Smokin' Mirrors

An Interview with Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai by Willhemina Wahlin Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977, has called on industrialised countries to reduce waste and increase investment to stave off desertification across the world. Speaking to a 400-strong crowd at Waseda University on February 13, where she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for her work in environmental protection, Prof. Maathai called desertification “the new enemy.” More This article was first published as a JIN Newsletter for Japan Inc. on Tuesday 21 February 2006. www.japaninc.com www.japan.com For more information on the Green Belt Movement, go to: http://www.gbmna.org/ Pic: Prof. Wangari Maathai at the 2004 Nobel Laureate Ceremony, courtesy of the Green Belt Movement.

When kick-backs bite you in the ass... The AWB is accused of funnelling AUD300 million of kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein via a Jordanian trucking company. While the upper management of the AWB has been going through the mill of an official inquiry, it wasn’t until most of them had claimed no knowledge that an AWB Market report on Iraq was brought before the Cole Inquiry, which stated: “Inland transport fees are paid via Alia in Jordon, which then pays the Ministry of Transport in Iraq.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. But there’s more.

Water, Water Everywhere, and Every Drop to Drink by Willhemina Wahlin The 17th January this year marked the 11th year since the Great Hanshin Earthquake devastated Kobe. In the midst of such a disaster freshwater is crucial. Burst water mains, spewing out onto the streets, become floods awaiting waterborne disease. A logistical nightmare unravels, as those in the wake of the disaster wait for supplies of freshdrinking water. Doctors treating the injured rely on clean water, but often that depends on whether the water system has made it through unscathed. Usually it hasn't. More Pic: DHD Multimedia picture Gallery This article was originally published via the Japan Inc. JIN Newsletter on February 15 2006. http://www.japaninc.com/ http://www.japan.com/

English Web Design: A Niche for Someone to Fill It might be that my poor Japanese language skills are to blame, sending me on a futile trajectory into the world's most pointless English-language banking website, but I can't help feeling a little frustrated. I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for some simple information on my bank's site. What's depressing is that the bank's Japanese-language version seems to have a lot more going on, and I'll be buggered if I can't find my 'Babel fish', which in "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" provides an instant translation of any language, when I need it. Back in Australia, I can do everything over the Net: the catch is that personal service is often sacrificed - just ask anyone who has spent the last five minutes trying to get through to a real live person on the phone. In Japan, the service is usually outstanding, but the technology often undermines it. Any visitor to Japan will...

Dramatic stretch to bridge one of the great divides There's a touch of the Australian way in the Tokyo maze, writes Willhemina Wahlin. In a city with no street names like Tokyo, it's hard to find home, let alone the nearly invisible entrance to a small theatre tucked behind a cracked glass door and a faded velvet curtain. But Rakutendan Theatre is proof you can never judge a playhouse by its maintenance budget. The director Yoshio Wada's passion for contemporary theatre breathes life into the walls, bringing a record number of Australian plays to its stage. "I love Australia," Wada says. "People embrace their multi-ethnic background. I think it makes the Australian people modest and gentle." Wada will next year lead some of the best in Australian and Japanese theatre in staging the Dramatic Australia Festival, part of the Australia-Japan Year of Exchange, for the 30th anniversary of the Basic Treaty of Friendship, signed in Tokyo in June 1976. In contras...

Is LNG the next oil? By Willhemina Wahlin “There’s a joke from the early days of the oil business,” write Daniel Yergin and Michael Stoppard, in “The Next Prize,” an article in Foreign Affairs in 2003. “A geologist reporting back on drilling a wildcat exploratory well says, ‘the bad news is that we didn’t find oil. The good news is that we didn’t find gas’.” Little did the early oil tycoons know that natural gas would have the last laugh, thanks largely and ironically to the emergence of its liquefied form, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)—and no country on earth is currently laughing louder than Japan, the largest importer of LNG in the world. The Japanese government views LNG as vital to its strategy to reduce the nation’s oil dependence, as well as a key ingredient in its post-Kyoto Protocol recipe for alternative fuels, and is actively promoting LNG through subsidies. Japanese corporations have been securing their lead position in every link of the global LNG supply chain, through the f...

Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture Art, Truth & Politics In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' More

Big Country. Bigger Country Rock 'n' Roll. The Re-mains go to the Coalface. For most people, Australia conjures up images of a big red centre, populated by various versions of Mick Dundee or Steve Irwin. It's tougher than that. It takes four days to get from Sydney to Perth--east to west--and few musicians in Australia these days take on the gritty, tough audiences of rural and outback Australia, preferring instead the well worn Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane run of the east coast. But one band has found an untapped spring, a 'coalface' as it were, in this rugged terrain, and they have made it their mission to share their special pioneering brand of country rock 'n' roll around. Introducing the Re-mains, and their soundtrack to rough driving. More

Maid in Japan Sydney Morning Herald October 11, 2005 As its young women say no to motherhood for longer, the country's population has begun to shrink, write Deborah Cameron and Willhemina Wahlin in Tokyo. More... A new picture … Japanese women are increasingly torn between family and career. Photo: Reuters