Speaking of Yoshinoya. . .
The logo is designed to resemble that of Yoshinoya, but the text says “yokozuna” (sumo grand champion) instead.
Available from our good friends and sponsors over at J-List.
Good news for you Yoshinoya enthusiasts. The massive restaurant chain Yoshinoya & Co has released a statement today saying that it will begin serving its staple food “Gyudon” beef bowls again. The only catch is that it will only be during lunch hours starting December 1.
It’s been a long time coming for Yoshinoya whose beef bowls are a staple diet for Salarymen (and yours truly). Because of the embargo on U.S. and Canadian Beef, the company had to stop selling its beef bowls in place of “Butadon” pork and “Toridon” Chicken simply because of lack of supply.
Since the Japanese government has eased its import ban on outside beef in July of this year, beef is again finding its way into supply in Japan. And so the company lead by President Shuji Abe decided to put Gyudon back into its menus.Beef bowls, if you’ve never had the pleasure of eating one, are fast food rice bowls served in a variety of ways. They are always served in a porcelain bowl with a good helping of rice and are topped with a variety of items. Some have pork and kimchee, while others have natto. The selling point is that it’s a filling delicious meal that is usually served within one to two minutes from order and can cost you between 350 yen to 550 yen depending on what you order.
The beef ban first began in December of 2003 when the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, or BSE broke out. The effect was felt in most restaurants as Japan relies on foreign imports for the lion share of its beef and meat supply.
A girl’s high school in Nagasaki is planning to add chopstick skills to its battery of entrance exams next year.
Sasebo Women’s High School administration officials say they want to determine whether prospective students are capable of minimal dining etiquette.
The “chopstick inspections,” which include picking up slippery beans, will influence the screening process to a certain degree, officials at the school said.
As crazy as this sounds, some of the younger generation really use some strange grips when it comes to using chopstics and when writing.
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Yoshiyuki Sankai, the Tsukuba University professor who invented the “hybrid assisted limb” (HAL) bionic suit, has announced that he is getting ready to start marketing the robot suit.
The HAL system detects faint electrical signals through your skin when you move and activates motors to assist in the movement.
A company named Cyberdyne will start out by producing 20 units in 2007, which they expect to increase to 400 to 500 units during 2008.
Owning your very own HAL suit will set you back anywhere from 5 million to 7 million yen, but the company also plans rentals for 70,000 yen per month.
(I wonder what the “buttery pack” does. . .)
Via Engadget
From Mainichi:
A man armed with a baseball bat and a knife stormed into a language school here Monday morning, injuring a Chinese student, police said. The suspect, who lives in a fourth-floor room of the building that houses the school, has refused to talk about the motives for his crime, investigators said.
Since the police are stumped as to his motives, I’m going to speculate myself. It could only be that he just wanted them to keep the noise down or that the voices in his head wanted him to tell them to ‘Stop learning Japanese! Stop learning Japanese!’.
Either way, I’d suggest the government channel more funds into mental health programs as ‘this kind of thing’ is certainly on the rise.
As we reported on Japan Talk #045, a government worker in Nara received full wages during a five-year period during which he worked a mere 8 days: one day in 2001, six days in 2003, and one day in 2005.
According to city officials, there was nothing they could do about it, because the man broke no laws or regulations!! According to in-house regulations, a Nara Municipal Government worker is entitled to up to 90 days of paid sick leave for a single illness. The man kept taking sick leave, submitting certificates from a doctor, always for a different ailment.
Now it has been learned that the employee in question and others from the Nara Municipal Government pressured the doctor into issuing false certificates.
According to the doctor, the former employee began coming to the clinic about two years ago.
He complained of a backache or diarrhea he claimed was work-related and had the doctor write about 20 certificates to submit to his workplace.
Another employee visited the clinic and demanded the doctor write a certificate concerning a disease the employee used to have. When the doctor refused, a man identifying himself as the employee’s boss visited the doctor and said the two would be in trouble if they did not have the certificate. The man also asked the doctor to extend the employee’s treatment period.
Meanwhile, the government is still claiming that taxes will need to be raised in order to cover shortfalls.
Good advice according to a report in the Cambodia Daily.
A man died on Friday and his two young daughters were poisoned after eating toad’s eggs in Kampong Cham province’s Kang Meas district, police said. Sarm Hou, 45, died, but doctors were able to save his daughters, aged 4 and 8, district police chief Cheng Sokhoeun said on Tuesday. “He ate a lot and his children ate less,” Cheng Sokhoeun said. People in the district dare to eat toad’s eggs even though they are poisonous, he said, adding that some may believe that they are similar to non-toxic frogs.
Though you might think that most people would be interested in keeping toads as far away from their mouths as possible, cane toad licking seems to be popular recreational activity among people looking for a halleucenogenic high.
