Haruki Murakami: Always on the Side of the Egg

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me - and especially if they are warning me - "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing. This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories - stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

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Source:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1064909.html

Tags:

Haruki Murakami, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Prize, Palestine, Gaza, Literary prize, Literature, Japan, Japanese authors, acceptance speech, acceptance lecture, UN, Global Best Practice, China,

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A Reclusive Billionaire Gives Away His Fortune

One by one, speakers rose to toast the elderly gent with baggy pants and a shy, gaptoothed smile.

"Of course, he didn't wear a tie tonight," teased one. Another called attention to the honoree's cheap watch and the plastic bag that serves as his briefcase. The joshing at a Manhattan gathering would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that the man pulling a worn blue blazer over his head in mock modesty was none other than the onetime billionaire, Chuck Feeney.

Never heard of him? No surprise there.

Over the years, the frugal 76-year-old has made a fetish out of anonymity. He declined to name his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, after himself, registering the $8-billion behemoth in Bermuda to avoid U.S. disclosure laws. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on universities and hospitals but won't allow even a small plaque identifying him as a donor.

"We just didn't want to be blowing our horn," he explains in a rare interview at his daughter's Upper East Side apartment. The party was to celebrate a biography of the elusive tycoon by Irish journalist Conor O'Clery, titled "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune," published last fall.

Feeney said he cooperated with the book and submitted to an interview because he is driven by a new public mission: nudging hedge fund heavies and silicon scions into "giving while living." It is the latest trend in philanthropy and one that he, more than anyone, jump-started several years before billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett followed suit.

Feeney, a founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, said he wants to "set an example" to address "that layer up there of people," the ones, as he puts it, who have "a jillion dollars. . . . I mean, honestly, if you ask them, 'Tell me what you're doing with your money this week?' they couldn't spend a fraction of what they're accruing." Most foundations, set up after the donor's death, dribble out barely more than 5% of their assets each year, the legal minimum.

But Feeney, raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, quietly transferred the bulk of his fortune to his foundation when he was 53. Then, eight years ago, he instructed his board to pay out every last dollar by 2016. So far: $4 billion down, $4 billion to go. Atlantic Philanthropies is spreading its wealth at the rate of more than $400 million a year, more than any U.S.-based family foundation apart from Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford.

As Feeney sees it, there is too much misery in the world to justify delay. "I'm not going to die until I can spend it," he vows with a merry chuckle. Feeney's biggest beneficiary has been Cornell University, which he attended on the GI Bill, earning spending money by selling sandwiches to fraternities. Over four decades, he has donated an astonishing $588 million to the Ithaca, N.Y., campus, almost all of it anonymously.

Many of Feeney's grants are still directed to traditional bricks and mortar -- $60 million for a Stanford biomedical center and $125 million for a UC San Francisco cardiovascular complex. But others are iconoclastic: Fighting homophobia among South African Muslims. Lobbying against the death penalty in New Jersey. Buying medical supplies for Cuban-trained doctors. Funding a Washington office for Sinn Fein during the Irish peace negotiations.

Feeney built his global enterprise through cutthroat competition and uncanny business intuition. He speaks fluent French and Japanese. And he still hop-scotches from Dublin to Da Nang seeding new projects.

But his demeanor is affable and unprepossessing and his conversational style is hesitant. He is allergic to introspection. Direct questions send him into vague digressions leavened with humorous asides. In the tiny world of stratospheric wealth, Feeney is a man of yin and yang: extravagant charity coupled with personal penny-pinching. "It's the intelligent thing to be frugal," says the erstwhile billionaire, who jokingly refers to himself as "the shabby philanthropist."

He once owned six luxurious homes from the French Riviera to Mayfair to Park Avenue. These days, he owns none, instead hunkering down in a cramped one-bedroom rental in San Francisco with his second wife, Helga, his former secretary. He raked in billions selling duty-free cognac, perfume and designer labels. But you won't catch Feeney in a Hermes tie or Gucci loafers. He once met the prime minister of Ireland with his drugstore glasses held together by a paper clip.

Feeney doesn't own a car and prefers buses to taxis. Until he turned 75, he flew coach. Now, making excuses for wobbly knees, he upgrades with frequent flier miles. Fine dining? "There are restaurants you can go in and pay $100 a person for a meal," he muses. "I get as much satisfaction out of paying $25. I happen to enjoy grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches."

