Friday, July 31, 2009
By MIHO INADA
Yokohama was just a small fishing village when U.S. Navy Commander Matthew C. Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 with his four "black ships" -- so called because the coal-powered vessels spewed black smoke and were painted black. His arrival forcefully persuaded Japan to resume commerce with the rest of the world, which had been limited for two centuries to a few traders from China and the Netherlands.
In time, Yokohama became a major port where mostly foreigners lived and traded. Today, it is Japan's second-largest city after Tokyo, which is just 30 minutes away by train.
Packed within walking distance of the sea are Chinatown, the city's old cemetery, parks and a hot-springs spa as well as many posh shops and restaurants. Should you get tired along the way, you can hop into a taxi, or a Velo, an electric-powered passenger tricycle introduced in the city a couple of years ago.
Through September, the city is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the port's official opening in 1859, which will bring a host of special exhibitions and events -- including a performance by a 12-meter-tall, 37-ton mechanical spider created and operated by a group of French artists, as well as an open-air restaurant called Kurofune (Japanese for "black ship") that serves a "Yokohama port opening burger" and a "Black ship curry."
10 A.M. CHINATOWN
Enter Chinatown through its East Gate, across the street from exit 1 of the Motomachi Chukagai station along the Minatomirai subway line. Bear right when you reach a fork in the road and you should be on Chukagai Odori or Chinatown Main Street. Look for a koban on your right. These petite local police stations -- originally built as shelters for Tokyo's fledgling police corps in the 1880s -- are a common sight throughout Japan.
One block down Main Street, you reach Shatenki, a small restaurant on the right at the corner ( 81-45-641-0779; open 10 a.m. to 8:25 p.m. daily, closed Tuesdays). A half-century old, it isn't fancy and you might miss it altogether were it not for the long line of people outside. The shop's various kinds of Chinese rice porridge, or congee, made with a special stock that's boiled for hours with dried scallops and chicken bones, draw so many customers at lunchtime that the wait can be more than an hour.
Have a late breakfast here. You can choose to take your congee with a variety of ingredients, such as vegetables, seafood and meat, and one bowl costs between 685 yen and 945 yen (about $7 to $10). If you don't feel like a sit-down meal, there are plenty of food stands along Main Street, serving snacks such as roasted chestnuts and pork dumplings.
At the end of Main Street, make a U-turn when you hit another gate, called Zenrin Mon or the Zenrin Gate, and retrace your steps to the koban (police station).
At the koban, turn right at Nanmon Siruku Rodo (South Gate Silk Road), which is full of quirky stores. Make a stop at the modern-looking shop named Goku (it comes from the name of a monkey with magical powers in a Chinese folk story). Its English name is Monkey Magic Teahouse ( 81-45-651-7824; 30 Yamashita-cho; open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, closed Wednesdays.) Check out the Chinese tea sets as well as the variety of teas touted to improve your health.
One block down South Gate Silk Road on your left is the flashy eight-story Yokohama Daisekai Daska building, where you can have a Chinese fortune teller read your palm, or get a foot massage.
After you pass the building, you'll hit a fork in the road. Stay to the right -- you'll see a Chinese temple also on your right -- and walk on until you reach the South Gate.
12 P.M. MOTOMACHI
As you stand in front of South Gate, cross the street and then make your way over the Maeda Bridge, which sits under an elevated highway and over a river. At the second left, turn onto posh Motomachi. This street, filled with tasteful shops selling dresses, shoes, bags and housewares, is popular with elegant Yokohamans. While international luxury brands have boutiques on nearby streets within this shopping district -- also called Motomachi -- this particular road specializes in sophisticated Japanese designers. Check out Kitamura (2-95 Motomachi) for bags and Mihama (2-83 Motomachi) for shoes. And Ishii (1-28 Motomachi) carries beautiful Japanese pottery and lacquerware as well as woodblock prints. This shopping street originated in the Meiji era (1868-1912) as part of a leisurely walk for residents of the hillside area of Yokohama called Yamanote. They would walk down through the Motomachi district to the commercial area by the sea.
When you reach the Gap store on your right, make a right turn. The smell of freshly baked bread will soon waft over you. It's coming from Uchiki-pan, one of the oldest bakeries in Yokohama, opened in 1888 by a Japanese man who had learned how to bake British-style bread from an Englishman. The shop, still run by the same family, sells pastries, cakes and various kinds of bread, including French, sourdough and cinnamon-raisin.
12:30 P.M. YOKOHAMA FOREIGN GENERAL CEMETERY
After the bakery, head left at the fork in the road. It leads to the entrance of Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, where about 4,800 gaijin (foreigners) from 40 countries rest. The first person buried here, in 1854, was a crew member on one of Commodore Perry's black ships, Robert Williams, who died on the journey from America. Many believe that Perry requested that Japan carve out land for a cemetery with an ocean view where Americans could be buried.
Many of those buried here contributed to the modernization of Japan in one way or another during the Meiji Restoration -- a revolutionary period beginning in the late 1860s that was marked by the downfall of the shogunate ("shogun" was the title given to the hereditary military commanders who ruled the country for 700 years) and feudalism and the creation of the modern state. For a small donation to support the maintenance of the cemetery, you can walk through the grounds between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays.
1P.M. HARBOUR VIEW PARK
Exit the cemetery and walk straight ahead on Yamatehondori Street, which is in front of the cemetery entrance, toward Harbour View Park. Stroll through the park, keeping the sea to your right. This area is called Mt. France; in the late 1800s and early 1900s the district was populated mostly by French expatriates. You can still see the remains of the French consular office, an old well and a windmill, all of which were demolished by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923.
At the end of the park, go up the ramp to the left to get on the elevated promenade that will lead you to Yamashita Park. Stay to the right until you reach the Pauline Bridge. Just before the bridge is a small bronze statue of a baby doll. It was created to commemorate the 13,000 blue-eyed dolls sent by Americans to Japan in 1927 to promote good relations between the two countries.
1:30 P.M. YAMASHITA PARK
After crossing the Pauline Bridge you'll be in Yamashita Park, which was created in 1930 on landfill using debris from the Kanto earthquake.
To your left, moored next to the park, you'll see the luxury passenger and cargo ship Hikawa Maru. Japanese-built, it carried passengers across the Pacific from 1930 through 1941, and again in the 1950s. The ship's service, food and Art Deco interior charmed not only wealthy Japanese, including some members of the Imperial family, but also foreign celebrities such as actor Charlie Chaplin, who chose the Hikawa Maru for his Japan trip in 1932 so he could taste its renowned tempura. The ship is open daily except Mondays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is 200 yen (about $2.)
As you disembark from the ship, head right, with the sea on your right, and walk through the park. It's a nice stroll through flower gardens and past fountains. As you reach the edge of the greenery, you will see a convenience store called Happy Lawson.
2:30 P.M. OSANBASHI PIER
Take the stairwell to the left of the convenience store to get to the elevated promenade -- a walkway over a busy street. You should see the sea to your right.
As you walk along, keep your eyes open for a sign on your left for the Osanbashi Pier (the pier itself is on your right). Head down the steps toward the pier -- you'll have to make a U-turn when you reach ground level; the pier will be on your left.
The pier, built in the late 1880s, is Yokohama's oldest. But it was redesigned in the late 1990s and reopened in 2002, following a world-wide design contest that drew 660 submissions from 41 countries. The winners were Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, an architect team operating in the U.K. The award-winning building is made of steel, wood and glass and includes a sleek rooftop plaza and "cruise" deck.
Inside the pier, head up to the wooden roof deck, which offers a great view of Yokohama with its skyscrapers and giant Ferris wheel, as well as the Yokohama Bay Bridge. When you've had your fill, head back down to the first floor and have a late lunch at Harbor's Cafe, which serves pasta, sandwiches, curry, salad and soup and offers a view of the sea, the Bay Bridge and Yamashita Park.
4P.M. JAPAN COAST GUARD EXHIBITION
Make your way back to the elevated promenade and walk straight ahead toward the Akarengasoko, or Red Brick Warehouse, now a retail complex. You can always hop in a taxi or Velo if you're tired.
Before exploring Akarengasoko, take some time to look at a North Korean spy ship on display in the seaside Japan Coast Guard facility behind Akarengasoko. (Free admission; open daily except Mondays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.)
The armed North Korean ship -- disguised as a fishing boat -- was cruising the East China Sea in December 2001 when it was discovered in Japanese waters by a Japanese Coast Guard patrol ship. A six-hour shootout ensued and the boat sank. A year later, the Japanese government salvaged it and it's now a permanent exhibit. The now-rusty vessel is riddled with holes, a testament to the gunfire exchanged. (None of the North Koreans on board, 15 all told, survived.) The exhibit includes a package of tobacco, a watch, canned foods and a pin bearing an image of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, as well as guns and an electric switch for a self-destruct system bearing Korean words that loosely translate as "suicide bomb."
4:30 P.M. AKARENGASOKO
As you exit the Coast Guard facility, head to the Akarengasoko shopping mall a short walk away. The mall consists of two red brick buildings built in the early 1900s. Enter the nearer one, which is named Nigo-kan (Japanese for "second building"). The other brick building also has shops, cafes and restaurants, but on a smaller scale.
Inside, a caricature artist has a makeshift studio on the second floor. A color portrait takes less than 10 minutes to complete and costs 1,800 yen (about $19). Unusual shops abound: One called Communication Mania focuses on what are best described as conversation pieces. A bestseller, for instance, is a tube of toothpaste that tastes like curry.
5:30 P.M. YOKOHAMA MINATOMIRAI MANYO CLUB
From Akarengasoko, take a short ride in a Velo or a regular taxi to Yokohama Minatomirai Manyo Club ( 81-45-663-4126; 2-7-1 Shinko). Housed in a nine-story building, Manyo Club is a hot-spring theme park that has 120,000 liters of spring water trucked in daily from Atami and Yugawara, famous resorts about a two-hour drive from Yokohama. Admission is 2,620 yen a person (about $28).
Inside are several kinds of baths including a big pool as well as an open-air soaking tub. Up on the roof, you can sit on a wooden bench with your feet dipped in hot-spring water, while enjoying a 360-degree view of the city, a perfect end to the day's walk.
Just be sure to follow the proper onsen, or hot-bath, etiquette: You'll be given a yukata, or cotton kimono, to wear inside the facility, along with a thin towel for washing and a thicker towel for drying yourself after the bath. When wearing the yukata, drape the left side on top of the right side -- in Japan, the right-over-left wrap is reserved for dressing a dead body. Men's and women's baths are segregated, but the facility has a separate pool for couples and families. It costs an additional 3,200 yen (about $34) an hour.
Remove your clothes in the large changing room and place them in a locker. In the shower area, which is separate from the large bath, use the thin towel to wash your body. Before stepping into the bath, used for soaking only, be sure you've rinsed your body of all soap suds. Putting your thin towel in the bath is considered impolite, but some Japanese will fold it in a small square and place it on top of their head (to keep them cool, presumably -- the water temperature is typically a toasty 40 to 41 degrees Celsius).
After a nice bath, you can stay at the club and for 2,380 yen ($25) a person treat yourself to a Japanese kaiseki dinner, a set-course meal that includes sashimi, tempura, vegetables, rice, miso soup and dessert.
Write to Miho Inada at miho.inada@wsj.com
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Hunting for Tuna: The Environmental Peril Grows
Monday, Nov. 09, 2009
By Krista Mahr / General Santos City
Nearly every day at dawn, John Heitz falls a little bit in love. Leaning over a 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin tuna, the 55-year-old American, whose business is exporting fish, circles his forefinger around its deep eye socket. "Look how clear these eyes are." He traces the puncture where the fish was hooked, and the markings under its pectoral fin where it struggled on the line. "Sometimes," Heitz says, "I see a good tuna, and it looks better to me than a woman."
Heitz, a blond Illinoisan who sports a fading Maui & Sons T-shirt and a tuna tattoo on his bicep, is an out-and-out tuna man. That's why he lives and works in General Santos City in the southern Philippines, one of the planet's great tuna-fishing ports. By 6 a.m. on an August morning, the heat at the docks — a raucous, clanging, blood-and-guts tangle of 10,000 buyers, sellers, porters and men whacking rusty knives into silver skin — is unforgiving. Boat crews crouch in patches of shade on deck, smoking and waiting for their wages. The boats' hulls, sloshing with bloody ice water, are almost empty, only a few shiny bellies lolling in the slush. Porters have already hoisted thousands of tuna onto their shoulders and carried them to the exporters; they swarm around the fat, fresh ones whose slick layer of slime still smells like the ocean, and whose scales gleam with a hint of the yellow flush they had when blood was pumping inside them.
It's one of the few quality hauls of yellowfin that has come in all week. Heitz jumps into the scrum of insults and jokes flying between the buyers and the sellers. Quality testers sink metal rods into the fish, pulling out samples of pink meat that they rub between their thumb and forefinger and smell. The biggest and best tuna will go for about $700 wholesale, and get whisked away to be washed, beheaded, gutted and packed with dry ice to catch the 10:30 a.m. flight to Manila. By the next day, the fish will be in Tokyo, Seattle or California. By the next night, its meat will be poised between chopsticks.
A Worrying Trend
The world's tuna trade is an awesome 21st century hunt. Ancient Greeks used to stand on bluffs to watch for schools of tuna passing the shore. Today, fishing fleets stalk the fish across thousands of miles of ocean with helicopters, GPS and sonar. In 1950, about 600,000 tons of tuna were caught worldwide. Last year, that figure hit nearly 6 million tons, the prize of a chase that plays out from the Philippines to Canada's Prince Edward Island.
For some species of tuna, the chase is becoming unsustainable. In September, the European Commission recommended that the E.U. support a temporary suspension of the global trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a majestic cousin of the yellowfin sold for tens of thousands of dollars a head for its coveted sashimi meat. At current fishing rates, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that Atlantic bluefin that spawn in the Mediterranean could disappear from those waters as early as 2012. But the recommended ban was shot down by E.U. member states including Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Spain, France and Italy — all countries with a stake in the trade. "The hunt is relentless," says Michael Sutton, vice president of the Center for the Future of the Oceans at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "These are the wolves, grizzly bears, lions and tigers of the ocean. If you take the top predators out, the ecosystem begins to get out of balance." On land, when top predators like lions or wolves die off, lesser ones like baboons or coyotes flourish, throwing an entire food chain off. The same goes for oceans. Scientists believe stocks of southern bluefin around Australia have likely fallen over 90% since the 1950s and could continue to drop. Of the world's 19 non-bluefin commercial tuna stocks, half are now overfished or at risk of going that direction, according to the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), a partnership of canning companies, scientists and the WWF.
That's bad news not just for the oceans, but also for John Heitz and millions of others who make a living from these fish. General Santos earned its motto as the "Tuna Capital of the Philippines" when fishermen could go out in the morning and return at dusk with two or three 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin or bigeye, two tuna species that, like the bluefin, are sold for sashimi. Now, even the smallest of those tuna are at least a two- or three-day trip out to sea. These waters, like so many others, have been fished too hard for too long. "General Santos lives and dies by tuna," says Heitz. "Now it's getting less and less. People just have to wake up and smell the coffee."
General Santos is not the only place dependent on tuna. At 6 a.m., an auctioneer in Tokyo reaches up to ring a brass bell, alerting a group of blue-capped, rubber-booted men perusing rows of gray frozen tuna that the bidding is about to begin. He starts to chant out the tuna's serial numbers, written on squares of paper stuck to their bellies. One bidder raises his hand with an offer that the auctioneer weaves into his mantra: "4-5, 4-5, 4-5." That's 4,500 yen — about $50 — one of many offers made for every kilo of the frozen fish on the block that morning. At Tsukiji, the world's most famous fish market, tuna are sold at prices equivalent to Ivy League educations. In one of hundreds of stalls, wholesaler Keisuke Morishima dismantles a fresh 271-lb. (123 kg) bluefin snared off Oma, a small Japanese town. Bluefin can live for decades, growing more than 10 ft. (3 m) long, weighing up to 1,500 lb. (680 kg), and with enough muscle to propel them at 40 m.p.h. (65 km/h). Throwing his weight into the fish as he makes a cut, Morishima is philosophical. "Some think it's endangered, and I understand their position, but what can you do by worrying about it?" he asks. He'd like all his bluefin to come from Japan, but if there are none on any given day, he says, he'll buy one caught somewhere else.
The Fish That Became Too Popular
Tuna has been eaten for thousands of years. The Greeks sliced, salted and pickled it, and Mediterranean bluefin was a staple of the Roman soldier's lunch box. But modern Japan's taste for the fish, coupled with rising demand in the U.S., Europe and China, has driven the Atlantic bluefin to become "the poster child of overfishing worldwide," says Monterey's Sutton. The number of breeding tuna in the eastern Atlantic has plunged over 74% since the late 1950s, with the steepest drop occurring in the past 10 years, while the western population dropped over 82% between 1970 and 2007. The Pacific bluefin, whose habitat spans from the West Coast of the U.S. to Japan, is officially in better shape, but one Tsukiji auctioneer estimates the number of tuna coming in these days is down 60% to 70% from what it used to be. Japan's Fisheries Agency does not believe its local tuna are overfished and has steadfastly refused to impose a quota on its tuna fishermen. But in August, Masayuki Komatsu, a professor at Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, who has fiercely defended Japan's right to hunt whale, made the heretical claim that because Japan's bluefin is so depleted "Japanese people must change their mind-set."
