Amazon has advised employees from countries affected by President Donald Trump’s temporary immigration ban from seven majority-Muslim nations to avoid traveling outside the United States, and is working on “contingency plans” for those who are currently abroad, according to an email provided to The Verge.
Unlike some other major tech companies, Amazon has not issued a high-level public condemnation of Trump’s recent executive order, which has been contested by judges in New York and Virginia. But it appears to be worried about consequences for employees from the countries in question — all of whom can (and likely will) be banned from entering the US, even if they’ve been granted green cards. In response to questions from The Verge, Amazon forwarded a message from VP of human resources Beth Galetti, which was sent to the workforce.
From the very beginning, Amazon has been committed to equal rights, tolerance and diversity — and we always will be. As we’ve grown the company, we’ve worked hard to attract talented people from all over the world, and we believe this is one of the things that makes Amazon great — a diverse workforce helps us build better products for customers.
TOEIC学習の参考になるのは以下の具体的な対策を述べている部分でしょうか。until further noticeのようなおなじみの表現をたくさん見かけます。
Our immediate focus is to make sure you all have the information you need to make travel decisions in the coming days and weeks. Here’s what you need to do now if you are a citizen of any of the countries listed in the order:
- If you currently reside and/or work in the US and are present in the US today, we recommend that you refrain from travel outside of the US until further notice as you may be denied re-entry to the US for the duration of the entry restrictions;
- If you currently work/reside in the US (as a green card holder or on a valid work visa such as an H, L, E, or TN) but are traveling abroad, please contact amazonimmigration@amazon.com. We are working on contingency plans for these employees and will be communicating with them directly;
- If you work for Amazon in another country (and are a citizen of any of the countries listed above) and have current plans to visit the US for business or personal reasons, we advise you to cancel them until the entry restrictions are lifted.
I’m not Japanese. I’m completely American. And yet every morning you make miso soup. Well, the food is a different story.
最後の締めでは流行りのgritが使われています。短い言葉ですので聞き取りには苦労しそうです。
The women who came over had a lot of grit and fortitude. I don't think I would have had the courage moving with a man that I didn't know, whose language I didn't speak, to a country that I really wasn't aware of without any backup. What these women represent is what is good about people, that they can forgive and they can go ahead and just start lives with people who used to be their former enemy. （こちらに来た女性たちにはやり抜く力と屈しない精神力がありました。私にはそんな勇気はなかったと思います。知らない男性と移り住んだところが、話せない言語で、よく知らない国で、何の助けもないんですから。この女性たちが体現しているのは人間の良い面です。許して前に進み、かつて敵国だった人と生活を始めることができるのです）
In the 1950s, Japanese women seeking a new life in America had to learn about more than just visa requirements. They also had to learn how to cook hamburgers, entertain neighbors, and confidently walk in high heels. Eyeliner application was, apparently, a vital skill.
These immigrants weren’t just any women. They were the war brides of American G.I.s, and some of them learned these lessons at the American Red Cross, which ran schools designed to prepare them for domestic life in the United States.
The American Red Cross Bride Schools sprang up in response to the wave of marriages between American soldiers and Japanese citizens following World War II. Thousands of G.I.s were stationed in Japan during the postwar Allied occupation, which led to several romances with local women. Although the statistics vary, scholars estimate somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 such marriages took place through the 1950s.
花嫁学校に当たる英語はfinishing schoolなんですね。初めて知りました。
（オックスフォード） finishing school a private school where young women from rich families are taught how to behave in fashionable society
This superiority complex is evident in a 1952 Saturday Evening Post article reporting on the American Red Cross Bride Schools. The story is full of anecdotes about clueless Japanese students wearing too many slips under their dresses and slapping raw fish right on the stove. “They’ve been children in a nation’s defeat, have gone hungry, have cared for smaller brothers and sisters with the aid of a couple of old kimono sleeves in contrast to the dozens of diapers they’re now given for their own children,” the Post wrote. “Some are quick, some stupid, many average.”
In order to teach their pupils how to be Americans, the instructors had to emphasize the country’s gender roles. And as so many disappointed Rosie the Riveters learned after V.E. Day, America wanted its women back in the home. These Japanese war brides were destined to be housewives, just like their instructors. A typical class might include a tutorial on washing machines, or how to get crisp hospital corners when making the bed. Topics like U.S. history were covered. But cooking was perhaps the biggest part of the curriculum.
“I have a Japanese war bride mother and I grew up with a culinary repertoire of Sloppy Joes, pineapple upside-down cake, spaghetti, and tuna casserole,” says Elena Creef, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College. “It’s kind of hysterical. How did my mother learn to master these really basic, slightly awful all-American dishes? Well, she was trained. I guess those lessons were taught very well.”
The Saturday Evening Postという雑誌名だけだとピンとこない人もいると思いますがあのNorman Rocwellによる表紙のイラストを見れば、「ああ、あれか」となるのではないでしょうか。
（ロングマン） ˌSaturday ˌEvening ˈPost, The a popular US family magazine that started in 1821 and continued until 1969. It contained news, short stories, humorous cartoons, and reviews. Pictures by Norman Rockwell often appeared on its cover.
（オックスフォード） The Saturday Evening Post a US magazine established in 1821 and published each week. It became one of America's most popular general magazines from the 1920s to the 1960s and was known especially for its covers painted by Norman Rockwell and its fiction by such writers as William Faulkner and F Scott Fitzgerald. It stopped being published in 1969 but began again in 1971 and is now published six times a year.
（トランスクリプト） The emperor is telling us “we lost the war”. We lost everything. It was a nightmare.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, half a million American soldiers and 5,000 civilians came to Japan to work for the occupation.
The original order was that they’re not to fraternize with the local people. But this quickly became unworkable. Lots of romances developed.
American did look more attractive. They’re well-fed, happy-go-lucky. They had tremendous appeal to young girls.
By the late 1950s, tens of thousands of Japanese women and American men had married and moved to the United States.
I wasn’t in love with him. I don’t even knew him. I just took a chance. I want to get out.
They had to assimilate. So they were not encouraged to speak Japanese at home.
I think the most difficult thing for the girls to learn here has been walking on high heels.
In my in-laws, they don’t want call me Hiroko. They call me Susie.
We see pictures of you with your mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. Everyone seems to be happy and having a good time. It’s supposed to look that way in the picture.
Three daughters lived in the shadow of a story they wanted to understand.
I never really saw her as a mother because compared to the other mothers that I knew she didn’t act at all like them. I think the biggest challenge she faced was that she was raising American kids.
How were you able to go over those hurdles? Is it just because you were tough and stubborn? And also very proud.
I’m not Japanese. I’m completely American. And yet every morning you make miso soup. Well, the food is a different story.
The women who came over had a lot of grit and fortitude. I don't think I would have had the courage moving with a man that I didn't know, whose language I didn't speak, to a country that I really wasn't aware of without any backup. What these women represent is what is good about people, that they can forgive and they can go ahead and just start lives with people who used to be their former enemy.
