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How Did an Island With a Copper Smelter Become a Mecca for Art? A Century of Naoshima, Refining Gold in the North and Showing Paintings in the South
More than 700,000 people a year come to the island to see art. Few notice that at its other end stands a factory that has been smelting copper for over a hundred years, and has never left.
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Why Does a Famous Japanese Inventor Hold His Breath Underwater to Find Ideas? Dr. NakaMats, Who Turned His Whole Life Into an Experiment
He says his best ideas come “0.5 seconds before death.” For more than ninety years he has turned meals, illness and elections into invention projects. It all started at fourteen, when he wanted to make pouring soy sauce easier for his mother.
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After Stainless Steel Took the Market, How Did a 700-Year-Old Blade-Forging Town Survive? The Story of Takefu Knife Village in Fukui
In 1993, ten family workshops in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture, that forged and sharpened blades each took on about 30 million yen in debt, shut down their own workshops, and moved into a single building that anyone could walk into and watch. More than 30 years later, it has become a…