TRAVEL

A Kyoto University team has developed a method to efficiently generate induced pluripotent stem cells that is less likely to lead to tumor development than the conventional method. iPS cells are able to transform into the cells of any organ. The new research, representing a step forward in putting iPS cells into practical use in regenerative medicine, was reported in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America on Tuesday. (Yomiuri)

A 64-year-old woman from Kyoto Prefecture was confirmed dead in the derailment Friday of a tourist train carrying many Japanese sightseers in southern Switzerland, All Nippon Airways Co. said. The woman was among 14 tourists and one guide on a tour arranged by ANA Sales Co., the airline said. The 14 people were seven couples, mostly 50 years old or older, and were on an eight-day tour in Switzerland and were to return to Japan next Tuesday, according to the airline. (AP)

Popping out of an alleyway to see a white-faced geisha shuffling along in her clogs was undoubtedly a Kyoto highlight. But you have to be quick to get a good photo; those slender Japanese girls can work up a real pace flitting around the narrow streets of Gion. You might get two at once or two in quick succession but, more likely than not, one will just pop out unexpectedly and disappear just as quickly, so you have to keep your eyes peeled. The best time to catch them is 6pm to 8.30pm daily. But Kyoto is full of unexpected delights. Who would have thought a city renowned for its temples and known as "traditional" Japan would greet its train passengers with a huge Astro boy atop a Kyoto sign? (news-mail.com.au)

Every year on Aug. 16, at exactly 8 p.m., the first in a series of five giant bonfires is lit on a mountainside overlooking the city of Kyoto, signaling the moment when ancestral ghosts return to the spirit world after visiting relatives on Earth during the three-day O-bon festival. The largest and most iconic blaze, on 大文字山 (Daimonjiyama, Big Letter Mountain), comprises 75 torches arranged in the shape of 大, a kanji meaning "big." (Japan Times)

Japan changes the way you think about life. It's like being beamed into an alternative reality, where optimism and respect permeate life, and modernism is fused with tradition to create exciting new possibilities of how to live. I'd organised my trip in and around Kyoto and Tokyo to explore Japanese food, but found myself captivated by the latest fashion in ryokans - Japanese inns. My revelation came in the form of Miyamasou, an idyllic new ryokan high up in the Northern mountain forests of Kyoto prefecture, famed for its wild herb food. Once our bus passed what looked like a beware-of-bears-crossing-the-road sign, deep in the dark cypress woods, the driver put on Greensleeves to announce its arrival to the mountain hamlets. (guardian.co.uk)

"Women Artists of Kyoto: Bearing Burdens / Burdens Born" is ostensibly about the classification of female artists since the late 19th century. The term "keishu-gaka" refers to accomplished women artists, "joryu-gaka" to post-World War II artists who created trends among male colleagues and "josei-gaka" simply emphasizes the feminine gender of an artist. Distinguishing between male and female interpretations of art has been historically important in Japan, and remains so. In the 1990s, the critic Kotaro Iizawa gave the name "onnanoko shashinka" (girl photographers) to an emergent generation of female artists with a penchant for taking brightly-colored photographs of everyday and intimate scenes. (Japan Times)

Items of memorabilia from Michael Jackson's concert tours were stolen from a special sales event at the Daimaru department store in Kyoto, investigative sources said Tuesday. The department store said it found on July 8 and 9 that nine items worth about 169,000 yen were missing. The missing goods include a pamphlet signed by Jackson's concert tour staff and a limited-edition gold disc, it said. The Kyoto prefectural police are investigating the case. The department store held the sales event from late June, offering about 1,000 products related to the legendary American musical artist, who died in June last year, including his autograph for 400,000 yen. (AP)

An unknown pathogen was probably responsible for the sudden deaths of 44 Japanese monkeys that have died in captivity since 2001, according to research by the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University. Located in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, the institute announced Thursday that only Japanese monkeys had developed symptoms from the pathogen and it would not affect people. According to the institute, the monkeys died after becoming extremely anemic and bleeding from mucous membranes in their noses. Most lost all their blood platelets, which help close wounds. (Yomiuri)