Japanese War Bridesと聞いてジュリー・オオツカさんの屋根裏の仏さまの世界で描かれた「写真花嫁」をドキュメンタリーにしたのかと思ったらLucyさんのは戦後すぐの話でした。3番目のインタビューは地味な人選になりやすいのですが視野を広げてくれるものばかりで個人的には楽しみです。まあ来月はGritのダックワースさんなので有名どころですが（笑）
七転び八起きをそのまま英語にしたFall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Bridesというタイトルですが、米国の占領政策が7年に及んだことや戦争で適齢期の日本人男性が少なかったことなどから米国人と結婚した日本人女性が4万5千人もいたそうです。Lucyさんのお母様も含め良家のお嬢様もたくさんいたとか。
As for my family, my Japanese grandmother opposed my mother’s relationship with Bill, and neighbors gossiped pointedly. My mother didn’t care. Neither did she care when my grandmother warned her with an old proverb: “He’s like the bones of an unknown horse.” My grandmother was saying: Before you marry a man, you must know his family, his circumstances, his values. The soldiers were an unknown quantity in a society where lineage is all-important.
The U.S. government was not in favor of these liaisons either. The men faced tremendous legal hurdles to bringing home Japanese wives. The Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigrants through a quota system by nationality, also excluded any person who was not eligible for citizenship, and that meant Asians. Several temporary laws in the late 1940s allowed servicemen to marry their Japanese girlfriends and bring them home if they could complete the paperwork in time. The system was designed to make marriage difficult to accomplish, and easy for the young man to change his mind.
Passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 removed the legal obstacles, although paperwork was still considerable. Commanding officers continued to discourage the relationships, not just out of personal animus but also because they anticipated the unions might be deemed illegal in the men’s home states. In 1952, interracial marriages were still banned, at least on the books, in more than half the nation. The Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional in the 1967 decision for Loving v. Virginia.
With their can-do American persistence, some men lobbied their congressmen for help. In 1947, Angelo Amato had just turned 20 and was determined to bring Kimiko Yamaguchi — “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen” — home to East Boston. That’s how the young John F. Kennedy, his congressman, came to sponsor H.R. 8558, “A Bill for the relief of Kimiko Yamaguchi, May 18, 1950.” Their son, Joseph Amato, treasures the sheaf of letters from Kennedy regarding the bill.
I don’t think of myself as Asian American. In my Upstate New York upbringing, there weren’t other Asians, certainly not other Japanese Americans, with whom I might have felt some affinity. But I was surprised to find that even children of Japanese war brides on the West Coast — with its deeply embedded Asian communities — did not think of themselves as especially Japanese American.
I think that’s partly because the Japanese war brides so rigorously suppressed their former identities to become American. Their departures on the arms of American men were viewed with sadness, by the women and their families alike, because they were probably leaving forever. And there was an underlying tinge of shame that they had turned away from Japan or that Japan could not provide for them.
The women don’t view their families today as a branch on their Japanese family tree; they started from scratch. “I came here alone, and today I have 28 family members,” one woman told me with quiet pride.
Business leaders, politicians, economists and others attending the annual Davos retreat in the Swiss mountains have been debating the political and economic fallout from the globalization policies that conference attendees have long advocated. Advances in artificial intelligence and automation are ushering in changes to industries ranging from manufacturing to law, threatening to eliminate many jobs. Brin said technology's evolution is "inherently chaotic" and changes require debate about the proper ways for society to adjust.
もちろんretreatには「保養地」という意味もあるのを忘れてはいけません。そもそもダボスはリゾート地だけではなく、結核患者のサナトリウムがあったようです。ダボスのホテルの案内にthe Hotel Alpina is the ideal retreat.とあります。
The over 100 years old building in the middle of Davos still shines today at its former charm. First built as a sanatorium, it was converted to a hotel in the early fifties. With only 18 cozy rooms, the Hotel Alpina welcomes you with a warm and friendly atmosphere.
Its central but very quiet location above the main street of Davos invites you to relax. In just a few minutes walk you will reach the convention center, the indoor pool, the ice rink, the Vaillant Arena and the bus stop. Thanks to the regular bus services, you can quickly reach the various mountain lifts, sightseeing and shopping, that Davos has to offer.
The quiet, sunny site, the creative cuisine and Swiss hospitality ensure a pleasant stay both in summer and in winter. For an extended family holiday but also for relaxing days together the Hotel Alpina is the ideal retreat.
We look forward to welcoming you soon at our hotel.
It's all too easy to take a swipe at "Davos" - the annual Alpine pilgrimage of the so-called global elite, during which they underline the urgency of tackling climate change to the hum of private jet traffic, pledge to alleviate food poverty while snacking on caviar canapes, and commit to reducing inequality while being waited on hand-and-foot by an army of service staff at exclusive dinner parties. But beyond the often jarring contrasts, the World Economic Forum (or ze WEF, as locals call it), has always been able to point to its role in oiling the wheels of a socially progressive, pro-globalisation alliance - safe in the knowledge that, to a greater or lesser extent, it was in harmony with the tide of history.
In retreatはまさに今週のEconomistの表紙でもあります。トランプ就任の前から多国籍企業のグローバル化が伸び悩んでいたことを分析しています。
He did this through his Spiritual Exercises (exercitia means “workout”), a monthlong retreat made one-on-one with a personal trainer. The Exercises are now treated as a kind of spiritual boot camp to be experienced by incoming Jesuit seminarians in a group under one director （中略）
The exercises lie behind the modern practice of a “retreat” – withdrawal from one’s daily routine and patterns to consider their broader setting, possibilities, or shortcomings. Corporate and legislative bodies now encourage such retreats for secular purposes. Ignatius, of course, wanted to have a person reconsider his whole relationship with God.
Jesuits have never been shy about naming schools and other institutions after “Ours” (as they refer to each other)—Loyola, Xavier, Gonzaga, Canisius, Marquette. I went to Campion High School, where I was on the Bellarmine Debating Society, before entering St. Stanislaus Seminary—all three of them named for Jesuit saints. So one might have expected the first Jesuit pope to take his papal name from a Jesuit saint; there are, conveniently, two called Francis—Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Francis Borja (general of the order from 1565 to 1572). But Jorge Bergoglio took his name from Francis of Assisi, who was not a Jesuit, not a pope, and not even a priest. This is not surprising, since Bergoglio was not on good terms with his fellow Jesuits before his election to the papacy—which was probably why he was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, who despised Jesuits. John O’Malley, S.J., the great Renaissance historian, suspects that the pope thought he was not getting “a real Jesuit.”
Despite all this, some are trying to make the pope a “typical Jesuit,” though that is a mythical beast. There are Jesuits of all sorts, some to be revered, some reviled; some good, others bad. A good one died last year, the peace activist Daniel Berrigan, S.J.—though some thought that he, too, was not a real Jesuit. One of his superiors said he was “in the order, but not of it.” If I were looking for a bad Jesuit, I would name Pietro Tacchi Venturi, S.J., the secret intermediary between Pope Pius XI and Mussolini—a thorough anti-Semite, an authoritarian schemer, and a sexual adventurer. Fortunately, there are recent books that bring these two men into better focus—The Berrigan Letters(correspondence between the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan) and The Pope and Mussolini, by David I. Kertzer.1 Tacchi Venturi figures largely in Kertzer’s book, and is given solo treatment in a forthcoming book by Kevin Madigan of the Harvard Divinity School.
