１８．Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)
By Christina Crapanzano
As wife of the 32nd President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt challenged and transformed the historically ceremonial, behind-the-scenes First Lady role. She increased her public presence by participating in radio broadcasts, authoring a daily syndicated column, "My Day," and holding weekly, women-only press conferences (she was the first presidential wife to do so) to discuss women's issues, her daily activities and breaking news. Along the way, she became one of her husband's unofficial advisers and informants, lobbying for civil rights policies to assist the poor, minorities and women, helping to formulate New Deal social-welfare programs and pushing for the creation of the United Nations. Following her husband's death, Roosevelt continued her humanitarian efforts as a member of the first American delegation to the U.N. and helped develop the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UNICEF. In recognizing Roosevelt's legacy of advocacy for the underprivileged both nationally and abroad, President Harry Truman famously dubbed her "First Lady of the World."
１９．Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
By Meredith Melnick
Every sexually-active person who doesn't think twice about parenthood can thank Margaret Sanger. As a nurse on New York City's impoverished Lower East Side, Sanger spent much of her time treating women who were injured during botched illegal abortions. As a result of this, she became convinced that contraceptive control was the primary avenue to freedom (and out of poverty) for women like her mother, who died young after giving birth to 11 children. Though she was born when contraception was illegal, by the time of her death, at 81, Sanger had founded the American Birth Control League — later known as Planned Parenthood — and masterminded the research and funding for the first FDA-approved oral contraceptive, Enovid.
２０．Gloria Steinem (1934-Present)
By Meredith Melnick
When Hillary Clinton became the first viable female presidential candidate and the GOP countered with Sarah Palin, many women looked to Gloria Steinem to make sense of the dueling candidacies. Opining on the 2008 election, she offered her characteristic long-term vision: "Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere." It would be hard to find an American women's rights organization that does not owe its creation in part to Steinem. Though she had long been active in legislative issues concerned with gender equality, it was her 1970 testimony before the Senate in favor of the failed Equal Rights Amendment that brought national attention. But her work as a founder of Ms. magazine and the Women's Action Alliance has overshadowed her groundbreaking journalism: in 1963, seven years before Hunter S. Thompson was credited with creating "gonzo" journalism, Steinem went undercover as a Playboy bunny to report on the treatment of women at Playboy clubs for Show magazine.
Her popular cookbooks, Martha Stewart Living magazine and television show of the same name have led many to dub Martha Stewart, 69, the doyenne of domesticity. Yet Stewart's home and lifestyle empire had humble beginnings in Nutley, N.J., where her mother taught her how to sew, cook and craft at an early age. After a brief stint as a stockbroker, Stewart began a catering business with a friend. Her relationships with publishing clients soon led to a book deal. In 1997, Stewart channeled her various ventures into a single company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, which went public in 1999 and made Stewart a billionaire in the process. Stewart faced scrutiny after insider-trading allegations in 2001, for which she would eventually serve a five-month prison stint in 2004. After her 2005 release, Stewart bounced back with a Kmart home-goods collaboration and a new TV show, The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Her design sensibility is ubiquitous, having won her millions of dedicated followers and no shortage of detractors and parodies. Stewart has crafted decorations for both Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, while her company has expanded in recent years to launch Martha Stewart–stamped houses, floor coverings, wines and even video. Over the past two decades, Stewart's influence on the way people entertain, decorate, cook and design has been unparalleled.
２２．Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
By Rachelle Dragani
Her iconic white garb with its blue stripe trim is now equated with her ideals of service and charity among "the poorest of the poor." Born Agnes Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents living under the Ottoman Empire, the petite nun made her way to India in 1929, building her start-up missionary community of 13 members in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) into a global network of more than 4,000 sisters running orphanages and AIDS hospices. Sometimes criticized for lacking adequate medical training, not addressing poverty on a grander scale, actively opposing birth control and abortion and even cozying up to dictators, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize nonetheless inspired countless volunteers to serve, and will wear her white habit all the way to Catholic sainthood.
２３．Margaret Thatcher (1925-Present)
By Kayla Webley
A woman with high standards and a short temper, Margaret Thatcher was not known as Britain's Iron Lady for nothing. After becoming both a chemist and a barrister and having two children, in 1959 Thatcher saw her long-held political ambitions realized when she became a Member of Parliament in the Conservative Party. Twenty years later, she found herself the Prime Minister. Serving from 1979 to 1990, she was Europe's first female Prime Minister and the only British Prime Minister to serve three consecutive terms, giving her the longest stay in office since 1827. In her 11 years at the top, she advocated for the privatization of state enterprises and industries and lower taxes, took on the trade unions and reduced social expenditures across the board. Thatcher worked, against a fair amount of resistance, to turn Britain into a more entrepreneurial, free-market economy, and is credited along with her conservative partner across the Atlantic, President Ronald Reagan, with helping hasten the demise of the Soviet Union.
Daytime television host, businesswoman and philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey overcame an impoverished childhood in rural Mississippi to build an eponymous media empire. The Oprah Winfrey Show, which has won multiple Emmy Awards and is broadcast in 145 countries, is the most successful daytime TV program in history. Winfrey's unparalleled influence on culture — often called "the Oprah effect" — has boosted lesser-known authors onto the New York Times best-sellers list while reviving America's interest in classic literature (John Steinbeck), turned obscure products into household brands (Spanx, Ciao Bella), and helped a whole battery of other personalities become full-fledged media powers of their own (Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Rachael Ray). Her 2008 endorsement of Barack Obama was worth 1 million votes to the then candidate in his primary battle with Hillary Clinton, according to one study. Oprah has also dabbled in acting, garnering Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her role as Sofia in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. Beyond television, Winfrey is the co-author of several books and the publisher of O, the Oprah Magazine. After 25 years as the queen of daytime talk on network television, Winfrey, in partnership with Discovery Communications, is set to launch OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, in January 2011. Godmother of the confessional media setting and unquestioned arbiter of self-help and spiritual trends, Oprah's influence on broader pop culture is peerless.
２５．Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
By Michelle Castillo Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010
Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf was a pioneer of modernist literature whose work shed light on the oppressed position of women in early 20th century social and political hierarchies. In works such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando and her landmark feminist essay A Room of One's Own, Woolf used her pen to explore the artistic, sexual and religious roles that women held at this monumental time in women's history. An early champion of stream-of-consciousness, Woolf was also a tireless, formal innovator whose dedication to her craft has inspired generations of authors. (The Hours, Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, is about three generations of women deeply affected by Woolf's 1923 novel Mrs. Dalloway.) Woolf suffered from extreme depression, and although her mental illness ultimately led to her suicide, her legacy lives on through the body of her creative works.
統一教会創始者の死とその経歴
****
Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 92, Self-Proclaimed Messiah Who Built Religious Movement, Dies
September 2, 2012
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean evangelist, businessman and self-proclaimed messiah who built a religious movement notable for its mass weddings, fresh-faced proselytizers and links to vast commercial interests, died on Monday in South Korea. He was 92.
Mr. Moon died two weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, Ahn Ho-yeul, a spokesman for the Unification Church, his religious movement, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Moon courted world leaders, financed newspapers and founded numerous innocuously named civic organizations. To his critics, he pursued those activities mainly to lend legitimacy to the Unification Church, although his methods were sometimes questionable. In 2004, for example, he had himself crowned “humanity’s savior” in front of astonished members of Congress at a Capitol Hill luncheon.
Mr. Moon was a leading figure in what Eileen V. Barker, a professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics, called “the great wave of new religious movements and alternative religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s in the West,” a time when the Hare Krishna and Transcendental Meditation movements were also gathering force.
