Discussion topics

I’m from Canada, where Christmas is a big deal. The minute Halloween is finished, the Santa decorations go up in stores, Christmas songs start playing on the radio, and the fuss of holiday shopping starts in earnest. For me, one of the most nostalgic parts of Christmas is the food. I love a plate of roast turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce with some pumpkin pie, all with a frosty glass of eggnog to drink.

But when I first moved to Japan, I was at a loss. Those foods are nearly impossible to find. And, even if I did find a turkey, I didn’t have an oven that would fit the bird! So, I asked my partner what we should do. On one hand, we could try to keep the old traditions alive. We could somehow procure roast turkey and try to find the ingredients for pumpkin pie. On the other hand, we could adapt. So my partner asked me a simple question, “What’s your favourite food?” The answer is simple: tacos. So, on December 25th, we had tacos. They were fantastic. The next year, again, we had tacos.

Fast-forward 8 years, we’ve had tacos on Christmas every year. It turns out, that’s how traditions are formed. Personally, I don’t think traditions have to be traditional. For me, they just have to be suitable to the place and people.
 

In 2014, there were just six gun deaths in Japan (≈0.00000004% of the population), compared to 33,599 (≈1.0% of the population) in the US.

Buying a gun in Japan takes patience and perseverance. First, you need to attend an all-day class, then sit a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95%. There are also mental health and drugs tests to pass.

Afterwards, your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. They even check your relatives and co-workers. Police have the power to deny gun licences and sweeping powers to search and seize weapons. In addition, handguns are banned outright. Only shotguns and air rifles are allowed.

If you're eventually granted a licence, police must be notified where the gun and ammunition are stored—and they must be stored separately under lock and key. Police will also inspect guns once a year. And after three years your licence runs out, at which point you have to attend the course and pass the tests again.

The Japan Times reported that most world leaders chose to fly to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, but Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg made headlines for deciding to sail instead.

This has prompted a gathering of tourism executives to ponder how to address the fact that flying adds to the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming. According to data cited by the Air Transport Action Group, in 2019, commercial flying accounted for about 2 percent of global carbon emissions and about 12 percent of transport emissions. By 2020, emissions from global international aviation are projected to be about 70 percent higher than in 2005 due to rising travel demand.

With the United Nations gathering underway, the travel site fromAtoB published research about international flights taken in 2018 by the leaders of the world’s largest economies. It found Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was responsible for the most travel. He took 38 flights, traveling 207,000 km. Coming in second was U.S. President Donald Trump with 16 flights and 131,000 km traveled. Among European leaders, German Chancellor Angela Merkel took the most flights, with 83, but most were within Europe.

According to the European Commission, a return flight between London and New York generates roughly the same level of emissions as heating a European home for a whole year.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who played a large role in developing lithium-ion batteries: Stanley Whittingham of the U.K., American John Goodenough (at 97, the oldest Nobel laureate ever), and Japan’s Akira Yoshino. Whittingham created the first functional lithium-ion battery in the 1970s, then Goodenough increased its capacity two-fold over the next 10 years. Finally, Yoshino removed the pure lithium, making it much safer to use.

Lithium-ion batteries are indispensable in today’s world, used in everything from cellphones to cordless power tools to electric cars. Rechargeable and able to store large amounts of energy, they have revolutionized electronics. As the Nobel Committee put it, "...this year’s chemistry laureates have laid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society."

With their large storage capacity, lithium-ion batteries can also help us move away from fossil fuels to cleaner, renewable energy sources. As solar panels and windmills, for example, become able to store greater amounts of energy, they become more efficient and, therefore, less costly.

It can be said that the work of Whittingham, Goodenough, and Yoshino may help save the world.

Car rental companies in Japan have figured out why some customers are returning their vehicles with barely a mile on the clock. Rather than travel from point A to B, as many as one in eight “drivers” are using their rental cars to take a nap, catch up on work or even brush up their language skills, according to industry surveys.

The unusual habits came to light after Orix Auto found a number of its 230,000 registered users were not driving their rented vehicles. Other rental firms noticed similar anomalies in their customers’ mileage records and approached them hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Anecdotal evidence suggests some users are taking advantage of the low cost and convenience of rental services to nap while doing the rounds of client meetings on business trips or to escape bosses and other colleagues during lunch breaks.

