It’s a simple but addictive logic puzzle game, and it’s taking the world by storm.

Though the name, sudoku, is Japanese, the puzzle itself was invented long ago in Switzerland. After some American magazines published the puzzles 20 years ago, Japanese publishers liked what they saw and imported the puzzle to Japan. Now, it’s very popular among British newspaper readers.

If you want to learn how to play, click here.

More adventuresome players might want to check out the pages here, here, here, or here.

Warning: addictive.

We previously reported on last year’s upheaval in Japanese baseball and the player and fan revolt that scuttled the plans of the Yomiuri Giants to contract the league. (Here, and here, more here, still more here, and finally here. Dang, I wrote about that a lot!)

David Jacobson, in a well-done piece for the Japan Media Review, covers the story of the return of Yomiuri’s “owner” Tsuneo Watanabe, the despotic don of Japanese baseball, who was ostensibly ousted from his position last year due to fallout from the fracas.

This return of disgraced executives from the dead is not uncommon in Japan, though it seems to happen less frequently these days. But Watanabe and Yomiuri are definitely old school.

Korean bloggers have been having a field day over the behavior of a young woman who refused to clean up the mess after her dog pooped on the floor of a subway.

Unfortunately for her, there was a person with a digital camera nearby. And judging by the gesture she was making with her left hand, the woman was aware she was being photographed and is fluent enough in sign language to flash a digital salute.

It began in a subway train with a girl whose dog made a mess on the train floor. When nearby elders told her to clean up the mess, she basically told them to fuck off. A nearby enraged netizen then took pictures of her and posted it, without any masking, on a popular website which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture.

According to Don Park’s writeup about the incident, the Internet coverage violated the privacy of the girl.

All mentions of privacy invasion were shouted down with accusations of being related to the girl. The common excuse for their behavior was that the girl doesn’t deserve privacy.

While the girl clearly behaved badly, those Korean netizens’ behavior is even worse and inexcusably so. Abuse by the mob is indistinguishable from abuse by dictators yet they just don’t see it in the heat of righteousness. Are they wary of ruining her life or hounding her into suicide? I doubt it. To quote some of them: her life deserves to be ruined and she won’t kill herself because she is a thick-skinned bitch.

So which is more sacred? The right to have your dog crap where it pleases? Or the right to privacy? You be the judge.

Although conventional wisdom says political and economic relations between Japan and China are two different animals, and are completely unconnected, a recent NY Times News Service editorial has evidence to the contrary. The editorial, which appears in the Taipei Times, argues that the recent anti-Japanese protests in China this past spring seems to have hit a nerve with Japan’s capitalist classes:

After a five-year boom, Japan’s export growth to China stalled in May. Recent polls of Japanese investors show a growing reluctance to make further investments in China.

Two surveys, seperated by six months, of 414 Japanese business operating in China discovered:

The percentage of Japanese companies planning to expand operations in China dropped sharply, to just under 55 percent in late May, from 86 percent last December, according to the Japan External Trade Organization, the country’s trade and investment promotion agency…Although only 10 percent of the companies said that business had suffered from the protests, largely in reduced sales and tarnished brands, 36 percent said they were worried about future effects, and 45 percent said the business risk of operating in China had increased.

The editorial concludes that the rising of nationalism in China, which seems to be permitted or even encouraged by the Chinese government, amounts to “a bucket of cold water for many Japanese investors who had assumed that they were secure in China because they were providing jobs and quality products.”

It’s kind of funny that in times like this we tend to swallow our democratic principles, and wish the Chinese government would just crack down on all those anti-Japanese protesters in order to preserve the business climate. Or in order to just shut them up. Business trumps politics, or so they say.

While the editorial quotes a Morgan Stanley Japan executive (an American) as saying “people are scared. . .they don’t know where China is going with this,” the Keidanren representitive is called in to cool things down, and says “most big (Japanese) companies are not worried about the situation.”

Good if you’re a big company, I guess.

