North Korea isn’t at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. And therein lies a tale — one of sports and viruses, but most of all a tale of complex politics. While it’s not making headlines here, the North’s absence is noteworthy, especially among those who watch the intersection of sports and diplomacy — and the way North Korea’s propaganda machine uses international attention to advance its needs. The no-show is especially striking when contrasted with the last Games. Perhaps the hottest story of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, was the North Korean delegation, which included 22 athletes, hundreds of cheerleaders and leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister. The coronavirus is the biggest reason for North Korea’s decision not to come to Tokyo. Always highly sensitive to communicable disease outbreaks, the nation has shut its borders even more tightly than normal, worried that its fragile health care system and rickety economy could not withstand a major outbreak. That, in turn, could imperil the ruling Kim family’s grip on power. But there are other things at work, too, according to analysts. North Korean sports, like much about the country, are intertwined with calculations about its pursuit of a nuclear-armed long-range missile program to target the US mainland. After a brief period of engagement, Kim Jong-un now fears the introduction of another virus — the cultural one from the wealthy South — and may be biding his time until next year’s Winter Games. Those take place in China, its longtime ally with which it shares a land border. Kim may have also decided there’s nothing to be gained by nuclear diplomacy at the Tokyo games, as Washington shows no intention of accepting Pyongyang’s demand to end sanctions. PROPAGANDA Neither do sports exist in a void inside the North, where domestic audiences consume messages controlled by the government every step
Why, for starters, is the Green Knight green? It’s a question that’s long vexed scholars of the 14th century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The movie, like the epic poem, is full of mysteries, most of them unspoken. But the knight’s unlikely color — Why isn’t he a more typical knightly blue? — is a question voiced by the characters of David Lowery’s adaptation, The Green Knight. He’s green, answers Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain, because it’s the shade of rot. The Green Knight, as seen in Lowery’s enchanting Arthurian dream, is an imposing tree of a man, with a wispy beard of twigs and a wooden mane whose movements rustle with the sound of bended, creaking branches. (He’s played by a much-costumed Ralph Ineson.) Early in The Green Knight, he rides on Christmas Day into King Arthur’s court, cloaked in shadow, and offers a game. Strike him wherever you want, and he will repay the same stroke a year hence at his Green Chapel. Gawain, freshly inspired by King Arthur to be ambitious after spending his days drinking and carousing, takes up the challenge and boldly chops off the knight’s head. The thrall of victory quickly turns ominous when the Green Knight stands, picks up his head and — with more menace than even an unwanted houseguest promising to return for the holidays — says he’ll see the young man next Christmas. The Green Knight is the color of nature and of death, which here are the same things. Lowery’s film, shot on misty Irish plains and dank forests, is earthy, with dirt under its nails, and blanketed in wintery fog. It’s both of the land and the ether, poised in a dreamy, mythical long ago. Gawain’s quest to visit the Green Knight a year later is a haunting journey into an
With market-trembling new rules and investigations, Beijing’s crackdown on its most prominent companies has seeped into nearly every aspect of modern life, wiping billions of dollars from Chinese and Hong Kong-listed stocks and bamboozling investment sages. From after-school tutoring to music streaming apps, and shopping to bike-sharing, stellar firms have been hit as Beijing tightens the leash on corporations, citing national security and antitrust concerns. Whether motivated by the control reflexes of the Communist Party or to avoid market contortions hurting the pockets and safety of the Chinese public, few expect this to be the end of the crackdown. Here are some of the sectors caught in regulators’ jaws so far. FOOD DELIVERY Top food delivery app Meituan’s shares have fallen about 15 percent from Friday last week after regulators suddenly announced new worker protection rules this week. Employers in China’s booming food delivery sector, a lunchtime lifeline for millions of office workers, must now enforce minimum salary levels and “relax delivery time limits.” Meituan and rival Alibaba-owned Ele.me have come under fire in recent months after local media exposed the dangerous routes taken by drivers on tight delivery deadlines. Hong Kong-listed Meituan’s stocks had already taken a beating in April when regulators launched an antitrust probe of its lifestyle super-app, which also allows users to book entertainment, health and leisure services. EDUCATION Beijing also trotted out new rules on Saturday requiring tutoring companies to become non-profits and forbidding weekend classes, sending the valuations of private education stocks plunging. Analysts said the move made the companies virtually uninvestable. The government said the industry, worth US$260 billion in 2018 according to consultancy and research firm L.E.K. Consulting, had been “hijacked by capital.” The founders of New Oriental and Gaotu Techedu almost instantly lost their billionaire statuses after the rules were announced. Their fortunes were built by capitalizing on China’s hyper-competitive education system where