As an evolutionary protective measure, cane toads secrete a variety of poisons, mainly through gigantic glands on either side of its head which can spew venom several feet. The toad’s skin and body are also infused with toxins. This makes the toad poisonous to most of its predators, but it has the odd side effect of making the toad hallucinogenic for people who lick it, or very carefully smoke or eat specific parts.
In addition to whatever social stigma you might incur, toad licking is a fairly dangerous activity — the main point of poison is, after all, to kill those who ingest it. This presents a particular danger for dogs who share an ecosystem with the toads, since a dog will lick just about anything you put in front of it.
Slurp. . .
The national past time of the Japanese isn’t singing karaoke, or writing haiku poems, or taking in the beauty of Mt. Fuji while the cherry blossoms fall all around. For many, it’s playing pachinko, essentially a vertically oriented pinball machine which you shoot metal balls into, hoping that enough balls happen to fall into one of the special holes in the machine so that more balls are released, eventually giving you more than you started out with.
Although generally viewed as a hobby of middle-aged men, many women play the game, too, and since women have more money (they traditionally control the family finances in Japan), pachinko parlor operators are scrambling to attract this more profitable market segment.
The newest theme in pachinko is machines that feature The Rose of Versailles, an anime series about the French Revolution that millions of females in Japan have fallen in love with over the last four decades. While you play, various scenes from the show are displayed on the LCD screen, with updated animation so it looks really nice. If you play well, you get to view special scenes with Oscar and young Marie Antoinette.
Other recent pachinko trends include machines centered around enka singer Hibari Misora, and good old Yon-sama, aka South Korean heart-throb Bae Yong Joon, much beloved by middle-aged Japanese women.
Japanese jeweler Ginza Tanaka has created a solid gold calendar to mark the coming of the year 2007.
Made of six kilograms of gold, the calendar measures 42 cm by 67 cm, and can be purchased for a mere 20.07 million yen.
I wonder if the thing loses value at the end of the year. . .
JAPUNDIT reader Joshua Richley kindly sent along this shot of a can of whale meat he found in a small neighborhood grocery in Osaka back in April.
So I guess the whale is out there.
To tell you the truth, the last time I ate whale was many moons ago, in the form of whale steak and frozen whale sashimi. I have never had canned whale meat.
My memory is that it was very good both grilled like a steak and dipped in soy sauce as frozen sashimi. After reading that there is a whale meat glut, I wanted to see if recollections about whale meat are accurate. Unfortunately, I still have been unable to locate any.
Japan-based radio-controlled model manufacturer Futaba seems to be doing everything it can to make good on its slogan: “The time has come for everyone to enjoy humanoid robots!”
For a mere $1,100 you can have your very own 10-inch tall Futaba humanoid robot (kit form, two hours required for assembly), which is capable of 15 pre-programmed moves and even comes with a motion editor to create your own moves.
After viewing this video of the Futaba robot in action, I am convinced that this would make a great toy for my cats.
$1,100 may seem like a lot of money to pay for a toy, but when you figure people in Japan are willing to shell out around $2,000 to $3, 000 to own the latest trendy cat or dog breed (saw a toy poodle puppy at a pet shop recently for 240,000 yen), it’s really not that much at all.
Via The Raw Feed
Japan Talk #045 is now available on the Japan Talk website and at FeedBurner.
* Back after a missing week
* Going to Kyushu next week
* Danny Bloom’s Hiragana Song
* North Korea in the news
* South Korea condom sales on the rise
* Misconceptions about Japanese diet
* Infect MP3 players given away by McDonald’s Japan
* Goodwill pizzas irk tax authorities
* Kidneys? What kidneys?
* Grandma gives birth to grandchild
* Garbage bag hag
* Genghis Khan’s DNA dynasty
* Karaoke Culture Day
* Billions slated to go up in smoke
* Paris syndrome
* One-grain sushi
* Coffee, tea, or Kitty?
* Comic book about soap
* Iceland to sell whale meat to Japan?
