Japan – Page 4 – artdiamondblog.com

Stem Cells Used to Create Tiny, Simple Human Livers

“Researchers from Japan used human stem cells to create “liver buds,” rudimentary livers that, when transplanted into mice, grew and functioned.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) Researchers in Japan have used human stem cells to create tiny human livers like those that arise early in fetal life. When the scientists transplanted the rudimentary livers into mice, the little organs grew, made human liver proteins, and metabolized drugs as human livers do.

They and others caution that these are early days and this is still very much basic research. The liver buds, as they are called, did not turn into complete livers, and the method would have to be scaled up enormously to make enough replacement liver buds to treat a patient. Even then, the investigators say, they expect to replace only 30 percent of a patient’s liver. What they are making is more like a patch than a full liver.
But the promise, in a field that has seen a great deal of dashed hopes, is immense, medical experts said.
“This is a major breakthrough of monumental significance,” said Dr. Hillel Tobias, director of transplantation at the New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Tobias is chairman of the American Liver Foundation’s national medical advisory committee.

For the full story, see:
GINA KOLATA. “Scientists Fabricate Rudimentary Human Livers.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 4, 2013): A3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2013.)

The research article is:
Takebe, Takanori, Keisuke Sekine, Masahiro Enomura, Hiroyuki Koike, Masaki Kimura, Takunori Ogaeri, Ran-Ran Zhang, Yasuharu Ueno, Yun-Wen Zheng, Naoto Koike, Shinsuke Aoyama, Yasuhisa Adachi, and Hideki Taniguchi. “Vascularized and Functional Human Liver from an iPSC-Derived Organ Bud Transplant.” Nature (July 3, 2013) DOI: 10.1038/nature12271.

The French and Japanese Believe Water Cleans the Anus Better than Dry Paper

Source of the book image: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780805090833.jpg

(p. C34) Ms. George’s book is lively . . . . It is hard not to warm to a writer who can toss off an observation like this one: “I like engineers. They build things that are useful and sometimes beautiful — a brick sewer, a suspension bridge — and take little credit. They do not wear black and designer glasses like architects. They do not crow.”
. . .
In Japan, where toilets are amazingly advanced — most of even the most basic have heated seats and built-in bidet systems for front and rear — the American idea of cleaning one’s backside with dry paper is seen as quaint at best and disgusting at worst. As Ms. George observes: “Using paper to cleanse the anus makes as much sense, hygienically, as rubbing your body with dry tissue and imagining it removes dirt.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; 15 Minutes of Fame for Human Waste and Its Never-Ending Assembly Line.” The New York Times (Fri., December 12, 2008): C34.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 11, 2008.)

The book under review, is:
George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

If Truman Had Not Used the Bomb, Hundreds of Thousands More American Soldiers Would Have Died

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . , the author reminds us of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who had died in the conventional bombings of places like Tokyo and Kyoto while Roosevelt was president, but with relatively little opprobrium attaching to FDR. Father Miscamble cites as well the horrific massacre of innocents for which the Japanese were responsible, a savagery still being unleashed in the summer of 1945, and the awful cost of battle in the Pacific, including 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded at Iwo Jima and 70,000 casualties suffered while capturing Okinawa. With these precedents, Herbert Hoover warned Truman that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could result in the loss of between half a million and a million American lives. Marshall, Leahy and Gen. Douglas MacArthur each had his own projected figures, none of them wildly different from Hoover’s.

Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that Truman would not have ordered the use of a potentially war-winning weapon the moment it could be deployed. It is impossible to imagine the depth of the public’s fury if after the war Americans had discovered that their president, out of concern for his own conscience, had not used the weapons but instead condemned hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to certain death on the beaches and in the cities of mainland Japan.

For the full review, see:
ANNE JOLIS. “BOOKSHELF; In Defense Of ‘Little Boy’; Herbert Hoover warned President Truman that invading Japan would cost at least half a million American lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Japanese “Longevity” Due Partly to Government Over-Counting Centenarians

“A Kobe city official, left, visited Mitsue Watase, 100, at her home last week as Japanese officials started a survey on the whereabouts of centenarians.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Oskar Morgenstern is mainly known as the co-author with John von Neumann of the book that started game theory. But it may be that his most important contribution to economics is a little known book called On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. In that book he gave examples of social scientists theorizing to explain ‘facts’ that turned out not to be true (such as the case of the 14 year-old male widowers).
The point is that truth would be served by economists spending a higher percent of their time in improving the quality of data.
One can imagine Morgenstern sadly smiling at the case of the missing Japanese centenarians:

(p. 1) TOKYO — Japan has long boasted of having many of the world’s oldest people — testament, many here say, to a society with a superior diet and a commitment to its elderly that is unrivaled in the West.

