JAPAN: In Japan, schussing among the spirits

Cutting through soft powder: “smoky snow,” as guide Noriyuki Watanabe calls it.

Published on Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 1:43PM EST Last updated on Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 4:35PM EST

Dave Ebner

A Japanese mountain range offers some magical backcountry

Hokkaido, Japan — From Saturday's Globe and Mail

The mountains of Daisetsuzan National Park explode from the earth, thrusting above plains painted lavender in summertime and thick white through the long stormy months of winter. At two colliding tectonic plates, this cluster of volcanic peaks stands sentinel at the heart of Hokkaido, the sparsely populated north island of Japan.

The Ainu, the local indigenous people, called this place kamui mintara, the playground of the gods.

Only a few hours from the international airport near Sapporo – and a world away from the Australian ski tourists who throng to the in-bounds slopes at the Niseko resort region of southeast Hokkaido –Daisetsuzan is a backcountry Eden.

Even for an ardent atheist, it's hard to resist the lure to embrace Japan's animist traditions, the belief that spirits imbue all things. Spirits seem to abound in Daisetsuzan, in the bountiful snow, cold sake and gnarled silver birch trees: effervescent, enchanting and fleeting.

Warm pleasures (and cold sake) await just off the slopes.

“In the morning, when the place is bathed in sunlight,” photographer Koetsu Ichinei writes, “the snow crystals sparkle, and the scene reminds me of fairy tales of trees dancing wildly in stories of Ainu folklore I listened to when I was a child.”

Even devotees of British Columbia's Rogers Pass will find themselves amazed by Daisetsuzan. Unlike at Rogers, though, there are hardly any other skiers as we dance through the silver birch, cutting deep through deliriously light fresh powder – “smoky snow,” as Noriyuki Watanabe, of Hokkaido Powder Guides, calls it. Like spirits.

Winter storms brew constantly to the west in Siberia, grow fierce and heavy with moisture over the Sea of Japan, and wallop the wall of Daisetsuzan's mountains.

The speed and constancy of the cycles is surreal; a night of swirling snow will ebb to midmorning sunshine, only to be ushered away by another whipping snowfall in the late afternoon. “I've never seen snow fall more, every day, twice a day. If this was Canada, it'd be a zoo,” my brother Markus remarks.

Tokachidake (dake means volcanic peak), an active volcano that last spewed in 1989, is 40 kilometres from the small farming town of Furano and offers the purest easily accessed backcountry terrain in the park. We are the first to forge through the forest to break trail for an ascent of Furanodake. We slog higher on the steep slope, cut a path amid wild arms of frozen dancers – the snow-covered silver birch.

The scale of these volcanic peaks is far less epic than the glaciated Selkirks of Rogers, where ascents can last hours and soar well more than a thousand metres of vertical gain. On Furanodake, we establish a circuit from the river to a ridge top of about 400 vertical metres and hammer five runs on one remarkable day.

On-mountain indulgences are bookended by complementary pleasures upon waking and in the evenings. At Tokachidake, at the end of the road, stands a nondescript three-storey white building: Ryounkaku is one of Japan's many traditional ryokans, inns where guests sleep on simple mattresses on tatami mats and soak in the restorative waters of onsen, the hot springs that bubble through fissures in Japan's long volcanic belt.

Ryounkaku has an excellent onsen, its water coloured rust by iron. But nearby there is a particularly wonderful onsen, the unadorned Fukiage, a short amble down a snowy path from the road. Spirits surely swirl in the steam as water percolates out of the earth amid a forest and falling snow.

Food, of course, is the other delicacy. From miso soup and raw fish for breakfast, to an array of items served omakase-style – chef's choice – at dinner, eating is an adventure equal to time on the mountains.

Farther north in Daisetsuzan National Park is Asahidake; with half its top blown out, a gigantic crater remains and sulphurous white clouds smoulder from gaping fumaroles.

