World Children's Baseball Fair in Wakayama
The 13th World Children's Baseball Fair in Wakayama will be held in various municipalities in Wakayama Prefectures August 3-11 under the sponsorship of the World Children's Baseball Foundation (WCBF), the Wakayama Prefectural Government and other organizations. The International Baseball Federation will serve as supervisor.WCBF is headed by Sadaharu Oh, currently manager of the Daiei Hawks, who once hit more homeruns than any other baseball player in the world. The sites of the 13th World Children's Baseball Fair in Wakayama are Shingu City, Gobo City, Arida City, Tanabe City and Kamitonda Town.
The World Children's Baseball Fair, aimed at promoting friendship and trust among children of the world through baseball as well as disseminating and developing baseball, is the idea of Oh and former American Major League slugger Hank Aaron. It has been held in summer every year since the initial Los Angeles event in 1990, with boys and girls from 20 to 30 countries and regions participating.
The Wakayama event will bring together about 170 children players from 21 countries and regions, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Denmark, China, South Korea, the United States and Japan. Participants in the WCBF Baseball Clinic will be divided into eight groups to receive guidance from coaches selected by the International Baseball Federation. All participants will have exchanges with children of the host municipalities. The Chinese and South Korean teams will play with representative teams at the host municipalities.
Osaka Pref. ties up with Italy's Lombardy
Osaka Prefecture has concluded a partnership agreement with Italy's Lombardy Region. Lombardy is the seventh foreign regional government with which Osaka Prefecture has concluded such an agreement. The six others are Shanghai (China), East Java Province (Indonesia), Val d'Oise Province (France), Queensland (Australia), Primorsky Territory (Russia) and California State (U.S.).Lombardy Region, the capital of which is Milan, is one of the leading economic centers in Italy and has many things in common with Osaka, such as a concentration of small industries.
A proposal for a partnership relationship between the two regions was made by Lombardy's governor when he visited Osaka last October. After reaching the conclusion that the prefecture would be able to make meaningful exchanges with Lombardy in various areas, mainly economic, the Osaka Prefectural Government had held partnership talks with Lombardy and signed the agreement during Osaka Governor Fusae Ota's visit to the Italian region recently.
On the basis of the partnership agreement, Osaka and Lombardy will promote joint projects for the expansion of trade and investment in such areas as small industries, fashion and tourism. They will also conduct various other joint projects such as the establishment of joint ventures, promotion of corporate tie-ups, exchanges in culture and the arts, and professional education for the development of personal resources, among others.
Nara team finds mechanism of Boundary formation
A group of researchers at the graduate school of Biological Sciences of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology has discovered for the first time in the world the mechanisms by which a morphological boundary and tissue separation of vertebrates take place.Boundary formation plays a central role in differentiating the flanking regions that give rise to discrete tissues and organs during early development. The group, headed by Yoshiko Takahashi, guest professor at the institute and a team leader at the Center for Developmental Biology of Riken, studied the mechanisms by examining chicken somite segmentation as a model system. By transplanting a small group of cells taken from a presumptive border into a non-segmentation site, the group found a novel inductive event where posteriority juxtaposed cells to the next-forming border instruct the anterior cells to become separated and epithelialized.
They also found that these boundary-forming signals are mediated by Notch, the action of which is confined to the border region by Lunatic fringe. Notch is the monocule known to play important roles in neuronal differentiation. The research group named the signals 'Segmenter.'
The discovery of the segmenter is seen likely to pave the way for the development of technology for precisely forming the shapes of organs, which are used for regeneration health care. Such technology has so far been left unexplored.
9th German Fest in Naruto City July 28
The 9th German Fest will be held at the Naruto German House and its neighborhood in Naruto City, Tokushima Prefecture, on July 28. The annual event, aimed at promoting friendship between Japan and Germany, will be organized by the organizing committee for the 9th German Fest in Naruto.Naruto was the site of the camp for German soldiers who were held prisoners in China's Chingtao after World War I. The German POWs and local citizens were engaged in various exchange activities. In memory of the German POWs camp, Naruto City has sponsored various activities for promoting friendship with Germany, including the building of the German House and the holding of the annual German Fest.
The 9th German Fest on July 28 will offer various events including street performances by Germans, folk dancing by foreign students and a German trade fair, where German wine, beer and sausages will be sold.