自身の名を冠した1970年代のコメディードラマ「メアリー・タイラー・ムーア・ショー（The Mary Tyler Moore Show）」では、一人暮らしをしながらテレビレポーターになる夢を追う独身女性という、当時としては先進的な役柄を演じた。同番組は7シーズンにわたり放送され、米誌タイム（Time）により「テレビを変えた17番組」の一つに選ばれている。
（ロングマン） Moore, Ma‧ry Ty‧ler /ˈmeəri ˈtaɪlə $ ˈmeri ˈtaɪlər/ (1936–) a US film and television actress and producer, known especially for appearing in several popular humorous television programmes, such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show(1970–77)
(Wikipedia) The Mary Tyler Moore Show, originally known simply by the name of the show's star, Mary Tyler Moore, is an American sitcom created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns that aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977. The program featured American television's first never-married, independent career woman as the central character.
What does Mary Tyler Moore know now that she didn’t know when she was in her twenty? That is OK. Whatever it is, it's OK because it's what it is. Don't be looking for perfection. Don't be short-tempered with yourself. And you'll be a whole lot nicer to be around with everyone else."
MARY TYLER MOORE TOSSES HER HAT Sept. 19, 1970 It was a simple little movement — Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat into the frigid Minneapolis air — but in addition to putting a perfect, um, cap on her signature show’s opening credits, the gesture also spoke volumes about Moore’s new-gal-in-town character, Mary Richards. ”Wasn’t it great?” says Moore. ”Freedom, exuberance, spontaneity, joy — all in that one gesture. It gave a hint at what you were going to see.” Viewers responded to what they saw, and Richards became the archetype against whom all other successful single women would be measured (Ally who?). Sure, the Chuckles the Clown episode and the WJM-TV clan’s group hug are classics, but for us, it’s the image of that heaven-bound hat (”a knitted black and turquoise beret my aunt had given me,” says Moore) that really sums up the creative spirit Mary brought to TV. Rank 2
In the days following the assassination, network cameras caught nearly everything: the tremor in Walter Cronkite’s visage as he removed his glasses and relayed the official announcement of Kennedy’s demise. The frantic scenes from police headquarters in Dallas. The gray faces of ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower as they walked up to the White House in the rain. That long weekend marked the moment we became a TV nation: Not only did television surpass print for primacy as a news source for the first time, it created a focal point for the public’s grief. By the time the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was broadcast live on Nov. 24, TV had not only become legitimate, but necessary. The point was driven home the following day, when the images from the funeral — a riderless horse, a veiled widow, a young son’s salute — were transmitted into our cultural consciousness.
”When the President was assassinated,” says Don Hewitt, executive producer of 60 Minutes, who has spent his life in TV news, ”people did not go to church or to meetings. They came to their televisions, and everybody who was watching was, in a sense, holding hands. They were saying, ‘Father Walter, tell us everything will be okay.’ And ever since, the real TV clergymen have not been Billy Graham or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, but Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw. Because in times of crisis, we now turn to them to hear that everything will be all right.” Rank 1
動画トランスクリプト This documentary, "Ukon the Samurai,” will soon be released in honor of Pope Francis recognizing Takayama Ukon, the Japanese samurai, as a martyr. This documentary highlights Ukon's life as one of the most important samurais in Japan, but also, as a prominent Christian figure.
Born in 1552, Ukon converted to Christianity, following the suit of his father and the mission of Saint Francis Xavier. As both master of the tea ceremony and master of the samurais, Ukon gained many Christian supporters.
A Japanese samurai who gave up his status to follow Jesus will be beatified in a ceremony in Japan on 7 February.
The ceremony for the beatification of Justo Takayama Ukon (1552-1615), known as the "Samurai of Christ", will take place in Osaka, Agenzia Fides reported.
Pope Francis signed a decree for his beatification in January last year and the Japanese have been preparing for the event since then.
Takayama, born in 1552, was baptized at the age of 12. Following the Tokugawa feudal government’s ban on Christianity, he was exiled to Manila in 1614 and died of disease the following year.
The approval of Takayama as beatus, or blessed, the stage below a saint, followed a campaign by Catholics in Japan for his beatification that grew active because last year was the 400th year since his death.
Do you need to work out a strategic plan? Build your team? Launch a project? It's unlikely that you will be able to work through these projects in a one- or two-hour meeting-;which is why many companies choose to hold an annual retreat.
"You start to understand perspectives that maybe you hadn't considered before," CEO and founder of Tutor.com George Cigale says of his company's past retreats. "Slowing down time allows you to think a little bit differently about the way you communicate and depend on each other." Throughout the years, Tutor.com's retreats have facilitated both large changes, like deciding to expand into the consumer market, and small changes, like instituting monthly meetings about operational metrics.
Taking time for a retreat eliminates daily work distractions and helps set the tone that the project you are working on is important and worth extra time. Here's how to get started on making yours a success.
A retreat is a meeting that is typically designed and organized specifically to facilitate the ability of a group to step back from their day-to-day demands and activities for an extended period of concentrated discussion, dialogue, and strategic thinking about the organization’s future or about specific issues.
2. Why hold a retreat?
There are as many reasons for doing a retreat as there are issues and challenges facing an organization. Among the most common uses of retreats are:
Strategic planning Budgeting Discussion of specific issues or challenges facing the organization Team building Problem solving Development of annual goals and objectives Orienting new members
3. Where should a retreat be held?
This is a challenging question for many organizations. Ideally, a retreat is conducted away from the normal workplace. The reasons for this are straightforward:
Retreats are hard work and require long periods of intense, uninterrupted discussion Participants are less likely to be interrupted by phone calls and staff members if they are away from the office Participants can better focus on the topics under discussion Participants are more like to stay for the entire time Being “away on retreat” creates a atmosphere that is more conducive to teamwork, creative thinking, and consensus building
Many governmental organizations are sensitive to holding meetings outside of their normal place of business. Citizens may criticize such meetings as efforts to “hide” from public scrutiny. There may also be criticism because of the cost of the retreat. Obviously, if a governmental organization enjoys a good relationship with the press and its citizens, such criticism is minimal.
It is usually possible to find a good retreat site within your city or county boundaries. Banks often have meeting rooms that you could use. The public library may be a good location. Local hotels have boardrooms or small meeting rooms that make good retreat locations. But the drawback to meeting close to home and office is the increased likelihood that participants will arrive late, leave early, or be interrupted by routine, day-to-day demands.
PHILADELPHIA—President Donald Trump sought to line up his party’s support Thursday behind an ambitious first-term agenda that includes a thorny health-care overhaul, tighter border security and a re-evaluation of U.S trade policy. In wide-ranging remarks about taxes, health care, trade, crime and manufacturing, among other policy topics, Mr. Trump used a retreat here for congressional Republicans to lay out his vision, saying that the country was at the “dawn of a new era of American independence.”