At a peak of 2,290 metres, Asahidake is Hokkaido's tallest mountain. From the base, a tram lift climbs 500 metres. There are two runs from the top station and many more options to duck off-piste; there are also a few routes to pick with climbing skins on backcountry skis or a splitboard (a modified snowboard). A couple of dozen vehicles are in the parking lot on a rare February blue-bird day. This is what passes for busy in Daisetsuzan.

Near the tram station base, a new ryokan called La Vista sells a much more luxurious experience than the more utilitarian Ryounkaku. Heavy with iconography of owls – the Ainu creation myth tells of an owl's claws carving the rivers and valleys of Hokkaido – the La Vista onsen is posh and the restaurant gourmet, from the shariko cocott (cod sperm) amuse-bouche to the local melt-in-mouth Tokachi beef barbecued on a hot plate built into the table.

Ever more distant is Kurodake. Rising from the Sounkyo resort, nestled in a gorge marked by basalt columns and waterfalls, a tram rises partway up the mountain as at Asahidake. There are no official runs of any sort, and the three dozen people on hand one day to maul the deep fresh snow in the tight trees are the biggest crowd that Clayton Kernaghan, an Alberta-raised Hokkaido transplant, has ever seen at “Japan's last frontier.”

Then, from late afternoon through the night, a storm pounds down 40 centimetres. In the morning, the prospects of climbing to Kurodake's peak are bleak. An hour later, the sky clears. Beyond our trio, four other people make the trek for the spectacular run from the 1,984-metre mountaintop to the 670-metre base.

“They just get so much snow,” American snowboarder Shaun White, two-time Olympic gold medalist, says in an interview. He has visited Japan often and made his first foray to the Hokkaido backcountry for a film two years ago. “It just dumps. It's a really cool place.”

Back in Furano, born-and-raised local restaurateur Takeshi Morimoto presides at Kumagera, where twisted bare branches, burnt in a long-ago explosion of Tokachidake and salvaged from a local river, sit atop the stone walls. He has made sake for a quarter-century and serves a selection of seven, from one as clear as a crystalline sky through to the last, smouldering dark.

He insists on two things: Drink the sake cold, and it's always best fresh. It's a delicate thing, something properly cherished at its source, a rarity in an era when everything seems ready for export or import. “Be present,” he counsels.

There are temptations to declare spirits real. Three things I know for sure: Spirits imbue Takeshi's sake; the smoky snow and dancing silver birch of Daisetsuzan backcountry's are equal to the best anywhere; and this playground of the gods is one fairy tale that blows away skepticism and leaves nothing but joy, a true believer.

* * *

Pack your bags

Getting there
Air Canada flies daily to Tokyo. In Japan, Sapporo is a short hop on Japan Airlines. Asahikawa is a smaller industrial city, closer to Asahidake and Kurodake. The town of Furano is closest to Tokachidake. The local tourism bureau is very helpful, as most locals do not speak English.

Where to stay
Ryounkaku Tokachidake Onsen On Mount Tokachi; 81 (167) 39-4111 or contact Furano Tourism (www.furano-kankou.com/english/). About $135 a night, two meals included.
La Vista Daisetsuzan At the base of Asahidake. 81 (166) 97-2323; www.japan-ryokan.net/lavistadaisetsuzan. From around $300 a night.

View Article in the Globe and Mail

JAPAN: Are you ready for wines from Japan?

Published: March 5 2010 22:45 | Last updated: March 5 2010 22:45

By Jancis Robinson

The words “Japan, wine exporter” have a somewhat unlikely ring but that is the aim of a new organisation, Koshu of Japan, which is keen to shine an international spotlight on a grape variety that is often dismissed within its native country.

I have just made my second visit in 12 years to Yamanashi prefecture, the Bordeaux of Japan in terms of winemaking. Except it reminds me more of Switzerland than Bordeaux. Every square metre in the heavily populated Kofu basin overlooked by Mount Fuji is cosseted. Individual vineyards are tiny, partly thanks to the postwar policy, implemented by General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw Japan’s reconstruction, of weakening the powerful landowners by redistribution. Farmers are protected. Labour costs are high. And the most-planted vine variety, like the Chasselas that is known as Fendant in French-speaking Switzerland, is also a table grape.