Japan consumes about 80% of the 60,000 tons of bluefin caught around the world each year — and local economies on both sides of the planet depend on it. Off the coast of the Spanish port of Cartagena, hundreds of seagulls swarm the same patch of water six days a week, waiting for a boat to arrive and uncoil a long, plastic tube into the water. As sardines and mackerel are pumped into the deep, the water begins to churn. Hundreds of bluefin tuna, circling in vast cages beneath the water's surface, duke it out for their daily meal. This is a tuna ranch, a method that started in the Mediterranean in 1996 and now dominates the Atlantic bluefin industry. Today there are 70 registered ranches in the Mediterranean alone (and more in Mexico, Japan and Australia), and the majority of the region's bluefin quota is caught and dragged to cages to be fattened for six months to a year. The ranch off Cartagena, owned and operated by Ricardo Fuentes & Sons, produces some 10,000 bluefin tuna annually, and this year half of them will go straight to Japan.
Tuna-ranching has proven to be a good way to do business — too good, some argue. In recent years, many boats have joined in the lucrative business of taking fish to ranches like these, sometimes netting more tuna than they're allowed to, or catching underage fish that have not had the chance to spawn. "Fattening is the motor that drives overfishing," says Sebastian Losado, oceans policy adviser for Greenpeace in Madrid. Oversight of this kind of illegal fishing — and more generally, stewardship of the fish — has proven weak. Last November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Madrid-based body charged with protecting the Atlantic bluefin, adopted a regional quota for 2009 that exceeded its own scientists' more cautious recommendations by nearly three times. Tuna activists read that as a shameless bow to lobbying from countries like France, Italy and Spain, where influential fishermen are loath to see their profits drop. "This isn't a process controlled by countries," says Losado. "It's controlled by companies."
And by lovers of tuna. In Tokyo's upmarket Okusawa suburb, the lunch crowd at the sushi restaurant Irifune has thinned out. Katsumi Honda, Irifune's owner and head sushi chef, rhythmically chops blocks of pink and red flesh behind a counter. Now 68, Honda remembers how, as a boy, his first bite of Japanese hon maguro, or bluefin, inspired him to become a chef. For Honda, it's the only tuna there is. "Once you experience our natural maguro, you cannot go to a conveyor-belt sushi place anymore," he says. In 2001, when the yen was still rolling, Honda helped auction a Pacific bluefin at Tsukiji for about $220,000. It was one of the most expensive fish ever sold in Japan. "Maguro," Honda explains, "has a power to move people."
Beyond Bluefin
As majestic and imperiled as it might be, all the world's bluefin catch accounts for less than 3% of the tuna that people eat. For the $175 that a plate of Honda's maguro runs to, you can buy half a year's supply of canned tuna from the Ocean Canning Corp. in General Santos. Inside Ocean Canning's processing plant, rows of men and women in blue smocks skin, bone and pack thousands of fish into cans sent to customers in Europe. Outside, dozens more would-be workers line up at the cannery's office, applications in hand. If there is one thing that people in General Santos can count on, it's the West's insatiable appetite for canned tuna. Global imports have skyrocketed from less than 3 million tons per year in 1976 to over 3.5 billion today. "Demand is very high," says Mariano Fernandez, Ocean Canning's general manager. "Raw material is the problem."
The raw material is mostly skipjack, a small, unglamorous tuna that makes up about 60% of the world's tuna catch. Of the main commercial species, bluefin, yellowfin and bigeye tuna are primarily sold to the sashimi market; skipjack and albacore land in cans. Over half the skipjack caught each year come from the waters in the western and central Pacific, and while skipjack in the region are officially plentiful, according to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) that keeps track of them, talk to anyone in General Santos and you'll hear otherwise. Supplies of fresh, local skipjack dropped 50% last year, says Miguel Lamberte, the port's manager. This August, the amount of both frozen and fresh skipjack being unloaded was at an all-time low, he says. "And it's still going down."
To keep the cans filled, large Philippine boats have gone further and further afield — to Papua New Guinea, to the Solomon Islands — where there is still plenty of skipjack for the taking. Fishing is growing faster in this swath of the Pacific than in any other part of the world, says the WCPFC, as ever greater numbers of boats from Asia, the Americas and Europe are leaving depleted waters for these bluer pastures. "We're getting a lot of boats seeking to come into our region from the Indian Ocean and eastern Pacific because the skipjack is still healthy here," says John Hampton, manager of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community's Oceanic Fisheries Program, which studies highly migratory fish stocks for the WCPFC. "There is good money to be made." But with more boats on the water, many local governments don't have the resources to keep track of how much fishing is being done in their waters, making illegal fishing or overfishing in protected areas tricky to control.
In General Santos and ports like it, when the fish start to go, everyone loses: the boat owners, the cannery workers, the exporters, the porters, the truck drivers. As the day winds down at the port, John Heitz walks between rows of small, unsold yellowfin that look, and smell, like they have seen better days. After the good ones go early in the morning, thousands of fish like these are left over, caught too young to have been given a chance to spawn and too far away to get back to dock in time to sell for a good price. To Heitz, it's obvious they're from Indonesia — and most likely have been caught without a permit — but there is nobody here from the government fisheries department to verify that. There almost never is. "All these bad fish kind of stress me out," Heitz says. "It would be so easy to manage, and they're just not doing it."
The fishermen get the worst deal of all: the work gets harder and the pay gets less. Down one lane in a waterfront neighborhood, Danilo Ante sits at home with his girlfriend and four kids between fishing trips. On his last job, Ante took home about $21 for six weeks of work on the high seas. "In the past, there were only a few fishermen," he says. "But now we get fewer fish because there are more boats on the water." Even if his boats keep catching less fish, Ante doesn't have a lot of options in General Santos. "We have to continue. We have to rely on the sea."
An Endangered Species?
In October, Monaco formally proposed to register Atlantic bluefin on Appendix 1 of the U.N.'s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a move that would temporarily ban its trade and transfer enforcement from ICCAT to governments. If trade is shut down, so would be fishing, and the Atlantic bluefin would have some time to recover, much as the humpback whale rebounded after being listed in 1975. Monaco's proposal, which all but six E.U. states voted to co-sponsor and which has U.S. support, will go before CITES for approval in March 2010.
Even if that bid fails — and many believe it could — just the threat of CITES may serve as a warning to the tuna industry and to governments. Fishermen, understandably, are not thrilled by the possibility of a ban, no matter how temporary. "We're in a race with the ecologists," says David Martínez Cañabate, adjunct director of Ricardo Fuentes & Sons in Cartagena, which employs about 1,000 workers. "They want to shut down the fisheries, and we want to show them that the quotas and enforcement are working." Cañabate acknowledges there is too much illegal fishing, but believes rogue players can still be controlled. A ban, he argues, would come at too high a price. "Wouldn't it be better to still have the industry?" he asks. "To keep the jobs?"
Even so, the fishing companies know better than anyone that the only way to save the business is to save the species. The Spanish company has invested in the global quest to get bluefin to reproduce and grow in captivity — a task that has eluded all but a few scientists. In a trial run by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, scientists funded by Ricardo Fuentes have injected Atlantic bluefin females with synthetic hormones to trigger the fish's egg-laying response. This year, the team helped create some 150 million bluefin eggs, of which they took about 3 million to try to hatch. Of those, "maybe 50 [will] survive to the weight of one gram, or about 50 days [old]," says Aurelio Ortega, a biologist on the project. "We're still a long way off. Even five years would be very optimistic."
Some are further along. In 2002, Japan's Kinki University successfully bred and raised bluefin in pens and is now selling small amounts of the farmed fish. This year, Clean Seas, an Australian fishing company, got its southern bluefin living in a land-based tank to spawn eggs that were raised to be fingerlings — a breakthrough in the growth cycle. The success was so unexpected that Clean Seas had to leave all but a few of the young fish to die; there wasn't enough room to let them grow.
Aquaculture is not a perfect solution. Farmed tuna have huge appetites — in Cartagena, it takes up to 22 lb. (10 kg) of seafood to add 2 lb. (1 kg) of weight — and they create a lot of waste. But tuna-breeding is one of an expanding list of ideas being rolled out by scientists, activists, chefs, fishermen and entrepreneurs trying to find a happier marriage between the human demand for tuna and the ecosystem. "There is no one silver bullet to end overfishing because there is no one thing causing overfishing," says Mike Crispino of the ISSF. Major canneries that have signed on to the ISSF, such as BumbleBee, StarKist and Chicken of the Sea, are trying to guarantee that the fish going into their cans come from legal and traceable sources. More and more, customers are being offered ways to play a part too. In San Francisco and Seattle, two restaurants are already running popular sustainable-sushi bars, with menus designed around plentiful, local ingredients. "In the U.S., people think of sushi as being five or six fish that you eat in a particular way," says Casson Trenor, a former chef who opened San Francisco's Tataki in 2008 and later helped Seattle's Mashiko transition into serving better-sourced seafood. In the modern sushi restaurant, says Casson, "we're not respecting these animals."
In General Santos, people do respect the tuna. John Heitz points to a few men hauling yellowfin through the water from small wooden boats. "This is one of the few handline fisheries in the world," Heitz says. It's not flashy, but it follows the rules, pays the bills and, over time, it will keep these great animals in the water. "By eating a certain product, you're part of the problem, or part of the solution." Heitz wants to be on the solution side. Once, when he was scuba-diving off General Santos' coast, two yellowfin torpedoed past. "It was like a motorcycle was going by," he says, crouching slightly, staring straight ahead and moving his shoulders back and forth to mimic the fish's muscular energy. "If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it." Unless something changes, he may never see its like again.
— with reporting by Lisa Abend / Cartagena and Yuki Oda / Tokyo
By Krista Mahr / General Santos City
Nearly every day at dawn, John Heitz falls a little bit in love. Leaning over a 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin tuna, the 55-year-old American, whose business is exporting fish, circles his forefinger around its deep eye socket. "Look how clear these eyes are." He traces the puncture where the fish was hooked, and the markings under its pectoral fin where it struggled on the line. "Sometimes," Heitz says, "I see a good tuna, and it looks better to me than a woman."
Heitz, a blond Illinoisan who sports a fading Maui & Sons T-shirt and a tuna tattoo on his bicep, is an out-and-out tuna man. That's why he lives and works in General Santos City in the southern Philippines, one of the planet's great tuna-fishing ports. By 6 a.m. on an August morning, the heat at the docks — a raucous, clanging, blood-and-guts tangle of 10,000 buyers, sellers, porters and men whacking rusty knives into silver skin — is unforgiving. Boat crews crouch in patches of shade on deck, smoking and waiting for their wages. The boats' hulls, sloshing with bloody ice water, are almost empty, only a few shiny bellies lolling in the slush. Porters have already hoisted thousands of tuna onto their shoulders and carried them to the exporters; they swarm around the fat, fresh ones whose slick layer of slime still smells like the ocean, and whose scales gleam with a hint of the yellow flush they had when blood was pumping inside them.
It's one of the few quality hauls of yellowfin that has come in all week. Heitz jumps into the scrum of insults and jokes flying between the buyers and the sellers. Quality testers sink metal rods into the fish, pulling out samples of pink meat that they rub between their thumb and forefinger and smell. The biggest and best tuna will go for about $700 wholesale, and get whisked away to be washed, beheaded, gutted and packed with dry ice to catch the 10:30 a.m. flight to Manila. By the next day, the fish will be in Tokyo, Seattle or California. By the next night, its meat will be poised between chopsticks.
A Worrying Trend
The world's tuna trade is an awesome 21st century hunt. Ancient Greeks used to stand on bluffs to watch for schools of tuna passing the shore. Today, fishing fleets stalk the fish across thousands of miles of ocean with helicopters, GPS and sonar. In 1950, about 600,000 tons of tuna were caught worldwide. Last year, that figure hit nearly 6 million tons, the prize of a chase that plays out from the Philippines to Canada's Prince Edward Island.
For some species of tuna, the chase is becoming unsustainable. In September, the European Commission recommended that the E.U. support a temporary suspension of the global trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a majestic cousin of the yellowfin sold for tens of thousands of dollars a head for its coveted sashimi meat. At current fishing rates, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that Atlantic bluefin that spawn in the Mediterranean could disappear from those waters as early as 2012. But the recommended ban was shot down by E.U. member states including Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Spain, France and Italy — all countries with a stake in the trade. "The hunt is relentless," says Michael Sutton, vice president of the Center for the Future of the Oceans at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "These are the wolves, grizzly bears, lions and tigers of the ocean. If you take the top predators out, the ecosystem begins to get out of balance." On land, when top predators like lions or wolves die off, lesser ones like baboons or coyotes flourish, throwing an entire food chain off. The same goes for oceans. Scientists believe stocks of southern bluefin around Australia have likely fallen over 90% since the 1950s and could continue to drop. Of the world's 19 non-bluefin commercial tuna stocks, half are now overfished or at risk of going that direction, according to the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), a partnership of canning companies, scientists and the WWF.
That's bad news not just for the oceans, but also for John Heitz and millions of others who make a living from these fish. General Santos earned its motto as the "Tuna Capital of the Philippines" when fishermen could go out in the morning and return at dusk with two or three 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin or bigeye, two tuna species that, like the bluefin, are sold for sashimi. Now, even the smallest of those tuna are at least a two- or three-day trip out to sea. These waters, like so many others, have been fished too hard for too long. "General Santos lives and dies by tuna," says Heitz. "Now it's getting less and less. People just have to wake up and smell the coffee."
General Santos is not the only place dependent on tuna. At 6 a.m., an auctioneer in Tokyo reaches up to ring a brass bell, alerting a group of blue-capped, rubber-booted men perusing rows of gray frozen tuna that the bidding is about to begin. He starts to chant out the tuna's serial numbers, written on squares of paper stuck to their bellies. One bidder raises his hand with an offer that the auctioneer weaves into his mantra: "4-5, 4-5, 4-5." That's 4,500 yen — about $50 — one of many offers made for every kilo of the frozen fish on the block that morning. At Tsukiji, the world's most famous fish market, tuna are sold at prices equivalent to Ivy League educations. In one of hundreds of stalls, wholesaler Keisuke Morishima dismantles a fresh 271-lb. (123 kg) bluefin snared off Oma, a small Japanese town. Bluefin can live for decades, growing more than 10 ft. (3 m) long, weighing up to 1,500 lb. (680 kg), and with enough muscle to propel them at 40 m.p.h. (65 km/h). Throwing his weight into the fish as he makes a cut, Morishima is philosophical. "Some think it's endangered, and I understand their position, but what can you do by worrying about it?" he asks. He'd like all his bluefin to come from Japan, but if there are none on any given day, he says, he'll buy one caught somewhere else.
The Fish That Became Too Popular
Tuna has been eaten for thousands of years. The Greeks sliced, salted and pickled it, and Mediterranean bluefin was a staple of the Roman soldier's lunch box. But modern Japan's taste for the fish, coupled with rising demand in the U.S., Europe and China, has driven the Atlantic bluefin to become "the poster child of overfishing worldwide," says Monterey's Sutton. The number of breeding tuna in the eastern Atlantic has plunged over 74% since the late 1950s, with the steepest drop occurring in the past 10 years, while the western population dropped over 82% between 1970 and 2007. The Pacific bluefin, whose habitat spans from the West Coast of the U.S. to Japan, is officially in better shape, but one Tsukiji auctioneer estimates the number of tuna coming in these days is down 60% to 70% from what it used to be. Japan's Fisheries Agency does not believe its local tuna are overfished and has steadfastly refused to impose a quota on its tuna fishermen. But in August, Masayuki Komatsu, a professor at Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, who has fiercely defended Japan's right to hunt whale, made the heretical claim that because Japan's bluefin is so depleted "Japanese people must change their mind-set."
Japan consumes about 80% of the 60,000 tons of bluefin caught around the world each year — and local economies on both sides of the planet depend on it. Off the coast of the Spanish port of Cartagena, hundreds of seagulls swarm the same patch of water six days a week, waiting for a boat to arrive and uncoil a long, plastic tube into the water. As sardines and mackerel are pumped into the deep, the water begins to churn. Hundreds of bluefin tuna, circling in vast cages beneath the water's surface, duke it out for their daily meal. This is a tuna ranch, a method that started in the Mediterranean in 1996 and now dominates the Atlantic bluefin industry. Today there are 70 registered ranches in the Mediterranean alone (and more in Mexico, Japan and Australia), and the majority of the region's bluefin quota is caught and dragged to cages to be fattened for six months to a year. The ranch off Cartagena, owned and operated by Ricardo Fuentes & Sons, produces some 10,000 bluefin tuna annually, and this year half of them will go straight to Japan.
Tuna-ranching has proven to be a good way to do business — too good, some argue. In recent years, many boats have joined in the lucrative business of taking fish to ranches like these, sometimes netting more tuna than they're allowed to, or catching underage fish that have not had the chance to spawn. "Fattening is the motor that drives overfishing," says Sebastian Losado, oceans policy adviser for Greenpeace in Madrid. Oversight of this kind of illegal fishing — and more generally, stewardship of the fish — has proven weak. Last November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Madrid-based body charged with protecting the Atlantic bluefin, adopted a regional quota for 2009 that exceeded its own scientists' more cautious recommendations by nearly three times. Tuna activists read that as a shameless bow to lobbying from countries like France, Italy and Spain, where influential fishermen are loath to see their profits drop. "This isn't a process controlled by countries," says Losado. "It's controlled by companies."
