It's often difficult for people to maintain the enterprising spirit they had when they first entered the workplace, fresh out of university. Especially in a large company it is difficult for people's voices are heard, and often they feel isolated as there are not many ...
It's tough for asylum-seekers to keep their hopes up in Japan, where only 1 in every 1,000 applicants was granted refugee status last year. While waiting, which takes more than 10 months on average, they practically have nothing to do. Only those whom the Justice ...
In Kanagawa, homeless grow crops and confidence
Kiyoko Ojima awoke to the problems of the needy while in elementary school, when she came across a TV documentary about trying to find solutions to starvation in Africa. "I wanted to help those who are starving by growing crops," she said of her passion ...
Kanagawa computer programmer, 82, recognized worldwide for efforts to keep seniors digitally engaged
People say it is never too late to start new things. No one would object to that. But in reality, not many people have the guts to tackle things that are totally unfamiliar to them as they get older. This can't be said, however, of ...
Kind act sprouts into grass-roots movement to feed kids
Hiroko Kondo is credited with coining the term kodomo shokudō: makeshift eateries for disadvantaged kids that morphed into a national grass-roots movement to address the growth of poverty in Japan. But when the 58-year-old first opened her humble "children's cafeteria" in a residential backstreet in ...
It was a sight that presented such a stark contrast to his own fortune; a young boy standing at the entrance to a slum in Phuket, Thailand, as Hiroki Watanabe passed by in a luxury bus on his way to a yacht race. Watanabe, now ...
Aki Higuchi's mission: Giving Japan's young minds a global outlook and confidence to speak out
Aki Higuchi, 28, grew up in a multicultural home, where university students from different countries came five days a week to look after her and her younger sister up until she turned 18. On Monday it was a Turkish student, then a Bulgarian on Tuesday, ...
Call it worm power. Takaaki Hirotsu is trying to harness the power of the nematode worm — a tiny, transparent roundworm that lives in soil or water — to detect all forms of cancer at their earliest stages. The use of nematodes for superearly cancer detection ...
Snapping-turtle expert in Chiba leads battle against invasive species
Takeshi Imazu's daily tasks are far from what a typical prefectural official handles. For more than half of the week, he goes out to the Inbanuma marsh of Chiba Prefecture either to capture or study snapping turtles, a freshwater species that threatens local biodiversity. Snapping turtles, ...
Astroscale exec to boldly clean where no one has cleaned before
Entrepreneur Nobu Okada has set off on a mission never before undertaken in the annals of human history — cleaning up Earth's space junk. Man-made space debris comprises everything from defunct satellites to abandoned launch vehicles and even tiny flecks of paint. This floating junk ...
Saitama woman turns maligned waste disposal firm into recycling powerhouse
As a child, Noriko Ishizaka was ashamed of her father's company — a waste disposal firm with towering smoke stacks overlooking a small town in Saitama Prefecture. "People would call him 'the garbage collector' ... and I wasn't proud of that," she recalled. But Ishizaka Sangyo ...
Social entrepreneur taps corporate millennials to engage in developing world
When Daichi Konuma was a Hitotsubashi University student, he and his friends used to talk passionately about a future of building a better world. Whether at an investment bank or at a trading company, they had resolved to help small businesses or to focus ...