That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said.
Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to check on other elderly residents. What they found so far has been anything but encouraging.
A woman thought to be Tokyo’s oldest, who would be 113, was last seen in the 1980s. Another woman, who would be the oldest in the world at 125, is also missing, and probably has been for a long time. When city officials tried to visit her at her registered address, they discovered that the site had been turned into a city park, in 1981.
To date, the authorities have been unable to find more than 281 Japanese who had been listed in records as 100 years old or older. Facing a growing public outcry, the (p. 6) country’s health minister, Akira Nagatsuma, said officials would meet with every person listed as 110 or older to verify that they are alive; Tokyo officials made the same promise for the 3,000 or so residents listed as 100 and up.
The national hand-wringing over the revelations has reached such proportions that the rising toll of people missing has merited daily, and mournful, media coverage. “Is this the reality of a longevity nation?” lamented an editorial last week in The Mainichi newspaper, one of Japan’s biggest dailies.
. . .
. . . officials admit that Japan may have far fewer centenarians than it thought.
“Living until 150 years old is impossible in the natural world,” said Akira Nemoto, director of the elderly services section of the Adachi ward office. “But it is not impossible in the world of Japanese public administration.”

For the full story, see:
MARTIN FACKLER. “Japan, Checking on Its Oldest People, Finds Many Gone, Some Long Gone.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., August 15, 2010): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated August 14, 2010 and has the somewhat shorter title “Japan, Checking on Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone”; the words “To date” appear in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)

The Morgenstern book is:
Morgenstern, Oskar. On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

China Exports to U.S. Are Smaller than Trade Stats Imply

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) The WTO says world trade fell 12.2% in 2009. On Friday, the organization predicted that trade would bounce back sharply this year, rising 9.5%.

But these figures don’t tell the whole truth about trade.
According to some economists, trade in finished products–the things consumers actually buy, such as cars, computers and iPods–declined by much less than 12.2% last year. That is because as much as two-thirds of the value of goods that go into trade statistics represent intermediate parts, which are imported from other countries and used to make finished products that then get re-exported. Economists call this the “valued-added effect.” If the value of imported parts were stripped out, however, global trade would have declined by between 4% and around 8% last year, economists say.
By ignoring the multinational composition of goods, conventional trade data also make trade imbalances between some trading partners seem larger than they really are.
China imports a huge quantity of parts from places like Japan and South Korea, but when those components are assembled into finished goods and shipped to the U.S., all the pieces count as Chinese exports, inflating the U.S. trade imbalance with its most polarizing trade partner.
A study by the Sloan Foundation in 2007, for example, found that only $4 of an iPod that costs $150 to produce is made in China, even though the final assembly and export occurs in China. The remaining $146 represents parts imported to China. If only the value added by manufacturers in China were counted, the real U.S.-China trade deficit would be as much as 30% lower than last year’s gap of at $226.8 billion, according to a number of economists.
At the same time, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan would have been 25% higher than the $44.8 billion reported last year, because many goods that China and others export to the U.S. contain parts purchased in Japan.

For the full story, see:
JOHN W. MILLER. “THE NUMBERS GUY; Some Say Trade Numbers Don’t Deliver the Goods .” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 27, 2010): A2.

Replication Easier than “Sweat and Anguish” of First Discovery

(p. 137) No one will deny that Japan’s triumph in semiconductors depended on American inventions. But many analysts rush on to a further theory that the Japanese remained far behind the United States until the mid- 1970s and caught up only through a massive government program of industrial targeting of American inventions by MITI.
Perhaps the leading expert on the subject is Makoto Kikuchi, a twenty-six-year veteran of MITI laboratories, now director of the Sony Research Center. The creator of the first transistor made in Japan, he readily acknowledges the key role of American successes in fueling the advances in his own country: “Replicating someone else’s experiment, no matter how much painful effort it might take, is nothing compared with the sweat and anguish of the men who first made the discovery.”

Kikuchi explains: “No matter how many failures I had, I knew that somewhere in the world people had already succeeded in making a transistor. The first discoverers . . . had to continue their work, their long succession of failures, face-to-face with the despairing possibility that in the end they might never succeed. . . . As I fought my own battle with the transistor, I felt this lesson in my very bones.” Working at MITI’s labs, Kikuchi was deeply grateful for the technological targets offered by American inventors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

Intel’s Computer-on-a-Chip “Was Achieved Largely by Immigrants from Hungary, Italy, Israel, and Japan”

(p. 111) By launching the computer-on-a-chip, Intel gave America an enduring advantage in this key product in information technology–an edge no less significant because it was achieved largely by immigrants from Hungary, Italy, Israel, and Japan. Intel’s three innovations of 1971–plus the silicon gate process that made them the smallest, fastest, and best-selling devices in the industry–nearly twenty years later remain in newer versions the most powerful force in electronics.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

After Lab Accident, Chip Innovator Shima Was Resilient

The incident recounted below is from the story of the development of the 4004 microprocessor (which was the first commercially available microprocessor). Hoff and Shima played important roles in the development of the chip.
I am not sure that the main “lesson” from the incident is about the importance of details. (After all, many entrepreneurs, including Simplot, embark on big projects without a clear idea of how to accomplish the details.) A bigger and sounder lesson may be the usefulness of resilience for successful inventors and entrepreneurs.