Six movie theaters - in Hachinohe (Aomori Prefecture), Sendai, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto - on July 3 started showing "The Cove," a documentary film about dolphin hunting in the whaling town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. There have been no reports of big disturbances. Originally, the movie, the winner of this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary, had been scheduled to be shown from June 26. Three movie theaters in Tokyo and Osaka gave up on screening the film after groups who call the movie "anti-Japanese" threatened to stage noisy protests near the theaters. Besides those six movie theaters, 18 others are to show the film. The distributor and the movie houses deserve praises for not bowing to pressure from protesters. (Japan Times)

Several hundred thousand people climb Japan's Mount Fuji every year, many of them in the peak period of July and August. But for an altogether more secluded and spiritual hiking experience, the Kumano Kodo region four hours south of Osaka offers an ancient network of pilgrimage trails and majestic shrines set among the densely forested mountains of the Kii Peninsula. The Kumano Kodo - meaning "Kumano old roads" - includes the Buddhist retreat of Mt. Koya and the temple area of Yoshino, sites that are relatively well-visited because of their proximity to Kyoto and Osaka. It also includes the three grand Shinto shrines, or "sanzen," near the southern tip of the peninsula - an appendage of the main Japanese island of Honshu - and the pilgrimage pathways that link all these locations. (Wall Street Journal)

About 57 percent of homeless people expressed a desire to vote in an election, according to results of a survey conducted by supporters released Wednesday. A group promoting exchanges among supporters of the homeless in Kagoshima Prefecture took the initiative in conducting the survey at parks, Internet cafes and other places in Tokyo and Kanagawa, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Kagoshima and Okinawa prefectures between late June and earlier this month, ahead of Sunday's House of Councilors poll. (Japan Times)

A 5.3-meter-tall high-voltage wire fence at Kyoto University's research center in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, proved no match for about a dozen monkeys bent on breaking out, it was learned Tuesday. The monkeys first climbed up trees and then used their branches as slingshots to propel them over the fences, researchers said. The trees are about 2 meters high and 2 to 3 meters from the fences. (Japan Times)

Her moniker on YouTube says it all - born and raised in Kyoto, thatjapanesegirl has lived in Japan all her life, moving to Tokyo just this year. With more than 24,000 subscribers to her two YouTube channels, thatjapanese girl, who prefers to withhold her real name, is one of Japan's most viewed English-speaking vloggers. Since she started vlogging in January 2009, thatjapanesegirl has been profiled in Japanese media, including NHK. Entertaining both foreign and Japanese viewers with her bilingual videos, thatjapanesegirl become serious about her English-language studies by abandoning Japanese television shows and watching only English ones instead. (Japan Times)

The man, who was not named, built his house in 1994 but 11 years later, the funeral parlour opened across the street. The plaintiff told the court that he has to keep his curtains drawn all day to avoid seeing coffins and mourners because it caused him intolerable stress. He had won two previous cases against the funeral operator, in the town of Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, with lower courts ordering the firm to raise a fence around the building by 1.2m. However, the firm appealed and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court overturned those rulings after the funeral company claimed that its facility is a public place, that raising the fence would be expensive and make the property appear "intimidating." (telegraph.co.uk)

Japanese researchers have for the first time in the nation successfully used stem cells to treat heart disease, opening up the possibility of replacing the need to resort to artificial hearts or transplants. Prof. Hiroaki Matsubara and his team from Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine harvested the stem cells from the patient's heart, used them to grow new heart muscle cells, and replanted them. The patient--Shigeki Yamaguchi from Nagata Ward, Kobe--had been ill with acute heart disease and had suffered a heart attack in February. (Yomiuri)

The government's pilot program for toll-free expressways was to start at midnight Sunday, covering a total of 1,652 kilometers in 50 sections on 37 routes, where traffic volumes are relatively small. The heavily traveled Metropolitan and Hanshin expressways, which serve the Kanto and Kansai regions respectively, will not have any free sections. But about 20 percent of the remainder of the nation's expressway system will become free. Expressways in provincial areas will have long toll-free sections. In Hokkaido, a 139-kilometer section between the Shibetsukenbuchi and Iwamizawa interchanges of the Hokkaido Expressway (Doodo) will be toll-free, as will a 112-kilometer section between Obama-nishi Interchange and Yokawa Junction on the Maizuru-Wakasa Expressway, which passes through Fukui, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures. (Yomiuri)

