Category Archives: Japan

by | 19 August 2006 · 9:17 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kimoi, Muzui, Mendoi, Omoroi, Uzai

Over dinner recently, the Far Outliers were talking about ways to describe food with a visiting Japanese college student (the niece of old friends) here for a bit of English immersion. The only Japanese equivalent for gross or yucky that came readily to mind was kimochi warui ‘unpleasant feeling’, which she shortened to kimoi.

(“Kimochi warui” is how my feistiest niece’s kindergarten classmates in Japan described her blue Irish eyes. “Your blue eyes give me the willies!” She always fought back when teased or excluded—and still does to this day.)

When I googled “kimoi”, I found an interesting set of similar terms on the sci.lang.japan FAQ wiki.

  • kimochi warui ‘feeling bad/unpleasant’
  • muzukashii ‘difficult’
  • mendoo kusai ‘troublesome’ (lit. ‘stinking of trouble’)
  • omoshiroi ‘interesting, funny’ (written ‘whitefaced’)

I don’t think you can describe these shortenings in strictly mechanical terms, especially when you include the final member of the set: uzai for urusai ‘noisy, aggressive, bossy’. (“Urusai!” is what people yell at loud revellers to tell them to pipe down.) In the other cases, the shortening rule seems to be to keep just enough syllables (or moras) to turn the compound into what sounds like a one-word adjective ending in -i in the present tense and -katta in the past. I suspect omoroshiroi ‘interesting’ would have ended up omoi were it not for the inconvenient homophone omoi ‘heavy’.

Mezurashii (‘strange, curious’), ne?

UPDATE: Two commenters who are far more kuwashii than me on Japanese have suggested that uzai is most likely short for uzattai, not urusai. That makes the shortening look a little more regular.

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by | 14 August 2006 · 5:55 pm

The Showa War: Japan’s Poor Grasp of Global Trends

The Daily Yomiuri, Japan’s largest newspaper (and a far cry from the Daily Worker), has been running a series of historical retrospectives leading up to the August 15 shusen kinenbi ‘end-war memorial-day’. Notice that they call the war that lasted from 1931 until 1945 the Showa War, named for the third emperor of modern Japan, known outside Japan as Hirohito. Here’s the 18th instalment, about Japan’s poor grasp of global trends as several regional wars mutated into a global conflagration.

What should we learn from Showa War?

Many people who experienced the Showa War have died in the 61 years since the curtain came down on the fighting. To younger generations, the war is a distant event.

The Yomiuri Shimbun’s War Responsibility Verification Committee attempted to determine the truth behind the hostilities, examined the facts and found many lessons that can be learned. To close the committee’s yearlong verification process, we summarize the mistakes made by the political and military leaders:

A nation’s future will teeter on a knife-edge if it cannot accurately read the balance of power among nations and global trends. After World War I, Japan found itself in such a situation.

Japan’s first mistake was the Manchurian Incident.

At the Washington Naval Conference held in Washington from late 1921 to 1922, the Nine-Power Treaty, whose signatories agreed to respect China’s sovereignty, and the Five-Power Treaty that limited tonnage of aircraft carriers and capital ships by the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy, were concluded. The invasion by the Kwantung Army into Manchuria challenged these treaties, which formed the backbone of the international order at the time.

The expansion of the Imperial Japanese Army into Manchuria provoked a fierce response from the United States, the country that advocated compliance with international agreements, nonintervention in domestic politics of other countries, market liberalization and equal opportunities. The reaction led to the Stimson Doctrine of January 1932, named after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson. The doctrine said the United States would not recognize any territorial or administrative changes imposed on China by Japan through the use of military force.

Japan’s growing isolation from the international community was highlighted by its withdrawal from the League of Nations in March 1933. Less than seven months later, Adolf Hitler’s Germany also left the league.

Japan’s plan to seek closer ties with Germany exacerbated this isolationism. The plan to conclude the Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy was once dropped due to circumstances in Europe described as “complicated and mysterious” by Prime Minister Kiichiro Hiranuma. However, dazzled by Germany’s string of victories in Europe, Japan finally concluded the Tripartite Treaty in September 1940.

