The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hạnh is a leading proponent.

He has a food meditation center in southern France.

Plum Village, as it’s called, attracts visitors who want to learn how to eat more mindfully, among other things.

Plum village winter retreat (Photo: Plum Village Online Monastery/Facebook)

So, for the Geo Quiz, we’re looking for the name of the French department or region where you can find Plum Village.

It lies between the Loire valley and the Pyrénées …

The answer is Dordogne, France. A Buddhist meditation center there called Plum Village attracts vistors from around the world who want to explore mindful eating. Lilian Cheung of the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life explains the basics of mindfulness to anchor Marco Werman.

Dr. Cheung shared one of the meditations she learned from monks at Plum Village. She says its a grace that’s said before each meal as a way to contemplate and honor the nourishing food:

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Ishioka died recently in Tokyo at the age of 73.

You may not know her name, but you might have seen some of her work.

I met Eiko Ishioka about a year ago, when she was working on the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” We talked backstage, surrounded by some of the surreal costumes she’d designed for the show, including a lizard-like Green Goblin.

Spider-Man was only the latest job in a career of extraordinary breadth. Ishioka won the 1993 Oscar for costume design for her work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” But her association with the film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, went back to a project in the mid-1980s that upended stereotypes about Japan — the film “Mishima.”

Ishioka said that before “Mishima” most Americans making movies about Japan focused on ninja, geisha and samurai. “So as a Japanese, I was very frustrated,” she said.

The movie was about Yukio Mishima, a Japanese novelist and activist who committed ritual suicide in 1970.

“This movie’s an American film, but talking about a Japanese subject, so I was very excited,” Ishioka recalled. “But at the same time I was very frightened.”

Eiko Ishioka had built her career as an art director for Japanese ad campaigns. Now she was working in the US as a production designer, or a costume designer.

She loved it.

She said that the designer’s job is typically a passive one. “When I receive very exciting job, turn to the very active, like I want to express my own creative philosophies, like a fine artist.”

That didn’t mean a specifically Japanese philosophy.

“I want to bring my own identity as a human being. But I don’t need to bring a Japanese identity. I don’t even know what Japanese identity is. Japan is a really complicated country.”

Maybe it was Ishioka’s refusal to accept simple categories that allowed her to jump from movies to designing racing outfits for the Canadian speed skating team — outfits that would later inspire her designs for the musical “Spider-Man”.

It’s no surprise then that an American jazz musician selected her, a Japanese artist, to dream up a cover for his album, one named in honor of a South African civil rights campaigner.

The album was “Tutu”; the jazz musician, Miles Davis.

“I observed his face, his hand — incredible symbol of his life,” Ishioka said. “So I said, this is it, this is perfect. I want to make his album with his face and hand.”

Eiko Ishioka won a Grammy for her work on “Tutu” — a series of striking close-up photos of Miles Davis, shot in stark black and white.

Ishioka died in Tokyo. But for the last 30 years her main base was New York. Not that it mattered.

“I was completely free spirit,” she said. “Any kind of exciting job, I wanted to do it.”

Koji Minoura is a paleontologist – he studies fossils and rocks – but he’s become something of a celebrity in Japan, for an unfortunate reason.

Long before last year’s massive earthquake and tsunami, Minoura had warned that just such a disaster was in the offing.

Minoura works at Tohoku University, in Sendai. Sitting in his cramped office, where all of the books fell off his shelves during the earthquake, he explains that the scientific work that made him famous began with the study of historical documents.

He was intrigued by an ancient poem. It refers with sadness to “the famed waves of Sue-No-Matsuyama.”

Minoura wondered if the poem referred to an ancient earthquake and tsunami. So he dug through old records and found that in July of 869 AD a huge quake and tsunami hit Northeast Japan. It’s known as the Jogan event.

“The record shows the tsunami hit the area and killed more than a thousand people,” he says. “But people quickly forgot about the tsunami.”

Minoura decided to look for geological evidence of that ancient disaster.

In the late 1980s, he visited the area around Sendai and dug into a rice paddy to see what the tsunami might have left behind.

He found what he was looking for – a layer of ocean sediment clearly visible in bright contrast to the rest of the gray-black dirt.

