In the four-minute advertorial, a young Chinese woman, her long hair pulled into a ponytail, weeps as her parents discuss her single status. “She’s just average-looking, not too pretty,” her mother says. “That’s why she’s a leftover.” In China the phrase sheng nu, or “leftover woman,” is a derogatory term referring to those in their late 20s who are unmarried.
A Procter & Gamble marketing campaign aims to remove this stigma while promoting products such as its $179 Facial Treatment Essence and $225 GenOptics drops for age spots, both included in its pricey SK-II skin-care line. The campaign features women who’ve chosen to pursue their dreams instead of being pressured into marrying for the sake of it. It’s helped increase sales of SK-II in China more than 50 percent over the past nine months, says Markus Strobel, global president of SK-II. “This campaign has put us on the map in China and generated extremely positive sentiment among consumers and retailers,” he says. “It’s helping us win with young professional and executive women.”
advertorialという単語は英和辞典にも載っていました。
（ウィズダム） advertorial (新聞雑誌の)記事形式の広告, PR記事.
（ケンブリッジ・ビジネス） advertorial an advertisement that is designed to look like a written article and seems to be giving information rather than advertising a product: Learn more about advertorials and how they can be an effective advertising medium for the products you sell online.
The bottom line: A marketing campaign in China for SK-II products has boosted sales growth more than 50 percent over the past nine months.
記事で It encourages women to overcome barriers and work and live as they want.と書かれているようにそのような女性たちを応援するために広告が作成されたのでしょうが、容姿を強調しすぎだという批判やこの広告一つで問題が解決されるわけではないというもっともな指摘もあります。
Gilhool is no fan of P&G’s campaign, saying it emphasizes women’s appearance and not their accomplishments. “I think the impact of the ad isn’t aligned with the intention,” she says. P&G spokesman Damon Jones says the campaign “celebrates women who are independent and creating their own definition of happiness, regardless of societal expectations.”
Chinese women who want to delay marriage or stay single say it will take more than an ad to alter prejudices. “The commercial just spells out the problems we have. It doesn’t really give a solution,” says Tong Lei, a 36-year-old executive who works in the tourism industry in Shanghai. She’s seen the video but hasn’t used SK-II products. “My parents can understand that society has changed,” she says, “but their values, in terms of prizing marriage, won’t change.” She says her relationship with her parents improved only after she moved from their home into her own apartment two years ago, an option not economically possible for many single women. “This mindset of looking down on single women will only change when my generation becomes parents,” she says.
日本にいると「中国けしからん！愛国日本！！」という雰囲気が強く中国人を煙たく思いがちですが、自分らしい人生を模索している点では我々と何ら変わりはないですよね。広告の最後にあったDon't pressure dictate your futureという言葉が印象的です。（それこそ広告の思う壺だという人もいるかもしれませんが。。。）
（ロングマン） load/install software Don't let your kids load pirated games software onto your machine.
download software Users can download the software without charge.
公式 TOEIC Listening & Reading 問題集 1のパート3で「箱をダウンロードする」と言っているように聞こえたので「おっdownloadもinstallのように色々なものを降ろす時にも使えるのか！」とスクリプトを調べてみたら、なんてことはないI’ve just unloaded the last box of …と動詞unloadが使われていただけでした。。。（汗）
前書きの一部ですが、英語学習を今でも続けている人は同じマインドを持っているのではないでしょうか。 Secondly, we both maintain the same “hungry heart” we possessed in our youth, that persistent feeling that “this is not good enough”, that we must dig deeper, forge farther ahead. This is the major motif of our work and our lives. Observing Ozawa in action, I could feel the depth and intensity of the desire he brought to his work. He was convinced of his own rightness and proud of what he was doing, but not in the least satisfied with it. I could see he knew he should be able to make the music even better, even deeper, and he was determined to make it happen even as he struggled with the constraints of time and his own physical strength.
In a conversation about the quality of the sound at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Ozawa recalls a live taping there of Brahms’s First Symphony with the Saito Kinen Orchestra in 2010: “When we recorded this,” he said, “I hadn’t been there for some time, and I’m pretty sure it changed in that time. It got a lot better.”
Mr. Murakami: “I heard it was renovated.”
