Word: hirayama
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...bespectacled Sirou Hirayama, times have never been so bad. He and his wife Kiyomi, standing behind the counter at the Toyomi pharmacy in downtown Toyota City, home to Japanese car giant Toyota Motor, complain that the global recession has so punished the local economy that his sales are down 20% from 18 months ago. Now, with Toyota facing a crisis over the safety of its cars, Hirayama fears more hard times down the road. "Toyota was known for quality cars. Now that's changed 180 degrees," he says. "I'm fearful of the impact. The whole area is dependent...
Unlike portable CD players, the DAT Walkman isn't susceptible to skipping when the going gets rough. (Sony has also introduced a DAT deck for cars.) The catalog of prerecorded DAT tapes (typical price: $20) is just beginning to build up, with only about 175 titles available. But as Hirayama Toshikatsu of Panasonic's audio division points out, "The majority of users want to create their own tapes with their own selection of music." Sony spokesman Tsutomu Imai agrees. "Software was important because the CD player was a playback- only machine," he says. "It had to have prerecorded music...
...campaign to ban cigarette smoking in public places received a big boost last January when Epidemiologist Takeshi Hirayama of Japan's National Cancer Center published the results of a 14-year study of 265,000 Japanese. He found that nonsmoking wives of heavy smokers had a higher risk of developing lung cancer than nonsmoking women married to men who did not smoke...
...Lawrence Garfinkel of the American Cancer Society studied data collected over twelve years on 176,739 nonsmoking women and concluded that those wed to smokers did not run a greater risk of dying from lung cancer than those married to nonsmokers. Garfinkel notes, however, that neither his study nor Hirayama's provides "definitive information" on the effects of passive smoking. "Classifying nonsmoking women on the basis of the smoking habits of their husbands is not an accurate measure of their degree of passive smoking," he says, since they may be exposed to varying amounts of smoke outside the home...
...part, Hirayama notes, "There are bound to be discrepancies between Japan and the U.S. for the clear-cut reason that the ways of life are different." For example, divorce in the U.S. is much more common, he says, so researchers should consider the smoking habits of ex-husbands as well as current spouses. American women are also more likely to have jobs and work in smoky offices...