Perhaps it is this familiarity with the pink-skinned Koshu in the fruit basket that makes many of Japan’s army of wine lovers suspicious of wine made from it. Perhaps it is the fact that Koshu’s thick skins, which help make it resistant to the fungal diseases that can plague other varieties in Japan’s exceptionally humid summers, can all too easily translate in the glass into bitterness. Or perhaps it is simply that Koshu is just too much a part of the national furniture to be taken seriously.

Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are regarded as much more foreign and, therefore, glamorous in Japan. Certainly the likes of Chateau Mercian’s Private Reserve Hokushin Chardonnay 2006 and Suntory’s Tomi Réserve Special 1997 mature red bordeaux blend, top Yamanashi wines from two of the biggest companies, are thoroughly admirable. But it seems unlikely that anyone other than the Japanese would be prepared to pay around £100 a bottle for such wines and, besides, they are made in such small quantities that exporting is hardly viable.

Still, the national government and local authorities are supporting this new initiative to launch an export campaign for varietal Koshu, a drive set in motion only last year by the single-minded Yamanashi wine producer Shigekazu Misawa of Grace Winery.

“It is my dream to see Koshu wine recognised for the qualities I know it can have,” he says.

Equally determined is a former sommelier and Master of Wine student Yuka Kudo, whose job it is to translate the plan into sales. She says: “We decided to focus on a market that was stable economically, had a real interest in Japanese cuisine, and was not a major wine producer itself: Britain.” Some may question the stability of the British economy but they would not deny that the culture of sake-drinking is much less established in Britain than in the US, leaving a convenient gap that might just be filled by Koshu on the wine lists of superior Japanese restaurants in the UK.

Accordingly, a delegation of producers flew to London in January and took over Japanese restaurant Umu to prove to some of us fortunate wine writers that Koshu goes with the likes of shiizakana, grilled sea bream with miso, and then held a much bigger tasting for members of the UK wine trade. They stayed at a modest hotel in Tavistock Square so that they could afford to have 15 translators in attendance when showing off their wines.

Lynne Sherriff, Koshu of Japan’s European co-ordinator, says so far three or four British outfits have expressed an interest in importing this exotic new variety – new to Europe that is, even if there is apparently evidence that this vine was grown in Yamanashi a millennium ago. DNA analysis reveals that its genes are predominantly European, prompting some to speculate that it was brought to Japan along the Silk Road.

. . .

There is a problem, however. Neither the grape Koshu nor the appellation Yamanashi are officially registered with the European Union. The second is likely to take much longer to remedy than the first. Understandably, EU regulations do not permit winemakers to add both sugar to increase final alcohol levels and acid to increase final acid levels in the same wine. Koshu grapes are naturally low in both acid and sugar – though the 2009 vintage was exceptional in both these respects – and export requirements could have a long-term beneficial effect on winemaking techniques.

Because Koshu is so light-bodied and transparent, it is best served relatively cool. It is also advisable to drink it relatively young, so I cannot see how the Japanese will manage to persuade British wine buyers to pay more for it than, for example, they would for a Muscadet from one of the best addresses, which means about £10 a bottle retail. It is not going to be easy for Koshu of Japan. (Pending export agreements and other factors make it impossible to predict exactly when the wines will be available in the UK.)

But even the greatest Koshu sceptics such as Hiroshi Yamamoto, famed for his translations of multiple wine books into Japanese, who dismisses Koshu wines (and half his compatriots) as, “essentially without much personality – like Japanese women”, admit that the quality of the better wines made from Koshu has increased enormously in recent years.

I must confess that what appeals to me about Koshu is its very lack of brashness, its delicacy, purity, limpidity, and the way it goes so well with the calmer regions of the Japanese gastronomic landscape. The better examples pair particularly well with sashimi – and indeed any sort of raw fish dish including oysters, with sushi, tempura, and rice – even some gentler-flavoured risottos. There seems something quintessentially Japanese about a fine Koshu. The word zen keeps coming to mind.