Mr. Moon, said Professor Barker, an expert on new religious movements, was “very important in those days — as far as the general culture was concerned — in the fear of cults and sects.”
Building a business empire in South Korea and Japan, Mr. Moon used his commercial interests to support nonprofit ventures, then kept control of them by placing key insiders within their hierarchies. He avidly backed right-wing causes, turning The Washington Times into a respected newspaper in conservative circles.
An ardent anti-Communist who had been imprisoned by the Communist authorities in northern Korea in the 1940s, he saw the United States as the world’s salvation. But in the late 1990s, after financial losses, defections and stagnant growth in the church’s membership, he turned on America, branding it a repository of immorality — he called it “Satan’s harvest” — and repositioned his movement as a crusade for moral values.
As Mr. Moon approached 90, and shortly after he survived a helicopter crash in 2008, three of his sons and a daughter began assuming more responsibility for running the church and his holdings.
In its early years in the United States, the Unification Church was widely viewed as little more than a cult, one whose polite, well-scrubbed members, known derisively as Moonies, sold flowers and trinkets on street corners and married in mass weddings. In one of the last such events, in 2009, 10,000 couples exchanged or renewed vows before Mr. Moon on a lawn at Sun Moon University near Seoul.
Such weddings were the activity most associated with Mr. Moon in the United States. They were in keeping with a central tenet of his theology, a mix of Eastern philosophy, biblical teachings and what he called God’s revelations to him.
In the church’s view, Jesus had failed in his mission to purify mankind because he was crucified before being able to marry and have children. Mr. Moon saw himself as completing the unfulfilled task of Jesus: to restore humankind to a state of perfection by producing sinless children, and by blessing couples who would produce them.
1-6
Marriage was a key part of achieving salvation, and for a couple the marriage was as much a commitment to the church as it was to each other.
In a ceremony involving 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden in 1982, for example, the men wore identical blue suits and the women lace and satin gowns. Mr. Moon was said to have made the matches, based on questionnaires, photographs and the recommendations of church officials.
Often the couples had met only weeks earlier or could speak to each other only through an interpreter. Many had to remain separated for several years, doing church work, before they were allowed to consummate the unions.
Mr. Moon struggled against bad publicity. He was sent to prison on tax evasion charges and accused of influence-buying and maintaining ties to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. He denied both allegations. In the late 1970s he was caught up in a Congressional investigation into attempts by South Korea to influence American policy. There were battles with local officials over zoning for church buildings and tax-exempt status.
(Page 2 of 4)
As his church grew more prominent in the 1970s and ’80s, it became embroiled in numerous lawsuits over soliciting funds, acquiring property and recruiting followers. Defectors wrote damaging books. From 1973 to 1986 at least 400 of the church’s flock were abducted by their family members to undergo “deprogramming,” according to an estimate by David G. Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on Mr. Moon. The church denied that it had brainwashed its followers, saying members joined and stayed of their own free will.
Mr. Moon said he was the victim of religious oppression and ethnic bias because of his Korean heritage. Established churches were angered, he said, because they felt threatened by his movement.
“I don’t blame those people who call us heretics,” he was quoted as saying in “Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church” (1977), a sympathetic account by Frederick Sontag. “We are indeed heretics in their eyes because the concept of our way of life is revolutionary: We are going to liberate God.”
Prominent people were paid to appear at Moon-linked conferences. The first President George Bush did so after he left office. Others, like former President Gerald R. Ford, Bill Cosby, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Jack Kemp, attended banquets and gatherings, sometimes saying afterward that they had not known of a connection between Mr. Moon and the organizations that invited them.
Personal setbacks marked Mr. Moon’s later years. In 1984 his second son, Heung Jin, died at 17 from injuries sustained in a car crash. Another son, Young Jin Moon, who was 21, committed suicide in 1999 by jumping from a 17th-story balcony at Harrah’s hotel in Reno, Nev. In 1995 Nansook Hong, the wife of his eldest son, Hyo Jin Moon, who at one time was Mr. Moon’s heir apparent, broke from the family and wrote a book characterizing her husband as a womanizing cocaine user who watched pornographic movies and beat her, once when she was seven months pregnant.
2-5
Ms. Hong portrayed the entire Moon family as dysfunctional, spoiled and divided by intrigue and hypocrisy. (She also wrote that the church believed that the spirit of Heung Jin had returned for a time in the body of a Zimbabwean man who traveled the world and, with Mr. Moon’s sanction, beat straying church members.)
From early on Mr. Moon was revered by his followers as the messiah, and in 1992 he conferred that title on himself. He also declared that he and his second wife, Hak Ja Han, were the “true parents of all humanity.”
Mr. Moon founded the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954 and began organizing it on a large scale in the United States in the early 1970s. It eventually claimed up to three million members worldwide, but historians of religion dispute that number, estimating a membership of 50,000 at the church’s height in the late 1970s, with only a few thousand in the United States. Membership has been difficult to evaluate more recently; church officials give different estimates and often define membership differently, according to an individual’s level of involvement.
Mr. Moon’s organizations established connections with African-American religious leaders, and Mr. Moon made forays into culture and education, establishing a ballet company in South Korea and financing a ballet school in Washington. In 1992 an organization with ties to Mr. Moon rescued the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, from bankruptcy, pouring in $110 million in subsidies over a decade and taking effective control. Mr. Moon received an honorary degree.
The university’s administration denied that the church had influence, but critics of the arrangement contended that students were being lured into church training with the promise of scholarships, noted that the church had opened a boarding school on campus for members’ children, and alleged that the church had used the university to import money, in the form of tuition, as well as followers, in the form of the many foreign students who attended.
(Page 3 of 4)
For a time Mr. Moon lived in an 18-acre compound in Irvington, N.Y., which Ms. Hong described as having a ballroom, two dining rooms (one with a pond and waterfall), a kitchen with six pizza ovens and an upstairs bowling alley. The church owned another estate, Belvedere, in nearby Tarrytown. Farther north along the Hudson River, the church founded the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, N.Y. On its Web site, it sometimes is referred to as “UTS: The Interfaith Seminary.” Mr. Moon’s business ventures in South Korea at one time or another included construction, hospitals, schools, ski resorts, newspapers, auto parts, pharmaceuticals, beverages and a professional soccer team. He also had commercial interests in Japan, where right-wing nationalist donors were said to be one source of funds. In the United States, Mr. Moon had interests in commercial fishing, jewelry, fur products, construction and real estate. He bought many properties in the New York area, including the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown Manhattan and the Manhattan Center nearby.
At one time or another he controlled newspapers including Noticias del Mundo and The New York City Tribune; four publications in South Korea; a newspaper in Japan, The Sekai Nippo; The Middle East Times in Greece; Tiempos del Mundo in Argentina; and Ultimas Noticias in Uruguay. In 2000, a church affiliate bought what was left of United Press International.
3-5
The extent of his holdings was somewhat of a mystery, but one figure gives a clue: Mr. Moon acknowledged that in the two decades since the founding of The Washington Times, in 1982, he pumped in more than $1 billion in subsidies to keep it going.
The church said its various operations earned tens of millions of dollars a year worldwide.
In their book “Cults and New Religions” (2006), Mr. Bromley and Douglas E. Cowan wrote that according to church doctrine, a member “recognizes Moon’s messianic status, agrees to contribute to the payment of personal indemnity for human sinfulness, and looks forward to receiving the marital Blessing and building a restored world of sinless families.”
Sun Myung Moon was born on Jan. 6, 1920, in a small rural town in what is now North Korea, according to his official biography. When he was 10, his family joined the Presbyterian Church. When he was a teenager, around Easter 1935, according to Unification Church lore, Jesus appeared to him and anointed him God’s choice to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.