それにこのretreatは新形式のTOEICにも既出ですよね。パート5に出た方は一文なのでarrangements for the company retreatが「社員旅行」か「会合」が区別がつきませんが、パート4に出た方はa welcome dinner for the first night of the meetingとあったのでおそらく「会合」でしょう。
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
Mr. Obama entered office as a writer, and he will soon return to a private life as a writer, planning to work on his memoirs, which will draw on journals he’s kept in the White House (“but not with the sort of discipline that I would have hoped for”). He has a writer’s sensibility — an ability to be in the moment while standing apart as an observer, a novelist’s eye and ear for detail, and a precise but elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound.
He had lunch last week with five novelists he admires — Dave Eggers, Mr. Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Mr. Díaz and Barbara Kingsolver. He not only talked with them about the political and media landscape, but also talked shop, asking how their book tours were going and remarking that he likes to write first drafts, long hand, on yellow legal pads.
Outgoing president dines with five leading novelists and speaks at length of his short stories President Obama lunched last week with five top novelists, it was revealed He dabbled in short story writing before penning his best-selling memoir, 'Dreams of my Father' He typically reads for about an hour late at night He quizzed authors with questions about their book tours and talked about the industry By Geoff Earle, Deputy Political Editor For Dailymail.com PUBLISHED: 22:48 GMT, 16 January 2017 | UPDATED: 03:26 GMT, 17 January 2017
(Oxford) Xavier, St. Francis (1506–52), Spanish Catholic missionary; known as the Apostle of the Indies. One of the original seven Jesuits, from 1540 he traveled to southern India, Sri Lanka, Malacca, the Moluccas, and Japan, where he made thousands of converts. Feast day, December 3.
(Collins) Xavier (ˈzeɪvɪə , ˈzæv-, Spanish xaˈβjɛr) Saint Francis, known as the Apostle of the Indies. 1506–52, Spanish missionary, who was a founding member of the Jesuit society (1534) and later preached in Goa, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the East Indies, and Japan. Feast day: Dec 3
(Webster) Xavier Saint Francis 1506–1552 Spanish Francisco Ja*vier /hä-ˈvyer/ Spanish Jesuit missionary
Ferreira is speaking about an anomaly that was to color the fate of Christianity in Japan. The concept of God, under the guidance of Xavier’s illiterate Japanese guide, Anjiro, was introduced to the Japanese as “Dainichi” — or “Great Sun” — a manifestation of Buddha in Japan.
According to historian George Elison, Anjiro mistakenly told Xavier that “the Japanese believed in one personal God who punished the bad and rewarded the good, the creator of all things.” However, Xavier had only Anjiro to rely upon as a source of knowledge of Japanese culture, and he began his missionary career in the new land preaching the doctrine of Dainichi. It was only after discussions with Buddhist scholars revealed his error that Xavier switched to teaching the word of “Daiusu” — Deus — but the damage had already been done.
“The danger,” writes Elison in his seminal work “Deus Destroyed,” “was that old beliefs would remain tied to the adopted terminology, being submerged under the surface of the new terminology rather than erased.”
Idea of Christmas fills you with dread? There are loads of places to escape the festive season, where December 25th is just like every other day. Hop on a plane and leave the horrors of present buying, TV specials and the Queen’s speech behind. Make your own Christmas cheers this year in one of these stunning, anti-Christmas, destinations...
1. Japan Although you might see giant robotic Santas in Tokyo, Christmas is not traditionally celebrated in Japan. Instead, you can visit cities like Kyoto and Nara to sample traditional culture, head to Tokyo to immerse yourself in its futuristic cityscape or go to Hokkaido to sample some of the best powder snow in the world. And all this whilst enjoying the friendly and gracious hospitality of your Japanese hosts. Got to know Tokyo before you fly, check out our picture gallery of the Japanese capital.
Words checked = [2226] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [77%]
Wikipediaでは以下のように書いていますが、この記事ではThis was Japan’s first Christmas on recordと慎重に書いています。記録がないだけでザビエルが滞在していた1549年と1552年の間にもクリスマスは実施されていたのではないかというのです。
(Wiipedia) 明治維新以前 1552年（天文21年）に周防国山口（現在の山口県山口市）において、カトリック教会（イエズス会）の宣教師であるコスメ・デ・トーレスらが、日本人信徒を招いて降誕祭のミサを行ったのが、日本で初めてのクリスマスである。しかし、その後江戸幕府の禁教令によってキリスト教は禁止されたことで、明治の初めまでの200年以上の間、隠れキリシタン以外には全く受け入れられることはなかった。 This Christmas of 1552 is often called “Japan’s first Christmas.” That’s probably misleading. Xavier would almost certainly not have passed up the opportunity to celebrate a Christmas on Japanese soil between his arrival in Satsuma, today’s Kagoshima Prefecture, in 1549 and departure for India in 1552, according to historians Klaus Kracht and Katsumi Tateno-Kracht. There is just no record of such an event. De Alcacova’s letter, written to brethren back home in Portugal, is simply the first extant account of a Christmas celebrated in Japan.
Jesuit accounts of Japanese Christmases in subsequent years follow roughly the same pattern.
“High-class men and women assembled in great numbers in the priestly residence,” missionary Duarte da Silva writes in a letter about the Japanese Christmas of 1553, also in Yamaguchi City. “From one in the morning, they listened to stories from the Bible — hearing of the creation of heaven and Earth and of man’s sin, then of Noah’s flood, the separation of languages, the beginning of idol worship, the destruction of Sodom, the story of Nineveh, the story of Joseph’s son of Jacob, the Babylonian captivity, the 10 commandments of Moses and the flight from Egypt, then of the prophet Elisha, Judith, Nebuchadnezzar’s statue — according to the ages — and finally the story of Daniel brought us into the dead of night.” Such protracted instruction in Old Testament storytelling was meant to bring home the necessity of Christ’s advent — which the Japanese converts learned about during the second half of the night.
Japan Times On SundayはTimeは毎週日本のトピックを取り上げた読み応えのある記事を読めるのでいいですね。
Midnight in Broad Daylight In a year marked by cultural entrenchment, the true story of the Fukuharas, a Japanese-American family torn between Japan and America in the endgame of World War II, was a powerful plea for empathy. “The enemy looks like us,” says the main character, Harry Fukuhara, summing up his dilemma of conflicting loyalties — of being torn between family and country. Named one of the best history books of 2016 by Kirkus Review, “Midnight in Broad Daylight” is a milestone of narrative nonfiction, putting real human faces on the internment of Japanese-Americans and the atom bomb horrors in Hiroshima. A must-read — and, sadly, timely.
Beyoncé joined the growing list of celebrities supporting the upcoming Women’s March on Washington.
The usually tight-lipped star shared a picture of the March’s logo on Facebook gave a shout out to Chime for Change, a global campaign launched by fashion house Gucci that aims to raise money to empower women and girls. “Together with Chime for Change, we raise our voices as mothers, as artists, and as activists,” Beyoncé captioned the photo. “As #GlobalCitizens, we can make our voices heard and turn awareness into meaningful action and positive change.”
（ビヨンセのメッセージ） Together with Chime for Change, we raise our voices as mothers, as artists, and as activists. As #GlobalCitizens, we can make our voices heard and turn awareness into meaningful action and positive change. #WomensMarch.