As for specific flavours, I found yuzu (a Japanese citrus) in some, lychee in others, and a professional Japanese wine writer assured me that quince was the fruit she found most often in Koshu. My acquaintance with it is still embryonic but the examples that have particularly impressed me so far have come from producers Grace, Haramo, Lumière, Marufuji and Yamanashi.

View Article in the Financial Times

JAPAN: The Fallen Angel

The bustle of Toyko's business district masks the stagnation of the Japanese economy. Photograph: Getty

Friday 5 March 2010 08.00 GMT

By Kenneth Rogoff

Despite the veneer of prosperity on the streets of Tokyo, Japan's slow-motion financial crisis looks set to get worse

If you listen to American, European, or even Chinese leaders, Japan is the economic future no one wants.

In selling massive stimulus packages and bank bailouts, western leaders told their people: "We must do this or we will end up like Japan, mired in recession and deflation for a decade or more."

Chinese leaders love pointing to Japan as the prime reason not to allow any significant appreciation of their conspicuously undervalued currency.

"Western leaders forced Japan to let its currency rise in the second half of the 1980s and look at the disaster that followed."

Yes, nobody wants to be Japan, the fallen angel that went from one of the fastest-growing economies in the world for more than three decades to one that has slowed to a crawl for the last 18 years. No one wants to live with the trauma of the deflation (falling prices) that Japan has repeatedly experienced. No one wants to navigate the precarious government-debt dynamic that Japan faces, with debt levels far above 100% of GDP (even if one factors in the Japanese government's vast holdings of foreign-exchange reserves). No one wants to go from being a world-beater to a poster child for economic stagnation.

And yet visitors to Tokyo today see prosperity everywhere. The shops and office buildings are bustling with activity. Restaurants are packed with people, dressed in better clothing that one typically sees in New York or Paris. After all, even after nearly two decades of "recession", per-capita income in Japan is more than £27,000 (at market exchange rates). Japan is still the third-largest economy in the world after the United States and China. Its unemployment rate remained low during most of its "lost decade", and, although it has shot up more recently, it is still only 5%.

So what gives? First, things look a lot grimmer when one gets two hours outside of Tokyo to places such as Hokkaido. These poorer outlying regions are hugely dependent on public-works projects for employment. As the government's fiscal position has steadily weakened, the jobs have become far scarcer. True, there are beautifully paved roads all around, but they go nowhere. Old people have retreated to villages, many growing their own food, their children having long abandoned them for the cities.

Even in Tokyo, the air of normalcy is misleading. Two decades ago, Japanese workers could expect to receive massive year-end bonuses, typically amounting to one-third of their salary or more. Now these have gradually shrunk to nothing. True, thanks to falling prices, the purchasing power of workers' remaining income has held up, but it is still down by more than 10%. There is far more job insecurity than ever before as firms increasingly offer temporary jobs in place of once-treasured "lifetime employment".

Although hardly in crisis (yet), Japan's fiscal situation grows more alarming by the day. Until now, the government has been able to finance its vast debts locally, despite paying paltry interest rates even on longer-term borrowings. Remarkably, Japanese savers soak up some 95% of their government's debt. Perhaps burned by the way stock prices and real estate collapsed when the 1980s bubble burst, savers would rather go for what they view as safe bonds, especially as gently falling prices make the returns go farther than would be the case in a more normal inflation environment.

Unfortunately, as well as Japan has held up until now, it still faces profound challenges. First and foremost, there is its ever-falling labour supply, owing to extraordinarily low birth rates and deep-seated resistance to foreign immigration. The country also needs to find ways to enhance the productivity of those workers it does have.

Inefficiency in agriculture, retail and government are legendary. Even at Japan's world-beating export firms, reluctance to confront the ingrained interests of the old-boy network has made it difficult to prune less profitable product lines – and the workers who make them.

As the population ages and shrinks, more people will retire and start selling those government bonds that they are now lapping up. At some point, Japan will face its own Greek tragedy as the market charges sharply higher interest rates.

