A visual journey into Japan's sex industry

Sex is everywhere in Japan, but most tourists don't see it. They walk past the men handing out tissue packages at train stations, and assume the neon signs in entertainment districts point to karaoke bars. But many indicate hostess clubs, oral-sex parlours, and “soapland” bathhouses. Those tissue packets advertise to men and are also used to recruit female workers.
According to Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs (Harry N. Abrams, $45), Japan's commercial sexual-services industry accounted for nearly US$20 billion in 2001. And although these clubs are a cultural phenomenon, they're strictly off-limits to foreigners.
Pink Box captures their inner sanctums in a photographic collection. It's not a coffee-table book you'd want your mother to see. Photographer Joan Sinclair visited over 90 clubs and returned with images of women working in nude theatres, peeping rooms, “touch pubs”, and “image clubs” with elaborately decorated fantasy theme rooms. Examples include a train replica where men pay to grope women posing as schoolgirls, and a department-store elevator, equipped with a mirrored floor and a uniformed, pantyless attendant. In “fashion clubs”, women provide services in true-to-life costumes—such as chain-restaurant uniforms, nurse outfits, officewear—or even dressed as anime characters.
On the line from San Francisco, Sinclair tells the Straight that she first learned of the clubs 10 years ago when she was working as an English teacher in Japan. She returned three years ago to photograph them. “ Pink Box is about the kitsch, the humour, and the over-the-top–ness of the domestic sex industry in Japan,” Sinclair says. “There is a sense of humour about it that's uniquely Japanese,” she says, adding that manga and Japanese graphic art are partly responsible. “There's something in Japanese society…that makes these archetypes of everyday life the heart of the role-playing fantasy.”
How did Sinclair gain access to these clubs? She speaks Japanese, and got to know the managers, workers, and customers. Once given permission to shoot, she worked with those who volunteered to be photographed for the book. “It's not an underground industry,” she explains. “They advertise, they all have Web sites…they have fan sites for the girls.”
Pink Box doesn't touch on the darker side of the industry: gritty brothels with Southeast Asian sex workers. Sinclair acknowledges that these exist but felt that was a different story to tell. She made the decision to shoot Japanese-style clubs that employ Japanese women. (Prostitution is legally a grey area in Japan, but Sinclair says one criterion they stick to is that they rarely risk employing those under 18.)
The book quotes customers and workers on their motivations. “It would take a year to earn the money for my [Louis Vuitton] purse if I was working in an office,” says a worker.
“All I ask is that viewers not assume that this profession is inherently degrading. It's more complicated than that,” Sinclair writes in the book. “These women are not powerless, they are not on drugs. They have made conscious choices; they have their own dignity.
“The clubs are a reflection of modern Japan, a literate society where the rules are written out, prices are not negotiable, and fantasies are predetermined, prescripted, and prepaid.” Sex and the city indeed.

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

Morinaga Milk Industry,A major Japanese food manufacturer has found traces of an industrial chemical in some of its products that were made in China, as a food safety scare centered on tainted milk continued to spread, health officials said Friday.

The news came as Japan added food products from 12 Asian countries and territories with a record of importing milk products from China to a watch list for special inspections.

Japan’s Marudai Food Co pulled its cream buns, meat buns and creamed corn crepes from supermarkets a week ago as the tainted milk scandal in China began to unfold. Its tests have since found traces of the industrial chemical melamine in several of the recalled products, Health and Welfare Ministry official Mina Kojima said.