The editorial doesn’t really explain how all of this could be bad for China. Although the writer argues China needs to reassure Japanese and other foreign investors in order to continue to attract investment, the editorial also points out that by 2050 China’s economy should be 30 times bigger that it is today, or 6 times the size of Japan’s economy, which is forecast to be about the same size in 2050 as it is now.

Anybody want to start taking Chinese lessons?

While those overseas following the political trends in Japan may realize a debate is underway about Prime Minister Koizumi’s more assertive stance toward Japan’s East Asian neighbors, symbolized by his controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, they may not be aware it is causing some internal friction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and with their coalition partners, the New Komeito Party. Three newspaper articles describe these strains and identify some of the important figures in the debate.

The first is a flawed article by J. Sean Curtin writing in the Asia Times a couple of weeks ago. It is worth reading for Curtin’s summary of the general political debate, some of the plot twists, and the people involved. He provides a service by pointing out that the debate exists. Unfortunately, however, Curtin’s wildly overblown language and his attempts to paint people into certain corners and use the tarbrush on others come off as ham-fisted.

He tries to show that LDP elders, the party’s coalition partners, the business community, and the public are all aligned against Koizumi and that by ignoring them, the prime minister will put Japan on an “extremely dangerous collision course” with China. And what would that be? Is the Chinese leadership so unbalanced that it would go to war over Yasukuni?

Curtin frames the argument as being between “neo-nationalists” on the one hand, and “moderates” on the other. He gets a bit carried away, referring to a “fierce” public debate (I’ve seen the debate, but haven’t seen any ferocity) and the “restless ghosts of Tokyo’s wartime past” (prose like this should be saved for unpublished novels). He contrasts those who “believe Japan must respect Chinese sensitivities” with those “neo-nationalists”, who seem about to break into a goose step any minute now. He goes so far as to equate support for Koizumi’s position with the belief that Hideki Tojo, one of Japan’s wartime prime ministers, is a “hero”. Seems to me that the journalist needs to put his feet up and sip on a cooling beverage.

Recently, former foreign minister Yohei Kono, a long-time supporter of closer ties with the Beijing regime (which Curtin fails to mention) rounded up eight former prime ministers to call on Koizumi to halt his Yasukuni visits. Koizumi rejected the advice, saying he already knew about their objections, and Curtin tries to take him to task for ignoring “Japan’s former helmsmen”. It is fatuous to apply this expression to such former prime ministers as Tomiichi Murayama, a socialist who sold out his beliefs and his party for a brief, tawdry term in office to allow the old guard of the LDP to crush the nascent attempts at domestic political reform, the likes of such lightweight placeholders as Toshiki Kaifu, Tsutomu Hata, and Yoshiro Mori, the hack machine pol Ryutaro Hashimoto, and Yasuhiro Nakasone, who was nicknamed the “Weathervane” during his days in office.

Curtin also reports that Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of the former prime minister, has spoken out on the issue for the first time and given her support to the Yasukuni visits. Though admitting that Tojo has never said anything publicly about Yasukuni before (and has never been seriously involved in politics as far as I know), she is somehow transformed two paragraphs later into one of the primary LDP revisionists. Also part of this bloc is Hisahiko Okazaki, who is credited with writing a “highly influential” article in the Yomiuri Shimbun “articulating the views of the neo-nationalists”. Considering that Curtin also reports public sentiment is trending against the Yasukuni visits, one wonders just who the article influenced, but Curtin doesn’t mention that.

If we clear away the clutter and juiced journalism, it is apparent that there is a division in the LDP over these issues. The fault lines of the division are staring us right in the face, but they are not the Nipponese Alan Alda wing against the Hideki Tojo faction. To see it clearly spelled out in print, we have to go elsewhere.

In this article, Kyodo reports that 116 LDP parliamentarians set up a group supporting Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni “in a move to counter calls by China and veteran LDP members that the premier suspend the trips.”