Conclusion of the pact meant Japan was allied with the nation bombing London. This was a fatal choice.

The Japanese military, whose leaders mostly were pro-Germany at that time, were unaware of the repercussions the treaty would have on the Sino-Japanese War. Britain had further clarified its stance of assisting Chiang Kai-shek, and the United States also promised substantial assistance. Japan had, accidentally, internationalized the Sino-Japanese War.

Japanese military and government leaders at that time failed to accurately grasp the international situation. They did not understand the rise of nationalism in China that set the foundations for the country’s unification after the Chinese Revolution of 1911.

At the heart of the problem was the common perception in Japan in those days that “Shina [China] isn’t a country.” Japan justified its invasion into China by claiming that China was a “society of marauding bandits.” The prevailing view in Japan at that time was that Chinese people lacked the ability to establish a modern state.

Of course, a few politicians, such as Tsuyoshi Inukai, clearly understood the nationalism in China. However, such politicians were shunted from the political stage early on during the Showa War by acts of terrorism by the military, making it impossible for them to influence Japan’s policy toward China.

Furthermore, army officials who should have played important roles in policy toward China instead became “an advanced group” to lay the groundwork for invading China. Dubbed “army China specialists,” they included Kenji Dohihara, chief of the Mukden Special Service Agency, and Takashi Sakai, chief of staff of the China Expeditionary Force. As military advisers to warlords possessing territories in China, they used conspiracies and various tactics as if they were real-life characters from the “Three Kingdom Saga.”

They ignored moves by Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and the rapidly rising Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. They also failed to consider the united national front of the Kuomintang and Communists that would later determine China’s destiny.

The leaders lost a balanced perspective of the international situation because Japan analyzed only one-sided data collected from Germany in Europe and warlords in China.

In the Imperial rescript on the declaration of war against the United States, as well as Britain, Emperor Showa said the war was for “self-existence and self-defense.” However, Japan changed the purpose of the war to create the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere after the war started. This was based on the concept of dividing the world geopolitically into four spheres–East Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Soviet Union–in which Tokyo planned to create a self-sufficient bloc of Asian nations led by Japan and free of Western powers.

However, this concept ignored the existence of China and focused too much on ideology. Consequently, it opened the door to an almost limitless expansion of the battle, although Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who played an important role in wartime diplomacy, took steps such as holding the Greater East Asia Conference in November 1943.

As Japan sought to bring an end to the war, it asked the Soviet Union, which had remained a virtual enemy of Japan, to serve as a mediator in peace negotiations. Japan’s leaders were unaware that the Soviet Union had pledged in a secret agreement at the Yalta Conference to enter the war against Japan within 90 days of Germany’s defeat, the U.S. success in developing atomic weapons and the U.S.-Soviet tug-of-war for the postwar global political leadership. In the end, Japan suffered two atomic bombings and was attacked by Soviet forces in the final days of the conflict, which led to the incarceration of many Japanese in Siberian internment camps after the war.

via Foreign Dispatches, who comments:

The day that Korea’s largest newspapers are capable of such candor about the less than glorious aspects of their country’s past is the day that I’ll know there are more than two true liberal democracies in East Asia (Taiwan being the other apart from Japan). As for China – well, I won’t expect any such thing in my lifetime …

UPDATE: Taiwan urges Japan to ‘face history‘

UPDATE 2: As commenter Peter North observes, this piece is far from hard-hitting. Instead, it reads like a wishy-washy committee report. The other instalments I’ve read are similar in that regard.

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by | 4 August 2006 · 8:17 pm

Oil Barons of Baku, 1901-1905

By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.

The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)

The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.

Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to ahead at the turn of the century, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town: A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”

Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.

The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 11-13

One of the most intriguing photographs reproduced in the book is labelled “Muslim-Jewish Christmas party, Baku, 1913.” Days long, long gone.

