2021 is going away. I have had a pleasant dinner with family. And bringing another dark beer in the shack, I have called CQ on 40m for a few times. No luck. Closing down in the new year's eve for now. May the new year be freed from the pandemic!
The winter solstice, colder than usual, has passed peacefully 3 days ago. It is the time for me to extend the Season's Greetings to friends of mine, domestic or abroad. I feel it has become a kind of mannerism torturing them to read it through. On behalf of that lengthy greeting in an e mail, I would write here how and what I look back this year at its end. In addition, my hope for the future.
First of all, I am feeling deeply grateful to my life that I could spend this year uneventfully in good health. The older I get, the more I feel that way. I could hardly say it stands to reason we could live this time of our lives in this way. I have not been a sociable guy. Getting less capable of going out easily like before, I might lose sociability even more. Maybe, I should compensate it with SNS etc from now. It is a milestone for aged to get through.
Working at the home garden and farm throughout a year was my duty. A pleasant duty. In spring, I was busy planting various kinds of vegetables at proper timing. Having cool breeze on my face standing in the mid of farm in summer, I sure felt I was living. In fall, I have harvested various sorts of basketful crops. I was cooking with them every evening. I have learned a bit of the natural farming. It tells us not to plow the soil so much and to utilize the compost made from the pulled weeds and the remnants of vegetables. I don't think it won't work for farming as an industry but is a quite ecological way of farming. I would go on farming in that method in my own way.
Leave vegetables have been rich crop this year. One of them is Chinese cabbage. It has become a material of salad today.
As for my hobbies, especially, music and ham radio, I have made a lot of posts in this blog. It is advisable for me to omit commenting about them. In short, I am at the turning point as for them. I don't know where I should go. So far as things permit me, I would go on enjoying them.
Now closing this greetings, I would wish all of you good health and happy new year to come. The situation of the pandemic, of its devastating effect on the world economy and of the posttruth era politics, make me feel liable to be negative and even pessimistic for the future. But I would still carry on with the great optimism Robert Browning used to express in his great poem "Grow Old". I appreciate you for your courtesy and friendship to me in this passing year.
Shin Onisawa
Whenever I start a QSO with anybody, I always have the motto "Tell me your story" in my mind. It is not easy to converse in that motto. Without that, however, the conversation is often devalued. When that motto is realized, I always feel quite comfortable and it becomes worthwhile to spend the time.
With that motto, there is only the relationship of "Ich und Du" as Martin Buber depicted the ideal relationship with the other, although it is a matter of idealism. The other is my own aim as well as an end itself but not a means. Conversational CW enables us to do that because it could be a real dialogue. No others interfere us. We could concentrate on what the other says.
Buber used to tell that the relationship is categorized as Ich und Du or Ich und Es depending on the attitude toward the other. In his idea, of course, the ultimate relationship of Ich und Du converges into that with God. It is evident that this distinction of relationships lies in the ordinary human relationship, whether it is conscious or not. Conversational CW is not an exception for this categorization of relationships. It is rather the area where that distinction appears in most obvious way.
The idea of "Tell me your story" came from a conversation with Mike WB4ZKA years ago. He used to tell me he had enjoyed listening to me and to others in conversation on 40m late at night in his time. I can't remember if he expressed this motto as it is. His operation style was telling me he had been in that style. Writing this story with Mike, I remembered having mentioned about him and his mail to me in the previous article in this blog. I won't brag quoting it here but still even more firmly believe his attitude is precious in ham world, especially in QSO on CW that is the slowest mode of communication.
http://nuttycellist-unknown.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-borderless-world-and-ham-radio-as.html
I must admit such a style is less and less seen in QSOs nowadays. I am afraid this trend to forget this tradition and to deviate to the Ich und Es type could be an ominous sign of the future in this hobby.
A very interesting paper regarding cross reactivity of the SARS-CoV2 with the other species of Corona viruses has been published in Communications Biology in Nature dated Dec 2nd from a Japanese laboratory of Riken. What attracted my attention most was that the cross reactivity was through an allele HLA A24, which 60% of Japanese posses. It could, at least partially, explain why COVID-19 cases have not been so numerous nor serious in Japan and the areas adjacent in the Eastern Asia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02885-6
Most people have had Corona Virus infection as upper respiratory tract infection in the past since that species are quite common in the society. They have found the epitopes with high affinity to HLA-24 in SARS-CoV2 spike region. Unexposed healthy individuals could have cytotoxic T cells reactive to that epitope. Thus, the preponderance of the allele among Japanese and the races in the Eastern Asia and ubiquitous infection of "common" species of Corona viruses may explain why COVID-19 has not devastating in our country.
It is a clear cut example as for how specific HLA alleles could work in immune response. This finding may also be important for universal vaccine development against Corona viruses. Since I have been involved in research of relationship of HLA with diseases for a few years long time ago, this study showing the function of HLA as an immune response gene/product has made me a bit excited. The researchers have long been studying tumor immunity as their site says. The accumulated knowledges and methodologies in immunology through such a research might have made it possible for such a short period.
Universal masking or keeping the other precautions are often told to be the reason why we Japanese have not had so many cases of COVID-19 in our country. It is sometimes hued with a kind of nuisance nationalism or strange self confidence. This finding should be a thesis against those nonsense ideas.
If this finding turns out correct, it should be emphasized this HLA linked immune response might apply for the SARS-CoV2 and its variants except for the Delta variant so far. This RNA virus could undergo a lot of mutations ahead and may evade the immunity linked with HLA A24.
Stagflation seems to go on in our country. While the wages won't rise, the prices are going up from next month. While the corporate prices are up by 9%, the import prices have reached up to 40% recently. Considering all of these indices, we seem to get into the era of stagflation never experienced for the past decades.
Our central bank, BOJ, could hardly deal with this situation where it should rise the interest rate to calm down inflation. Because it has possessed extraordinary large amount of national bond and of stock as ETF. With the prices of national bond and of stocks declining, BOJ could do little against such economical emergency. If they get out of the quantitative easing by such as increasing the interest rate, it will strangle themselves through falling in prices of national bond or of stock. Their net worth equity capital is amounted only less than 10 trillion JPY, while they own more than 500 trillion JPY of national bond and more than 50 trillion JPY of ETF.
The tremendous astronomical quantitative easing by the Abe administration for 8 years will have resulted in this disaster very shortly. Have we Japanese dreamed of any euphoria in this bubble economy? How could we get it through? Maybe, someone tells me not to be too pessimistic for the future. I would ask him how we could manage this possibility of serious collapse.
Especially, for retirees dependent on the public pension, the situation is tragic, I am afraid. This will burden on the next generation as well. Those having worked as irregular employees without any social security would start retiring soon. If they won't receive any good pension of social security aid, what tragedy would there be in the society?