Initiated by LDP Acting Secretary General Shinzo Abe and other hard-liners in the party, the group consists of 116 lawmakers, constituting almost a third of the LDP’s total of 364 parliamentarians in the two chambers. The members are junior lawmakers who have been elected one to five times to the House of Representatives or for up to two terms in the House of Councillors.

There you have it. What Kyodo tells us (and Curtin didn’t) is that the fault line is age-related. Both Nakasone and Miyazawa are in their late 80s, and none of the rest of the former prime ministers could be considered young. The faction wanting to appease China comes primarily from the era in Japanese politics when the Japanese were supposed to be obsequious and mouth platitudes in foreign affairs, particularly in East Asia. The “hardliners”, as Kyodo calls them, are all relatively young, came of age politically when Japan had recovered from the wartime devastation, and now believe there is nothing wrong with Japan asserting its position in the world and nothing right about backing down whenever China or the two Koreas—nobody’s angels—complains.

The third article appeared several months ago in the Globe and Mail, but I found it copied on a Yahoo! discussion board. It profiles Shinzo Abe (photo), the leader of the group in the Kyodo article acting in support of Koizumi.

Abe, at 50 quite young to play a leading role in Japanese politics, has consistently said that Japan should take a more assertive stance internationally.

“Japan used to just repeat world peace like a Buddhist chant,” he once said. “Now we have to think about how best to pursue the national interest.”

He has not hesitated to put his ideas into action, taking a leading role in demanding that Japan call North Korea to account over the abduction issue. While this article is a serviceable portrait of a man who may become Japan’s next prime minister, the author, Geoffrey York, also has a couple of coherence problems. In one passage, he explains that Abe studied politics at the University of Southern California, yet York also tries to suggest that Abe and his supporters have a narrower view of the world than their elders. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a man whose fluency in another language is sufficient to attend university in a country on the other side of the planet would have a narrower view of the world than some of the LDP’s great-granddads.

He also uses a quote by a university professor suggesting that Abe is “jingoistic”. There’s no question that Abe’s a man of the right, but for a professor to use this expression for publication suggests that (a) the professor was ill-served by an interpreter, (b) the professor doesn’t really know what jingoism is, or (c) he is so far to the left it has distorted his view of the political playing field.

York also claims that “as the scion of (his political) family, Mr. Abe enjoys the kind of mystique that surrounds the Kennedy family in the United States.” Come on, Geoff, Abe’s an interesting guy, but it’s silly to make up stuff about a Kennedy-like “mystique”.

Hack through the lush journalistic overgrowth of these articles, and you’ll see the outlines of some interesting trends in domestic Japanese politics. With the anniversary of the end of World War II fewer than two months away, some people are ready to pounce on the Japanese prime minister’s next visit to Yasukuni (surely a question of when and not if), and the flying fur and feathers should be quite a spectacle. Also, Koizumi is due to step down as prime minister in little more than a year, with no clear successor in sight. Japanese politics are starting to get yeasty, so there’s really no need for others to add their own ingredients to the brew.

Eleanor Morris Wu is writing as fast as she can. An English teacher at Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, Wu has written a 4-part series of adventure novels set in Taiwan, China and Japan, with assorted side trips to the USA and Europe included. Reviewed in the Taipei Times and the China Post, with review submissions also sent to the New York Times and the Washington Post, in addition to the International Herald Tribune, Wu novels encompass the best that there is in modern Asian adventure romances.

LINK: http://www.eleanormorriswu.com

The longtime Taipei expat has completed her fourth
romance novel in a series of books
set in Taiwan, and the new book — titled “East by Northeast” –was recently published by New World Media in
the US and is now available via online order sites.

A popular teacher at Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Wu has written
another long page-turner of romance, intrigue and
adventure that will surely captivate readers interested in Asian
culture. She knows her history and has an uncanny knack at getting
inside her characters’ emotions, from priests to spies, and she once
gives readers a bravura performance. The new book takes place in
Canada and mainland China, with stops in Taipei as usual as well.