And by lovers of tuna. In Tokyo's upmarket Okusawa suburb, the lunch crowd at the sushi restaurant Irifune has thinned out. Katsumi Honda, Irifune's owner and head sushi chef, rhythmically chops blocks of pink and red flesh behind a counter. Now 68, Honda remembers how, as a boy, his first bite of Japanese hon maguro, or bluefin, inspired him to become a chef. For Honda, it's the only tuna there is. "Once you experience our natural maguro, you cannot go to a conveyor-belt sushi place anymore," he says. In 2001, when the yen was still rolling, Honda helped auction a Pacific bluefin at Tsukiji for about $220,000. It was one of the most expensive fish ever sold in Japan. "Maguro," Honda explains, "has a power to move people."
Beyond Bluefin
As majestic and imperiled as it might be, all the world's bluefin catch accounts for less than 3% of the tuna that people eat. For the $175 that a plate of Honda's maguro runs to, you can buy half a year's supply of canned tuna from the Ocean Canning Corp. in General Santos. Inside Ocean Canning's processing plant, rows of men and women in blue smocks skin, bone and pack thousands of fish into cans sent to customers in Europe. Outside, dozens more would-be workers line up at the cannery's office, applications in hand. If there is one thing that people in General Santos can count on, it's the West's insatiable appetite for canned tuna. Global imports have skyrocketed from less than 3 million tons per year in 1976 to over 3.5 billion today. "Demand is very high," says Mariano Fernandez, Ocean Canning's general manager. "Raw material is the problem."
The raw material is mostly skipjack, a small, unglamorous tuna that makes up about 60% of the world's tuna catch. Of the main commercial species, bluefin, yellowfin and bigeye tuna are primarily sold to the sashimi market; skipjack and albacore land in cans. Over half the skipjack caught each year come from the waters in the western and central Pacific, and while skipjack in the region are officially plentiful, according to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) that keeps track of them, talk to anyone in General Santos and you'll hear otherwise. Supplies of fresh, local skipjack dropped 50% last year, says Miguel Lamberte, the port's manager. This August, the amount of both frozen and fresh skipjack being unloaded was at an all-time low, he says. "And it's still going down."
To keep the cans filled, large Philippine boats have gone further and further afield — to Papua New Guinea, to the Solomon Islands — where there is still plenty of skipjack for the taking. Fishing is growing faster in this swath of the Pacific than in any other part of the world, says the WCPFC, as ever greater numbers of boats from Asia, the Americas and Europe are leaving depleted waters for these bluer pastures. "We're getting a lot of boats seeking to come into our region from the Indian Ocean and eastern Pacific because the skipjack is still healthy here," says John Hampton, manager of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community's Oceanic Fisheries Program, which studies highly migratory fish stocks for the WCPFC. "There is good money to be made." But with more boats on the water, many local governments don't have the resources to keep track of how much fishing is being done in their waters, making illegal fishing or overfishing in protected areas tricky to control.
In General Santos and ports like it, when the fish start to go, everyone loses: the boat owners, the cannery workers, the exporters, the porters, the truck drivers. As the day winds down at the port, John Heitz walks between rows of small, unsold yellowfin that look, and smell, like they have seen better days. After the good ones go early in the morning, thousands of fish like these are left over, caught too young to have been given a chance to spawn and too far away to get back to dock in time to sell for a good price. To Heitz, it's obvious they're from Indonesia — and most likely have been caught without a permit — but there is nobody here from the government fisheries department to verify that. There almost never is. "All these bad fish kind of stress me out," Heitz says. "It would be so easy to manage, and they're just not doing it."
The fishermen get the worst deal of all: the work gets harder and the pay gets less. Down one lane in a waterfront neighborhood, Danilo Ante sits at home with his girlfriend and four kids between fishing trips. On his last job, Ante took home about $21 for six weeks of work on the high seas. "In the past, there were only a few fishermen," he says. "But now we get fewer fish because there are more boats on the water." Even if his boats keep catching less fish, Ante doesn't have a lot of options in General Santos. "We have to continue. We have to rely on the sea."
An Endangered Species?
In October, Monaco formally proposed to register Atlantic bluefin on Appendix 1 of the U.N.'s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a move that would temporarily ban its trade and transfer enforcement from ICCAT to governments. If trade is shut down, so would be fishing, and the Atlantic bluefin would have some time to recover, much as the humpback whale rebounded after being listed in 1975. Monaco's proposal, which all but six E.U. states voted to co-sponsor and which has U.S. support, will go before CITES for approval in March 2010.
Even if that bid fails — and many believe it could — just the threat of CITES may serve as a warning to the tuna industry and to governments. Fishermen, understandably, are not thrilled by the possibility of a ban, no matter how temporary. "We're in a race with the ecologists," says David Martínez Cañabate, adjunct director of Ricardo Fuentes & Sons in Cartagena, which employs about 1,000 workers. "They want to shut down the fisheries, and we want to show them that the quotas and enforcement are working." Cañabate acknowledges there is too much illegal fishing, but believes rogue players can still be controlled. A ban, he argues, would come at too high a price. "Wouldn't it be better to still have the industry?" he asks. "To keep the jobs?"
Even so, the fishing companies know better than anyone that the only way to save the business is to save the species. The Spanish company has invested in the global quest to get bluefin to reproduce and grow in captivity — a task that has eluded all but a few scientists. In a trial run by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, scientists funded by Ricardo Fuentes have injected Atlantic bluefin females with synthetic hormones to trigger the fish's egg-laying response. This year, the team helped create some 150 million bluefin eggs, of which they took about 3 million to try to hatch. Of those, "maybe 50 [will] survive to the weight of one gram, or about 50 days [old]," says Aurelio Ortega, a biologist on the project. "We're still a long way off. Even five years would be very optimistic."
Some are further along. In 2002, Japan's Kinki University successfully bred and raised bluefin in pens and is now selling small amounts of the farmed fish. This year, Clean Seas, an Australian fishing company, got its southern bluefin living in a land-based tank to spawn eggs that were raised to be fingerlings — a breakthrough in the growth cycle. The success was so unexpected that Clean Seas had to leave all but a few of the young fish to die; there wasn't enough room to let them grow.
Aquaculture is not a perfect solution. Farmed tuna have huge appetites — in Cartagena, it takes up to 22 lb. (10 kg) of seafood to add 2 lb. (1 kg) of weight — and they create a lot of waste. But tuna-breeding is one of an expanding list of ideas being rolled out by scientists, activists, chefs, fishermen and entrepreneurs trying to find a happier marriage between the human demand for tuna and the ecosystem. "There is no one silver bullet to end overfishing because there is no one thing causing overfishing," says Mike Crispino of the ISSF. Major canneries that have signed on to the ISSF, such as BumbleBee, StarKist and Chicken of the Sea, are trying to guarantee that the fish going into their cans come from legal and traceable sources. More and more, customers are being offered ways to play a part too. In San Francisco and Seattle, two restaurants are already running popular sustainable-sushi bars, with menus designed around plentiful, local ingredients. "In the U.S., people think of sushi as being five or six fish that you eat in a particular way," says Casson Trenor, a former chef who opened San Francisco's Tataki in 2008 and later helped Seattle's Mashiko transition into serving better-sourced seafood. In the modern sushi restaurant, says Casson, "we're not respecting these animals."
In General Santos, people do respect the tuna. John Heitz points to a few men hauling yellowfin through the water from small wooden boats. "This is one of the few handline fisheries in the world," Heitz says. It's not flashy, but it follows the rules, pays the bills and, over time, it will keep these great animals in the water. "By eating a certain product, you're part of the problem, or part of the solution." Heitz wants to be on the solution side. Once, when he was scuba-diving off General Santos' coast, two yellowfin torpedoed past. "It was like a motorcycle was going by," he says, crouching slightly, staring straight ahead and moving his shoulders back and forth to mimic the fish's muscular energy. "If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it." Unless something changes, he may never see its like again.
— with reporting by Lisa Abend / Cartagena and Yuki Oda / Tokyo
Japan's new hi-tech 'graveyards'
Japan's new hi-tech 'graveyards'
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo
It is a problem faced by everyone in the end or by their relatives left behind - finding a place to spend eternity.
And in Japan, a crowded mountainous country with a fast-ageing society, there is a shortage of final resting places, especially in the big cities.
Burial plots in Tokyo can cost more than $100,000 (£63,318), so some are turning to a cheaper hi-tech solution - multi-storey graveyards.
From the outside, one such place looked rather like a block of flats - a grey building five or six storeys high but with few windows.
Inside, Buddhist monk Ryutoku Ohora chanted a prayer in front of an altar, dressed in black robes, sandals with wooden soles and a shawl embroidered with golden thread.
His tone was sombre, funereal even, but he was delivering a sales pitch for potential customers visiting the recently-built facility.
"With this kind of system we can store a lot of remains so you don't have to visit a graveyard far away," he said. "And it's convenient because it's beside the station."
"The cost will be half or a third of a normal graveyard in Tokyo, because we can store many remains compared to a normal graveyard so we can offer a reasonable price."
The vast majority of Japanese are cremated.
In a ceremony relatives collect the ashes, picking up pieces of bone with chopsticks, and placing them in a ceramic urn.
The remains are then buried, usually under a family tombstone.
But in the high-rise graveyard, the urns are stored on shelves instead.
One half of the building is a warehouse for the dead, filled from the ground floor to the shadows high above with row upon row of rectangular metal boxes.
"You can put ashes for two people in one box," said the monk. "So 7,000 people maximum in this space, [when] for a normal graveyard you would get 100 graves in this area [of land]."
A key selling point of the graveyard is that the ashes can be retrieved for loved ones to honour the departed.
Visiting bereaved families swipe a card in a reader attached to a computer to activate a robotic arm in the darkness of the vault.
It moves to the appropriate place on the shelves, picks up the box and delivers it to one of several mourning rooms.
Sombre music plays and photographs of the departed are displayed on computer screens.
Then a frosted glass screen slides back, revealing the box framed by a black marble tombstone set off with vases of flowers and a trickling water fountain.
Prospective customers seemed impressed with what they saw.
"Our family grave is outside and sometimes it rains and there's strong wind and you have to fix the graveyard," said Mikiko Takazawa, who was considering the vault as a final resting place for older relatives.
"This can be an option because it's inside and it's near the station as well."
"One of the things to consider is the price, it's reasonable," said Toshio Ishii, who at 82 years old was looking for his own grave.
"And I think it will be nice to be stored with other people. It's more fun, there'll be company."
The Japanese have turned to technology for solutions to many of the problems of life - and now death too.
Three hundred families have placed the ashes of their loved ones in the building so far.
With hi-tech graveyards being built across Japan it is no longer an outlandish option, and the monk expects that the remaining slots on the shelves will be occupied soon.
Published: 2009/10/13 00:15:00 GMT
© BBC MMIX
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo
It is a problem faced by everyone in the end or by their relatives left behind - finding a place to spend eternity.
And in Japan, a crowded mountainous country with a fast-ageing society, there is a shortage of final resting places, especially in the big cities.
Burial plots in Tokyo can cost more than $100,000 (£63,318), so some are turning to a cheaper hi-tech solution - multi-storey graveyards.
From the outside, one such place looked rather like a block of flats - a grey building five or six storeys high but with few windows.
Inside, Buddhist monk Ryutoku Ohora chanted a prayer in front of an altar, dressed in black robes, sandals with wooden soles and a shawl embroidered with golden thread.
His tone was sombre, funereal even, but he was delivering a sales pitch for potential customers visiting the recently-built facility.
"With this kind of system we can store a lot of remains so you don't have to visit a graveyard far away," he said. "And it's convenient because it's beside the station."
"The cost will be half or a third of a normal graveyard in Tokyo, because we can store many remains compared to a normal graveyard so we can offer a reasonable price."
The vast majority of Japanese are cremated.
In a ceremony relatives collect the ashes, picking up pieces of bone with chopsticks, and placing them in a ceramic urn.
The remains are then buried, usually under a family tombstone.
But in the high-rise graveyard, the urns are stored on shelves instead.
One half of the building is a warehouse for the dead, filled from the ground floor to the shadows high above with row upon row of rectangular metal boxes.
"You can put ashes for two people in one box," said the monk. "So 7,000 people maximum in this space, [when] for a normal graveyard you would get 100 graves in this area [of land]."
A key selling point of the graveyard is that the ashes can be retrieved for loved ones to honour the departed.
Visiting bereaved families swipe a card in a reader attached to a computer to activate a robotic arm in the darkness of the vault.
It moves to the appropriate place on the shelves, picks up the box and delivers it to one of several mourning rooms.
Sombre music plays and photographs of the departed are displayed on computer screens.
Then a frosted glass screen slides back, revealing the box framed by a black marble tombstone set off with vases of flowers and a trickling water fountain.
Prospective customers seemed impressed with what they saw.
"Our family grave is outside and sometimes it rains and there's strong wind and you have to fix the graveyard," said Mikiko Takazawa, who was considering the vault as a final resting place for older relatives.
"This can be an option because it's inside and it's near the station as well."
"One of the things to consider is the price, it's reasonable," said Toshio Ishii, who at 82 years old was looking for his own grave.
"And I think it will be nice to be stored with other people. It's more fun, there'll be company."
The Japanese have turned to technology for solutions to many of the problems of life - and now death too.
Three hundred families have placed the ashes of their loved ones in the building so far.
With hi-tech graveyards being built across Japan it is no longer an outlandish option, and the monk expects that the remaining slots on the shelves will be occupied soon.
Published: 2009/10/13 00:15:00 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Chinese Trial Reveals Vast Web of Corruption
November 4, 2009
By ANDREW JACOBS
CHONGQING, China — Wen Qiang had a fondness for Louis Vuitton belts, fossilized dinosaur eggs and B-list pop stars. For a public employee in charge of the local judiciary, he also had a lot of money: nearly $3 million that investigators found buried beneath a fish pond.
But Mr. Wen’s lavish tastes were nothing compared with the carnal appetites of his sister-in-law, Xie Caiping, known as “the godmother of the Chongqing underworld.” Prosecutors say she ran 30 illegal casinos, including one across the street from the courthouse. She also employed 16 young men who, according to the state-run press, were exceedingly handsome and obliging.
In recent weeks, Ms. Xie, Mr. Wen and a cavalcade of ranking officials and lowbrow thugs have been players in a mass public trial that has exposed the unseemly relationships among gangsters, police officers and the sticky-fingered bureaucrats.
The spectacle involves more than 9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice.
But like all big corruption cases in China, this one is as much about politics as graft. The political machine in Chongqing, a province-size mega-city of 31 million people in the southwest, has been broken up by a new Communist Party boss, Bo Xilai, who is the son of a revolutionary party veteran and has his eye on higher office.
Mr. Bo, a former trade minister sent to Chongqing to burnish his managerial credentials, has conducted the crackdown in a way that appears devised to maximize national attention. The drawn-out nature of the trial and the release of lurid details of the criminal syndicate have given him a reputation as a leading corruption fighter, though the inquiry has yet to implicate any really high-ranking party officials.
So far six people have been sentenced to death. Ms. Xie got off relatively lightly, receiving an 18-year prison term on Tuesday.
How Mr. Bo’s performance is regarded by the party elite is a matter of speculation. There are some suggestions that his swagger, including boastful comments to the news media, strikes some fellow officials as excessive. Anticorruption campaigns by China’s one-party state are generally calibrated to show resolution in tackling venality, but also to reassure the public that whatever problems are uncovered are localized and effectively contained.
“These guys are all for fighting corruption, but they are a little alarmed by the way Bo Xilai has been going about it and building up his personality,” said Sidney Rittenberg, one of the few American citizens to join the Communist Party here and a confidant of Chinese leaders since 1944. “People I talk to say he’s getting too big for his britches.”
A so-called princeling whose father, Bo Yibo, was an economic planner and a onetime ally of the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Mr. Bo, 60, is already a member of the Communist Party’s powerful Politburo. He is often talked about as a future top leader in Beijing, although in the party’s rigid hierarchy the No. 1 posts in the party and the government have already been assigned to other younger officials.
Recent statements by Mr. Bo suggest he understands the perils of drawing too much attention. Two weeks ago, he defended the crackdown, saying he was forced to act by the rampant violence and brazen criminality that had given this perpetually foggy city a reputation for lawlessness.
“The public gathered outside government offices and held up pictures of bloodshed,” he said. “The gangsters slashed people with knives just like butchers killing animals.”
In the three weeks since trials began, the crowds have continued to come, and their stories of bloodshed are indeed horrifying. They press outside the gates of the Fifth Intermediate Court, hoping to glimpse the orange-vested defendants who are paraded through the hearings.
Others desperately seek out reporters willing to hear tales of crimes unpunished. “The bandits used to live in the mountains; now they live in the Public Security Bureau,” said Zheng Yi, a vegetable wholesaler.