A secular education beckoned, and in 1941 Mr. Moon entered Waseda University in Japan, where he studied electrical engineering. Two years later he returned to Korea and married his first wife, Sun Kil Choi, who bore him a son. In 1946, leaving them behind, he moved to Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, to found a predecessor of the Unification Church called the Kwang-Ya Church. He was imprisoned by the Communist authorities, and later said that they had tortured him.
He was freed in 1950 — by United Nations forces, his official biography says — and was said to have walked 320 miles to Pusan, on the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. There, as the account goes, he built a church with United States Army ration boxes and lived in a mountainside shack.
Despite the centrality of marriage in his developing theology, Mr. Moon divorced his first wife in 1952 (something that was glossed over in the official biography) and the following year moved to Seoul, where he founded the Unification Church in 1954. Within a year, about 30 church centers had sprung up.
Before the decade was out he published “The Divine Principle,” a dense exposition of his theology that has been revised several times; his daughter-in-law Ms. Hong, in her book, said it was written by an early disciple based on Mr. Moon’s notes and conversation. He sent his first church emissaries to Japan, the source of early growth, and the United States, and began building his Korean business empire.
(Page 4 of 4)
Rumors of sexual activities with disciples, which the church denied, dogged the young evangelist, and he fathered an illegitimate child born in 1954. In 1960, Mr. Moon married the 17-year-old Hak Ja Han, who would bear him 13 children and be anointed “true parent.”
He embarked on world tours over the next decade and in 1972 settled in the United States, seeing it as the promised land for church growth. “I came to America primarily to declare the New Age and new truth,” he is quoted as saying in the book “Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church.”
He took an interest in politics, urging that President Richard M. Nixon be forgiven for his role in the Watergate crisis. Church leaders plotted a strategy to defend the president. Church rallies in support of Nixon drew thousands to Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden and the Washington Mall.
4-5
Mr. Moon’s interests expanded into film when a church-linked company backed the 1982 movie “Inchon,” a $42 million Korean War epic notable for its bad reviews and the casting of Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Moon came under scrutiny by the federal authorities, mainly over allegations that he was involved in efforts by the South Korean government to bribe members of Congress to support President Park Chung Hee. A Congressional subcommittee said that there was evidence of ties between Mr. Moon and Korean intelligence, and that the church had raised money and moved it across borders in violation of immigration and local charity laws.
Then, in October 1981, Mr. Moon was named in a 12-count federal indictment. He was accused of failing to report $150,000 in income from 1973 to 1975, a sum consisting of interest from $1.6 million that he had deposited in New York bank accounts in his own name, according to the indictment.
“I would not be standing here today if my skin were white and my religion were Presbyterian,” Mr. Moon said after the charges were announced. “I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church.”
He called the case a government conspiracy to force him out of the country.
Mr. Moon was convicted the next year of tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was assigned to kitchen duty. As his church’s fortunes declined in the United States, Mr. Moon revised his pro-American views. In a 1997 speech, he said America had “persecuted” him. He also attacked homosexuals and American women. Mr. Moon and his church largely dropped from public view in the late ’90s and 2000s, but once in a while they attracted attention. In 2001, a Roman Catholic archbishop from Zambia, Emmanuel Milingo, married a Korean woman in a multiple wedding performed by Mr. Moon. The archbishop then renounced the union.
One of the more bizarre moments in Mr. Moon’s later years came on March 23, 2004, at what was described as a peace awards banquet held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. Members of Congress were among the guests. At one point the Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, wearing white gloves, carried in on a pillow one of two gold crowns, which were placed on the heads of Mr. Moon and his wife.
Some of the members of Congress who attended said they had no idea that Mr. Moon was to be involved in the banquet, though it was hosted by the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, a foundation affiliated with the Unification Church.
At the banquet, Mr. Moon stated that emperors, kings and presidents had “declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent.”
He added that the founders of the world’s great religions, along with figures like Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin, had “found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons.”
5-5
近代日本を代表するのはどっち、歌舞伎、能、宝塚？
*******
VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Tokyo: Which theater form — kabuki, noh or Takarazuka — would you say best represents modern Japan?
Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012/Japan Times
By MARK BUCKTON
Sayuri Nakajima
Student, 24 (Japanese)
I think it would have to be Takarazuka, as kabuki and noh are from so long ago, and are a lot more traditional, while Takarazuka is better advertised, so more people have heard of it. I've never seen kabuki or noh as the level is too high, but I've been to Takarazuka.
K. Sato
Translator, 39 (Japanese)
I would have to say that Takarazuka best represents modern Japan. It's an all-female form of theater with a 100-year history, which now makes kabuki, as an all-male theater form, look old-fashioned and obsolete.
Nicole Bauer
Japan Tourist Regional Partner, 41 (German)
To be honest, I only know kabuki. In general, I wouldn't associate Japanese theater with modern Japanese culture at all. I went to a kyogen performance once — great fun to watch, but modern? Not really.
Lee Prescott
Teacher/writer, 31 (English)
I used an English audio guide at kabuki and understood more than my Japanese friend because of the archaic language, so I wouldn't say kabuki represents modern Japan. And noh is old, stylized and all about Zen. As it is different from traditional images of Japan, I'd say Takarazuka by default.
Kyoko Watanabe
Sales assistant, 36 (Japanese)
I am not sure any of them really represents modern Japan. Perhaps kabuki is reaching out to younger fans though with their "Super Kabuki" with its flying and more acrobatic-style performances. The answer could not be Takarazuka though, as too much sexism still exists in Japan.
Paul Purvis
North Asia political watcher, 35 (American)
I am going to have to go with Takarazuka as being the most representative, as they show women to be true members of society worthy of a respected place in the modern world, unlike before — at least in Japan, anyways.
カソリック教−聖マリアンの生前の献身活動と聖人になるまで
****
Mother Marianne becomes an American saint
By Jen Christensen, CNN
updated 1:40 PM EDT, Sat October 20, 2012
(CNN) -- An American health care pioneer will receive the Roman Catholic Church's highest honor this weekend.
On Sunday, Mother Marianne Cope -- along with another North American, Kateri Tekakwitha -- will become a saint, a designation so difficult to achieve that only 10 other Americans have been canonized before her.
Saint Marianne Cope, as she will soon be known, may be best remembered for her work with patients suffering from Hansen's disease -- or lepers, as they were called at the time.
In Hawaii in the late 1800s, people were so afraid of the disease that even those with simple, unrelated rashes were often banished to the remote island of Molokai. They remained at this leper colony for the rest of their lives, far away from family and friends. Their children became orphans.
An island priest who was worried about this health crisis wrote to nearly 50 different religious congregations asking for help. But the work was perceived as so dangerous that only Mother Marianne responded. Before she made her long journey to the remote islands, though, she radically changed medical practices on the mainland.
'A wonderful hospital administrator'
Mother Marianne opened and operated some of the first general hospitals in the United States, St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, New York, in 1866 and St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, in 1869. Both are still in operation today.
At that time, hospitals had a bad reputation. Doctors had limited medical knowledge and even less understanding of how diseases spread. Most patients who turned to hospitals for help never left them alive.
Mother Marianne started to change that, first by instituting cleanliness standards. The simple act of hand-washing between patient visits cut the spread of disease significantly. Word of her facility's success spread quickly, according to Sister Patricia Burkard.
"She was a wonderful hospital administrator and really started the patients' rights movement and truly changed how people cared for the sick," said Burkard, who until recently held the same office Mother Marianne did as head of her religious congregation, now known as the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities.
Leaders at the College of Medicine in Geneva, New York, heard about Mother Marianne's success and decided to relocate to her area.
