Word: tokyo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hair and impeccable manners, is the dean of Hong Kong's ivory trade. He has never been to Africa, and the only elephant he has seen was in the Paris zoo. Yet he is a major conduit for ivory entering both Hong Kong and Japan. In February he helped Tokyo's largest trader, Koichiro Kitagawa, purchase nearly five tons of Sudanese ivory for $1 million from another Hong Kong dealer. In 1987 he engineered the purchase of 26 tons of Congo ivory by the Osaka trader Kageo Takaichi. The $3.5 million shipment contained 2,052 tusks...
...time even registered ivory reaches Japan, the link with Africa is all but lost. On the wall of the Fuso Trading Co. in downtown Tokyo is a photograph of a lone elephant standing in silhouette against a red sunset. "We don't know exactly what country the ivory originated from, very sorry," says company accountant Miyako Yoshida. Last year the company imported 4.5 tons of ivory from Singapore, of which 2.5 tons went for making piano keys. Once Yoshida and a customer saw a film in which an elephant was shot. She said they covered their eyes in horror...
...many as 30,000 Japanese draw their living from ivory -- as traders, carvers and merchants. But the import trade is controlled by a few. Two men, Takaichi in Osaka and Kitagawa in Tokyo, have accounted for as much as half the ivory entering Japan in recent years. Kitagawa, 47, is a stern man who presides over an industry in turmoil. He was twelve when he was introduced to what has been his family's business for nearly a century. His showroom, scanned by video cameras and kept moist by humidifiers, features a towering ivory pagoda and cases filled with ornate...
Current and former CITES staff members and consultants have actively led the fight against the proposed ivory ban. In July, Yoshio Kaneko, a staffer originally on loan from the Japanese government, wrote an editorial in a Tokyo daily on behalf of CITES, exhorting Japan and the trade to assert their economic interests and oppose the ban. And Zimbabwe's position paper against the ban, to be offered at this week's meeting, was written by former CITES staffer Huxley, who received $5,000 in funding for the study from the Japanese ivory association...
That is a question Japanese carver Koryu Kawaguchi asks as well. On the outskirts of Tokyo, the 70-year-old master carver sits on a tatami mat, his workbench and tools covered with a fine ivory dust. In his hands is an ivory figurine of the Merciful Mother Kannon, which he has been carving for a month. Beside him sits his son Ryusei, 37, a fourth-generation ivory carver. The elder Kawaguchi is a gentle man with a reverence for the gleaming white medium he has spent his lifetime bringing to life. His eyes are weak from the strain...