Entrepreneur generates electricity solely from used cooking oil collected throughout Tokyo
For Yumi Someya, Tokyo is an untapped oil field, full of potential to generate electricity. The precious fuel, however, doesn't exist underground. It's a resource sitting in the kitchens of millions of Japanese homes — cooking oil. Someya's ultimate goal is to collect every last drop ...
Goichiro Toyoda taps technology in bid to save Japan's health care system
Goichiro Toyoda, 34, has an impressive resume. A graduate of the prestigious University of Tokyo faculty of medicine, Toyoda worked as a brain surgeon in Tokyo before leaving to become a research scholar at Children's Hospital of Michigan. Toyoda, however, eventually quit what looked to ...
Japanese woman works to give impoverished Filipinos path to education and jobs
While in college, Takako Yamada was determined to brighten the days of impoverished Filipino children through sports and leisure activities — a right she believed some of them had been deprived of. The student, now 32, said that at the time, she believed her efforts ...
From the DJ booth, man with ALS taps into tech to brighten future for all
Masatane Muto slowly maneuvers the controller on his power wheelchair with his right hand to move around his Tokyo office. He can barely move his body on his own and needs the help of a colleague to take occasional sips from the straw in his ...
Real estate for the people: One man's mission turning vacant houses into homes for everyone
Hideki Kawakita doesn't look like your average real estate agent. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt spotted with bright purple and yellow illustrations, he looks more like a traveler, or maybe a writer. Perhaps it is precisely his unpretentious manner that has allowed him to single-handedly ...
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, ...
