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.

Thanks to Jon Climpson for the pointer

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:

• A dinner show by the Return, a Beatles cover band from the U.S., at the Capitol Hotel’s Pearl Room
• “The Beatles in Tokyo” photo exhibit at The Sony building
• Release of “The Beatles ‘65 Box” CD set by Toshiba-EMI

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.