Koichi Hasegawa

Fridays for Future, a network of young people working on climate change issues, is still active despite the COVID-19 pandemic under which large face-to-face events are hard to hold. In Glasgow, UK, during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November 2021, about 100,000 people marched to demand more aggressive action to combat the climate crisis. In mid-September 2019, this campaign succeeded in mobilizing more than 7.6 million young people globally...

“Haiku” is the shortest form of poetry in the world. It was originally a part of traditional Japanese culture; yet, today, it is widely enjoyed in other cultures and languages. A traditional Haiku has a total of 17 or fewer syllables with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables, requiring one word or phrase symbolizing a season of the year. These two are the only rules for haiku writing. The history of haiku goes back to the poetry master, Basho Matsuo...

Last May, under the strong leadership of Shujiro Yazawa, President of the Japanese Sociological Society, Japanese sociologists created a network, now numbering more than 150 members, for research and information dealing with the tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011. The disastrous earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear power accident have generated so much work for sociologists, including administering surveys in almost every affected region.   Challenges...

Along the beautiful and deeply-indented coast line of North-East Japan, the tsunami destroyed every fi shing port, sweeping away wooden buildings, and leaving just steel structures. This picture of the devastated town of Minami Sanriku shows the frame of its three-story disaster prevention center. From among the more than thirty offi cials working in the building on March 11, only eight including the town mayor were miraculously rescued from the roof top...