JR Tokai Starts Maglev Station Construction

 

Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) has started building underground stations at terminals in Tokyo and Nagoya for the magnetically levitated train line scheduled to start running between the two cities in 2027.

A ceremony to pray for the safe completion of the project was held at both stations on Wednesday. Traveling at speeds of up to 500 kph, the linear Chuo Shinkansen line will cover the 286 kilometers between Nagoya and Tokyo’s Shinagawa area in just 40 minutes.

JR Tokai plans to extend the line further west to Osaka by 2045. The maglev train will zip between Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes.

About 20 people attended the ceremony at Nagoya Station, including representatives of residents from areas through which the new line will pass.

“We are finally starting construction,” JR Tokai President Koei Tsuge said at the ceremony. “I am sure there will be many difficulties during this major project, which will take more than a decade. We want to press ahead with construction safely, while giving proper consideration to the preservation of the environment and working closely with the regions the line will pass through.”

JR Tokai will start preparatory construction for building the linear terminal station under the existing station on company-owned land.

The rail operator plans to begin construction on land that it does not own from next fiscal year at the earliest. The first major hurdle will be whether negotiations for acquiring building sites go smoothly with local authorities along the line, which are handling talks with the landowners.

JR Tokai reached a basic agreement Thursday with the Aichi prefectural government and the Nagoya city government to help with the development of areas around Nagoya Station, the acquisition of land and other issues. JR Tokai is continuing to arrange a similar partnership with the Gifu prefectural government.

Toyota Museum A Success For Toyota - And Aichi

 

The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology opened in 1994 on the 100th birthday of Toyota Motor Corp. founder Kiichiro Toyoda (1894-1952). The facility's attractions include textile machinery that chronicle the development of the automatic loom by Kiichiro's father, Sakichi (1867-1930), known as the "king of Japanese inventors," as well as automotive technology that began with the capital created by Sakichi's enterprise.

"If the warp yarn breaks, the machine will come to a halt." This explanation in English was given as the 90-year-old loom, operating with quite a ruckus, came to a stop to the gasp of foreign visitors. One of them, 23-year-old Michelle Wheat from the United States, said she got a real sense of Japanese technology at the museum, and that she was impressed by it more than any other museum.

The number of visitors to the museum during its first 10 years was steady at about 100,000 people annually. The figure jumped to 304,000 in 2005 as a result of the Aichi Expo, but fell thereafter. Last year, however, a record 309,000 people visited the museum, establishing a new record for the first time since the expo.

This year, the museum drew 311,000 visitors as of the end of October, ensuring a new record for the second consecutive year.

The driving force behind the good times is foreign tourists.

The live demonstrations put on by museum staff, who operate real machinery, spin yarn and weave cloth, have generated a buzz on global travel information website TripAdvisor, where the museum was ranked No. 28 in this year's "Japanese sightseeing spots popular among foreign tourists."

Foreigners account for about 30 percent of the visitors to the museum. Apparently, the increase in the number of individual visitors is outpacing that of groups.

Another factor behind the museum's renewed popularity is the TBS TV drama "Leaders," which focuses on the life of Kiichiro Toyoda. The series was aired this past March.

The museum served as a location for scenes such as one in which Kiichiro is seen drawing. The series depicts how he redirected the assets of his father, Sakichi, and pursued his dream of developing Japanese-made automobiles.

The Tokai region in central Japan has many industrial sightseeing facilities suitable for touring that carry the stories about and history of industrial technology. Visitor numbers apparently peaked around the time of the Aichi Expo, with excitement waning thereafter. However, the cheaper yen has signaled the winds of change, with more foreign tourists visiting Japan.

Toyota is forecast to earn a net profit of 2 trillion yen ($16.81 billion) for the fiscal year ending in March 2015, a record high.

Masami Hayashi, the head of the Chubu Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry's logistics and service industry section, hopes the company's performance, along with the increasing flow of visitors to Toyota's "group mecca," will "lead to a utilization of the region's assets and stimulate the economy."

Asahi

Marubeni Completes Nagoya Solar Project

 

Marubeni completed its solar energy project with success yesterday.  Sharp and Yingli supplied the PV modules, a Marubeni spokesperson tells Recharge, without disclosing additional details.

The project, constructed on 78 hectares of reclaimed land in the town of Kisosaki, Mie prefecture, is expected to generate enough electricity to supply power to 14,500 homes per year.

Last April, the Tokyo-based conglomerate finished one of Japan’s biggest solar projects, an 82MW installation in Oita prefecture, on the southwestern island of Kyushu.

