Food, money, a bed, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful–but troublingly modern–woman. Nevertheless, this artist possesses a chalk that brings pictures to life. The significance of Argon is far more apparent: it is a noble gas (希ガス) that takes its name from the Greek for “lazy” (hence used commonly as an inert gas), and despite being a “rare gas” in Japanese, I understand it is the most common of the noble gasses. The significance of the ‘starving artist’ figure is debatable, because in 1951 most people in Japan were starving–the artist here is the everyman in this regard. In this early Abe gem, a starving artist named Argon sells off most of his possessions for food and is left with a piece of chalk. I ran across this image by the talented artist Gary Kelley, and could not help but recall Abe Kobo ‘s 1951 short story, “The Magic Chalk” (魔法のチョーク). This is not an unproblematic trend, Genda concedes, but there are two problems with blanket criticism: first, it does not actually correlate to high unemployment, and second, these critics lump all non-regular employees together, failing to notice the emergence of the “quasi-regular employees.” workers were laid off in waves during the “Lehman shock”). Critics have come down too harshly on the post-Lehman expansion of hiring of part-timers/contract workers in place of the higher paid-and more difficult to fire-regular employees (temp. The major is what he calls a “market trend” of “quasi-regular employees” emerging to fill the gaps between the regular employees (I’m assuming he is thinking of 正社員) and the dispatch/freeter class. Genda makes a number of informative observations. As far as blueprints go, this one is rather pale of shade and sparse of detail, but this may be due to the stage at which this “Project for the Creation of an Employment System that Enables Lifelong Growth for All People” initiative is currently. 46), professor of Labor Economics, Genda Yuji aims to provide a “blueprint” for an adjustment to Japan’s employment system that can effectively face future crises, taking into account lessons learned from the latest economic downturn. In “The Near Future of Employment in Japan” published in the March 2012 issue of Social Science Japan (Newsletter of University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science no.