Japan has ordered an investigation Tuesday after a boy who took Tamiflu jumped to his death in the latest case allegedly linked to the blockbuster flu medicine.(AFP)
From everything I’ve read, the drug can mimic LSD like symptoms and cause depression. I have no idea if thats true, but if it is, that would be a pretty whacked out medicine to give to kids…
More on the jumping death can be read HERE.
A big thanks to Paul Nicholls for tracking this story down.
It seems Japan’s two largest and highly unrelated companies have joined forces, according to a Gizmodo report. Japanese cellphone powerhouse NTT DoCoMo will partner with McDonalds “restaurants” purveyors of delicious and nutritious treats such as the Mega Mac:
“No, it won’t be McDonalds-branded cellphones, but this agreement will promote DoCoMo’s IC-card e-cash system in McDonalds restaurants. If you are part of Japan’s McDonalds “membership club” you can begin paying for food using your cellphone’s contactless IC card system. Now you can just swipe your phone to receive a heart-attack, to go.”
The e-cash/cellphone payments concept makes perfect sense, although it may be morally questionable to make it so effortless for children to buy Happy Meals practically on credit. But I didn’t know that McDonalds Japan had a Membership Club? Does anyone here belong? What do members get? Maybe coupons for discounts on triple bypass operations or perhaps Ronald McDonald gives the eulogy at your funeral and hands out little plastic toys to the kids?
In the photo above, NTT DoCoMo President Masao Nakamura (L) and McDonald’s Japan President Eiko Harada stand behind the restaurant chain’s ‘Ronald McDonald’ character following a news conference in Tokyo February 26, 2007, announcing that DoCoMo will offer electronic payment services and special promotions at McDonalds outlets for some of the mobile phone operator’s users.
Photograph courtesy of REUTERS/Michael Caronna (JAPAN)
An academic group is soliciting papers about “cute”. One of the organizers writes:
“Cute,” as we now commonly conceive of it, originated in the U.S. in
the late 19th century. Japanese “kawaii” is a quite recent import
altering and adding to “cute” in a variety of ways.
A zoo worker dressed as an orang-utan falls after being ’shot’ by another zoo worker with a simulated tranquiliser dart as part of an animal escape drill at a zoo in western Tokyo February 27, 2007.
Zoo workers practiced surrounding the escapee with nets before pretending to shoot it with a tranquilising dart and returning it to its enclosure. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Michael Caronna (JAPAN)
A few days ago, it was reported that Yamanashi prefectural police had managed to leak information about investigations “including personal information on over 500 individuals including the name of a sex crime victim” onto the internet.
It’s happened time and time again in the offices of folks holding sensitive information. And the cause of it has often proved to be the p2p file-sharing application Winny (often in conjunction with the virus Antinny).
Last year, the Yomiuri reported that a domestic Internet service provider sent “an unprecedented letter to users who [had] downloaded confidential data on mentally ill patients in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, asking them to delete the relevant file”.
The Japan Times reported last summer that “sensitive information about Japanese power plants [data regarding security arrangements at a thermoelectric power plant run by the Chubu Electric Power in Owase, Mie prefecture] has leaked online from a virus-infected computer for the second time in less than four months”.
You might recall similar stories involving airlines, local police forces, mobile phone companies, the National Defense Agency even.
Therefore it’s hardly surprising that many organisations banned the use of Winny (though why p2p software wasn’t already forbidden in offices, I don’t know). The Mainichi reported that “Yamanashi Prefectural Police banned the use of any file-exchange programs in their offices in June 2005. All officers and clerical workers submitted written pledges not to use such software.”
Meanwhile in a completely unrelated story, Saitama District Court last week squashed a suit filed by a concerned citizens’ group who “sought deletion of their personal data from the Juki Net national residency registry network, claiming it infringes upon their privacy in violation of the Constitution.”
The judge Toshikuni Kondo, who apparently neither gets out much nor reads newspapers, said in the ruling, “The Juki Net is needed for administration. There is no substantial danger of data leakage to third parties. The operation of the network does not represent an unlawful infringement of privacy rights.”
Forgive my earlier scepticism. I’m convinced.
Here is at least one Japanese gadget (tool?) that seems practical and is not either totally weird or Hello Kitty-branded. Gizmodo reports on a new minibot that performs surgery from the inside out. While previous bots designed for your insides could only take pictures, this is apparently the first to actually be proactive once inside.