The government will be forced to consider raising revenues sharply. The best guess is that Japan will raise its VAT, now only 5%, far below European levels. But is it plausible to raise taxes in the face of such sustained low growth?

Investors who have bet against Japan in the past have been badly burned, grossly underestimating the Japanese people's remarkable flexibility and resilience. But the fiscal road ahead looks increasingly perilous, with political consensus fraying badly in recent years.

In the end, are foreign leaders right to scare their people with tales of Japan? Certainly, the hyperbole is overblown; the Chinese, especially, should be so lucky. But neither should apologists for deficits point to Japan as reason to be calm about outsized stimulus packages. Japan's ability to trudge on in the face of huge adversity is admirable, but the risks of crisis ahead are surely greater than bond markets seem to recognise.

View Article in the Guardian

RUSSIA: On this day: 6 March

Cover the first issue of «Pioneer truth»

March 6, 1925, was the day Pionerskaya Pravda (The Pioneer Truth) was first issued. Its title replicated the name of the main Soviet print medium, Pravda, as did numerous other newspapers. Pionerskaya Pravda was designed in the image and liking of the Komsomolskaya Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Komsomol organization, and was used for similar purposes. Both the Pioneer and the Komsomol organizations were junior bodies of the Communist Party, hence their main goal was to ensure that the younger generation would become good devoted communists when their time came.

Pionerskaya Pravda has always been popular with teenagers, each of them finding something to their taste. For that reason, in the 1970s and 1980s the paper’s circulation rose to 10 million issues. Since Pionerskaya Pravda still remained a propaganda medium whose motto read “helping the Pioneer organization and the school to raise political awareness and communist spirit in the younger generation,” many schools were required to subscribe to the paper and expected to discuss every issue at special debates and club meetings. Kids did not normally respond to the propaganda part, but genuinely felt for their starving peers from Africa and enjoyed taking part in the Pionerskaya Pravda-supervised charity drives out of sheer humanity, not political bias. Pionerka, as it was lovingly called, initiated international correspondence with teenagers from other socialist countries, and Soviet pioneers enjoyed their international friendships. Pionerka received about 200 thousand letters from young children all around the Union each year.

Young pioneers were welcome to try their hand at journalism, side by side with experienced professional journalists. The paper also provided informational and promotional support for all-Union and international youth activities: contests, sport matches, arts and crafts exhibitions and was hailed by many prominent Soviet writers who published their addresses (open letters) on its pages.

In the 1980s, with the advent of perestroika, the format of the newspaper was changed to fit the new youth lifestyle. In the era marked by a total absence of information, Pionerka became a real getaway for teenagers. Now, the pages of the paper gleamed with celebrity stories and lyrics for pop songs, which, in the absence of the Internet, made the paper precious for fans. The last page of every issue contained a chapter from a new teenage novel. It was published in installments, becoming a kind of written TV series. It was a very smart move which made kids look forward to the next issue. Sometimes, as part of a contest, authors would ask the readers to finish the story for them, and winners were awarded.
The Pioneer organization ceased to exist, but Pionerka still maintains a certain niche, though having lost its past popularity.

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CHINA: China sets inflation target at 3% for 2010

Friday, 5 March, 2010

Source: Xinhua 

CHINA targets a rise of consumer price of around 3 percent this year, Premier Wen Jiabao said when delivering a government work at the parliament's annual session today.

The target takes into account of the carry-over effects of last year's price changes, price fluctuations of major international commodities, hefty increase of domestic money and credit supply, and consumers' ability to bear price increases, Wen said in the report delivered to the Third Session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC).

The figure compares with a 0.7 percent fall of CPI last year as economic slowdown and lackluster demand drove prices down.
The report noted the goal leaves room for reform in resource and environment taxes and fees and in the pricing of resource products.

Wen said the government will deepen the reform of pricing of resource products as the current state-controlled pricing mechanism does no good for conserving energy and resources, and achieving sustainable development.

