SAITAMA News

SAITAMA -- The city of Saitama said Tuesday it will start offering from June 1 simultaneous translation in five languages when non-Japanese speaking foreign residents make emergency phone calls by dialing 119.

Saitama will become the first Japanese major city with a population of 500,000 or more to offer around-the-clock multilingual translation services -- Chinese, English, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese -- provided through a contracted private company.

There are about 17,000 registered foreign residents in the city, and the number has been rising moderately. Some 30 emergency calls are made per year by those residents.

The service makes possible three-way conversations among, for instance, a non-Japanese speaking caller, interpreter and Japanese emergency services worker. The three will also be able to talk with each other at emergency sites through the mobile phones of firefighters.

KAWAGUCHI, Saitama -- A bell that went missing from a temple in Tokyo after being requisitioned by the Japanese military during World War II is set to be returned -- some 70 years later.

The bell had been in the possession of Jizoin temple in Kawaguchi, but its original owner was unknown until the temple's head priest, Yuju Komuro, conducted a search and found that it had belonged to Koenji temple in Tokyo's Minato Ward. The bell is now set to be returned to the Tokyo temple.

"I never dreamed it would come back," Koenji temple's head priest, Hiroshi Sakurada, said.

Jizoin temple submitted a bell made in 1728 to the Japanese military during World War II in 1943. It is said that at the time, some 50,000 temple bells around the country were submitted in this way. Those that were not melted down were later passed on to temples around the country, as their original owners were not known. Jizoin temple, not knowing what had become of its bell, claimed a bell it found along a railway line near Kawaguchi Station. That bell bore inscriptions suggesting it was donated by parishioners of a temple in remembrance of a girl who died over 300 years ago. The bell was around 120 centimeters tall, 69 centimeters wide, and 300 kg in weight.

When a new bell was donated to Jizoin temple in 1990, Komoro's father, who was formerly head priest, tried to find the old bell's original owner but gave up.

However, afterward there were strengthened calls for Jizoin temple to get back another bronze bell from Kawagoedaishi Kitain temple in Kawagoe. This prompted Komuro to try to find the owner of the old bell his temple was holding.

Based on a Buddhist name in the bell's inscriptions and other clues, he speculated that the bell had belonged to a temple of the Jodo Shinshu sect. A seal on the bell led him to suspect that the temple was in Tokyo, and after contacting two temples there, he received a response from Koenji temple in Minato Ward. At the end of August, that temple's head priest visited Jizoin temple to check on the bell.

A match between the inscriptions on the bell and the name of a head priest on records, and the fact that a family associated with Koenji temple had descended from a person mentioned in the inscription, led the priests to conclude that the bell had belonged to Koenji temple. The temple lost the building where the bell would have been hung to the Great Kanto Earthquake and Tokyo air raids, so the returned bell will be stored in the main temple building instead.

"I'm looking forward to hearing the sound it makes," Sakurada said.

KAWAGOE, Saitama -- The beating of a 15-year-old student here in January that has left him in a coma stemmed from bullying, according to an investigation by the city board of education and the student's school.

The investigation found that the student had been bullied since around a year earlier. The boy was beaten by three other students, and the investigation found that the students' teachers had been aware of at least eight times when there was trouble between the student and the three others, but the teachers did not judge these incidents as bullying and only responded with verbal warnings to both sides.

According to the city board of education and other sources, the investigation involved a school survey in January, carried out on the student's grade-level peers at the request of the boy's mother. Survey answers came in that the student had been kicked, had stationery stolen from him, and otherwise been bullied since being a first-year student at the junior high school he attended. In late March, the city board of education determined that bullying had been behind the attack.

Masatoshi Shinpo, head of the educational instruction division of the city board of education, said that there were problems with the board and school's responses before the attack happened.

According to prefectural police and other sources, in the January incident, the boy was beaten in turn by three other students at a park in Kawagoe. The three were arrested the same day and later sent to a youth correctional facility. The beaten student, however, remains in a coma.