And so we say farewell to yet another Minister of Agriculture. It’s often said there’s a revolving door at the Min of Ag., and it’s really been on a spin recently.

The Shinzo Abe administration saw 3 Ministers. You wouldn’t have thought there was time, but surely there was. Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who committed suicide in May of last year, was succeeded by Norihiko Akagi. He lasted all of 60 days but you’ll remember him as the chap who turned up at a press conference with an unshaven and bandaged face, looking like he’d taken the wrong route home.

Masatoshi Wakabayashi then warmed the Ministry seat for about three weeks before Takehiko Endo took over officially. Mr Endo then made Akagi look like a stayer by resigning after a mere 8 days in office. Mr Wakabayashi was called back for his second stint in a fortnight.

Seiichi Ota took over the reins at the beginning of August. And today he’s decided to take responsibility (as is the ministerly tradition) for the tainted rice scandal by buggering off and doing nothing at all to help clear up the mess. Very noble, I’m sure.

That’s 6 ministers in 16 months if you’ve lost count. At this rate, within a few years, we’ll all get a go at being the Agriculture Minister.

For a bit of balance, and following on from our article on blue bees the other day, let’s take a look at the other end of apiological scale.

If those gentle, quiet blue bees were old ladies on trundling mamachari, then vespa mandarinia would be helicopter gunships.

For vespa mandarinia is the giant asian hornet, and if you’ve yet to meet one, believe me, that name is no exaggeration…

(if you’re in any way phobic, leave now)

Nature-lovers, you might have caught a story in last week’s Asahi Shimbun about a rare and unusual kind of bee to be found buzzing around Japan, and in particular at the Aso Highland Museum Park, in Kumamoto prefecture.

Though the article seemed to downplay the chances of finding any, we decided to make the trip up into the highlands to the museum anyway, as it lies at the foot of Mount Aso, which is always worth trip, bees or no bees.

Dotted around the museum’s garden, there were patches of flowering basil, and busily buzzing around these bushes were hundreds of insects – including some blue and black striped bees.

As I crouched next to the plant, waiting for an opportune moment to take a snap, with the bees buzzing around my head, it struck how quiet they were. In fact they were barely buzzing at all. Occasionally one would stop and hover in front of my face, as if it were checking me out. This made them seem very friendly, though I may just have been caught up in the moment.

More photos of the unmistakeable blueness can be seen here.

Some more products to prepare you for The Big One, which is probably is sure to maybe hit Japan at any moment.

If your house is destroyed, how about a cardboard house?

And if you don’t make it, you can be buried in a cardboard coffin.

Just yesterday we heard about how proud the Japanese people are of their unique fine-tuned sense of the four seasons. Now the word out of Sapporo is that “indigenous peoples” are experiencing “unique fear” over the impacts of changes in the climate.

SAPPORO — Indigenous peoples will be the hardest hit by climate change because of their dependence on “Mother Earth,” Ben Powless, a native Mohawk from Canada, told a convention of nongovernmental organizations Monday.

In one of the subcommittees at the People’s Summit 2008, also called the Alternative Summit, Powless said climate change will harm indigenous peoples all over the world with food insecurity, decreased water resources and loss of cultural sites and traditions.

Damn it’s a drag being a sensory-deprived non-indigenous non-Japanese. . . I feel a unique sense of ennui coming on. . .

Newsweek has an online article about whaling, focusing on Japan and the upcoming International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting. It is an interesting topic which pits national sovereignty against international consensus with no easy or obvious solution.

The Japanese delegation at the IWC parley is expected to lobby other countries to relax the moratorium on worldwide commercial whaling that the body imposed in 1986. No other country has been quite as prepared to risk international opprobrium over this issue as Japan, which is allowed to kill up to 1,000 whales a year for “scientific research” under a loophole in the IWC ban. Tokyo wants the body to acknowledge the right of individual countries to engage in whaling along their own coastlines and has threatened to walk out of the IWC and unilaterally resume commercial whaling if a compromise can’t be worked out by the end of next year’s IWC meeting in Portugal.

Most of the world’s whale populations have benefited from the IWC moratorium, which took effect more than 20 years ago (some species have seen 3 percent to 8 percent growth). One of the most endangered species of all, the blue whale, has shown signs of a modest comeback: Relentlessly hunted by Japanese whaling fleets off Chile’s southern shores as recently as the late 1960s, blue whales have returned to those waters in recent years, and at least 250 individual animals have been photographed and identified. That has inspired plans to create a large marine reserve to protect their breeding ground, which is centered off the northern coast of Chile’s Chiloe Island.