Japan's third largest dairy company posted [yen] 431.2bn in sales for its 1999 financial year, ending March 1999, for a net profit of [yen] 2.5bn and a current profit of [yen] 8.7bn, up compared with sales of [yen] 418.2bn in 1998, for a [yen] 2.5bn net profit and a current profit of [yen] 7.5bn. Morinaga Milk's main business is dairy products; it posted [yen] 193bn, it holds a 8% share of market milk and which represented 45% of the sales in dairy product business. Sales of condensed milk, dried milk, cheese and butter, represented 20% of the sales, for [yen] 84.8bn. Morinaga Milk ranks second on the yogurt market with a 19% market share ; its sales came to [yen] 55bn in 1998. It also ranks second on the ice cream market, posting sales of [yen] 51.3bn, up 4%. Morinaga Milk leads the coffee creamer market; it sold 7.350 tonnes of its Creap brand which holds a 34% market share. In 1998, Morinaga Milk sold [yen] 520mn worth of baby food for a 2.5% market share, and it ranks third on the infant milk market, where it holds a 26% market share, for a sales volume of 9,000 tonnes. In addition to dairy products, Morinaga is involved in soft drinks, chilled foods, fertilisers, effluent treatment plants, coffee creamer, infant foods, tofu, dairy engineering, farming, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, cosmetics, and real estate. It exports tofu to 32 countries, and sells tofu with a long shelf life in the United States. Morinaga milk's soft drink sales came to [yen] 33.8bn in 1998, representing 8% of sales. Morinaga milk spent [yen] 10bn biotechnology research laboratory which is to produce drugs for cancer from bifidus bacteria, and to develop other drugs designed to counteract side effects of cancer

Marudai has sold more than 300,000 of the products, most of which are believed to have been consumed, but so far there have been no reports of health problems, she said.

Company executive Masaaki Sugiyama told a news conference that two kinds of cream buns and the crepes had traces of melamine, but the amount was so small that it posed no health threat. He apologized for the company’s failure to prevent the contamination.



The public health department in Takatsuki, a western city where Marudai is headquartered, said its lab tests found one of the cream buns, “Cream Panda,” contained melamine 74 times higher than the tolerable daily intake level set by the European Food Safety Agency.

But public health official Mami Matsumoto said an average adult would need to eat 33 crepes or 17 panda buns every day to risk being sickened.

“Nobody eats so many of them. We believe the risk is negligible,” Matsumoto said.

The ministry said earlier Friday that it had suspended imports of milk and milk products from China, and had singled out products from 12 other countries and territories for close inspection. The move was meant to prevent tainted products from entering the country, ministry official Yoshiya Nishimura said. This study has three main objectives: (i) to quantify the impacts of milk and feed price changes on the primary milk supply in the U.S.;Many of the more than 60,000 dairy farms in the United States have been cutting costs, selling off their cows, or leaving the dairy business altogether as milk prices plummet 35 percent in just the past two months while dairy farm operating costs remain uncomfortably high.



Some farms are losing $200 per head every month.

"We've dealt with 18 percent interest. We've dealt with farm recession. We've dealt with droughts and floods and this is by far the worst economic situation we have ever dealt with in our years of farming," said Kooistra, who has run Kooistra Farms in Woodstock, Illinois, with her husband since 1980.

(ii) to examine the impacts of technological changes on the price responsiveness of supply and specific herd characteristics; and (iii) to generate dynamic long-run forecasts of the milk supply response to price changes and possible future technological advancements. The econometric analysis contained in this study is an update of the model by Chavas and Klemme (1986). We used the residual-based bootstrap to test hypotheses regarding the long-run price-responsiveness of supply, and found that the 10-year elasticity of milk supply to milk price is lower in 2007 than it was in 1980. This result is most surprising. One might expect that with better genetics, improved heifer management and larger farms the industry would be likely to react to prices more quickly than almost thirty years ago, when small and medium-sized dairy operations played a major role. A detailed analysis of the predicted herd structure supports the conjecture that a decrease in priceRight now, the price of milk will barely cover our feed costs and to pay our veterinarian. I'm not even counting all the other expenses that go along with keeping a farm running, the utilities, the fuel costs," she said.

"Given the suddenness and severity of the plunge in farm-level milk prices, a significant number of farmers won't survive the winter," Jerry Kozak, president and chief executive of National Milk Producers Federation, said last month.

