I first started hearing of translator (etc) Junko Edahiro before the first Iraq war when musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, (NPO bank activist, speaker) Yu Tanaka (scroll down for English Bio), Jun Hoshikawa (another translator writer, now head of Japan’s GreenPeace) worked with a lot of people to put out the No War book.
I actually had the honor of driving her around Miyazaki for a bit to see the famed Lucidophyl forest in Aya town, Miyazaki prefecture. I fell out of touch with the ‘No War’ book people but then stumble on her name again as she oversaw the translation of David Suzuki’s _Good News_ into Japanese. It’s a very usefull book. The section on the Canadian company that came up with a mobile incinerator that can render PCB’s harmless was heartening. Miyazak (and the rest of Kyushu) has Agent Orange buried haphazardly in the mountain forests. You would think processing that now would be a priority before a land slide (mountain collapse) or natural degradation has it leak into the rivers and groundwater. We all live downstream. We already have enough dioxins and environmental hormones in our environment with all the plastic and incinerators here in Japan. Japan has 8 or so times the number of incinerators than Germany with comparable area and population. Huge environmental and political issues with garbage disposal here. (Setsuko Yamada).
To get back on track, searching for useful materials in English to use in university classes I kept rediscovering Junk Edahiro’s Japan For Sustainability site. It’s nice for variable level classes because you can match up Japanese and English paragraphs to get everyone up to speed in spite of varied English abilities.
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