It became Syracuse University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and its students went on to perfect their skills at Mother Marianne's hospitals. That meant her patients had access to some of the top medical minds in the country and some of the most cutting-edge treatments.
The addition of student doctors also gave Mother Marianne's patients an unheard of choice. They were asked if they wanted to be seen by a student or cared for by someone with more experience.
1-5
Mother Marianne made sure the medical facilities welcomed all people regardless of race, creed or economic standing. That was many decades before desegregated hospitals. She even weathered criticism for caring for alcoholics. She treated their problem -- which was seen by many experts as a moral failing unworthy of help -- like a disease.
"She was clearly far ahead of the times," Burkard said.
Travels to Hawaii
In 1883, Mother Marianne left those hospitals in good hands, Burkard said, and traveled with six sisters to Hawaii. When they arrived in Hawaii, church bells rang and a gathered crowd cheered to welcome them.
Within a year, she established the first general hospital on Maui. The facility was so successful that King Kalakaua honored her with the medal of the Royal Order of Kapiolani. She also opened the Kapiolani Home, which cared for the many female orphans of patients with Hansen's disease.
At the government's request, she took over another badly run medical facility in Honolulu. The hospital, which was supposed to house only 100 patients, housed 200. Its deplorable conditions were described in a diary kept by one of her fellow Franciscans and quoted in a book about Mother Marianne's life, "A Song of Pilgrimage and Exile."
"Fat bedbugs nested in the cracks (of walls). Brown stains upon walls, floors, and bedding showed where their blood-filled bodies had been crushed by desperate patients. Straw mattresses, each more or less covered by a dirty blanket, lay upon the unswept floor. ... Blankets, mattresses, clothing, and patients all supported an ineradicable population of lice," wrote Sister Leopoldina Burns.
Pope Benedict XVI's homily of beatification for John Paul II
"When she got to Honolulu, it was roll up the sleeves and clean the places up," Burkard said. "That was the story wherever they went. The sisters came in with their bucket brigade. They brought order, and I guess a lot of TLC to people no one else wanted to help."
Mother Marianne's efforts were so successful her patients were allowed to remain on the main islands, but in 1887 a new government took charge. Its officials decided to close the Oahu hospital and reinforce the old banishment policy. Mother Marianne decided to follow them to Molokai, even though it meant she'd never return.
On the island of Molokai
On the island, Father Damien DeVeuster, whom the Catholic Church named a saint in 2009, had established a medical facility known as the Apostle of the Lepers. By the time Mother Marianne arrived, he was dying from Hansen's disease.
At his request, she told him she would care for his patients. Upon his death, she took over his facility that cared for men and boys and established a separate enterprise to treat girls and women.
Saint Damien of Molokai's patients had been living in rudimentary huts. They dressed in rags. Mother Marianne wanted to improve their lives.
She raised money and started programs that gave the ill population a much more dignified life. She set up classes for patients. She worked to beautify the environment with gardens and landscaping. Patients got proper clothes, music and religious counseling. She couldn't cure them, but she could make their lives better.
2-5
Mother Marianne died on August 9, 1918, at the age of 80. Incredibly, to this day none of the Franciscan sisters have ever contracted Hansen's disease.
Almost immediately the sisters started organizing her case for sainthood. To become a saint, a person must meet a strict set of religious and otherworldly requirements. Once a person dies, this kind of local effort must be made on their behalf.
The sisters gathered all of Mother Marianne's written work and correspondence. They took testimony from people who knew her. This evidence of her holiness had to be presented to a local council, which made a recommendation that she was worthy of consideration to the Vatican. There, a team of nine theologians pored over the documents.
The theologians voted in her favor, and then the Pope John Paul II named her a "Servant of God, Venerable." This is the honorific after which most cases for sainthood stop.
To become a saint, it's not enough to do good deeds. People must pray to the person under consideration, and the Church must establish that in doing so those prayers resulted in not one, but two verifiable miracles.
"A miracle is some extraordinary fact, especially in the medical field -- a cure that nobody expected and suddenly, against all expectations, this person is cured," said Father Peter Gumpel, a priest who has scrutinized hundreds of sainthood cases in his nearly 50 years as a "devil's advocate," or someone at the Vatican who examines the case made on behalf of a potential saint.
"Miracles are still required because the Church has to be absolutely sure what we are doing in canonizing someone conforms to the will of God," he said. "To do this, we ask for a sign from God."
After a case is made that a miracle has occurred, a team of doctors must verify that there is no medical explanation for the cure. Then the case goes to a second group of doctors who consult for the Vatican, who go over those same records and must make the same determination. The process then starts over again once a second miracle occurs.
Many of these cases take hundreds of years. Mother Marianne's got through in record time.
Mother Marianne's miracles
Mother Marianne's first official miracle came in 1992. That's when Syracuse resident Kate Mahoney recovered after her doctors had given up hope.
The then-14-year-old had a near-fatal reaction to the chemotherapy she received to treat ovarian cancer. In December of that year, she was admitted to the hospital suffering from severe abdominal pain.
Doctors performed surgery to remove an internal buildup of fluid. During the surgery, she suffered a serious hemorrhagic shock followed by cardiac arrest. Many of her vital organs shut down. Machines kept her alive when her heart, kidney and lungs stopped working.
According to the medical file submitted to the Vatican, three doctors determined Mahoney's body was in the process of overall deterioration. They thought she would die.
It was around then that friends reached out to Sister Mary Laurence Hanley. Hanley was the director of the Cause of Mother Marianne and the person who put her case for sainthood together.
The sister visited the sick girl. She prayed for Mother Marianne's help, enlisting others to do the same. She touched Mahoney with a relic from the soon-to-be-saint.
3-5
That week, Mahoney showed signs of improvement. By the next week, her medical records show doctors recording their "surprise" that her vital organs started to work again "for some unknown reason." Eventually local and Vatican doctors determined there was no medical explanation for her full recovery.
In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI agreed that Mahoney had experienced a miracle. Mother Marianne was beatified, one step away from sainthood.
It was in that same year that the second miracle happened.
Sharon Smith, then 58, was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse. She says she had been at home and fainted.
"I woke up two and a half months later in the hospital," Smith said.
Her doctors told her she had developed a severe inflammation that was killing her pancreas and was spreading to other vital organs. Several surgeries did little to help. Her doctor consulted several experts. None could remember anyone recovering from similar cases. The doctor told Smith there was little they could do for her.
"When I heard that, I started thinking about my time in the Navy," the Gulf War veteran said. "I thought, 'I have led an interesting life. I have great friends. I have some wonderful memories. Lord, if you have to take me, at least I have these.'"
Smith mentally prepared for death.
"But for some reason He was nice enough to leave me here," she said, laughing.
Smith says the doctors did what they could to keep her comfortable. They even tried surgery to repair a huge hole that had opened between her stomach and intestine, but it didn't work. That's when the Franciscan sisters stepped in.
"My friend was sitting in the waiting room with my longtime roommate Pat while I was in surgery," Smith said. "The doctor came in to tell them, 'She is not going to breathe on her own again.' My roommate came in and said goodbye, and then my other friend came in and told her that this lady in the waiting room gave her a prayer card with Mother Marianne on it and suggested they pray for her help.
"They did, and I woke up. I started breathing on my own," Smith said.
The nuns paid regular visits to Smith, who is not Catholic. They kept her company. They prayed with her. They brought her communion. Then Sister Michaeleen Cabral pinned a small plastic bag on Smith's hospital gown. Inside was dirt from around Mother Marianne's grave -- known in the church as a relic.
"When they pinned that relic on me, I started feeling a little better," Smith said. "A little while later, when I opened my eyes, my doctor started pulling out my tubes.
