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日経新聞記事 「五輪閉幕後も広がる輪」
１１/１２/２０２１
More and more charitable-minded people are being actively involved in volunteering, and charitable organizations are offering those people various opportunities to take more pleasure out of giving than they do getting. Motivated by social-interest, not by self-interest, volunteering is making the participants self-aware of how worthy they are by channeling their passions into helping others in need and meeting community needs. What the acts of giving their time without the expectation of the return bring to them is attracting like-minded people more and more to volunteering through community service projects organized by volunteering organizations in collaboration with municipalities.
After the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games in which a lot of charitable-minded people worked behind the scenes, volunteering organizations are serving keenly to keep socially-concerned people’s passions alive, ensuring that the Olympics’ philanthropic legacies are carried from one generation to the next. A charitable organization called The Nippon Foundation Volunteer Support Center is providing the information about various seminars through its website, such as a French-learning seminar for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, a seminar to train as disaster relief volunteers and emergency response volunteers. The website created in October has 6,000 registered members.
A survey shows how the experience of volunteering leaves an impact on the participants and how energetic the emotions the experience has produced are. According to a survey conducted by the Tokyo government on how willing participants in volunteering are to give their time again, 96.4 % of the respondents totaling 7,700 say that they will not miss out when opportunity knocks the next time. More than 60 % of the respondents say that they want to make the participation in volunteering routine and regular by paying much attention to all information related to those activities available to them.
Many participants in volunteering are finding it invaluable to get in touch with a sense of belonging by making an active commitment to a community of their own accord. Those compassionate, empathetic people are prompted to wire themselves to a sense of community by exchanging what they have learned from their own experiences in person or through message posting on the website, set up in November by the Tokyo government and a charitable organization in Tokyo. About 3,200 members registered on the website are posting various stories about how they are bonded together through the feelings of joy, gratitude and selflessness they have experienced and shared with other people. Some stories tell about how interpersonal relationships deepen without being plagued by the soul-destroying emotions many selfish persons with a hedonistic lifestyle tend to fall into in all-consuming pursuit for pleasure. Other stories tell about how the self-awareness of being a part of a community helps them see themselves as who they really are, without letting themselves get sidetracked by the self-centered thought about what other people will give them to make them happy.
日経新聞記事 「専門人材の育成課題に」
１１/１２/２０２１
When the government plans to give economic stimulus checks worth three trillion yen to small and middle-sized companies beset by the pandemic, without considering what matters to those companies struggling to rebound from the slump, the stimulus checks are tantamount to the seeds scattered haphazardly over the uncultivated ground as the cost for avoidance of bankruptcy. Chances are that those seeds are less likely to come to fruition. It is when the pandemic-plagued companies take action to cultivate themselves and expose themselves to new dirt with nutrients that the seeds are more likely to take root and grow to their full potential in a new soil fertilized by the government.
The stimulus checks financed by the government are most likely to serve as a short-lived distraction from a credit crunch for many small and middle-sized companies, as the pandemic slump is keeping them off-balance. With their bottom lines left crimped, the stimulus checks are needed as just a buffer against the stress of making sure that the pinch from the poor cash flow they have been running from, does not yet catch up with them. For companies in capital with from over 10 million up to 100 million yen, without the cash flow coming from sales enough to cover the cash flow going out as debt repayment and business expenses, the burden of debt repayment is as 1.5 times as heavier than that in the pre-pandemic period. The president of a travel agency called Fuji International Travel Service in Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture says, “With a 95 % sales decline, compared with that in the pre-pandemic period, almost all the profits from sales of tours go to the labor cost despite our efforts for cost reduction. The stimulus checks are far from being the ticket to the boom we used to bask in.”
Grown tired of being beaten down by the pandemic slump, some companies have been cultivating themselves without the reliance on stopgap financial support from the government. They have stopped limiting themselves to what they were familiar with in the pre-pandemic period. A metal cutting and processing company in Kashiwa City, Chiba Prefecture has stopped buying into the benefits of being subcontractors to remove a block to the growth in corporate potential. It, instead created their original products by making the most of their skills to explore new clients and new business opportunities. Goku, a company handmaking colorfully-coated wood chopsticks in Obama City, Fukui Prefecture is recalibrating their marketing strategy to make their products get to international customers through an e-commerce platform, embracing the adversity as what they need to change the in-person marketing.
Yao Toyo Juki, a company selling housing-related products in Yao City, Osaka Prefecture is cultivating a new model of how to germinate the ideas about digital transformation in the garden of the mind of each employee to improve overall corporate performance by weeding out chronic self-limiting mind-sets rooted in the long-standing corporate custom. All employees are required to being adept at handling their jobs through company-provided mobile devices to enhance job performance. As the crops the company seeks to produce from the garden, job efficiency is being enhanced through teleworking applied to 60 % of the employees and electronic document transactions.