Malaysia Industrial Parts Fair underway in Osaka
The Malaysia Industrial Parts Fair is now underway at the BPC Network Center under the sponsorship of the Osaka Municipal Government, the Malaysian External Trade Development Corporation and the Osaka Business Partner City Council. The fair, aimed at exhibiting Malaysian industrial parts and supporting new trade deals with Malaysian parts makers, will run until August 30.Some 40 Malaysian companies interested in Japanese markets are taking part in the fair, where electric parts, electronic parts, computer parts, machinery parts, industrial materials, metal components, plastic components, rubber components, construction materials and auto parts are displayed. The EMS (electronic manufacturing services) production system which designs, manufacturers, inspects and delivers electronic and other appliances ordered by customers are also introduced at the fair.
The sponsors offer information on these parts and the EMS system for small companies in Kansai. Admission is free. Photographs of commodities exhibited at the fair are available on the homepage of the Osaka Business Partner City Council (http://www.bpc.gr.jp/)
3-D Tourist Map for Internet developed in Kyoto
The Kyoto City Government and the Kyoto Digital Archives Research Center have jointly developed a three-dimensional tourist map, which enables viewers to make a virtual sightseeing tour of Kyoto on the Internet.The map, dubbed 'Sky View Kyoto,'is a next-generation tourist guide system, which incorporates state-of-the-art communications technology. Based on aerial photographs, the system enables viewers to make a virtual sightseeing tour of Kyoto as if they are flying over the city, if they trace a real city map. They can move freely within an extent from 10 to 3,000 meters.
The map also offers an aerial sightseeing tour of 13 courses as well as tourist information. Thirty-two famous tourist spots, such as Kiyomizu Temple and Kinkaku Temple, can be seen in detailed three-dimensional images.
Kyoto is the first municipality to offer a three-dimensional tourist map on the Internet. Sky View Kyoto's URL is: http://mmptwww03.kyoto-archives.gr.jp/skyview/
Kansai in Focus: Kansai boosting wider cooperation for its resurgence
To bail out of a prolonged recession hit by a high unemployment rate, municipalities and the private business sectors in the Kansai region are working hard to resurrect the region. As part of their efforts, municipalities, companies, universities as well as public and private research institutions have been engaged in various joint projects since last summer under the slogan of 'Coordination and Cooperation.'At the meeting of the Governors' Club of Kinki Bloc (Kansai region) held aboard a boat cruising Lake Biwa last November, governors exchanged opinions on how to improve the current situation and decided to promote cooperation among all the sectors concerned for the creation of new industries. Then, the governors' club meeting, held in Osaka in May, launched a working group organized by nine prefectures of the region, including Mie, Fukui and Tokushima. The working group consists of three divisions, technology licensing organizations (TLO), public research institutions, and the sharing of information. These divisions will offer venues for officials of the prefectural governments and industrial experts to discuss measures for cooperation. It is quite unusual for local governments to cooperate with the academic and business sectors, and thus the move is drawing national attention.
The TLO Division will form a network with the Osaka TLO, Kansai TLO (Kyoto), TLO Hyogo, Mie TLO and other regional TLOs to promote coordination among them and with universities and other academic and research organizations, for the purpose of activating technological transfer. The division will urge the central government to ease rules banning staff members of national and public universities from holding other jobs, as part of the measures for promoting technological transfer.
The Public Research Organizations Division will promote joint use of facilities and equipment at prefectural industrial, scientific and technological centers as well as industrial technological research institutes in order to enhance the technological potentials of the industrial sector of the region. It will also promote joint studies on environmental protection and technologies dealing with the aging of the population.
The Information Division will promote the sharing of information on research and technological development through the homepage of the Kansai Council. The working group will exist until fiscal 2003, and each division is expected to compile an interim report this autumn. The division reports are expected to incorporate action plans, which will break down prefectural barriers and restore vitality in the region.
In line with the municipalities' moves, academic circles in the region, including Osaka University and Kyoto University are moving to promote cooperation among them for the purpose of making Kansai a huge base for biomedical research. Kansai academic circles have previously tended to compete with each other rather than cooperating with each other. They have already established the Kansai Biomedical Industry Promotion Council in cooperation with municipal governments and industrial sectors.
The National Cardiovascular Center (NCVC) in Osaka's Suita City, meanwhile, has established the Advanced Medical Engineering Center aimed at developing medical equipment and nurturing personnel resources in cooperation with the business sector. At the same time, plans are afoot for the building of scientific and technological metropolises, such as the Kansai Science City, the Kobe Medical Industry City and SAITO, a new scientific and cultural metropolis in north Osaka.
If all sectors in Kansai cooperate with each other on a comprehensive basis in order to make full use of the region's vitality, they will make up for its weaknesses and make it a region with vitality for the 21st Century. (J)