Mr. Ozawa: “Oh, really? That makes sense.”
Mr. Ozawa led the Vienna Philharmonic in three concerts at Carnegie in 2004. “I remember then thinking that the sound had improved,” he says. “It certainly hadn’t when I was there with the Boston Symphony” some eight years before.
But this is all balderdash. The wholesale renovation of Carnegie took place in 1986, and the concrete left under the stage floor was removed in 1995. No changes significantly affecting the acoustics have been made since.
MURAKAMI: Now that you mention it, Mann said a lot about the breath. When people sing, they have to take a breath as some point. But “unfortunately,” he said, string instruments don’t have to breath, so you have to keep the breath in mind as you play. That “unfortunately” was interesting. He also talked a lot about silence. Silence is not just the absence of sound: there is a sound called silence. OZAWA: Ah, that’s the same thing as the Japanese idea of ma. The same concept comes up in gagaku, and in playing the biwa and the shakuhachi. It’s very much like that. This kind of ma is written into the score in some Western music, but there is also some in which it’s not written. Mann has a very good understanding of these things.
OZAWA: Yes, in both my conducting and my teaching. I don’t approach either with preconceived ideas. I don’t prepare beforehand but decide on the spot when I see who I’m dealing with. I respond then and there when I see how they are handling things. Somebody like me could never write an instruction manual. I don’t have anything to say until I’ve got a musician right in front of me. MURAKAMI: And then, depending on who that musician is, it changes what you say. It must be good for the students to have the two of you in combination: you, with your flexible approach, and Robert Mann, with his unwavering philosophy. I bet it works out very well. OZAWA: Yes, I think so.
OZAWA: … you can pour a lot of time into rehearsing each one. Take the rehearsals we’re doing now: we probe very deeply into each piece. And the more you rehearse, the more difficulties come to the surface. MURAKAMI: You mean, the more time you spend rehearsing, the more difficult become the various hurdles that need to be cleared? OZAWA: That’s right. You may get them to where they’re all breathing together, but still the parts are perfectly synced. The nuances of sound are a little off, say, or the rhythms are not quite together. So you put lots of time into refining each of these tiny details. That way, tomorrow’s performance should be at an even higher level. So then you demand even more from them. This process teachers me an awful lot.
そうそう今週のNew York TimesのBook ReviewでThe SympathizerやNothing Ever Diesのベトナム系作家Viet Thanh Nguyenが夕食会に呼びたい三人の作家に村上春樹を選んでました。
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Haruki Murakami, since it seems unlikely I’ll ever meet him. He can curate the music and cook spaghetti. Carrie Fisher, for her wit and bravura. Lastly, John Berger. I love that Berger gave half his Booker Prize money in 1972 to the Black Panthers, and used the other half to fund the research for his next book on migrant laborers. Berger was the kind of writer we need more of — politically committed, aesthetically serious, always curious.
Simmering grievances against the fast-food industry don’t entirely explain why the story of Ray Kroc merits relevance in 2017. The Founder also bears some strong resemblances to recent industry-themed movies—Steve Jobs, The Social Network—that have not only sought to chronicle the histories of hugely influential companies and gesture at their far-reaching impacts, but also gawk doubtfully at the manias of their creators. As a title, The Founder is a provocation: After all, the McDonald brothers created McDonald’s and, like the Winklevii of an earlier era, their roles have been mostly written out of the history.
Another potential and potent reason for its newsworthiness has to do with an additional theme that connects Kroc to the present day: the arrival of a hectoring, fast-food-loving salesman into the highest seat of power. “However decent the director’s original intentions, The Founder emerges as the first Trumpist film of the new era,” wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in his review. Another entry from Flavorpill is entitled “I Dare You to Watch ‘The Founder’ Without Thinking About Trump.” That The Founder’s release date switched twice before it was finally slated for wide release on Inauguration Day only fuels this theory.