Hundreds of elected community leaders in Hong Kong have resigned and dozens of civil society groups have disbanded as China remoulds the finance hub in its own image. Just days before Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city last year, student Wong Yat-chin founded a new group called Student Politicism. He had just finished his exams and wanted to keep opposition voices alive in a city supposedly still guaranteed free speech by setting up small street booths to discuss issues such as democracy and prisoner rights. Since then he has been arrested five times for hosting booths or making speeches. “The red lines are being tightened each day,” the 20-year-old said. He added some venues have quietly urged his group not to turn up after one was questioned and reminded of anti-coronavirus rules by police recently, a tactic commonly used on the Chinese mainland. “Even the most peaceful and rational voices are not allowed. And there are so many groups disbanding themselves,” he lamented. Civil society, he said, is “ebbing and withering.” ‘PATRIOTS RULE HONG KONG’ China has used a double-blow knockout on dissent in Hong Kong after the city was convulsed by huge and often violent democracy protests two years ago. The first was the national security law with more than 120 arrests so far, almost entirely for political views. The other is an ongoing campaign dubbed “Patriots Rule Hong Kong,” where all public office holders and local politicians must be vetted for their loyalty. Most of the city’s prominent democracy leaders are either in jail, facing prosecution or have fled overseas. And a wave of resignations has swept through the city as community leaders try to avoid receiving a knock on the door from police. More than 250 district councilors have now quit ahead of the new political loyalty tests. District councils were the only elections in
A stack of Olympic and possibly world records will be broken on the Tokyo track over the next two weeks but, such has been the incredible impact of shoe technology on performance lately, that nobody quite knows what constitutes great any more. It used to be the case the world records on the road and track were edged down by fractions of a second, often untouched for years at a time, before the next generation shaved a couple of hundredths and were rightly feted. However, since the arrival of thick-soled, carbon-plated road shoes, and now their track spike equivalent, long-standing records set by the sport’s all-time greats are being obliterated, and then obliterated again, to leave historical comparisons difficult, if not impossible. Any lingering questions about how much difference Nike’s Alphafly shoes made disappeared in one weekend in October, 2019 when Eliud Kipchoge wore them to run the first, unofficial, sub-two hour marathon and fellow Kenyan Brigid Kosgei lopped four minutes off her personal best to break Paula Radcliffe’s 16-year-old women’s marathon record by over a minute. On the roads, 17 of the 20 fastest men’s marathon times in history have been set in the last five years and, coincidentally, it is the same case for women over the distance. Nobody had gone under 58 minutes for the half marathon until last December when four men did in the same race — with winner Kibiwott Kandie clocking an amazing 57 minutes 32 seconds in his Adidas Adios Pro carbon shoes. As that technology filtered into track spikes, Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei destroyed the early 2000s world records of all-time-great Kenenisa Bekele in the 5,000m and 10,000m. Last month Dutchwoman Sifan Hassan took a huge 10 seconds off the 10,000m world record but even that giant leap lasted all of two days as Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey beat it by