"When he started pulling out the last one, I said to myself, 'This is it.' But instead he said, 'Now I want you to order a sandwich.' I didn't think I heard him right. I hadn't eaten in nine months. I said, 'Are you kidding me?' But he said, 'No, order anything you want to eat. I don't know what happened, but the hole I couldn't fix between your stomach and intestine has healed itself. Your inflammation is gone. You're better.'"
4-5
Smith finally left the hospital in January of 2006. "I had never heard of Mother Marianne before this, but all those prayers with the help of God and Mother Marianne's intercession, I survived," Smith said. "I'm still flabbergasted."
'You are our miracle'
To give back to the sisters who helped her, Smith started regularly volunteering at Francis House, a medical facility the sisters run to care for the terminally ill. Smith spends much of her time there cleaning rooms and visiting patients.
As she walked out of a patient's room one day, she ran into the nun who used to bring her communion at the hospital.
"She said, 'Oh my God, are you the girl I saw in the hospital who was so sick?'" Smith said. "I thought Sister Michaeleen was going to pass out.
"She told me, 'You've got to see Sister Mary Laurence. You are our miracle. I know you are.' They dragged me up to Sister Mary Laurence, who was amazed. They thought they had their miracle."
And so it was, the Catholic Church concluded. After multiple doctors examined her medical records and could find no other explanation, the case went on to Pope Benedict XVI. In December 2011 he announced Mother Marianne would become a saint.
This weekend, Mahoney and Smith are both at the Vatican for the canonization service. Smith will present Pope Benedict XVI with a cross that contains a dirt relic from Mother Marianne's grave. To this day, Smith wonders why she has been chosen to be a part of something so big.
"I can't imagine that someone like me would experience a miracle. I'm an ordinary person," Smith said. "But the sisters explained that's who God and the saints use."
Sister Burkard is at the Vatican, as well.
"Every time I think about the large banner with her image that will hang on the Vatican for the ceremony, I get chills," she said.
"People tend to think of saints as these very special otherworldly people, but so much of (Mother Marianne's) life parallels so many other good people we know today," Burkard said.
"She probably could have done anything with her natural talents for leadership and organization, but she chose to make the world a better place. She would not let people's fear determine what she did or how people should be treated.
"She is a wonderful example for these difficult times. She gave people that others feared hope. She restored their dignity. That is the path she chose to walk."
5-5
Isn't That Cute? In Japan, Cuddly Characters Compete
Cities, Associations Promote Mascots; Flying Tax Filer, 'Lovable' Premier Abe.
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI and MIHO INADA
More than 800 plush characters faced off for the title of Most Popular Mascot in Japan's third annual Yuru-kyara Grand Prix. Think: Miss America, but with bear-like creatures and inflatable sumo wrestlers. WSJ's Daisuke Wakabayashi reports.
TOKYO—Japan's new prime minister won election this month promising a more muscular military, and campaigning with a trademark clenched fist in TV commercials vowing to "take back Japan."
But soon after taking office Wednesday, Shinzo Abe will get an image makeover. Next month, his Liberal Democratic Party will unveil the design of a soft, cuddly mascot modeled after him—based on a proposal deemed most "widely lovable and cute," said an official when announcing the contest in November. The LDP will choose from more than 60 ideas received from supporters during a two-week proposal window.
In the past, backers of Mr. Abe had promoted his looks. But now, "we thought Mr. Abe would be accepted more widely by being cute versus being handsome," said Taizo Toyoda, an LDP spokesman.
It is no surprise that Japan's democracy has been infected by the craze for "yuru-kyara," or "loose characters." A growing army of yuru-kyara is inundating Japan with hundreds of soft, plush mascots representing municipalities, government organizations and companies with a uniquely Japanese mix of cute and bizarre.
Creating a yuru-kyara usually starts with a mascot in a soft, full-body suit and an oversize headpiece. Their name often provides some clues to "what" they are—because it may not be clear visually. The characters, each with an elaborate back story, communicate with fans through their own websites, Twitter and other social media.
Luring tourists to overlooked rural towns and regions, drawing attention to obscure causes, or softening the image of organizations from the military to railway operators, these mascots take Japan's long-standing fixation with all things cute to the next level.
Japan's national tax agency, for instance, has "Eeta-kun"—created to promote electronic tax filing.
Eeta-kun—a green mascot with a square head resembling a computer screen, with eyes and mouth configured in the shape of an "e" and the word "tax" written vertically on his torso—stands 5-foot-5 inches tall, according to his official profile. His weight is "secret" and he is skilled with computers. His friends include a gang of rainbow-colored mascots called the "El-rangers" who share a similar passion for promoting the electronic filing of taxes, although they focus on local levies.
"He can fly too," said a tax agency official of Eeta-kun. "He flies around the country to different locations to get as many people as possible to use this e-tax system."
The most common characters are ones used to promote a city or region. "Koroton" is the tourism ambassador of Maebashi, a landlocked city known for its pork. Koroton—a name that combines the Japanese onomatopoeia of koro-koro, the sound of a rolling object, and ton, the word for pork—is a totally round pig with blushed cheeks and tiny stumps for arms and legs. According to Koroton's profile, the rosy cheeks are a sign of good health to encourage people to eat the city's pork.
1-2
Other characters are extensions of real-world cuteness. A branch office of East Nippon Expressway, which operates about 4,000 kilometers of highways in Japan, created "Manatee." The giant turquoise-blue mascot—or "manner"-tee—teaches proper driving etiquette. A spokesman for the group said Manatee can deliver lessons on automobile manners through hugs. The manatee's goal is to create a "heartful highway."
"There are characters overseas, but the abundance of characters here is a very Japanese trait," said Japanese cartoonist Jun Miura, who came up with the name yuru-kyara about a decade ago.
During travels around Japan, he discovered many municipalities had created mascots for a region's food, wildlife or landscape. Often, they toiled in anonymity without the polish of characters like Japan's most famous ambassador of cute, Hello Kitty.
While today's yuru-kyara mascots are more sophisticated, the label has stuck. In the past few years, the number of mascots has surged. This year, 865 characters—double the number from last year—competed in the "Yuru-kyara Grand Prix," an online contest to select Japan's most popular mascot.
Last year's Grand Prix was marred by allegations of vote-rigging by overzealous backers of some characters, including "Nishiko-kun," a mascot representing Tokyo's Kokubunji area.
Nishiko-kun has a giant, circular headpiece like the round, decorative edges of roof tiles found in many of the historical buildings in that area. His fans are alleged to have created multiple email accounts and used a specially created program to stuff the ballot for their candidate automatically, according to the contest organizer.
After an investigation, "Kumamon," a mischievous black bear from Kumamoto Prefecture, edged out "Bary-san," an egg-shaped, yellow bird from the southern city of Imabari—an area known for grilled chicken cuisine—to become the 2011 winner.
After the victory, Kumamon's face was put on 6,000 different goods sold by local businesses, ranging from smartphone apps to bottles of soy sauce. This year, the prefecture expects sales of Kumamon goods to double last year's total of \2.5 billion, or $30 million.
Kumamon has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 70,000 "likes" on its Facebook FB -0.53%page, where fans can find pictures of the pear-shaped mascot riding a horse, working at a convenience store or bungee jumping.
The winner of this year's voting was announced last monthat the third-annual Yuru-kyara Summit in Saitama Prefecture, two hours outside of Tokyo. Nearly 300,000 visitors attended the two-day event where 265 mascots mugged for photos, sold goods bearing their image and revealed details about themselves during "PR Time."
