Hula Girls (International: English title) 扶桑花女孩 2007 在台大看過
The Fair Trade Commission on Thursday searched offices of Yamada Denki
Co., the nation's largest chain of large-scale appliance and
electronics retailers, on suspicion that it demanded suppliers to
provide workers, in violation of the Antimonopoly Law.
The FTC believes the Maebashi-based company illegally pressured
manufacturers and other suppliers to provide staff to work as de facto
sales clerks in its stores. The FTC searched for evidence in the
chain's head office in the capital of Gunma Prefecture and some
branches.
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VOX POPULI: Iwaki once again finds hope through its "Hula Girls"
2011/04/10
The 2006 Japanese movie "Hula Girls" is set in a decaying coal mining town in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, in the 1960s. Based on the real-life Joban Hawaiian Center resort that opened in Iwaki in 1966, the town is planning to build a mock-Hawaiian resort, and a young woman (Yu Aoi) is interested in responding to a recruitment ad for hula dancers. She tells her mother (Junko Fuji) so during supper, but the mother admonishes her sternly: "Forget it. Hawaii in these boonies here in the northeast? Ain't happening."
But the struggling town sees its only hope of survival in the Joban Hawaiian Center, which will use the region's natural hot springs. Miners' daughters get busy practicing hula dancing, but many locals remain hostile to this new project because it only suggests the imminent closure of the coal mines.
A hula dance instructor arrives from Tokyo and makes an impassioned appeal: "You've got to understand that these girls are determined to save the community. That's why they've become such accomplished dancers."
The ardor of the project's supporters gradually turns nonbelievers into believers, and this "Hawaii of the Tohoku Region" blossomed into a successful venture. It has since been renamed Spa Resort Hawaiians, and attracts about 1.5 million visitors a year.
Then the March 11 quake and tsunami struck, followed by the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant disaster 50 kilometers away. Spa Resort Hawaiians has been temporary shut down, and this is said to represent a worse crisis for the locals than when the coal mines closed.
About 30 hula girls, now out of work, will shortly begin performing in the Tokyo area and some parts of the Tohoku region, and later tour the nation. The last nationwide tour was just before the opening of the Joban Hawaiian Center, and it was to promote the new facility. The current tour will enable the dancers and disaster survivors to renew their resolve to revive their communities.
What transformed Iwaki's coal-sludge heaps into a tourist resort was the miners' sense of impending doom for their families and communities because of the moribund coal industry. Today, unfounded rumors of radioactive fallout are their bane. These people were made to pay--and are still being made to pay--for the nation's energy policy. My heart goes out to them.
Getting over the quake and tsunami damage will require far greater energy than developing a coal production center. The people of Iwaki will probably derive their energy from their love of family and community, but outsiders could also provide invaluable help, as did the hula dance instructor from Tokyo in the movie. And the greatest source of energy must lie in the town's young people, who must see their own future overlapping the nation's future. They will be like those hula girls who danced to revive their dying town.
--The Asahi Shimbun, April 9
* * *
But the struggling town sees its only hope of survival in the Joban Hawaiian Center, which will use the region's natural hot springs. Miners' daughters get busy practicing hula dancing, but many locals remain hostile to this new project because it only suggests the imminent closure of the coal mines.
A hula dance instructor arrives from Tokyo and makes an impassioned appeal: "You've got to understand that these girls are determined to save the community. That's why they've become such accomplished dancers."
The ardor of the project's supporters gradually turns nonbelievers into believers, and this "Hawaii of the Tohoku Region" blossomed into a successful venture. It has since been renamed Spa Resort Hawaiians, and attracts about 1.5 million visitors a year.
Then the March 11 quake and tsunami struck, followed by the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant disaster 50 kilometers away. Spa Resort Hawaiians has been temporary shut down, and this is said to represent a worse crisis for the locals than when the coal mines closed.
About 30 hula girls, now out of work, will shortly begin performing in the Tokyo area and some parts of the Tohoku region, and later tour the nation. The last nationwide tour was just before the opening of the Joban Hawaiian Center, and it was to promote the new facility. The current tour will enable the dancers and disaster survivors to renew their resolve to revive their communities.
What transformed Iwaki's coal-sludge heaps into a tourist resort was the miners' sense of impending doom for their families and communities because of the moribund coal industry. Today, unfounded rumors of radioactive fallout are their bane. These people were made to pay--and are still being made to pay--for the nation's energy policy. My heart goes out to them.