In late October, it revealed plans to work with Japanese e-retailer Rakuten to offer services to consumers of renewables-generated electricity, in anticipation of the government’s plans to open the nation's retail electricity market up to competition by 2016. 

Recharge Energy

Nagoya Based Child Care Company Sued In Tokyo

Sekimachi Kita, Tokyo

When the Asc Sekimachi-kita day care center opened in Tokyo's Nerima Ward in 2007, it surrounded its yard with a three-meter high sound isolation wall, the kind of wall seen along expressways. It limited the time for children to play in the yard to two hours a day and the facility has double-paned windows.

Despite these efforts, the center was sued by neighbors who claimed the children’s loud voices constituted noise.

Hiromi Yamaguchi, head of Nagoya-based Japan Nursery Service Inc., which runs the day care center, said the facility was treated as a troublemaker in the lawsuit.

“I have managed day care centers with the sense of a mission, but I don’t feel like establishing new facilities if it causes trouble,” Yamaguchi said.

Tokyo govt mulls review of the ordinance.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ claims were based on a stipulation in the metropolitan government’s environmental security ordinance that states, “No one should make noises exceeding the regulatory standards.”

The metropolitan government had received complaints saying that it was unreasonable to equate children’s voices with the noise of factories and from other causes.

Sixty-five percent of local governments in Tokyo also have called for review of the ordinance.

Given this, the metropolitan government has started to consider excluding children’s voices from the stipulation.

The metropolitan government plans to revise the ordinance as early as next spring. An official of the metropolitan government’s Environment Bureau said: “Although it is considered undesirable to control children’s voices from the viewpoint of [its effects on] their growth development, it is also true that some people cannot abide noise. It’s necessary to strike a balance in the review.”

Some day care centers have started making efforts from the planning stage to communicate with neighbors to avoid possible trouble with local residents.

A day care center that is scheduled to open in Ota Ward in April next year plans to welcome local people to events such as a summer festival, by joining a local residents’ association. Yoshitaka Nishio, president of Blossom Co., a Chuo Ward-based company running the day care center, said: “It’s impossible to make children follow the instruction, ‘Keep quiet.’ This is a matter that adults rack their brains to solve.”

“I suppose more people feel that children’s voices are noisy because it has recently become rare to hear their voices in our daily lives due to the declining birthrate,” said Masako Maeda, professor of Konan University who specializes in social security studies. 

“Still, if such voices are considered noise, the educational environment would become suppressed. So, the revision of the ordinance would be reasonable,” she said.

Maeda was involved as deputy mayor of Yokohama in the city’s efforts to tackle the issue of children on day care waiting lists.

“It’s also necessary to make compromises. Operators of day care centers need to provide more thorough explanations, and local residents may need to exercise patience,” she added.Speech

Paper Suggests Ways To Make Nagoya Protocol Easy

 

A recent paper proposes that countries use the access and benefit-sharing mechanism of the Nagoya Protocol to ensure conservation action and effective implementation of the protocol.

The Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force in October (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 10 October 2014).

The paper is published in the Asian Biotechnology and Development Review and entitled, “Access and Benefit Sharing as an Innovative Financing Mechanism”.  It suggests innovative ways to build access and benefit sharing (ABS) models.

“We need to stop looking at ABS through the lenses of the Nagoya Protocol negotiations where the focus is to prevent biopiracy at all costs,” it says. “Instead we now have to start viewing ABS as an innovative financing mechanism than a regulatory burden.”

The authors are Balakrishna Pisupati, senior research fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway, and Sanjay K Bavikatte, a fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, UNU-Institute of Advanced Studies in Japan.

The paper encourages countries to prioritise “modest but steady revenues from ABS over infrequent but big pay offs.” It also calls for prioritising “cooperation over competition when it comes to shared genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge.” And it proposes to prioritise “incentives over penalties to motivate compliance with ABS laws.”

The paper, citing another study, says: “If over 50 per cent of pharmaceutical products in the market now are derived from genetic resources or inspired by natural compounds, the global market for pharmaceutical products alone should hold enormous resourcing potential for prospecting based financing for biodiversity conservation agenda.”

This paper is being made available for distribution with special arrangement from the Asian Biotechnology and Development Review.

PAL To Begin Nagoya Flights

 

In a product launch, Philippines Air Lines (PAL) provided travel agencies, program partners and media with an overview of the flag carrier’s latest flight offerings.

PAL will begin four-times-weekly flights (Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays) between Cebu and Osaka via PR 410 starting on Dec. 19. Flights will depart from NAIA Terminal 2 at 9:15 a.m., arriving in Osaka at 2:40 p.m. local time. Return flights fall on the same days, departing from Osaka at 3:40 p.m. local time and arriving in Manila at 7:30 p.m.