Unlike past sweeps that brought down crime bosses and their henchmen, the crackdown in Chongqing has yielded a number of wealthy businessmen and Communist Party officials, exposing the depth of corruption that has resulted from the mixing of state control and free-market economics in China.
Ko-lin Chin, who studies the intermingling of organized crime and government in China, said the line between legitimate business and illegal conduct had become increasingly blurred, although most official corruption involved bribery, not violence.
“As these gangs have become more powerful, their existence depends entirely on the cooperation and tolerance of the Communist Party,” said Mr. Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers. “But when things get out of hand, as they did in Chongqing, the party can really go after these groups with a vengeance.”
Among those on trial this week is Li Qiang, a local legislator and billionaire who the authorities say owned a fleet of 1,000 cabs and 100 bus routes. So great was his power, they say, that he orchestrated a taxi strike last year that brought the city to a standstill. On trial with him are three government officials suspected of acting as his “protection umbrellas” in exchange for payments of about $100,000 each.
While Mr. Li stood in the dock, more than 200 people gathered outside in the rain, including women who said they were roughed up in October last year when they refused to vacate their homes for a redevelopment project. One of them, Wu Pinghui, 67, said 40 people were herded into a government-owned bus and dumped in the countryside. By the time they made it back, their homes were gone.
“We called 110,” she said, referring to the Chinese emergency number, “but the police said they couldn’t get involved in a government affair.”
Hong Guibi also came to the courthouse. She said the Communist Party chief of her village, enraged when she and her husband refused to give him part of their orchard, watched as thugs attacked the couple with cleavers. Ms. Hong, 47, was critically wounded, and her husband was killed. “The neighbors heard our screams, but they were afraid to do anything,” she said.
Although heartened that so many are being prosecuted, Ms. Hong is still waiting for someone to prosecute the village chief. “If I could just kneel down in front of Bo Xilai,” she said, “I’m sure he would solve my problem.”
Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.
By ANDREW JACOBS
CHONGQING, China — Wen Qiang had a fondness for Louis Vuitton belts, fossilized dinosaur eggs and B-list pop stars. For a public employee in charge of the local judiciary, he also had a lot of money: nearly $3 million that investigators found buried beneath a fish pond.
But Mr. Wen’s lavish tastes were nothing compared with the carnal appetites of his sister-in-law, Xie Caiping, known as “the godmother of the Chongqing underworld.” Prosecutors say she ran 30 illegal casinos, including one across the street from the courthouse. She also employed 16 young men who, according to the state-run press, were exceedingly handsome and obliging.
In recent weeks, Ms. Xie, Mr. Wen and a cavalcade of ranking officials and lowbrow thugs have been players in a mass public trial that has exposed the unseemly relationships among gangsters, police officers and the sticky-fingered bureaucrats.
The spectacle involves more than 9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice.
But like all big corruption cases in China, this one is as much about politics as graft. The political machine in Chongqing, a province-size mega-city of 31 million people in the southwest, has been broken up by a new Communist Party boss, Bo Xilai, who is the son of a revolutionary party veteran and has his eye on higher office.
Mr. Bo, a former trade minister sent to Chongqing to burnish his managerial credentials, has conducted the crackdown in a way that appears devised to maximize national attention. The drawn-out nature of the trial and the release of lurid details of the criminal syndicate have given him a reputation as a leading corruption fighter, though the inquiry has yet to implicate any really high-ranking party officials.
So far six people have been sentenced to death. Ms. Xie got off relatively lightly, receiving an 18-year prison term on Tuesday.
How Mr. Bo’s performance is regarded by the party elite is a matter of speculation. There are some suggestions that his swagger, including boastful comments to the news media, strikes some fellow officials as excessive. Anticorruption campaigns by China’s one-party state are generally calibrated to show resolution in tackling venality, but also to reassure the public that whatever problems are uncovered are localized and effectively contained.
“These guys are all for fighting corruption, but they are a little alarmed by the way Bo Xilai has been going about it and building up his personality,” said Sidney Rittenberg, one of the few American citizens to join the Communist Party here and a confidant of Chinese leaders since 1944. “People I talk to say he’s getting too big for his britches.”
A so-called princeling whose father, Bo Yibo, was an economic planner and a onetime ally of the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Mr. Bo, 60, is already a member of the Communist Party’s powerful Politburo. He is often talked about as a future top leader in Beijing, although in the party’s rigid hierarchy the No. 1 posts in the party and the government have already been assigned to other younger officials.
Recent statements by Mr. Bo suggest he understands the perils of drawing too much attention. Two weeks ago, he defended the crackdown, saying he was forced to act by the rampant violence and brazen criminality that had given this perpetually foggy city a reputation for lawlessness.
“The public gathered outside government offices and held up pictures of bloodshed,” he said. “The gangsters slashed people with knives just like butchers killing animals.”
In the three weeks since trials began, the crowds have continued to come, and their stories of bloodshed are indeed horrifying. They press outside the gates of the Fifth Intermediate Court, hoping to glimpse the orange-vested defendants who are paraded through the hearings.
Others desperately seek out reporters willing to hear tales of crimes unpunished. “The bandits used to live in the mountains; now they live in the Public Security Bureau,” said Zheng Yi, a vegetable wholesaler.
Unlike past sweeps that brought down crime bosses and their henchmen, the crackdown in Chongqing has yielded a number of wealthy businessmen and Communist Party officials, exposing the depth of corruption that has resulted from the mixing of state control and free-market economics in China.
Ko-lin Chin, who studies the intermingling of organized crime and government in China, said the line between legitimate business and illegal conduct had become increasingly blurred, although most official corruption involved bribery, not violence.
“As these gangs have become more powerful, their existence depends entirely on the cooperation and tolerance of the Communist Party,” said Mr. Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers. “But when things get out of hand, as they did in Chongqing, the party can really go after these groups with a vengeance.”
Among those on trial this week is Li Qiang, a local legislator and billionaire who the authorities say owned a fleet of 1,000 cabs and 100 bus routes. So great was his power, they say, that he orchestrated a taxi strike last year that brought the city to a standstill. On trial with him are three government officials suspected of acting as his “protection umbrellas” in exchange for payments of about $100,000 each.
While Mr. Li stood in the dock, more than 200 people gathered outside in the rain, including women who said they were roughed up in October last year when they refused to vacate their homes for a redevelopment project. One of them, Wu Pinghui, 67, said 40 people were herded into a government-owned bus and dumped in the countryside. By the time they made it back, their homes were gone.
“We called 110,” she said, referring to the Chinese emergency number, “but the police said they couldn’t get involved in a government affair.”
Hong Guibi also came to the courthouse. She said the Communist Party chief of her village, enraged when she and her husband refused to give him part of their orchard, watched as thugs attacked the couple with cleavers. Ms. Hong, 47, was critically wounded, and her husband was killed. “The neighbors heard our screams, but they were afraid to do anything,” she said.
Although heartened that so many are being prosecuted, Ms. Hong is still waiting for someone to prosecute the village chief. “If I could just kneel down in front of Bo Xilai,” she said, “I’m sure he would solve my problem.”
Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.
Japan 'will end' Afghan mission
Japan will end its refuelling mission in support of the US-led military operation in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa has said.
Mr Kitazawa said the mission would end "based on the law" when its current legal mandate expires in January.
But he suggested Japan could continue to provide support for the mission in an alternative form.
Japan's government won August elections on pledges to pursue a foreign policy with greater independence from the US.
The eight-year-old Afghan support mission - which provides fuel and logistical support for US forces in the Indian ocean - has long been contentious.
Some critics say Japan's involvement in the mission violates the nation's pacifist constitution, which strictly limits its military activities.
Commitment unclear
Mr Kitazawa's statement came after Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told reporters in Islamabad on Monday that it would be "difficult" to extend the mission.
Japan had "no plans" to propose an extension to the mission in the Japanese parliament, Mr Kitazawa said.
It is the clearest indication so far that the new government will end the mission in its current form, though correspondents say Japan's overall commitment to the US-led Afghan operation remains unclear.
The government has suggested it could provide alternative support to civilian operations in Afghanistan - a possibility also mooted by Washington's ambassador to Japan earlier this month, reported Reuters news agency.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying that ministers were still arriving at their "final political decision" on what was best for the region.
He said the government was keen to formulate "some concrete, comprehensive idea" by the time US President Barack Obama visits Japan in a month's time.
Published: 2009/10/13 09:06:31 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Mr Kitazawa said the mission would end "based on the law" when its current legal mandate expires in January.
But he suggested Japan could continue to provide support for the mission in an alternative form.
Japan's government won August elections on pledges to pursue a foreign policy with greater independence from the US.
The eight-year-old Afghan support mission - which provides fuel and logistical support for US forces in the Indian ocean - has long been contentious.
Some critics say Japan's involvement in the mission violates the nation's pacifist constitution, which strictly limits its military activities.
Commitment unclear
Mr Kitazawa's statement came after Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told reporters in Islamabad on Monday that it would be "difficult" to extend the mission.
Japan had "no plans" to propose an extension to the mission in the Japanese parliament, Mr Kitazawa said.
It is the clearest indication so far that the new government will end the mission in its current form, though correspondents say Japan's overall commitment to the US-led Afghan operation remains unclear.
The government has suggested it could provide alternative support to civilian operations in Afghanistan - a possibility also mooted by Washington's ambassador to Japan earlier this month, reported Reuters news agency.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying that ministers were still arriving at their "final political decision" on what was best for the region.
He said the government was keen to formulate "some concrete, comprehensive idea" by the time US President Barack Obama visits Japan in a month's time.
Published: 2009/10/13 09:06:31 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Japan urged to end 'false confessions'
Japan urged to end 'false confessions'
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo
Hiroshi Yanagihara cannot forget the day he was forced to confess to a crime he did not commit.
A taxi driver, he had been detained on suspicion of attempted rape.
The police interrogation was so relentless, he says, that it brought him to the brink of suicide.
"When I first started saying I was innocent the intimidation and the pressure on me grew stronger," he said.
"They kept saying, 'Your family is giving up on you, they're very disappointed in you.' They kept repeating over and over.
"I got to the stage of there's really nothing I can do about this. Anything I say they're not going to listen to, there's nothing I can do. I just said yes, one word yes. That led them to arrest me."
That confession was enough to see Hiroshi Yanagihara convicted and spend more than two years behind bars, even though a footprint at the scene did not match his shoe size.
He was only cleared after he was released, when another man was found guilty of the crime.
His is one of several high-profile cases of forced confessions in Japan.
'King of evidence'
Amnesty International has now called on Japan's new government to immediately implement reforms of the police interrogation system to avoid such miscarriages of justice.
Suspects can be held for up to 23 days before they are charged in what the campaign group says is a brutal system that has no place in modern Japan.
The conviction rate is more than 99%, often based on confessions. Amnesty International says some are extracted from suspects under duress.
In its manifesto the Democratic Party, which won a general election in August, pledged to introduce full videotaping of interrogations.
Japan's courts have a conviction rate of more than 99% - although it cannot be compared directly to other countries because there is no plea bargaining.
Prosecutors usually proceed with a case only if they are sure they will win and a confession has been called the king of evidence.
"The detainee has absolutely no access to his defence lawyers, has no idea how long the interrogation session would go," said Rajiv Narayan of Amnesty International.
"And this also involves many, many hours of repeated questions and sometimes sleep deprivation, and where the detainee is given the impression he would only be released once he confesses.
"In that kind of system, what's of great concern is the confessions extracted could even be used to sentence a person to death."
Amnesty International says it is impossible to know how many miscarriages of justice there have been.
'Just co-operate'
A British man, who did not want to be named, told the BBC about his experience of police detention in Japan.
"The first thing I was told, and this was by the officers, was you're going to hell with your eyes open," he said.
The man had been caught trying to smuggle two kilograms of cannabis into Japan.
He admits his guilt, but claims he was interrogated for up to 16 hours a day for weeks on end as officers tried to get him to confess to further crimes.
He says he was handcuffed, tied with a rope to his chair and not allowed to use the toilet.
Every day he was presented with papers in Japanese, which he did not understand, and told to sign them.
Each time he refused, he says, things got worse.
"He says to me, 'Just co-operate and you'll find things will be… just co-operate with him'," the man said.
"He wanted me to agree that I'd brought marijuana to Japan before, I'm in a gang. They started shouting at me. They tried to force me to sign the papers. They put one inmate in my cell and he started to do all the kung fu like he was going to attack me."
Official concern
The police and the Ministry of Justice were unable to respond to these particular allegations because the charity representing the prisoner wants to maintain his anonymity with a view to future compensation.
However, they were prepared to discuss the case of Hiroshi Yanagihara, wrongly convicted of attempted rape.
"Regarding this case the prosecutor's office investigated the problems in August 2007 to prevent it happening again," said Ministry of Justice spokesman Yoshio Nakamura.
"They released the report. And we believe the report will be used in order to prevent it from happening again."
Trial by jury has just been introduced in Japan, and campaigners hope it will cast light on the justice system.
But Amnesty International says this is not enough. They are calling on Japan's new government to immediately fulfil an election pledge to videotape interrogations to stop abuses in police detention.
There is no commitment to reduce the length of time suspects can be held by police.
"Wrongful convictions should not happen, and I hope they won't in the future," said Keiko Chiba, the new minister of justice.
"People in the justice system and politicians knew there was a problem and were concerned.
"But at the same time a lot of people would say if you didn't do it why did you say you did? And they thought there's no way the investigators would do such a thing. That's why it didn't come to changing it as much as it should have done."
Published: 2009/10/05 23:42:26 GMT
© BBC MMIX
By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo
Hiroshi Yanagihara cannot forget the day he was forced to confess to a crime he did not commit.
A taxi driver, he had been detained on suspicion of attempted rape.
The police interrogation was so relentless, he says, that it brought him to the brink of suicide.
"When I first started saying I was innocent the intimidation and the pressure on me grew stronger," he said.
"They kept saying, 'Your family is giving up on you, they're very disappointed in you.' They kept repeating over and over.
"I got to the stage of there's really nothing I can do about this. Anything I say they're not going to listen to, there's nothing I can do. I just said yes, one word yes. That led them to arrest me."
That confession was enough to see Hiroshi Yanagihara convicted and spend more than two years behind bars, even though a footprint at the scene did not match his shoe size.
He was only cleared after he was released, when another man was found guilty of the crime.
His is one of several high-profile cases of forced confessions in Japan.
'King of evidence'
Amnesty International has now called on Japan's new government to immediately implement reforms of the police interrogation system to avoid such miscarriages of justice.
Suspects can be held for up to 23 days before they are charged in what the campaign group says is a brutal system that has no place in modern Japan.
The conviction rate is more than 99%, often based on confessions. Amnesty International says some are extracted from suspects under duress.
In its manifesto the Democratic Party, which won a general election in August, pledged to introduce full videotaping of interrogations.
Japan's courts have a conviction rate of more than 99% - although it cannot be compared directly to other countries because there is no plea bargaining.
Prosecutors usually proceed with a case only if they are sure they will win and a confession has been called the king of evidence.
"The detainee has absolutely no access to his defence lawyers, has no idea how long the interrogation session would go," said Rajiv Narayan of Amnesty International.
"And this also involves many, many hours of repeated questions and sometimes sleep deprivation, and where the detainee is given the impression he would only be released once he confesses.
"In that kind of system, what's of great concern is the confessions extracted could even be used to sentence a person to death."
Amnesty International says it is impossible to know how many miscarriages of justice there have been.
'Just co-operate'
A British man, who did not want to be named, told the BBC about his experience of police detention in Japan.
"The first thing I was told, and this was by the officers, was you're going to hell with your eyes open," he said.
The man had been caught trying to smuggle two kilograms of cannabis into Japan.
He admits his guilt, but claims he was interrogated for up to 16 hours a day for weeks on end as officers tried to get him to confess to further crimes.
He says he was handcuffed, tied with a rope to his chair and not allowed to use the toilet.
Every day he was presented with papers in Japanese, which he did not understand, and told to sign them.
Each time he refused, he says, things got worse.
"He says to me, 'Just co-operate and you'll find things will be… just co-operate with him'," the man said.
"He wanted me to agree that I'd brought marijuana to Japan before, I'm in a gang. They started shouting at me. They tried to force me to sign the papers. They put one inmate in my cell and he started to do all the kung fu like he was going to attack me."
Official concern
The police and the Ministry of Justice were unable to respond to these particular allegations because the charity representing the prisoner wants to maintain his anonymity with a view to future compensation.
However, they were prepared to discuss the case of Hiroshi Yanagihara, wrongly convicted of attempted rape.
"Regarding this case the prosecutor's office investigated the problems in August 2007 to prevent it happening again," said Ministry of Justice spokesman Yoshio Nakamura.
"They released the report. And we believe the report will be used in order to prevent it from happening again."
Trial by jury has just been introduced in Japan, and campaigners hope it will cast light on the justice system.
But Amnesty International says this is not enough. They are calling on Japan's new government to immediately fulfil an election pledge to videotape interrogations to stop abuses in police detention.
There is no commitment to reduce the length of time suspects can be held by police.
"Wrongful convictions should not happen, and I hope they won't in the future," said Keiko Chiba, the new minister of justice.
"People in the justice system and politicians knew there was a problem and were concerned.
