Lemon

2024/02/27

Tsutomu Yaguchi

President, 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 a "box" (the interior and exterior of a building), it would end up being the same as any other facility. The name came from a desire to differentiate ourselves 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 since 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. 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

In the Kataura district of Odawara City, mandarin orange production has flourished since ancient times. However, due to the aging of farmers and a decrease in successors, about 50 to 60 hectares of mandarin orange groves have been abandoned. Through a Kanagawa Prefecture western university collaboration project, our Graduate School is attempting to revitalize these abandoned mandarin orange 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 achieve 3.7 times the profitability of 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 Motojiro Kajii's famous literary work "Lemon" (1925). Many readers seem to have gone on "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 provided 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 this is the theme for the February issue to coincide with the lemon season, "Lemon Memorial Day" (Lemon-ki) is March 24th, and Kajii's 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 relevant to computer research is that we decided to use them in demonstrations to show how little energy our ultra-low-power computers require to operate. It wouldn't run on one lemon, but it worked when six were connected in series. We then refined our know-how on making lemon batteries—where to insert the electrodes, how to polish them, and how adding baking soda can revive them 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.