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Filed under Caucasus, Central Asia, energy, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 1 August 2006 · 8:57 pm

Mike Plugh’s Darvish Watch

Japundit contributor and kuwashii Japan baseball fan Mike Plugh has created a Darvish Watch blog devoted to the young Iranian Japanese pitching phenom, Yu Darvish. Here’s an excerpt.

The million dollar question is, “Who in the World is Yu Darvish?” This phenom has burst on the scene in Japan and is a marvel to behold on the mound. He lacks the polish and seasoning that a true star pitcher possesses, but it’s important to keep in mind that we are talking about a 19 year old player that was rushed to the pros by a team [Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters] looking to stake its identity among a field of more famous teams.

The story begins with a Japanese woman and an Iranian man, who married and settled down in Osaka, Japan to raise a family. The elder Darvish was a player for the Iranian national soccer team, and met his wife in the United States while the two attended university. His athletic roots were apparently passed on to his son, as the young Darvish began to show his uncanny baseball skills as a second grader. Progressing quickly, Yu Darvish joined a boys baseball league in junior high school and became the ace of the rotation in no time. As a 16 year old high school student in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, this stellar young pitcher struck out 11 consecutive batters and 13 overall to lead his team to the finals of the prefectural championships. He also threw a 4-hit, 80 pitch, complete game shutout in one hour and nineteen minutes that season topping out at 87 MPH against neighboring Iwate Prefecture’s top club. That was just the beginning of the story.

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by | 23 July 2006 · 7:42 am

The Economist on Japan’s Economic Recovery

“As Japan emerges from an era of a zero interest rate,” the Economist recaps its long economic downturn and its rising prospects for recovery. Here are a few excerpts.

Japan’s experience is unique. The country’s decade and a half of stagnation stands in bleak contrast to the blistering growth that preceded it and that enjoyed more recently by many other rich economies, notably America. Japan is not alone in having had a banking crisis brought on when an asset bubble burst. America had its “savings-and-loan” mess in the 1980s. Sweden had a crisis like Japan’s in the early 1990s. And in 1997-98, a financial typhoon tore through most of Asia. Yet in all these instances, action was, on the whole, fairly swiftly taken to write off bad debts, clean up banking systems and restore economies to growth. By contrast, Japan was mesmerised. For too long, instead of seeking to bring its financial system back to health, it appeared to place its hopes in great dollops of spending on public works to get the economy moving….

Japan was lucky. It began its long malaise as one of the richest societies on earth. But its subsequent performance was abysmal. Between 1990 and 2005, real growth averaged just 1.3% a year. Without the malaise, Japan’s GDP would have been about 25% higher in real terms than it is now. In nominal terms, Japanese GDP remains below its 1997 level, thanks to deflation (see chart 1). Over that same period from 1997, the nominal GDP of neighbouring South Korea, which bore the full brunt of the Asian financial crisis, has risen by 65%; America’s is up by 50%. Japan’s stagnation, then, represents a great squandering of wealth and opportunity….

Why did the recovery not arrive earlier? One reason must be that, with the real level of non-performing loans in the banking system undeclared for so long, huge provisioning by the banks merely aggravated a state of financial disruption: banks could not afford to make fresh loans, even to good prospects. Another related reason is that until the banks had cause to deal with their loans, the troubled companies that had taken the loans out had little incentive to restructure. Japanese companies are now in much ruder health, but that is largely because of measures taken only in the past few years.

At the policy level, the government made two huge blunders. The first was to raise the consumption tax in 1997, which wrecked economic confidence. Just as confidence appeared to be recovering in August 2000, the BoJ declared an end to deflation and raised rates. The economy again went into a tailspin and the bank decided to retreat to zero six months later. But with prices falling, the expansionary effect even of a zero rate was lost, since real interest rates remained positive. A radical new measure was tried by the BoJ: in effect, printing money by stuffing the accounts that banks hold at the central bank with free cash. That super-loose liquidity, known as “quantitative easing”, was withdrawn this spring.

