Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Anit-Whaling Ship vs. Japanese Boat

(To make sure everybody understands, this article was from January 2010, so yes its "old news" but i still thought it was important)

"The anti-whaling ship Bob Barker, and a Japanese harpoon boat collided in the icy waters off Antarctica on Saturday" (but wait, wasn't Bob Barker the host of the game show "the Prrice Is Right"? Yes! He donated millions of dollars to buy the Bob Barker ship for the Sea Shepherds). Although no injuries were reported4d, the activist group Sea Shepherd said "a small hole was torn in the hull of its ship...[but] the vessel was not in danger of sinking. For the past few years, the Japanese whaling ships and the Sea Shepherds have been accusing each other of "acting in increasingly dangerous ways." What I think is that we are not being dangerous enough yet, because the Japanese whalers have not stopped killing the whales for their profit. It's like they aren't thinking to the future, and what the consequences of their actions might be not only to themselves, but the whole world, and the sea life. If whales become extinct we can only imagine what might happen to the sea life. It might go all out of whack because of the non stop growing of the krill population which unbalances the rest of the food chain/web what whales, and krill are in.
There are three main tactics that Sea Shepherd activists. The first is trying to "block the whalrers from firing harpoons" at the whales in the water. If the Sea Shepherds donot succeed at these first two tactics, they deal with the possibility of seeing a whale get harpooned and dragged onto the dekc of the Japanese whaling ship. The third tactic that the Sea Shepherd activists do , is "hurling packets of stinking rancid butter" onto the dock of the ships and "the whalers have responded [most of the time] by firing water cannons and sonar devices meant to disorient the activists." Shooting the water guns also make it harder for the smaller boats, that throw the packets, to get close enough to the sides of the boats to throw them onboard the whaling ships.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

"Double Atomic bomb survivor dies in Japan"

"Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93." How does this happen you wonder?

Yamaguchi was sent on a business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, where he "suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city." After the bombing, and his business trip was over, he made his way back home to the city of Nagasaki, where the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, just three days after the first. Luckily on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, stopping any more atomic bombs from occuring on its homeland.


After the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher. Here are some things that Yamaguchi has done in effect to the bombings that he was in:

"Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope that such weapons would be abolished.
He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks."