Four persons came to join our chatting community, though it kept raining the whole day. I was very happy that each participant has a strong motivation to brush up English. First we introduced ourselves each other so that we could easily communicate with each other. I asked them whether they have pollen allergy in a spring season. “Pollen allergy” is a bit difficult word if it is said all of a sudden in the conversation. Some participants at first didn’t make it out. So I tried to explain the word with a simple expression; “There is a lot of pollen flies around today.”
I also mentioned the story of the tidal level around the Pacific coast of Japan. As there was a big earthquake in Chili the other day, the Meteorological Agency warned residents not to go out to the seaside just out of curiosity. It seems that the tidal level arose by 20 or 30 centimeters.

As a warming exercise, we talked a bit about how to brush up our English skills. Recently, some universities try to boost classes in English. However, conducting classes in English is very tough for many teachers at universities of Japan. Many of us have studied English in terms of reading, writing and grammar, however many Japanese are still not good at discussing academic subjects in English. Japan is lagging behind at the global community concerning English education. The point is that we don’t speak English in our daily lives as long as we live in the Japanese Archipelago. Holding such a chatting circle is a purpose for our having chances to use the target language in daily life and to state our opinions logically.

Next, we discussed Mao Asada’s response to Former Prime Minister Mori’s harsh remark for her skating performance in Sochi. Mori said that Mao-chan was always falling at the most crucial time of a competition (partly extracted from The Japan Times on February 26th). Mao’s response was very cool as a matured athlete: “Oh, he said something like that about me? But people don’t want to fail, so my first reaction was that it was something that he shouldn’t have said. . . . Perhaps Mr. Mori has regrets that he made such a comment.” (extracted from The Japan Times) We strongly hope that she would continue to perform on a skating rink after Sochi.


The topic of ‘Deaf’ composer was a bit irritating for us to talk about. None of the participants at the chatting community bought the CD “Symphony No. 1”. The impression of his music changed a lot after the composer’s scandal. Mr. Niigaki ghostwrote scores for Samuragochi, his recent appearance for a press interview seemed very courageous. His attitudes in the interview also looked very sincere and honest.


The topic of the day was something about falsified data in STAP papers. As we don’t have much information about Riken report, we had a debate concerning the Riken’s organizational nature. We discussed her sloppy data management and her supervisors’ poor guidance over her research. She might have a psychological pressure for achieving an excellent research with a limited contract at Riken. However, using some images of her doctoral thesis and patching up DNA image to have a clearer one for Nature papers are not allowed to do from the viewpoint of ethics of a researcher.


We don’t know what is really going on inside Riken institute, however, we guess human affairs in Riken have something to do with the recent scandals, which have harmed the public trust in the research of science at large. It is generally said that scientists have to be very strict with the management of their data in order to prove that their theory is true. We Japanese don’t need to be sentimental while watching the news conference in Osaka. The point is whether “STAP” cells really exist or not, for the cells might give incurable patients bright hopes near future.

Written by Junichi Saito