“This is the trace of the tsunami,” he says, displaying a photograph. “My age measurement showed that this is the sediment from the 869 Jogan tsunami.”

The ocean water had reached two and a half miles inland.

Minoura’s research didn’t stop there. He dug deeper into the soil and found more marine layers – proof of similar giant tsunamis every thousand years or so, meaning Northeast Japan was overdue for another one.

Over the next 20 years, Minoura would publish his findings in major scientific journals.

Yet Japan was ill prepared for the massive tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was swamped by the waves, causing a nuclear disaster.

Hiro Hasegawa, a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the plant, says the company was aware of Minoura’s research and considered making modifications to protect the plant.

“We were in the process of considering that,” he says, “but this accident occurred during that process.”

Paleontologist Koji Minoura believes his warnings were not taken seriously.

“I regret it, but no one paid attention to my thesis,” he says.

Since the tsunami, people have paid attention to Minoura. Bloggers have picked up on his work. The Japanese news media have covered it extensively. Minoura now has the attention of the government and is regularly invited to speak before important groups.

“Yes,” Minoura says, acknowledging the attention. “But it’s too late.”

Watch Nuclear Aftershocks Preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

The announcement comes nine months after the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami, triggering one of the worst nuclear energy disasters in history.

Anchor Marco Werman talks with physicist Edward Lyman, a senior staff scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC.

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Marco Werman: Japanese authorities are saying today that the reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are under control. The announcement comes nine months after the plant was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami, triggering one of the most clear energy disasters in history.

Joshihiko Noda: [speaking Japanese]

Werman: Japanese Prime Minister Joshihiko Noda said the reactors have reached a state of cold shutdown and that the accident at the nuclear power plant is now over. He declared that phase II of the roadmap to bringing the accident under control is now complete. Edward Lyman is a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He joins us now from Washington. So the Japanese prime minister declared the plant has reached a stable state of cold shutdown, I guess that was the goal all along, but what does that mean exactly, cold shutdown?

Edward Lyman: Well, cold shutdown has a pretty precise meaning when you’re talking about a nuclear plant that has undergone some kind of a crisis. And if you can bring the plant to a stable state where the temperature is lower than the boiling point of water and there’s no risk of the reactor becoming critical again. Now, in the case of Fukushima because they still don’t know a lot of the issues within the reactor itself, they can’t come to such a firm conclusion, so they characterize it as a condition of cold shutdown.

Werman: It almost sounds like you’re saying that the government has kind of redefined what cold shutdown means for their own needs.

Lyman: Yes, and to some extent it’s a practical definition. I don’t have a problem with it, but to the extent that it gives people false confidence I think that would be a bad thing.

Werman: Prime Minister Noda also said many issues remain. So even he tempered the good news. What for you are the big outstanding issues that make you feel that this crisis is not over?

Lyman: With regards to the reactors themselves, clearly they’re being cooled now by a Jerry-rigged cooling system that is not hardened against large earthquakes. But what concerns me the most is the radioactivity that’s already been released out into the environment that is now contaminating thousands of square kilometers of residential areas and farmland in Japan, and they still don’t have a coherent or responsible plan for coping with that contamination.

Werman: And is that contamination still happening? Is it still leaking?

Lyman: It is, but to a much lower extent.

Werman: Edward Lyman, you’ve been following this crisis since the beginning. I mean you know the political coziness between the utility, TEPCO, that owns and operates the Fukushima plant, and the government. That coziness diminished the trust in what the government says about Fukushima. I mean in June of this year TEPCO said it was gonna be impossible as a result of the crisis at the plant until 2012. Now, the government says the crisis is over. Why should the Japanese even believe what the government says about progress at the plant right now?

Lyman: Well, it’s very important that people maintain in multiple sources of information analysis, and so clearly no one should trust a single source in their assessment. Of course, control of information is one factor and to the extent that the source information they choose to make these decisions is kept from the public, that presents independent assessments from being generated.

Werman: Edward Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, thanks very much indeed.

Lyman: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

But in Japan, it is not just the taste and healthiness of the meal that is important – but how it looks.

The country’s ancient emphasis on food presentation has been transformed into a trend for character bento – packed lunches made to look like pandas, teddy bears or even real people.

The BBC’s Tokyo correspondent Roland Buerk has been finding out more.

