Word: straws
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...Yoshihiro Matsumoto knows that sinking feeling. It comes over him like a bad hangover every morning at 5 o'clock when he and his wife head out to a 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...
...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...
...chic boutiques, antique shops, cafés and restaurants, punctuated by stately public squares - the monumental fountain on the Place des Terreaux is by Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. Traboule down from Croix-Rousse to one of the city's bouchons, simple bistros named after the straw plugs once used as bottle-stoppers. For a taste of the local gastronomic specialty of cervelles de canut (literally, silk-worker's brains) - fresh white cheese mixed with crème fraîche and herbs - try Garet, Chez Hugon or Le Musée, where the three Laverri...
...them had disappeared during Japan's occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. That morning, with dawn breaking and the skies clearing, workers reverentially pried open the first box. Before cranes pulled out the initial statue, curator Brian Jang and the museum's director spread out a straw mat and bowed low to the ground twice. Jang was choked with emotion. "It was like welcoming back ancestors who had been taken away to Japan by force," says Jang. "We had finally brought them back...
...Even so, European alarm persists: Britain's foreign secretary Jack Straw said Thursday that his government would press for the British subjects held at Guantanamo to be returned to the U.K. to stand trial there, rather than before a U.S. military tribunal. An American diplomat had further inflamed European tempers by telling the British media that British subjects held at Guantanamo would face the death penalty if tried by U.S. military courts - capital punishment is forbidden in the European Union, and most EU countries won't extradite prisoners who may face the death penalty elsewhere...