Farmers have an opportunity to get paid for culling their herds via the farmer-funded CWT program, which was in the process of securing a line of credit to augment its efforts in 2009, according to NMPF's Kozak.


Industry analysts say the reason for the steep drop in milk prices is simple-- too much milk and not enough demand for it. Restaurant traffic is down in the United States as recession jitters have consumers reeling in their spending. About 40 percent of U.S. milk production is made into cheese and roughly 60 percent of the cheese is used in the restaurant and food-service sectors, according to analysts.

Dairy exports, which helped drive U.S. milk prices to the sky-high levels in 2007 and 2008, are also down sharply.

Meanwhile, New Zealand and Australia, two top global suppliers, are exporting more milk products after severe drought slashed production in the past few years.

milk industry still recovering from melamine crisis

The European Union has reinstated export subsidies on a range of dairy products, essentially pricing U.S. supplies out of the market.


"Even in the good times, you're always looking at ways to manage better and keep the costs down. When these extremes come along, it's pretty hard to find anything else to cut," said dairy farmer Brad Scott, of Scott Brothers Dairy Farm in San Jacinto, California.



"In a factory, when things get bad you can always just turn the key off and wait until things improve. In a dairy there's no key to turn off." responsiveness is a consequence of decades-long excessive focus on yield improvement in genetic selection. The intensive production process could make cows susceptible to health problems, imposing biological constraints on the economic lifetime of a cow. Hence, herd expansion decisions will be harder to implement, as culling rates are not easily reduced, and more replacement heifers are needed just to keep the herd size stable

How You Can Upgrade Your Life

How You Can Upgrade Your Life
By Mohamed Tohami

Most people try to improve their lives in the wrong – and most difficult – ways.
They try to bring in more money and acquire more possessions, but forget about the essence of happiness and the basics of life improvement.
When I look back on my own life and point out those moments where I felt my life had improved in some way, I discover an amazing thing.
I discover the presence of a single factor in every one of those moments, a factor that has made my life better time and again. This single factor is solely responsible for bringing me more happiness, more wealth, and more satisfaction.
And that sole factor is...
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.
That's it!
That is the secret to life improvement. And it is one of the most important principles of success and happiness ever known.
All successful people are committed to the principle of constant improvement. They never stop learning and growing. They learn from the best and expand their minds with new ideas every single day.
The quality of your life is directly proportional to your personal value.
When you strive to be better, your life will be better. The more you know, the more you grow. The more value you add to yourself, the more your life improves.
When you change who you are, your life changes, too.
If you change for the better, your life will become better. If you change for the worse, your life will become worse.
The only surefire way to UPGRADE your life is to UPGRADE yourself.
Strive to become better every day. Learn from the best and expose yourself to new ideas. Allow yourself to grow and expand.
Increase your personal value and your life will become just what you want it to be.
Remember: upgrade yourself, upgrade your life

from - http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/How_You_Can_Upgrade_Your_Life.html

Tips To Upgrade Your Sex Life

Tips To Upgrade Your Sex Life
If you’re bored of those same old sex positions and want to try something new to spice up your sex life, this article is just meant for you. Here are some erotic extras for an instant sex boost:
1. Predictive text
Being able to tune into one another’s sexual signalling is a great way of strengthening your bedtime bond. Take a moment to check your man’s body language when you’re feeling sexy. Direct eye contact and an open posture directed towards you are all sexual cues.

Upgrade Your Lifestyle: Get Cash for iPhones

Upgrade Your Lifestyle: Get Cash for iPhones

Our culture is defined by a get rich and go bigger philosophy. Although the idea of ‘green living' has come to the forefront as an avid attempt at changing the American ideology, the concept of making it big and consuming products in our capitalist society is a long-standing fixture of the American dream. We may try to deny ourselves the reality of our guilty obsession with this concept, but no amount of denying will ever make it go away. That's why simple ideas like getting cash for iphones play such an affective part in feeding the fire of our greedy desires. Every small contribution to the capitalist market that we can make brings us one step closer to fulfilling our dreams to be rich and successful individuals.
Hip-hop and pop stars sing about it all the time, and the Hollywood stars that we obsess over flagrantly advocate the get rich or die trying mentality that has defined the American way of life for so many years. Though the images dancing across the music video may push the concept to a whole new controversial level, they are honest in their outright depiction of this desire. Still, bombarding the average middle-class American with these images begs the question, what little part can we play in this massive consumer machine if we are ever to make it to the status we dream of?

from - http://www.articlealley.com/article_1648727_45.html

How You Can Upgrade Your Life!