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by | 23 July 2006 · 7:15 am

Ho-hum: Asashoryu Wins Again

The Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament this year started out with many hopeful contenders, from the giant Estonian rookie Baruto to the veteran Japanese ozeki Tochiazuma, but each began to fade during the second week while the sole yokozuna Asashoryu cruised to his 17th victory, clinching it on the second-to-last day with a record of 14-0. His nearest rival, newly promoted ozeki and fellow Mongolian Hakuho stood at 12-2 when he faced Asashoryu in the final bout of the tournament, which turned out to be the most exciting bout of all. Hakuho won it, finishing just one loss behind the grand champion at 13-2. Barring injuries, there is a very good chance that the Sumo Association will promote another Mongolian to yokozuna by the end of the year.

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by | 21 July 2006 · 5:26 pm

In Memory of Joe Stanka, Jr.

This blogpost illustrates the small world phenomenon. Japan-based blogger White Peril recently posted about Japan’s latest, long-running consumer safety scandal.

Manufacturer Paloma Industries has produced on-demand water heaters (the usual type in housing here in Japan) that have been linked to several carbon monoxide poisonings over the years. You know the script for these things by now, don’t you?

We had a similar water-heater installed in our drafty apartment in south China in 1987-88, but we put the heater in the toilet behind a separate wall rather than in the room with the bath, partly because I remembered that a former fellow high schooler in Japan had died from gas poisoning in Kobe in 1965-66 (though it may not have been a water heater). His name was Joe Stanka, the son of Nankai Hawks pitcher Joe Stanka, a major reason my brother and I were ardent Hawks fans at the time. (I’m no longer a Hawks fan. My current Pacific League favorite is Bobby Valentine’s Chiba Lotte Marines.)

Joe Jr. was in my brother’s class. Here’s a poignant follow-up from the spring 2004 issue of the alumni magazine, Canadian Academy Review (PDF).

Foad Katirai ‘68 [Columbia ‘72] felt that he was meant to join this field trip [to the former site of Canadian Academy on Nagamine-dai hillside in Nada-ku, Kobe, Japan] as he came across something of special significance to his class. Upon entering Matsushita Gymnasium, Foad saw a plaque in memory of his classmate, Joseph Stanka Jr., still hanging on the wall above a trophy case. Joe, who died in a gas poisoning accident during their sophomore year [1965-66], was the son of Joe Stanka Sr., a pitcher for the Nankai Hawks, formerly of the Chicago White Sox. While at CA, he followed in his father’s footsteps as a pitcher for the [CA] Falcons. When the Matsushita Gymnasium opened in 1966, the trophy case was dedicated to him. Unfortunately, during the move to the new campus [on Rokko Island], the plaque was left behind. Upon its discovery by Foad, the plaque was returned to Canadian Academy.

I didn’t really know that much about Joe Sr. at the time, but he is profiled in baseball-reference.com.

Stanka went to Nippon Pro Baseball in 1960; playing for the Nankai Hawks, he went 17-12 with a 2.48 ERA in 38 games, finishing sixth in ERA and making the Pacific League All-Star team. In 1961, he went 15-11 with a 3.30 ERA in 41 games. Joe fell to 8-10 with a 3.61 ERA in 1962. He rebounded in 1963, going 14-7 with a 2.55 ERA in 34 games. He was part of a three-way tie for the PL lead with four shutouts.

Stanka had his best year in 1964, as he posted a 26-7 record with a 2.40 ERA in 47 games. As a result Stanka became the first American pitcher of non-Japanese descent to win an MVP award in NPB. His six shutouts led the league, he was second to reliever Yoshiro Tsumajima (2.15) among the ERA leaders and was four wins behind PL leader Masaaki Koyama. Despite winning the MVP award, he lost the Sawamura Award to the only American to win it as of 2005, Gene Bacque of the Central League Hanshin Tigers. Stanka also was the MVP of the Japan Series that season. After shutting out Hanshin in the opener and beating Minoru Murayama by a 2-0 score, he dropped game three 5-4 to Midori Ishikawa. In game six, with the Hawks on the ropes and trailing three games to two, Joe came back to beat Bacque 4-0 with his second shutout. When Nankai skipper Kazuto Tsuruoka asked him if he would be willing to work game seven the next day, Stanka agreed. Despite his fatigue, he threw nothing but goose eggs again, with a 3-0 shutout win over Murayama. He had gone 3-1 with a 1.23 ERA and 0.65 WHIP in the Series.

