On a lighter side

On a lighter side, the terrible mess around Fukushima is generating typical stories of bracing for revival, the "gambarimasu" phoenix type of narratives they are supposed to love here. "Supposed" because success here is less important than effort. They do love the vain efforts, maybe more than the success stories. But anyway, many examples of "restarting from less than zero" are pushed forward in the media. I would suggest readers of Japanese to register free to the Nikkei BP web site and follow at least the free articles published by the Nikkei Business magazine, those about Tohoku revival. This week issue of the paper magazine is about the crimes and sins of TEPCO. It's quite impressive to see such words printed by the magazine. Let's hope this is not the usual scapegoat scenario which is, with the "gambarimasu" vein, a standard feature of Japan.

And on an even lighter, utterly unrelated side, I found a cheap (it was never costly) copy of John Kenneth Galbraith "The Great Crash 1929" and I am reading it again bits by bits. I remember the pleasure I had reading it first time, both with the story and the writing style. In the original "On the origins of this book", Mr. Galbraith recalls the pleasure he had to research and write the book "working under the Orosco murals on the ground floor" of the Baker Library at Darmouth College. The nice thing about the Internet is that you can query for pictures that illuminate the reading, like this one of the library under the same murals here.