An aside. My friend Frank had to have a colonoscopy (sadly, as a mere precaution or as a result of one of those false positives) and they somehow forgot to administer the anesthetic so that he finally asked if it was supposed to be that painful. Well, it isn’t–just “uncomfortable.” Only happens once in a million times though (but that’s enough…)
However, that isn’t the point. He read somewhere that the colon is actually 60 feet long or something and all coiled up, so he wondered why the instrument is only about three feet long? The doctor explained that they don’t have to look at the whole thing–if anything’s wrong it’s obvious from just one part. Naturally, I volunteered to phone the doctor to ask if he could have the 60-foot one next time–just to be on the safe side.
But, if you do need something looked at or done, I guess it’s better if they use something like this rather than having Dr Butcher cut you up to get inside? As Gizmodo comments:
Boy, this sounds pleasant. Researchers in Japan have developed a minibot that enters your body via an incision. It’s then controlled from the outside while it performs surgery on you. It has forceps to take tissue samples, can deliver medicine, and take pictures. So what do you think? Would you rather have a doc slicing and dicing from the outside in, or would you be OK having a tiny robot swimming around your insides doing all the work instead? I can’t really imagine the feeling of having a robot inside me, but I guess in the long run it would be better to have the most minimally invasive surgery possible.
Shoichi Nakagawa, policy chief of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, says that China’s military build-up creates the risk that Japan someday may face of becoming a province of China.
“If something goes awry in Taiwan in the next 15 years, then within 20 years Japan might become just another one of China’s provinces,” Nakagawa said Monday in the central city of Nagoya, as quoted by the Sankei Shimbun daily.
“If Taiwan comes under (China’s) complete rule, Japan could be next,” he was quoted as saying later at parliament.
If your interested in learning more about the samurai, The History Channel has a produced a great one hour and thirty minute documentary called The Samurai.
You can watch the show in its entirety for free by clicking here. The narrators accent when pronouncing particular terms drives me nuts. They have some fantastic interviews with brilliant authors.
Pisses me off actually because I can only WISH that we had access to those people at my workplace.
Anyways its well done and certain worth watching so take a look.
Enjoy!
A fan of the Anime Naruto, shows us her stuff…
Japan is a very safe place — so safe it might just kill you with boredom.
Swimming pools in Japan generally have two or more lifeguards on duty at all times, although it’d be pretty hard to drown since the water is never deeper than your waist, and dangerous things like diving boards are not allowed. My son and I didn’t realize what we were missing until we went to visit family in Maryland, and got to jump off the high dive at the local pool, something a non-Olympic swimmer could only dream of doing in Japan.
People are constantly bombarded with silly safety messages here, which remind you to “stand behind the yellow line” on train platforms because apparently trains are dangerous or something, and there’s even a voice to tell you how to get on or off an escalator safely in department stores.
Now the latest trend in obsessive safety thinking is condemning swings, sliding boards, jungle gyms and other equipment at playgrounds due to an infinitesimally small number of tragic accidents involving children at play.
Japan is nothing if not the land of duality, though, and just as it tries to “think of the children” on the playground, the country still lacks some of the basic safety attitudes we take for granted in the U.S., like always using approved child carseats when driving, using baby gates to keep little ones from dangerous parts of the home, and so on.
When Shintaro Matsuo was on the way home in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture last Sunday afternoon, he incurred the ire of some bosozoku who chased him down and forced him to pull over. They then proceeded to beat Matsuo, breaking a rib. When police arrived, they smelled alcohol on Matsuo’s breath, and so they arrested him for driving under the influence.
Police are questioning the bosozoku, but the news report had no word about any arrests being made in that regard.
Female members of a Japanese TV show called Gravure Idol Academy for Girls (broadcast on Fuji BS) recently held a press conference in Akihabara to announce the release of a set of five DVDs featuring the girls in various poses. During the press conference the ladies donned various costumes, including schoolgirl uniforms and bikinis.
On the Gravure Idol Academy for Girls program, which is hosted by Junji Takada who plays the headmaster of the school, the girls play the roles of students. The show features talk segments and fortune telling, along with behind-the-scene shots of gravure photo shots.
Click here for more photos of the press conference, and here for more information about the DVDs (in Japanese).
You must have read the previous post by alexpappas about the “CIA Recruited Japanese War Criminals” story. Like that one, this is not really about USA even though some gaijin in Japan may be involved. But mostly adding some further details to that post about things that were definitely happening in Japan at that time.
But it does seem incredible that “The informants, many of whom were held as war criminals after Tokyo’s surrender and subsequently released, operated under the patronage of Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, a German-born, monocle-wearing admirer of Mussolini, a staunch anti-Communist and, as the chief of G-2 in the occupation government, considered second in power only to his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.” [Associated Press]
But there’s a new book filling in some further detail to the same period. First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War was compiled by Anthony Weller, son of George Weller, the Pulitzer Prize– winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.