A Bösendorfer piano. (Photo: Gryffindor)

All proceeds went to a program founded in Japan called School Music Revival.

The concert was initiated by Eric Gorfain, a violinist with the ensemble The Section Quartet. He spoke to anchor Marco Werman.

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The sample came from a Fukushima city farm about 37 miles (60km) from the plant.

The government is considering banning shipments from the area it was found.

Marco Werman talks with reporter David McNeill in Tokyo.

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Marco Werman: In Japan, the government today banned shipments of rice grown near the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. The plant’s been spewing radiation since it was wrecked by the March 11th tsunami but, until now, the rice grown in the region was deemed safe. Now, it’s been found to have high levels of radiation – 630 becquerels per kilo to be exact. The government limit is 500. David McNeill of Britain’s Independent Newspaper is following the story in Tokyo. He puts the numbers in perspective for us.

David McNeill: A lot of people would consider the government numbers quite high although, of course, the government says that it’s within sort of international limits. But a lot of people don’t trust the government when they give these limits. So the fact that it’s gone over on an already high limit is worrying people especially when the governor of that province last month reassured people that rice from the province was safe. And you have to remember that this is, sort of, one of Japan’s bread baskets. You know, Fukushima was quite famous for producing not just rice but all kinds of fresh food before the disaster. It’s the fourth largest rice-producing area of Japan. You know, there’s been a string of scares about this sort of level, borderline high or over-the-limit radiation in tea, in fish, in beef. But this is the first time really that it has hit rice, of course, which is Japan’s staple. It’s sort of equivalent to wheat in America. It’s that kind of impact and it is scary, obviously, to people who live on rice.

Werman: Right. I mean, of all the foodstuff to be banned in Japan it would be rice. I mean, the country is all about rice; it’s sacred there. There’s even an expression that God is in every grain of rice. What will this ban do then to the Japanese psychically as far as their view of Fukushima and the nuclear disaster there?

McNeill: Well, we have to be careful and say that this ban is for one area of one prefecture. It’s for an area covering about 150 – 160 rice paddies or rice farms. Although it is an important, sort of, psychological blow to this attempt to make sure that the radiation is not getting into food, it is only a limited thing. I think what people are doing at the moment in practice is… First of all, sales of food from that prefecture and from the surrounding prefectures are down. What people are doing, you see them in the supermarkets now all the time, is they check very carefully where the food is produced and they tend to go for foods that’s from the south of the country now, away from that nuclear disaster and from the extreme north, up in Hokkaido. I think they will continue to do that. They will continue to treat the government’s reassurances with skepticism. They will continue to hope that… I mean, you have to say Japan is not Soviet Russia; this is not Chernobyl. They really have a very sophisticated medical health system and checking system, and so on. But they will continue to look at these figures with some skepticism, I think.

Werman: What will it do economically to the northeast of Japan which has already been devastated by the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear crisis?

McNeill: Well food production, as I said, is an important component of Fukushima’s economy. Already, food production from that prefecture has been devastated. I was looking at statistics last week, you know, rice sales, sales of fruit and vegetables are down by 60, 70, 80 percent. A lot of farmers have been wiped out and a lot of other farmers are on the border line. There’s a struggle over compensation and how do you pay adequate compensation for loss of produce and so on. That’s going to be an ongoing battle for the next year and years to come.

Werman: David McNeill, Tokyo correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, thanks very much for your time.

McNeill: You’re very welcomed.

Werman: You can find more of our coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster including a series of reports from my visit to Japan in June following the earthquake. That’s all at theworld.org.

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Two new reports that came out in the past week prompted us to call up Geoff and get an update on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The conversation led us to the issue of radiation release, and what is known about how soil and crops in Tohoku have fared.

Here’s Geoff’s view.
Food radiation by The World

A new report by a group of American nuclear experts describes in detail what happened at the plant after it was struck by the devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Science journalist, Geoff Brumfiel has been writing about the Fukushima disaster for Nature magazine. He spoke with Marco Werman.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is the world, the co-production of the BBC world service PRI and WGBH Boston. The evidence is now in on. The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan was in fact the second worst nuclear accident, after the one in Chernobyl in 1986. The Fukushima accident, you’ll recall, occurred just after the March 11th earthquake and tsunami devastated northeast Japan. A new report describes just how serious the accident was. The report was compiled by experts at the Atlanta based organization, The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. Geoff Brumfiel is a science journalist at Nature magazine and has been covering the nuclear Fukushima disaster. He joins us from the BBC studio in London. Geoff, the broad strokes of what happened at Fukushima are well known now, but what new information does this report provide that we didn’t know before?