Kazuo Ishiguro first won the Booker prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. Thirty-one years later, the British author has made the longlist for the £50,000 award with Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel prize in literature. Ishiguro’s story of an AF, or “artificial friend,” which is bought as a companion for a 14-year-old girl, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s Booker, the most prestigious books prize in the UK. The author, who has been shortlisted three times, was praised by judges for his “haunting narrative voice — a genuinely innocent, ego-less perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear.” “It’s not just a novel about a technological future,” said judge Rowan Williams, the writer and former archbishop of Canterbury. “It is a novel about power, the nature of personality, about freedom and about love.” Ishiguro makes the cut alongside some heavyweight names, from Richard Powers, chosen for the yet-to-be-published Bewilderment, about a widowed astrobiologist trying to raise his nine-year-old son, to Rachel Cusk, longlisted for Second Place, in which a woman invites an artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives. Sally Rooney, who was nominated for the Booker for her 2018 novel Normal People, was overlooked by judges for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is out in September. Judges also failed to longlist Don DeLillo’s short novel The Silence. “Most of us had one or two favored novels that really struck us, but we couldn’t persuade the others, or sometimes there was a novel where we thought this was a really really good, thoroughly satisfying novel, but does it quite break the new ground or change the horizon in the way we hope a Booker winner would?” said
“That all those who knew him should write about him,” Borges wrote of the protagonist Ireneo Funes in his story Funes the Memorious, “seems to me a felicitous idea.” Certainly those who knew Borges, even in passing, thought it was a felicitous idea to write about him. Fifty years ago, it seemed that a trip to Buenos Aires wasn’t complete without a stopover at his sixth-floor Calle Maipu apartment, which he shared with his mother. Both Alberto Manguel and Paul Theroux have written about reading to the blind genius in his living room. VS Naipaul, in The Return of Eva Peron, found Borges to be “curiously colonial,” insulated from the violence and disorder in his country. When Mario Vargas Llosa visited in 1981, he noticed that Borges had kept his mother’s bedroom intact, with a lilac dress ready on the bed, even though she had died six years before. Jay Parini’s “encounter” happened far from Argentina. He claims to have met Borges in Scotland, while doing his PhD at St Andrews. Parini was close to the poet Alastair Reid, who lived nearby and wrote regularly for the New Yorker: Reid was also one of Borges’s English translators. During Borges’s visit in 1970, Reid was called away for a few days to London. Parini was asked to look after the guest, and the two of them apparently set out on an impromptu journey across the Highlands. Borges offered to bear all costs, while Parini was tasked with both driving and describing aloud everything he saw en route. “Description is revelation,” Borges told him. Borges even christened the car Rocinante and fancied their getaway as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on a Scottish literary pilgrimage. They stayed at the Crusoe hotel in Lower Largo, where Borges tasted a pint of Export — by stirring
The importance of biodiversity is well understood. A diverse biosphere is better able to provide ecosystem services, those tangible and intangible benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. These include: foods that can be grown, gathered, hunted or trapped; plant pollination; useful materials such as timber and bamboo; clean air and water; the regulation of flooding and soil erosion; and non-material benefits such as recreation and cultural enrichment. The greatest biodiversity is found in certain places untouched by agriculture or industry. Urbanization is usually harmful for native animals, which suffer as their original habitats shrink and are fragmented. For this reason, nature-lovers in Taiwan — just like their counterparts elsewhere — often fetishize wildernesses, while ignoring the cities in which more than 80 percent of the country’s population lives. Such thinking shows an incomplete understanding of cities’ ecological functions, argue the authors of a paper published in the February issue of BioScience. CONSERVATION In “The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity,” scientists affiliated with the San Francisco Estuary Institute assert that not only do many urban areas harbor greater biodiversity than even many specialists suspect, cities also have the potential to make important contributions to global biodiversity conservation as the impact of climate change on nature grows. Researchers in Australia have identified 39 species, among them plants, a type of tortoise and a kind of snail, that now cling to existence only in urban habitats. In an article posted by the Environmental Information Center (環境資訊中心, e-info.org.tw) late last year, Lee Yu-chin (李育琴) explains how tidiness can be an enemy of biodiversity. Lee writes that citizens expect neatly trimmed trees and the removal of dead leaves from parks, not knowing that “fallen leaves nourish microorganisms in the soil [and] seemingly useless deadwood is also home to insects and some