"But at the same time a lot of people would say if you didn't do it why did you say you did? And they thought there's no way the investigators would do such a thing. That's why it didn't come to changing it as much as it should have done."
Published: 2009/10/05 23:42:26 GMT
© BBC MMIX
China Approves Disney Theme Park in Shanghai
November 4, 2009
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — After a courtship of about 20 years, the Walt Disney Company has won approval from the central government of China to build a Disneyland-style theme park in Shanghai, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said Tuesday.
The agreement for a Shanghai Disneyland is a landmark deal that carries enormous cultural and financial implications. Analysts estimate the initial park — not including hotels and resort infrastructure — will cost $3.5 billion, making it one of the largest-ever foreign investments in China.
The initial resort, with a mix of shopping areas, hotels and a Magic Kingdom-style theme park, will sprawl across 1,000 acres of the city’s Pudong district — with the theme park occupying about 100 of those acres. It would be a little bigger than Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., and on par with the parks in Paris and Tokyo. It is expected to open in five or six years.
Disney’s plans are ambitious: If further development of the resort happens as expected over the coming decades — still a big if — it will encompass more than 1,700 acres and have a capacity rivaling Disney World in Florida, which attracts about 45 million annual visitors.
The company’s goal is to create an engine that will drive demand among China’s 1.3 billion residents for other Disney products, from video games to Broadway-style shows to DVDs. Disney typically relies on the creation of new Disney TV channels to pump its brand abroad, but China’s limits on foreign media have made that impossible. The approval, notably, did not come with concessions from China on the television front.
Mr. Iger called the approval “a very significant milestone” in a statement, taking care to praise China as “one of the most dynamic, exciting and important countries in the world.” A spokeswoman declined to elaborate on details. Throwing open its doors to such a uniquely American — and permanent — entertainment experience is a milestone for China, which has aggressively protected its culture from Westernization in general and Hollywood in particular. Only 20 non-Chinese films are allowed to be shown in theaters each year, for instance, and those are often edited.
“Disney, perhaps the most iconic American brand of all, is supercharged in this department,” said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.
It was unclear what convinced China to finally approve the deal after years of off-again, on-again talks. The prospect of creating tens of thousands of jobs at a tough economic moment might have played a role, Mr. Schell and other analysts said.
Others have speculated that the timing involved President Obama’s inaugural visit to China later this month.
Mr. Schell said he saw something more at work. “It’s a signal that now they will tolerate a certain kind of Western investment,” he said.
Disney will own about 40 percent of the Shanghai resort, with the remainder owned by a holding company formed by a consortium of Chinese companies selected by the government, according to people with knowledge of the plan but who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Only the Magic Kingdom-style portion of the project needed Beijing’s approval; Disney will now negotiate with Shanghai authorities on construction plans, but that is considered a matter of process.
Details about rides are still being worked out, but there are to be a smattering of classic attractions and new rides developed specifically for Shanghai, perhaps incorporating Chinese stories and history.
Disney is often accused of force-feeding its products to international markets and thus homogenizing culture. The company’s heavy-handed creation of Disneyland Paris in the early 1990s, for instance, was a public relations disaster; French farmers with pitch forks protested Disney.
But the company, under new leadership since 2005, has worked to erase that imperious reputation by bending to the quirks of local markets and taking on local partners. Where appropriate, it has incorporated local customs; the decision to serve alcohol at Disneyland Paris helped turn that resort into a financial success.
Disney has opened a chain of language schools in Shanghai, taking care to promise that the goal is to teach children to speak English, not to indoctrinate them with Princesses 101. (The company’s characters, however, are very visible at the centers.)
Disney, which already does more business in China than most foreign media companies, has more than 600 employees in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Merchandise like plush toys and Mickey Mouse apparel is sold at about 6,000 branded locations.
The company delivers about a dozen hours of television programming (“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”) to local stations each week, and its Broadway unit has toured “The Lion King,” among other shows.
But Disney executives have set a high bar for international growth, saying publicly before the recession that about 50 percent of the company’s annual profit could originate overseas within a few years; now it is about a quarter of revenue and operating income.
The company picked Shanghai largely because of its transportation network; moving guests in and out of a huge resort and feeding them while they are there pose enormous logistical challenges. About 300 million potential customers live within two hours of the site, located between the city’s airport and downtown.
“Strategically, we know that our theme parks represent a huge tent pole for the Disney brand wherever we put them,” Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said in August during an interview about the division’s growth plans.
The announcement marks the culmination of a courtship that began in July, 1990, when Zhu Rongji, then the mayor of Shanghai, made a trip to the original Disneyland in Los Angeles with four other Chinese mayors and came home determined to have a Disneyland in his city. Mr. Zhu rose through the ranks to become premier of China from1998 to 2003 and was a consistent champion of the project, said Michael Rowse, the Hong Kong government official who played a central role in negotiating the establishment of Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened four years ago.
The Shanghai approvals come as Disney works to keep its domestic theme parks healthy amid the global economic downturn. Unlike most theme park operators, Disney has managed to keep attendance high by applying steep discounts to hotel rooms and dining.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — After a courtship of about 20 years, the Walt Disney Company has won approval from the central government of China to build a Disneyland-style theme park in Shanghai, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said Tuesday.
The agreement for a Shanghai Disneyland is a landmark deal that carries enormous cultural and financial implications. Analysts estimate the initial park — not including hotels and resort infrastructure — will cost $3.5 billion, making it one of the largest-ever foreign investments in China.
The initial resort, with a mix of shopping areas, hotels and a Magic Kingdom-style theme park, will sprawl across 1,000 acres of the city’s Pudong district — with the theme park occupying about 100 of those acres. It would be a little bigger than Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., and on par with the parks in Paris and Tokyo. It is expected to open in five or six years.
Disney’s plans are ambitious: If further development of the resort happens as expected over the coming decades — still a big if — it will encompass more than 1,700 acres and have a capacity rivaling Disney World in Florida, which attracts about 45 million annual visitors.
The company’s goal is to create an engine that will drive demand among China’s 1.3 billion residents for other Disney products, from video games to Broadway-style shows to DVDs. Disney typically relies on the creation of new Disney TV channels to pump its brand abroad, but China’s limits on foreign media have made that impossible. The approval, notably, did not come with concessions from China on the television front.
Mr. Iger called the approval “a very significant milestone” in a statement, taking care to praise China as “one of the most dynamic, exciting and important countries in the world.” A spokeswoman declined to elaborate on details. Throwing open its doors to such a uniquely American — and permanent — entertainment experience is a milestone for China, which has aggressively protected its culture from Westernization in general and Hollywood in particular. Only 20 non-Chinese films are allowed to be shown in theaters each year, for instance, and those are often edited.
“Disney, perhaps the most iconic American brand of all, is supercharged in this department,” said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.
It was unclear what convinced China to finally approve the deal after years of off-again, on-again talks. The prospect of creating tens of thousands of jobs at a tough economic moment might have played a role, Mr. Schell and other analysts said.
Others have speculated that the timing involved President Obama’s inaugural visit to China later this month.
Mr. Schell said he saw something more at work. “It’s a signal that now they will tolerate a certain kind of Western investment,” he said.
Disney will own about 40 percent of the Shanghai resort, with the remainder owned by a holding company formed by a consortium of Chinese companies selected by the government, according to people with knowledge of the plan but who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Only the Magic Kingdom-style portion of the project needed Beijing’s approval; Disney will now negotiate with Shanghai authorities on construction plans, but that is considered a matter of process.
Details about rides are still being worked out, but there are to be a smattering of classic attractions and new rides developed specifically for Shanghai, perhaps incorporating Chinese stories and history.
Disney is often accused of force-feeding its products to international markets and thus homogenizing culture. The company’s heavy-handed creation of Disneyland Paris in the early 1990s, for instance, was a public relations disaster; French farmers with pitch forks protested Disney.
But the company, under new leadership since 2005, has worked to erase that imperious reputation by bending to the quirks of local markets and taking on local partners. Where appropriate, it has incorporated local customs; the decision to serve alcohol at Disneyland Paris helped turn that resort into a financial success.
Disney has opened a chain of language schools in Shanghai, taking care to promise that the goal is to teach children to speak English, not to indoctrinate them with Princesses 101. (The company’s characters, however, are very visible at the centers.)
Disney, which already does more business in China than most foreign media companies, has more than 600 employees in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Merchandise like plush toys and Mickey Mouse apparel is sold at about 6,000 branded locations.
The company delivers about a dozen hours of television programming (“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”) to local stations each week, and its Broadway unit has toured “The Lion King,” among other shows.
But Disney executives have set a high bar for international growth, saying publicly before the recession that about 50 percent of the company’s annual profit could originate overseas within a few years; now it is about a quarter of revenue and operating income.
The company picked Shanghai largely because of its transportation network; moving guests in and out of a huge resort and feeding them while they are there pose enormous logistical challenges. About 300 million potential customers live within two hours of the site, located between the city’s airport and downtown.
“Strategically, we know that our theme parks represent a huge tent pole for the Disney brand wherever we put them,” Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said in August during an interview about the division’s growth plans.
The announcement marks the culmination of a courtship that began in July, 1990, when Zhu Rongji, then the mayor of Shanghai, made a trip to the original Disneyland in Los Angeles with four other Chinese mayors and came home determined to have a Disneyland in his city. Mr. Zhu rose through the ranks to become premier of China from1998 to 2003 and was a consistent champion of the project, said Michael Rowse, the Hong Kong government official who played a central role in negotiating the establishment of Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened four years ago.
The Shanghai approvals come as Disney works to keep its domestic theme parks healthy amid the global economic downturn. Unlike most theme park operators, Disney has managed to keep attendance high by applying steep discounts to hotel rooms and dining.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Could China's Economic Policies Trigger Another Crisis?
By Bill Powell / Shanghai Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009
Just before the global financial crisis exploded, the conference halls in China were alive with the rhetoric of economic reform. Hardly a week went by without some think tank or ministry in Beijing toasting the 30th anniversary of China's great opening to the world and outlining what the next phase of China's historic development would entail. At a time when experts and policymakers everywhere were decrying "global economic imbalances," China would do its bit to rectify them.
That meant attacking the problem at the root. Just as the U.S. saved too little while consuming too much, China saved too much and consumed too little. The result was a lopsided international trade scorecard. China ran huge current account surpluses — peaking at 10% of GDP in the first half of 2008 — and as a result accumulated a massive load of foreign exchange, which it turned around and loaned, mostly to the U.S. government, which enabled Americans to go on borrowing and spending. China, policymakers said, intended to break this unhealthy cycle.
Then a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to rebalancing: the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Chinese response to sharp declines in manufacturing and exports has been cheered for its effectiveness. Government stimulus spending and loose credit powered the country's economy to an 8.9% growth rate in the third quarter, and the most recent Purchasing Manager's Index (PMI), a widely watched gauge of economic sentiment released on Oct. 30, rose for the eighth straight month. It now shows "sustained expansion in industrial activity," says Jing Ulrich, managing director at JPMorgan in Hong Kong. At the same time, the U.S.-China economic relationship is not as lopsided as it was a year ago, at least by some measures. The U.S. savings rate has increased to about 4% of GDP (from zero at the recession's onset), and China's current account surplus has fallen from 10% of GDP to about 6.5% of GDP. Both are improving for the same reason: shell-shocked consumers in the U.S., where the unemployment rate is 9.8% and rising, have snapped their wallets shut. Now that it's pouring, they have started saving for a rainy day.
It's the Chinese side of the equation, many economists believe, that remains unaddressed. Far from making the promised progress on needed structural reforms, China has either stood pat in the past year or has probably regressed in terms of taking steps that would reorient its economy toward consumption and away from savings and investment.
One obvious example, which will be front and center when U.S. President Barack Obama makes his first visit to China on Nov. 15, is the exchange rate of Beijing's currency, the renminbi (RMB). After allowing it to rise against the dollar by about 15% earlier this decade, China has since the onset of the crisis kept the RMB's value tightly pegged at about 6.8 to $1. Economists differ on how greatly undervalued the RMB is. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank contend that it's about 15%-25% below where it would be if it were allowed to float freely. Virtually all agree that it needs to move higher, both for China's sake and the sake of its trading partners. An undervalued currency reduces real household income in China by raising the cost of imports while subsidizing Chinese producers who sell their products overseas. As the dollar has declined in value in the past year, so has the RMB — making Chinese goods cheaper in the international marketplace. In other words, China's peg has helped it maintain its share of global export markets at the expense of other countries who let their currencies float. That's exactly the opposite of what needs to happen if rebalancing is to occur.
Ominously for Beijing, the value of the RMB may be one of the few things the fractious American political class seems to agree on. Recently, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and columnist for the New York Times — and a steadfast Obama cheerleader — wrote a column ripping Beijing for its "outrageous" currency policy. He was followed late last week by Martin Feldstein, a former chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, who made a similar argument in the pages of the Financial Times. Both noted that the RMB-dollar peg is badly hurting economies in Europe and East Asia and that if Obama raises this issue in Beijing (as he surely will), he'll have tacit backing from a lot of precincts.
Does Beijing care? In its response to the financial crisis — the depth of which absolutely stunned Chinese policymakers — China desperately pushed every familiar button to keep its economy from succumbing the way the developed world's did. It has thrown buckets of practically free money at state-owned banks, which in turn loaned it out to mostly state-owned companies in a wide range of industries. Banks also loaned money to real estate developers, who have added inventory to what were already overbuilt residential and commercial markets in several major Chinese cities. And now the government has turned around and acknowledged that the mind-bending surge in bank lending — by June of this year, total lending exceeded the amount for all of 2008 — has done nothing to rebalance China's economy between consumer and producer. In fact it's done the opposite: late last month, the National Development and Reform Commission, an important policymaking body, conceded that it must start implementing rules aimed at reducing overcapacity in several key industries, including steel and petrochemicals.
It isn't just indiscriminate bank lending that has retarded moves toward rebalancing. Outright government subsidies to businesses have increased in the past 12 months. Everything from bicycle makers to textile producers to chemical companies have seen their export subsidies rise because their markets worldwide were shriveling, and a panicky Beijing was spooked by the prospect of massive unemployment if factories shut down. "By transferring wealth from households to boost the profitability of producers, China's ability to grow consumption in line with growth of the nation's GDP is severely hampered," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. Indeed, although China is also subsidizing some consumer purchases and retail sales in China were up about 15% in the first nine months of 2009, consumption as a percentage of GDP remains today about where it was a year ago: at about a third of China's economy.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has long let it be known that he thinks the imbalances between the U.S. and China contributed to the financial breakdown of the global economy. China's excess savings were sloshing around and needed a home, and profligate America was more than willing to borrow those savings. On Oct. 19, Bernanke gave a speech in which he said that while personal savings in the U.S. is now rising, the government had to get its own accounts in better order. He then pointedly noted that "policies that artificially enhance incentives for domestic savings and the production of export goods" have got to go in order "to reduce the risks of [future] financial instability."
That message was aimed at Beijing. It's one that will be reinforced when Obama arrives in China in two weeks. The only question is, will anyone in the Chinese leadership — who may believe the headlines about what economic magicians they've been for the past year — be listening?
Just before the global financial crisis exploded, the conference halls in China were alive with the rhetoric of economic reform. Hardly a week went by without some think tank or ministry in Beijing toasting the 30th anniversary of China's great opening to the world and outlining what the next phase of China's historic development would entail. At a time when experts and policymakers everywhere were decrying "global economic imbalances," China would do its bit to rectify them.
That meant attacking the problem at the root. Just as the U.S. saved too little while consuming too much, China saved too much and consumed too little. The result was a lopsided international trade scorecard. China ran huge current account surpluses — peaking at 10% of GDP in the first half of 2008 — and as a result accumulated a massive load of foreign exchange, which it turned around and loaned, mostly to the U.S. government, which enabled Americans to go on borrowing and spending. China, policymakers said, intended to break this unhealthy cycle.
Then a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to rebalancing: the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Chinese response to sharp declines in manufacturing and exports has been cheered for its effectiveness. Government stimulus spending and loose credit powered the country's economy to an 8.9% growth rate in the third quarter, and the most recent Purchasing Manager's Index (PMI), a widely watched gauge of economic sentiment released on Oct. 30, rose for the eighth straight month. It now shows "sustained expansion in industrial activity," says Jing Ulrich, managing director at JPMorgan in Hong Kong. At the same time, the U.S.-China economic relationship is not as lopsided as it was a year ago, at least by some measures. The U.S. savings rate has increased to about 4% of GDP (from zero at the recession's onset), and China's current account surplus has fallen from 10% of GDP to about 6.5% of GDP. Both are improving for the same reason: shell-shocked consumers in the U.S., where the unemployment rate is 9.8% and rising, have snapped their wallets shut. Now that it's pouring, they have started saving for a rainy day.
It's the Chinese side of the equation, many economists believe, that remains unaddressed. Far from making the promised progress on needed structural reforms, China has either stood pat in the past year or has probably regressed in terms of taking steps that would reorient its economy toward consumption and away from savings and investment.