Geoff Brumfiel: Well, I think that what this report provides really, is a very in-depth look of exactly what happened and what the workers at the plant were facing. I mean it’s really, it reads like an airport thriller with a lot of acronyms. Basically, it shows that the situation at Fukushima spiraled out of control in the hours and days after it was first rocked by this big earthquake on March 11th, and then hit by a tsunami.

Werman: Right, and especially the conditions for the workers. I mean, the one thing that struck me when I was reading parts of this report, were the details of the workers of the plant, the conditions they were living in as they tried to control this evolving disaster. It’s been said before, but remind us, just kind of, what conditions these guys were working under that made them truly nothing short of heroes.

Brumfiel: Well yeah, first of all, they were surviving on biscuits and cups of noodles. The life on the plant for the first couple of days was extremely rough. Beyond that they were contending with very high levels of radiation and radiation in the control rooms where they were struggling to contain this accident. They were working at consoles that were completely black, there was no electricity anywhere on site. They were working with flashlights, with emergency lighting, whatever they could get their hands on. At one point they were using car batteries to try and hook up the emergency relief valves on the reactor cores. And, not only were they sitting in these contaminated control rooms, struggling, they would go out into the reactor building and there’s just some chilling stories there of you know, things shuddering in the turbine halls and they’re wading through radioactive water trying to find out if emergency systems were operating, I mean it was a real nightmare.

Werman: I was wondering if you have a sense, Geoff, of what kind of health effects these workers are bound to face?

Brumfiel: Well if the radiation numbers that are detailed in the report are to be believed, you know, it’s reasonable they they’re probably in the ballpark. Dozens of workers received fairly high doses of radiation, and two, received you know, high enough doses that it could lead to cancer later in life. The insidious thing about radiation is that usually it means that you are going to develop cancer earlier on than you might have otherwise done, or there may be some sort of complication many years in the future. Now, trying to untangle this, from you know, the normal occurrence of cancer in the population is quite tricky; so we may never know exactly what effect the radiation had on these workers.

Werman: One thing that is definitely keeping people scratching their heads is where the radiation from Fukushima has gone in Japan, and what in Japan is contaminated. So, a few weeks ago a new study claimed that the amount of radiation released from the plant was far more than the Japanese government claimed. Has that debate been resolved?

Brumfiel: No, it hasn’t. As far as I know, the Japanese government really has kind of given up on estimating how much radiation came out of Fukushima. They made an initial estimate back in June and then they just sort of decided to let that stand as a rough ballpark figure. The big problem is that there is so much uncertainty about what happened inside the reactors themselves, and unless you know that and you know the way they were venting radiation and the quantity of radiation they were venting in those first few days, that first week after the accident started, there’s really no way to tell how much radiation was released. The report, which came out of a Scandinavian group, said it was about double what the government said. Other reports may say a little bit less. I think the government feels like, ok, we’ve got a ballpark figure now, we’re just going to stick with that and kind of the real issue is the clean up.

Werman: Now I’ve also heard, Geoff, that mercifully, the environmental conditions in mid March were such that Tokyo, which is a hundred miles or more south of Fukushima, was actually spared any major radioactive blowback from the meltdowns in Fukushima. Explain why a different and more tragic outcome in Tokyo did not happen.

Brumfiel: So, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what was coming out of the plant and where it was going but the best pictures we have are computer models that sort of estimate the emission and take into account weather conditions at the time. Now one of the models that came out from an independent group in Scandinavia showed that there was actually a chance that Tokyo could have gotten a pretty serious dose of radioactive contamination. What was going on was there was this plume of radiation that was streaming out of the plant, it was whipping around in the wind and where ever the rain fell, that’s where the radiation ended up. Now, it happened to be dry in Tokyo when this model showed the radiation plume passing over and if it hadn’t been, I think conditions in Tokyo would have been so bad that people may have had to evacuate. So, I do think that Tokyo dodged a bullet there.