Staging an Olympics during the worst pandemic in a century? There’s a widespread perception that it couldn’t happen in a better place than Japan. A vibrant, open democracy with deep pockets, the host nation is known for its diligent execution of detail-laden, large-scale projects, its technological advances, its consensus-building and world-class infrastructure. All this, on paper, at least, gives the strong impression that Japan is one of the few places in the world that could even consider pulling off the high-stakes tightrope walk that the Tokyo Games represent. Some in Japan aren’t buying it. “No country should hold an Olympics during a pandemic to start with. And if you absolutely must, then a more authoritarian and high-tech China or Singapore would probably be able to control COVID better,” said Koichi Nakano, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo. The bureaucratic, technological, logistical and political contortions required to execute this unprecedented feat — a massively complicated, deeply scrutinized spectacle during a time of global turmoil, death and suffering — have already put an unwelcome spotlight on the country. Most of all, it has highlighted some embarrassing things: that much of Japan doesn’t want the Games, that the nation’s vaccine rollout was late and is only now expanding and that many suspect the Games are being forced on the country because the International Olympic Committee needs the billions in media revenue. The worry here isn’t that Tokyo’s organizers can’t get to the finish line without a major disaster. That seems possible, and would allow organizers to claim victory, of a kind. The fear is that once the athletes and officials leave town, the nation that unwillingly sacrificed much for the cause of global sporting unity might be left the poorer for it, and not just in the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on the Games. The
The Yoyogi National Stadium by Kenzo Tange was the elegant symbol of Tokyo’s 1964 Summer Olympics, a combination of modern technique and Japanese tradition. Tange was awarded the Pritzker prize in 1987 — architecture’s highest award — and the citation described Yoyogi as “among the most beautiful buildings of the 20th century.” It remains so. Simple. Striking. Timeless. It went up just 19 years after Japan’s defeat in World War II, a time when building materials were in short supply in the country. It offered an early glance into a modernizing Japan that included tiny transistor radios, bullet trains, and ubiquitous labels that read “Made in Japan.” Yoyogi’s sweeping roof is anchored to earth and held up by steel cables — like a suspension bridge — and connects modern, western design with forms found in Japanese temples and shrines. “It’s kind of a miracle,” said professor Souhei Imamura, who teaches architecture at the Chiba Institute of Technology. “It combines structure, form and also function. Each is unique and they are blended. Dynamism was required at the time because Japanese society wanted to change, to evolve. The dynamism was also needed for those Olympics.” Yoyogi endures like a 500-year-old European cathedral and sits next door to the sprawling park and Meiji Shrine in central Tokyo. Small by today’s standards, Yoyogi was the swimming venue in ‘64 where American teenager Don Schollander won four gold medals. He was the Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps of Tokyo 57 years ago. This time it’s the venue for team handball, and was also used for a gymnastic event last year when organizers began testing anti-COVID-19 measures they might use in order to hold the Olympics during a pandemic. Tange also designed a companion building next door — usually called the Annex — that was the basketball venue in ‘64 where the Americans won
When I visited John Lamorie’s eco-farm in Pingtung a few weeks ago, the first thing I saw when I stepped out of his car was an iguana running along the ditch that borders his property. “It’s been hanging around there for weeks,” he said. “Can’t get rid of him.” An invasive species from an exotic land that looks like a monster (the 1998 Godzilla film hints that Godzilla is a mutated iguana), iguanas have been in the spotlight for a year now, with a spate of articles highlighting their growing presence in southern Taiwan. The government banned their import in 2015, and 15,000 were killed in Taiwan last year, over 8,000 in Pingtung alone. Like most invasive species in sensitive island environments, they are extremely destructive. They burrow, damaging irrigation infrastructure, and they compete with local species for resources. They were first reported on Taiwan island in 2004, likely as the result of an intentional release. Several local governments now offer bounties for them. ‘INTERESTING CASES OF SPECIATION’ Taiwan is a special place. Because it sits on the boundary between two major zoogeographical zones, the Indomalaya and the Palearctic, it hosts lineages from both areas. There are over 100 amphibians and lizards native to Taiwan, with roots in both regions. Since Taiwan is cut up into numerous tiny regions by high mountains and fast-moving rivers, the island presents interesting cases of speciation. For example, lizards of the genus Takydromus are distributed widely in the Palaearctic regions, and reach their greatest diversity in Taiwan. A 2015 paper found that speciation occurred between T. viridipunctatus and T. luyeanus, two species separated by a narrow stream only 15 meters wide, “one of the narrowest contact zones ever documented in terrestrial vertebrates”, the authors observed. Invasive species threaten these unique and precious creatures. The many-lined sun skink,