The need for a restorative daytime snooze is clear. One survey conducted using fitness trackers in 28 countries found that Japanese men and women slept on average for just six hours and 35 minutes a night— 45 minutes less than the international average. That made Japan the most sleep-deprived of all the nations surveyed, a phenomenon blamed partly on punishing working hours and long commutes.

Goldman Sachs has instituted a new diversity program based not on quotas but on hard data trends that uncovered why even progressive recruitment out of college hasn’t solved the problem. Women and minorities, it turned out, even when hired at the same rates as their white male counterparts, kept falling out of the pipeline. Attrition was enormous.

According to the data, both populations were more likely to quit than their white male peers and were simultaneously more likely to be replaced by white men moving laterally from another company. Additionally, they were less likely to be promoted and less likely to even be considered for promotion.

Retention and promotion are as important as hiring, and if you aren’t making workplaces where people feel welcome or are really enabled to succeed, you aren’t going to solve the problem. Companies need to do the work that Goldman Sachs did: get the numbers, look at when you’re losing those players and why, and then take steps to rectify it.

In Goldman’s case, they’ve incentivized hiring and promotion of affected groups by tying performance bonuses to not only hiring but also maintaining a diverse (and gender-balanced) team, as well as changing requirements to include skillsets rather than specific career histories or experience, which encourages hiring managers to actively recruit outside the usual pool.

Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development, says Hannah Fry, an associate professor of mathematics at University College, London. The ethical pledge would commit scientists to think deeply about the possible applications of their work and compel them to pursue only those that, at the least, do no harm to society.

“We need a Hippocratic oath in the same way it exists for medicine,” Fry said. “In medicine, you learn about ethics from day one. In mathematics, it’s a bolt-on at best. It has to be there from day one and at the forefront of your mind in every step you take.”

The issue has become urgent now that researchers are building systems that take on life-or-death decisions. “We’ve got all these tech companies filled with very young, very inexperienced, often white boys who have lived in maths and computer science departments. They have never been asked to think about ethics, they have never been asked to consider how other people’s perspectives on life might be different to theirs, and ultimately these are the people who are designing the future for all of us.”

On Friday, September 22, millions of young people around the globe walked out of school to protest the lack of action to reverse climate change. Led by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, teenagers, children, and some adults added their voices to an ever-growing movement to hold governments and corporations accountable for their environmental destruction and demand that they make immediate changes to reverse the damage. A week later, more strikes drew similar crowds, some even larger. In New Zealand, an unprecedented 3.5% of the population took to the streets.

The movement, officially known as Fridays for Future, has inspired the creation of local groups on every continent, each with their own website and social media accounts. The movement’s Twitter account @FridaysforFuture, Greta Thunberg’s personal account, and hashtags like #climatestrike have garnered hundreds of thousands of tweets and retweets. Literally millions are members or followers on Facebook. 

While adults have participated in strikes and protests, movement organizers are teenagers. Young people are leading the way in demanding a better future for our planet.

In the words of Greta Thunberg, "We are doing this to wake the leaders up. We are doing this to get them to act. We deserve a safe future, and we demand a safe future. Is that really too much to ask? ... We should not be the ones fighting for our future, and yet, here we are. … No one is too small to make a difference. See you on the streets!”

In the United Kingdom, the United States and other developed countries, abused or neglected children are often sent to live with a foster family. But that rarely happens in Japan, one of the world's wealthiest and most progressive societies. 

Close to 90 percent of Japan's troubled children are placed in state institutions. Foster care has not emerged as a viable alternative for abused children in Japan because governments have failed to properly train carers, monitor the placements, or adequately educate the public about its benefits. In addition, Japan strongly values blood ties, so welcoming a stranger’s child into a family seems unnatural to many people. Japan is also a country where speaking out about child abuse causes great shame.

Some 33,000 children currently live in 131 child nursing homes. Inside these institutions, there are babies as young as six months old, and institutionalised children spend on average five years there. 

There is no institution where parents can learn about child-rearing and that is why the chain reaction of abuse cannot be stopped. With child abuse cases rising to a record 73,000 cases last year, the problem of institutions and where to place troubled children is unlikely to go away.