First-Ever Japan-America Summer Picnic

Join us on Saturday, July 22 from 3:00 to 7:30 pm at historic Fort Ward in Alexandria for our first-ever “Natsu-Atsu” summertime picnic. It will be a Japan-America cross-cultural event featuring summertime foods from both countries, from onigiri and yakitori to hot dogs and corn on the cob – plus ice tea, lemonade, beer and wine.

Join us later in the Greek amphitheatre for a rocking concert by Nen-Daiko, Washington’s greatest taiko Japanese drum troupe.

There will be plenty of activities for children, visits to the Fort Ward Civil War Museum, and lots of time to walk the 43-acre park and see the Civil War cannon and defenses.

To top it all off, we will be giving away two tickets on Southwest Airlines (to anywhere it flies) plus a $50 gift certificate for J-Life International, an on-line store of Japanese products.

There is ample parking available in the park grounds, or you can park next door at St Stephen’s & Agnes School and walk directly into our picnic area. We have reserved the entire southwest area of the park for our event. (See the attached map.)

For more information, and to make reservations, please go to our website at http://www.us-japan.org/dc/programs/NatsuAtsu.pdf. Your friends and guests are most welcome to join us. Tickets are $25 for members and their guests and $30 for non-members. Children 8 and under are $12. Reservations should be made by July 16.

To learn more about historic Fort Ward, please go to http://oha.alexandriava.gov/fortward/. Fort Ward is just one mile from I-395 and is very near the Inova Alexandria Hospital.

Society Staff Invited to White House Welcome for Prime Minister Koizumi

The White House invited the staff of the Japan-America Society to be part of the welcome ceremony for Prime Minister Koizumi when he met with President Bush on June 29.

It was a wonderful recognition by the White House of the important role that the Japan-America Society in our Nation's Capital plays in promoting friendship and greater understanding between the American and Japanese people.

Smiling above are the Society's Associate Director Yukiko Hino (L) and Special Events Coordinator Reiko Hirai (R).

Collaborative Japan-America Poetry Reading

Noted Japanese poet Yoko Danno has collaborated on a new book of English poetry with a young American, James C. Hopkins. The two poets will give a selected reading of their collection "The Blue Door" on Thursday, July 13 at 'Chapters: A Literary Bookstore,' 445 11th Street NW (near Metro Center).

There will be a wine reception at 6:00 pm, followed by the poetry reading and book signing beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ms Danno has travelled to the United States from Kobe especially to join in this reading.

The Japan-America Society is honored to join Chapters in announcing the publication of their new work.

Society to Offer Prep Course for the JLPT

Get ready! For the first time, the Society's Japanese Language School will offer preparatory courses for Japanese language learners who want to take the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). The JLPT evaluates and certifies the language proficiency of non-native speakers of Japanese.

The exact starting date in September for our courses has yet to be set, but the JLPT test itself will be on Sunday, December 3, 2006 at Georgetown University. For information about the test, go to http://www.jflalc.org/?act=tpt&id=8

We believe we are the first and only language school in the Washington area to offer a JLPT preparatory course. For information about our JLPT prep courses, look for an announcement in August from the Society.

Japan Passes Italy as Most Elderly Nation

The Japanese Government said on June 30 that Japan had surpassed Italy as the world's most elderly nation, fueling concerns over the effects of a rapidly aging population on the world's second-largest economy.

People aged 65 or older accounted for 21% of Japan's population in 2005, the Ministry of International Affairs and Communication said in a preliminary report.

The ratio of people under 15 also hit the world's lowest level at 13.6%, dipping below Bulgaria's 13.8%, according to the report, based on a nationwide census taken last year.

The Wall Street Journal says that the plunging birth rate and an expanding elderly population pose serious concerns for Japan as it struggles to tackle a labor shortage and eroding tax base.

Japan's population dropped in 2005 for the first time on record, spurring a spate of measures to encourage women to have more babies. The government began a five-year project to build more daycare centers, while encouraging men to take paternity leave. Towns and villages have also launched matchmaking services to get more people to marry.

The country's birthrate in 2005 stood at a record low of 1.25 babies per woman, far below the 2.1 rate needed to keep the population steady.