Getting over the quake and tsunami damage will require far greater energy than developing a coal production center. The people of Iwaki will probably derive their energy from their love of family and community, but outsiders could also provide invaluable help, as did the hula dance instructor from Tokyo in the movie. And the greatest source of energy must lie in the town's young people, who must see their own future overlapping the nation's future. They will be like those hula girls who danced to revive their dying town.
--The Asahi Shimbun, April 9
* * *
起碼 Iwaki 市我造訪過 (約1992)
我是讀紐約時報的一篇文章*中注意到它的
我查Wikipedia 才知道它原先的漢字 不過它們可能是錯誤的 "岩樹" 是另一說法
The forms いわき, 石城, 岩城, and 磐城 are all ways of writing "Iwaki," which means "rocky castle". Today, いわき is the most common written form. Iwaki, Fukushima - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - [ 翻譯此頁 ]Iwaki (いわき市, Iwaki-shi) is a city located in the southern part of the Hamadōri coastal region of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. ...
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Op-Ed Contributor
Memories, Washed Away
By MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT
Published: March 14, 2011
ON Aug. 9, 1945, my great-uncle was out fishing in the Pacific, far enough away from Nagasaki, Japan, that he missed the immediate impact of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans that day. My great-aunt was in their new house outside Nagasaki; the entire family had only a few days earlier fled the city because my great-uncle feared a repeat of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Adam McCauley
Related
Times Topic: Japan -- Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
For 36 hours after the earthquake and tsunami that eviscerated the east coast of Japan on Friday, I was unable to get any word from my relatives who oversee and live in our family’s Buddhist temple in Iwaki City, south of Sendai, the biggest city near the epicenter. I wondered if they too were lucky and smart.
I wanted to know, and I did not want to know. I dipped into the world of the Internet, with its videos of water raging over the farmland and crushed ferries, and then quickly backed out. Not looking at the videos kept reality at bay, because the images of the coastline do not match the Japan that I know.
In the Japan that I know, I board the Joban Line train from Ueno station in Tokyo, and travel up the northeast coast to Iwaki City. If it’s spring, the bento stalls in the station sell cherry blossom-themed meals to eat on the train: pink cakes made of mochi rice paste are cut into flower shapes. The train will stop at Kairakuen, a park in Mito City that is famous for its plum blossoms. In the evening, the trees are illuminated from below, making neon pink froth against an indigo sky.
Not long after Kairakuen, the train curves and begins to hug the coast. Then I know that I have entered Tohoku, the northern region of Japan where the goddesses and demons of legend seem to be alive and seafood is sweet.
Often on this journey, I will switch to a local train to get off at Nakoso, a town famous for its inns and hot springs. My favorite spa, Sekinoyu, is just yards off the beach, a vegetation-thick cliff at its back. The waves of the North Pacific crash right outside the windows.
I do not see how the spa could have survived the tsunami. Its Web site is eerily still online, with numerous photos of ocean views though the windows of baths and dining rooms; no status update is posted on its main page.
The Joban train now does not run any further than Mito City; past this, the tsunami has battered train tracks and highways, making passage nearly impossible. A section of one train was found on its side just north of Iwaki City, the cars abandoned.
The beach where I used to play at Oarai, a town whose name means “big washing” and which sounded romantic in happier times, is covered with sludge. Sendai is home to the most famous and romantic of summer festivals, Tanabata, when the stars Vega and Altair, who are in love but separated by the Milky Way, are reunited for one night. Sendai, site of many happy pilgrimages for me, has also been pummeled.
All this has happened even though Japan is arguably better prepared than any other country when it comes to earthquakes and other natural disasters.
When I was a child growing up in California, my Japanese mother would ask me, “How do you know a tsunami is coming?”
“When the ocean starts to disappear,” I would say.
“And then what do you do?”
“Drop everything and run up a hill.”
The residents of Fukushima Prefecture would have been taught this as well, and yet most would have had only 15 minutes to understand they had just experienced an earthquake, to notice the sea was retreating, and escape.
After 36 hours, I get through to my family at the temple in Iwaki. My relatives are unharmed, but there are new fears of a catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, just 30 miles away. One of the family cars is full of gas, and they assure me that they can escape at a moment’s notice. Fuel is in short supply, so in this, they are lucky.
I would like them to leave right away, but they refuse to flee. The job of the keepers of a Buddhist temple, after all, is to help shepherd souls into and through the afterlife. Since they were children, my cousins have held wakes, chanted sutras over dead bodies, and anticipated the needs of those in mourning. Nuclear fallout or no nuclear fallout, their neighbors will need them.
After 48 hours, the phone lines are not working again. I sit and wait.
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