One obvious example, which will be front and center when U.S. President Barack Obama makes his first visit to China on Nov. 15, is the exchange rate of Beijing's currency, the renminbi (RMB). After allowing it to rise against the dollar by about 15% earlier this decade, China has since the onset of the crisis kept the RMB's value tightly pegged at about 6.8 to $1. Economists differ on how greatly undervalued the RMB is. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank contend that it's about 15%-25% below where it would be if it were allowed to float freely. Virtually all agree that it needs to move higher, both for China's sake and the sake of its trading partners. An undervalued currency reduces real household income in China by raising the cost of imports while subsidizing Chinese producers who sell their products overseas. As the dollar has declined in value in the past year, so has the RMB — making Chinese goods cheaper in the international marketplace. In other words, China's peg has helped it maintain its share of global export markets at the expense of other countries who let their currencies float. That's exactly the opposite of what needs to happen if rebalancing is to occur.
Ominously for Beijing, the value of the RMB may be one of the few things the fractious American political class seems to agree on. Recently, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and columnist for the New York Times — and a steadfast Obama cheerleader — wrote a column ripping Beijing for its "outrageous" currency policy. He was followed late last week by Martin Feldstein, a former chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, who made a similar argument in the pages of the Financial Times. Both noted that the RMB-dollar peg is badly hurting economies in Europe and East Asia and that if Obama raises this issue in Beijing (as he surely will), he'll have tacit backing from a lot of precincts.
Does Beijing care? In its response to the financial crisis — the depth of which absolutely stunned Chinese policymakers — China desperately pushed every familiar button to keep its economy from succumbing the way the developed world's did. It has thrown buckets of practically free money at state-owned banks, which in turn loaned it out to mostly state-owned companies in a wide range of industries. Banks also loaned money to real estate developers, who have added inventory to what were already overbuilt residential and commercial markets in several major Chinese cities. And now the government has turned around and acknowledged that the mind-bending surge in bank lending — by June of this year, total lending exceeded the amount for all of 2008 — has done nothing to rebalance China's economy between consumer and producer. In fact it's done the opposite: late last month, the National Development and Reform Commission, an important policymaking body, conceded that it must start implementing rules aimed at reducing overcapacity in several key industries, including steel and petrochemicals.
It isn't just indiscriminate bank lending that has retarded moves toward rebalancing. Outright government subsidies to businesses have increased in the past 12 months. Everything from bicycle makers to textile producers to chemical companies have seen their export subsidies rise because their markets worldwide were shriveling, and a panicky Beijing was spooked by the prospect of massive unemployment if factories shut down. "By transferring wealth from households to boost the profitability of producers, China's ability to grow consumption in line with growth of the nation's GDP is severely hampered," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. Indeed, although China is also subsidizing some consumer purchases and retail sales in China were up about 15% in the first nine months of 2009, consumption as a percentage of GDP remains today about where it was a year ago: at about a third of China's economy.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has long let it be known that he thinks the imbalances between the U.S. and China contributed to the financial breakdown of the global economy. China's excess savings were sloshing around and needed a home, and profligate America was more than willing to borrow those savings. On Oct. 19, Bernanke gave a speech in which he said that while personal savings in the U.S. is now rising, the government had to get its own accounts in better order. He then pointedly noted that "policies that artificially enhance incentives for domestic savings and the production of export goods" have got to go in order "to reduce the risks of [future] financial instability."
That message was aimed at Beijing. It's one that will be reinforced when Obama arrives in China in two weeks. The only question is, will anyone in the Chinese leadership — who may believe the headlines about what economic magicians they've been for the past year — be listening?
Today's babies could live to 22nd century: study
(AFP) – Oct 1, 2009
PARIS — More than half of the babies born today in rich countries will live to 100 years if current trends of life expectancy continue, a study appearing in the medical journal The Lancet said on Friday.
In the 20th century, most developed countries saw an increase of around 30 years in life expectancy, according to the paper led by Kaare Christensen, a professor at the Danish Ageing Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark.
In 1950, only 15-16 percent of 80-year-old women, and just 12 percent of octogenarian men, made it to the age of 90 in advanced economies.
In 2002, this had risen to 37 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Japan, the survival rate from 80 to 90 is now more than 50 percent for women.
"If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays," the review said.
Evidence also suggests that, today, the extra years are less encumbered by disabilities and dependence than in the past.
The paper warned, though, that longer lifespans pose major social, economic and medical challenges as the very elderly become a greater proportion of the community.
One solution could be to spread employment more evenly across populations and ages of life, the authors said.
Instead of working for a long, intense spell and then retiring, "individuals could combine work, education, leisure and child-rearing in varying amounts at different ages."
"The 20th century was a century of redistribution of income. The 21st century could be a century of redistribution of work," they argued.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
PARIS — More than half of the babies born today in rich countries will live to 100 years if current trends of life expectancy continue, a study appearing in the medical journal The Lancet said on Friday.
In the 20th century, most developed countries saw an increase of around 30 years in life expectancy, according to the paper led by Kaare Christensen, a professor at the Danish Ageing Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark.
In 1950, only 15-16 percent of 80-year-old women, and just 12 percent of octogenarian men, made it to the age of 90 in advanced economies.
In 2002, this had risen to 37 percent and 25 percent respectively. In Japan, the survival rate from 80 to 90 is now more than 50 percent for women.
"If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays," the review said.
Evidence also suggests that, today, the extra years are less encumbered by disabilities and dependence than in the past.
The paper warned, though, that longer lifespans pose major social, economic and medical challenges as the very elderly become a greater proportion of the community.
One solution could be to spread employment more evenly across populations and ages of life, the authors said.
Instead of working for a long, intense spell and then retiring, "individuals could combine work, education, leisure and child-rearing in varying amounts at different ages."
"The 20th century was a century of redistribution of income. The 21st century could be a century of redistribution of work," they argued.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
Prosecutors probe Japan PM's fund scandal
03 October 2009 1610 hrs
TOKYO: Prosecutors have launched investigations into a political donation scandal against Japan's new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, a local daily reported on Saturday.
Hatoyama, who was sworn in last month, admitted to keeping sloppy accounts for his fundraising body in June, which reported a donors' list including the names of dead people and those who had denied giving money.
Tokyo prosecutors have started hearings with the people on the donors' list, the Yomiuri daily said, without citing sources.
Hatoyama said his former accountant was solely responsible for the problem, in which a total of 21 million yen (220,000 dollars) had been recorded incorrectly since 2005.
But the case has remained an Achilles heel for the politician even after his centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took office with the new cabinet enjoying more than 70 per cent of public support.
The Liberal Democratic Party, which was ousted by the DPJ, has attacked Hatoyama, criticising him for making false reports on political donations.
DPJ's Ichiro Ozawa, Hatoyama's predecessor as the party leader, has resigned after being accused of accepting illegal donations in return for public works contracts.
- AFP/so
TOKYO: Prosecutors have launched investigations into a political donation scandal against Japan's new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, a local daily reported on Saturday.
Hatoyama, who was sworn in last month, admitted to keeping sloppy accounts for his fundraising body in June, which reported a donors' list including the names of dead people and those who had denied giving money.
Tokyo prosecutors have started hearings with the people on the donors' list, the Yomiuri daily said, without citing sources.
Hatoyama said his former accountant was solely responsible for the problem, in which a total of 21 million yen (220,000 dollars) had been recorded incorrectly since 2005.
But the case has remained an Achilles heel for the politician even after his centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took office with the new cabinet enjoying more than 70 per cent of public support.
The Liberal Democratic Party, which was ousted by the DPJ, has attacked Hatoyama, criticising him for making false reports on political donations.
DPJ's Ichiro Ozawa, Hatoyama's predecessor as the party leader, has resigned after being accused of accepting illegal donations in return for public works contracts.
- AFP/so
'I'm sorry' robber arrested in Japan
(AFP) – Sep 30, 2009
TOKYO — A would-be Japanese robber armed with a wooden stick was arrested after being confronted by an angry shopkeeper, apologising and calling the police to confess his crime, an official said Wednesday.
Takashi Owada, a 54-year-old unemployed man, demanded money from the 59-year-old female cashier at a convenience store in the northern city of Fukushima on Tuesday, according to a local police spokesman.
But she told him, "Don't be silly!", Owada immediately changed his mind and said: "I'm sorry."
He called the police at the store exit with his own mobile telephone and was arrested within minutes on the spot for attempted robbery.
Japan has a strict control on firearms and most gun violence is linked to gangs.
Even so police do not recommend scolding robbers, the spokesman said.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
TOKYO — A would-be Japanese robber armed with a wooden stick was arrested after being confronted by an angry shopkeeper, apologising and calling the police to confess his crime, an official said Wednesday.
Takashi Owada, a 54-year-old unemployed man, demanded money from the 59-year-old female cashier at a convenience store in the northern city of Fukushima on Tuesday, according to a local police spokesman.
But she told him, "Don't be silly!", Owada immediately changed his mind and said: "I'm sorry."
He called the police at the store exit with his own mobile telephone and was arrested within minutes on the spot for attempted robbery.
Japan has a strict control on firearms and most gun violence is linked to gangs.
Even so police do not recommend scolding robbers, the spokesman said.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
Japan rules against road over ancient port behind 'Ponyo'
Japan rules against road over ancient port behind 'Ponyo'
(AFP) – Oct 1, 2009
TOKYO — In a rare win for heritage activists, a Japanese court Thursday halted plans for a road bridge over the scenic and ancient port that helped inspire the animation hit movie "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea".
The court ruled that the impact would have been too grave on picturesque Tomonoura port -- which is lined with traditional Japanese houses and faces the Seto Inland Sea -- located in western Hiroshima Prefecture.
It was the first time a Japanese court halted a public works project in order to preserve a landscape, according to public broadcaster NHK.
"This is an epoch-making ruling," said one of about 160 plaintiffs, mostly local residents, who had sued the prefecture demanding the project be scrapped.
The prefecture and Fukuyama city, where the port is located, first planned the project -- a 180-metre (590 foot) bridge and a connecting road on reclaimed waterfront land -- 26 years ago to ease traffic congestion.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental group set up with the support of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), had appealed against the Tomonoura project.
Presiding judge Akio Nose noted that the port is an asset of the people, according to Jiji Press news agency.
Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki spent about two months in a clifftop house overlooking Tomonoura as he sought inspiration for his latest film "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea", a tale of a fish-girl, a human boy and the sea.
"It was a very good ruling," Miyazaki told reporters. "This is not just an issue in Tomonoura. When you envision the future of Japan, it makes a very important step forward."
The film was a blockbuster in Japan and hit screens abroad this year.
Hiroshima Governor Yuzan Fujita said he regretted the ruling, and said the prefecture would decide what to do after examining the decision carefully.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
(AFP) – Oct 1, 2009
TOKYO — In a rare win for heritage activists, a Japanese court Thursday halted plans for a road bridge over the scenic and ancient port that helped inspire the animation hit movie "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea".
The court ruled that the impact would have been too grave on picturesque Tomonoura port -- which is lined with traditional Japanese houses and faces the Seto Inland Sea -- located in western Hiroshima Prefecture.
It was the first time a Japanese court halted a public works project in order to preserve a landscape, according to public broadcaster NHK.
"This is an epoch-making ruling," said one of about 160 plaintiffs, mostly local residents, who had sued the prefecture demanding the project be scrapped.
The prefecture and Fukuyama city, where the port is located, first planned the project -- a 180-metre (590 foot) bridge and a connecting road on reclaimed waterfront land -- 26 years ago to ease traffic congestion.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental group set up with the support of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), had appealed against the Tomonoura project.
Presiding judge Akio Nose noted that the port is an asset of the people, according to Jiji Press news agency.
Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki spent about two months in a clifftop house overlooking Tomonoura as he sought inspiration for his latest film "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea", a tale of a fish-girl, a human boy and the sea.
"It was a very good ruling," Miyazaki told reporters. "This is not just an issue in Tomonoura. When you envision the future of Japan, it makes a very important step forward."
The film was a blockbuster in Japan and hit screens abroad this year.
Hiroshima Governor Yuzan Fujita said he regretted the ruling, and said the prefecture would decide what to do after examining the decision carefully.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
Asia moves up university league table
Asia moves up university league table
(AFP) – Oct 8, 2009
LONDON — US and British universities dominate the top of a league table of universities worldwide published Thursday, but Asian seats of learning are moving up the global rankings.
Harvard remains in top spot in the Times Higher Education (THE) league table, followed by Britain's Cambridge University then Yale in third place, with London's University College and Imperial College in fourth and fifth.
Oxford has slipped one to joint fifth, but the next 10 places are occupied by US universities, most of them Ivy League like Princeton and Columbia, but also including Chicago University.
But Asian universities, while still struggling to break into the top 20, are moving upwards, with numbers in the top 200 growing in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Malaysia.
After the University of Tokyo in 22nd place come the University of Hong Kong in 24th, Japan's Kyoto University in 25th, and the National University of Singapore in 30th.
Philip Altbach of Boston University says the Asian improvement is due to a number of factors.
"These countries have invested heavily in higher education in recent years, and this is reflected in the improved quality in their top institutions," he told the Times education weekly.
"They have also attempted to internationalise their universities by hiring more faculty from overseas... this helps to improve their visibility globally," he added.
Japan has the most top-200-ranked universities at 11, one more than last year, followed by China with six; Hong Kong (up from four to five); South Korea (up from three to four); and Singapore and India, with two each.
Europe's top non-British university is Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in 20th spot, followed by France's Ecole Normale Superieure in 28th. The top German university is the Technical University of Munich, in 55th.
The top non-US and non-European universities are the Australian National University in 17th place, down one, and Canada's McGill University in 18th position, down two.
The league table, compiled by the THE in collaboration with the QS global career and education network, ranks universities according to a series of criteria including peer review, employers' views and student opinion surveys.
In Britain, Oxford University voiced surprise at the downgrading.
"League table rankings can vary as they often use different methods to measure success," said a spokesman for Oxford, one of the world's oldest universities which has a fierce rivalry with Cambridge.
"But Oxford University's position is surprising given that Oxford... has the highest research income of any UK university and has come first in every national league table," he added.
Here is a ranking of countries with the most universities in the top 200 of the THE/QS league table:
Country Region 2008 2009
United States North America 58 54
United Kingdom Europe 29 29
Canada North America 12 11
Japan Asia 10 11
Netherlands Europe 11 11
Germany Europe 11 10
Australia Australasia 9 9
Switzerland Europe 7 7
China Asia 6 6
Belgium Europe 5 5
Hong Kong Asia 4 5
Sweden Europe 4 5
France Europe 4 4
South Korea Asia 3 4
Denmark Europe 3 3
Israel Asia 3 3
New Zealand Australasia 3 3
India Asia 2 2
Ireland Europe 2 2
Norway Europe 1 2
Russia Europe 1 2
Singapore Asia 2 2
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
(AFP) – Oct 8, 2009
LONDON — US and British universities dominate the top of a league table of universities worldwide published Thursday, but Asian seats of learning are moving up the global rankings.
Harvard remains in top spot in the Times Higher Education (THE) league table, followed by Britain's Cambridge University then Yale in third place, with London's University College and Imperial College in fourth and fifth.
Oxford has slipped one to joint fifth, but the next 10 places are occupied by US universities, most of them Ivy League like Princeton and Columbia, but also including Chicago University.
But Asian universities, while still struggling to break into the top 20, are moving upwards, with numbers in the top 200 growing in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Malaysia.
After the University of Tokyo in 22nd place come the University of Hong Kong in 24th, Japan's Kyoto University in 25th, and the National University of Singapore in 30th.
Philip Altbach of Boston University says the Asian improvement is due to a number of factors.
"These countries have invested heavily in higher education in recent years, and this is reflected in the improved quality in their top institutions," he told the Times education weekly.
"They have also attempted to internationalise their universities by hiring more faculty from overseas... this helps to improve their visibility globally," he added.
Japan has the most top-200-ranked universities at 11, one more than last year, followed by China with six; Hong Kong (up from four to five); South Korea (up from three to four); and Singapore and India, with two each.
Europe's top non-British university is Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in 20th spot, followed by France's Ecole Normale Superieure in 28th. The top German university is the Technical University of Munich, in 55th.
The top non-US and non-European universities are the Australian National University in 17th place, down one, and Canada's McGill University in 18th position, down two.
The league table, compiled by the THE in collaboration with the QS global career and education network, ranks universities according to a series of criteria including peer review, employers' views and student opinion surveys.
In Britain, Oxford University voiced surprise at the downgrading.
"League table rankings can vary as they often use different methods to measure success," said a spokesman for Oxford, one of the world's oldest universities which has a fierce rivalry with Cambridge.
"But Oxford University's position is surprising given that Oxford... has the highest research income of any UK university and has come first in every national league table," he added.
Here is a ranking of countries with the most universities in the top 200 of the THE/QS league table:
Country Region 2008 2009
United States North America 58 54
United Kingdom Europe 29 29
Canada North America 12 11
Japan Asia 10 11
Netherlands Europe 11 11
Germany Europe 11 10
Australia Australasia 9 9
Switzerland Europe 7 7
China Asia 6 6
Belgium Europe 5 5
Hong Kong Asia 4 5
Sweden Europe 4 5
France Europe 4 4
South Korea Asia 3 4
Denmark Europe 3 3
Israel Asia 3 3
New Zealand Australasia 3 3
India Asia 2 2
Ireland Europe 2 2
Norway Europe 1 2
Russia Europe 1 2
Singapore Asia 2 2
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
Japan court acquits file-share software creator
Japan court acquits file-share software creator
(AFP) – Oct 7, 2009
TOKYO — A Japanese high court on Thursday acquitted the creator of a popular file-sharing software program of copyright violations, overturning an earlier conviction.
