Lemon

Tsutomu Yaguchi

CEO of Lemon Peel Plus Co., Ltd., 1987 Faculty of Law

The company name "Lemon Peel Plus" means adding value. I believe that by squeezing lemon peel, you can add more flavor to food and drinks, or change the taste profile entirely.

Our business involves the design and construction of amusement facilities. If we simply designed and built the "box" (the interior and exterior of the building), it would end up being the same as any other facility. My desire was to differentiate our work from other facilities.

It took me three years to obtain my license as a first-class architects and building engineers (Ikkyu-Kenchikushi) to become a professional in architecture. I would pass the written exams, but because I was not an architecture major, I struggled to complete the practical second-stage exam (a design and drafting test where you must draw a three-story steel structure in five and a half hours) within the time limit every year.

However, right after graduation, I joined a securities firm, and a company president who became my client told me, "If you work hard at architecture, it will pay off." Those words gave me hope when I was at a loss after the bubble burst. Now, I am working hard at managing an architectural firm.

Takayuki Tomaru

Project Professor, Keio University Graduate School of System Design and Management, 2012 SDM PhD

Mandarin orange production has long flourished in the Kataura district of Odawara City, but due to the aging of farmers and a decrease in successors, about 50 to 60 hectares of mandarin groves have been abandoned. Through a collaborative project with universities in western Kanagawa Prefecture, our Graduate School is attempting to revitalize these abandoned mandarin groves in the Kataura area by converting them into lemon groves. The reasons for promoting lemons are that, compared to mandarins: 1) the annual harvest per unit area is higher; 2) work time for pruning and other tasks is shorter; 3) the unit sales price per kilogram is higher; and 4) there is no damage from birds or animals. Therefore, lemons can be 3.7 times more profitable than mandarins, contributing to farmers' income. Furthermore, according to our field surveys, much of the abandoned land is on north-facing slopes with poor sunlight, and lemons have the advantage of being able to grow even on such land. However, there are challenges. According to our consumer surveys, awareness of lemons from Kataura, Odawara, is low in the Tokyo metropolitan area, with about 80% of people unaware that lemons are produced in Odawara. Moving forward, we want to conduct PR activities to improve the recognition of Odawara lemons.

Maiko Odaira

Professor, Keio University Faculty of Letters

Indulging in the fantasy of blowing up Maruzen, the great fortress of beauty and intellect, with a lemon imagined as a bomb—this is the famous literary work "Lemon" (1925) by Motojiro Kajii. Many readers seem to have made "pilgrimages" to Teramachi-dori in Kyoto to visit the greengrocer where Kajii bought the lemon, the Cafe Kagiya, and Maruzen, but today those shops have either disappeared or changed their form.

Due to pulmonary tuberculosis and a complex sense of frustration, Kajii could no longer find peace in conventional values. Perhaps the enduring popularity of "Lemon" indicates that everyone finds a part of themselves that doesn't fit in with their surroundings and desires their own "Lemon" to blow up their melancholy.

The freshness of this lemon is consistently created by Kajii's poetic language. Above all, the kanji characters for "Lemon" (檸檬) evoke a distant world, and in the expression "like lemon-yellow paint squeezed from a tube and hardened," the abstraction through the color name derived from the fruit is more vivid than the lemon itself. While the theme for the February issue is based on the lemon season, the anniversary of Kajii's death (Lemon-ki) is March 24, and his grave is in Osaka.

Hideharu Amano

Professor, Keio University Faculty of Science and Technology

A lemon battery is a type of fruit battery made by inserting zinc and copper electrodes into the pulp of a lemon. The lemon juice acts as an electrolyte, generating electromotive force based on the same principle as a voltaic pile. A single lemon has an electromotive force of about 0.7V, but as a battery, its internal resistance is extremely high, and the generated voltage is unstable.

The reason lemon batteries are related to computer research is that we decided to use them in demonstrations to show how little energy our ultra-low-power computer requires to operate. It wouldn't run on one lemon, but it worked when six were connected in series. We refined our know-how on making lemon batteries—such as where to insert the electrodes, how to polish them, and how to revive them by adding baking soda when the voltage drops—and found they could operate stably for several hours.

We traveled around the world demonstrating this experimental setup, and it was very well received. However, to our surprise, the questions focused more on how to make the lemon batteries than on the ultra-low-power computer itself, which was an unexpected turn of events.