July 26 to Aug. 1 Five hours after they ventured inland, the European expedition party returned to the St Peter and St Paul with five Taiwanese prisoners — two of them seriously wounded. Three party members were struck by arrows. What’s believed to be the first European landing on the nation’s east coast 250 years ago obviously did not go well. According to the 1790 English translation of the Memoirs and Travels of Mauritius Augustus Count de [Benovsky], the 18-person group found a few people on the shore and asked for food. They were taken to a village and fed “boiled rice with roasted pork and a quantity of lemons and oranges,”and they offered a few knives in return. As the party made its way back to the ship to deliver the news, they were suddenly hit by a shower of arrows. The Europeans fired back immediately, mowing down about a half-dozen attackers. They were ambushed again as they neared the ship, this time defeating 60 warriors and capturing five of them. “Upon this information, I would have quitted the place, as I was not desirous of exposing myself to a war with the natives,” Benovsky writes. “But my associates insisted on entering the harbor. I found it impossible to calm their fury, and for that reason, at last consented.” The Slovakia-born Benovsky ended up staying in what’s believed to be today’s Suao (蘇澳) for 16 blood-soaked days, where his crew ended up helping a local “prince” win a massive battle against their pro-Chinese enemies. While Benovsky is considered somewhat of a national hero in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, it’s generally agreed that his tales were greatly exaggerated and full of fabrications, and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. WHITEWASHING VIOLENCE Benovsky’s brief visit is often brought up
As the coronavirus pandemic threatened to overwhelm Chinese hospitals last year, Chinese resellers appear to have colluded to inflate the prices of ventilators and other essential medical equipment from multinational companies including Siemens, GE and Philips, according to a review of recent public records on the sale of medical equipment in China. Hospitals purchased high-value MRIs, CT scanners, ultrasound machines and other equipment — all vital for diagnosing and researching the novel coronavirus — in some cases paying millions of dollars above fair market prices. Such inflated prices typically include a cushion for bribery of hospital officials and others along the purchasing chain, according to court cases and corruption experts. One Chinese hospital paid a reseller US$5.16 million for a GE Signa Pioneer MRI scanner, while another Chinese hospital paid just US$2.56 million for the same machine. A Siemens CT scanner sold for US$3.24 million at one Chinese hospital, when the top-of-the-line Siemens model carries a market price of US$1.95 million. The bidding documents, which usually include the prices, often contain such detailed technical specifications that it would be difficult for anyone other than employees of the manufacturers to draw them up, suggesting that companies like Siemens, GE and Philips may at times tacitly assist resellers engaged in deals that risk violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In 2008, Siemens paid one of the biggest corporate fines in history, US$1.6 billion, over foreign bribery charges and made pledges of reform, admitting it had violated the record-keeping and internal control provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Later reporting by Suddeutsche Zeitung and The New York Times following Chinese corruption trials documented the involvement of employees of Western companies in bribery in Chinese health care. The new revelations, based on more recent purchases by hospitals, suggest the return of a “familiar cycle,” according to Peter Humphrey,
TRAX The team behind TraX is motivated by what host Dave Johnson sees as a lack of English-language documentaries that cover “contemporary history, nature, or the more quirky things about Taiwan ... also, what is available isn’t particularly impressive in visual terms.” Shot and edited by Colin Phoenix, TraX is produced under the banner of Guan Xi Media, a Taichung-based platform for artists of all kinds. Guan Xi Media is led by Michael Schram, a Canadian resident of Taichung. “Michael occasionally accompanies us when we shoot a video, but the most important thing is that Guan Xi Media is a registered media company. That carries a bit of weight and opens doors. Through it, we’re now members of Association of Taiwan Journalists (台灣新聞記者協會),” Johnson says. The company’s senior translator and coordinator Kelly Zheng (鄭安閑) also significantly contributes to the production process, Johnson says. “Guan Xi Media was looking to start a video series, and they found me through the stories and photography I’d put online. I went for a meeting to see if our interests matched, and they did,” Johnson recalls. The series was named TraX to incorporate the X of Guan Xi and also to allude to “making tracks,” Johnson says. Guan Xi’s YouTube channel includes Urb-X, a series of urban exploration videos also made by Phoenix. Before TraX got up and running, Phoenix had professional video and editing experience, “whereas I had absolutely no experience in front of the camera. I’m not a natural and I have to fight really hard to pull it off,” Johnson says. “We felt that many of the videos showcasing Taiwan are vlogs, and they concentrate on things like food and night markets. We want to make mini-documentaries that will still be watchable and relevant 10 years from now,” says Johnson, an Englishman who’s lived in Taiwan for 12