Niall O'Dowd, a friend of Feeney and editor of Irish-America magazine, reflects: "The way he copes with his wealth is to never remove himself from his working-class persona. He keeps grounded by acting like it hasn't happened to him -- like basically he is still the same guy." At the book party, most of the guests were bused in from the Garden State: former classmates from St. Mary's of the Assumption High School and an extended clan of Feeney-Fitzpatricks, including two of his five children.

Feeney joked about his "rent-a-crowd" but, amid the toasts and roasts, seemed moved: "Who was it who said, 'My cup runneth over?' " He planted a kiss on the head of his 21-year old great-nephew, Dennis Fitzpatrick, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He autographed copies of the book while seated at a small table with Dennis by his side.

"He'd send my parents $50,000 for our college educations," nephew Daniel Fitzpatrick, 50, recalled. "But if you went out to have a beer with him, he'd check the bar bill. . . . If I left the light on in a bedroom, he'd say, 'By the way, you left a light on.' And I knew I'd better go up and turn it off."

O'Clery, former international business editor of the Irish Times, spent two years traveling with Feeney and investigating a financial empire that had been sheathed for decades in obsessive secrecy. He unfolds a story of ferocious entrepreneurship that operated, he concluded, "on the edge of legality but was never corrupt." Shortly after graduating from college, Feeney, who had served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan during the Korean War, moved to Europe. With a partner he knew from Cornell, Robert Miller, he began peddling duty-free liquor to sailors.

The two went on to sell cars to American soldiers based in Europe and Asia. Eventually, profiting from a postwar boom in tourism, they built Duty Free Shoppers into the biggest retailer of liquor and cigarettes in the world and a global purveyor of luxury goods. Their ingenious schemes stretched the limits of the duty-free concept. As O'Clery explains, Duty Free Shoppers allowed a tourist in Mexico, for instance, to peruse a catalog and choose a cashmere sweater to be shipped from Amsterdam to his home in the U.S. Leaving Mexico, he could declare the faraway sweater as "unaccompanied baggage" and avoid paying duty. Feeney and Miller operated with Swiss bank accounts and offshore headquarters in Lichtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands Antilles. They registered assets in the names of Danielle, Feeney's French wife, and Miller's Ecuadorean wife, Chantal, as a precaution against the long arm of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Today, Feeney makes no apologies. "Most large companies structure their affairs so that they minimize their tax payments," he says, rocking back on an armchair in his daughter's apartment. "As long as you do it within the law, it's OK." For Duty Free Shoppers, publicity was to be avoided at all cost, to ward off not just tax collectors but also competitors. "If you had a machine to make money, you wouldn't blow your horn and say copy me, copy me," says Feeney, whose annual share of dividends from the business reached $155 million in 1988, making him richer at the time than Rupert Murdoch, David Rockefeller or Donald Trump.

Why did he decide to give it away, leaving himself with a net worth then that dipped below $1 million? "I'm an easygoing guy," he shrugs. "I like to eat my grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches quietly. I don't like people to say, 'Look over there; he's eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich.' " In 1990, Feeney had separated from Danielle. And, in the divorce, she retained their mansions and luxury apartments, along with $100 million. "The wealth got to him," recalls his nephew, Fitzpatrick. "He got disgusted by it, in my opinion. He said, 'This expensive heavy-duty lifestyle doesn't fit me.' "

Feeney gave his children, friends and colleagues copies of Andrew Carnegie's 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth," in which the robber baron-turned-philanthropist admonishes rich men to use their fortunes to help others and "to set an example of modest unostentatious living, shunning display." In the realm of modesty, Feeney tended to extremes. For years, Atlantic Philanthropies staff couldn't tell their families where they worked. Beneficiaries, few of whom knew the origin of their grants, signed agreements acknowledging that the funding would halt if its source were revealed.

It was only in 1997 that the existence of Atlantic Philanthropies became public during the sale of Duty Free Shoppers to French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault. Court papers revealed that Feeney's share of the company had been transferred to a foundation. The news that a huge donor had surfaced -- bigger than renowned charitable institutions founded by the Pew, Lilly, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Mellon families -- rocked the philanthropic world, although many had long suspected something was afoot.

Today, though Atlantic Philanthropies lists its grants on its website, it still won't issue news releases touting accomplishments. Black tie thank-you dinners, along with plaques, remain verboten. Feeney's practical reason for not plastering his moniker on buildings is to attract matching donors who would want naming rights -- as was the case at Stanford with high-tech tycoon Jim Clark and at a UC San Francisco cancer facility with venture capitalist Arthur Rock.