Werman: Geoff Brumfiel, a science journalist from Nature magazine joining us from our studios in London. Geoff, we greatly appreciate your time indeed. Thank you.

Brumfiel: Thank you.

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They work in so-called hostess clubs in Tokyo.

But according to the US government, they are victims of sex trafficking.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas is the author of “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo.

She spent months working in a hostess club in Tokyo.

Perrenas speaks with host Lisa Mullins about her book.

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Lisa Mullins: Bangkok is among a number of Asian cities battling an unsavory reputation for sex trafficking. Another such city is Tokyo. Every year thousands of Filipino women travel to Japan’s capital to work in so called “hostess clubs”. According to the U.S. government they are victims of sex trafficking. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas disagrees with that. She is a Sociology professor at the University of Southern California. Salazar Parrenas spent three months working in a hostess club in Tokyo to get a firsthand look at the work. She’s the author of the book “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo”. Here’s how she describes the duties of a hostess.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas: You have to flirt professionally and flirting often just entails sitting next to a man in the club, telling them that he’s the most good looking person you’ve ever met, you know, holding his thigh, perhaps even sometimes holding his hand. So that was the extent of the physical contact you usually had with your customers and so sometimes the flirting would involve singing and dancing in very scant attire. Oftentimes it could be platonic. Sometimes it could be very raunchy, sometimes clubs would require a woman to undress while they’re dancing on stage.

Mullins: Could you consider these brothels?

Salazar Parrenas: No, because prostitution was not required in the job and that’s why it’s surprising for me that these women were labelled “sex trafficked people” who were “forced into prostitution according to the U.S. Department of State” because what they do for a living is far from prostitution. I would define it a sex work because I look at sex work very broadly, to not just be prostitution, but it could be like stripping, pole dancing, but in this case, sex work would just be professional flirting.

Mullins: Who were the clientele?

Salazar Parrenas: So the clientele were regular Japanese men. The club where I worked was a working class club and so most of our clients were plumbers, like janitors, very low level salary men.

Mullins: How were the women paid?

Salazar Parrenas: So the women that I worked with, some got paid directly, so they would be paid directly by the boss, but some were actually not paid until the end of their six month contract because they were contract workers and so their brokers were paid and so the brokers didn’t want them to quit and what the brokers would do was that they would withhold their salary until they would have to return to the Philippines at the end of their six month contract and that they would be paid at the airport actually.

Mullins: So how do they make ends meet before that?

Salazar Parrenas: They would make ends meet by relying primarily on tips and then the commission that they made and so you receive commission from the amount of times that a customer requests for your company inside the club and also for the amount of times that a customer takes you out on a date. So for every date that you would go out, you would receive about 30 U.S. dollars and then for requests for your company inside the club, that would be around 10 dollars that you would receive.

Mullins: So, give us one of your experiences Rhacel. I know that you say in the book that you were a little bit older, you were not, you know, 100 pounds like most of these women were. So they would kind of show you the ropes and tell us how they did that.

Salazar Parrenas: I was actually one of the least skilled hostesses and so I’m also not the most feminine woman and so I don’t often have a feminine posture, meaning like my legs are often spread wide open. I’m often slouching. The management and my co-workers often micromanaged my actions and so once in a while I would just be spaced out and then all of a sudden I would realize that there’s a spotlight aimed between my thighs and it was the way for the management to tell me to close my legs. I was really horrible, but my co-workers were just, they seemed to be so attuned to to their femininity, but I was so bad that they often relegated me to be the woman standing outside distributing flyers. So I would be often standing outside, screaming, wearing a very scanty outfit and feeling actually very degraded.

Mullins: So let me ask you this, you argue in the book that Filipino women who are working in these bars in Japan are not victims of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking now, as you say, is a specific label. At the same though, you’re talking about these women being uneducated, basically being held hostage to thier salary, in some cases not being given a salary for like six months. So are you making a semantic difference? Is this just about the terminology because it does sound like exploitation.

Salazar Parrenas: The definition of trafficking is, like there’s a three part definition to it, is that first you have to be transported, second you have to be duped in the process or coerced, and then third you have to be exploited. The problem is, for people who look into trafficking, they just reduce the definition to the third part which is exploitation.

