I originally wondered whether this might be a PhotoShop job, but poking around the net I found out that Korean companies make it a habit to rip off trademarks and tradenames, especially those of the hated Japanese.
In Japan, there is a popular soft drink called Calpis (which famously sounds like “cow piss” the first time most people hear it).
Found at Japan Probe.
According to an article that appeared in the Japanese weekly Spa! (7/4) and reported on by the illustrious Mainichi WaiWai, the latest craze in Japan is pantsu getta (pants getter).
Pantsu getta is a treasure hunt game in which women hide used underpants that they no longer need in public places, and then provide clues on the net so men can try to locate them.
A game starts when a woman posts a message announcing that she has hidden some undies in a certain area. Anybody interested in searching for the undergarments can post questions, which the woman can answer, and theoretically provide more specific clues about the location of the lingerie. When somebody finds a pair of panties, they’re supposed to report all the details on the same bulletin board so that anybody still searching will know they can stop. On occasion, several pantsu getta will assemble at the same time and search for skids en masse.
According to the article, undies hunters quickly become hooked on the quest once they get started.
“I get involved in about 20 games a month, but about half of these are just tricks where nothing is hidden at all. Last month, I found four pairs of panties, which I reckon is probably a miraculous recovery rate,” he tells the men’s weekly. “There are plenty of veteran pantsu getta out there who’ve been playing the game for a long time yet never managed to get some panties of their own.”
Pant, pant!
As has been mentioned in the comments here and reported elsewhere, one of the highlights of Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s state visit to the United States will be a stop in Memphis by the two national leaders in order to drop in on Graceland.
This will mark the first time for reigning elected national leaders to visit the home of The King.
Koizumi is well known as being a huge Elvis fan, and has even put together a compilation CD of 25 of his favorite Elvis tunes, complete with liner notes by the PM. The CD sold 200,000 copies and reached Number 8 on the Japanese music charts.
Koizumi was born January 8, which is the same as Elvis’ birthday.
Check out this piece by Robert Koehler at The Marmot’s Hole about how opinions about the origins of the Korean War have evolved over time from the belief that the war started with a North Korean invasion of the South at the instigation of and support of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, to the revisionist view that the United States and South Korea started it all, to the current opinion (based on access to information available following the collapse of the Soviet Union) that it was North Korean leader Kim Il-sung who masterminded the whole thing.
30 people in Cambodia, most of them children, came down with food poisoning after eating homemade noodles contaminated with chewing tobacco that had dropped into the noodle batter from the mouth of the cook, a 39-year-old woman.
Sieng Sang, an avid tobacco chewer like many poor Cambodian women, said she had not realized a wad had dropped into the flour as she was talking.
Police gave her a lesson in hygiene and told her to be more careful when opening her mouth while cooking.
A 38-year-old woman (I guess that pretty much rules out dementia) who operates a company in Nagano, Japan has been cheated out of 47 million yen since the end of last year.
In December last year, she received a fax from a person claiming to represent a Tokyo financial institution who was interested in lending money to her company. The woman requested a loan of 10 million yen, and was told by the “lender” that 800,000 yen needed to be deposited a particular bank account as a deposit. For some reason, she complied.
Then she was told that a syndicate would be putting the loan together and they also required deposits. Over a period of time, she reportedly sent a total of about 30 million yen to secure her loan of 10 million.
Being no dummy, the woman shrewdly deduced that something was amiss when her loan never arrived.
The woman became suspicious when she did not receive any loans, and asked that her loan contracts be cancelled. The swindler then told her that she needed to pay cancellation charges. She then sent a combined 17 million yen on 18 occasions.
Kyodo News is reporting that Tokyo’s Capitol Tokyu Hotel is providing people with the opportunity to indulge in a little belated Beatlemania. For a mere 115,000 (which is a mere 25% of the suite’s normal rate), you can spend a night in the hotel’s Presidential Suite, which is where the Fab Four stayed during their visit to Japan in 1966.
“We would like to offer a last chance for fans to stay in the suite before the hotel is torn down,” said spokesman Takanori Yasuoka.
