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From Our Own Correspondent: Pakistan and Japan

Pakistan and Japan

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Pakistan and Japan

Pascale Harter presents insights from Aleem Maqbool in Sindh and Roland Buerk in Tokyo.

Wit and insight from BBC correspondents around the world, with Pascale Harter. Aleem Maqbool learns what drove one flood victim to lie to him; Roland Buerk asks just why Tokyo's pets are so pampered.

Insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers from around the world. Introduced by Pascale Harter. 

In this edition:

A drowned world - and a desperate lie

Nine months ago, the floods which inundated much of Pakistan caused deaths, destruction and despair for many of the country's poorest people, who had little to lose in the first place. But as Aleem Maqbool found when he revisited areas of Sindh he first saw under water, even those who survived the flooding itself are still struggling. Some are still finding it so hard they're driven to lie in the hope of more food. And what sort of precautions are now in place as we enter another monsoon season?

Fur babies?

Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, at just 1.39 children per average woman. The trend is so strong that a team of university researchers recently calculated that if current trends continue the Japanese people will be extinct in a thousand years. There are dire estimates that the population could shrink by two-thirds just in the next century, unless the country's women can be lured back into childbearing. 

These days children are outnumbered by pets in Tokyo, as correspondent Roland Buerk found out when on a mission to buy clothes for his own toddler. What does that mean for the economy and for society?

(Image: Flood victims line up for food distribution by the World Food Program (WFP) at a tented camp on 21 August 2010 in Sukkur, Pakistan. Credit: Getty Images)

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