Day: August 10, 2017

The International Olympic Committee said Thursday that it was closely monitoring rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, less than 200 days before the 2018 Winter Olympics are set to begin in South Korea’s Pyeongchang.

The games return to the country next year for the first time since the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. But what would be the first Winter Games in Asia outside Japan and the first of three consecutive Olympics on the continent risk being overshadowed by the mounting crisis involving North Korea.

The reclusive North’s apparent progress in developing nuclear weapons and missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland led to a war of words this week between the two countries, unnerving regional powers.

President Donald Trump said the United States would respond with “fire and fury” if North Korea threatened it. North Korea dismissed the warnings and outlined detailed plans for a missile strike near the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.

Experts in South Korea said the plans for an attack around Guam ratcheted up risks significantly, since Washington was likely to view any missile aimed at its territory as a provocation, even if it were launched as a test.

Games on track

“We are monitoring the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the region very closely,” an IOC spokesperson said. “The IOC is keeping itself informed about the developments. We continue working with the organizing committee on the preparations of these games, which continue to be on track.”

South Korea failed to land the Winter Olympics of 2010 and 2014 but succeeded in getting the nod in 2011 for the 2018 edition, which is scheduled for February 9-25.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said last month that the North would be given until the last minute to decide whether it will take part in the Olympics. He wants to get North Korea involved, even though none of its athletes have met the qualification standards.

His proposal for a unified team has already been turned down by a top North Korean sports official as unrealistic in the current political climate.
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A historical film about the last Russian czar’s affair with a ballerina has been cleared for release, the Culture Ministry said Thursday, despite passionate calls for its ban.

“Matilda,” which describes Nicholas II’s relationship with Matilda Kshesinskaya has drawn virulent criticism from some Orthodox believers and hard-line nationalists, who see it as blasphemy against the emperor, glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian lawmaker Natalya Poklonskaya, who previously had served as the chief regional prosecutor in Crimea following its 2014 annexation by Moscow, spearheaded the campaign for banning the film. She even asked the Prosecutor General’s office to carry out an inquiry into “Matilda,” which is set to be released on the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

The lavish production, filmed in historic imperial palaces and featuring sumptuous costumes, loosely follows the story of Nicholas II’s infatuation with Kshesinskaya that began when he was heir-apparent and ended at his marriage in 1894.

The czar and his family were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in July 1918. The Russian Orthodox Church made them saints in 2000.

“Matilda” opponents have gathered signatures against the film, and earlier this month several hundred people gathered to pray outside a Moscow church for the movie to be banned.

The film’s critics were recently joined by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed regional leader of Chechnya, and authorities in the neighboring province of Dagestan, who argued that “Matilda” should be barred from theaters in the mostly Muslim regions in Russia’s North Caucasus.

Director Alexei Uchitel has rejected the accusations and prominent Russian filmmakers have come to his defense. The film’s critics and its defenders both have appealed to the Kremlin, but it has refrained from publicly entering the fray.

On Thursday, the Russian Culture Ministry finally announced that the film has received official clearance.

Vyasheslav Telnov, the head of the ministry’s film department, said it checked “Matilda” and found it in full compliance with legal norms.

Asked to comment on statements from Chechnya and Dagestan, Telnov said that the film has been cleared for release nationwide, but the law allows regional authorities to make their own decisions.

“There is no censorship in Russia, and the Ministry of Culture stays away from any ideological views of beliefs,” he said. “A feature film can’t be banned for political or ideological motives.”

Disputes over the movie reflect the rising influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and the increasing assertiveness of radical religious activists.

Russia’s growing conservative streak has worried many in the country’s artistic community. A Moscow art gallery recently shut down an exhibition of nude photos by an American photographer after a raid by vigilantes, and a theater in the Siberian city of Omsk canceled a performance of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” following a petition by devout Orthodox believers.
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While the northern and southern U.S. states were engaged the civil war of the 1860s, a smaller war was playing out in the American southwest between the U.S. Army and the Mescalero Apache and Navajo peoples.