Zhuang Jian, a senior economist with the Asian Development Bank, said the target was lower than expected as analysts did not expect the resource price reform would come as early as this year.

"The 3 percent target is mild, which eases inflation fears. The resource price reform is very likely to stage this year," he said.  Zhuang noted although the full year target is 3 percent, there will be monthly fluctuations.

As the economy picked up thanks to the government's stimulus package, CPI returned to the positive territory last December, and gained 1.5 percent in January.

View Shanghai Daily Article

CHINA: China’s Premier Presents Plan for Growth

Published: March 4, 2010

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China said Friday that the nation would expand social spending, bolster lending, curb inflation and meet its traditional 8 percent economic growth target in 2010, but he cautioned that China still confronted “a very complex situation” in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Delivering his annual report to China’s unelected legislature, the National People’s Congress, Mr. Wen said that “destabilizing factors and uncertainties” in the world economy posed a challenge to China’s continued growth. But he effectively said that China’s plan to slowly ease away from last year’s enormous economic stimulus program, which spared China the worst of the recession, would continue unchanged.

“There’s no surprise here,” Tao Wang, an economist for USB Securities in Beijing, said in an interview after Mr. Wen’s address. “This has been the working assumption for a long time.”

Mr. Wen’s 35-page speech, the rough equivalent of an American State of the Union address, included a listing of statistics aimed at underscoring the government’s successful policies, swathed in boilerplate assertions of arduous struggle and glorious achievement.

While economies in most of the rest of the world struggled last year, China managed an 8.7 percent increase in its gross domestic product, capped by 10.7 percent growth in the last quarter of 2009. Many economists, including Ms. Wang, predict that China will easily beat its goal of 8 percent growth this year.

But Mr. Wen’s address also referred to problems in China’s booming economy that some experts say could hamstring future growth if they are not addressed quickly.

He pledged to clamp down on speculative real-estate purchases, which some analysts say are creating a bubble in China’s housing market. He also said the state would take measures to rein in an explosive rise in urban land prices. He warned that some Chinese industries, fed a diet of easy money and loose regulation, had developed serious overcapacity problems.

And even as he committed to expand the nation’s money supply by 17 percent this year, increasing lending by 7.5 trillion renminbi, or $1.1 trillion, Mr. Wen warned that “latent risks in the banking and public finance sectors are increasing.”

More skeptical economists have contended that China’s flood of lending during the recession will create a mountain of bad debt that will hamper future growth.

Mr. Wen said the government would run a budget deficit of $154 billion in 2010, which is in line with economists’ expectations. As a share of gross domestic product, the projected deficit is unchanged from last year.

Over all, spending will rise about 11.4 percent this year, half of the increase in spending during the recession last year.

Beyond economics, Mr. Wen’s speech laid out a familiar blueprint for raising China from a developing nation into the top ranks of the developed world. Last year, he said, the government’s stimulus measures helped increase auto sales by 46.2 percent, housing by 42.1 percent, as measured in square meters, and retail sales of consumer goods by 16 percent.

He recited a series of often-staggering numbers to highlight the country’s rapid development: 800,000 older homes were renovated in 2009; 165,000 miles of power lines were upgraded; 3,450 miles of new rail lines were laid; 2,900 miles of new freeway were opened; 35 airports were either built or renovated.

Mr. Wen said that the government had drastically increased spending on low-income housing, pensions, education and health care, and that the increases would continue this year. The government will take new steps to recruit top-level educators to China, to improve teacher training and to direct talented teachers to impoverished rural areas, he said.

Mr. Wen also said that China would pour money into strategic industries, increasing research and development and infrastructure spending to “capture the economic, scientific and technological high ground.” Among the areas he singled out were biomedicine, energy conservation, information technology and high-end manufacturing.

In a bow to China’s status as the world’s single-largest polluter, Mr. Wen also pledged to increase environmental protection measures, planting nearly 23,000 square miles of new forests, expanding sewage treatment and clean drinking-water programs, and retrofitting coal-burning power plants with advanced machinery to cut emissions.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 5, 2010, on page A7 of the New York edition.

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