日経新聞記事 「にぎわい 試合で創出」
１１/２１/２０２１
Municipalities and Women’s Baseball Federation of Japan are teaming up to focus their attention on what baseball diamonds, bustling with the games played by amateur female ballplayers, bring about in a local vigor-restoring project, designed to rejuvenate local residents’ lives. The project is aimed at nurturing a festive atmosphere in which many local residents enjoy watching, cheering and playing with female players on baseball diamonds as a local pastime. Municipalities with local female baseball teams are putting much faith in the role local teams play, in spicing up the local residents’ lives and sparking local economies.
With non-professional female baseball teams totaling about 100, including high school and college teams across the country, WBFJ is hitting a single to advance municipalities as runners to the next base, when municipalities are trying hard to score a run by clarifying a vision of how the dynamism of female baseball sheds light on the path towards local communities’ revitalization. By selecting ten municipalities as WBFJ-accredited model towns, WBFJ as the host of female baseball tournaments is making the ten municipalities eligible for the venues of the tournaments, scheduled to be held during the baseball season.
As one of the WBFJ-accredited model towns, Awaji City, Hyogo Prefecture is placing a lot of expectations on a local female baseball team called The Awaji Brave Oceans as a driving force in the city’s rejuvenation project. The city is giving a favor to the team members seeking for job security, as some of them are buckling down to baseball after moving to the city from other areas, where they used to work as company employees. With a former professional female baseball player named Tomoko Tanaka as the team manager, coupled with a donation of 17 million yen raised through crowdfunding, members are hitting hundreds of baseballs every day in indoor batting cages. Tanaka says, “We want to return the favor to local baseball fans, by building a team competitive enough to play thrilling games with tough rival teams at ballparks, crowded with many local fans cheering us.”
Other municipalities accredited by WBFJ as model towns, are aiming enthusiastically to create high-profile images of their own, enriched by the diamonds shining with female ballplayers’ smiles to magnetize many visitors from other areas. Ureshino City, Saga Prefecture is collecting wits to stand as the best candidate for the venue of various tournaments and training camps, to increase opportunities for local hotels to accommodate female ballplayers and their fans from other areas. Kimobetsu Town, Hokkaido with a population of about 2,000, is embracing with kid gloves a famous female baseball team, The Hornets Ladies, decorated with many medals, by providing a town-run baseball field as the team’s practice ground for no rental fee. With tempting job offers from many local companies suffering from a shortage of young female workers, the town is serving as an incubator for aspiring female ballplayers, keeping their lives financially stable.
日経新聞記事「アスリート、盗撮から守れ JOCなど警察と連携」
１１/２０/２０２１
When the massive bombardment of explicit, filthy sexual stimuli is making a moral fortress fragile, the defamatory images and video clips targeting female athletes are being circulated and traded in cyberspace, despite frequent crackdowns on indecent acts. Sports organizations including the Japanese Olympic Committee are having a hard time teaching big boys with poor self-discipline a lesson, as indulging in sexual fantasies, fed by well-known female athletes’ obscene images, is a hard habit to break for those who tend to act on what is good for themselves, not on what is right in a moral sense.
Sports organizations have been waging a never-ending battle against morally-repugnant conduct to prevent psychological damage from being done on female athletes. With the allegations a missing Chinese top tennis player, Peng Shuai, made of sex assault against a former vice premier, as a tailwind, JOC has scrambled to find the information about illegal images and video clips, related to Japanese female athletes and has deleted what is considered as obscene from problematic sites as many as they can. The Japan Association of Athletics Federations are preparing themselves to protect against the abuse of female athletes’ photos, taken by an infrared camera, with a newly-invented uniform preventing the eye of an infrared camera from seeing the inside of it. The cat-and-mouse game is going on.
It seems to the police that nothing can stop twisted sexual desire from getting carried away, when the targets they are cracking down on come with newly advanced digital technologies. The abusers of those technologies are not aware of being disconnected from their morality, let alone a glimpse into what the disconnection leads to. The technologies enable the abusers preoccupied with sexual fantasies, to edit the images taken by TV cameras or their cameras, and to build voluptuous portraits in a birthday suit in erotic scenes with their imagination . Those abusers are, at the mercy of the urge to spread the edited images from a TV show about female athletes in play, through SNS. They choose not to take action to resist the temptation to give in to the urge, even though they are able to control their actions. Among those who followed the sexual urge, are a pornographic web site’s operator charged in May with copyright infringement by posting the edited images of female athletes on the site, and a company employee arrested after selling the video clips featuring female athletes’ underwear showing through.
Sports organizations are focusing on providing a deterrent to the indecent conduct stripping female athletes of their dignity, by guiding each individual with his or her personal moral compass towards the world of sports without the violation of human rights. The guidance says, “Make sure that what you are trying to do is in line with what you value doing through your moral compass. The moral compass may be obscured by a sexual complex or blinded by money-driven motivation or overlooked by a sense of being of benefit to yourself. When you lose touch with the moral compass, the gold medal you might win never will shine, even if it is the result of hard work and dedication.”