2nd Annual US-Japan Baseball Night

Society staff members do their best to make everyone "happi"

at the Yankees-Nationals game

Almost 1,000 members and friends of the Japan-America Society joined a sell-out crowd at RFK Stadium on Friday, June 16 and watched the New York Yankees come from behind to beat our hometown Washington Nationals 7-5.

While we were disappointed that the great Hideki Matsui was sidelined by a wrist injury and did not join the Yankees for the Washington trip, there was no shortage of fans who wanted to see the Yankees play in Washington for the first time since 1971. All three games in the weekend series were sell-outs and drew the biggest crowds to RFK since basbeall returned to Washington last year.

The Society also was honored to invite 120 military members from Walter Reed Hospital (the US Army Medical Center) to join us for the game as our guests. This included wounded soldiers as well as Army medics who soon will be deploying to Iraq.

The lucky winners of the free round-trip airplane tickets to Tokyo, courtesy of All Nippon Airways, were Belinda Sterling of Virginia and Hirohide Takaseki of Maryland.

Society Trustee Outlines Plan for US-Japan Economic Integration

Matthew Goodman, a Japan-America Society trustee and a consultant with Stonebridge International, has co-authored a Financial Times article with former National Security Council officer Michael Green ("Why Saying Sayonara is the Hardest Thing to Do", June 27) that lays out a plan for economic integration between the United States and Japan.

Goodman and Green write, "we share the scepticism of many US-Japan experts about the feasibility - or desirability - of a [free trade agreement - FTA ] at this time."

"The idea is not ambitious enough: with few formal trade barriers between them, a conventional FTA would add little to US or Japanese economic welfare...At the same time, an FTA is probably overly ambitious in light of current political realities."

"Until both sides - but especially Japan - are ready to open fully their agriculture markets, a free trade agreement would be incomplete and politically untenable...."

"A more realistic approach would be to work on the 'building blocks' of an eventual comprehensive agreement. The two governments could seek to negotiate a series of smaller deals that addressed the underlying structural obstacles to full economic integration, covering services, investment, customs procedures and so on."

"In particular, the two governments could productively work on convergence of regulatory standards such as those covering healthcare products and services, financial services, and intellectual property. "

Goodman and Green conclude, "as the world's two biggest economies, with shared values, the US and Japan have much to agree on. Moreover, they could set the pace for global standards..."

The Freer and Sackler Feature Japanese Art - Three Times Over

The Freer Gallery and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution have three new exhibits featuring Japanese and other Asian art.

"Facing East: Portraits from Asia" is on display from July 1–September 4, 2006. This exhibition explores how portraits expressed cultural identities in Asia and the Ancient Near East over the millennia. Paintings and sculptures of Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese empresses, Japanese actors, Indian rajas and a host of other subjects reveal how the identities, importance and power of historical subjects were diversely constructed, understood and represented. The exhibition raises questions not only about visual culture in Asia, but also, more broadly, about practices of representing the self the world over.

"Freer and Tea: Raku, Hagi, Karatsu," on display from July 1, 2006–January 1, 2007, features the tea ceremony ceramics that Charles Freer collected by 1906.

"Freer—A Taste for Japanese Art," on display from July 1, 2006–January 1, 2007, celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of Charles Lang Freer's gift of his collection and museum to the United States. It features a selection of 31 paintings, calligraphy, wood sculpture, lacquer, and ceramics from Freer's Japanese art collection.

For two decades from 1887, when Freer bought his first Japanese painting, his interest in Japanese art grew deeper, as he sought to increase his knowledge of Japanese and Asian art and to understand the aesthetic harmonies between art of different historical periods and cultures.

Although he was encouraged in these interests by his friends -- the artist James McNeill Whistler and the scholar Ernest Fenollosa -- Freer relied on his own judgment and consciously resisted the decorative porcelain and gold lacquerware popular among Western collectors. Instead, he focused on painting, ceramics, Buddhist sculpture, and lacquerware from earlier periods, forming a collection of some 1100 Japanese works of art dating from the eighth through the nineteenth centuries.

Highlights of this exhibition include a Heian period (794–1185 Buddhist sculpture, a thirteenth-century Buddhist narrative handscroll, Miracles of the Bodhisattva Jizō, Moonlight Revelry at Dozō Sagami, by Kitagawa Utamaro, Fisherman and Woodcutter by Katsushika Hokusai, calligraphy by Hon'ami Kōetsu, paintings by Ogata Kōrin and ceramics by his brother, Kenzan.

