Word: japanism
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...1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn't any family to call on. So Yoshida started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse...
...international community rejected U.S.-led efforts to expand protections for a number of endangered and threatened species at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Of the roughly 40 proposals on the agenda, the most contentious dealt with a prized fish. Japan, which imports nearly 80% of bluefin tuna for use in sushi and sashimi, fought hard against a proposed trade ban. Conservationists warned against prioritizing economic interests over the survival of an entire species...
...doesn't do tricks at aquariums. But it tastes really, really good, and it's on the verge of becoming extinct. Already depleted from overfishing, stocks are down 60% just over the past decade, and the species might be gone within a few short years. The reason? Japan, the world's most tuna-loving nation, recently submarined a global export ban that nearly every industrialized nation had agreed to. Earlier this month, 175 nations met in Qatar to discuss the fates of various endangered species, with the U.S., Europe, all scientific opinion and the best interests of the fishing nations...
These weren't tree-hugging Greenpeace activists that Japan was fighting, either, but pragmatic officials trying to preserve an industry with the current life expectancy of Jesse James' next marriage. If you make money from fishing bluefin tuna, and bluefin tuna go extinct, you are out of business. It's really not complicated. The southern bluefin is in even worse shape than its Atlantic counterpart, and scientists still haven't figured out a way to effectively farm a fish that weighs more than an NFL lineman, is entirely carnivorous and takes 30 years to reach its maximum size. Of course...
Obama's trip will offer a challenge to the new top dog in Asia. China is now a larger trading partner of both Japan and ASEAN than the U.S. is, and the pace of U.S. investment in Southeast Asia has slowed in recent years. "If we are closer to China now, it is only because the U.S. has neglected us," says Kavi Chongkittavorn, a columnist for the Nation, a Thai newspaper. The rivals for the region's affections are not getting along. In recent weeks, China has attacked Obama for approving arms sales to Taiwan and meeting with the Dalai...