(p. 104) Hoff’s counterpart at Busicom was a young Japanese named Masatoshi Shima who also had been thinking about problems of computer architecture. An equally formidable intellect, Shima came to the project through a series of accidents, beginning with a misbegotten effort to launch a small rocket using gunpowder he made by hand in his high school chemistry laboratory. As he carefully followed the formula, he claims to have had the mixture exactly right, except for some details that he overlooked. The mixture exploded, and as he pulled away his right hand, it seemed a bloody stump. At the local hospital (p. 105) a doctor with wide experience treating combat wounds felt lucky to save the boy’s thumb alone,

This ordeal taught the teen-aged Shima that “details are very important.” In the future he should “pay attention to all the details.” But the loss of his fingers convinced his parents–and later several key Japanese companies–that the boy should not become a chemical engineer, even though he had won his degree in chemical engineering. Thus Shima ended up at Busicom chiefly because it was run by a friend of one of his professors.

Source:

Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Paperback ed. New York: Touchstone, 1990.

World Trade Barriers Are Increasing

The small dark blue squares indicate the “number of nations that have imposed protectionist measures on each country” and the light blue squares indicate the “number of measures imposed on each category of goods.” Source of quotations in caption and of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) BRUSSELS — This weekend’s U.S.-China trade skirmish is just the tip of a coming protectionist iceberg, according to a report released Monday by Global Trade Alert, a team of trade analysts backed by independent think tanks, the World Bank and the U.K. government.
A report by the World Trade Organization, backed by its 153 members and also released Monday, found “slippage” in promises to abstain from protectionism, but drew less dramatic conclusions.
Governments have planned 130 protectionist measures that have yet to be implemented, according to the GTA’s research. These include state aid funds, higher tariffs, immigration restrictions and export subsidies.
. . .
According to the GTA report, the number of discriminatory trade laws outnumbers liberalizing trade laws by six to one. Governments are applying protectionist measures at the rate of 60 per quarter. More than 90% of goods traded in the world have been affected by some sort of protectionist measure.

For the full story, see:
JOHN W. MILLER. “Protectionist Measures Expected to Rise, Report Warns.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 15, 2009): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Electric Mitsubishis and Nissans May Leapfrog Hybrid Toyotas

(p. B6) Both Nissan and Mitsubishi have their own reasons for rushing out an all-electric car. Having invested little in hybrids, they hope to leapfrog straight to the next technology.
. . .
“You don’t see many competing technologies survive in a key market for very long,” said Mr. Shimizu, the Keio University professor.
And more often than not in the history of innovation, a change in the dominant technology means a change in the market leader.
“Electric cars are a disruptive technology, and Toyota knows that,” Mr. Shimizu said. “I wouldn’t say Toyota is killing the electric vehicle. Perhaps Toyota is scared.”

For the full story, see:
HIROKO TABUCHI. “The Electric Slide.” The New York Times (Thursday, August 20, 2009): B1 & B6.
(Note: The online version of the article had the title: “Toyota, Hybrid Innovator, Holds Back in Race to Go Electric.”)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Clear Relationship in Rice Farming Between Effort and Reward”

(p. 236) What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of that work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful. First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it’s complex work. The rice farmer isn’t simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

And, most of all, it’s autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can’t work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.
“The thing about wet-rice farming is, not only do you (p. 237) need phenomenal amounts of labor, but it’s very exacting,” says the historian Kenneth Pomerantz. “You have to care. It really matters that the field is perfectly leveled before you flood it. Getting it close to level but not quite right makes a big difference in terms of your yield. It really matters that the water is in the fields for just the right amount of time. There’s a big difference between lining up the seedlings at exactly the right distance and doing it sloppily. It’s not like you put the corn in the ground in mid-March and as long as rain comes by the end of the month, you’re okay. You’re controlling all the inputs in a very direct way. And when you have something that requires that much care, the overlord has to have a system that gives the actual laborer some set of incentives, where if the harvest comes out well, the farmer gets a bigger share. That’s why you get fixed rents, where the landlord says, I get twenty bushels, regardless of the harvest, and if it’s really good, you get the extra. It’s a crop that doesn’t do very well with something like slavery or wage labor. It would just be too easy to leave the gate that controls the irrigation water open a few seconds too long and there goes your field.”

Source:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)