#2-11 Nowhere to hide [Oct 15th, 2011]

Nowhere to hide [Oct 15th, 2011]

Oct 23rd 2011 10:00-12:00 Ichigaya Renoir My space

Ono, Ogawa, Tomozawa, Saito, Kurasawa, Sotani, Miyabe and Yamazaki

Articles we discussed

[Leaders][Solar Power] Thou orb aloft full-dazzling

[Asia] Branding Japan as “cool” No limits, no laws

[International][Tax havens] Trouble Island

[Finance and Economics][Economic Focus] Realism rewarded

[Science and technology] Transporter of delight

We reserved a meeting room at Renoir for the first time. Members of the group increases so we are anxious about securing seats and comfortable environment for discussion. Renoir have meeting rooms around Tokyo so last week Ono, Ogawa and Yamagata decided to use a meeting room in Ichigaya for the study group. We had new comers this week. Miyabe, who is a friend of Tomozawa, working in a consulting firm and Yamazaki, who is a colleague of Ogawa came to join.

 We started from a solar power article Saito chose to discuss. The article insists two things. One is that solar power is now taking off and the other is that solar subsidies are wasteful. Tomozawa specialized in solar power inhis graduate school and Sotani is now struggling with renewable energy on her job so they leaded the discussion with various new ideas and information.

Second article we picked up was about “Cool Japan”. They introduce a striking picture of girls who are walking on Takeshita Street wearing strange colorful fashion, attached with words ”where Toyota failed...” I think this article is ironical because even though the headline “beautiful people join hands with bureaucrats” has a positive meaning, they don’t think the girls looks beautiful. The article introduce Japan’s“The Cool Japan Promotion Strategy Programme” promoted by METI. The whole context is favorable but as the title “No limits, no laws” suggests, they are doubtful of the strategy of bureaucrats who usually make regulations and rules.

Let’s follow remaining articles. Ogawa chose the third article about tax haven. “Haven” is different from “heaven”. But both meanings can be understood when we consider tax haven so we often take haven to heaven by mistake. Firstly we got ideas of the havens in shape. Then we made a brief debate about whether we should accept existence of tax havens or not. What would you say if you are “No” to tax havens? Debate was experimental but it was fan.

Ono picked up a column about two Novel Prize winners latest studies. He made a lecture of the winning and answered our question why they got prizes. He used a white board for the lecture. It was also new for us.

During his lecture the time was up because we had two hours reservation of the room but we still had one article from science and technology section. Kurasawa picked up “Transporter of delights”, which is about the genetics of happiness. She chose the article because we had discussed Brazilian optimistic attitude based on the article of Brazil economy. We moved to have a lunch and during the lunch we continued to discuss the topic. Most of us have curiosities and eager to learn new things.