The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of an English school AEON.

Topic: Cell phones and social etiquette
Style: Formal
Among many alleged manners for cell phones or smartphones, the most vocal one in these days might be “do not use your cellphone/smartphone while you are walking on the street”. It is absolutely true that looking at the screen of a cellphone/smartphone during your walk is quite dangerous not only for you, but also for others whom you may jostle. Some of smartphone applications, however, require users to watch the screen while they are walking. The most typical one is Google Map. Many people (including myself) use the app to find destinations when they are lost in unfamiliar areas. Some may argue that we should use the “vocal guidance” function so that we do not need to look at the screen. For many others, however, it is inevitable to look at the screen even with some vocal guidance since the app is named “map”. And a map is to look at while we are walking. In the past, when we had no cellphone/smartphone, nobody said that we should not look at a paper map while we were walking. The difference between the old information system and the new one is, just the number of people who use it. People did not always have maps in the past, but now most of them have smartphones and they use them almost all the time while they are awake.
From this example, we can argue that we should think more how to solve the addiction to smartphone than to expect good manners for smartphones. For many young people, the first thing to see in the morning after they woke up and the last thing to see before they fell asleep are the same thing, their smartphones. When I travelled in China in last September, what shook me most was the fact that many young engineers with whom I had a lunch one day started to check their smartphones as soon as they finished eating. At this point of change in personal behavior, we should intensively study potentially negative impacts to human health for both body and mind.
As a conclusion, smartphone addiction is quite a serious problem and to consider good smartphone etiquettes is quite useless without thinking of possible solutions for this addiction.

The following essay is what I wrote as a writing assignment of an English school AEON. The title this time is “Food Safety” and I described three notorious incidents in Japan.

Topic Food safety
Style Formal

We eat to live, not we live to eat. Food is, however, one of the most essential parts for our health. In the traditional thought of oriental medicine, foods occupy the crucial part of medication. In Japan, we believe that we can drink rather safe water and eat mostly safe foods. Despite the alleged fact that Japan is the safest country in the world for water and foods, it does not mean that Japan is 100% free from risks caused by poisonous water or foods. Let us look at three notorious examples happened in Japan from the late 1950’s to the present:

(1) Morinaga Milk arsenic poisoning incident (1955)
Dry milk corrupted by arsenic produced at the Morinaga’s Tokushima factory killed 130 infants and 12,044 suffered from arsenic intoxication for a long period. This is practically the first incident in Japan where the safety of food was strictly reviewed and the related consumer protests were highly activated. Because this incident happened during the country’s rapid growing period, the then government tried to protect Morinaga rather than to defend the victims and actually oppressed the related consumer activism. In 1969, 14 years after 1955, a professor at Osaka university found that the victims still suffered from aftereffects and it stirred up strong boycott campaign in all over Japan. Morinaga finally accepted its responsibility and closed its Tokushima factory in 1970.

(2) Kanemi oil symptoms (Yusho) incident (1968)
Because of edible oil contaminated by PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl), more than 14,000 people suffered from skin and visceral disorder. Some pregnant mothers gave birth to so called “black babies” and it stunned people all over the world. The oil was produced by Kanemi Warehouse company and PCB that was used as a heat medium in the production line leaked from wrongly allocated pipes and was mixed with edible oil. PCB changes to dioxins once heated and caused many health troubles for the victims. The production and import of PCB were prohibited in 1975, although it had been until then widely used as a good insulating material.

(3) Yukijirushi mass food poisoning incident (2000)
14,780 people who drank Yukijirushi’s low-fat milk described symptoms such as diarrhea, nausea, or abdominal pains. Despite the fortunate fact that no one died, it was the biggest incident related to food safety in Japan. In this case, the reaction of Yukijirushi was quite bad and what the CEO said in an interview was harshly criticized. (He said that he has not slept at all by the incident). Although Yukijirushi was one of the biggest food related companies at that time, it lost its market share in a very short period and it was finally absorbed by another company.
The current relatively safer status for food was built upon such harsh experiences. Some weekly magazines now frequently report the risk of foods imported from China. We can be sure that China will also experience such incidents in the near future. (Please note that many visitors from China to Japan often buy Japanese dry milk including Morinaga’s claiming that they are much safer than Chinese companies’ products. It sounds very ironic.)

(The following essay is what I wrote as an assignment of writing English on October 6.)

Title: Computers Style: Casual

I have a CD of Japanese Tokusatsu (special-effects dramas) theme songs. There is a song among them named “Time Limit”, and some very interesting parallel phrases are included in it. Quote:

“Turn around, turn around the earth! Angels inhabit computers. Let’s charge! They give us energy of dream and hope with some items that can increase our happiness.

Stop, stop the earth! Devils inhabit computers. Let’s charge! They bring us to the stage where we hate each other with dark and ambitious energy.” (from the ending theme of Choujinki Metalder, broadcasted in 1987 – 1988)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbxm9OGMUyo

Is a computer an angel or a devil? It is quite an interesting and still imminent question. Now, in 2018, we can rephrase it: Is AI an angel or a devil? Since the early years of the 1960s, there has been naïve belief that computers can do everything. Nearly 60 years later, there are many people who still believe that AI can do everything. I watched recently one such story in Voyage to the bottom of the sea, an old Sci-Fi TV drama broadcasted in the 1960s. In that story, the submarine Seaview was attacked by a huge coelenterata (simply said, just a giant jelly fish), and the skipper Crane asked her computer about necessary evasive actions he should take, and he closely followed the instructions given by the computer. The drama described the then near future, namely the 1970s. We know that even in the 1970s there was no computer that could give us such sophisticated knowledge for something. But who can laugh at Irwin Allen (the director of the drama)? If we remake the drama now, the computer would be replaced by AI, eventually. There is absolutely no difference at all.

It may be true that AI programs will go beyond human beings in the near future. Some scientists expect that in 2045 and call it “singularity”. A clear and famous example is Google’s Alpha Go, AI Go program. The latest version of Alpha Go has made itself stronger and stronger by repeating battles inside it for more than 100 million times. Now the program is alleged to have reached the level that even its programmers could not expect in advance.
Since this essay is “casual”, I won’t discuss this problem further. But honestly to say, I have no answer for the above-mentioned question whether a computer/ AI is an angel or a devil. But I feel like that the year of singularity will come earlier than expected. Thus, the song “Time Limit” may sound like a prophecy, very realistic.