“It’s a story that tries to intertwine the destinies of several
nations and cultures in Asia and the West,” says Wu, who previously
published ”Losing Plum Blossom”, ”The Black King” and ”A
Conspiracy of Nations”, in 2003, 2004, and 2006, respectively. The
four novels each stand alone as separate books, but for readers who
have been following the series, there’s a group of characters who
surface in each book and tie all the loose threads together.

The rather racy cover of “East by Northeast” features a handsome Asian
man and a scantily-clad Western woman pictured amid a colorful collage
of the Great Wall of China and Niagra Falls along the U.S.-Canadian
border. Although Wu claims in the forward to her book that it is a
work of “fiction,” she has obviously used her personal life
experiences and adventures in Taiwan and other parts of Asia to fuel
her vivid imagination.

“Some people have told me the new book might be perceived as a bit
scandalous, beceause of the nature of the story,” Wu says. “But my
publisher in America said the novel is not libelous and won’t get me
on any blacklist in China, since it’s a mere fictional story. I hope
to visit friends in Beijing on my next trip to the mainland, so I hope
the new book doesn’t cause any problems with my travel plans.”

Wu graduated from Harvard University and studied anthropology in
graduate school in Canada. She married an Asian man surnamed Wu, and although her
husband passed away more then ten years ago, Morris Wu has remained in Taiwan
for her work. An adult son, Jonathan, lives in the U.S., she said.

Wu’s novels have reached readers around the world. One
reviewer in Taipei, commenting on the author’s style, noted: “I am very
favorably impressed by Wu’s prose style. She likes to dwell on
images and incidents for pages at a time. And in her case, she can command
the reader’s attention throughout. It takes a particular talent to do
that.”

Wu said that she usually writes her books in Taiwan, sends the
manuscript to her publisher in the U.S., and then markets them online
using the Internet and literary blogs to reach her audience. She said
she feels that the books have been worth the effort she made
to get them published and she enjoys writing them. Will there be one
more novel in the series? The professor said she is writing the next
book in the series right now!

A recent study suggests that the meat-based “Western diet” and the traditional salty “Japanese diet” are equally bad for you in terms of colon cancer — especially if you are a woman.

Researchers in Japan found that among more than 42,000 adults followed for 10 years, women (but not men) with either a Western pattern of eating or a diet heavy in traditional Japanese foods like salted fish and pickled vegetables had a higher risk of colon cancer compared with women who were deemed healthy eaters.

The survey studied the effects of three dietary patterns: a “Western diet” high in meat, poultry, cheese and bread and butter; a “traditional Japanese diet” of rice, miso soup, salted fish and pickled vegetables; and a “healthy diet” of fruits, vegetables, soy products, beans and dairy.

Both the Western and traditional Japanese diets doubled the risk of colon cancer among women, while the healthy diet showed no link to colon cancer.

As reported in Bloomberg and the Mainichi (Japanese only), the Chinese are once again up in arms over Japanese textbooks. A school for Japanese students has been fined and its geography textbooks seized by the Chinese government. The crime? Chinese officials purport that maps in the books depict Taiwan as a seperate country - Taiwan appears in a different colour than mainland China.

There are six Japanese schools in various parts of China, and each school can choose its own supplementary teaching materials, including textbooks, and there’s no word on whether or not geography textbooks at other schools will be affected.

Interestingly enough, Japan officially recognizes Taiwan as belonging to China.

Now, if the Japanese government held such strong sway over the contents of textbooks as the Chinese claimed back in April, during the original textbook controversy, don’t you think the textbooks in question this time around would have featured a Taiwan that appeared to be part of China?

Even after nearly a quarter of a century in Japan, here’s a subject I knew nothing about until today. Kyodo is reporting that moves are afoot to revive—not start—women’s sumo. I was hoping that the women might wrestle in mawashi, the same stylized thongs the men wear, but no such luck.

According to the article, women’s sumo was as popular as men’s sumo in Japan, Taiwan, and Hawaii until the 1960s, when it disappeared. The article is well worth reading, but Kyodo could have made it even better by spending more time translating and editing it. First they state it was as popular as men’s sumo, then they say there was a period when it was more popular than men’s sumo (though they don’t say when), and they conclude by claiming that “many people remain tight-lipped about women’s sumo”. Really? I’ve yet to see any Japanese I know remain tight-lipped about something that was popular until the 1960s.

I shouldn’t come down too hard on them, though, because the web abounds with confusing information on this subject. The Kyodo article says that women’s sumo originated in the 1880s; yet this source says it was banned in the 19th century as being harmful to public morals. There is no indication of when the ban was removed or why the sport fell out of favor. Novelist Akira Hayasaka, who plans to write a stage play about the sport, said he saw a women’s sumo tournament under a tent on a vacant lot in Ehime Prefecture around 1941. This snippet from the Mainichi Shimbun from more than a year ago states that women’s sumo started with World War II and the shortage of men.

Yet this article from a Russian website claims that onna-zumo started in Osaka in the 1700s and was performed by prostitutes. They also say that women competed with blind men. (Feel free to take a few minutes to consider all the possibilities before continuing to read. I did.) They also say it was banned in 1926, which contradicts the other articles. They suggest that people in Japan don’t talk about it because of the associations with prostitution, which makes sense on a superficial level, but that still doesn’t sound like any Japanese people I know. Come to think of it, the Russian claims for the origin of women’s sumo also might explain the Kyodo article’s statment that it was more popular than men’s sumo at one time. The site features photos of Russian women grunting and shoving, which I am not about to show on this site. (Those ladies are even more massive than my great aunt, a first-generation Russian American who worked in a can factory.) The two Thai girls look much more graceful.

Apparently, there are some differences between the male and female versions. Sumo originated about 2,000 years ago as a way to entertain the deities during festivals, and many Shinto rituals are still used for the matches today. (Here is a good summary of the religious aspects.) This does not seem to be the case with women’s sumo, however.

Entertainment without the tradition was probably the objective of the female variety. The Japanese women had a kind of tournament called gonin nuki (beating five wrestlers in succession), which the men don’t have, and also performed hajikara. This latter entertainment seems to place women’s sumo in a category akin to women’s professional wrestling, as the wrestler picked up rice straw with her teeth and pounded steamed rice on her belly into the dough used for rice cakes. (This is probably a variation on mochitsuki, a New Year’s custom in which a special variety of especially glutinous rice is pounded by friends, family and neighbors to make the rice cakes, or mochi, which are eaten during the holiday. I’ve done it once, and it’s hard work!)

There’s more than a touch of irony to all this. Women were banned from sitting at ringside to watch sumo matches until the 20th century, and they are still forbidden to enter the ring. The ban has to do with Shinto and its insistence on purity. Women in primitive societies were considered impure because they menstruate, and sumo still hasn’t gotten over it. Even the men have to purify the ring before they step into it; that’s why they throw salt into it first.

Japan wants to make sumo an Olympic sport, but the IOC thought that idea was a non-starter because of the ban on women. So, a women’s federation was formed in Japan in 1996, and several tournaments have been held. Here’s the Daily Mainichi profiling a female Japanese rikishi back in 2001; they describe her as being “just an ordinary girl”. I wouldn’t assume that Japanese women have an advantage in international competition because of their familiarity with the sport, however. It would not be an easy task to push some of those Russian women out of the ring.

Besides, everyone’s getting into the act. Here’s an article about women’s sumo in the U.S., written by California Sumo Association President Andrew Freund in 2001. Taking advantage of journalistic privilege, he quotes himself in the third person: “We are very proud of our women’s team.” And here’s this 2003 article from Britain’s Daily Telegraph, which focuses on British sumo but also reports that women from 17 countries are now actively involved.

Still, it may take a little longer before the women’s sport becomes established. As the president of the British Sumo Association noted, “You can’t go up to a woman and say, ‘Hey, I think you’d be good at sumo’.”

Gloria Goodale, in an otherwise interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor newspaper based in Boston, reported recently from Tokyo about how the anime phenomenon is taking over the world.

But in the very first paragraph of the article (which has been reprinted in over 200 newspapers worldwide), Goodale refers to Japan as a “small island nation.”

While a grown man reading a comic book might seem unusual in other parts of the world, in this small island nation Mr. Nozawa is only one of millions of consumers of anime (as animation is known here). “I’ve been an anime fan since I was a child,” says Nozawa with a laugh as he navigates the busy midday traffic. “So is everyone I know.”

Since when is 125 million people a small island nation?

Japan is NOT a small island nation anymore! From the northern coast of Hokkaido to the southern islands of Okinawa, Japan can hardly be considered to be a Small Island Nation (SIN).

Taiwan is a small island nation. Japan is not. Enough already!

Meet Jack Bauer, Team Leader of Operation Proteus, former Special Agent in Charge of CTU, and Los Angeles SWAT team member.

You can see Jack being shot, stabbed, nuked, narced, tortured and terrorized each week on the popular TV show 24.

Now the latest addition to Jack’s resume seems to be japanderer. Jack has been appearing in a Japanese TV commercial (click here to see it) for Calorie Mate, a bland cookie that’s packed with all the vitamins and minerals that a tough CTU operative needs to replenish energy used up by jumping out of helicopters as he barks into his cell phone.

The photo shown here is courtesy of Miklos Fejer, keeper of the blog named Miyakonojo, which is a very entertaining journal of the life and times of a gaijin living in a small town in Miyazaki Prefecture, Kyushu.

The issue of fingerprinting Japanese nationals, ethnic Korean citizens of Japan and foreigners has been a hot potato for many years.

It’s an issue in Taiwan, too. Click here for a good overview of the situation in Taiwan today by Mau-kei Chang from the Taiwan News, an English-language daily.

A few months ago, news sites around the world covered the story of Miyoko Kawahara like a blanket. Kawahara was the woman who blasted her 64-year-old neighbor with loud music and insults for 2-1/2 years before the authorities finally stepped in and arrested her.

The neighbor recorded videos of Kawahara screaming (”Move out! Move out! Hurry up and move out!”) at the top of her lungs in time with each strike as she beat the dust out of her futon on the veranda in the morning. The good folks over at conbinibento.com put together a video compilation of Kawahara in action, which you can view by clicking here.

Kawahara made the news again today when she pled “not guilty” to charges of inflicting violence and injury on her neighbor. She admits to playing the music, but claims that the volume was “not unbearable.”

Miyoko Kawahara admitted she aimed her portable stereo toward the home of the 64-year-old neighbor almost 24 hours a day between November 2002 and last April.

But she denied that the music was so loud that it caused physical damage to the neighbor, including headaches and sleepless nights.

According to prosecutors, Kawahara made a hole in her back door to ensure that the racket from her portable stereo reached her neighbor’s house in Heguri, Nara Prefecture.

The two homes are about 6 meters apart.

Judging from what I have seen in the videos, Kawahara’s lawyers really have their work cut out for them.

Trouble started when Kawahara developed a grudge against her neighbor in 1989 after the older woman’s family moved in but did not come over to greet her, as is often the custom in Japan. A light that was reportedly too bright, a car that was parked the wrong way, and other incidents Kawahara perceived as slights added fuel to the feud over the years, apparently driving Kawahara over the edge and firmly into the realm of battydom.

You might never have noticed this before, but the 7-Eleven store logo that can be seen just about everywhere in Japan has one very interesting feature — The word “eleven” in the logo is capitalized like this: ELEVEn . . . with the final letter, the “n”, lowercased.

I wonder why?

If anyone knows why, please click the Comments link below and let us know.

At 814 pages, it may be a bit heavy for summertime reading—and may take the entire summer to get through—but Mao, the Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, seems to be a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in East Asia. Kevin Rafferty had this to say in his review for the Japan Times:

This is a nuclear weapon of a book. It devastates the reputation of Mao and most of his henchmen, and raises questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party…

Other writers have already exposed the monstrous nature of Mao’s rule, but none managed such a frontal, comprehensive attack…

Chang and Halliday remorselessly show Mao as a ruthless power-monger and plotter. Their almost unrelieved catalog of cruel terrors that occurred while his colleagues stood by cowardly and cowed, makes you wonder if whether anyone could really be so evil.