Tokyo Area Continues to Grow; Osaka Shrinks

The Mainichi Daily News reported that the population of Kanagawa prefecture, which includes Yokohama and Kawasaki cities, has passed Osaka to become the 2nd highest in Japan.

The population of Kanagawa Prefecture is 8,823,227, some 2,142 people more than that of Osaka Prefecture, officials said.

While the gap is not that large, it is seen by many observers as a further indication that Japan's economic and population dynamics are dominated today by the greater Tokyo region -- and that the outlying regions continune to fall behind.

82% of Japanese People "Like Americans"

The Pew Global Attitudes project has been surveying public opinion in several countries around the world since 2001. It is most famous for its reports on the decline in America's global image since 2002 and especially since the war in Iraq was launched in 2003.

In its most recent report, issued on June 13, 2006, the Pew Project indicates that 66% of the Japanese people hold a favorable opinion of the United States. While that is a drop from 77% in the year 2000, it is still the highest rating that the US received among the 14 countries surveyed.

The Pew Project has discovered that there is a difference between attitudes towards America as a country and attitudes towards the American people. Many people are more critical of US government policies than they are of the American people. For example, only 32% of the Japanese people say they have confidence in President Bush's international leadership, and only 26% support the US-led war on terror today -- a major drop from the 61% figure recorded in 2002.

But when the Japanese were asked whether they held a favorable opinions of Americans as people, 82% said yes. No other country surveyed held Americans in such high esteem.

As for American opinions of Japan, our Pacific ally gets a 66% favorable rating, a slight increase from last year's rating.

Washington Post Raves about Laurel's Work

The June 24 Washington Post devoted half a page to the exhibit of art work by the Society's former Executive Director, Laurel Lukaszewski -- and even compared her to America's greatest glass artisan, Dale Chihuly.

The Post said that Laurel's work, featured in an exhibition called Shiroi Kuroi " straddles the divide between craft and high art. Lukaszewski's approach to her material -- she uses hard-fired white porcelain and black stoneware -- gives her work the illusion of transcending its medium. It's as if she transformed hard stone into something entirely more alive and lively. And the matte-surface minimal objects that result speak more to form than to color; about half the works are black, the other half creamy white. "

The Post added, "Many of Lukaszewski's works are made of coiled pieces of fired clay. The coils interlock to form hanging, freestanding or wall-mounted sculptures. The massive, 16-foot-tall hanging piece that commands the gallery's double-height entrance is an impressive sight, its 350 pounds of interlocking porcelain coils coming together in an organic form suggesting a cocoon or Spanish moss. The stone curls hang off central metal supports that are practically invisible. The work itself hangs, almost too simply to be safe, from a single hook. Up close, individual coils are almost magically deceiving. Varying in diameter from a quarter-inch to about a half-inch, the components look as if they're made of anything but fired stone."

"As I moved through the exhibition," the Post art critic said, "I had to remind myself of what I was looking at. Lukaszewski's manipulation is really that good. Some of these pieces -- the 16-footer in particular but a number of other hanging works as well -- suggest the bravado of Dale Chihuly's glass sculptures. These pieces, too, would be comfortable in a hotel or corporate lobby; they're easy on the eyes and have big presence. Yet they are subtle enough in color and demeanor that they subvert some of their own bluster (which means they're not much like Chihuly after all."

Laurel's exhibition continues through July 29 at the Project 4 Gallery, 903 U Street NW, in Washington (tel: 202-232-4340). The gallery's hours are 2-6 pm Wednesday-Friday and noon-6pm on Saturdays.

Green Tea Is Good for You, Say Yale Researchers

Reuters reports that green tea could be responsible for the lower cancer rate and better heart health in Asia.

While smoking is a well-known cause of heart disease and lung cancer, the rates of these diseases have remained inexplicably low in Asian countries where smoking is common. But researchers say there is growing evidence that green tea is one piece of the puzzle.

Writing in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Yale University researchers detail the body of evidence linking green tea to better heart health and a lower risk of cancer.

No one is suggesting that smokers ignore the danger of the habit and simply drink green tea. But research indicates that the tea’s high concentration of antioxidants called catechins may offer a range of health benefits, according to Dr. Bauer E. Sumpio and his colleagues at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.