{"id":18785,"date":"2011-04-12T09:02:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T13:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=18785"},"modified":"2011-04-17T22:51:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T02:51:25","slug":"wit-life-162-japan-tobacco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/12\/wit-life-162-japan-tobacco\/","title":{"rendered":"WIT Life #162: Japan Tobacco"},"content":{"rendered":"

WITLife<\/strong><\/em><\/a> is a periodic series written<\/strong><\/em> by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator <\/strong><\/em>Stacy Smith<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(Kumamo<\/strong><\/em>to-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts<\/strong><\/em> her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shar<\/strong><\/em>es s<\/strong><\/em>ome of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

My interpreting travels currently take me to Raleigh, NC, once home to a thriving tobacco industry.\u00a0 However, in addition to formerly being a center for textiles and furniture, those days are gone and different sectors have risen to take their place.\u00a0 As the group I am working with is studying economic revital\"\"ization, yesterday we visited the American Tobacco Historic District, once home to America’s largest tobacco plant.\u00a0 It has been converted into a multi-functional area which maintains the character of the historic buildings, while at the same time incorporating modern aspects to create a vibrant community of businesses and restaurants (We got to visit the headquarters of Burt’s Bees which is housed there!).<\/p>\n

In an interesting incidence of convergence, before heading to the district I read an article in the WSJ<\/a> about how Japan’s disaster has affected its tobacco industry.\u00a0 It highlights how the earthquake and tsunami destroyed both cigarette-making and supplier factories, as well as damaged distribution networks.\u00a0 As a result, smokers have been turning to foreign brands which are more easily accessible at this time (because they are not allowed to be made in Japan, their production was unaffected).\u00a0 This has been devastating to Japan Tobacco Inc. (JTI), the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer.\u00a0 Yesterday delivery of its top 7 brands finally restarted, but the remaining 97 are not expected to be available for weeks at the earliest.<\/p>\n

One analyst commented that this might shake up the cigarette market: “Some consumers will change.\u00a0 They will try Kent, Lark, Virgina Slims or Marlboro as a trial and if they think it is better than JT, then they will stay.\u00a0 However, another disagreed that some customers might believe it is better to stay loyal and use whatever JT has to offer at this point rather than try a foreign brand: “While it is not as patriotic a mood as the ‘Buy America’ sentiment in the wake of 9\/11, there could be a ‘Buy Japan’ movement among smokers after the 3\/11 earthquake.”\u00a0 Japan has a $40 billion domestic cigarette market, so the impact will clearly be felt.<\/p>\n

In following up on the radiation issue<\/a>, the alert level for Japan’s nuclear disaster has now been upgraded from 5 to 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, putting it on par with Chernobyl.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations. My interpreting travels currently take me to Raleigh, NC, once home to a thriving tobacco […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,1,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translatinginterpreting","category-uncategorized","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-4SZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18785"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18818,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18785\/revisions\/18818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}