Japan Times On Sundayの書評を楽しみにしているのですが、先週号にはPicture Brideの方が紹介されていたんですね。映画Silenceのレビューに気をとられていました（汗）
‘Picture Bride Stories’: Stories of the resilient women who traded Japan for the cane fields of Hawaii BY NICOLAS GATTIG SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES JAN 21, 2017 ARTICLE HISTORY PRINT SHARE “I thought if there was a way to walk across the ocean (back) to Japan, I would have done so.” This is how Haruno Tazawa remembers her early experience as a “picture bride” — the name for the more than 20,000 women who, during the period of restricted immigration between 1908 and 1924, left Japan to marry Japanese men mainly in Hawaii after only seeing them in photographs.
In “Picture Bride Stories,” Barbara F. Kawakami interviews 16 of these women who sailed to Hawaii, including Tazawa. A rich tapestry of immigrant lives, the book is narrated with generous sweep and great anthropological detail. A recurring theme is the hardships many of the women endured on the sugar plantations where they worked. Often lacking any English skills, many brides traded their family homes for makeshift shacks and their full lifestyles for social isolation. On top of chores and child rearing, most women joined their husbands in the cane fields, learning that cutting cane in tropical heat was different from farm work in rural Japan.
アマゾンでの紹介文がこちらです。カワカミさんはハワイの写真花嫁を中心に取り上げているようです。
Picture Bride Stories, by Barbara F. Kawakami. 298 pages LATITUDE 20, Nonfiction. 内容紹介 During the 1885 to 1924 immigration period of plantation laborers from Japan to Hawaii, more than 200,000 Japanese, mostly single men, made the long journey by ship to the Hawaiian Islands. As it became apparent that they would never return to Japan, many of the men sent for brides to join them in their adopted home. More than 20,000 of these picture brides immigrated from Japan and Okinawa to Hawaii to marry husbands whom they knew only through photographs exchanged between them or their families.
Based on Barbara Kawakami's first-hand interviews with sixteen of these women, Picture Bride Stories is a poignant collection that recounts the diverse circumstances that led them to marry strangers, their voyages to Hawaii, the surprises and trials that they encountered upon arriving, and the lives they led upon settling in a strange new land. Many found hardship, yet persevered and endured the difficult conditions of the sugarcane and pineapple plantations for the sake of their children. As they acclimated to a foreign place and forged new relationships, they overcame challenges and eventually prospered in a better life. The stories of the issei women exemplify the importance of friendships and familial networks in coping with poverty and economic security. Although these remarkable women are gone, their legacy lives on in their children, grandchildren, and succeeding generations.
In addition to the oral histories the result of forty years of interviews the author provides substantial background on marriage customs and labor practices on the plantations.
著者について Barbara F. Kawakami (nee Oyama) was born in Japan in 1921 and immigrated to Hawaii with her family when she was three months old. She learned to sew at a young age, and for thirty-eight years was a dressmaker a profession she continued after marriage while raising a family of three children. At age fifty-three, she entered college and earned a BS in fashion design and merchandising, and later an MA in Asian studies. Ms. Kawakami has been a researcher, writer, and consultant for a number of projects, including the film Picture Bride, released by Miramax Pictures in 1994. Her award-winning book, Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii 1885 1941, was published in 1993.
Picture brides The term picture bride refers to a practice in the early twentieth century by immigrant workers who married women on the recommendation of a matchmaker who exchanged photographs between the prospective bride and groom. Arranged marriages were not unusual in Japan and originated in the warrior class of the late Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Men and women had different motivations for marrying or becoming a picture bride and despite these differences, these picture brides, or shashin hanayome, were critical to the establishment of the Japanese community in both Hawai'i and America.