Does Feeney have no ego, then? "It doesn't matter who put the building up," he says. "The important thing is that it happens." In Vietnam, he recounts with a chuckle, "the people at the Da Nang General Hospital felt so bad that we wouldn't put our name on the hospital that they painted it green" -- shamrock green. He pauses, adding, "Which used up a lot of paint."

Although his parents were American-born, Feeney's attachment to the land of his ancestors runs deep. The Republic of Ireland in the 1980s was plagued by high unemployment, a brain drain and the festering guerrilla war to the north. Anonymously, Feeney began pouring money into renovating Ireland's seven universities, along with two in Northern Ireland.

He offered $125 million for postgraduate research if the Irish government would match the amount, nearly 20 times what the Republic was spending a year. Soon, Ireland's best and brightest flocked to the new research institutes. In all, Atlantic Philanthropies has spent more than $1 billion in Ireland.

In 1993, O'Dowd, who had worked with Feeney to promote U.S. naturalization for Irish immigrants, asked him to join in what would become the Connolly House Group, named after the Belfast headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. The small, secret group of Irish Americans offered the newly elected Clinton administration a back-channel to negotiate a cease fire between Britain and the Irish Republican Army.

"At the time, it was risky business to be seen 'talking to terrorists'--that was the label," said former Rep. Bruce Morrison, one of the group. Feeney was intensely involved in the negotiations that led Clinton to grant a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and he funded a Washington office for Sinn Fein to the tune of $750,000.

"It was New Jersey working class meets Belfast working class," O'Dowd recalled of a secret meeting between Feeney and Adams in a Dublin safe house. "These two guys understood each other right away." The peace process was ultimately successful, and Feeney has since funneled millions into reconciliation programs in Northern Ireland. "The only way you're going to solve things with your friends or enemies is to sit down and talk to them," he says today. "It didn't seem right to me that Irish people were killing Irish people."

On the coffee table in his daughter's living room, Feeney opens Bill Clinton's recent bestseller "Giving." He turns to the chapter "How Much Should You Give and Why?" and reads from statistics derived from U.S. income tax data showing that if the top 14,400 taxpayers gave a third of their income, the total would be about $61 billion.

Feeney shakes his head. "People who wouldn't miss it," he muses. "Sixty-one billion in one year!" And why isn't it happening? "People traditionally collect money. I guess there is an attraction to be known as a wealthy person," he says. "It's not my role in life to tell them what they should be doing. . . . I'm just convinced if people gave money to things they've identified as being in the public interest, they'd get great satisfaction out of it."

Feeney mentions one of his favorite charities, Operation Smile, which sponsors surgeons to operate on children with cleft palates in developing countries. He tells of watching a little girl in a waiting room sitting with her hands covering her mouth. "I kept an eye on her," he recalls. "After she had the operation and she was smiling [like], 'It's not the ugly me you knew before. It's the new me.' "

On another occasion, he says, a man in a restaurant called him over and said, "Do you realize you educated me in this business? I had one of your scholarships . . . and here I am now, the general manager of this chain. " O'Clery, who hung out with Feeney for several years at P.J. Clarke's, the Manhattan pub, before broaching the topic of a book, attributes Feeney's generosity to growing up with charitable parents and in a neighborhood where people helped one another.

He calls his subject an "enigma. . . . He likes to make money, but he doesn't like to have it. He travels all over the world, but in a way, he's never left Elizabeth, N.J." Feeney suggests with a cryptic smile, "There's a thin line between sanity and the other side. Some people might even say the idea of giving money away is crazy."

For those folks, Feeney has a Gaelic proverb: "There are no pockets in a shroud."

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Source:

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/08/local/me-feeney8

Tags:

LA Times, Atlantic Philanthropies, Duty Free Shoppers, Chuck Feeney, Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, Irish Catholic, Cornell University, Bernard Arnault, IRA, Sinn Fein, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Global Best Practice,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Asia To Witness 21st Century’s Longest Eclipse

The longest solar eclipse of the 21st century created near darkness in daytime, along a swath that stretched from India to China and the South Pacific.