During Stanka’s final year with Nankai, he went 14-12 with a 3.28 ERA in 34 games. Stanka joined the Taiyo Whales in 1966, where he slipped to 6-13 with a 4.16 ERA in 32 games. Stanka was the first American pitcher to win 100 games in the NPB. His record overall there was 100-72 with a 3.03 ERA.

You have to wonder how much his son’s untimely death during the 1965-66 school year ruined his concentration during the 1966 baseball season. Not a hint of family trauma appears in a retrospective SABR-Zine interview last year entitled Joe Stanka, First American All-Star in Japanese Baseball.

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by | 13 July 2006 · 8:25 pm

Bobby Valentine’s Japanese Improving Fast

Daily Yomiuri reporter Yoko Mizui recently profiled Chiba Lotte Marines manager Bobby Valentine’s thrilling success in mastering Japanese in his mid-fifties.

“The most exciting thing that ever happened to me was not winning the Asian Championship and the Japan Championship last year. Nor was it winning the Major League. It was not even winning koryusen [interleague competition] this year,” said Chiba Lotte Marines baseball team manager Bobby Valentine. “The most exciting thing was that at the age of 50 plus, I could discover Step Up Nihongo and learn the language.”

Valentine talked about how he learned the Japanese language and utilizes it in managing his team at a seminar to introduce a new e-learning system, “eSUN,” in Tokyo on June 26….

In 2004, Valentine returned to Japan once again as the manager of the Marines after managing the New York Mets for seven years. He started to study Japanese seriously with the book and CD. “It made me successful–not only in my personal life, where I have derived great satisfaction from learning to communicate in another language, but also in my workplace, where I have been able to gain the respect of the players and the coaches who work for me,” he said.

Although he has hired an interpreter “to ensure that my communication with the players and coaches is always accurate,” he finds it important that he has been able to understand what the players and coaches are saying. “I believe that communication is about words, feelings and actions. What I found with Step Up Nihongo is that it teaches me more than just words,” he said.

“I’ve become able to see and understand so much with my players. Very often, they think they don’t need an interpreter when they come and talk to me in my office. When I’m talking with my players, my coaches, my friends and my fans, I feel very comfortable speaking Japanese.”

Valentine also uses an interpreter when he speaks to the press. “Because I think it is very important to use the correct words as they are writing down what I say and sending it out to the fans,” he said.

Like any dedicated athlete, he spends a lot of time on drills.

SUN employs a lot of pattern drills, as Yamauchi believes mastering the patterns is the best way to rapidly learn Japanese. Valentine studies Japanese during his workout. “I use an exercise bike for about 35 to 45 minutes every day and that is my time for study,” he said.

via Colby Cosh

My father learned Japanese well enough to preach, teach, and counsel in it (starting about age 25), but found it much harder to learn Spanish in his late 60s.

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by | 10 July 2006 · 1:06 pm

Only Bluebloods Battle for Japan’s LDP Leadership

In an opinion piece on 3 July in The China Post, longtime Japan-watcher Joe Hung offers both genealogical and historical perspectives on the three top contenders for leadership of Japan’s ruling LDP.

Nobusuke Kishi vowed on his eighty-eighth birthday he would revise the Constitution to make Japan a normal country. Standing by the side of Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, who organized the birthday party for him in 1984, Kishi said he would dedicate the rest of his life to the rewriting of what is popularly called the MacArthur constitution, which forbids Japan from waging war. Kishi was the prime minister who signed a new mutual defense treaty between Japan and the United States in 1960 and stepped down after he had rammed it through the Diet for ratification against the opposition-led boycott, that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to cancel a scheduled visit to Tokyo after Taipei to celebrate the exchange of ratifications. Abe was Kishi’s son-in-law….