In the first scene of Fragrance of the First Flower (第一次遇見花香的那刻), protagonist Yi-ming (Zaizai Lin, 林辰唏) accidentally wanders into a gay wedding. “Although same-sex marriage is legal now, she’s still a little surprised by it,” director Angel Teng (鄧依涵) tells the Taipei Times. “It still hasn’t been completely accepted as the norm. There’s still a little conflict there, and I like highlighting these subtle details found in everyday situations.” Legalization also had little impact on Yi-ming’s life, as she has a husband and son. But when she reconnects with her close high school friend Ting-ting (Lyan Cheng, 程予希), her suppressed emotions are awakened. “She never figured out what her feelings meant back then,” Teng says. “And today, when society finally says that it’s okay to marry a woman, the decision isn’t really available to her anymore. There’s a sense of regret there. This film is not about blaming society for taking this long to push through legalization; it’s just a light-hearted drama where the audience can follow [Yi-ming and Ting-ting’s] relationship and come to their own realizations.” The six-episode mini-drama series made headlines earlier this month as Taiwan’s first title to be officially selected to the prestigious French Series Mania International Festival, which runs from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2. The production evolved out of Teng’s script that won the Gold Award at last year’s inaugural GagaOOLala Pitching Sessions, which provides funding for original LGBTQ projects. Frederic Lavigne, artistic director at Series Mania, praised Teng for being able to “find the right balance between frankness and caution,” noting that the story and characterization is “subtle and sensible” due to Lin and Chen’s “delicate interpretations.” The series will be available on GagaOOLala’s streaming platform in September. SUBTLE DIFFERENCES With a masters degree in psychology, Teng says she enjoys observing changes in people and society, then presenting
Move to another country, learn the language there, then make a living by translating between that language and one’s native tongue. Since the Age of Exploration, countless people have trodden this path. In addition to those who have developed full-time careers in the translation and interpretation (T&I) industry, there are many who translate as a side gig. For decades, David Wang (王宇大) was one of the latter. Wang, who’s now semi-retired, moved to Canada with his parents in 1967 after graduating from elementary school in Taipei. When he returned to Taiwan in 1984, he immediately realized his fluency in English was a big advantage in the job market. “I felt I had a gift for translating Chinese to English, despite my limited knowledge of my mother tongue. My first job in Taipei was translating news articles into English. That forced me to relearn a lot of the Chinese I’d forgotten living in Canada,” he says. Wang taught English at cram schools and — apart from a short period when he worked as an in-house translator — took on translation assignments to supplement what he earned by teaching. “In the 1980s, it would have been extremely difficult to survive in Taiwan by translation work only, due to the slave-like wages,” he says. Most of his translation work came via agencies who paid him a per word or per page rate. “I also found some clients on my own, and by networking. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was never easy to pick up well-paid translation work,” Wang says. That was before the advent of the Internet and e-mail. “I actually used a fax machine to receive texts and return my handwritten translations of them,” Wang remembers. For translators, the Internet is fantastically useful. It makes communicating with clients, receiving and submitting assignments, and conducting research