In September 1945, four weeks after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George passed himself off as a senior American officer and filed a series of dispatches and photos documenting the material and human devastation. Unfortunately, General MacArthur censored the dispatches, and Weller’s account remained unpublished until his son found the carbon copies sixty years later.
MacArthur had a pretty tight grip on information at the time, since journalists were not allowed anywhere near Hiroshima or Nagasaki–in fact, they weren’t even allowed to visit Tokyo. I think they were allowed to see basically only what MacArthur and Willoughby wanted them to see. The Publishers Weekly review says:
The first Westerner to tour the city’s ruins, Weller talked with doctors at the makeshift hospitals and scoured the countryside in search of the POW camps scattered across southern Japan over several weeks. Weller’s dispatches from Nagasaki are riveting even at this late date, though they are only a small part of the book. His extensive interviews with POWs mostly reinforce what we already know about their brutal treatment. The book also offers an account of one of the so-called “death ships” that carried POWs from the Philippines to Japan, and a 1966 essay on Weller’s experiences in Nagasaki.
Booklist says “The account is, at first, curious. Weller describes the destruction of the city in a detached, unemotional manner; however, once he visits the shell of a hospital and views the suffering of children with acute radiation burns, his mask of objectivity falls away. Weller graphically recounts the slow, painful agony of children dying from radiation poisoning, yet he does not engage in guilt-ridden breast-beating over America’s crime.”
Like Publishers Weekly concluded, “On balance, Weller’s dispatches are a welcome addition to the historical record.”
But it must have been a strange time, with monocled Nazis occupying the country, preventing any accurate information from leaking out, and hiring war criminals as spies who figured they could make more money being yakuzas anyway! It’s a wonder the master plan for Japan’s future didn’t work out permanently as intended–or did it?
In a very stunning news release today by the Associated Press, newly declassified CIA documents reveal that Japanese War Criminals were recruited by the CIA during the Cold War by the American Government.
Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March. And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA’s view.
The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority’s intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.In addition to Tsuji, who escaped Allied prosecution and was elected to parliament in the 1950s, conspicuous figures in U.S.-funded operations included mob boss and war profiteer Yoshio Kodama, and Takushiro Hattori, former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
More than anything this article proves to me that ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ are just concepts.
The CIA also cast a harsh eye on its counterparts — and institutional rivals — at G-2, the occupation’s intelligence arm, providing evidence for the first time that the Japanese operatives often bilked gullible American patrons, passing on useless intelligence and using their U.S. ties to boost smuggling operations and further their efforts to resurrect a militarist Japan.
Click HERE for the full article.
Kindergarten pupils participate in a bean-throwing ceremony to drive away evils and bring good luck during the annual Setsubun festival at Tokyo’s Sensoji Temple, 03 February 2007.
Plans for Japan’s first “baby hatch,” where parents can drop off unwanted infants anonymously, are suffering labour pains as the country struggles with its declining birth rate.(Photography courtesy of AFP/File/Yoshikazu Tsuno)
A 65 year old Chinese woman who claims to be Ando Momofuku’s daughter by his second wife, who was also Chinese, as was Ando (Wu Bai-fu by birth name), is threatening his estate with a nasty lawsuit. Her name is Wu Mei-ho. She did get around US$100,000 as part of her inheritance from the late noodle king, but she wants more, apparently miffed that the old man cut her out of his life after he “moved on” to other things, such as a third wife and major Cup Noodle profits.
According to a story in the papers, the woman’s half-brother in Osaka once called the police to arrest her when she tried to visit her father at the Nissin office there, and she spent a day in jail for her efforts. As the world turns. Keep slurping those noodles.
A man who was found lying unconscious on railroad tracks in Chiba, Japan Friday with his mouth covered in adhesive tape, his left wrist handcuffed, and his legs bound with plastic rope died after being admitted to a hospital.
Police reportedly have yet to determine whether to treat the case as a murder or a suicide.
21-year old Japanese beach volleyball star Miwa Asao recently announced the release of a DVD intended to spotlight her skills and promote the sport of beach volleyball.
Asao is currently seventh in the Japan volleyball rankings, and also works as a TV personality and model. Sales of a shashinshu (photo book) that features photos of Asao already have exceeded 10,000 copies.
How can you tell sumer is getting closer? Because Ichiro’s picture is EVERYWHERE! Not really complaining… But hell, you just know this summer Japanese Television is going to be loaded with baseball stars plugging everything from vitamins health to beer!
