It was not that long ago that a Japanese baseball team headed by a foreign manager was unthinkable. The success of Chiba Lotte Marines skipper Bobby Valentine last year and Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters manager Trey Hillman this year, however, seems to have shattered that taboo for good.

Now we get word that former Houston Astros and Anaheim Angels manager Terry Collins may be at the helm of the Orix Buffaloes next season. Orix is denying that anything has been decided yet.

Collins [h]as enjoyed success at the big-league level, posting a 444-434 mark in a six-year career in which his teams finished second in their respective division all but one time.

Collins later managed at Triple-A Las Vegas, an affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was promoted to director of player development for the club, and he was a candidate to replace Jim Tracy as Dodgers manager when Tracy was released after the end of the 2005 season.

I wonder if the Yomiuri Giants will ever go gaijin. . .

It’s late, I just finished this week’s podcast, and there is nothing really that interesting in the news right now, so here’s a link to an off-topic story about popcorn lung.

China has come up with another reason to bash Japan (as if it needed another one). . . A computer game.

Chinese game players are saying that the adult-oriented Japanese computer game “Slaves of the Red Mansion” insults the classic Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber.”

“Turning ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’ into a lewd game besmirches a treasure of Chinese literature, and is a desecration of Chinese culture,” thundered one irate Net surfer on Web portal Sohu.com.

“As a big fan, this is absolutely unforgivable for me!”

The Chinese classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which also goes under the “Dream of the Red Mansion,” was penned by Qing dynasty (1644-1911) author Cao Xueqin. It is the story of the decline of a noble family.

While the game’s setting has little to do with the epic novel, Chinese Internet users believed its main character — a pallid young girl called Lin Daiyu — was a direct take-off of the novel’s heroine.
The Chinese Internet users said the story’s character had been slandered, described in the game as an illegitimate child borne after her mother had an affair with a foreigner.

(For some reason I just knew that blue-eyed devils had to figure in here somewhere.)

This isn’t the first time that Chinese gamers have gone ape over what they considered to be insults against China carefully hidden inside of a computer game.

In July, thousands of online game players denounced an image of a red sun used in the hugely popular online game, “Fantasy Westward Journey,” developed by China’s NetEase.com Inc.

Players associated the rising sun image, used as a backdrop in a virtual Chinese government office, with a symbol of Japanese militarism, local media reported.

Police in Tokyo have arrested eight youths for mugging otaku in Tokyo’s Akihabara district in a practice they referred to as “otaku hunting.”

The teens all targeted junior high school students they referred to as “Akiba-kei,” or geeks who like the otaku culture found widely in retail outlets throughout Akihabara.

Police said there have been 25 reported incidents of “otaku hunting” since the start of the year, with victims losing a combined 350,000 yen between them.

“Otaku are weak and they’ve got money, so we went after them,” one of the arrested youths told the police.

Not only do otaku have plenty of money, they also are easy marks. According to police, otaku often meekly surrender their cash when threatened.

Here are some videos of the Uchiwa Matsuri that I reported on here.

Zhang Fei Float

The other day we received word that JAPUNDIT has been nominated in the Best Asian Group Blog category of the Asia Blog Awards.

Normally, we have taken a rather dim view of the self-nominating, ballot-box stuffing fiascos that try to pass themselves off as serious blog awards, but the folks at Asia Pundit (who are running the awards) seem to be doing their level best to ensure that the Asia Blog Awards are fair and representative.

One sure sign of their good judgment was the selection of Japundit as a judge for the Best Asian Blog category. Of course, we will have no vote in the category in which we were nominated.

Thanks to whoever was responsible for our nomination, and the best of luck to all of the other blogs that were nominated in this and all the other categories for this year’s contest.

By now most people have heard the news that Iva Toguri D’Aquino, also known as “Tokyo Rose,” has passed away at the age of 90.

I met Ms. Toguri D’Aquino a number of times down in Chicago’s Little Tokyo many years ago, and she seemed like a nice woman.

Japundit reader and U.S.-based Japanese workworker Len Cullum kindly sent along a link to a site that tells the Tokyo Rose story, and suggests that Ms. Toguri D’Aquino may actually have been victim of a post-war witch hunt.

You’ve probably never heard of Iva Toguri and, if you have any association with the name “Orphan Ann” at all, it’s probably to the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. On the other hand, you probably have heard of “Tokyo Rose” and think you know all about her: the sultry, Japanese radio propagandist who taunted “our boys” in the Pacific during World War II.

You’re in good company, too. When National Geographic interviewed Trinh (“Hanoi Hannah”) Thi Ngo on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, it compared her anti-American broadcasts to the “Tokyo Rose” program. The problem is that there never was anyone called “Tokyo Rose” on Radio Tokyo or any of its subsidiaries. She, like “Kilroy,” is a myth based on the frustrations and fears of young men waging war in difficult circumstances far away from their homes.

There were Japanese women broadcasters, over a dozen of them, and a few of them, most notably Foumy (“Madame Tojo”) Saisho and Myrtle (“Little Margie”) Lipton, even broadcast along the lines attributed to “Tokyo Rose;” but no such person ever really existed.

This wouldn’t be much of a problem as problems go, were it not for the fact that a real person was unjustly arrested, tried, convicted, fined, and imprisoned for broadcasting as “Tokyo Rose;” a real person who, by rights, should have been hailed as an American hero and, to the day she died, remained one of the most loyal Americans I have ever known.

Check out this page where this guy posts nothing but photos of Japanese vending machines.

Thanks to Mr. Pink.