A New Year reception to deepen ties among Palaceside Building tenants, building staff, and tenants with one another was held in late January at Mainichi Hall on the building's first basement floor. About 80 tenants and building staff took part = photos left and below.
This is the third New Year gathering that brings tenants and building staff together. It began after the Great East Japan Earthquake, as people felt more strongly that they should help one another in an emergency.
The reception had two parts: a lecture and a social hour. In part one, Mainichi Newspapers reporter Yukiko Motomura (editorial board member, Digital News Center)—also a commentator on TBS's "N Sta," "Information 7 Days News Caster," and "Ippuku!"—spoke on "Science That Catches the Eye" = photo above.
Science is a vast field, but recent topics have been rich: the first-rate good news of three Japanese winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering and putting blue LEDs to practical use,
and also sad and frustrating cases such as the STAP cell affair and doubts over clinical trials of Novartis Pharma's hypertension drug Diovan. Motomura explained the background to science news, weaving in her own reporting, including attending the banquet after a Nobel Prize ceremony.
On the Nobel Prize, she described the scramble after the announcement: "We had been watching Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, but Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University, Akasaki's student who did the actual lab work, was off our radar." On STAP cells she said, "There were dubious points, but the people around (Obokata) were such a dream team that RIKEN, Nature, and reporters were all taken in." Among themes to watch in Japanese science this year she named astronaut Kimiya Yui, the "middle-aged star," heading into space. Even those of us who shy from science learned a great deal. Thank you, Motomura!!
At the social hour that followed, after greetings and a toast from Tsuneo Haneda, president of Mainichi Building Co., people exchanged cards and introductions, Motomura among them, and deepened their ties.