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Katori Senko


Katori senko （Mosquito coil） is mosquito-repelling incense, usually shaped into a spiral, and typically made from a dried paste of pyrethrum powder. The coil is usually held at the center of the spiral, suspending it in the air, or wedged by two pieces of fireproof nettings to allow continuous smoldering.

Burning usually begins at the outer end of the spiral and progresses slowly toward the centre of the spiral, producing a mosquito-repellent smoke.

A typical Katori senko can measure around 15 cm in diameter and lasts up to 8 hours. Katori senkos are widely used in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Pyrethrum was used for centuries as an insecticide in Persia and Europe,and the Katori senko was developed around 1890s by a Japanese business man, Eiichiro Ueyama. At that time in Japan, people usually mixed pyrethrum powder with sawdust and burned it in a brazier or incense burner to repel mosquitoes.

Initially, Ueyama created incense sticks mixed from starch powder, dried mandarin orange skin powder, and pyrethrum powder. However, the bar-shaped mosquito sticks quickly burned up in about 40 minutes, too brief for a long repelling action.

In 1895, his wife, Yuki, proposed making the sticks thicker and longer, and curling them in spirals. In 1902, after a series of trials and errors, he finally obtained a desired incense burning effect out of a spirally-shaped mosquito repellent.

The method involved cutting from a thick bar of incense to a certain length and manually winding it. This method continued to be used until 1957, where mass production was made possible through machine punching, making a far larger manufacturing scale possible.

After the Second World War, his company, Dainihon Jochugiku Co. Ltd, set up joint-venture firms in various countries, such as China and Thailand, to produce products suited to the actual local conditions.

Katori senkos nowadays burn without flame for up to eight hours of continuous repelling action. In quantitative tests, they provide about 80% protection.

Katori senkos are also cheap and need no special equipment to use it other than just lighting it up. They are portable and fit into normal household practices of lighting candles or incense.

China's rich tourists bring a shopping revolution to Japan

Number of Chinese visiting Japan has risen 80% in past year, boosting sales for businesses hit by domestic stagnation.

The Japanese are feeling the impact of China's emergence as an economic superpower in many different ways. As their relative spending power declines, so that of their neighbour's rises and the relationship between the two countries changes.

Japanese businesses, for example, are switching from buyer to seller, with shoppers increasingly likely to be served by Chinese workers brought in to help deal with increasing numbers of cash-rich tourists from the middle kingdom.

Chinese visitors to Japan have jumped 80% over the last year, following a relaxation on visa requirements, providing a much wanted boost in business at Japan's department stores and luxury outlets, where sales to domestic customers have long stagnated.

Some Japanese retailers are now being forced to produce manuals telling staff how to deal with the influx of Chinese speaking customers.

In December 2009 Melrose Corporation, a Tokyo based clothing company, introduced a Chinese language manual for staff in response to the rise in the number of Chinese speaking customers.

"We realised that a number of our stores were seeing Chinese speaking customers on a daily basis," said Kyoko Ogasawara, press officer at Melrose.

Japanese shoppers used to pour by the planeload into Paris, Milan and New York to buy exclusive European and US brands. But Chinese shoppers at Melrose now favour clothes by Japanese designers.

There has also been a rise in the number of Chinese employed in the service sector, including fast food outlets, cleaning businesses and small stores. Japanese born during the economic boom of the mid to late 1980s have become a parasite generation, living with and off their parents while shirking manual labour.

While not entirely fluent in the language these non-Japanese workers are sometimes viewed as more acceptable than their Japanese peers.

"There is a Chinese girl at the laundry I use, who doesn't speak Japanese 100%, but is always polite," says Hiroshi Umezawa an executive in the restaurant business.

"That's different than the young Japanese guys I come across working at restaurants, who clearly have no desire to be there."

Phone Call About Fertilizer Could Be a Big Help to Philippine Rice Farmers

Advice on how much fertilizer to use will soon be just a phone call away for rice farmers in the Philippines.

The Philippine Department of Agriculture and the International Rice Research Institute plan to launch a free service next month.

Farmers will call a number and a recorded voice will ask them simple questions in Tagalog or other languages including English.

RECORDED VOICE: "Welcome. This is the nutrient manager for rice. Answer a statement by pressing the appropriate number on your phone."

For example, to get fertilizer guidelines for the wet season, they press one. For the dry season, they press two.

Farmers will be asked about the size of their field and how many bags of rice it produced last year.

What about natural sources of fertilizer? Does the farmer return rice straw to the field? Is the field near a lake or river that floods, or in a low area collecting soil and other material from nearby hills?

About ten minutes later the farmer will get a text message. The message will advise what kind of fertilizer to use and how much. The grower will also get suggestions about when to plant and harvest the rice.

Roland Buresh at the International Rice Research Institute helped developed the system. Mr. Buresh says fertilizer represents about one-fifth of the cost of inputs for rice production.

Hesays the service could help farmers in the Philippines increase their yields and their profits.

ROLAND BURESH: "If we in a year can be reaching just five thousand farmers and their fields can be increasing the yield by half a ton per hectare, we could be looking at profitabilities for those farmers in the range of half a million dollars."

Danielle Nierenberg at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, says the system could also help reduce pollution.

DANIELLE NIERENBERG: "In the Philippines and all over Asia, fertilizer has been overused and misused because no one explains to them how much they need or how to use it."

The technology could also be copied for crops in other places. Danielle Nierenberg has been traveling across sub-Saharan Africa. She says the cost of a cell phone there is low enough that most farmers have their own or borrow someone else's.

In Zambia, for example, farmers without bank accounts can use their phones to buy seeds and fertilizers. They can also get information on how much their crop is selling for in city markets.

DANIELLE NIERENBERG: "They can decide whether they want to travel all the way from their village to the city, because sometimes farmers get there and prices are too low."