Word: kagami
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...large, chilly warehouse next door. He climbs up a loft, pulls out a 2-m-high bundle of blue-green straw called igusa, carries it downstairs and dumps it in the hopper of a weaving machine where it will be made into tatami mats. The Matsumotos have worked in Kagami, on the southern island of Kyushu, for three generations; it was igusa that turned a poor country backwater into a modern middle-class town, one of the wealthiest farming communities in all of Japan. The farmers had a nickname for their prized crop: Blue Diamond...
...Today igusa is, well, straw. The farmers in and around Kagami ply an anachronistic endeavor propped up for decades by protectionism. When Japan was booming, the government thought it could have it all. Farmers, who traditionally voted for the long-ruling LDP, were shielded from competition from imports; Japan's consumers shouldered ridiculous bills for homegrown farm products. Today, thanks to the weak economy and the wrenching opening up of Japan's markets, tatami prices are half what they were 10 years ago. Farmers can't pay off the loans they were once encouraged to take. "Thirty farmers have committed...
...relentlessly confident 1980s, the tatami makers of Kagami sent a delegation to teach Chinese farmers how to raise igusa and weave tatami. "I had a slight feeling of dread," admits 33-year-old farmer Yasushi Furushima, who visited China a few years afterward. "But their quantity wasn't very good." China, of course, caught up fast: today, its exports account for more than two-thirds of the tatami market in Japan. In a last ditch measure to protect its farmers, Japan last year slapped import duties on Chinese tatami, along with leeks and shiitake mushrooms, other endangered cash crops...
Japanese holdings overseas are now worth about $70 billion more than the investments that foreigners have made in Japan. That total should reach $100 billion this year, moving Japan past the U.S. ($95 billion) and Britain ($81 billion) into the top spot among international investors. Nobumitsu Kagami, chief economist of Nomura Investment Management in Tokyo, projects that Japan's overseas investment surplus will rise to $500 billion by 1992. Says Hiroshi Takeuchi, a managing director of Japan's Long-Term Credit Bank: "Our country could become a permanent capital exporter...
...twitch of an eyebrow can be as electric as a lightning bolt. One of the stars of the company, Baiko, is a master of this sign language, and he plays Hangan with expressively poignant force. With staggering ease, Baiko also dominates the second number on the program, Kagami-Jishi (The Mirror Lion Dance), in which he plays a shy flower-loving maiden who turns into the king of beasts. (All female roles are played by men in Kabuki theater.) The three-stringed twang of the samisen haunts the entire evening like a choral book of lamentations...