日経新聞記事 「旅人誘う ビーガン料理」
１１/２７/２０２１
Veganism or vegetarianism is being globally promoted, with the social guilt instilled, as a catalyst by the environmental and ethical mantra that a meat-eating diet gets in the way of the achievement of so-called Sustainable Development Goals. More and more environmentally-conscious people are embracing a dietary lifestyle without all or part of animal products as the less animal protein and fat they take, the better they feel from a sense of contributing to environmental conservation and animal protection. With a niche in the hospitality sector, a boom in veganism-driven tourism is kicking in.
A dieting tendency among the national population to take as few animal products as possible has been growing, according to a survey compiled in December 2019 by Frembassy Inc in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo through its website called Vegewel. The proportion of vegans and lacto-ovo vegetarians increased from 4.5 % in 2017 to 5.7 %. The proportion of people reducing meat through a flexitarian diet went up from 12.5 % in 2017 to 16.8 %.
With a focus on how tourists’ dietary preferences are influencing their choices of destinations, Gunma Prefecture known as a hot-spring resort is mounting a vegan-friendly campaign in tandem with local hot-spring hotels serving plant-based menus within their restaurants. Among them is a local hot-spring hotel called Kashiwaya in Nakanojo Town giving the guests with a dietary restriction a chance to savor the culinary delights with locally-produced vegetables. The hotel’s fully stacked veggie menu is magnetizing domestic and international tourists sticking to a meat-free diet. 63-year-old Kenji Koito is one of the happy guests. He says, “I am a long-time vegetarian from my childhood. An uncomfortable feeling wells up when meat is on my plate. The compassion for farm animals made me lose my appetite. Few meat-free dishes in the restaurants of the hotels where I want to stay bring inconvenience to me.”
Many vegan-curious young people are getting their feet wet in a vegan’s shoes, wondering how much difference a trend towards less meat intake makes in reducing resource consumption, environmental pollution and animal cruelty cases. A glamping facility in Mihama Ward, Chiba Prefecture is attracting people in their twenties and thirties curious about how satisfying a diet without meat would be, how meaningful it is from the perspective of global environmental sustainability. The facility offers a cook-out experience to move away from an eating style with meat as the center of the plate. 26-year-old Misaki Uchi is among the participants in a vegan barbecue event. She says, “I’m not a vegan as I’m aware of a potential risk of vitamin B12 deficiency due to a lack of all animal food. I just wanted to go out on a limb and expose myself to as a breath of fresh air, the dishes free from all animal-based food by putting on an open grill plant-based meat made from pea protein and local fresh veggies. The tantalizing smells of soy-made butter without animal fat were wafting in the ocean breeze caressing my face with a satisfied look on it.”
日経新聞記事 「都会キャンプで行楽気分」
１１/２３/２０２１
Even after released from the pandemic-straitjacketed mood, urban residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area, still haunted by the unwillingness to go beyond their familiar areas for pleasure seeking, are welcoming anybody who challenges the notion that the concrete jungle they live in is the last place pleasure seekers would choose as a camping site as there is no chance for campers to immerse themselves in nature. Many city dwellers are finding it refreshing and inspiring to dip their toes into new experiences in nearby camping sites between, beside or on the buildings they are familiar with. Various camping site providers and event organizers are magnetizing city campers with camping equipment placed near where the campers live.
Located in open parkland between buildings in Minato Mirai 21, bordering on Yokohama Bay, the central business district of Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, an outdoor activity center opened in October is offering local visitors a series of precious moments to spend with their friends and family members free from the dullness of familiar routine. The center run by Soulplanet in Minato Ward, Tokyo is equipped with all items required for outdoor activities including camping and barbecue-cooking, wood-chopping, fire-making to save the visitors trouble and hassle involved in the preparation for a pleasure trip to enjoy outdoor activities. A barbecue-cooking experience is available with the cost of 5,500 yen per person. Every weekend barbecue pits are filled with pleasure seekers.
Major retailers have shed a new light on their roles, not only as the provider of shopping opportunities, but also as the provider of fun activities by taking a short side trip away from their comfort zone. An Isetan’s outlet store in Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture agreed in April to rent its roof floor on weekends as a camping venue for the project a local group organized to spice up customers’ shopping routine through the route up to the place for fun-seekers. On the roof floor carpeted with artificial turf, equipped with camping items including tents and hammocks, a barbecue party is available without staying overnight. Aeon Groups has invested effort and energy in building an outdoor activity center next to an Aeon Groups-run shopping mall in Chiba City, Chiba Prefecture to offer camping and cooking experiences. Easy access to the center local shoppers have is serving as a launch pad for local family gatherings or group gatherings around barbecue pits, bringing to their minds keen awareness of how invigorating it is to share the same relaxed experience with their friends and loved ones.
Rooftop-camping in the center of Tokyo is casting a magic on city boys and city girls when camping on the rooftop of a building near JR Sendagaya Station in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo is magnetizing curiosity-minded young campers. Some campers drop by on their way home from work on weekdays to make the reality they are in take on a different hue. Many young couples are willing to pay 16,980 yen each to put their romantic relationships to the test, cooking up a barbecue, keeping a moonlit night view over rooftops in their hearts and digging their minds deeper through intimate conversations.
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