Sunday, May 23, 2010

May Overflow II

These 2 are from China and Japan. The 1st card was sent by Gao and the 2nd by Moegi "marumo".

The new Beijing Poly Plaza building in Beijing, incorporates 24 stories of office space built around a 90-meter-tall atrium enclosed by the world’s largest cable-net-supported glass wall. The museum occupancy is contained in an eight-story hanging ‘lantern’ suspended in the building atrium from four parallel strand bridge cables.

"Oze is a 25,000 hectare tract of north-eastern Japan that until summer of 2007 made up part of the gargantuan Nikko National Park. Oze sprawls across parts of no less than three prefectures: Gunma, Niigata and Fukushima.

This is Japan’s largest area of highland marsh, and is renowned for its vistas of wild flowers and majestic mountain scenery. Oze is a spectacular example of what beauty nature can produce with fire and brimstone. Lava from an eruption of nearby Mt. Hiuchigatake dammed the Tadamigawa River creating the marshlands, which Kita Tadamigawa is still the prime source of water for.

The plethora of streams here provides much of Tokyo’s energy requirements, no less than 70% of the land in the park being owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company.

Nikko National Park, of which Oze was a part, came into being in 1934 as Japan’s fourth largest. In 2005, it was included in the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance (the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands being an international convention adopted in 1971).

In summer of 2007 Oze was formally detached from Nikko National Park and given the status of a new park: Japan’s twenty-ninth.

Nikko is one of Japan’s busiest tourist areas, and the rationale behind this move is to reduce the tourism impact on Oze and nurture it as a true natural reserve."- in: http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=357&pID=1408

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