His letters from Japan make extraordinary reading now, for even this erudite, open-minded scholar sounds a bit like an orthodox Muslim today commenting on the decadent West. The first thing to know about Japan, he wrote, is that everything is utterly different from other countries. Women, for example, are still free to marry even if they lose their virginity. Not only that, but unlike in Europe, women are quite free to leave their house and walk about town, without the permission of their parents. Most shocking of all, Japanese don’t object to a woman getting an abortion.
How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth-century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos and, from his own very particular perspective, Shusaku Endo.
When I use the word ‘particular’, I am not referring to the fact that Endo was Japanese. In fact, it seems to me that Silence, his greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.
（中略） I picked up this novel for the first time twenty years ago. I’ve reread it countless times since. It has given me a kind of sustenance that I have found in only a very few works of art.
Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence. What role am I playing, wonders Rodrigues? Why am I being kept alive? When will my martyrdom arrive? Of course, it doesn’t. Which means that he will be playing a role that is very different from the one he expected to play. He will not be following in the footsteps of Jesus. He will be taking a less revered path, and therefore playing a very different role. This is the most painful realization of all.
How do I translate the last pages of the novel, as abstract as Moby-Dick or The Idiot, into images and actions? So how do I film these interior sensations and realizations and emotions? How do I make the mystery of faith, and the ways of God, cinematically present? The answer is in making the movie — going to Taiwan, working with the actors and the cameraman and the production designer, shooting, and then putting it together in the editing room, adding a frame here and taking one out there, mixing the sound, timing the color, and deciding that it’s finished. But on another level, that answer lies within the cinema itself, and its way of pointing us toward what we cannot see.
定期購読者限定の記事になり恐縮ですがNew York Review of BooksではIan Burumaがレビューを書いていました。
Martin Scorsese’s beautiful new movie, Silence, based on Endō Shūsaku’s novel, begins and ends in the same way: a dark screen filled with the noise of summer on the rural coast of southwestern Japan, cicadas rasping, waves crashing, thunderclaps exploding, and rain lashing the rocks. In between is played out, for almost three hours, the harrowing story of two young Portuguese Jesuit missionaries on a clandestine search for another priest who is rumored to have renounced his faith after torture and to be living as a Japanese Buddhist. The tale, based on historical events, is set in the 1640s. Half a century before, the Shogun Hideyoshi, who unified Japan after years of violent conflict between regional warlords, had embarked on a merciless campaign to get rid of Christianity by expelling foreign priests and forcing Japanese Christians, concentrated mostly in the regions around Nagasaki, to give up their faith by stamping on images of Christ and the Virgin. Those who refused were subjected to a variety of hideous tortures: scalded in sulphurous hot springs, burned at the stake, crucified, drowned at sea, or suspended upside down over pits filled with excrement until death, often slow in coming, ended their torment.
A man was on a train in Japan, reading a novel set in Japan. The train slid past the mountains, bound for Kyoto, where the man, bearded, bright-eyed, was headed. The year was 1989. The train was a bullet train.
The man on the train was in a quandary, and the man in the novel he was reading was in a quandary; and as he read the novel, it emerged that his quandary and the one in the novel were essentially the same.
The man in the novel was Sebastian Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit priest sent to Japan in the 17th century. He was there to minister to Japanese Catholics suffering under a brutal regime and also to find out what had happened to his mentor, a priest rumored to have renounced the faith under torture.
The man on the train was Martin Scorsese. He was in Japan to play the part of Vincent van Gogh in a movie by Akira Kurosawa, another master filmmaker. He was also there to move past a brutal battle in America’s culture wars over a picture of his, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
The film had been pilloried by conservative Christians for a dream sequence in which Christ has sex with Mary Magdalene. In depicting Christ’s life as a doubt-ridden struggle between his human and divine natures, Scorsese had intended to make a film that was at once an act of doubt and an act of faith. In the novel he was reading, the priest was shown profaning an image of Christ, and yet the act was an act of faith.
The train slid past the mountains. Scorsese turned the pages. This novel spoke to him. All at once he saw it as a picture he would like to make.
The novel was “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese convert steeped in European literature and the history of Catholicism in Japan. Published in Japan in 1966, “Silence” sold 800,000 copies, a huge number in that country. Endo was called “the Japanese Graham Greene” and was considered for the Nobel Prize. Greene referred to “Silence” as “one of the finest novels of our time.”
The day the film had its premiere at the Ziegfeld — Aug. 12, 1988 — hundreds of picketers were there. So were several television news crews.
“After the premiere,” Scorsese recalled to me, “a group of us went to dinner at the Regency hotel.” The group included Universal executives; the celebrated director Michael Powell; Scorsese’s longtime editor and collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker; and prominent Christians who had supported the movie. Paul Moore, the Episcopal bishop of New York, had written a letter to The New York Times declaring that the movie dramatized the core church teaching that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. At the Regency, Moore told Scorsese about a book he should read. The next day he had it sent over: “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo.
In Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, China, and elsewhere, the persecution of Christians — often to the point of martyrdom — is real and continuing. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the word “martyr” has taken on awful new connotations. “Silence,” then, is inadvertently topical. Like the novel, the picture interrogates the very idea of Christian martyrdom, by proposing that there are instances when martyrdom — the believer holding fast to Christ to the bitter end — is not holy or even right. It makes in the way of art the arguments made in defense of “Last Temptation”: that an act can’t be fully understood if the intentions behind it aren’t taken into account, and that a seeming act of profanation can be an act of devotion if done out of an underlying faith.
日本では大航海時代と呼ばれるAge of Discoveryという言葉を紹介したくなった別の理由はつい最近上記の本をAudibleで聞いたからでした。今はルネサンス、発見の時代に匹敵する大激動の時代というのです。
日本人は何か新しい時代が始まろうとするとすぐに「第三の開国」とか、「何ちゃら維新」とか呼びたくなりますが、欧米にとってはルネサンスという言葉もそのような言葉なのかもしれません。Are We Living in a New Renaissance?と呼びかけています。以下のScientific Americanのサイトでは本の始まりである第１章の抜粋を読むことができます。英語学習的にはa New Renaissance という冠詞の使い方やflounder, or flourishという語呂の良さもチェックしておきたいです。
If Michelangelo were reborn today, amidst all the turmoil that marks our present age, would he flounder, or flourish again?
Every year, millions of people file into the Sistine Chapel to stare up in wonder at Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Creation of Adam. Millions more pay homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Through five centuries, we have carefully preserved such Renaissance masterpieces, and cherished them, as objects of beauty and inspiration.
But they also challenge us.
The artists who crafted these feats of genius five hundred years ago did not inhabit some magical age of universal beauty, but rather a tumultuous moment—marked by historic milestones and discoveries, yes, but also wrenching upheaval. Their world was tangling together in a way it had never done before, thanks to Gutenberg’s recent invention of the printing press (1450s), Columbus’s discovery of the New World (1492) and Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to Asia’s riches (1497). And humanity’s fortunes were changing, in some ways radically. The Black Death had tapered off, Europe’s population was recovering, and public health, wealth and education were all rising.
Have we been here before? I know — it feels as if the internet, virtual reality, Donald Trump, Facebook, sequencing of the human genome and machines that can reason better than people constitute a change in the pace of change without precedent. But we’ve actually been through an extraordinarily rapid transition like this before in history — a transition we can learn a lot from.
Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, and Chris Kutarna, also of Oxford Martin, have just published a book — “Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance” — about lessons we can draw from the period 1450 to 1550, known as the Age of Discovery. It was when the world made a series of great leaps forward, propelled by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Copernicus and Columbus, that produced the Renaissance and reshaped science, education, manufacturing, communications, politics and geopolitics.
この本の面白いところの一つにルネサンスの光の部分だけでなく激動の時代の闇の部分にも触れているところでしょうか。トランプに匹敵する扇動家がいたというのです。先ほどの冠詞の使い方がWas there a Donald Trump back then?とここでもされています。
Was there a Donald Trump back then?
（中略）
“From there, Savonarola launched an ugly campaign of public purification, introducing radical laws including against homosexuality, and attacked public intellectuals in an act of intimidation that history still remembers as the Bonfire of the Vanities. Savonarola was amongst the first to tap into the information revolution of the time, and while others produced long sermons and treatises, Savonarola disseminated short pamphlets, in what may be thought of as the equivalent of political tweets.”
In reading the book, I was really fascinated with the quotes taken from the Renaissance that sounded actual and real. You describe the era as an eruption of genius.
For me, the real driver of that explosion of genius was the printing press. It was the sudden sharing of ideas and information, and, with that, the desire to have literacy. Before then, only monks could really read and write in Latin the handwritten manuscripts in their monasteries, and the church had a monopoly of knowledge. This revolution democratized information in the same way the internet has today. But, of course, the numbers of people today are so much greater. We go from a world of only half a billion people connected in the 1980s to 5 billion people connected now. When I first went to China in 1980, only 78 people had doctoral degrees. Now there are hundreds of thousands. That’s a quantum shift in the number of incredibly gifted people around the world who are sharing ideas. If you believe in the random distribution of exceptional creativity, call it genius, there’s a lot more today—only the new Einsteins will not emerge from the streets of Vienna or New York or London; they will emerge from Mumbai and elsewhere.
It’s not just individual random genius; it’s also collective genius. When people come together as diverse teams, that’s when you really get sparks, and that’s happening across the board. It’s happening virtually—look at YouTube videos of people learning to hip-hop dance, sharing the latest moves around the world, or see what’s happening in the labs in the Oxford Martin School on new cures for cancer on a 24-hour research cycle around the world. It’s that collective endeavor which is totally unlike anything that’s ever happened before.
(Wikipedia) 「大航海時代」の名称は、1963年岩波書店にて「大航海時代叢書」を企画していた際、それまでの「地理上の発見」、「大発見時代」（Age of Discovery / Age of Exploration）といったヨーロッパ人の立場からの見方による名称に対し、新しい視角を持ちたいとの希求から、増田義郎により命名された。増田は、大航海時代の時間的範囲について、議論があると前置きした上で、具体的な始まりと終わりの年を提案している。増田によれば、大航海時代の始まりは、1415年におけるポルトガルのセウタ攻略。終わりの年は、三十年戦争が終結し、ロシア人の探検家セミョン・デジニョフがチュクチ半島のデジニョフ岬に到達した1648年である。
もちろんだからといってgreat voyageという言葉が使われないということではありません。つい先日New York Timesで大航海時代から地球はグローバル化していたというコラムがあったのですが、the monarchs of Spain and Portugal funded the great voyages of the age of discovery.という表現がありました。発見の時代はまさにgreat voyageがあったんですもんね。
It was in hopes of bypassing Venice and the Middle East that the monarchs of Spain and Portugal funded the great voyages of the age of discovery. The Portuguese mariners who pioneered the sea route to the Indian Ocean brought with them not just their religion but also the prevalent European faith in monopolies. This notion was alien to the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, where the rulers of the major ports had always vied with one another to attract as great a variety of merchants as possible. The Portuguese, and the Spanish, Dutch and English who followed them, were unheeding of these traditions: They never veered from their quest for monopolies, especially amid the vulnerable islands of the Moluccas.
◇啓蒙の定義 啓蒙とは何か。それは人間が、みずから招いた未成年の状態から抜けでることだ。未成年の状態とは、他人の指示がなければ自分の理性を使うことができないということ である。みずから招いたというのは、人間が未成年の状態 にあるのは、理性がないからではなく、他人の指示を仰がないと、自分の理性を使う決意も勇気ももてないからであ る。それゆえ、「敢えて賢明であれ Sapere aude !」「自分自身の悟性を使用する勇気をもて!」というのが、啓蒙の標語である。 Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!
◇未成年の利点 ほとんどの人間は、自然においてはすでに成年に達していて(自然による成年)、他人の指導を求める年齢ではなくなっているというのに、死ぬまで他人の指示を仰ぎたいと思っているのである。また他方ではあつかましくも他人の後見人と僣称したがる人々も跡を絶たない。その原因は 人間の怠慢と臆病にある。というのも、未成年の状態にとどまっているのは、なんとも楽なことだからだ。 （中略） Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature!
そしてすべての女性を含む多くの人々は、未成年の状態から抜けだすための一歩を踏みだすことは困難で、きわめ て危険なことだと考えるようになっている。しかしそれは 後見人を気取る人々、なんともご親切なことに他人を監督するという仕事をひきうけた人々がまさに目指していることなのだ。後見人とやらは、飼っている家畜たちを愚か な者にする。そして家畜たちを歩行器のうちにとじこめておき、この穏やかな家畜たちが外にでることなど考えもしないように、細心に配慮しておく。そして家畜がひとりで外にでようとしたら、とても危険なことになると脅かしておくのだ。 The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided.
ところがこの〈危険〉とやらいうものは、実は大きなものではない。歩行器を捨てて歩いてみれば、数回は転ぶかもしれないが、そのあとはひとりで歩けるようになるものだ。ところが他人が自分の足で歩こうとして転ぶのを目撃すると、多くの人は怖くなって、そのあとは自分で歩く試みすらやめてしまうのだ。 Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts.
おそらく革命を起こせば、独裁的な支配者による専制や、利益のために抑圧する体制や、支配欲にかられた抑圧体制などは転覆させることができるだろう。しかし革命を起こしても、ほんとうの意味で公衆の考え方を革新することはできないのだ。新たな先入観が生まれて、これが古い先入観ともども、大衆をひきまわす手綱として使われることになるだけなのだ。 A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.
人間の理性の公的な利用はつねに自由でなければならない。理性の公的な利用だけが、人間に啓蒙をもたらすことができるのである。 The public use of man's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men
A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant. I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.
We are a mere number and born to consume the fruits of the earth; like Penelope’s suitors, useless drones; like Alcinous’ youth, employed above measure in pampering their bodies; whose glory was to sleep till mid-day, and to lull their cares to rest by the sound of the harp. Robbers rise by night, that they may cut men’s throats; and will not you awake to save yourself? But, if you will not when you are in health, you will be forced to take exercise when you are in a dropsy; and unless before day you call for a book with a light, unless you brace your mind with study and honest employments, you will be kept awake and tormented with envy or with love. For why do you hasten to remove things that hurt your eyes, but if any thing gnaws your mind, defer the time of curing it from year to year? He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning. Boldly undertake the study of true wisdom: begin it forthwith. He who postpones the hour of living well, like the hind [in the fable], waits till [all the water in] the river be run off: whereas it flows, and will flow, ever rolling on.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life.
