I will go out on a wild and crazy limb here and write down here — in the light of public print — that the next prime minister of Japan, following Mr Koizumi’s interesting reign, will be Shinzo Abe, still a young guy at 51 and who will be only 52 when he takes the reins next year.
Am I right or am I wrong?
We introduced American writer Sujata Massey earlier in the year on Japundit, and now the Baltimore-based author has a new detective novel starring Japanese-American amateur sleuth Rei Shimura, titled The Typhoon Lover.
Reviews have been good, and one critic noted: “Sujata Massey’s novels are a mini-course in Japanese culture and tradition.
Through heroine Rei Shimura, a Japanese-American who has been working as an antiques dealer in Japan, Massey has delivered a cross-cultural tour of the differences — and similarities — between the two countries.
Why a dress, of course!
The nearby photo is from a collection shot at the recent “Body Painting Cheong-sam Spectacular” held at the Shanghai Toronto Art Gallery.
Artists from around the world gathered to exhibit their skills.
Click here for the rest of the photos.
Via Simon’s World
PJ Swenson over at Sharkspage sent us a link to a great article he wrote about the World Sumo Challenge that was held in Madison Square Garden on October 22.
World Sumo Challenge saw sumo champions from Japan, Mongolia, Germany, Ukraine, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Poland, Georgia, Hungary, Norway, and the U.S. squared off against each other to vie for the championship. Ringside commentary was provided by retired American-born yokozuna (grand champion) Musashimaru.
Mitshuhiko Fukao of Japan defeated Petar Stoyanov of Bulgaria in the final to win the inaugural World Sumo Challenge. Stoyanov initiated a throw, but the 410 pound Fukao used his leverage to force the Bulgarian to hit the mat first.
The bleached blonde Hans Borg of Norway was far from the largest competitor at 6,4, 324 pounds, but his enthusiasm was contagious and made him an early fan favorite. After readjusting and preparing for each bout, Hans would raise his leg high in the air and the fans at Madison Square Garden erupted in applause.
Click here to see PJ’s full story, and check out some of the great photographs that accompany it.
The city of Malibu has started passing out tsunami safety brochures that contain the following warning:
NEVER GO TO THE BEACH TO WATCH FOR, OR SURF, A TSUNAMI WAVE!
When questioned about whether people need to be told they shouldn’t be trying to hang ten on a tsunami, Malibu’s emergency preparedness director stated that he thought it would be prudent to address all possibilities.
“Some people may feel that we are stating the obvious and some people may not,” Brad Davis said. “We want to encourage people to move away from the coast rather than towards it.”
The California Sea Urchin Commission is saying that the growing popularity of sushi in the United States may help to restore seaweed beds, which have been slowly vanishing along the California coastline.
According to the commission, sea urchins, or uni, feed on kelp. By feeding on the uni, sushi lovers help to cut down on the sea urchin population and preserve the seaweed that is an important part of the California coastal ecosystem.
As Halloween becomes more and more of an Asian (commercial) tradition year after year, the holiday has also become popular in Taiwan.
In this recent photo from the Taipei Times, Taiwanese college students dress up as Japanese and Chinese ghosts at Cheng Shiu University in the southern city of Kaohsiung.
The two women who staged a protest in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Tokyo the other day seem to be migrating from country to country.
The Reuters photo below shows the same women in South Korea being photographed by a man with his cellphone.
Brandi Valladolid (left) and Christina Cho were protesting in front of a KFT establishment in Seoul recently against the abusive treatment of chickens in factory farms and slaughterhouses.
It’s looking more and more likely that the Japanese Princess Aiko will one day become Empress. Her name, according to Wikipedia is;
Aiko, written with kanji character for “love” and “child”, refers to “a person who loves others.” The baby will also have a royal title. The princess will be called Princess Toshi (敬宮 toshi no miya) while she is young. That means “a person who respects others.” This formal title will be dropped if the princess marries.
