Sa-mee-tow

When I attended a planning meeting for the July 7 - 10 2008 G8 Toyako Summit, the stated focus of the gathering would be the environment, and climate change specifically. In the past year the focus has remained on cutting global carbon emissions but also widened to include issues of nuclear nonproliferation, African development and intellectual property rights. However, in the past several months the news has also been a-blitz with the realities of rising food and fuel prices, which now certainly threaten to take center stage. Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda has also thus far failed to take the lead in emissions reductions. His "Fukuda Vision", which ambitiously proposes to half current emissions by 2050 fails to set any sort of midterm goals, which has earned the plan intense criticism from global NGOs. It will be an interesting three days.

In any case, the G8 Summit is a major international event for sleepy Hokkaido, and everyone is trying to get involved. Here are some things that I've noticed in the past several weeks.

• There are limited edition consumables of all varieties marking the vent. For example, one of the Hokkaido sake producers union had a major press conference a few weeks ago for the release of commemorative G8 Summit premium sakes from 11 different breweries.
  

• An American-born professor at Hokkaido University filed a harassment complaint against the Hokkaido government for racial profiling as a part of its anti-terrorist measures questioning. He was reportedly badgered at the airport. 

• While the commemorative goods have received the prefix "sa-mee-to" (summit), there is also a major advertising boom for environmental products, which get the prefix "eco", pronounced "echo". There is a new "eco" anime on television and the TV programming and advertising is chock full of things "eco" promising to conserve air, water, space, etccccccc.
  

• Copy-cat summits: A friend invited me to do some translation for the G8 World Environment Children's Summit, held for the past several days here in Sapporo. However, I pretty much ended up helping the other volunteers prepare name-tags and whatnot for the visiting children. Today, the 27th, and tomorrow, the 28th, also mark the first annual "C8" -- or Curry Summit. I read an article a few weeks ago on the C8 in the Hokkaido Shinbun thinking the summit was a joke. In fact, it is apparently quite serious, with representatives from eight different key "curry hotspots" around Hokkaido gathering to first discuss the modern state of curry in Hokkaido and then to issue a declaration for Hokkaido curry shops to only purchase and use local ingredients, following the principle that things consumed on the land should also be grown on the land. The summit also features curries made from strictly Hokkaido ingredients such as Ezo deer and certain shellfish. I would be there right now except the train fare to Asahikawa from Sapporo was a little too dear in my jobless state. Below is a photo and the summit poster, compliments of the summit.

  

Without getting into curry's significance in Hokkaido too much, it is interesting to consider curry as being adapted by the British from India, then adapted by the Japanese from the British adaptation -- and now adapted once more by areas in Hokkaido in a variety of "dry" and "soup" curries. Fascinating.