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’

Brighter, sunlit summer evenings are something I miss since moving to Japan. I hide inside under air-conditioning during the day, and by the time I finish work, night has already fallen. In winter you expect that, but in summer?

Really, who needs bright sunshine and searing heat waking you hot and sweaty at 4.30 in the morning, but still have the sun setting no later than 7pm?

Today, the Prime Minister “expressed support for introducing daylight saving time in Japan”

[He noted] an increase in calls for the country not to go against a worldwide trend. “Japan has become one of the few countries that do not use daylight saving time. I think calls are increasing for Japan to introduce such a system,’’ Fukuda said.

Please please please please please…

Ex-Beatle Sir Paul is reportedly horrified that an eco-friendly Lexus LS600H automobile given to him by Toyota was delivered by flying it 7,000 miles to the U.K. from Japan.

A source is reported to have said: “Paul was offered a Lexus as a gift and ordered the hybrid limo because it helps to reduce emissions.
“He’ll be horrified after learning it was delivered by plane. Paul has always campaigned for green issues and he can’t understand why anyone would send an enormous car from Japan to Britain on a plane.”
Carbon offsetting firm CO2balance.com said the plane journey would have caused a carbon footprint of 38,050kg, compared to 397kg for a three-week boat journey.

Thanks to Mr. Pink.

Toyota recently became the world’s leading car maker and the Associated Press is reporting that last month it surpassed 1,000,000 gas-electric hybrid Prius sold (I looked it up, Toyota says the plural of Prius is Prius).

• The Prius first went on sale in 1997.
• It’s sold in 40 countries and regions.
• 592,000 were sold in North America and 315,000 in Japan.
• The latest model gets 48 miles per gallon (20 km per liter) in city driving and 45 miles per gallon (19 km per liter) in highway driving.

Before I started riding the trains here, I drove a Honda Insight in the U.S. and loved it. Unfortunately, it was discontinued because the 2-seater was too small to be practical for most people. Nevertheless, I’m glad that Japanese automakers are taking the lead on greener cars since the U.S. surely isn’t.

There was an interesting article by Leo Lewis in this weekend’s Times in which Lewis outlines how he reckons that a very simple agreement between the USA and Japan could be a massive step towards world food price stabilisation.

Lewis says that current World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules “[oblige] Tokyo to buy rice it does not need and that eventually rots in storage. The WTO rule, its many critics say, effectively turns millions of tonnes of high-grade American produce into feed for Japanese hogs and chickens.”

If Japan doesn’t want or need the US rice, you may ask, why then doesn’t it simply sell it to some of its neighbours?

Standing in the way of that, however, has been a rule that prevents Japan from re-exporting its reserves of US rice without permission from Washington, which has not been forthcoming until now because of the fear of domestic political repercussions from the US rice industry.

Washington’s Centre for Global Development (CGD) said an agreement “would prick the speculative bubble and the hoarding mentality that has sent rice prices into the stratosphere. [...] A sudden surge of unexpected supplies [would] reassure anxious countries and poor people around the world that there is indeed enough rice for everybody.”

The amount of rice being spoken of is said to be in the region of 1.5 million tonnes, the release of which, according to the CGD, could mean that “rice prices could halve by the end of the month.”

If you thought that hanami season finished when the last of the cherry blossoms fell, think again. Even though Japan’s most famous blossoms are gone for another year, there are still chances to enjoy a hanami picnic before the sultry heat of summer kicks in.

Following signs off the beaten track to the Hiyoshi shrine in Tamana, Kumamoto prefecture, we found the Yamada wisteria (山田藤). The many vines, some of them reputedly over 200 years old, form a canopy over the shrine’s grounds - a pergola in purple.

Golden Week is a perfect time to see it, occuring as it does right around the start of wisteria’s flowering season, and I’d imagine that that has contributed to the Yamada wisteria’s huge popularity.