Princess Aiko (as I’ll call her to make things easy for our western audience), has had quite a life already. Her mother is the Harvard educated Crown Princess Masako, whom Crown Prince Naruhito famously pursued, even after she had tried to avoid his attentions several times. She reportedly relented after he promised that he would always protect her. After Princess Masako married her prince, she left her professional life — not an easy decision for a woman who was fluent in 6 languages and had met world leaders like Bill Clinton. Pressure on Princess Masako to get pregnant was intense, and the country was happy when, at age 36, she gave birth to Princess Aiko. However, Japanse succession laws have dictated that a male must take the throne, and yet no male heir has been born to the Japanese royal family since 1965.
What to do. Princess Masako is now in her 40s and the pressure upon her to conceive again by the highly conservative Imperial Household Agency (and other pressures) led to her exhaustion and withdrawal from public life , and to a rare public excoriation by her husband of the Agency itself. When Princess Masako does come out in public, as she did this past summer for the Aichi Expo, news commentators examine every inch of her behavior for clues. When she got of the shinkansen, for example, commentators noted that Princess Masako turned to greet the platform greeters. This, apparently, was worth noting.
For the past few years, there has been discussion that succession laws should be changed to allow a woman to take the throne. A few die-hard protestors insist that a male should be found instead, but with fully 80 percent of the country backing Princess Aiko, and this latest move from the government, it looks like Japan may enter into a matriarchy. It wouldn’t be the first time — as recently as 1700 Japan had an Empress.
Sometimes it seems as if quite a large portion of Japan’s R&D effort has been allocated to coming up with better writing implements.
One of the latest products to come out of these efforts is Mitsubishi Pencil’s Signo (sig-no) pen.
Signo features a “needle tip” that is the width of two human hairs (0.18 mm), making it the world’s thinnest according to Mitsubishi. Though ultra-thin, the tip is designed and engineered to resist bending and collapse due to writing pressure. Available ink colors are orange, light blue, violet, pink, red, black, emerald, and blue.
Price: 210 yen each, or 1,732 yen for an 8-pack with all the colors.
Via GIZMODO
Click here to read a roundup of what the Japanese weeklies had to say about Bobby Valentine following the 4-game sweep of the Japan Series by his Chiba Lotte Marines.
Asahi Geino
“During a game, when one of his players is ruled out in a close call, he has been known to bellow what sounds like ‘F**k!’” the no-nonsense weekly (which spells out the word in bold uppercase type) hears from a sports journalist. “He can be pretty aggressive.”
Shukan Taishu
“This season,” a team insider tells Shukan Taishu, “[Valentine] came up with no fewer than 128 batting orders.” That’s rare in Japanese baseball, the magazine comments. A juggling act on that scale had to be handled with delicacy if confusion and resentment were to be avoided.
Weekly Playboy
“Baseball is fun,” Weekly Playboy has him lecturing his charges at a particularly intense point in the playoffs. “I want you to feel that with every fiber of your being. If you can’t, you’re better off looking for another job.”
It should be noted here that Valentine is used to being treated shabbily by the Japanese press. During the month of August, when the Marines were trying to concentrate on the pennant race they were in, the Shukan Asahi weekly magazine claimed that the sudden success of the ball club was due to the introduction of amphetamines into their training schedule. The story, titled The Mysterious Drug Lotte Players are Taking and was supposedly based on an unnamed source “close to the Lotte organization,” contained not a single attributable quote.
Click here for the details on this story and for more about how other gaijin (foreign) sports stars are treated by the Japanese mass media.
This spring’s bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat has a new challenger. Writer Naomi Moriyama will soon publish her book Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat, and it looks like a great read!
As the story goes, Moriyama spent two years in Japan and promptly lost 25 pounds. I have to say, every time I go to Japan, I feel this incredible collective pressure to lose weight — everyone is so lithe and energetic, so I’m excited that someone has written a book on this subject.
The book is very timely for the US, where a full 34 percent of American women are obese. Japanese women weight in at a teeny tiny 2.9%. This is quite intriguing when you consider what a food obsessed culture Japan really is. And yet, the emphasis is on small portions, healthy ingredients, and very little cream or butter.
One of the things that I love about Moriyama’s book is that it is subtitled: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen. This, of course, is one of the secrets to the Japanese diet — to have a Japanese mother in the first place.
Did you know that “Kobe beef”, called “wagyu” in Japanese, is not allowed to be imported into the USA?
