-agricultural households now account for 90%, with the result that local residents have lost interest in about 600 existing reservoirs.
The reservoir fair consisted of 250 events, including exhibitions, lectures and outdoor workshops in which participants were introduced to wild plants. Exhibited at the main site was a reservoir keeper's cottage for Kako Oike Pond in Inami Town. The fair brought together as many as 350,000 visitors, many of them coming from other prefectures.
The prefectural government's relevant department, Kenminkyoku, plans to host a national reservoir forum in January next year, hoping that the forum will be as successful as the Higashi-Harima fair. The department is seeking to strengthen cooperation with Osaka and other neighboring prefectures to nurture reservoirs as living and cultural zones, and make reservoirs dearer to local residents.
Protection activities
Reservoirs came into being 1,800 to 2,000 years ago and are as old as the history of rice growing. Fish and plants in reservoirs have supported the lives of Japanese people. Reservoirs also served as festival stages and warmed the heart of people.
With Higashi-Harima residents increasingly interested in reservoirs, civic groups promoting their protection have been created one after another and activities for the protection of fish and aquatic plants and birds are being promoted including schoolchildren. The neighboring Osaka Prefecture has less reservoirs than third-ranked Kagawa Prefecture and fourth-ranked Yamaguchi Prefecture but is the No.1 prefecture when it comes to the space of paddy fields as the percentage of total land space. Osaka-based websites are full of reports on private-sector volunteers engaged in reservoir-preservation activities. One website called for a campaign to protect reservoirs from the invasion of foreign aquatic plants.
Enthusiasm for protecting reservoirs is also mounting in Kyoto Prefecture, which has a large number of reservoirs, and Shiga Prefecture, which has selected the 50 best reservoirs in the prefecture. These moves show that reservoirs are drawing public attention as "cultural assets." (K)
<Editor's note: the latest issue of KIPPO's "Kansai a la carte" bilingual booklet series includes an article calling for the registration of "Tameike" reservoirs as World Heritage sites.>