Between 1864 and 1866, soldiers forced tens of thousands of men, women and children along the so-called “Long Walk,” nearly 500 kilometers from their homeland in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Today, a memorial marks the site, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a $150,000 grant to help New Mexico and the Navajo and Mescalero Apache Nations develop a permanent exhibit and educational programs at the memorial.

“This grant will provide matched funds for site programming for the next four years,” said Patrick Moore, director of New Mexico Historic Sites. In an emailed statement, he listed a variety of planned events, including lectures, tribal youth and elder gatherings, film showings, and a 150th anniversary commemorative “run/walk/horseback ride/motorcycle rally,” honoring the 1868 treaty between the U.S. and the Navajo Nation.

“The broad array of partners and the vast geography across which the proposed activities are planned provide an opportunity to reach a multitude of audiences,” Moore said. “For example, the organization of a horseback ride from Bosque Redondo to Window Rock is an activity that could link local Anglo ranchers and Navajo participants–parties with shared horse culture bonds that would never have otherwise interacted.”

Hopefully, he said, these programs can help shift perspectives on both sides.

Funding cultural preservation

That grant is one of a dozen NEH announced last week which will fund efforts to preserve Native American culture and history across the country.

Maryland’s St. Mary’s College will receive one of the larger grants, $240,000, to support its research into the Rappahannock people, who flourished in Virginia before the arrival of British explorers in the 15th century.

The college was earlier contracted to reconstruct the “indigenous cultural landscape” of Virginia’s Rappahannock River valley. Using the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Information Systems Data, anthropologists dispelled previously-held notions about the Rappahannock people.

“It was commonly accepted that the Rappahannock moved to this area to distance themselves from the more powerful Powhatan people,” said Julia King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s. “As we came to the end of the study, it became clear that this was the area where tribal groups who wanted to get away from the Europeans in the 17th century went.”

The NEH grant will allow the team to continue its research, develop a detailed cultural history of Rappahannock River groups, identify Rappahannock villages and connect them to contemporary locations, excavate sites and work with the modern Rappahannock tribe to create an oral history.

Saving language

NEH also announced a three-year partnership with First Nations Development Institute to help revitalize Native American languages through language-immersion education programs in a dozen tribal communities. Language loss, a global phenomenon, is particularly acute in North America. Prior to contact with Europeans, hundreds of languages were spoken north of present-day Mexico. Today, only around 150 languages are still spoken, in some cases, only by the elderly, and are in danger of being lost.

“Language is highly important to Indian culture and identity,” said First Nations president Michael Roberts. “When you’re talking about indigenous languages, you’re talking about languages that have been around for thousands of years, and so in the sense of indigenous knowledge and history and even things as seemingly unrelated as changing climate and the knowledge of how to survive those climatic changes, all of these things are embedded in language.”

Proposed shutdown

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency created in 1965 to fund research, educational and humanities programs across the country. The grants announced August 2 are the last it will give out for fiscal year 2017, and, if the White House proposed 2018 budget passes, its last ever.

The Trump Administration has called for eliminating the NEH and other cultural agencies entirely. Its FY 2018 budget, released in May, requests about $42 million to cover administrative expenses and salaries associated with shutting the agency down by October 1, when the new fiscal year begins—which, in Julia King’s opinion, would be a tragedy.

“The NEH contributes enormously to what we might call quality of life issues–who are we, as Americans, where we came from,” she said. But she is optimistic the agency will survive. “This is not the first time the NEH has been targeted. Sometimes they emerge bruised, but they always emerge intact.”

For his part, FNDI’s Roberts stressed the importance of continued government funding for Native American cultural projects.

“The U.S. spent a lot of money on the destruction of Native culture and languages,” he pointed out, “so to put a little bit put back into the restoration is a start.”
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The Japanese summer delicacy of roasted eel, braised with a tangy sauce and sprinkled with prickly mountain pepper, is in question as the creatures with their mysterious migrations become increasingly endangered. 