Esvelt has spoken about Lyme dozens of times in the past year, not just on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard but at forums around the world, from a synthetic-biology symposium in Chile to President Obama’s White House Frontiers Conference, in Pittsburgh. At every appearance, Esvelt tells the audience that he wants his two young children—he has a three-year-old son and a daughter who is almost one—to grow up in a Lyme-free world. But that’s not really why he speaks at infectious-disease meetings, entomology conventions, and international conservation workshops. He has embarked on a mission that he thinks is far more important.
Esvelt and his colleagues were the first to describe, in 2014, how the revolutionary gene-editing tool crispr could combine with a natural phenomenon known as a gene drive to alter the genetic destiny of a species. Gene drives work by overriding the traditional rules of Mendelian inheritance. Normally, the progeny of any sexually reproductive organism receives half its genome from each parent. But since the nineteen-forties biologists have been aware that some genetic elements are “selfish”: evolution has bestowed on them a better than fifty-per-cent chance of being inherited. That peculiarity makes it possible for certain characteristics to spread with unusual speed.
Until crispr came along, biologists lacked the tools to force specific genetic changes across an entire population. But the system, which is essentially a molecular scalpel, makes it possible to alter or delete any sequence in a genome of billions of nucleotides. By placing it in an organism’s DNA, scientists can insure that the new gene will copy itself in every successive generation. A mutation that blocked the parasite responsible for malaria, for instance, could be engineered into a mosquito and passed down every time the mosquito reproduced. Each future generation would have more offspring with the trait until, at some point, the entire species would have it.
At the meeting on Nantucket, Esvelt assured residents that he and his team fully understood the implications of manipulating the basic elements of life. He said that he regards himself not just as a biologist but as the residents’ agent; if they stop showing interest in the research, he will stop the experiments. He also insists that he will work with absolute openness: every e-mail, grant application, data set, and meeting record will be available for anyone to see. Intellectual property is often the most coveted aspect of scientific research, and Esvelt’s would be posted on a Web site. And no experiment would be conducted unless it was approved in advance—not just by scientists but by the people it is most likely to affect. “By open, I mean all of it,” Esvelt said, to murmurs of approval. “If Monsanto”—which, fairly or not, has become a symbol of excessive corporate control of agricultural biotechnology—“did something one way,” he said, “we will do it the opposite way.”
（アメリカンヘリテージ） bleach v.intr. 1. To act as or use a bleach. 2. To become white as a result of the loss of algal symbionts, usually following an environmental stress such as increased water temperature. Used of coral.
TERRY HUGHES: Reef sentinel A coral researcher sounded the alarm over massive bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. By Daniel Cressey
When Terry Hughes flew over the Great Barrier Reef in March, his heart sank at the sight of telltale pale patches just below the surface, where corals were dead or dying.
Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC’s) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, says that he and his students wept after looking at the aerial surveys of the damage. The bleaching hit nearly all of the reef, with initial surveys showing 81% of the northern section suffering severely. It was the most devastating bleaching ever documented on the Great Barrier Reef — and part of a wider event that was harming corals across the Pacific.
The trigger for this year’s coral troubles in the Pacific was a strong El Niño warming pattern in the tropical part of that ocean. Abnormally high water temperatures prompt corals to expel the symbiotic zooxanthellae algae that provide them with much of their food — and their colour. Some corals can recover after bleaching, but others die. Follow-up studies in October and November found that 67% of shallow-water corals in the 700-kilometre northern section of the Great Barrier Reef had died.
Corals throughout the world have struggled in the past couple of years, as global temperatures have repeatedly hit record highs. In October 2015, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that a global bleaching event was happening as coral reefs in Hawaii, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives began to succumb.
This year, the bleaching spread to Australia, Japan and other parts of the Pacific. Researchers say that, as climate change drives up baseline temperatures, bleaching will afflict reefs more frequently. Under some scenarios, this could happen so often that most corals can no longer survive.
Has comparable bleaching happened before? This is the third bleaching event that the barrier reef has experienced at a large scale, after 1998 and 2002, but this is much worse in terms of the number of reefs that are severely bleached. It could have been worse: we were lucky enough to have an ex-cyclone [the remains of cyclone Winston, which had passed over Fiji] come to the Queensland coast. It brought cloud to the middle and southern barrier reef, which cooled it down. Without that cyclone, the whole reef would have bleached as severely as the northern part.
The temperature on the barrier reef has slowly been rising as a result of global warming, decade by decade. Today, the northern barrier reef is half a degree centigrade warmer than it was 30 years ago. The southern part is closer to a full degree centigrade warmer. El Niño events happen on a regular basis. But it wasn’t until 1998 that they started to cause bleaching events. It’s the underlying baseline temperature that’s turning El Niño events into climate extremes for the reef.
Common factors The research team, led by Joshua Cinner, a social scientist who studies coral-reef systems at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, based its analysis on data that describe conditions at more than 2,500 reefs. The researchers used information on a reef’s habitat, depth, nearby human population and amount of fishing to model how many fish could live at each site.
The bright spots shared several characteristics, including high levels of local engagement in resource management, high dependence on local marine resources, and protective cultural taboos — such as excluding fishers from outside the local village.
Cinner’s work also suggests that the proximity of urban centres is a key driver of change in marine systems. It can damage reef systems that seem to be performing well to the naked eye, such as sites in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands that are part of a well-policed marine reserve but are still classified as a dark spot.
オバマ大統領の最後の演説。どうせアメリカの建国理念を再確認し「あなたたちが主役だ」というのオバマ節だろうと正直期待していませんでした。確かにど真ん中のスピーチだったものの、やっぱり感動してしまいました。トランプ大統領への毒はところどころ散りばめていたんですが、もう少し自分のできることを頑張ってみようとさせてもらえるリーダーは本当に素敵です。演説を一通り聞いて一番印象に残ったのはShow up. Dive in. Stay at it.というフレーズ。ワシントンポストも記事のタイトルにしていました。
But the warm embrace from his adopted hometown may have served another purpose, too, in helping to insulate Obama and his faithful from the stark reality that his goodbye speech was not the crowning valedictory they had so recently anticipated.
Over the course of 4,500 words, the president delivered a determined pep talk and reality check, warning his audience not to lose faith in democracy or to give up participating in the American experiment.
“Show up. Dive in. Stay at it,” he urged. “Sometimes you’ll win. Sometimes you’ll lose . . . And more often than not, your faith in America — and in Americans — will be confirmed.” America, we weaken those ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren’t even willing to enter into public service. So course with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen, not just as misguided, but as malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others.
これからなんでもトランプ大統領にせいにできるかもしれませんが、そんなことはオバマ大統領は許しません。なぜならwe in fact all share the same proud type, the most important office in a democracy, citizen. Citizen. So, you see, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you.だから。
America, we weaken those ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren’t even willing to enter into public service. So course with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen, not just as misguided, but as malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others.
When we write off the whole system as inevitably corrupt. And when we sit back and blame the leaders we elect without examining our own role in electing them.