True. And if you ever see wagyu, or Kobe beef, on the menu in a restaurant in America, you should know that is not from Japan but rather from Texas or Montana. It’s from the same breed of cattle, but with little else in common with the Japanese animal.
So says Esquire magazine in its October 2005 issue. It’s not the real thing.
From the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich to Jesus in an oyster, I always enjoy the crazy things on eBay.
In Japan, Yahoo Japan is the biggest auction site (not eBay), and it is much easier to use and cheaper than eBay in the U.S. (I tried both, so I know.)
This weekend I put a candy can up on Yahoo Japan, with a starting bid of 100 yen. It’s just a dirty old can that I have used to hold paper clips since 1975. I thought I should throw it away, but then I wondered if some Snoopy collector somewhere might want it. One person has already bid on it.
People in Japan have changed their attitude towards old stuff, because we’ve come to realize that everything may have some value for someone. Something that is trash to me might be a treasure to others. We learned this from Yahoo auction and a TV program called Nandemo Kantedan.
The rules of Nandemo Kantedan, which came on the air 10 years ago, are simple — guests bring items from their homes, and the show introduces them with details about their backgrounds. The guests declare how much they think their particular item is worth, and then professional appraisers reveal the real value and history of each item. This show still enjoys high ratings and actually has fueled a major antique boom in Japan.
A variety of different things have been brought in to the show. Many people bring Japanese antiques like ceramics, jars, paintings, or calligraphic writing. They often believe they own something created by a famous artist, but in many cases they are sad to be told it is just a copy or fake. But of course it is fun to watch when the owner guesses a value of 3 million yen, only to find out the real value of their treasure is closer to 5,000 yen!
One person brought in an old toy that he played with when he was kid. He had left it in the closet for many years, and guessed it would be worthless. The appraisers valued it at 1 million yen!
Thanks to this show, we have learned that original packaging makes a big difference in the value, and that even an old, dirty stuffed animal is highly valued if it is a Steiff bear. Even an old train ticket, chopstick bag, or bento wrapping paper has value for collectors.
Because of this show, people have started looking for old things and checking the manufacturer or signature of items more closely. To be honest with you, even my dad checked the signature of a painting that has hung in the entrance of our home for more than 30 years!
Here is the show’s archive page were you can check out some of the items they have featured. Items include a fish print by baseball great Ichiro, and Godzilla’s foot!
Sometimes guests come onto the show from other countries. A guy from the U.S. brought this dress, which Marylin Monroe wore in the movie The Seven Year Itch. The appraiser said the dress is worth 200 million yen!
Sometimes the show goes abroad in search of treasures. Here is an article about the show going to the U.S. to appraise Douglas MacArthur’s Eastern artifacts.
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The above was adopted from an article that originally appeared on Watashi To Tokyo, the blog where Mari 5A offers her insights on life in Tokyo.
Animal rights activists demonstrated against Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo yesterday, protesting its alleged abusive treatment of chickens at factory farms and slaughterhouses.
The Association of Japanese Private Railways (Mineitetsu) recently released the results of the 5th annual poll convering annoying behavior on Japanese commuter trains.
I found some of the results quite amusing. The details of the poll can be found on the official site of the organization (Japanese only). Basically they polled people commuting on any of the 16 major private railroads in Japan about what they thought was the most annoying behavior of their fellow passengers.
The following are the results from this year’s poll (as best as I can translate them). The poster to the right shows examples of poor train etiquette, with the numbers in the poster corresponding to those below. Click here or on the nearby image for a larger version of the poster.
Well, most of the answers I fully agree with!
There’s nothing more annoying to me when people waste space in the seats by sitting like sacks of potatoes and/or with their bag next to them! Further, people rushing onto the train before you have time to get off are so darn annoying, too. I always try to elbow them in the chest to make a point!
But, I can’t say I am particularly bothered by women putting on their makeup on the train. I find it amusing that they do, but it doesn’t bother me at all.
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Submitted by: Johan Groth
The above was adapted from an article that originally appeared on Lost In Japan, where Johan blogs about what it is like being a Swede living in Japan.