The lawns under the fragrant flowers were packed with picnicking folk, enjoying an al fresco lunch on blue sheets.

in january of this year, what is being called a “missing link” from the cretaceous period was discovered in iwate prefecture by one kazuhisa sasaki.

this specimen is the oldest praying mantis specimen to have legs with hair and spines.

interesting…

Through the winter, the rolling fields of Kyushu’s Aso and Kuju highlands are a light brown, with a carpet of long, dry susuki grass as far as the eye can see.

But with spring comes a clearing out of the old, making place for the new. Spring then is a time for fire festivals in this region. Across the whole region, last year’s grass is burned away in a series of what I assume are controlled fires, making way for the spring new growth.

It’s something of a surprise to me that this age-old tradition of burning thousands of acres of grassland every year has survived into this day and age - it doesn’t jive well with an alleged concern for air pollution, for example, as visibility and air quality are reduced to Beijing-like levels for a week or more.

What is even more surprising…

is that it’s quite a spectator sport.

And it appeared it was quite a tourist draw…

Quite apart from anything else, there were of course no public safety precautions whatsoever. I think the idea was that if you’re silly enough to come up into the mountains while they’re being set alight, then safety is quite your own responsibility.

There was something quite awesome about the fire. As the wall of flame advanced, the savage crackling noise was overwhelming. And even standing in the road, you had to be very aware of which directions the fires were moving either side of the road. With the grass burning right up to the edge of the road, the heat was intense, even passing hurriedly by in the car.

Driving back along the Aso Milk Road the following day, there were odd tufts of tan grass here and there, but other than them, all was black…

…with the winding road offering the only contrast to the charred landscape.

And so with the first stage of the spring transformation complete, we’ll be back up there as the weather warms up, the air becomes breathable again, and the black gives way to summer green.

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ever thought about cruising on your own boat around the pacific ocean? you know, just for the hell of it? well then, are you an environmentalist perhaps? someone who is worried about the increasing acidity of our oceans and the giant pile of trash polluting the pacific. hmmm? then you’ll love this man.

his name is kenichi horie. already a record holder in solar powered sailing and a world class recycler of used beer kegs.

his vessel is the suntory mermaid 2. a wave powered ship; it is slow as a snail, but environmentally friendly and a possible harbinger of a future propulsion system for large slow moving ships like the cargo ships from china

It may have been 4° in my living room when I got up this morning, but a neighbour of mine assures me spring is just around the corner.

And with good reason.

Yes, it’s time to kick off the blankets and kick up the nature worship again. Parts of Japan might shivering be under feet of snow, but here in central Kyushu the plum trees are blooming red, white and pink. Which means not long now until the debauchery of cherry blossom hanami season! Don’t know about you, but I can’t wait.

(Picture can be seen full-size here.)

below the buzzing metropolis of tokyo in the depths of a high rise building is a microcosm of an agricultural revolution. in a facility staffed by former freeters looking for a source of lasting employment, there are six rooms dedicated the the seeding, germination, and successful growth of various vegetables. why is this anything exciting, you might ask?

while for the last century large scale indoor cultivation has been commonly practiced around the world and indoor greenhouses and grow rooms are used by people as varied as researchers to marijuana growers, what is interesting about this experiment is the intent and unintended consquences. pasona o2, unlike its counterparts has among it goals the employment of that portion of disaffected japanese youth. in addition it is a live testing of the marginal transformation of land to capital in an urban environment.

while at first this may seem unexciting, to me it is intriguing for two reasons. first of all it is an introduction to a field of steady work for moderately educated youth to introduce themselves to both industrial and agricultural technology. while these are seemingly dying arts they are also heavily subsidized industries and thus a safe bet. secondly, while the proprietors may not see this as the future of farming, it was an object of debate in an environmental economics class in which i once enrolled. in an area where land prices are high and the soil quality is poor enough that it must be continually augmented by expensive fertilizers, there could conceivably be a situation, provided a cheap source of electricity, where hydroponic gardens in skyscapers could be the source of food to a nation and the nations to which it exports.

hat tip to pruned