Read more here:

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/asia-to-witness-21st-centurys-longest.html

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Tags: India, China, Japan, Solar Eclipse, New Moon, Punjab, Superstition, Eclipse mania, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, longest-lasting total eclipse, astrophysics, Pacific Ocean,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Japan Explores Using Cell Phones To Stop Pandemics

TOKYO - A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls.

If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through thestudent body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school — using mobile phones.

The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.

The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.

A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.

The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to get checked out by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.

"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, who works on infrastructure strategy at Softbank.

He demonstrates with a calculation: If an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,500 people would get sick.

The experiment was conceived before the current outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn fresh attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside of North America.

It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a program to promote new uses for Japan's Internet and cellular infrastructure. The country boasts some of the most advancedmobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speedcellular networks, and phones come standard with features like GPS, TV and touchless train passes.

The mobile phone market is largely saturated, however, and fees are being driven down by an ongoing price war. For Softbank, a government-backed health-monitoring service could be boon to business.

GPS has its shortcomings, including hazy readings indoors. But Softbank believes it could keep readings accurate to several yards, at least for an experiment in a limited area.

Until now, technologies like GPS have mainly been used to help people figure out where they are and what is nearby. As networked devices like the iPhone become more popular, new applications let people track their children or friends, and could give companies and governments access to their location.

Aoyama Gakuin University, a prestigious school in Tokyo, is givingApple Inc.'s iPhone 3G to students, partially as a way to check attendance via GPS readings from an application running on the phone.

That kind of project raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.

If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, said Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease. "If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," said Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama. Uchida serves on a board that evaluates such proposals for the government.

Softbank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in the fall. But Takahashi says that whichever company is chosen, he hopes the potential benefits of a monitoring system are enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.

"I think it would have a bigger impact than Tamiflu," he said.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090606/ap_on_hi_te/as_tec_japan_mobile_pandemic_stopper_1

Tags: Japan, cell phones, pandemics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Iphone, GPS, Yokohama, Softbank Telecom, Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, Global IT News, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Mitsubishi Rolls Out Zero-Emission Electric Minicar

TOKYO (AFP) – Japan's Mitsubishi Motors Corp. rolled out its first zero-emission electric minicar Friday, hoping to capture a slice of the fast-growing market for environmentally friendly vehicles.

 

The new "i-MiEV" -- short for Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle -- can seat four adults, emits no carbon dioxide and has a range of up to 160 kilometers (100 miles) on a fully-charged battery. The distance should be enough for day-to-day city driving in Japan, said company president Osamu Masuko, who added that the automaker was initially targeting corporate and government clients.

 

"We at Mitsubishi Motors hope to build technology that will put us in a competitive position in the global market of the future," he told a press conference. "Thinking about the Japanese auto industry in 10 to 20 years from now, we must make sure the industry does not fall behind our foreign rivals."

 

Mistubishi says the car, priced at 4.6 million yen (47,500 dollars), runs quietly but accelerates quickly, and the running cost is one third of that of a petrol-powered car -- or less if it is charged during off-peak hours. Because of its efficiency -- including converting braking energy into battery power -- the vehicle emits only one third of the CO2 of a petrol car when the electricity generated to recharge it at a power plant is factored in.

 

The battery can be charged overnight on a domestic power source, or it can be powered up through quick-chargers now being developed by power companies, Mitsubishi said. The i-MiEV is the latest addition to a lineup of Japanese autos with green technology.

Industry leader Toyota Motors' Prius hybrid became Japan's best selling car in monthly sales in May, pulling ahead of its rival, Honda's Insight, also a hybrid. The Japanese government has offered tax breaks and other incentives for consumers to buy fuel-efficient vehicles.

 

Masuko said: "The current launch price is high for ordinary motorists to purchase. But mass production will allow it to fall." He added that Mitsubishi hopes to eventually bring the cost down to around two million yen. For the year to March 2010, the company aims to sell 1,400 i-MiEVs to government and corporate users in Japan, in addition to 250 units overseas.

 

The company will start selling the vehicle to the general public from April 2010, with an annual target of 5,000 units in Japan and 1,000 overseas. In 2011, Mitsubishi hopes to sell as many as 15,000 units, Masuko said, adding that the company would make a profit on the model once production rises above 30,000 vehicles.

 

Tags: mitsubishi, electric car, zero emissions electric car, japan, imiev, fuel efficiency, prius, Toyota, hybrid cars, osamu masuko, 

 

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090605/sc_afp/japanautoenvironmentcompanymitsubishimotors_20090605161715

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