FIFA, the world’s soccer governing organization, ruled that North Korea’s home qualifier against Japan will not be played in Pyongyang, but in a closed stadium at a neutral venue. The decision not to play in NK was made as punishment for crowd violence at matches against Bahrain and Iran in Pyongyang last month.

The Japanese side welcomed the decision and expressed a desire to play the match in Malaysia. Japan does not want to play the game in China, due to the anti-Japanese atmosphere that was ignited by disputes over Japanese textbooks, territorial disputes, and other disagreements between the two countries.

Last year, during a soccer tournament in China, Chinese fans heckled Japanese players, booed during Japan’s national anthem, pelted Japanese fans with garbage and hung banners criticizing Japan.

Some in the West think it’s no longer appropriate to refer to China as a Communist country now that they have instituted free market reforms.

It’s true they may no longer have a true Communist economic system, but old ways die hard. Philip P. Pan in the Washington Post reports that President Hu Jintao has emerged as a hardline ideologue in his third year on the job. China has resumed purging professors who criticize the government and is requiring university students to take more classes on Communist theory.

One passage in the article was particularly revealing:

In a recent comment often cited as a clue to his thinking, Hu wrote in an instruction to propaganda officials that though the economic policies of communist allies Cuba and North Korea were flawed, their political policies were correct, according to a person who saw the instruction and others briefed on it. The remark, first reported by the Hong Kong magazine Open, stunned many in the party who consider the two countries repressive and isolated from the rest of the world.

Nothing more needs to be said, does it?

China is claiming that Japan broke a “gentlemen’s agreement” reached 20 years ago under which the Japanese prime minister was not to visit Yasukuni Shrine.

There was a gentlemen’s agreement in which prime ministers, chief cabinet secretaries and foreign ministers — who are the ‘face’ of the Japanese government and represent Japan’s international image — would not go (to Yasukuni),” Kyodo news agency quoted Ambassador Wang Yi as telling a ruling party foreign affairs panel.

China had agreed in return not to make an issue of visits to Yasukuni by private citizens or rank-and-file politicians, Wang added.

The deal was allegedly reached in 1985 after then-prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made an official visit to the shrine. Japan, however, is denying that such an agreement ever existed.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone denied that there was any such informal agreement between Japan and China.

“It goes completely against the facts,” Nakasone told reporters at his office in Tokyo. “We never had that kind of agreement. Perhaps it is a mistaken memory on the part of the ambassador.”

Nakasone said he phoned the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo to lodge a protest against Wang’s remarks, made during a speech at the Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters in Tokyo.

There’s good news and there’s bad news for Chad Rowan, AKA Akebono, the most dominant sumo wrestler of his day. The good news is that he finally found a sport in which he can compete since his retirement from sumo. The bad news is that the sport is professional wrestling.

As we explained in January, Akebono was one of the most important figures in the sport’s 2,000-year history. A native Hawaiian, he was the first foreign-born rikishi to be promoted to the rank of yokuzuna, or grand champion. In addition to being a champion in the dohyo, or sumo ring, a yokozuna has to exemplify the character and personality traits the sport’s elders and fans demand.

Akebono was a winner on both counts. His rise from a novice to become the sport’s only yokuzuna took just 30 tournaments—the fastest in history. He won 11 tournaments, the 7th highest total ever at the time of his retirement. He also was enthusiastically accepted by Japanese fans for his demeanor, a qualification just as important as his fighting skills.

After retiring from sumo, he inexplicably decided to become a K-1 fighter. One can only imagine the Sumo Association’s shock and dismay on hearing the news. It did not turn out to be a happy decision for the fighter, either. In six straight matches, Akebono was handed his lunch by his opponents, some of whom were lightly regarded in K-1 circles. His matches seldom lasted more than a couple of minutes.

Then the SmackDown! Xprofessional wrestling show made its way to Japan this February. Akebono attended and was invited into the ring by one of the wrestlers, Big Show. The two shook hands and exchanged pleasantries before Akebono left. But Akebono didn’t leave it there. In a story familiar to anyone who has ever been a 10-year-old boy, there was a report that SmackDown’s announcer “tracked Big Show down backstage and told him word out of Japan was that Akebono wanted to face Show at WrestleMania 21 on April 3 in Los Angeles.”

Big Show accepted the challenge and the match was arranged. It was to be a sumo style match, which naturally gave Akebono an advantage. Perhaps the organizers did not want Akebono to flop as badly in professional wrestling as he did in K-1. Another possibility was suggested by wrestling commentator NormanB: “What’s going to happen: Akebono wins, because celebrity pseudo-wrestlers NEVER lose to sports entertainers. Examples: Lawrence Taylor, Jay Leno, David Arquette, Mr. T, Kevin Greene…”

During a weigh-in that must have used cattle scales, Akebono showed up at 504 pounds while the seven-foot-tall Big Show tipped the scales at a mere 493. The Big Show has a sense of humor about his size. He told an interviewer, “We have to take these small commuter planes, and I feel like I’m wearing the plane, not sitting in it.”

