Word: akan
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...marimo is a plant, a kind of alga (Aegagropila sauteri), found in three small patches of water in Lake Akan on the northern island of Hokkaido. Their name means "ball of fur," and fair-sized specimens look like green, fuzzy tennis balls. What makes them so dearly beloved is their quaint behavior...
Gamboling Algae. As marimos lie on the bottom of Lake Akan (or of an aquarium in a Japanese gentleman's home), they exhale oxygen which collects as small bubbles entangled in their fur. When enough gas has accumulated, the marimo rises to the surface. It breaks the water with a gentle plop and rolls around languidly until most of the gas has escaped. Then it sinks to the bottom to collect more bubbles. This sportiveness, not common in algae, makes it an entertaining...
Marimos were discovered in Lake Akan in 1897, and Japanese biologists, including Emperor Hirohito, have studied them lovingly in every possible way. But no one has figured out why they thrive in so few places, or how they reproduce. One theory is that water currents of just the right kind are needed to bounce the marimos along the bottom and detach bits of fuzzy green stuff to grow into young marimos. No marimo lover, however skilled, has duplicated this process...
Just before World War II a marimo fad started, and thousands of the gamboling plants were snatched from Lake Akan. But the war intervened to save them from extinction, and in 1947 the Education Ministry's Committee for the Protection of Cultural Objects dug up an old law that proclaimed the marimos "a national treasure." It threatened fine or imprisonment for anyone who molested them...
Creative Abdication. The "we" are 4,500,000 tribesmen who speak such languages as Dagomba, Akan, Ewe and Ga and are scattered across a rectangular patch of jungle, swamp and bushland that juts into the westward bulge of Africa, north of the coast that was once called the "White Man's Grave." Seven out of ten are illiterate, more than half believe in witchcraft, yet the happy-go-lucky Gold Coasters have been chosen by Imperial Britain to pioneer its boldest experiment in African home rule. In 1951 the British gave the Gold Coast its first democratic constitution; last...