For example, Eco Meister, a bearlike creature with a plant growing from the top of its head, wears clothes made from a plastic bag and promotes a green lifestyle. Taking the stage during PR Time, one of Eco Meister's handlers spoke on behalf of the silent mascot and surprised the audience by saying the androgynous character is a woman—"a housewife, actually"—who just had a child. The crowd cheered.
Then, the announcement that everyone was waiting for. Last year's runner-up Bary-san won the vote. In representing Imabari city, the bird wears what appears to be a crown but is actually a replica of a nearby bridge and wraps a towel around its waist. Towel-making is one of the area's biggest industries.
When its name was called, the mascot lifted a giant trophy and a handler speaking for the mascot wept and thanked supporters. Bary-san's booth sold out of merchandise, and the character was mobbed everywhere during the two-day summit. During one giant scrum of fans and photographers, a middle-aged man turned and said to no one in particular: "This is just like seeing a celebrity."
2-2
Sericulture or silk production has a long and colorful history unknown to most people. For centuries the West knew very little about silk and the people who made it. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote in his Natural History in 70 BC "Silk was obtained by removing the down from the leaves with the help of water ". For more than two thousand years the Chinese kept the secret of silk altogether to themselves. It was the most zealously guarded secret in history.
ORIGIN OF SILK - LEGEND OF LADY HSI-LING-SHIH
Chinese legend gives the title Goddess of Silk to Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih, wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, who was said to have ruled China in about 3000 BC. She is credited with the introduction of silkworm rearing and the invention of the loom. Half a silkworm cocoon unearthed in 1927 from the loess soil astride the Yellow River in Shanxi Province, in northern China, has been dated between 2600 and 2300 BC. Another example is a group of ribbons, threads and woven fragments, dated about 3000 BC, and found at Qianshanyang in Zhejiang province. More recent archeological finds - a small ivory cup carved with a silkworm design and thought to be between 6000 and 7000 years old, and spinning tools, silk thread and fabric fragments from sites along the lower Yangzi River reveal the origins of sericulture to be even earlier.
SILKWORM AND THE FAMILY
There are many indigenous varieties of wild silk moths found in a number of different countries. The key to understanding the great mystery and magic of silk, and China's domination of its production and promotion, lies with one species: the blind, flightless moth, Bombyx mori. It lays 500 or more eggs in four to six days and dies soon after. The eggs are like pinpoints one hundred of them weigh only one gram. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce twelve pounds of raw silk. The original wild ancestor of this cultivated species is believed to be Bombyx mandarina Moore, a silk moth living on the white mulberry tree and unique to China. The silkworm of this particular moth produces a thread whose filament is smoother, finer and rounder than that of other silk moths. Over thousands of years, during which the Chinese practiced sericulture utilizing all the different types of silk moths known to them, Bombyx mori evolved into the specialized silk producer it is today; a moth which has lost its power to fly, only capable of mating and producing eggs for the next generation of silk producers.
1-4
Producing silk is a lengthy process and demands constant close attention. To produce high quality silk, there are two conditions which need to be fulfilled preventing the moth from hatching out and perfecting the diet on which the silkworms should feed. Chinese developed secret ways for both.
* The eggs must be kept at 65 degrees F, increasing gradually to 77 degrees at which point they hatch. After the eggs hatch, the baby worms feed day and night every half hour on fresh, hand-picked and chopped mulberry leaves until they are very fat. Also a fixed temperature has to be maintained throughout. Thousands of feeding worms are kept on trays that are stacked one on top of another. A roomful of munching worms sounds like heavy rain falling on the roof. The newly hatched silkworm multiplies its weight 10,000 times within a month, changing color and shedding its whitish-gray skin several times.
*The silkworms feed until they have stored up enough energy to enter the cocoon stage. While they are growing they have to be protected from loud noises, drafts, strong smells such as those of fish and meat and even the odor of sweat. When it is time to build their cocoons, the worms produce a jelly-like substance in their silk glands, which hardens when it comes into contact with air. Silkworms spend three or four days spinning a cocoon around themselves until they look like puffy, white balls.
*After eight or nine days in a warm, dry place the cocoons are ready to be unwound. First they are steamed or baked to kill the worms, or pupas. The cocoons are then dipped into hot water to loosen the tightly woven filaments. These filaments are unwound onto a spool. Each cocoon is made up of a filament between 600 and 900 meters long! Between five and eight of these super-fine filaments are twisted together to make one thread.
*Finally the silk threads are woven into cloth or used for embroidery work. Clothes made from silk are not only beautiful and lightweight, they are also warm in cool weather and cool in hot weather.
Literary sources such as The Book of History, and The Book of Rites give further information about sericulture. Reeling silk and spinning were always considered household duties for women, while weaving and embroidery were carried out in workshops as well as the home. In every silk-producing province the daughters, mothers and grandmothers of every family devoted a large part of the day for six months in a year to the feeding, tending and supervision of silkworms and to the unraveling, spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidering of silk. By the fifth century BC, at least six Chinese provinces were producing silk. Each spring, the empress herself inaugurated the silk-raising season, for silk production was the work of women all over China. The technique and process of sericulture were guarded secrets and closely controlled by Chinese authorities. Anyone who revealed the secrets or smuggled the silkworm eggs or cocoons outside of China would be punished by death.
2-4
When silk was first discovered, it was reserved exclusively for the use of the ruler. It was permitted only to the emperor, his close relations and the very highest of his dignitaries. Within the palace, the emperor is believed to have worn a robe of white silk; outside, he, his principal wife, and the heir to the throne wore yellow, the color of the earth.
Gradually the various classes of society began wearing tunics of silk, and silk came into more general use. As well as being used for clothing and decoration, silk was quite quickly put to industrial use by the Chinese. This was something which happened in the West only in modern times. Silk, indeed, rapidly became one of the principal elements of the Chinese economy. Silk was used for musical instruments, fishing-lines, bowstrings, bonds of all kinds, and even rag paper, the word's first luxury paper. Eventually even the common people were able to wear garments of silk.
During the Han Dynasty, silk ceased to be a mere industrial material and became an absolute value in itself. Farmers paid their taxes in grain and silk. Silk began to be used for paying civil servants and rewarding subjects for outstanding services. Values were calculated in lengths of silk as they had been calculated in pounds of gold. Before long it was to become a currency used in trade with foreign countries. This use of silk continued during the Tang as well. It is possible that this added importance was the result of a major increase in production. It found its way so thoroughly into the Chinese language that 230 of the 5,000 most common characters of the mandarin "alphabet" have silk as their "key".
A SECRET OUT TO THE WORLD
In spite of their secrecy, however, the Chinese were destined to lose their monopoly on silk production. Sericulture reached Korea around 200 BC, when waves of Chinese immigrants arrived there. Silk reached the West through a number of different channels. Shortly after AD 300, sericulture traveled westward and the cultivation of the silkworm was established in India.
It is also said that in AD 440, a prince of Khotan ( today's Hetian)--a kingdom on the rim of Taklamakan desert -- courted and won a Chinese princess. The princess smuggled out silkworm eggs by hiding them in her voluminous hairpiece. This was scant solace to the silk-hungry people of the West, for Khotan kept the secret too. Why share it with the westerners and kill a good market?
Then around AD 550, two Nestorian monks appeared at the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's court with silkworm eggs hid in their hollow bamboo staves. Under their supervision the eggs hatched into worms, and the worms spun cocoons. Byzantium was in the silk business at last. The Byzantine church and state created imperial workshops, monopolizing production and keeping the secret to themselves. This allowed a silk industry to be established in the Middle East, undercutting the market for ordinary-grade Chinese silk. However high-quality silk textiles, woven in China especially for the Middle Eastern market, continued to bring high prices in the West, and trade along the Silk Road therefore continued as before. By the sixth century the Persians, too, had mastered the art of silk weaving, developing their own rich patterns and techniques. It was only in the 13th century the time of the Second Crusades that Italy began silk production with the introduction of 2000 skilled silk weavers from Constantinople. Eventually silk production became widespread in Europe.