The interviewer asked him if professional wrestling was fake, recalling that another wrestler once told him the moves were choreographed but the pain was real. Here’s Big Show’s answer:

I’ve had Undertaker kick me in the nuts so hard in The Garden, I just about passed out on Triple H. The chairs are metal, and your ears will ring for about two days after a good chair shot. That’s the thing that people don’t understand. We put our bodies on the line to tell that emotional story.…I just hope that one day they have a Mac Truck wheel chair so I’ll be able to get around.

Who is this Big Show? His real name is Paul Wight, and he played basketball at Wichita State University. I found some biographical information on the Web that I’m going to let you have straight, no chaser:

After training at the Power Plant, Wight made his WCW debut in 1995.
Initially, he was billed as Andre the Giant’s son in WCW to get revenge on Hulk Hogan for his “father”. He appeared at ringside several times, most notably at Bash at the Beach 1995 to confront Hogan. A member of Kevin Sullivan’s Dungeon of Doom, Wight, dubbed “the Giant”, put Hogan and his WCW World title in his sights.

On October 29th, 1995, after a monster truck rally where Wight “fell” off the top of the Joe Louis Arena, he defeated Hulk Hogan in Detroit to win the WCW World Heavyweight title as a part of the Halloween Havoc pay-per-view. He won the match via disqualification, when Hulk Hogan’s manager, Jimmy Hart, hit Wight with his megaphone. As it turned out, the Giant won the title when it was revealed that Hart had signed a contract with a clause stating that the titles COULD change hands on a disqualification. With manager Hart now on his side, Wight’s title reign lasted just over a week before WCW stripped the Giant of the title.

Once, Akebono was the most respected member of a 2,000-year-old tradition, a record holder, and a true pioneer. A little more than a decade later, he’s challenging Big Show to a match in WrestleMania 21. The result? Big Show briefly picked up Akebono up off his feet, but after one minute and two seconds, Akebono shoved his opponent out of the ring. A victor again, though this time it was probably scripted. And I’m sure the pain was real.

Wrestling fans were not impressed. I leave you with the verdict of another commentator, “Judge David Packard”:

The Sumo match between former grand champion Akebono and Big Show was forgettable. I suppose we were supposed to be impressed that Big Show was able to temporarily lift the 504-lb. Akebono for the briefest of moments despite the fact that Big Show pushed a Jeep onto its side in the last month. Both men spent more time lumbering around and tossing handfuls of salt into the unsquared circle than they did pushing each other around. If you returned from a bathroom break and a bowl of nachos just in time to see Akebono fling Big Show from the ring like a rag doll, you didn’t miss a thing. And as much as I bitched about Wrestlemania not being shown in high-definition …this made me realize how glad I was that it wasn’t in HD….I don’t think I needed to see Akebono and Big Show wearing their man thongs in glorious 1080i. Whew.

Read all about how it was made here.

Source: Boing Boing

Here is an innovative desk (links to Japanese page) that’s the perfect thing for couch potatos and people who wish to use their laptop without getting out of bed.

The Gorone desk (gorone is a Japanese word that means to “lie down and take a nap”) easily adjusts to a variety of different sitting and reclining positions.

Price: 4,980 yen

Source: Akihabara News

Police have arrested a 39-year-old man for forcing his seven-year-old daughter to perform obscene acts on him so he could film them and send the images to a friend.

The man used a mobile phone camera to film the scenes, which he sent to another man he met through a child porn site on the Internet.

It’s official—the political winds in China have now changed direction.

For nearly a month, the government tacitly encouraged and abetted the anti-Japanese demonstrations that raged across the country. Fueled by anti-Japanese propaganda in the media and the culture at large, the demonstrators were awarded official approval and provided with such amenities as professionally printed signs and bottled water on street corners. The police escorted the protesters down the streets and then stood by and watched as they damaged private property and injured Japanese citizens.

Now, however, the government has thought better of its actions. Officials have urged the protestors to “show their patriotism” in other ways, such as studying or working hard. The Public Security Ministry warned people against participating in other demonstrations. As this AP article in the Washington Post describes, authorities have detained 42 for “disturbing social order”, and 16 of those were formally arrested.

Also, Kyodo reports that the Peoples’ Daily is calling on citizens not to boycott Japanese products. The newspaper says that the economies of the two countries are so closely connected that a boycott would wind up hurting the Chinese as well.