Mullins: But why does that bother you?

Salazar Parrenas: Because it doesn’t take into account the will of individuals. These women made a decision to go into the situation, that they agreed to enter a situation of servitude. They knew that they were going to be in this job for six months. They knew that they were going to have a hard time quitting. The problem arises is when they want to quit their job and they cannot. Then they become trafficked victims.

Mullins: For you, what’s the bigger picture here? Is it how we help these women? How we try to prevent human trafficking, sex trafficking or not?

Salazar Parrenas: Yeah, in the case of the women that I studied, I would say that the solution to their job is not “rescue” as advocated by the U.S. government, meaning we shouldn’t pluck them out of their situation. Instead, we have to work on making them free workers or we have to ensure that they have greater control over their labor and migration. So we do that by freeing them of middle man brokers, allowing them to negotiate directly with their employers – the club owners, allowing them to choose their jobs, and not limiting their visa to one club. It’s redefining how we look at the problem for the purpose of coming up with nuance solutions to their problems.

Mullins: OK, thank you. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Sociology professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo” Thank you Rhacel.

Salazar Parrenas: Thank you.

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For our once-a-month-ish gab fest, Carol and I just couldn’t pass this one up.

Sometime, corporations knock it out of the park with their inventions, or re-inventions, of words. Who can argue with Coca-Cola? And it’s not like they’re alone. Shakespeare did it (0r at least he popularized recently invented words). Kanye West does it. Soldiers do it. Prison inmates do it. Schoolkids do it.

But what about that sub-group of word reinvention, the spelling change? This happens most commonly when a word migrates from one language to another (Spanish for soccer/footbal: fútbol; Chinese for sandwich: 三明治 or sānmíngzhì). It can be an act of rebellion against the colonial master (American English spellings). It can be a way of transcribing an accent that may later be co-opted by the speakers of that accent (Lil thang, wassup, etc).

The corporate version of a respelled word is usually überclunky, probably because there is no reason for it to exist other than to satisfy the corporation’s desire to sell a product. The language, and the speakers who sustain the language, have not demanded it. Instead, it has been dreamed up in some boardroom or office. The result: terms like riDQulous and City Sentral .

Fear of a Chinese-Speaking Planet

L’arrivo di Wang (The Arrival of Wang) is an Italian thriller recently shown at the Venice Film Festival. In this scene, a police officer questions a blindfolded Chinese interpreter, who is suspected of colluding with a Chinese-speaking alien. The presumption that the alien has chosen to communicate in Chinese because it — or its masters — have concluded that Chinese is the planet’s most prominent language. The film’s characters can’t decide whether the alien is benign. Has it come to forge some kind of partnership or to colonize the Italians with its language, culture and values?

The arrival of The Arrival of Wang comes at a time when Americans and Europeans are debating whether Westerners will really learn Chinese and even if they do, whether it’s worth it.

Also discussed in this week’s pod:

The expanding reach of English means more varied accents. Here is the source of the accent test that I sprang on Carol. Here are the 100 words that linguist David Crystal has chosen to tell the story of English. And here is an update on previous pod discussion about Arizona’s harsh line on English language teachers who have foreign accents. (Under Federal pressure, Arizona has agreed to stop yanking such teachers out of the classroom and to retraining classes).

For Singapore’s Chinese, a challenge: The country’s former non-nonense leader Lee Kuan Yew says the city-state became an economic power-house because the government made eveyone speak English. While Lee says this should continue, he is also urging Singapore’s Chinese (who make up about 70% of the population) to speak Mandarin at home.

In Japan, English-speaking chatbots guarantee embarrassment-free conversations. Yup, if you don’t care for the constant humiliation of learning a language by trial and (mostly) error, a conversation with a chatbot is for you. And because a chatbot is not human, it will correct your errors without making you feel foolish– but also perhaps without your remembering them quite so well.

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Beate Sirota Gordon was the featured speaker at the 2011 Commencement ceremony at Mills College. (Photo: Stephan Babuljak)

In 1941, shortly before Japan declared war on the United States, a set of recordings were made of traditional Japanese music.

Only two copies of these recordings existed after World War II of which one set was given to Beate Sirota Gordon for safe keeping.