Japan’s insistence on its right to pursue whaling operations infuriates environmentalists and leaves others scratching their heads. Though polls show that most Japanese don’t care much for whale meat, a hardcore minority does and defends whaling as a time-honored tradition that is worth preserving. Japan has ceased hunting endangered humpback whales, but Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has justified the yearly slaughter of hundreds of whales on the grounds of scientific investigation. Advocates of the IWC ban dismiss that contention out of hand, arguing that it isn’t necessary to kill the giant mammals to study them. Tokyo’s case is further undermined by evidence of whale blubber turning up on sushi menus and in Japanese school cafeterias. “You wouldn’t know this wasn’t commercial whaling because all the whale meat from scientific whaling is sold on the market,” says David Phillips, executive director of the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, which has lobbied for stronger conservation measures at previous IWC conferences. “And the so-called science is mostly unnecessary.”

The New York Times has an interesting article on Japanese energy technology. What always leaves me scratching my head is how this environmentally-minded country has such lousy windows and insulation which leads to more heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer (and thus more energy consumed and greater expense). I’d also love to see an accounting for all of the energy consumed by the millions of ubiquitous vending machines!

Now, with oil prices hitting dizzying levels and the world struggling with global warming, [Japan] is hoping to use its conservation record to take a rare leadership role on a pressing global issue. It will showcase its efforts to export its conservation ethic — and its expensive power-saving technology — at next week’s meeting in Japan of the Group of 8 industrial leaders.

“Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste give Japan the world’s most energy-efficient structure,” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said. Japan “wants to contribute to the world,” he said.

Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less. It is also the only industrial country that sustained government investment in energy research even when energy became cheap again.

Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Check out this report on gardening in limited spaces in Tokyo.

Thanks to Robert Leonard.

MSNBC has still another story about the high-tech toilets of Japan.

Japanese toilets can warm and wash one’s bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises that drown out potty sounds. They play relaxation music, too. “Ave Maria” is a favorite.

High-end toilets can also sense when someone enters or leaves the bathroom, raising or lowering their lids accordingly. Many models have a “learning mode,” which allows them to memorize the lavatory schedules of household members.

But this story tries to put a whole new twist on the whole thing by saying Japanese toilets are consuming too much energy.

These always-on electricity-guzzlers (keeping water warm for bottom-washing devours power) barely existed in Japan before 1980. Now, they are in 68 percent of homes, accounting for about 4 percent of household energy consumption. They use more power than dishwashers or clothes dryers.

“For hygiene-conscious Japanese, the romance with these toilets is equivalent to the American romance with the Hummer,” said Philip Clapp, deputy managing director of the environmental group at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington.

Proof positive that there are people in the world wanting to micro manage your entire life, including how you take a s**t.

Thanks to bjair for the tip on the story.

It took my wife a year to train me to take a shopping bag with me when I went over to the konbini to buy lunch. It was all I could do to remember my shoes and what I was supposed to buy when I got there. And when I got there, I usually realised I’d forgotten the bag. But eventually, like Pavlov’s dogs – only different – I was conditioned to hear the call for lunch, and automatically pick up a shopping bag.

What has taken slightly longer is training the staff in the konbini to stop trying to give me another bag every day. Along with chopsticks, spoons, forks, and wipes that I don’t need.

I stood at the cash register, counting out money, the bag tucked under my arm, and keeping my left eye on my money, I’d have to swivel my right eye – chameleon-like – to catch them as they grab a plastic bag. I’d tell them I didn’t need one. They’d express surprise, then thank me, then apologise. I tried variations on this which involved opening the bag obviously while counting out my money, but found that not only did this do nothing to dissuade them from thinking I might like another bag, it also required three hands at the very least.

After two years of standing at the till going through this Groundhog Day routine, I was shaken out of my complacency today. I chatted with the cashier about the weather – good, safe, conversational ground for the English and Japanese – and then something peculiar happened. We just stood looking at each other waiting for someone to do something.

I realised that the routine had been thrown to the wind – she’d overcome her reflex to reach for a bag. Unprepared, I stood there, gormless, with my MyBag (yes, ‘my MyBag‘) under my arm (no, not ‘my MyArm’), until my brain creaked back into action.

When I stepped outside, it was no longer raining. The sun was even making an effort to shine.

Photo from Roseville California community site, entitled ‘The Urban Tumbleweed’