Finally, the latest developments have a decidedly sinister cast. The International Herald Tribune carried an article by Joseph Kahn in the New York Times that begins:

A major Chinese state-run newspaper has said in a staff editorial that the wave of popular protests against Japan were part of an “evil plot” with “ulterior motives,” suggesting that at least some elements of the Chinese leadership now wish to portray the demonstrations as a conspiracy to undermine the Communist Party.

The editorial in the state-run Liberation Daily of Shanghai implied that the protests were used either by antigovernment groups for their own purposes or by some ruling party members in an internal political conflict. This marks a change from previous media comments that characterized the demonstrations as a spontaneous popular uprising.

Kahn’s article quotes one source as saying the editorial is reminiscent of a People’s Daily editorial in 1989 when the pro-democracy demonstrations were about to begin. Kahn notes the earlier editorial provided evidence of a power struggle in the party.

What’s the reason for the about-face? It’s apparent even to the Socialist Worker:

During the Shanghai march, one 23 year old demonstrator claimed that the marchers were not simply motivated by opposition to Japan. “People are taking part in this march because they aren’t allowed to protest about anything else,” he told reporters.

There are signs of growing resistance in China. A riot broke out in the eastern village of Huankantou on 12 April following the police killing of two elderly women taking part in a protest against factory pollution.

Villagers fought off over 1,000 riot police, hospitalising 30. Official figures show a 15 percent rise in protests last year, involving over three million participants.

Faced with this the ruling party has a difficult balancing act. On 14 April a senior Communist Party official said that while he welcomed the anti-Japanese protests, “there is a state of concern, even panic, about whether this could get out of hand”.

It should be apparent by now that the reason the Japanese government remained calm in the face of the hysteria is that they knew events would unfold in this way. They know that the Chinese government is afraid of its own citizens and would have to stop what they helped start before events got out of hand.

How typical of the mass media that they didn’t, or couldn’t, see beyond the immediate spectacle of turmoil in the streets to realize that when the Chinese government postured against the Japanese, they showed that their reach exceeds their grasp.

The sakura zensen, or cherry blossom front, indicating the leading edge of blossoming cherry trees when the weather warms in the spring, has reached the northernmost areas of the country. Happy picnickers are taking advantage of the pleasant temperatures to bring bento boxed lunches to cherry-viewing parties in the parks of…Seoul? South Korea? Where just two weeks ago demonstrators were launching flaming arrows at the Japanese embassy?

Yes, they have hanami in Seoul, reports Masataka Harada, Korean correspondent for the Nishi-Nippon Shimbun. As they do with all things Japanese, Korean attitudes toward the cherry trees run the gamut from hatred to love. Some consider cherries a disturbing legacy of the Japanese colonial era, while others look at them and see that the Japanese empire also left behind some beauty.

Most of the cherry trees in Korea were planted during the Japanese occupation. After the country was liberated, the Koreans chopped almost all of them down in a “felling campaign”. Linguist Iksop Lee, writing in The Korean Language, witnessed this activity:

One of the most vivid memories…from that period is, immediately upon liberation from Japanese rule, groups of citizens spontaneously rose up and chopped down the cherry trees that had been planted in front of (my) elementary school. The flowering cherry was (and still is) of course the symbol of Japan, and during the Japanese period it was called by the Japanese name sakura, even though the tree grew natively and was much loved by the Korean people.

After the restoration of independence, those flowering cherries that had not been symbolically cut down were called by their native name again, peotkkot.

The Korean antipathy toward cherry trees changed, Harada reports, after the spread of the theory that Cheju Island was the origin of one of the more popular varieties cultivated for viewing. This led to the resumption of cherry planting in the country in the 1980s.

Harada was invited to a hanami in Seoul this year, at which everyone ate bento lunches of tonkasu, a word derived from the Japanese tonkatsu, or pork cutlets. This is not the usual Japanese fare for picnics beneath the cherry trees, but both the food and its name originated in Japan, so perhaps it was natural for the Koreans to combine it with a Japanese activity. The Japanese, after all, have a custom of eating chicken on Christmas, though chicken is not associated with Christmas dinners in the West. It seems to be used as a substitute for turkey, which is not often eaten in Japan.

The correspondent heard a conversation during the picnic that summed up for him the all the elements of current Korean attitudes toward things Japanese. Korean pop singer Ryu Si Won has just released his first single in Japan, and the song’s title is Sakura. While some Koreans at the party thought it was disgraceful that Ryu would release a song with a Japanese title, others chose to overlook it, saying, “Business is business”.

Harada concludes that Japanese-Korean relations are just like the weather in Seoul these days—three cold days alternating with four warm days.

Doctors in Thailand removed 50 maggots from the ears of an 84-year-old man who went to the hospital complaining of itching.

“We believe flies might have gone inside his ears to lay eggs, which hatched into larvae and caused the itching,” said Somsak Nonthasri, the doctor who treated him.

Doctors kept the man in the hospital for observation in case more eggs hatch.