How You Can Upgrade Your Life!
By Mohamed Tohami
Most people try to improve their lives in the wrong – and most difficult – ways.
They try to bring in more money and acquire more possessions, but forget about the essence of happiness and the basics of life improvement.
When I look back on my own life and point out those moments where I felt my life had improved in some way, I discover an amazing thing.
I discover the presence of a single factor in every one of those moments, a factor that has made my life better time and again. This single factor is solely responsible for bringing me more happiness, more wealth, and more satisfaction.
And that sole factor is...
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.
That's it!
That is the secret to life improvement. And it is one of the most important principles of success and happiness ever known.
All successful people are committed to the principle of constant improvement. They never stop learning and growing. They learn from the best and expand their minds with new ideas every single day.
The quality of your life is directly proportional to your personal value.
When you strive to be better, your life will be better. The more you know, the more you grow. The more value you add to yourself, the more your life improves.
When you change who you are, your life changes, too.
If you change for the better, your life will become better. If you change for the worse, your life will become worse.
The only surefire way to UPGRADE your life is to UPGRADE yourself.
Strive to become better every day. Learn from the best and expose yourself to new ideas. Allow yourself to grow and expand.
Increase your personal value and your life will become just what you want it to be.
Remember: upgrade yourself, upgrade your life

from - http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/How_You_Can_Upgrade_Your_Life.html

WAYS TO UPGRADE YOUR LIFESTYLE

 WAYS TO UPGRADE YOUR LIFESTYLE
too many people think a lifestyle upgrade means buying a bigger house, a posher car, more exotic vacations, more fashionable clothes, more expensive furniture, jewelry, pets, toys, what have you. To me those are the paving stones of the road to a downgrading of your lifestyle by turning yourself into a prisoner of your possessions and possession-based ego needs.

     To me an upgrade in lifestyle means having more of the things that really make me happy: leisure, fun, health, energy, intellectual stimulation, emotional fulfillment
As a matter of fact, upgrading your lifestyle doesn't take more money. What it does take is the imagination and the discipline to pull yourself out of the rut imposed by hand-me-down habits, social conditioning and sheer laziness. If you've got what it takes, the rewards are many, not the least of which is developing a lifestyle that you want, not one imposed by others.

     Here are some tips for upgrading your lifestyle while actually saving money.

1. Combine good food with your favorite activities
     Pointless and compulsive dining out, I am convinced, lies at the heart of America's social ills: bankruptcies, bulging waistlines, hysterical levels of social competitiveness, pretension, hypocrisy, alienated kids. I'm not talking about the occasional dinner out for a new ethnic cuisine, exceptional grub or the occasional business lunch, but the need to put on the dog and flock to every restaurant that's been deemed hot. Becoming a restaurant slave does more than destroy your budget and your waistline; it turns you into a bore. Why? Because you end up with nothing to talk about but what so-and-so said. It's like entering a hall of mirrors -- you get lost in reflections of reflections of reflections...      That's boring -- and killing.      To turn that around, remind yourself that food is incidental to fun, not the other way around. Make sure that when you eat out, it's for a very good reason, like doing something fun outside the house. Center your leisure time around an activity, not a meal. A concert under the stars, rowing on a lake, hiking a trail, a sunset walk on the beach, attending a kid's game. For about a quarter the money you'd spend in a nice restaurant, you can pack a sumptuous picnic basket, complete with wine and dessert. When you do sit down to eat, you will have something real to talk about and real use for the calories.