Among the points made (in addition to the estimate of 70 million Chinese killed):

• The story behind the famous Long March is fictitious: Chiang Kai-Shek let Mao’s forces go.
• Mao and his comrades never actually marched. They were carried on litters (The authors talked to people who were on the march.)
• Mao never mounted serious efforts against the Japanese, preferring to spend his time eliminating his rivals.
• In Yenan in 1941, Mao funded his operations by converting 30,000 acres of land to opium production. (Some years ago, a bearded, sandal-wearing professor of Chinese history told me that Mao banned opium for everyone but himself. He smoked one bowl a day because it “helped him to think”. The professor thought this was amusing.)
• In power, Mao lived a life of utter luxury resembling that of an emperor. He had villas built throughout the country to his own specifications and used them once. Special fish were flown in live from 1,000 kilometers away so he could eat them with his special rice, water, and milk. (Sound like someone we know in Pyongyang?)
• Joseph Mobuto Sese Seko (former dictator of Zaire), describes how Mao used foreign aid to foment world revolution. At its peak, foreign aid accounted for 6.92% of overall Chinese expenditures.

In addition to Mobuto, the authors also talked to Mao’s daughter and grandson, veterans of the Long March, two U.S. presidents, Henry Kissinger, an Oscar-winning actor, several other heads of state, and the woman who washed Mao’s underwear.

Viewed from another perspective, this book may offer some clues for the reasons Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi doesn’t seem inclined to take seriously the Chinese complaints about his behavior and a few textbooks. The Chinese object to the content of Japanese history books, but none of this information will be found in any Chinese school text. The Chinese also complain about Yasukuni Shrine, yet as the book notes, “Today, Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.”

First it was “Snakes and Earrings,” her debut novel, which won the Akutagawa literary prize, and shocked Japanese readers (well, those who bothered to read it) with its violent and graphic opposition to the traditional cultural expectations of how Japanese girls should behave.

Then it was her second novel, titled “Ash Baby”, which explored the friendship between a young Japanese woman and a child molester.

Now Hitomi Kanehara, all of 22, is getting ready to publish her third novel about a young person with a terrible eating disorder.

Click here to find out more about Hitomi Kanehara and how she is challenging Japan’s taboos in very public ways.

A collection of academic essays, titled “Bad Girls of Japan”, will be published soon by Palgrave MacMillan Press in the UK.

The book will explore the way deviant women who have defied patriarchies have long provoked moral panic in Japan and also examines bad-girl photography, extreme makeup and brand consumption among contemporary Japanese girls and women. “Bad Girls of Japan” will also spotlight the politics of propriety in Japan these days, the boundaries of gender and the delight audiences take in being shocked by the misbehavior of these young postmodern Japanese women, according to the book’s co-editors, Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley.

They say that humor is untranslatable between cultures, and while that is often the case, it is by no means a hard and fast rule. Japanese usually don’t tell the story jokes that are told in the Anglosphere (at least), but they understand and appreciate a lot of them when they are translated.

There are still some people who think the Japanese lack a sense of humor, but they don’t realize their humor takes a different form. In fact, most Westerners have no trouble appreciating Japanese humor, which can be wickedly clever, particularly when wielded by women. For example, for some years now women in Japan have referred to the comb-over hairstyle utilized by some balding, middle-aged men as the “bar code”.

This article in the Daily Mainichi goes one step further by reporting on the latest slang used by women in the sex industry. Most of this will be understandable even if you don’t know any Japanese. One expression that needs a bit of explanation, however, is soku-shaku. Soku is a prefix that means immediate or on the spot, while shaku is short for shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, which is also used as a term for a certain other activity, as you will see from the article.

I particularly liked the irony of the last one, but you’re sure to have your own favorites.