An Industry Washes Out?

After recording the production in Japan of a stunning 1580 film cameras in January of this year, the Camera and Imaging Products Association (Kamera Eizō Kiki Kōgyōkai) seems to have ceased counting the number of film cameras produced by its members.

I have drawn up a graph of the last year and a quarter of monthly production data. According to CIPA figures, manufacturers in Japan produced 92,716 film cameras in July 2007 and 79,210 as recently as October.

Click on image for full size

From all appearances, the industry has just evaporated.

I believe I now can understand what my great-grandparents must have felt when they read in the newspaper one day that the last cart owner in the city had put his old mule out to pasture.

Original report from Wired's Gadget Lab.

Later - It seems Kitanaka-san checked in with her getto first.

Great Smoggy Mountain

At a meeting of the Chemical Society of Japan yesterday, researchers from Waseda University announced a surprising discovery - the level of photochemical smog precursors in the air atop Mount Fuji is higher than that found in the center of Tokyo. Indeed, in the case of toluene the levels in the air at the summit were 3 times higher than in city air.

So much for standing on the mountaintop, taking in a bracing lungful of fresh, clean air.

The Waseda result may help explain the disconcerting red haze over the summit of Mt. Fuji in this image that I took when halfway up Mt. Ono last year (click on image for larger view).

View of Mt. Fuji from Yaga
Ashigarakami-gun, Kanagawa Prefecture
April 29, 2007

Unsurprisingly, researchers suspect that the source of the high-altitude pollution is China somewhere outside Japan's borders, though they do not have the evidence supporting this contention yet.

Our beloved 99 Yen Store products come with an increasingly visible second price tag, it seems...