Leaving for Prague

This is to attend ISDCI congress, an official congress of the International Society of Developmental and Comparative Immunology, held every three years. This time is quite special to me, because (1) I was elected as President Elect from 2009, which mean I will be the President from 2012 for three years, (2) I am going to offer to chair the conference held in Fukuoka in 2012, (3) I will have a 20 min talk about history of JADCI, Japanese DCI association, in the History session, in addition to my scientific oral presentation on carp complement C1 complex in a 'Complement and Complemen-like Factors' session, which I will co-chair with Oriol. Hoping everything goes fine.
Tomorrow morning, I will have a flight to Incheon (Korea) to change plane to Prague, and be back Fukuoka at 5th July. See you again then.

June 23 and Okinawa

Sixty-four years ago, today was the day of ending of Okinawa battle in the World War II. Not many Japanese people, including me, have known this day, much less than the day of World War II end (Aug. 15) or start (Dec. 8).
About 100 thousand people were killed during the Okinawa battle, not only by US army but also Japanese army and indirectly by Japanese education at that time. The Okinawa people have been taught (or mind-controlled) to kill themselves rather than to become a captive of US army.
It is difficult for our age to understand with reality how horrible or nasty the battle was, but we have to keep the record, learn what happened and why that happened, in oder to prevent repeating any stupid war again, no matter win or loose.
According to a recent publication and a TV documentary, a song called "Shimauta", a big hit about 10 years ago, was written by a singer-song writer Mr. Miyazawa, who was inspired by the tragedy record of the Okinawa battle. So the "ShimaUta" is a story of the Okinawa batte. I have not imagined such a background of that song, but from now on, I will probably feel differently when I listen to that song or sing it in Karaoke.

The song, Shimauta (Island Song) is here.

Here is another Okinawa song of my favorite.

A tiny shrine

A few days ago, on the way to a funeral service of our professor emeritus, I found a very tiny shrine near Kashii station, Fukuoka City. The shrine, named Hamao Shrine, only has a small shrine gate, Torii in Japanese, and a tiny cottage-like main body, which should harbor a god of this shrine. In the shrine garden, however, it has a nice pasania tree full of green leaves, providing a peaceful shade in the garden and looking as if this tree might be a real main body representing a god in this shrine.
Although small and equipped only with minimum elements of a shrine, Hamao Shrine is neatly decolated with holy white paper ribbons and maintained well, indicating that some Japanese spirits are still alive among the residents there.

Welcoming new students

Yesterday, we had a softball competition among laboratory teams to welcome new undergraduate students (3rd grade) of the department of fisheries science. My laboratory team has had training twice in the last three weeks to prepare the games. As a result, although we lost the first game, won the second game. I think this result is not bad. I myself played as a first-baseman, and batting was also fine.
In the evening, we had a welcome party, with beer and snacks. I wish we could show more hospitality to the new students who might want to have more conversation and discussion with more experienced students and professors. Nevertheless, I drank a lot, talked a lot with a few students, and finally got hangover this morning.

The rainy season (month) is coming.

In most region of Japan, we have a month (mid June to mid July) of rainy season, pronounced as Tsuyu or ToYou in Japanese. This is bit depressing weather, but should be important to keep normal climate and plant growth in Japan. This weekend has been cloudy with occasional rain, looking as a sign of rainy season. I hope the season this year is calm without any flood damage.
A few things good for this season are 1) my birthday is coming (June 8) and 2) one of my of favorite flowers, hydrangea, will bloom. In the Hakozaki Shrine near my house, a beautiful hydrangea garden is now opened for visitors with a small entrance fee, 300 JPY (~$3).

Economic depression and holding a scientific meeting

The current global economic depression is also affecting budget situation of holding a scientific meeting. I will chair a domestic symposium on the complement system in Aug 2009, and now trying to collect funding from several companies related to the complement research and to my laboratory. Currently, the trials have been in vein. They have very good or crying excuse about the toughness of the economic situation in these years. The worse is that I have failed to get a good research grant in this year, so they do not expect a good order or purchase from me, perhaps as a real reason. But if someone offer a good donation especially under such condition this year, I will treat such dealer/company with much better privilege upon my grant success next year ^^;

Symposium of Japanese Society for Marine Biotechnology

Yesterday I gave a short lecture in a symposium of Japanese Society for Marine Biotechnology, held in Waseda University, Tokyo. The symposium topics was "Current status and perspectives of Immunological Study on Aquatic Organisms". For me, molecular and cellular analyses of bivalve defense system were interesting. Also a lecture on genomic research of aquatic organisms by Dr. Nobuyoshi Shimizu, Keio University, was impressive, because of that's contents but also partly because of knowing his good recovery from brain attack that happened two years ago just in front of us. He still has right limbs partially paralyzed, but can walk, use hands, speak and lough with sharp intelligence unchanged. It was a great pleasure for me to see him keeping active research.
My lecture was not so good, simply because I put so many things in 20 min. My topic was identification and functional characterization of complement components (C1, C4, C2) involved in the classical activation pathway in carp. Since I had put all the relevant findings to my abstract before I knew how many minutes are given to me, I was trying to touch all the things mentioned in the abstract; this was totally failure. Spoken too fast (completely against typical my manner), my intention to introduce what's interesting and important in studying the classical complement pathway in bony fish became much less persuasive.

On the other hand, utilizing this chance to travel to Tokyo, it was nice to visit my favorite coffee bar, Yoshida-ya (Nogizaka, Tokyo), to enjoy a cup of nice blended coffee named Mild Sour Blend and calm/warm atmosphere there. A master of Yoshida-ya, Mr. Akira Yoshida, was a bassist of my top favorite pop-music band, Tulip, until about 25 years ago. So anytime I visit and order some coffee there, I am shy and feel a nostalgia.
In Japan, that kind of authentic coffee bar with calm and relaxing mood is not so popular now a days, instead, full of Starbucks-like fashionable ones. This is little bit pity situation for me.
Photo from Yoshida-ya web page( in Japanese only.) -->