Children often wonder about what it’s like to be an adult, experiencing both the challenges and rewards of a grown-up existence. Mitsubishi Motors (MMC) is helping to answer this curiosity with an exhibit for the new KidZania Koshien facility opening in March 2009 in Osaka.       The KidZania concept originated in Mexico in 1999, and has since spread to Japan and Indonesia. Each KidZania facility provides an immersive recreation of adult life with dozens of simulated work places, including police and fire stations, hospitals, banks and various shops.       This allows children to sample multiple professions over the course of a single day.
KidZania Koshien will be the second such facility in Japan, following the success of KidZania Tokyo, which has had over 1.4 million visitors since opening in October 2006.       MMC’s exhibit will consist of a “Driver’s License Testing Office” and a “Rent-A-Car Center” similar to those it has in KidZania Tokyo, along with a few new concepts. Children will learn about automobiles, environmental issues and safe driving before receiving “driver’s licenses.” Once they have their licenses, children can take a miniature automobile for a drive. It is hoped that this exhibit will help young people gain the skills and confidence needed in modern society.
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Many young Japanese artists experience difficulty finding opportunities to display and publicize their work, which can be disheartening to aspiring young artists. Mitsubishi Corporation’s (MC’s) Art Gate Program has been established to provide encouragement to these struggling artists by providing them with opportunities for their work to be displayed and purchased.       The program plans to purchase a total of 200 artworks per year (50 works quarterly) at ¥100,000 each. All chosen artworks will first be displayed at MC’s head office in Tokyo and at other public sites and then sold at a charity auction to be held quarterly. The theme for the first collection is “Living with nature.”       All proceeds from the auction will be donated to charitable institutions when the auction price is at or less than the original price paid to the artists by MC. If the auction price exceeds ¥100,000, then 50% of the difference between the auction price and the original purchase price will be paid back to the artist of the work and the other 50% will be donated to charitable institutions in addition to the initial ¥100,000.       It is hoped that this program will help art students and graduates who wish to become professional artists achieve their dream. The name “Art Gate” reflects the aim of this program, which is to provide artists with a gateway to the larger, global art world. PAGE TOP

To an outsider of any age, chemistry seems too complicated to ever be fun, but once one realizes how much we use chemistry everyday, the topic assumes new relevance and interest. Since 1993, Japanese chemical industry organizations and their member companies, including Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsubishi Rayon, have sponsored year-round events for children in the “Dream Chemistry 21” campaign.       Organized by the “Dream Chemistry 21” Committee made up of Japan’s chemical industry associations and societies, the campaign seeks to promote the importance of chemical technology and usefulness of chemical products, particularly by appealing to young people’s interest in the wonders of chemistry, and, at the same time, fostering internationally active chemists.       A popular event every year is “Dream Chemistry 21” Summer Holiday Children’s Chemistry Experiment Show, which ran in 2008 from August 22 to the 24. Mitsubishi Chemical participated with two experiments about color. Applying chromatography, which is used in police investigation testing and development of medicine, the Wonders of Color placed silica gel in a test tube to separate the dyes from a mixture of bath additives into their individual colors. A second color experiment used a three-color LED to show what happens when the primary colors are mixed in different combinations.       Mitsubishi Rayon’s experiment, titled How Light Moves in Plastic Optical Fiber, used LEDs to explore the properties of light. PAGE TOP