The year summer never came. Japan forced to import rice
Ben Hills
CLOUDS swallow the harvest moon as the black rain thrashes the sodden paddy-fields of Niigata, Japan's premier rice-growing district.
There will be no tsukimizake tonight, no moon-viewing sake- drinking celebration for Katsuichi Yamaga, a third-generation rice-farmer. "If it doesn't let up soon, we will lose the rest of our crop," he says.
The world’s rarest bird - the last days of the toki
Ben Hills
SADO ISLAND: the early summer tourists cluster around the guardrails, peering through binoculars, using their longest lenses, the zoom on their video cameras, to try to capture the creature behind the bars of the massive steel and concrete cages 100 metres away.
Somewhere in there, perched on a log and oblivious to all the attention, sit two birds the size of geese, each with stilt-like legs, a long black beak and a belly of the palest pink.
The world’s first industrial disaster. The never-ending battle for justice for the victims of Minamata.
Ben Hills
Like an Edo era woodblock, the strange three-masted fishing skiffs with their white sails bulging in the breeze are etched against the bottle green of the Shiranui Sea. The crew, husband-and-wife teams, tough as leather, lean over the side of their utase boats, hauling in nets with a harvest of prawns and ribbon fish.
The winter Olympics - politicians going for gold
Ben Hills
AFTER driving round in circles for 30 minutes on the narrow dykes that divide the rice-paddies, the taxi-driver suddenly brakes to a halt and smacks himself on the forehead. "Over there |" he cries, pointing to a grove of gnarled apple-trees. "That must be the place."
The ultimate toilet
Ben Hills
IT'S now official. The Japanese really are different. Their poo doesn't stink. At least it won't from next April, when Hiroshi Kobayashi, a design engineer, unveils Japan's latest contribution to 21st century technology.
From the country that brought you Super Nintendo, tofu ice-cream and the cellular car-fax, stand by for the latest revolution - an odour-devouring superloo that even wipes your bottom. Koyabashi and a team of 17 engineers, designers and electronic specialists have been beavering away for years in the laboratories of Toto, Japan's largest loo-maker. They have thought of every creature comfort you desired, and patented it - no fewer than 172 patents have been applied for.
The tragedy of Princess Masako.
Modern woman collides with ancient dynasty
Ben Hills
On Wednesday morning, barring any last-minute mishap, Masako Owada, graduate of Harvard and Oxford, career diplomat and the very model of the modern Japanese woman will be driven across the forbidding moat that surrounds Tokyo's imperial palace, and back more than a thousand years in time.
The woman who graduated magna cum laude with an econometric dissertation on the effect of oil prices on Japan's economic cycle, will have to learn to converse in an archaic imperial language that is Latin to most modern Japanese; to master intricate ritual, like the angle of the bow she must give the in-laws every time she meets them (precisely 60 degrees); and to submit to shamanistic ceremonies like having her body rubbed with rice-bran to ensure her fertility.