3-4
Silk became a precious commodity highly sought by other countries at a very early time, and it is believed that the silk trade was actually started before the Silk Road was officially opened in the second century BC. An Egyptian female mummy with silk has been discovered in the village of Deir el Medina near Thebes and the Valley of the Kings, dated 1070 BC, which is probably the earliest evidence of the silk trade. During the second century BC, the Chinese emperor, Han Wu Di's ambassadors traveled as far west as Persia and Mesopotamia, bearing gifts including silks. A Han embassy reached Baghdad in AD 97, and important finds of Han silks have been made along the Silk Road. One of the most dramatic finds of Tang silks along the Silk Road was made in 1907 by Aurel Stein. Some time around 1015, Buddhist monks, possibly alarmed by the threat of invasion by a Tibetan people, the Tanguts, sealed more than ten thousand manuscripts and silk paintings, silk banners, and textiles into a room at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang, a station on the Silk Road in north-west Gansu.
From about the fourth century BC, the Greeks and Romans began talking of Seres, the Kingdom of Silk. Some historians believe the first Romans to set eyes upon the fabulous fabric were the legions of Marcus Licinius Crassus, Governor of Syria. At the fateful battle of Carrhae near the Euphrates River in 53 BC, the soldiers were so startled by the bright silken banners of the Parthian troops that they fled in panic. Within decades Chinese silks became widely worn by the rich and noble families of Rome. The Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (AD 218 - 222) wore nothing but silk. By 380 AD, Marcellinus Ammianus reported, "The use of silk which was once confined to the nobility has now spread to all classes without distinction, even to the lowest." The craving of silk continued to increase over the centuries. The price of silk was very hight in Rome. The best Chinese bark ( a particular kind of silk) cost as much as 300 denarii (a Roman soldier's salary for an entire year!). Many sources quote that Roman citizens' demand for imported silks was so great as to be damaging to the Roman economy.
Silk was even beginning to have a civilizing effect on the barbarians. In 408 AD when Alaric, a Goth, besieged Rome, his price for sparing the city included 5000 pounds of gold, 3000 pounds of pepper, 30,000 pounds of silver and 4000 tunics of silk.
SILK TODAY
World silk production has approximately doubled during the last 30 years in spite of man-made fibers replacing silk for some uses. China and Japan during this period have been the two main producers, together manufacturing more than 50% of the world production each year. During the late 1970's China, the country that first developed sericulture thousands years ago dramatically increased its silk production and has again become the world's leading producer of silk. http://www.silk-road.com/artl/silkhistory.shtml
4-4
サムソンのthe Galaxy S IVの新製品のニューヨークデビューは大不評。
How not to launch your biggest tech product ever
By Adrian Covert @CNNMoney March 15, 2013: 4:13 PM ET
Samsung had the world's attention on Thursday night. Then the company blew it.
The Korean tech giant picked New York, the highest-profile city, to debut its latest smartphone,the Galaxy S IV. Samsung even picked historic Radio City Music Hall to show the phone off.
Everything seemed to be in Samsung's favor: It spent the last yearbuilding the Galaxy brand into a household name with hardware prowess and marketing guile.
And then the lights came on.
The crowd was subjected to an hour of overblown theatrics, unnecessary banter, and moments which, at best, bordered on political incorrectness. At worst, it was downright sexist.
If you're going to launch your biggest tech product ever, here are eight things you shouldn't do.
1) Don't portray women as technologically illiterate: Yes, it's OK to acknowledge that there's a growing segment of smartphone users who happen to be female. It's not OK to suggest that the main reason they'd want Samsung's latest and greatest technology is to keep their nails dry and prevent their hair from getting messed up. (Samsung did not respond to requests for comment.)
2) Don't portray women as technologically illiterate...again: Yes fitness tracking features are good. Yes, some women are into fitness. But fitness enthusiasm, or almost any other aspect of technology, is hardly gender specific. And presenting that idea to millions has no place in the world in 2013.
3) Don't plant shills in the audience to make awkward comments: One of the more surreal moments of being at the event was a number of audience members who laughed and cheered at seemingly arbitrary things. It sure seemed to me that Samsung planted audience members. And to make things all the more awkward, I heard a few making strangely pointed comments about the attractiveness of the female performers on stage. Huh?
4) Don't make the event into a Broadway play: Even if the idea holds up conceptually, don't mask the launch of your biggest product. Nobody really cares about the presentation. People care about the phone.
5) Don't trot a kid out on stage: The whole overly-precocious youth gimmick hasn't been not-annoying in at least 10 years. Sticking a smartphone in his hand doesn't make it anymore excusable.
6) No tap dancing: Making the smartphone-shilling half pint tap dance? Samsung, you just compounded the problem.
7) Don't demo your new phone in the basement of a theater: Radio City Music Hall holds 6,000 people. And it looked quite full on Thursday night. So why Samsung tried to corral the crowd into demo stations a fraction of the size of the actual theater is beyond me.
8) Don't stoop to lowest common denominator-type populism: The whole point of this event was an attempt by Samsung to appeal to the mainstream. Specifically, the American mainstream. But in trying to strike a less arrogant, more populist tone, Samsung went for the lowest common denominator, playing to cultural tropes which are simply retrograde.
正式名前とニックネームの恋愛術
****
Does a shorter name make you more attractive to online daters?
Data from online dating site Badoo.com found that women named Jennifer and Catherine had more luck as Jenny and Cathy, while men named Michael and Christopher were more successful as Mike and Chris. 'A diminutive name gives a sense of warmth and informality,' a behavioral psychologist and dating coach said.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013, 3:28 PM AFP RELAXNEWS
Better as "Jenny" Aniston? A new study suggests so.
New research from dating website Badoo.com suggests that the shorter your name, the more attractive you may appear to online daters.
Using data from what the site says is its 190 million users around the globe, results showed that both men and women with shorter first names were more attractive to the opposite sex than those with lengthier names. Women named Jennifer, Catherine and Amanda, for example, were much more successful at online dating as Jenny, Cathy, and Mandy in both the US and UK, while women preferred Mike, Chris and Andy over Michael, Christopher and Andrew, the researchers said.
“Your name says a huge amount about you,” said researcher Joanna Hemmings, a behavioral psychologist and dating coach. “People with abbreviated names appear more approachable and friendlier; less intimidating. A diminutive name gives a sense of warmth and informality.”
Badoo compared the number of online messages received over a five-month period by those with shortened or diminutive names (like Jenny or Mike) and those with full-length equivalents (Jennifer, Michael), in eight countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. The site collected a total of 162 pairs of names, with one short and one longer version. In 72 percent of such head-to-head comparisons, the full-length name proved less attractive, and all countries showed a bias in favor of shorter names.
RELATED: WOMEN WANT YOUNGER MEN ONLINE
Findings showed that men are roughly twice as likely as women to use abbreviated names. For female names, the shorter name proved more alluring in 79 percent of the female pairs studied, compared to 69 percent of the male ones.
A recent study from earlier this year from TheLadders, an online job matching site, claimed that the shorter your name, the bigger your paycheck. It too studied matched pairs of name, finding that in the 24 pairs analyzed, people with the shorter name earned more money.
Viewpoint: The Limitations of Being ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’
Only organized religion can mobilize communities and lead to real action
By Rabbi David Wolpe @RabbiWolpeMarch 21, 20130
Do you like feeling good without having to act on your feeling? Boosting your self-esteem no matter your competence or behavior? Then I’ve got the religious program for you.