"It was a very fair judgement," Isamu Kaneko, the 39-year-old developer of the Winny "peer-to-peer" program, told reporters after the Osaka High Court in western Japan handed down the verdict.
"This will obviously have a good impact" on software development, he said.
Winny, which Kaneko had made available on his website, enables users to exchange files such as computer games and movies over the Internet for free, making Kaneko a cyberspace icon in Japan.
He had pleaded not guilty, arguing that holding programmers responsible for copyright infringement would hamper technological development.
In December 2006, the Kyoto District Court had convicted Kaneko, ruling that he made the software available on the Internet while knowing it would be widely used for illegal purposes.
The Kyoto court had refused a call from prosecutors for a one-year prison sentence but fined him 1.5 million yen (17,000 dollars) in Japan's first ruling on file-sharing software.
Chief judge Masazo Ogura at the Osaka High Court said Thursday that Kaneko had been aware of the possibility that the software might be used for inappropriate purposes but had not recommended users to do so.
Winny allows the anonymous exchange of files between two computers, facilitating the transfer of music and movie files -- and obscene content.
It has also been said to suffer programming flaws vulnerable to virus and has been the source of information leaks, including from a number of computers belonging to government and company officials who used the software privately.
Kaneko was a research assistant at Tokyo University until his arrest in 2004. He had amassed thousands of dollars in donations for his legal defence.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
(AFP) – Oct 7, 2009
TOKYO — A Japanese high court on Thursday acquitted the creator of a popular file-sharing software program of copyright violations, overturning an earlier conviction.
"It was a very fair judgement," Isamu Kaneko, the 39-year-old developer of the Winny "peer-to-peer" program, told reporters after the Osaka High Court in western Japan handed down the verdict.
"This will obviously have a good impact" on software development, he said.
Winny, which Kaneko had made available on his website, enables users to exchange files such as computer games and movies over the Internet for free, making Kaneko a cyberspace icon in Japan.
He had pleaded not guilty, arguing that holding programmers responsible for copyright infringement would hamper technological development.
In December 2006, the Kyoto District Court had convicted Kaneko, ruling that he made the software available on the Internet while knowing it would be widely used for illegal purposes.
The Kyoto court had refused a call from prosecutors for a one-year prison sentence but fined him 1.5 million yen (17,000 dollars) in Japan's first ruling on file-sharing software.
Chief judge Masazo Ogura at the Osaka High Court said Thursday that Kaneko had been aware of the possibility that the software might be used for inappropriate purposes but had not recommended users to do so.
Winny allows the anonymous exchange of files between two computers, facilitating the transfer of music and movie files -- and obscene content.
It has also been said to suffer programming flaws vulnerable to virus and has been the source of information leaks, including from a number of computers belonging to government and company officials who used the software privately.
Kaneko was a research assistant at Tokyo University until his arrest in 2004. He had amassed thousands of dollars in donations for his legal defence.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
Japan's ex-finance minister Nakagawa found dead
Sunday, … .Sat Oct 3, 9:45 pm ET
TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's former finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who was forced to resign over his apparently drunken behaviour at a meeting of world powers, has been found dead at his home, police and news reports said Sunday.
"We were informed that former finance minister Nakagawa has been found dead, but we are still unaware of further details," said a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
Nakagawa, 56, was found dead in a bedroom at his home in Tokyo's residential distrct of Setagaya, Jiji Press news agency and other media said, adding that the cause of death was not immediately unknown.
Nakagawa, a close ally of then prime minister Taro Aso, was incoherent and slurred his speech at a news conference in February after the Group of Seven talks in Rome amid the global economic crisis.
Nakagawa said he had sipped some wine with lunch before the press conference but blamed jet lag and cold medicine for his drowsiness.
The debacle dealt a blow to Aso, who resigned last month after his conservative party suffered a massive defeat against Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan in general elections in August.
TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's former finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who was forced to resign over his apparently drunken behaviour at a meeting of world powers, has been found dead at his home, police and news reports said Sunday.
"We were informed that former finance minister Nakagawa has been found dead, but we are still unaware of further details," said a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.
Nakagawa, 56, was found dead in a bedroom at his home in Tokyo's residential distrct of Setagaya, Jiji Press news agency and other media said, adding that the cause of death was not immediately unknown.
Nakagawa, a close ally of then prime minister Taro Aso, was incoherent and slurred his speech at a news conference in February after the Group of Seven talks in Rome amid the global economic crisis.
Nakagawa said he had sipped some wine with lunch before the press conference but blamed jet lag and cold medicine for his drowsiness.
The debacle dealt a blow to Aso, who resigned last month after his conservative party suffered a massive defeat against Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan in general elections in August.
Michelin starry-eyed in new Japan city guides
(AFP) – Oct 13, 2009
TOKYO — After publishing a Tokyo dining guide, Michelin unveiled on Tuesday a book focusing on Japan's western cities of Kyoto and Osaka, awarding stars to its entire selection of 150 restaurants.
The guide, due to hit Japanese bookstore shelves on Friday in both Japanese and English, lavished the ancient capital of Kyoto with six three-star ratings among the city's 85 chosen restaurants.
Kyoto and Osaka are both famed for their historically rich, although divergent, culinary expertise.
Kyoto is famed for the quiet sanctuary of its temples, shrines and Zen gardens, while its more boisterous working-class neighbour Osaka, Japan's third largest city, has been nicknamed "Japan's kitchen."
Between them, the two cities were awarded 118 single stars, 25 double-stars and seven triple-stars.
Tokyo remains Michelin's culinary world capital, winning stars for 227 restaurants, among them nine three-star ratings.
In addition to its usual selection of restaurants and hotels, Michelin in the Kyoto and Osaka book for the first time featured traditional "ryokan" hotels, awarding stars to three establishments out of 22 listed.
"Kyoto is a city that deserves a guide, because there is a tradition there, a culture of gastronomy. Our selection highlights this respect for tradition," Michelin guide director Jean-Luc Naret told AFP.
"Some chefs wholly deserve to be acknowledged by three-star ratings, as do younger ones who have already worked with the best and who show that the new generation will continue this tradition."
Nearly 97 percent of the guide's listed Kyoto restaurants offer Japanese traditional cuisine, as do 82 percent of those selected in Osaka. The other featured restaurants offered French, Chinese or fusion cuisine.
The Michelin staff, made up entirely of Japanese inspectors, visited more than 1,000 restaurants, hotels and ryokans from late 2007 before telling 203 establishments that they had been selected.
Under Michelin's rules, one star signifies a "very good" cooking quality, two stars mean "excellent," and three stars mean "exceptional."
Michelin will run 150,000 copies in Japanese and 30,000 in English. The guide will be available in Europe in February.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
TOKYO — After publishing a Tokyo dining guide, Michelin unveiled on Tuesday a book focusing on Japan's western cities of Kyoto and Osaka, awarding stars to its entire selection of 150 restaurants.
The guide, due to hit Japanese bookstore shelves on Friday in both Japanese and English, lavished the ancient capital of Kyoto with six three-star ratings among the city's 85 chosen restaurants.
Kyoto and Osaka are both famed for their historically rich, although divergent, culinary expertise.
Kyoto is famed for the quiet sanctuary of its temples, shrines and Zen gardens, while its more boisterous working-class neighbour Osaka, Japan's third largest city, has been nicknamed "Japan's kitchen."
Between them, the two cities were awarded 118 single stars, 25 double-stars and seven triple-stars.
Tokyo remains Michelin's culinary world capital, winning stars for 227 restaurants, among them nine three-star ratings.
In addition to its usual selection of restaurants and hotels, Michelin in the Kyoto and Osaka book for the first time featured traditional "ryokan" hotels, awarding stars to three establishments out of 22 listed.
"Kyoto is a city that deserves a guide, because there is a tradition there, a culture of gastronomy. Our selection highlights this respect for tradition," Michelin guide director Jean-Luc Naret told AFP.
"Some chefs wholly deserve to be acknowledged by three-star ratings, as do younger ones who have already worked with the best and who show that the new generation will continue this tradition."
Nearly 97 percent of the guide's listed Kyoto restaurants offer Japanese traditional cuisine, as do 82 percent of those selected in Osaka. The other featured restaurants offered French, Chinese or fusion cuisine.
The Michelin staff, made up entirely of Japanese inspectors, visited more than 1,000 restaurants, hotels and ryokans from late 2007 before telling 203 establishments that they had been selected.
Under Michelin's rules, one star signifies a "very good" cooking quality, two stars mean "excellent," and three stars mean "exceptional."
Michelin will run 150,000 copies in Japanese and 30,000 in English. The guide will be available in Europe in February.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
Asia's 'Astro Boy' set to take on Hollywood
By Mathew Scott (AFP) – Oct 8, 2009
BUSAN — When a feisty little robot named "Astro Boy" emerged from the Japanese comic world in the 1960s, children across the globe were charmed by his charisma and inspired by his courage.
The cartoon character used super powers to fight all manner of evil, from man-hating robots to robot-hating men, but nothing could have prepared him for the battle he now faces: "Astro Boy" is about to take on Hollywood.
The Hong Kong-based animation studio Imagi on Saturday launches its modern 3D take on the "Astro Boy" story in Japanese cinemas before it goes out in the US from October 23, right in the middle of the lucrative autumn cinema season.
Imagi?s studio heads are gambling that their 65 million dollar production will steal a share of the animation market dominated by the American super studios of Pixar and DreamWorks -- and inspire a new wave of Asian-based animation.
"Astro Boy shows the potential and the promise in the Asian animation industry and the possibilities that are here," says Imagi?s vice-president of animation, Tim Cheung.
"Talent is always around, the important thing is how it is developed. And that is what you are seeing now -- the talent is being developed in Asia."
First sketched by Osamu Tezuka in 1956, "Astro Boy" became an instant classic of the Japanese-invented manga-style comics with its tale of a powerful little robot boy built by a scientist in the image of his deceased son.
There have been a number of version of the story produced since, most famously the 1960s series which heralded the rise of the influential Japanese "anime" style of cartoons used in television and film.
Without giving too much away, Imagi say they have taken the traditional story -- which saw Astro Boy abandoned to a circus and then reborn as a superhero -- and updated it not only with modern 3-D CGI technology but with modern themes.
For their English-language version, Freddie Highmore ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") and Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage will provide the voices for the lead roles -- Astro Boy and Dr Tenma, the scientist who builds the robot.
"It?s always tricky to ask a filmmaker about their production but I feel hugely confident," says Cheung. "It?s very well balanced throughout. It?s rare to have movie like this where so many moments in the film are touching.
"Plus it has action and humour. And all that is enshrined in the story of Astro Boy -- it has always had all that.
"It will be fairly new for the North American audience, but very familiar for the Asian audience."
Imagi has grand plans for an Asian animation market that is looking to go global.
Three of the worldwide box office?s top 10 hits this year have been CGI-animated films -- with "Up" coming in third so far (with 292 million dollars in ticket sales), "Monsters vs Aliens" at sixth and "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" seventh.
But until now, Asian animators have been content to target their own regional markets.
Japan?s legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki won an Oscar in 2003 for "Spirited Away", and he has a cult following across the globe. But Miyazaki remains the exception.
There is good reason, says Kim Ji-Seok, who programmes the Asian sections at South Korea?s annual Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), the biggest in the region.
"The status of the feature animation film in Asia, except for Japan, has been poor," says Kim.
"Some Asian countries, however, have tried to promote the animation industry on a national level.
"It seems to me that animated feature film production in Asia is slowly materializing, in places such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Philippines where it was difficult to make feature animation films before."
This year?s PIFF -- which is running until October 16 -- features a special "Ani Asia! A Leap of Asian Feature Animation" section that features films from those smaller Asian markets.
"What these animated features provide is a kind of refreshment," says Kim. "They can be distinguished from conventional animation from the West or Japan, and the characters and stories are aesthetically combined with each country?s cultural traditions."
Kim says the region?s comic traditions have long inspired filmmakers, a point reinforced last month when America?s Vanquish Motion Pictures picked up the rights to "DevaShard", the best-selling graphic novel series from Hong Kong.
"DevaShard" is based on ancient Sanskrit epics such as "The Mahabharata" and so far its two issues have sold out print runs of 50,000 in its home town.
Imagi is also at work on their next feature, an updated version of the Japanese anime series "Gatchaman", which follows the exploits of a five-member team of superheroes and first appeared in the 1970s. The film is set for release towards the end of 2010.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
BUSAN — When a feisty little robot named "Astro Boy" emerged from the Japanese comic world in the 1960s, children across the globe were charmed by his charisma and inspired by his courage.
The cartoon character used super powers to fight all manner of evil, from man-hating robots to robot-hating men, but nothing could have prepared him for the battle he now faces: "Astro Boy" is about to take on Hollywood.
The Hong Kong-based animation studio Imagi on Saturday launches its modern 3D take on the "Astro Boy" story in Japanese cinemas before it goes out in the US from October 23, right in the middle of the lucrative autumn cinema season.
Imagi?s studio heads are gambling that their 65 million dollar production will steal a share of the animation market dominated by the American super studios of Pixar and DreamWorks -- and inspire a new wave of Asian-based animation.
"Astro Boy shows the potential and the promise in the Asian animation industry and the possibilities that are here," says Imagi?s vice-president of animation, Tim Cheung.
"Talent is always around, the important thing is how it is developed. And that is what you are seeing now -- the talent is being developed in Asia."
First sketched by Osamu Tezuka in 1956, "Astro Boy" became an instant classic of the Japanese-invented manga-style comics with its tale of a powerful little robot boy built by a scientist in the image of his deceased son.
There have been a number of version of the story produced since, most famously the 1960s series which heralded the rise of the influential Japanese "anime" style of cartoons used in television and film.
Without giving too much away, Imagi say they have taken the traditional story -- which saw Astro Boy abandoned to a circus and then reborn as a superhero -- and updated it not only with modern 3-D CGI technology but with modern themes.
For their English-language version, Freddie Highmore ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") and Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage will provide the voices for the lead roles -- Astro Boy and Dr Tenma, the scientist who builds the robot.
"It?s always tricky to ask a filmmaker about their production but I feel hugely confident," says Cheung. "It?s very well balanced throughout. It?s rare to have movie like this where so many moments in the film are touching.
"Plus it has action and humour. And all that is enshrined in the story of Astro Boy -- it has always had all that.
"It will be fairly new for the North American audience, but very familiar for the Asian audience."
Imagi has grand plans for an Asian animation market that is looking to go global.
Three of the worldwide box office?s top 10 hits this year have been CGI-animated films -- with "Up" coming in third so far (with 292 million dollars in ticket sales), "Monsters vs Aliens" at sixth and "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" seventh.
But until now, Asian animators have been content to target their own regional markets.
Japan?s legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki won an Oscar in 2003 for "Spirited Away", and he has a cult following across the globe. But Miyazaki remains the exception.
There is good reason, says Kim Ji-Seok, who programmes the Asian sections at South Korea?s annual Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), the biggest in the region.
"The status of the feature animation film in Asia, except for Japan, has been poor," says Kim.
"Some Asian countries, however, have tried to promote the animation industry on a national level.
"It seems to me that animated feature film production in Asia is slowly materializing, in places such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Philippines where it was difficult to make feature animation films before."
This year?s PIFF -- which is running until October 16 -- features a special "Ani Asia! A Leap of Asian Feature Animation" section that features films from those smaller Asian markets.
"What these animated features provide is a kind of refreshment," says Kim. "They can be distinguished from conventional animation from the West or Japan, and the characters and stories are aesthetically combined with each country?s cultural traditions."
Kim says the region?s comic traditions have long inspired filmmakers, a point reinforced last month when America?s Vanquish Motion Pictures picked up the rights to "DevaShard", the best-selling graphic novel series from Hong Kong.
"DevaShard" is based on ancient Sanskrit epics such as "The Mahabharata" and so far its two issues have sold out print runs of 50,000 in its home town.
Imagi is also at work on their next feature, an updated version of the Japanese anime series "Gatchaman", which follows the exploits of a five-member team of superheroes and first appeared in the 1970s. The film is set for release towards the end of 2010.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.
Australian town in Japanese dolphin back-flip
Fri Oct 16, 3:17 am ET
SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian town has issued an apology to its Japanese sister city after backing down on a decision to cut ties over its slaughter of thousands of dolphins, officials said Friday.
Broome, a remote tourist town on Australia's rugged northwest coast, in August cancelled its three-decade relationship with Japan's Taiji "while the practice of harvesting dolphins exists".
But at an extraordinary meeting on October 13 it rescinded the decision which it said was made in haste and without wide consultation.
The council said it "unreservedly apologises to the Japanese community in Broome and Taiji, their families and friends for any disrespect caused by council's resolution of 22 August 2009".
"Following a delegation from local cultural groups, councillors decided that a rescission motion was in order," Broome shire president Graeme Campbell said, adding that Taiji officials had been made aware of the change.
Broome suspended its arrangement with Taiji, in Japan's Wakayama prefecture, over its commercial hunting of dolphins after environmentalists objected to the deaths of about 23,000 dolphins there each year.