The hotel will close Nov. 31 and be rebuilt.
Other events in Tokyo this year to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ visit are:
What’s a country to do when they need to cut greenhouse gas emissions into the air in order to comply with the Kyoto Protocol?
Pump it into the ground, according to a report coming out of Japan.
Japan hopes to slash greenhouse gas emissions and fight global warming with a revolutionary plan to pump carbon dioxide into underground storage reservoirs instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, an official said Monday.
The proposal aims to bury 200 million tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2020, cutting the country’s emissions by one-sixth, said Masahiro Nishio, an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Introduced last month, the plan is still under study.
Though this idea actually is not new to Japan (similar steps are being taken in Norway, Canada, and Algeria), the system envisioned by Japan is the largest by far. Questions remain, however, as to what would happen if the system is ruptured by a major earthquake.
If you have every watched Japanese TV for even a short period of time, you probably will have seen the face of Mino Monta at one time or another.
Currently appearing on ten regular shows Mino is on the air for 35 hours per week, making him one of the workingest men on Japanese TV. . . And one of the wealthiest.
According to a recent write up in Forbes that lists him as one of its annual Celebrity 100, Mino pulls down $10 million dollars a year, before book royalties and TV commercials.
Found via Japan Probe.
Mike Park runs a small independent record label in California and blogs about music he likes: The other day, he noted: “I saw the GING
NAN BOYZ from Japan play the most intense heart stopping punk rock set that I’ve seen in years.”
Four songs to listen to for free here: Enjou Kosai, Kakenukute Seishun, Cute Girls Don’t Lie, and Seishun Jidai
The Polysics, the cult synth-punk crew founded by Hiroyuki Hayashi in 1997 that began as a cheeky Devo homage, have blossomed into a phenomenon in Japan and beyond.
Are they Devo? No they are not the synth-happy Polysics and they do add a new Japanese twist to de-evolution theory. See what Sarah Liss has to say about this group here.
Lost in the frothy trivialities of the debate over Prime Minister Koizumi’s Yasukuni Shrine visits is an impressive record of accomplishments during his term in office that should have left the world’s media hailing him has Japan’s greatest postwar political reformer. Indeed, his primary accomplishments dovetail almost precisely the laundry list of reforms that the media and its amen corner of academics and commentators insisted Japan must accomplish to become a mature political state. These include:
I heard an interesting interview on NPR this week that featured writer Sheridan Prasso and her new book The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, And Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. Ms. Prasso used to be the Business Week Asia Editor and is quite familiar with a number of East Asian cultures and their history.
One point in particular that Prasso stuck with me; she said that in Japan men and women very much have their own “worlds” and believe they experience a degree of freedom there that we in the West don’t understand. Specifically, she said that a number of Japanese women find it odd that Western women must “check with their husbands” before accepting an invitation to lunch or dinner with a friend. This was a very general point, and hard to examine in detail in a brief interview, but I thought it many ways that it was astute and made me move her book up in my reading pile.
I also thought Japundit readers might find the following line from the Publisher’s Weekly review to be interesting. Apparently, within the pages of the book:
WARNING!
The images at the other end of the the link below are very NSFW.
Though it is often said that The Group is very important in Japan society, I really have to wonder how in the world they were able to get enough people together in the same room to pull this off.
I also wonder how it squares with Hiroaki Fukuyama’s claim that all unmarried Japanese girls are virgins.
Beleaguered Princess Masako is off to the Netherlands for her first trip since 1999. Her name, if not her face, has appeared in the press a great deal since she signed off her royal duties due to a “stress related illness” which many say has to do with the pressure she has been under to conceive a son. Fortunately Princess Kiko has stepped up to the pregnancy plate and Masako may be off the hook there.
I thought it was interesting that Princess Masako was off to the Netherlands. Apparently, her doctors recommended that she take this trip. Apparently Masako’s father is a judge on the World court at the Hague, and Queen Beatrix herself has extended the invitation to Masako. And I suppose that the Netherlands has other opportunities to relax.
I hope that the family is able to enjoy itself and have a proper holiday.
And Koizumi takes his love of Elvis seriously. 