Nine artworks using material from fake Louis Vitton products have been removed from an exhibition at a Kobe museum after the fashion company protested, it was learned Sunday. The 40-cm-long pieces by Mitsuhiro Okamoto of Kyoto are shaped like locusts and titled "Batta-mon" ("Locust Stuff"). In the Kansai dialect, batta-mon is slang for knockoff. (Japan Times)

Monkeys enjoy watching TV just as much and in the same way as human beings, according to new research by Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute. The research team, led by professor Nobuo Masataka, tracked changes in the neural blood flow of a 3-year-old rhesus monkey (equivalent in maturity to a 10-year-old human child) by beaming near-infrared light at the animal's head and measuring how much light bounces back -- a technique called "optical topography." The monkey was then shown TV images while the researchers observed which parts of the brain became active. (Mainichi)

A Japanese scientist who created the equivalent of embryonic stem cells from ordinary skin cells has won one of this year's Kyoto Prizes and will receive a $550,000 prize. Shinya Yamanaka, 47, developed a way to reprogram skin cells so that they can be developed into all kinds of tissue, such as that of the heart or brain. This has vast potential to speed medical research, creating genetically matched cells for use in damaged parts of the body. He developed the method as an alternative to using embryonic stem cells, an approach that required embryos to be destroyed, raising complicated ethical questions that held back research. (Fox News)

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare will accept last month's court decision that its criteria on disability and benefits for workers' injuries were sexually biased and unconstitutional, ministry officials said Thursday. The ministry will not file an appeal against the May 27 Kyoto District Court decision, the officials said. A sharp change in the country's conventional social wisdom has made it difficult to back up the reasonability of setting the levels of disability and subsequent workers' compensation benefits by gender, the officials said. (AP)

Effective April 1 - the start of the new academic year - I became president of Shiga University, a "national university corporation" near Lake Biwa in Japan's Kansai region. It is a relatively small institute consisting only of the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Economics. I have served at a number of institutions of higher education during the past 44 years - two years at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Tokyo, 37 years at the Institute of Economic Research of Kyoto University and four years at the Graduate School of Policy Science of Ritsumeikan University. (Japan Times)

A hunting trip in Japan went horribly wrong when one man committed suicide after he accidentally shot dead his friend while searching for wild boar. Yoshinobu Nakashima, 67, was hunting for wild boar in the mountains near Fukuchiyama City in northern Kyoto prefecture when the incident took place. The group was walking through the mountains when Nakashima accidentally shot his fellow hunter Satoshi Miyake, 65, according to reports. As the men rushed to assist the injured man, Mr Nakashima reportedly said that he would go down the mountain to call for an ambulance and obtain assistance. However, minutes later, as the group tended to Mr Miyake they heard the sound of a gunshot before discovering Mr Nakashima a short distance away with a fatal wound to his chest. (telegraph.co.uk)

A group of Japanese researchers have uncovered the mechanism by which blood first circulates in vertebrates -- knowledge that could be applied in researching methods to treat and prevent strokes and other ailments. Kyoto University professor Atsuko Sehara and other researchers found that blood flow did not originate merely from pulses of the heart, but started when enzymes acting as scissors cut away red blood cells that had become attached to the inner walls of blood vessels after the heart started beating. These enzymes exist in people's blood and there is a possibility that they could be useful in preventing or treating blood clots. (Mainichi)

I just came from Kamakura, a place that we love (or at least, those who love things Japanese) to think of in terms of samurai and the lore of loyalty. There's a validity in that tendency: Kamakura was in the 12th century the capital that nurtured the Shogunate that wielded power over a massive area even as the emperor remained in Kyoto and appeared to be the ultimate authority. Minamoto no Yoritomo, it is said, consolidated his power here, after his clan's defeat from the powerful Taira clan. Trees would play a significant role in the narrative of the shogunate. Minamoto no Yoritomo hid in the hollowed trunk of a tree to escape the enemies. (Business Mirror)

Chikako Pari, whose stage name is Ichizuru, is the last geisha, also known as geiko, of a small town in Kyoto Prefecture. Her unusual last name, Pari - written in kanji - refers to the city of Paris and her French ancestry, although the details of her French great-grandfather's life were never revealed to her. Pari's happy childhood came to an abrupt end at age 12, when she was sold to a geisha house to pay off her father's debts. Today, she has plenty to smile about: She recently married a police officer who stole her heart 43 years ago. (Japan Times)