* Golfer hits student and runs
* City official works 8 days in 5 years
* Shoe thief
* Teacher arrested for breaking into student’s home
* American prof arrested for stalking
Japundit Contributors:
Danny Bloom in Taiwan, David Weber in Tokyo, Marie Mockett in New York, Kaishin in Casablanca, Alex Pappas in Ottawa and Tokyo, Mike Plugh in Akita, Bill Fish in Fukuoka, Mr. Wake in Kamakura, Sylvain Bouchard in Sendai, Tokyoid in London, Iron Chef in Australia, Harvey in Yokohama, Peter Payne in Gunma, JP in Tokyo
Music
MF247
* Seishun Maggie, by The Alan Smithy Band
* Letter, by Essence
Podsafe Music Network
* Space Rocks Keep Falling On My Head , by Away With The Fairys
Listener Feedback
* Emmett J. Cat
* Len Cullum
Links of Interest
* Hiragana Song
* Danny Bloom on NPR
* McDonald’s Announcement (Japanese)
* Len Cullum, Japanese wordworker
* Podsafe Music Network
* MF247
* Japundit
Japanese Terms Used
* shabondama: soap bubble
Contact: podcast@japundit.com
I have everyone at my office hooked on Itoen’s line of teas, which have made steady progress in infiltrating the New York City delis (many of which are run by Koreans). Alongside Gatorade and Snapple, you’ll now find Tea’s Tea and I see more and more people buying and enjoying these unsweetened products, not doubt in part because of all the recent articles touting the health value of green tea.
It seems that every time I read a news report about the whaling situation in Japan I end up getting more and more confused.
We keep hearing about how Japanese people love to eat whale because it is part of the culinary cultural heritage. Then we get reports that stocks of whale meat in Japan are exploding because not enough people are eating it. I have looked for whale meat at the store on countless occasions, but there is never any being sold.
Now we get word that Japan will be buying whale meat from Iceland!
The meat of the first whale caught in Icelandic waters since the North Atlantic nation resumed commercial whaling was destined for consumers in Japan, news reports said Monday.
The roughly 20-metre long fin whale was harpooned Saturday off Iceland’s west coast, and was landed Sunday at a whaling station near Reykjavik.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other about whaling, but this kind of thing really makes me wonder just what in the heck is going on here!?!
No doubt Japanese baseball will be just a bit duller with the recent retirement Tsuyoshi Shinjo. But the bigger question is what will Tsuyoshi Shinjo be like without baseball.
During the months leading up to his retirement there were rumors of Shinjo becoming an actor or politician, but the ex-New York Mets outfielder recently told reporters that such career moves are not in his current plans. In fact, the interview centered more on what he would not be doing rather than providing any information on what he would be doing.
Q: Do you plan to be involved in baseball?
A: For now, I don’t think so.Q: Do you plan to become an actor or a politician?
A: That’s what I said in America. It was a joke. I want to have a variety of experiences if I have the chance.Q: How about the rumor of you running in the House of Councillors’ election?
A: I don’t think I am able to do that for now.Q: What will you be doing around this time next year?
A: I don’t know. I am looking forward to finding out what other talents I have. I want to follow a new dream while doing various types of work.Q: How about becoming a guest commentator for professional baseball games?
A: I don’t think I will do that.
One thing is for sure, just about anything he ends up doing will most probably be a lot of fun for everyone.
According to a government survey, there are over one million sex related businesses and websites operating in Japan today. The Tobita Shinchi district of Osaka City is certainly one of the most well known in the country.
A few minutes walk from the Sakaisuji subway line reveals a new world where pleasure is the goal and anything your heart desires is for sales. Here you will find the name brands in sexual services. From Soap Lands and Fashion Massages that provide shower and hand-jobs services to Pink Houses that provide full service sex in any manner you wish to Idol Cafes that provide everything from cosplay and rape fantasies, its all here and its not what you think. Its clean, its not run by the Yakusa, and its big business.
When Japan passed its anti-prostitution law in April of 1958, sex houses became “restaurents” and simply kept on doing business as usual. Japans unspoken rule on this has generally been one of “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t worry”.
These pleasure palaces once run by shady Japanese yakuza are now being run by multi-million dollar corporations and those who have visited in the last couple of years are shocked by the outstanding level of drop-jaw beauties and quality service.
One friend of mine who has recently visited told me how suprised he was mentioning that they are just as beautiful as any idol on television. The girls are tested every week and customer satisfaction is number one. And don’t think that its just for men. Many of the shops are catering to an all female crowd who perhaps have not been satisfied with the level of er, service from their husbands or boyfriends.
But this can be an expensive outting.
For something as “innocent” as spending 20 minutes with a girl dressed as a maid drinking coffee will cost you 11,000 yen. Thats about $120 US. But never the less business is booming and no one is complaining. The girls who work the pink clubs on average will take 60% of the pay at the end of the day and the house will take 40%. The really successfull ones will make an average salary of 10 million yen per year.
Business owners are now trying to cater to new market. Gaijin! Male tourists who have come to Japan from North America or Europe obviously have a language barrier not to mention other obstacles to face if they tried to access the palaces of pink. And so a consortium of owners in the Kansai area are trying to make it easier. They are hiring English speaking girls both as workers and front desk attendents to help ease the curious foriegners into their rooms, and into their pocketbooks.
It is expected that in 2007 the sex industry in Japan will surpass the car manufacturing industry in terms of gross capital net gains.
