Category Archives: Others

【News】 Students in Aomori fight against culling of abandoned pets by using their bones as manure to grow flowers (March 4, 2015)

Hiroko Obara Students of Aomori Prefectural Sambongi Agriculture High School in Towada, Aomori Prefecture, are working on a project to use powdered bones of culled pets as manure to grow flowers. The students have grown some 1,500 pots of flowers in three years under the “flowers of life” project, aimed at conveying the preciousness of life and life cycle. The project was started in 2012 by the pet research laboratory of the school’s zoological science division. Students of the laboratory, who visited the prefecture’s animal shelter in the city of Aomori during a field trip, were told that more than 2,000 pet dogs and cats abandoned by their owners are … Continue reading

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【News】 Hokkaido University student’s trip from Hokkaido to Okinawa with two Dosanko horses to end (March 1, 2015)

Tetsuya Onda A 24-year-old undergraduate student in his sixth year in Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, is now in the course of a long journey through Japan, surprisingly walking all the way from Hokkaido to Okinawa on foot with two Dosanko horses. The student, Kohei Yamakawa, says he wants more people to know that there are some extant Japanese indigenous horse breeds including some critically endangered. Kohei and his two Dosanko horses, native to Hokkaido, left Sapporo, Hokkaido, in August 2014 and now they are almost there at goal, the Yonaguni Island of Okinawa. Late February, Kohei and his mates, Yuki and Mitchy, were walking up the hill in … Continue reading

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【Editorial】 Regional revitalization strategy must reflect local people’s views (Feb. 25, 2015)

  The government has been advocating regional revitalization as one of its main strategic policy goals, but the effectiveness of the strategy remains questionable. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the number of people moving in to the Tokyo metropolitan area, which includes Tokyo and Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures, exceeded the number of people moving out last year for three consecutive years. The data reveals that overconcentration of population in urban areas is accelerating. The government aims to balance the number of people moving in to the Tokyo metropolitan area and those moving out by 2020. However, it seems difficult to meet the goal unless the … Continue reading

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【News】 Glowing silk yarns showcased at Hikari Exhibition (Feb. 7, 2015)

Kotaro Yamada Hundreds of radiant cocoons and shining silken stoles and lamp shades. You’ll see them all in Ueno, Tokyo, at the National Museum of Nature and Science, in the darkness at its special exhibition “Hikari–The Wonder of Light”. The shining products are presented by the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS) based in Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki Prefecture. The cocoons and silk yarns were produced by silkworms that NIAS genetically engineered. It successfully inserted a certain fluorescence protein gene extracted from a coral and a jelly fish in silkworms to give them the ability to spin silk yarns that can emit light. The glowing cocoons emit red, orange or green light … Continue reading

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【News】 Memorial service to mark 20th anniversary of 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake took place in Awaji, Hyogo Prefecture (Jan. 18, 2015)

On January 17, 2015, tens of thousands of people in Hyogo Prefecture gathered at events to commemorate the victims of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. The memorial service to mark the 20th anniversary of the earthquake was also given in Awaji-shi, the city on the Awaji Island known for stock farming and growing onions and loquats, attended by a great number of people including quake-hit farmers. At 5:46 in the morning, the exact time of the earthquake, they prayed for the victims, reaffirming the importance of handing down the lessons learnt from the disasters from generation to generation. The earthquake took the lives of 63 Awaji islanders including some who … Continue reading

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