Gordon was born in Vienna, Austria, to esteemed Russian pianists. Her father was the famous Leo Sirota who moved to Tokyo, Japan where she lived for about ten years before moving to Oakland, California, in 1939 to attend Mills College.

Apart from belonging to a famous family, Beate Sirota Gordon is famous in her own right. She was a member of the team that drafted the Constitution of Japan under Douglas MacArthur. She is considered an American icon among Japanese women for helping secure women’s rights and equality by writing portions of articles into the Japanese Constitution.

Excerpts of the portions of 1947 Japanese Constitution that Gordon helped write:

Article 14

All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.

Article 24

(1)Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.
(2) With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.

Article 26

All people shall have the right to receive an equal education correspondent to their ability, as provided by law.

Article 27

All people shall have the right and the obligation to work.

The recording that were given to Gordon have now been released on CD titled “Japanese Traditional Music: Koto- Shamisen” for the first time.

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BBC: David Shukman’s Video Report
The World: Japan – Change in the Wake of Disaster

The group’s latest album, “Osaka Ramones: Tribute to the Ramones” covers 13 of Shonen Knife’s favorite songs from New York City’s legendary punk group.

Maria Bakkalapulo finds out how this three-piece Japanese punk band got to where they are and what is it up to now.

By Maria Bakkalapulo

When the Ramones released their first album in 1976, their sound changed everything. The group perfected a rapid-fire, two-minute song style that would be emulated by many rock bands – from the Sex Pistols to Green Day. These days, no one does Ramones-style rock quite like Japan’s venerable Shonen Knife.

The crowd erupts at Glasgow indie club, Nice ‘n’ Sleazy as Shonen Knife tears into songs from their latest album, “Osaka Ramones”. The youthful 50-year-old lead singer and guitarist, Naoko Yamano has loved the group since she was a teenager, and chose to record the album as a celebration of her three decades in the industry.

“I first listened to the Ramones songs on the radio in Japan. It was late 70’s. And I rushed to the record store and get their vinyl,” says Naoko. “Then I started Shonen Knife, and we had our original songs but we wanted to cover some songs from our favorite bands and we chose Ramones songs.” That was in 1981. Naoko was joined by her younger sister Atsuko on drums and friend Michie Nakatani on bass.

Shonen Knife’s hit song “Banana Chips” may not seem especially profound, but it was groundbreaking. The women at the time were working as office clerks and lived with their conservative middle-class parents, who discouraged them from playing rock.

They even insisted the band hide their guitars. In some ways, this made Naoko work harder, creating songs with quirkier subjects than the standard pop fare.

“I am ashamed to write songs about love and I don’t want to write songs similar to other bands,” says Naoko. “Other bands, usually write about love songs. So I like to write about my daily life. When I find something interesting I write down the keyword down in my notebook. For example, I write in my book … I like banana chips. Banana chips are so tasty. When I write songs I expand the keyword and put a melody on it.”

That’s in part why Naoko loves the Ramones – simple but eloquent lyrics and fun music.

Shonen Knife got its big break in 1986 when the group was featured on the Sub Pop 100 compilation album, one of the early releases by the influential grunge label. A few years later, Shonen Knife toured with Nirvana. they also landed major record deals, MTV appearances and a spot on the alternative rock mega-fest Lollapalooza in the early 1990’s.

Shonen Knife has gone through lineup changes, but Naoko has always remained part of the band. Drummer Emi Morimoto joined last year. In 2006, Ritsuko Taneda started playing bass with the group. “When I was a high school student, I heard ‘Riding the Rocket’” I thought, wow, Japanese Beatles,” says Ritsuko.

The mix of the Ramones and original material at the show was well received by fans new and old. Glenda Nugent is in her 40’s and saw Shonen Knife play nearly 20 years ago. She was blown away by the music, and the band’s longevity.

“Three girls from Japan and who started off 30 years ago when it wouldn’t be so comfortable to watch that, going 30 years on and still get me downstairs and make me dance when I’ve seen loads of bands and I’m usually not bothered,” Glenda says. “I was really impressed.”

Shonen Knife plays in a new city almost every night in the UK as the band’s 30th anniversary tour continues. The Japanese punk rockers will show up in Canada and the US in October.

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