この記事はFORTUNE CEO Dailyというメルマガの紹介がコンパクトにまとまっていたのでそちらを紹介します。核ミサイル格納庫を改築したluxury condo retreatsが出てきますが、ここでは「避難所」みたいな意味でいいのではないでしょうか。世界の終わりが来ても逃げ込めるシェルターこそまさに究極のretreatですね。
SPEAKING OF ESCAPE... "Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich", in the New Yorker , is everything a magazine article should be: Surprising, nuanced, and layered with multiple levels of meaning. As the title conveys, it's about ultra-wealthy types—mostly in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—who have adopted the sorts of survivalist plans that are possible for those with nine-figure assets. (The article appeared before news broke that venture capitalist billionaire and Trump acolyte Peter Thiel obtained citizenship in New Zealand.) One investment chief tells the writer, Evan Osnos, "I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system." Why, yes, I see how those could come in handy. Readers go on to visit an underground former nuclear missile silo near Wichita, Ks., now converted to luxury condo retreats (in the most literal sense) for the wealthy…when the people with the pitchforks come. 「超金持ちのためのこの世の終わりへの備え」は雑誌ニューヨーカーの記事だが、雑誌記事に必要なものがすべて詰まっている。驚きを与え、考えさせられ、重層的な見方を示してくれている。タイトルが伝えている通り、超富裕層の中で、多くがシリコンバレーやウォール街出身だが、緊急事態の備えをしているタイプについてである。この備えは9桁の資産がないと実行できない。（この記事が出てからベンチャーキャピタリストで億万長者のトランプ支持者Peter Thielがニュージランドの国籍を取得したというニュースが飛び込んできた）。ある投資責任者がライターのEvan Osnosに次のように語った「ヘリコプターの燃料を常に満タンにしているし、地下シェルターには空気清浄装置がある」まあ、これらのことは役立つことはわかる。読み進めると、カンザス州ウィチタにある地下の核ミサイル格納庫を訪れることになる。今は裕福な人のため（まさに文字通りの意味で）豪華マンションの避難所に改築されている。 This isn't a story about a handful of quirky paranoiacs. Osnos diagnoses significantly graver social maladies, and they're hardly limited to a few people: "A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k)." He notes that the doomsday preparations accelerated after 2008, sped up some more during Obama's second terms and yes, continue to mount today. In New Zealand, which you'll discover is the lusher, more aesthetically pleasing alternative to an underground silo in Kansas, 13,401 Americans registered—the first step in applying for citizenship—in the days after Donald Trump was elected president. That's more than 17 times the usual rate, according to Osnos. （この話は一握りの変わった誇大妄想者についてのものではない。Osnosが診断しようとするのは最も深刻な社会病理である。ほんのわずか人々に限ったものではないのだ。「ナショナルジオグラフィックに委託を受けた調査によれば40パーセントのアメリカ人が食料を貯め込んだり、防空シェルターを建てた方が401Kの積立年金よりも賢い投資だと考えているのだ」この世の終わりに備えをするのが広まったのは2008年以降で、オバマ政権第２期でさらに増えていった。もちろん、今でも増え続けている。ニュージーラーンドは緑の豊かで美しいので、カンザス州の地下サイロに代わる選択肢になっているので、13401名のアメリカ人がドナルド・トランプが大統領に当選した日以降に登録をしている。これは国籍申請の第一歩である。Osnosによれば通常の17倍の割合だ） By the time this article is done, Osnos has astutely compared today's income inequality and rising resentment of the wealthy (at least, as it's perceived by those affluent people) to a similar era more than a century ago, when John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were symbols of profligate riches at a moment of stark economic gaps and perceptions of government failure. As Osnos points out, those titans decided to spend their millions to address social ills; the people he describes in this article are using their wealth to flee them. （この記事が終わるところで、Osnosは今日の収入格差と高まる富裕層への恨み（少なくとも裕福な人が感じているもの）を一世紀以上前の似た時期と鋭く比較している。その時代とはJohn D. RockefellerとAndrew Carnegieが盛大に浪費する金持ちのシンボルとなり、大きな経済格差と政府の失敗という認識があった時である。Osnosが指摘するように、これらの大金持ちたちは大金をはたいて社会問題に取り組んだ。この記事で登場した人物たちは自分たちの富を問題から逃れるために使っている）
ニューヨーカーの記事でもこのような態度はélite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawalと批判気味に書いています。こんな態度の人がシリコンバレーやウォール街にいれば切り捨てられた人々もトランプの唱えるような対策を取りたくなるのもわかります。（賛成はしませんが。。。） Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal. Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ ”
記事のタイトルはthe survival of the richest（金持ち生存）でしたが、the survival of the fittest（適者生存）のもじりですね。
（オックスフォード） the survival of the fittest the principle that only the people or things that are best adapted to their surroundings will continue to exist
（ロングマン） survival of the fittest a situation in which only the strongest and most successful people or things continue to exist
(Wikipedia) "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. In Darwinian terms the phrase is best understood as "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations."