2. Make Learning Your Number One Hobby
     We've all gone through that academic burnout of wanting only to be done with classes and exams. Sadly many people never shake off that mentality. Even as their brains turn into graveyards of obsolete knowledge, they remain firmly convinced that they know all there is to know because they have a diploma or two. Consequently they sink ever lower on the evolutionary scale relative to the rest of the world and wonder why the world seems to be receding in the distance.      If that sounds like you, it's time to renew the zest for learning you had as a kid starting school. Your formal education only touched on a few areas of knowledge. The advances in the natural sciences and technology, not to mention evolution in thinking in the social scienes, during the past decade alone fill libraries

3. Turn Nature into Your Backyard
4. Enrich your home with Asian arts & crafts.
5. Make your second car a bike.
6. Buy your fruits and vegetables directly from farmers.
     Nature is one of life's lasting pleasures. Sadly, to many it's only the vegetation in their backyards or the view through their car windows. Whether the natural offerings in your area are rugged mountains, rolling hills or painted deserts, the scenic beauty, invigorating air and opportunities for exploration and discovery make it a vital resource for self-renewal. Nature is the only place in which you can feel at once a sense of solitude and a connection with the universe.      Depending on climate, terrain and accessibility, buy yourself a good pair of hiking boots, a backpack and a canteen and find a spot where you can enjoy nature in relative isolation. It doesn't have to be an all-day commitment, especially if you're a tenderfoot. Once you experience a couple of hours of nature, you will be looking forward to the next outing when you can spend more time discovering what's around the bend or over the ridge. Before long you will be itching to learn your way around entire mountain ranges. If you're one of those restless people who needs something to keep your hands busy, combine nature with a hobby like photography or rock collecting.      Cultivating an active appreciation for nature is the least expensive and most pleasant way to decrease your sense of alienation from a sometimes senseless world while increasing your physical vitality.      No matter how expensively your home is furnished, it screams second-rate unless it show a distinctive connection to who you are. At its best a home is a reflection of your soul. That doesn't mean it has to be filled with antiques to be authentic. Get acquainted with the arts and crafts of your ancestral culture. Even the sleekest, most ultra-modern home can be connected to your family heritage through choice accents like Chinese armoires, calligraphy scrolls, celadon urns, Japanese screens. When you reaffirm your cultural lineage, you elevate your home from a possession to a symbol of cultural ownership.      What's more responsive than a Porsche, sexier than a Ferrari, quieter than a Benz, more rugged than a Hummer and gets better gas mileage than a Honda Civic gas-electric hybrid? You know the answer. A bike is also cheaper than a health-club membership and will make you look better than a whole new wardrobe. Combine it with a bumper rack and it will take you to unforgettable places the way no car can.      Fruits and vegetables bred for shelf life and picked prematurely to be ripened in cargo containers and refrigerated warehouses just don't taste as good as their freshly picked counterparts. They also lack much of the nutritional value. To add insult to injury, supermarket produce is often more expensive than the offerings of roadside stands, farmers markets and farms themselves. Besides, what could be more romantic than picking peaches or tomatoes in some scenic countryside in the good old summertime?

7. Automate your financial life.
     Paying bills ranks near the bottom of everyone's list of favorite activities. Running to the bank to deposit and cash checks are down there too. If you're still wasting precious time doing such things the old-fashioned way, you're a relic of the twentieth century.      Thanks to the internet, you can take care of every financial transaction from the comfort of your PC. Start by opening an online checking account -- which can be done online in most cases. That will let you automate everything from depositing your paychecks to paying bills to transferring money to savings or retirement accounts. Yes, you can finally bid adieu to paper checks, bank lines and postal boxes, and spend the time on more twenty-first-century things like locating and downloading those old twentieth-century favorites into your iTunes library

from - http://www.goldsea.com/Money/Upgrade/upgrade2.html