On Dec. 20, PAL will also start operating three weekly flights (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays) between Cebu and Nagoya via PR 480. Flights will depart from NAIA Terminal 2 at 9:10 a.m., arriving in Nagoya at 2:40 p.m. local time. Departures from Nagoya at 3:40 p.m. local time fall on the same days, with arrivals in Manila at 7:30 p.m., the airline said.

The new routes to be launched within the month will bring to 67 the total number of PAL flights to Japan per week. The carrier currently operates from Manila 11 weekly flights to Haneda (Tokyo), 14 weekly flights to Narita (Tokyo), seven weekly flights each to Nagoya, Osaka (Kansai), and Fukuoka. 

From Cebu, there are 14 weekly flights to Narita (Tokyo).

Japan is the third biggest source of visitor arrivals to the country. Data from the Department of Tourism show that from January-August 2014, arrivals from Japan reached 310,901, an increase of 5.95 percent from the same period the year before.

Philippines Reuters

Chuo Wards's J Model K Studio Busted For Child Porn

Aichi Prefectural Police on Sunday announced the bust of a studio in Chuo Ward for allowing the filming of naked school girls under the age of 18, reports Sports Nippon (Dec. 7). 

On Saturday at approximately 4:00 p.m., officers raided J Model K and discovered a girl, 17, serving as an unclothed model for a 63-year-old male customer in a private room. 

Police charged Nobufusa Osumi, the 60-year-old manager of the studio, with violating of child pornography and prostitution laws. 

Osumi has reportedly admitted to the allegations. “The girls did it for pocket money,” the suspect is quoted by police, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun (Dec. 8). 

Two girls, both 17 years of age, were taken into protective custody. 

Dubbed a “JK business,” a term derived from joshi kosei, or school girl, the parlor charged customers 13,000 yen for the first 60 minutes of filming. An additional 3,000 yen was required should the customer want the female model to wear special clothing. 

During the raid, officers also seized a large number of Santa Claus costumes, maid outfits, school uniforms and sailor suits.

Jiji Press (Dec. 7) reports that J Model K opened in October of last year and has employed about 10 girls, who earned 4,000 yen per hour. 

Tokyo Reporter

Kazuo Shii Speaks In Nagoya

Nanjing Refuses To Heal Sister City Dispute

Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura

The Chinese city of Nanjing has decided to keep its sister-city relationship with Nagoya terminated.  Nagoya’s mayor in April 2012 expressed doubts that the Japanese Army’s 1937 Nanjing Massacre actually took place.  One month later the city council of Nanjing voted unanimously to end the sister city relationship.

The falling out began when Nagoya’s mayor, Takashi Kawamura, told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from Nanjing in April 2012, "I doubt that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing, but I find absolutely no evidence to support these claims."

The falling out underscored how differing views of history remain a problem in Japan’s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely raised in such a public manner, or directly to Chinese officials. But there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China’s government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes. 

The mayor continued when pressed by the Chinese delegation, "History is written by the victors and China in a sense is a victor because it hid under the cloak of US and the Allies after the war.  Nanjing was pushed as a war crime yet the atomic bombings were not.  My point proven."

Still, the Japanese government scrambled to head off a full-blown diplomatic quarrel. The top government spokesman restated Japan’s official position that the massacre did, in fact, take place. 

“This is a problem that should be appropriately resolved between the cities of Nagoya and Nanjing,” said the spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura. 

The sister city relationship was encouraged to be healed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ahead of the December 14 election to give Abe another 4 years mandate for his reform policies.  The healing between Nagoya and Nanjing would have been seen as a major diplomatic score for the ruling LDP.

Nanjing city council members refused to even bring the measure to a vote Wednesday citing officially, "Unless the mayor of Nagoya comes to this chamber personally and apologizes with the Prime Minister of Japan then there is nothing to discuss."

Bill Bryant

Oasis 21 Ice Skating Rink

 

A non-ice skating rink at Osasis 21 shopping arcade is attracting many couples and families with children, as it allows them to enjoy the winter activity in warmer conditions.

Unlike conventional ice-covered rinks, the rink is made of plastic and coated with silicon wax, according to an official of the facility.

Users of the rink must wear special skates. This year, the rink added a feature that allows skaters to interact with images projected onto the surface by gliding over them.

The skating rink is open 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays and winter holidays (Dec. 24-Jan. 6). The rink will be open through March 1, except on Feb. 23.

Nagoya Band Makes Big Hit