Word: japanes
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...February, Dong signed a licensing agreement with Japan's Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding for Inbicon's biomass-refinery technology to convert waste products from palm oil into ethanol. "In our view, being on the edge of new green technologies is a great opportunity," says Eldrup. "It gives us an advantage in reducing CO[subscript 2], but it also gives us technological advantages as well as business opportunities. The U.S. has very high ambitions to increase its ethanol production, and we think this might be a great opportunity in years to come...
...there are other compelling reasons for the RMB to rise. A revaluation will help China rebalance its economy by increasing the attractiveness of imports from everywhere; both developing nations like Vietnam and Thailand, whose own industrial development has been stunted by an undervalued RMB, to traditional manufacturing powers like Japan and South Korea will all likely benefit. That fact might not win votes in rust belt America - and the U.S. Congress may be only temporarily appeased - but it is a fact: The global economy desperately needs China to pull more weight, and a stronger RMB helps...
...Japan, kodokushi, a phenomenon first described in the 1980s, has become hauntingly common. In 2008 in Tokyo, more than 2,200 people over 65 died lonely deaths, according to statistics from the city's Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health. The deaths most often involve men in their 50s and the nation's rapidly increasingly elderly population. Today, 1 in 5 Japanese is over 65; by 2030 it will be 1 in 3. With senior citizens increasingly living away from family and a nationwide shortage of nursing homes, many are now living alone. "There is a kind of myth...
...Japan's two-decade economic slump is not helping. The collapse of the bubble economy after 1990 shrunk the size of Japanese firms and led to a restructuring that is still playing out today. The percentage of the workforce employed in part-time, temporary and contract work has tripled since 1990, forcing workaholic Japanese businessmen, many of whom never married, into a lonely early retirement. "Their world has evaporated under their feet," says Scott North, an Osaka University sociologist who studies Japanese work life. "The firm has been everything for these men. Their sense of manliness, their social position, their...
...Ichinose speculates that the kodokushi trend might be connected to Japan's contemporary cultural habit of ignoring death, and a possible avenue of research for the Institute of Death and Life Studies. "I don't know why," he says, "but people don't want to see a dead body and, in general, they don't want to talk about death...