According to the latest Pew report, almost 1 in 5 Americans identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” In other words, they have some feeling, some intuition of something greater, but feel allergic to institutions. Yet as we approach Passover and Easter, it’s important to remember that it is institutions and not abstract feelings that tie a community together and lead to meaningful change.
All of us can understand institutional disenchantment. Institutions can be slow, plodding, dictatorial; they can both enable and shield wrongdoers. They frustrate our desires by asking us to submit to the will of others.
But institutions are also the only mechanism human beings know to perpetuate ideologies and actions. If books were enough, why have universities? If guns enough, why have a military? If self-governance enough, let’s get rid of Washington. The point is that if you want to do something lasting in this world, you will recall the wise words of French Catholic writer Charles Péguy: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” Got a vision? Get a blueprint.
Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world. Religions create aid organizations; as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a column in the New York Times two years ago: the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization is not Save the Children or Care, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian group.
Aid organizations involve institutions as well, and bureaucracies, and — yes — committee meetings. There is something profoundly, well, spiritual about a committee meeting. It involves individuals trying together to sort out priorities, to listen and learn from one another, to make a difference. I have found too often that when people say, “I stay away from the synagogue — too much politics,” what they mean is that they did not get their way. Institutions enable but they also frustrate, as do families and every other organized sector of human life. If you want frictionless, do it alone.
To be spiritual but not religious confines your devotional life to feeling good. If we have learned one thing about human nature, however, it is that people’s internal sense of goodness does not always match their behavior. To know whether your actions are good, a window is a more effective tool than a mirror. Ask others. Be part of a community. In short, join. Being religious does not mean you have to agree with all the positions and practices of your own group; I don’t even hold with everything done in my own synagogue, and I’m the Rabbi. But it does mean testing yourself in the arena of others.
No one expects those without faith to obligate themselves to a religious community. But for one who has an intuition of something greater than ourselves to hold that this is a purely personal truth, that it demands no communal searching and struggle, no organization to realize its potential in this world, straddles the line between narcissistic and solipsistic. If the spirit moves you to goodness, that is wonderful. For too many, though, spirituality is a VIP card allowing them to breeze past all those wretched souls waiting in line or doing the work. Join in; together is harder, but together is better.
Rabbi David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe
Wolpe is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of seven books. The views expressed are solely his own.
Author of ‘game-changing’ stem cell papers accused of misconduct, fraud by Japan’s leading research institute
Haruko Obokata, the lead writer of papers that described how mature animal cells could be reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, was accused of misconduct Tuesday by RIKEN, Japan's leading research body. Obokata said she intends to file a counter-complaint.
REUTERS / Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 12:20 PMA.
The lead writer behind stem cell papers hailed as a game-changer in the field of medical biology has been accused of misconduct involving fabrication by Japan's top research body - a finding she vehemently denies.
Two papers published in the scientific journal Nature in January detailed simple ways to reprogram mature animal cells back to an embryonic-like state, allowing them to generate many types of tissues.
Such a step would offer hope for a simpler way to replace damaged cells or grow new organs in humans.
But reports have since pointed out irregularities in data and images used in the papers, prompting RIKEN, a semi-governmental research institute and employer of the lead writer, to set up a panel to look into the matter.
The panel said, for example, that one of the articles reused images related to lead writer Haruko Obokata's doctoral dissertation, which was on different experiments.
"Actions like this completely destroy data credibility," Shunsuke Ishii, head of the committee, told a news conference.
"There is no doubt that she was fully aware of this danger.
"We've therefore concluded this was an act of research misconduct involving fabrication."
In a statement, Obokata said she would soon file a complaint with RIKEN, challenging the findings.
"I'm filled with shock and indignation," she said. "If things stay as they are, misunderstanding could arise that the discovery of STAP cells itself is forgery. That would be utterly unacceptable."
Obokata, 30, refers to the reprogrammed embryonic-like cells in her team's research by the term Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency, or STAP, cells.
RIKEN may reinvestigate the matter if a complaint is filed. It has not decided what penalty may be imposed on the researcher, the research body said.
Obokata became an instant celebrity in Japan after the publication of her papers, with television broadcasting images of her wearing a traditional Japanese apron, rather than a lab coat, and working in a laboratory with pink-painted walls.
RIKEN did not confirm or deny the existence of STAP cells, but said it planned to launch a verification process to see if they were real.
That will take about a year to complete and will be led by RIKEN President Ryoji Noyori, a 2001 Nobel laureate in chemistry.
"This is truly regrettable," Noyori said, referring to the probe panel's conclusions.
"I would like to apologize afresh that articles RIKEN researchers published have damaged the credibility of the scientific community," he said, bowing to reporters as camera flashes went off.
According to the Nature papers and media briefings, Obokata and other researchers took skin and blood cells, let them multiply and then subjected them to stress "almost to the point of death" by exposing them to events such as trauma, low oxygen levels and acidic environments.
Within days, the scientists - Japanese researchers joined by others from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the United States - said they had found the cells had not only survived but had also recovered by naturally reverting to a state similar to that of an embryonic stem cell.
These stem cells were then able to differentiate and mature into different types of cells and tissues, depending on the environments they were put in, they said.
RIKEN said outside researchers had been unable to replicate the research.
Cat-astrophic revelation purr-turbs Hello Kitty fansBy Hilary Whiteman, CNN
1:16 PM EDT, Thu August 28, 2014 CNN World
Hong Kong (CNN) -- Six simple words have sent Hello Kitty lovers into a spin.
"Hello Kitty is not a cat."
The apparently shocking revelation was made in an LA Times article published Wednesday about a retrospective of Kitty paraphernalia opening next month at the Japanese American National Museum.
The story started innocently enough before the bombshell was dropped by Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, who has delved more deeply than most into the Hello Kitty phenomenon.
"That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show," Yano told the LA Times.
"Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."
Whoa.
The news reached far and wide, including backstage after the Linkin Park gig at the Minnesota State Fair.
"I just got off stage to find out that Hello Kitty is not a cat. This is worse than finding out Pluto is not a planet," tweeted clearly shocked rapper Mike Shinoda.
For those who don't know, Hello Kitty is an international superstar who was introduced to the world in 1974 by Japanese company Sanrio.
In the last 40 years her button nose has appeared on a dazzling array of merchandise, generating billions of dollars for the company.
Until now, her pointy ears and whiskers gave her legion of fans the distinct impression she was feline.
Wrong.
Summing up the disbelief, @jkltoraay tweeted: "You cannot say hello kitty is not a cat after 40 years no human has whiskers and pointed ears and a little yellow nose."
For some, the news raised more questions than it answered.
"Been tossing and turning for the last few hours trying to figure out how Hello Kitty isn't a cat. How is it possible? What does it mean?" @NotKennyRogers tweeted.
"Since Hello Kitty isn't a cat, wtf is My Melody?" tweeted @mrsunlawyer.
Users raced to update Kitty's Wikipedia entry, which now reads: "She bears the appearance of a white Japanese bobtail cat with a red bow although she is actually a little girl."
Singer Katy Perry stepped in to try to calm the masses: "IT'S OKAY HELLO KITTY FANS, KITTY PURRY IS A CAT."
At last count it was retweeted more than 13,000 times.
As the Sanrio website clearly states, Hello Kitty is a "cheerful and happy little girl ... who lives in London with her mama (Mary White), papa (George White), and her twin sister Mimmy."
Yes, she's also British.
For the record, Kitty's birthday is November 1, she likes baking and making pancakes, origami and eating apple pie.
Her favorite saying is "You can never have too many friends."