The issue raised emotions in the coastal town on Australia's west coast, leading to dolphin cut-outs with the wording "Stop the Slaughter" being left at the town's Japanese cemetery.
The council expressed "its sorrow for the public distress caused to the Japanese community by the offensive material" left at the cemetery and said it would install surveillance cameras in the area.
But it noted that it did not condone the harvest of dolphins in Taiji, with which it forged sister-city relations in 1981.
Diplomatic tensions have emerged between Australia and Japan in recent years over Tokyo's continued hunting of whales under the guise of scientific inquiry.
SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian town has issued an apology to its Japanese sister city after backing down on a decision to cut ties over its slaughter of thousands of dolphins, officials said Friday.
Broome, a remote tourist town on Australia's rugged northwest coast, in August cancelled its three-decade relationship with Japan's Taiji "while the practice of harvesting dolphins exists".
But at an extraordinary meeting on October 13 it rescinded the decision which it said was made in haste and without wide consultation.
The council said it "unreservedly apologises to the Japanese community in Broome and Taiji, their families and friends for any disrespect caused by council's resolution of 22 August 2009".
"Following a delegation from local cultural groups, councillors decided that a rescission motion was in order," Broome shire president Graeme Campbell said, adding that Taiji officials had been made aware of the change.
Broome suspended its arrangement with Taiji, in Japan's Wakayama prefecture, over its commercial hunting of dolphins after environmentalists objected to the deaths of about 23,000 dolphins there each year.
The issue raised emotions in the coastal town on Australia's west coast, leading to dolphin cut-outs with the wording "Stop the Slaughter" being left at the town's Japanese cemetery.
The council expressed "its sorrow for the public distress caused to the Japanese community by the offensive material" left at the cemetery and said it would install surveillance cameras in the area.
But it noted that it did not condone the harvest of dolphins in Taiji, with which it forged sister-city relations in 1981.
Diplomatic tensions have emerged between Australia and Japan in recent years over Tokyo's continued hunting of whales under the guise of scientific inquiry.
Tokyo freezes $33 bln spending plan
(AFP) – Oct 15, 2009
TOKYO — Japan's government announced on Friday it would freeze spending of about 33 billion dollars from the previous administration's extra budget as part of its war on waste in the public sector.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet approved the suspension of spending of about 2.93 trillion yen (33 billion dollars), out of a supplementary budget of 14.7 trillion yen for the year to March 2010.
The cuts were just short of the government's target of three trillion yen. Former premier Taro Aso pushed the extra budget through parliament in May to fund his economic stimulus measures.
The savings were "unprecedented," said Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party took power last month, ending more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule.
"In a way, this is the start of new politics," he said.
Hatoyama's centre-left government plans to use the money to fund its campaign promises, such as expanded childcare allowances, an end to expressway tolls and free public high school tuition fees.
It has scrapped some projects including a planned national media arts centre aimed at promoting manga cartoons and animated films, as well as an expansion of highways and public housing development programmes.
The Hatoyama government will continue to try to cut waste, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano.
Hatoyama has "instructed the ministers to conduct thorough spending cuts in drafting (the next year's) budget," Hirano told a regular press conference.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
TOKYO — Japan's government announced on Friday it would freeze spending of about 33 billion dollars from the previous administration's extra budget as part of its war on waste in the public sector.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet approved the suspension of spending of about 2.93 trillion yen (33 billion dollars), out of a supplementary budget of 14.7 trillion yen for the year to March 2010.
The cuts were just short of the government's target of three trillion yen. Former premier Taro Aso pushed the extra budget through parliament in May to fund his economic stimulus measures.
The savings were "unprecedented," said Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party took power last month, ending more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule.
"In a way, this is the start of new politics," he said.
Hatoyama's centre-left government plans to use the money to fund its campaign promises, such as expanded childcare allowances, an end to expressway tolls and free public high school tuition fees.
It has scrapped some projects including a planned national media arts centre aimed at promoting manga cartoons and animated films, as well as an expansion of highways and public housing development programmes.
The Hatoyama government will continue to try to cut waste, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano.
Hatoyama has "instructed the ministers to conduct thorough spending cuts in drafting (the next year's) budget," Hirano told a regular press conference.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
George W. Bush throws out first pitch in Japan
George W. Bush throws out first pitch in Japan
(AP) – 8 hours ago
TOKYO — Former President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the Japan Series between the Yomiuri Giants and Nippon Ham Fighters.
Bush, wearing a Yomiuri warmup jacket, took the mound Tuesday at Tokyo Dome and threw a pitch to Giants catcher Shinnosuke Abe that bounced once in the dirt before being caught.
Bush chatted briefly with several players after walking off the field and watched the game in a private box with former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Also in the box were Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh and U.S. Ambassador John Roos.
The Giants won the game 7-4 to take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series, Japan's version of the World Series.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
(AP) – 8 hours ago
TOKYO — Former President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the Japan Series between the Yomiuri Giants and Nippon Ham Fighters.
Bush, wearing a Yomiuri warmup jacket, took the mound Tuesday at Tokyo Dome and threw a pitch to Giants catcher Shinnosuke Abe that bounced once in the dirt before being caught.
Bush chatted briefly with several players after walking off the field and watched the game in a private box with former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Also in the box were Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh and U.S. Ambassador John Roos.
The Giants won the game 7-4 to take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series, Japan's version of the World Series.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
Tokyo 'green' film festival opens
Tokyo 'green' film festival opens
(AFP) – Oct 17, 2009
TOKYO — The Tokyo International Film Festival opened Saturday with a debut screening of a US-made documentary about a traditional dolphin hunt in Japan a contentious inclusion at the week-long gala.
Since last year the festival has taken on the theme of the environment, with guest overseas movie stars, filmmakers and other dignitaries walking along a ceremonial green carpet instead of the usual red.
Stars attending the opening ceremony of the 22nd edition of TIFF, which runs through to October 25, include American actress Sigourney Weaver and actor Sam Worthington, star of James Cameron's new film "AVATAR Special Presentation".
The hard-hitting "The Cove", a late inclusion at the festival, will be shown for the first time publicly in Japan, with some saying it casts Japanese tradition in a negative light.
It focuses on the annual dolphin hunt in the coastal town of Taiji, a long practice for local fishermen but condemned internationally by animal rights activists for being cruel.
The film shows angry confrontations between residents and the lead activist, Ric O'Barry, who in the 1960s trained dolphins for the US hit television show "Flipper" but now argues the animals should be free to roam the oceans.
The film has won numerous international prizes, including the Sundance Festival's audience award.
TIFF has aspired to be the top festival in Asia for international films with the same prestige as Cannes, Venice or Berlin, although it faces tough competition from rivals in Bangkok and Busan, South Korea.
In addition to "The Cove" and "AVATAR Special Presentation", other special screenings include "Drag Me to Hell", directed by Sam Raimi, as well as the Japanese re-make of the 2004 Oscar-winning "Sideways".
Fifteen movies ranging in theme and style will compete for the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, the top prize.
New premier Yukio Hatoyama, sporting a green bow tie in a nod to the environmental theme, and his wife Miyuki were among those who attended the opening of the gala.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
(AFP) – Oct 17, 2009
TOKYO — The Tokyo International Film Festival opened Saturday with a debut screening of a US-made documentary about a traditional dolphin hunt in Japan a contentious inclusion at the week-long gala.
Since last year the festival has taken on the theme of the environment, with guest overseas movie stars, filmmakers and other dignitaries walking along a ceremonial green carpet instead of the usual red.
Stars attending the opening ceremony of the 22nd edition of TIFF, which runs through to October 25, include American actress Sigourney Weaver and actor Sam Worthington, star of James Cameron's new film "AVATAR Special Presentation".
The hard-hitting "The Cove", a late inclusion at the festival, will be shown for the first time publicly in Japan, with some saying it casts Japanese tradition in a negative light.
It focuses on the annual dolphin hunt in the coastal town of Taiji, a long practice for local fishermen but condemned internationally by animal rights activists for being cruel.
The film shows angry confrontations between residents and the lead activist, Ric O'Barry, who in the 1960s trained dolphins for the US hit television show "Flipper" but now argues the animals should be free to roam the oceans.
The film has won numerous international prizes, including the Sundance Festival's audience award.
TIFF has aspired to be the top festival in Asia for international films with the same prestige as Cannes, Venice or Berlin, although it faces tough competition from rivals in Bangkok and Busan, South Korea.
In addition to "The Cove" and "AVATAR Special Presentation", other special screenings include "Drag Me to Hell", directed by Sam Raimi, as well as the Japanese re-make of the 2004 Oscar-winning "Sideways".
Fifteen movies ranging in theme and style will compete for the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, the top prize.
New premier Yukio Hatoyama, sporting a green bow tie in a nod to the environmental theme, and his wife Miyuki were among those who attended the opening of the gala.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
Japan's labour unions eye resurgence
By Miwa Suzuki (AFP) – Oct 17, 2009
TOKYO — After decades of decline, Japan's labour unions are looking to flex their new-found muscle in the wake of a historic power shift that handed them unprecedented close ties with the government.
The unions were a crucial support base for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose centre-left Democratic Party took power last month, ending more than half a century of almost unbroken rule by the business friendly conservatives.
"We are mates, comrades. We have the same thinking," said Tsuyoshi Takagi, who recently finished a four-year term as head of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation -- better known as Rengo -- which represents 6.8 million workers.
"The issue of employment is the most urgent problem we are now facing in Japan," he said in an interview with AFP before stepping down.
Hatoyama has pledged to create a more "fraternal society" and has attacked what he sees as the excesses of US-style capitalism.
His cabinet includes former labour chiefs and vocal opponents of free-market reforms that were stepped up during Junichiro Koizumi's 2001-2006 premiership and put another nail in the coffin of Japan's traditional job-for-life culture.
The recently ousted Liberal Democratic Party was close to big business so the current situation "is very new," said Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a politics professor at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University.
"But we still don't know how far trade unionists can influence policies that were not in the party's manifesto," Yamamoto said.
Hatoyama's Democrats aim to hike the minimum wage to a national average of 1,000 yen (11 dollars) an hour, up from the current 713 yen, and ban the use of dispatch workers, or temporary workers, at manufacturing firms.
Such employees are easier to fire than regular workers and bore the brunt of a recent wave of layoffs.
Dispatch workers "have a lot of trouble" with companies where they work, said Takagi.
"We should prohibit those dispatches to the manufacturing factories," he said.
Economists, however, warn such a ban could burden companies and ultimately lead to fewer jobs.
Some firms may just reduce their workforce to lower labour costs, said Hiroshi Watanabe, an economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research.
"This could jeopardise jobs for 'the working poor,' making them just 'the poor,'" he warned.
As in many other countries, Japan's labour unions have endured decades of decline as its economy matured.
Only 18 percent of workers were union members in 2008, sharply down from a peak of 56 percent in 1949 and matching a record low seen in 2007, according to the government.
Labour market deregulation has caused the number of dispatch workers in Japan to more than triple to 1.4 million in 2008, from 430,000 in 2002.
Rengo's members are mostly regular workers at big companies who generally earn more and are granted many fringe benefits, said Tetsuro Kato, a politics professor at Hitotsubashi University.
If the new government becomes serious about addressing the problems of dispatch workers on insecure job contracts, at the expense of regular workers' welfare, it might cause "friction" with Rengo, Kato said.
Workers at Japan's biggest companies won an average wage hike of just 1.8 percent in the spring wage offensive this year, according to the business lobby Keidanren, down from 1.95 percent in 2007 -- the first decline in five years.
But the unions' close ties with the government do not mean they will secure a good wage rise next year in their annual bargaining with companies, said Hideyuki Araki, an economist at Resona Research Institute.
"It's a separate issue because what companies are watching is how government policies would affect their earnings," he said.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
TOKYO — After decades of decline, Japan's labour unions are looking to flex their new-found muscle in the wake of a historic power shift that handed them unprecedented close ties with the government.
The unions were a crucial support base for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose centre-left Democratic Party took power last month, ending more than half a century of almost unbroken rule by the business friendly conservatives.
"We are mates, comrades. We have the same thinking," said Tsuyoshi Takagi, who recently finished a four-year term as head of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation -- better known as Rengo -- which represents 6.8 million workers.
"The issue of employment is the most urgent problem we are now facing in Japan," he said in an interview with AFP before stepping down.
Hatoyama has pledged to create a more "fraternal society" and has attacked what he sees as the excesses of US-style capitalism.
His cabinet includes former labour chiefs and vocal opponents of free-market reforms that were stepped up during Junichiro Koizumi's 2001-2006 premiership and put another nail in the coffin of Japan's traditional job-for-life culture.
The recently ousted Liberal Democratic Party was close to big business so the current situation "is very new," said Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a politics professor at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University.
"But we still don't know how far trade unionists can influence policies that were not in the party's manifesto," Yamamoto said.
Hatoyama's Democrats aim to hike the minimum wage to a national average of 1,000 yen (11 dollars) an hour, up from the current 713 yen, and ban the use of dispatch workers, or temporary workers, at manufacturing firms.
Such employees are easier to fire than regular workers and bore the brunt of a recent wave of layoffs.
Dispatch workers "have a lot of trouble" with companies where they work, said Takagi.
"We should prohibit those dispatches to the manufacturing factories," he said.
Economists, however, warn such a ban could burden companies and ultimately lead to fewer jobs.
Some firms may just reduce their workforce to lower labour costs, said Hiroshi Watanabe, an economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research.
"This could jeopardise jobs for 'the working poor,' making them just 'the poor,'" he warned.
As in many other countries, Japan's labour unions have endured decades of decline as its economy matured.
Only 18 percent of workers were union members in 2008, sharply down from a peak of 56 percent in 1949 and matching a record low seen in 2007, according to the government.
Labour market deregulation has caused the number of dispatch workers in Japan to more than triple to 1.4 million in 2008, from 430,000 in 2002.
Rengo's members are mostly regular workers at big companies who generally earn more and are granted many fringe benefits, said Tetsuro Kato, a politics professor at Hitotsubashi University.
If the new government becomes serious about addressing the problems of dispatch workers on insecure job contracts, at the expense of regular workers' welfare, it might cause "friction" with Rengo, Kato said.
Workers at Japan's biggest companies won an average wage hike of just 1.8 percent in the spring wage offensive this year, according to the business lobby Keidanren, down from 1.95 percent in 2007 -- the first decline in five years.
But the unions' close ties with the government do not mean they will secure a good wage rise next year in their annual bargaining with companies, said Hideyuki Araki, an economist at Resona Research Institute.
"It's a separate issue because what companies are watching is how government policies would affect their earnings," he said.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
Japan to bail out JAL: reports
(AFP) – Oct 17, 2009
TOKYO — Japan's new centre-left government is set to bail out troubled Japan Airlines after creditor banks rejected a restructuring plan submitted by Asia's biggest carrier, reports said Sunday.
A task force of corporate rescue experts overseen by Transport Minister Seiji Maehara wants a new quasi-public agency to take a majority stake in JAL and rebuild the ailing airline, the Sankei Shimbun said.
Maehara's task force wanted creditor banks to forgive debts of more than 250 billion yen (2.75 billion dollars) racked up by JAL. But the banks say that would be too big a burden for them to carry, the Sankei said.
The banks had rejected a total assistance package for JAL worth 300 billion yen, including the loan waiver and a debt-equity swap, the Nikkei business daily said.
But the creditors did not want to force JAL into bankruptcy, the Nikkei added.
JAL's fate could thus be decided by the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corp. of Japan, which the new government launched on Friday to help debt-laden companies that are seen as having the potential to recover.
However, since taking office last month, the centre-left Democratic Party has made clear that JAL must do more to get its own house in order before it receives any public funds.
The airline was initially offering to cut 6,800 jobs, drastically reduce its route network and seek a tie-up with a foreign carrier.
Under government pressure, JAL is now reportedly ready to shed 9,000 jobs and oust its president, Haruka Nishimatsu.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
TOKYO — Japan's new centre-left government is set to bail out troubled Japan Airlines after creditor banks rejected a restructuring plan submitted by Asia's biggest carrier, reports said Sunday.
A task force of corporate rescue experts overseen by Transport Minister Seiji Maehara wants a new quasi-public agency to take a majority stake in JAL and rebuild the ailing airline, the Sankei Shimbun said.
Maehara's task force wanted creditor banks to forgive debts of more than 250 billion yen (2.75 billion dollars) racked up by JAL. But the banks say that would be too big a burden for them to carry, the Sankei said.
The banks had rejected a total assistance package for JAL worth 300 billion yen, including the loan waiver and a debt-equity swap, the Nikkei business daily said.
But the creditors did not want to force JAL into bankruptcy, the Nikkei added.
JAL's fate could thus be decided by the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corp. of Japan, which the new government launched on Friday to help debt-laden companies that are seen as having the potential to recover.
However, since taking office last month, the centre-left Democratic Party has made clear that JAL must do more to get its own house in order before it receives any public funds.
The airline was initially offering to cut 6,800 jobs, drastically reduce its route network and seek a tie-up with a foreign carrier.
Under government pressure, JAL is now reportedly ready to shed 9,000 jobs and oust its president, Haruka Nishimatsu.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved
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