Editor's notebook.

Stem Cell Research--Who Benefits? Who Loses?

With the threat of a presidential veto hanging over a House of Representatives bill that would expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, Bonnie Lee La Madeleine's piece (pp. 54-59) is timely indeed. The House bill is intended to unleash American scientists to catch up with Korea, where researchers have announced the cloning of human embryos to extract stem cells for regenerative treatments.

It was in response to the Korean scientific advances that the Japanese government narrowly approved embryonic stem cell research. An ad hoc government committee is now grappling with the formulation of guidelines and was moving in the direction of approving the use of stillborn and aborted fetuses for stem cell research when legal scholars and social scientists on the committee objected that approval would encourage abortions.

Osaka National Hospital was the only hospital supplying embryonic stem cells to regenerative medicine institutions in Japan. It stopped from concern that if research advances in the absence of guidelines it could influence their formulation.

"What are the practical benefits of taking a leading role in stem cell research?" asks La Madeleine. "Who benefits? Who loses?" The answers, she suggests, would be of more help in making an ethical policy than the current debate on the morality of using fetal cells.

Withdrawn No More

We don't hear about hikikomori, or social withdrawal, as often as we once did. This does not mean the problem often manifested as refusal to go to school, has disappeared. John Dodd, in "Trends in Japanese Alternative Education," reports an estimated 150,000 Japanese elementary and middle school children skip school more than 30 days a year. Perhaps we hear the word hikikomori less often because of the emergence of a system of "free schools" for maladjusted children. Today these schools teach more than 130,000 children aged three through fifteen. Many of the once withdrawn kids have been drawn out.

Playing Humbert Humbert

No one could be less withdrawn than the girls who gather on Jingubashi bridge Sundays. Kitted out in "Lolita" or "Gothic" styles or as a favorite rock star, they cry out to be seen. They are. Camera-toting tourists and outrefashion wannabes and gray-beard satyrs in shades wind through the costumed sorority seated or standing in circles. Apropos the last named, Rivena Ridikir complained to our Emily Kubo that "these guys obviously have a fetish ...." Yes they do: they are playing Humbert Humbert to the bridge-top Lolitas.

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