Congratulations to Okayama Prefecture Women Ekiden Runners

We celebrate a top 8th place finish of women runners in today's 30th annual National Women's Ekiden relay race staged in Kyoto today. This 9 stage race was won by the Osaka team. In the 10 Km last stage, they continued to increase their lead even with a great effort from the Chiba Prefecture (East of Tokyo) runner, advancing three places.
The NHK television announcer mention that several of the country's top runners passed on this run due to preparation for the London Summer Olympics.
Coincidentally, later this month we will be adding a video about the origin and significance of the Ekiden (駅伝) races to our Japanese Cultural Video resources. See the link on the left.

New Year's Greetings

On behalf of the Officers and Board of Directors Members, we wish you and your loved ones a healthy, happy and prosperous 2012. We look forward to this year in expanding our outreach to Japan and to our local community. If you are not a member, please join in. The community will benefit from your interest and energy.

Bob Green, Secretary

San Jose Costa Rica trip highlights from that group

At the December public meeting, the head of the San Jose - San Jose, Costa Rica Sister City group, Abby Duran, gave us a summary of the trip made last month. Members Forest and Dorthy Williams, who were also along on the trip, filled in more details. Abby promised to have a meeting of his group and invite us to see images taken. We are all surely looking forward to it!

You can see a group photo in our previous post on Dec 2, 2011.

Interesting Japanese TV Programming in the Holidays

As we have mentioned, NHK-World and Tokyo Television have moved to Channel 38.4 in the San Francisco area. Unfortunately it is not yet on Comcast cable but they have recently moved to this new channel and the signal level is greatly improved for on-the-air reception through an antenna.

TTV has announced the broadcast of an interview with Donald Keen, Columbia University professor studying Japanese literature for over 70 years. After the disasters of Spring 2011, he decided to become a citizen of Japan and live the remainder of his life there. The program airs at the following time: 12/17 (Sat) 5:10pm, 9:10pm, 12/18 (Sun) 9:10am, 2:10pm.

There is also broadcast of the NHK Red/White music show (men-vs-women music stars competion) at 7pm on 12/31 and a Japanese movie with subtitles, Shodo Girls, a dramatization of a true and moving story of a contest in japan. That airs the following morning, 1/1/2012 at 9am.

We recommend these programs.

Update on Tuesday, December 20, 2011 by Secretary - sj-okayama.org

Member Bob Green reports that he has a personal copy of the Donald Keen program that he can share.