Soaring demand for Japanese eel, or Anguilla japonica, helped put the creatures on the International Union of Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered species in 2014. It’s spurring poaching of similar species off the U.S. East Coast. 

But Katsumi Tsukamoto, “Dr. Eel” of the only “Eel Science Laboratory” at Nihon University in Japan, thinks he’s unlocked the secrets to eventually farming the eels, known as unagi, sustainably and profitably. Tsukamoto found out where the eels are spawning, and that helped researchers study conditions needed to raise them from the egg stage to adulthood. 

​Secret life of unagi

The possibility of extinction, and soaring prices for grilled eel believed to help build stamina for enduring sweltering summer days, have dismayed many Japanese gourmands and the restaurants that specialize in the dish.

Despite their important role in Japanese food culture, until recently very little was known about the life cycles of eels, such as where they spawned and how tiny, nearly transparent glass eels manage to travel back to their freshwater habitats in Asia and elsewhere. 

Supplies depend on wild-catching the juveniles and farm raising them until adulthood, a practice that has spread from Japan to Taiwan and mainland China as demand has surged. 

Tsukamoto says his discovery of Japanese eel larvae and spawning adults west of the Mariana Ridge, near Guam, in 2009 has enabled him and other researchers to figure out the right diet and environmental conditions for spawning eels and their offspring. 

Eel farming

Despite skepticism about the potential for such farming to work, Tsukamoto says three Japanese state-owned laboratories are able to raise the eels from the larval stage and get them to spawn, completing their life cycle. But for now each lab can raise only about 3,000-4,000 a year. A lack of funds is hindering construction of the infrastructure needed to make such operations commercially viable by producing tens of thousands of eels a year.

The complete farming of eels and some other endangered species as a way to help them survive by relieving the pressure from soaring demand.

Depending on the restaurant, Yuta Maruyama, an intermediate wholesaler who handles wild blue eel at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Fish market, says a multi-course menu including grilled blue eel can cost up to 30,000 yen ($270) per person at exclusive restaurants, mainly in the flashy Ginza shopping and dining district. 

The choice eels are often served in different styles to the traditional “kabayaki” eels, which are grilled in a coating of dark soy sauce marinade. Restaurants that specialize in kabayaki, often handed down generation to generation, may offer both wild and farmed eels — with supply depending on what is available that day at the market. 

​Wild-caught, farm-raised

At Hashimoto, a Michelin one-star kabayaki restaurant in Tokyo that first opened in 1835, the eels are all farm-raised the conventional way on the southern island of Kyushu, after being caught as glass eels. 

Like farmed salmon, the farmed eels raised from wild-caught glass eels tend to be fattier. “They have a flavor that is preferred by most customers,” said Shinji Hashimoto, the sixth-generation owner.

Hashimoto said his kabayaki sauce is “light,” to allow the eel’s flavor to come through. 

“The Tokyo palette has traditionally disliked sweet flavors,” he said.

To manage with fewer catches and higher prices, Hashimoto tries to get two servings out of larger eels. 

After cleaning and slicing them open, the cooks skewer them to ensure they will stay together while cooking. They are grilled directly over hot charcoal, then steamed to soften the flesh. Afterward they are coated in a sauce of soy sauce boiled with sweet rice wine, or mirin and then returned to the grill and basted three times before being served as “unajyu,” steaming hot over rice in a neat lacquer box. 

The busiest days tend to be the Day of the Ox in the lunar calendar, the first of which in 2017 was Tuesday, July 25th. Hashimoto served about 150 customers that day. 

“Even if the price rose to 10,000 yen (about $90) for one box of unajyu, Japanese people would still eat it once a year,” Tsukamoto said. “Why do Japanese people like unagi? Because we like soy sauce. The salty-sweet sauce, made from a mixture of soy sauce and mirin, is brushed on, is singed and grilled on the eel over charcoal — and that smell makes it irresistible.”
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