It’s a neighborhood watch with a difference. A clean-nosed crew, sniffing out trouble and keeping the streets safe for school kids: meet the pups of Tokyo’s real-life Paw Patrol. They might not have the gadgets and gear of their beloved cartoon counterparts, but the dogs of the Wan-Wan (“bow-wow”) Patrol are firm favorites in Tokyo’s Karasuyama neighborhood. Twelve-year-old Yurika Igarashi counts on seeing Sakura, a fluffy toy poodle, when she’s on her way home from school. “Sometimes I’m scared when I’m coming home alone, but I feel okay when I’m walking with Wan-Wan Patrol,” she said, gently cradling Sakura on her lap. Sakura is one of 150 pups who form the Wan-Wan Patrol, a program that enlists dogs and their owners to turn their daily walks into a neighborhood watch, monitoring children, looking out for residents and helping deter crime. The Karasuyama program is one of the oldest such community initiatives in Japan and was founded by a local police officer. “Individual owners walk whenever they can and have their dog wear the same scarf,” said Keiko Shimizu, the patrol’s current leader. Clearly marked canines patrolling the streets means “we can help make the neighborhood less prone to crime,” she added. Many of the dog owners are parents of current and former students of the local school, but others just participate in the community watch as residents. On one recent morning, five pooches in Wan-Wan Patrol’s lime-green neckerchiefs wagged their tails as they accompanied children going to elementary school. Pu, a 17-year-old shih tzu, is one of the oldest members of the patrol and can no longer walk by herself. But she proudly participates from the comfort of a doggy stroller pushed by her owner. ‘CAREFREE’ PLAY “The program helps us get to know each other and become good neighbors, and I feel this place stays safe that way,” said Michiko Takeuchi,
Michael Pollan has written for many years, brilliantly, about our relationship with food and farming, in particular for the New York Times. In 2018, in what seemed like a midlife departure, he published a book on “the new science of psychedelics,” which was a personal report on renewed scientific interest in experiments with LSD and Ayahuasca, after decades of taboo. Pollan saw no change of direction in that project, however; he insisted to me at the time that it was simply a natural evolution of his “abiding interest in how we interact with other plant and animal species and how they get ahead in nature by gratifying our desires.” The desire to change consciousness was a fundamental element of that relationship, he suggested. This book, which concerns our species’ symbiotic entanglements with three other potent plant-derived substances — opium, caffeine and mescaline — is a further development of a lifelong inquiry, which began, he writes, when he took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis. His essays on perhaps the three most dramatically efficacious medicinal compounds proceed in a similar way, weaving personal experimentation with each of the “drugs” into informed histories of the ways in which they have taken such a hold of different human cultures. At the root of each case study is a pair of questions: the first asks why, as a species, we have gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate and disseminate these consciousness-changing molecules, and the second is why they are subject to paranoia and regulation in differing degrees. Pollan’s personal history with opium began 25 years ago, when Harper’s magazine commissioned him to grow opium poppies in his garden, and to report on the ethics and effects of his harvest. What began as a sort of academic prank at the height of America’s
Asia is sliding into a dangerous arms race as smaller nations that once stayed on the sidelines build arsenals of advanced long-range missiles, following in the footsteps of powerhouses China and the US, analysts say. China is mass producing its DF-26, a multipurpose weapon with a range of up to 4,000km — while the US is developing new weapons aimed at countering Beijing in the Pacific. Other countries in the region are buying or developing their own new missiles, driven by security concerns over China and a desire to reduce their reliance on the US. Before the decade is out, Asia will be bristling with conventional missiles that fly farther and faster, hit harder and are more sophisticated than ever before — a stark and dangerous change from recent years, analysts, diplomats and military officials say. “The missile landscape is changing in Asia, and it’s changing fast,” said David Santoro, president of the Pacific Forum. Such weapons are increasingly affordable and accurate, and as some countries acquire them, their neighbors don’t want to be left behind, analysts said. Missiles provide strategic benefits such as deterring enemies and boosting leverage with allies, and can be a lucrative export. The long-term implications are uncertain, and there is a slim chance that the new weapons could balance tensions and help maintain peace, Santoro said. “More likely is that missile proliferation will fuel suspicions, trigger arms races, increase tensions, and ultimately cause crises and even wars,” he said. HOMEGROWN MISSILES According to unreleased 2021 military briefing documents, US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) plans to deploy its new long-range weapons in “highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the First Island Chain,” which includes Japan, Taiwan and other Pacific islands ringing the east coasts of China and Russia. The new weapons include the Long-range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), a missile that can deliver a highly maneuverable warhead at more
RSS