(CROWD CHEERS)
It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy. Embrace the joyous task we have been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours because, for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud type, the most important office in a democracy, citizen.
(APPLAUSE)
Citizen. So, you see, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when you own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.
(APPLAUSE)
If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing.
(CROWD CHEERS)
If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clip board, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.
(CROWD CHEERS)
Show up, dive in, stay at it. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose. Presuming a reservoir in goodness, that can be a risk. And there will be times when the process will disappoint you. But for those of us fortunate enough to have been part of this one and to see it up close, let me tell you, it can energize and inspire. And more often than not, your faith in America and in Americans will be confirmed. Mine sure has been.
もし選挙結果に不満だったら外に出て活動を始めたらどうだShow up, dive in, stay at it.と激励します。If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clip board, get some signatures, and run for office yourself. Show up, dive in, stay at it. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose.と。勝つ時もあるし負ける時もあるが、それこそが民主主義を確固たるものとするのだからというメッセージ。まさにオバマ大統領は若い時シカゴの街角で活動を始めたんですよね。
自分もShow up. Dive in. Stay at it.を肝に銘じて頑張ってみようと思います。
The speech has been lauded, but there were some curious moments, most notably her chiding of the sport of mixed martial arts. “And if we kick ’em all out,” she said of all of the international stars, “You’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” The idea is, without all of the diversity present in Hollywood and at the Globes, we’d all be left with Trump and his supporters watching football and mixed martial arts, apparently the hobbies of the modern-day neanderthal.
格闘技の方が多様性を含んでおり、白人至上主義が続くハリウッドよりもマシというのです。
The choice of MMA showed not only a gross misunderstanding of what the sport is, who participates in it, and who its audience is. Not only is alluding that MMA is the sport of the immigrant-loathing Trump supporter insulting, it’s just plain wrong. By inferring that Hollywood — a culture so white-washed that #OscarsSoWhite became a movement last year and actors and actresses of color boycotted the profession’s premiere event — was somehow more diverse than sports in general, but especially MMA, Streep made her tender and eloquent moment laughable, even for the briefest of moments.
具体例としてゴールデングローブ賞の内訳をあげています。
At the 2017 Golden Globes, the event Streep celebrated for its diversity and international mix, only 10 of the 30 actors and actresses nominated in the six primary individual actor categories were either black or international and only one won, and that includes several British born actors and actresses. The other 20 were all American born white actors and actresses. That was up from last year when only three international or black actors were nominated, and none won. In fact, over the past three years, every single award in those major categories has been awarded to a white American or Brit, save for Viola Davis’ lone win on Sunday in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role category.
米国のフォーリン・ポリシー誌（Foreign Policy magazine）が12月12日に発表した2016年「世界の頭脳100」（The Leading Global Thinkers of 2016）に、当社の社員2名、鈴木 瑛と木田 東吾が選出されました。両名が手掛けている、臓器移植の普及・啓発を訴求する「Second Life Toys」※プロジェクトが高い評価を得ました。
Only about 300 people a year in Japan receive organ transplants, despite some 14,000 patients in need. The reason for this deficit is rooted in both cultural stigma (the traditional belief that bodies should be whole upon cremation) and legal restrictions that finally loosened six years ago (previously, only brain-dead individuals over age 15 could donate, and only with written consent). With Second Life Toys, which repairs and transforms damaged stuffed animals, Togo Kida and Akira Suzuki are counting on a new generation to end the nation’s transplant hang-up. Picture a lion with an elephant’s ear, or an alligator with a monkey’s tail. After the surgery, toy recipients are encouraged to write a thank-you letter to donors, making the process both personal and open. （年間わずか300人ほどしか日本では臓器移植を受けていない。14000名もの患者が必要としているにもかかわらず。このような不足が生じている原因は文化的な偏見（伝統的な考えでは遺体はそのまま火葬されるべきとされる）及び法的規制の両方があった。法的規制はようやく6年前に緩和された（以前は15歳以上の脳死者のみが移植可能で、しかも書面での同意がある場合に限られていた）。Second Life Toysという傷んだぬいぐるみの動物を修理して変貌させる団体で、木田 東吾と鈴木 瑛は国内の移植問題を終わりにすることを新しい世代に託している。ゾウの耳を持ったライオンやサルの尻尾を持ったワニを思い浮かべて欲しい。術後におもちゃを受け取ったらドナーにお礼の手紙を出すように依頼されており、このやり取りを個々人同士のものだけでなくオープンなものにしている）
より詳しい英文記事がリンクとして紹介されていました。冒頭のおもちゃのエピソードは共感できますね。泣き腫らすことをcrying my eyeballs outと表現しています。
ART 7 MONTHS AGO SECOND LIFE TOYS SUZANNE TROMP Everyone remembers that moment in their childhood when their all-time-favorite toy suddenly lost its eye, its arm or even worse, its head. After crying my eyeballs out, I would either try to fix it myself, or run to my mum to have her fix Lion as soon as possible.
Akira Suzuki and Togo Kida had a similar memory. While tossing ideas around for a new project besides their regular client work at Tokyo-based advertising agency Dentsu, they stumbled on a shared experience from the past: when they were kids they both tried to fix their broken toy by attaching something from another toy to it.
“There is this tradition called Kintsugi in Japan. It’s a way to fix broken dishes or tableware by using melted gold as an adhesive to connect the broken pieces. The idea is to cherish that restructured dish as something even more beautiful than it was before it broke. “And then, you’d have something new and you start to think that it is actually better than it was before,” Togo continues. “You creatively replace the broken part with something to have a new experience with the toy.”
(Wikipedia) Kintsugi (金継ぎ, きんつぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, きんつくろい, "golden repair"),[1] is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique.[2][3][4] As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
A metaphor’s desire to transcend diminishes any human story; its ambition to illuminate blinds those who create metaphors. In my distrust of metaphors I feel a kinship with George Eliot: “We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” My abandonment of my first language is personal, so deeply personal that I resist any interpretation—political or historical or ethnographical. This, I know, is what my husband was questioning years ago: was I prepared to be turned into a symbol by well-intentioned or hostile minds?
別の場所でもEnglish is my private language.とあくまで個人的なものであると書いています。
When we enter a world—a new country, a new school, a party, a family or a class reunion, an army camp, a hospital—we speak the language it requires. The wisdom to adapt is the wisdom to have two languages: the one spoken to others, and the one spoken to oneself. One learns to master the public language not much differently from the way that one acquires a second language: assess the situations, construct sentences with the right words and the correct syntax, catch a mistake if one can avoid it, or else apologize and learn the lesson after a blunder. Fluency in the public language, like fluency in a second language, can be achieved with enough practice.
Perhaps the line between the two is, and should be, fluid; it is never so for me. I often forget, when I write, that English is also used by others. English is my private language. Every word has to be pondered before it becomes a word. I have no doubt—can this be an illusion?—that the conversation I have with myself, however linguistically flawed, is the conversation that I have always wanted, in the exact way I want it to be.
In my relationship with English, in this relationship with the intrinsic distance between a nonnative speaker and an adopted language that makes people look askance, I feel invisible but not estranged. It is the position I believe I always want in life. But with every pursuit there is the danger of crossing a line, from invisibility to erasure.