Shinzo Abe, the son of Shintaro Abe, is Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s chief Cabinet secretary. He is far in front of rivals in the Liberal Democratic Party race to succeed Koizumi, come next September…. His chief rival, Yasuo Fukuda, trails far behind with a mere 14 percent support. After Fukuda comes Taro Aso, foreign minister. Both are political bluebloods: Fukuda, the son of former Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, was the chief Cabinet secretary before Abe, and Aso is a grandson of the legendary Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida.

via Japundit

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by | 4 July 2006 · 6:12 pm

Illegal Aliens: Black Bass in Biwako, Asian Carp in Chicago

Invasive fish species are upsetting the ecology of one of the world’s oldest lakes and one of the world’s largest river systems. The unique ecology of Lake Biwa, Japan, is threatened by bluegills and largemouth bass from North America, while the North American Great Lakes are now threatened by Asian carp that have been spreading up the tributaries of the Mississipi, including the Illinois River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Lake Biwa hosts 491 species of plants and 595 species of animals. Recent studies of the lake bottom suggest that many more species remain to be discovered. About 50 species and subspecies are found nowhere else. These include such animals as the freshwater pearl mussel (Hyrlopsis schlegeri). Other species reach their southern limit in Lake Biwa, where they persist in the cooler temperatures of deep waters. An example of this are a small snail Cincinna biwaensis.

Other species have been intentionally or unintentionally introduced into the lake. In 1883, for instance, salmon were introduced and have supported a small fishery. Other species of fish, such as North American bluegills (Lepomis macrochilus) and largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) have come to dominate the fish community since the 1980s. These top-level predators have profoundly altered the ecosystem of the lake.

Among the species threatened are carp and crucian carp.

Naikos (attached lakes) of Lake Biwa served till mid sixties both as spawning grounds and as breeding areas for the endemic species such as round crucian carps. Environmental destruction over time and introduction of alien species drastically affected their biota. Nowadays, bluegills, one of the most rampant alien species in Japan, are dominant in all the naikos, while largemouth bass (commonly called “black bass” are dominant in more than two-thirds of all the naikos.

A series of field research in 2001 in Nodanuma naiko revealed that up to 95% of the collected larvae and juveniles were from invasive alien species. This has caused the occurrence of larval/juvenile carps and crucian carps, including some endemic species, to be limited to the earlier part of their original spawning period, namely from April through early and mid-June.

Meanwhile, Asian carp are moving in on the Great Lakes.

Asian carp have been found in the Illinois River, which connects the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan. Due to their large size and rapid rate of reproduction, these fish could pose a significant risk to the Great Lakes Ecosystem….

Two species of Asian carp — the bighead and silver — were imported by catfish farmers in the 1970’s to remove algae and suspended matter out of their ponds. During large floods in the early 1990s, many of the catfish farm ponds overflowed their banks, and the Asian carp were released into local waterways in the Mississippi River basin.

The carp have steadily made their way northward up the Mississippi, becoming the most abundant species in some areas of the River. They out-compete native fish, and have caused severe hardship to the people who fish there [except those fishermen who have begun to rely on the carp!].

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, where the barrier is being constructed, connects the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes via the Illinois River. Recent monitoring shows the carp to be in the Illinois River within 50 miles of Lake Michigan….

Asian Carp are a significant threat to the Great Lakes because they are large, extremely prolific, and consume vast amounts of food. They can weigh up to 100 pounds, and can grow to a length of more than four feet. They are well-suited to the climate of the Great Lakes region, which is similar to their native Asian habitats.

Researchers expect that Asian carp would disrupt the food chain that supports the native fish of the Great Lakes. Due to their large size, ravenous appetites, and rapid rate of reproduction, these fish could pose a significant risk to the Great Lakes Ecosystem. Eventually, they could become a dominant species in the Great Lakes.

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