It is often said that Japan takes its lead from the U.S.
It’s too bad that the umpires who are officiating in the Japan Series between the Yomiuri Giants and the Seibu Lions this year have taken to mimicking the poor performance of their Yankee brethren during this year’s World Series.
As everyone probably knows by now, American-born Japanese heartthrob Leah Dizon recently announced that she is both married and pregnant.
Instructive in this announcement is the childishness with which dating, male-female relationships, marriage, and pregnancy is treated in Japan.
Here is a video of Leah’s announcement at a recent concert. Note the screams of shock and disbelief that a young 22-year-old woman would do such things. At the end of her announcement, Dizon says she will take some time off to have the baby, after which she plans to start performing again. She ends with a plea to her fans not to “toss her aside.”
With attitudes like this, it is no surprise that young people in Japan are shying away from marriage and that the population of the country is declining.
In an Italian trial for a murder in which the victim was found in her bed with her throat slit a day after she wore a bloody vampire costume to a Halloween party, a prosecutor is arguing that a brutal slaying was inspired by a violent manga comic.
Manga also have been linked to a death in Belgium, in which a note found next to the victim’s mutilated body referred to a Japanese comic called Death Note.
Manga also have been connected with the murder of British teacher Lindsay Hawker after piles of pornographic comics were found at the suspect’s flat.
An let’s not forget that Taro Aso is a manga fan…
SiteMeter provides us with visitor data grouped by, among other things, country, referral, and continent.
I was surprised to note on the continent graph for JAPUNDIT visitors recently that we are even getting visitors from unknown continents. And to think that I have been going through life thinking that the world had been completely charted centuries ago. . . !?!
So my Japanese roommate and her friend (also Japanese) were browsing through my bookshelf one day, looking at my English language literature, when they stumbled upon an old paperback of Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road). They picked it off the shelf wondering how haiku, something so intimately Japanese, could be translated to English.
After just a few minutes browsing through the pages, my two fluent-in-English friends burst out into laughter. I overheard the uproar in an adjacent room and went over to ask what the fuss was about.. Apparently, the original message was so unbelievably lost in the translation from Japanese to English, they thought it was downright hilarious. They said it was way too modern and conjured up images of Basho wandering the forest with an iPod Nano, mobile phone (with bluetooth headset), and Macbook (which he of course used to write his haiku).
I have decided to take this idea and run with it for haloween. I’m tentatively calling it DJ Basho, and it’s gonna be rad.
More to come.
In order to avoid confusion that would be caused if we require separate logins here on the Japundit Blog and on the Japundit News Page, we have decided to open up commenting to the general public on the blog.
You no longer will be required to log in to comment, but our commenting rules still apply.
Of course, we reserve the right to remove any comment we feel is in appropriate.
We are happy to announce the availability of a new Japundit Bookmarklet, which makes posting to Japundit quicker and easier than ever.
To use the Japundit Bookmarklet, simply go to the bottom of the Japundit News Story page and click Japundit Bookmarklet link under JAPUNDIT TOOLS.
On the scsreen that appears perform either of the following operations.
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Make any change you want to the title, select a category, fill in some tags, etc. Finally, click Submit, and you are done.
This in from Mr. Pink.
The following is the winning entry in an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term: This year’s term was Political Correctness.
The winner wrote: ‘Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end’
R.J.Wiedemann.LtCol.USMC Ret.
Don’t know if the story is on the level, but the definition is spot on!
Let’s all remember that the purpose of the articles on the JAPUNDIT news page is to let visitors know what is at the other end of the link.
If you want to chat with another member or contributor, you can do so in the comments section or you can send a private message after clicking the My inbox link under your user name in the left sidebar on the news page.
Chatty posts will be deleted.
Right now, the number of votes required for promotion from the Upcoming page to the Top Stories page is 4.
Is this enough?
Should I change it to 5?
Or even higher?
What say you, JAPUNDITs?
I don’t know if an Open Thread is even required with our new format, but here it is for this week.
Feel free to sound off about anything you want, including the new JAPUNDIT format.
The following are the currently supported HTML tags you can use when posting a story on the JAPUNDIT News Pages.
Please let us know if there are others you would like to see implemented.
I’ve been getting reports from people about the buggy login/logout handling over at the JAPUNDIT News Site.
We are fully aware of the problem, but the guy who takes care of fixing things like that for us is off on holiday for a few days. We will get it fixed as soon as he gets back.
In the meantime, please keep clicking around and refreshing the page, which eventually solves the problem.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
There have been a number of times while getting used to our new system at JAPUNDIT where I thought a story was not being posted or that a changed setting was not taking effect. That’s when I realized that the new system makes heavy use of buffered images to increase speed. Normally, a simple browser page refresh is enough to solve the problem.
So any time you feel that your story got lost in the ether or if anything else does not look right, dry a browser page refresh and see if that does not do the trick.
We have increased the maximum story length from the default 400 characters up to 2000 characters. This should provide more versatility when writing stories.
The big difference between the old JAPUNDIT and the new JAPUNDIT is that the new version is a community based site. This means that the site depends on all of its members to keep it interesting and vibrant.
The most basic thing we need users to do is to vote for stories that others submit. This is the bare minimum you can do to help support JAPUNDIT. If a story does not receive a minimum number of votes, it is never promoted to the top page.
Please help make JAPUNDIT a success by taking the time to click the VOTE buttons to the left of the stories.
Up until now, we have been using numerous contact addresses for JAPUNDIT, to keep track of submissions, contacts, podcast-related items, etc.
Effective immediately, we will be consolidating everything to one single address: contact(at)japundit(dot)com.
We will try to update all of the mail addresses mentioned on the site, but we may miss some.
Use the following procedure to post a video on JAPUNDIT.
In the “Story’s URL” box on the screen that appears after you click the “Submit Story” tab, paste the URL where the video is located.
Right now there is only one way to post an image on JAPUNDIT.
In the “Story’s URL” box on the screen that appears after you click the “Submit Story” tab, paste the URL where the photo is located.
We will be trying to work out a way to make it possible to include both an image and a link to the story that includes the image, and we will let you know as soon as we figure it out.