The next time someone tells you that, in case of an earthquake, turn off the gas, get under a table, stand in a doorway, and do all of that other good stuff, remember this video which was taken by a camera that was rolling when the Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake hit in 1995.
Hibaritei is a self-described “psychological browser crash” that, in the great Japanese tradition of fetish mashups, combines maid-themed cosplay with cross-dressing.
Though they have yet to open an establishment of their own, the members of Hibaritei have been holding special events at different maid cafes throughout Akihabara since August of last year, in which the men of the group dress up in maid costumes to serve patrons.
Via Akibanana
The Japanese government is charging ahead with legislation that could end up putting the Internet here under direct government control. A government panel is proposing that “influential, widely read news-related sites” be governed under the same rules that are applied to newspapers and broadcasting. Rules are to be enforced by making Internet service providers liable for the content that passes through there computers onto the Net.
The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, is seeking to have the new laws passed by Parliament in 2010.
“Japan’s Internet is increasing its clout, so naturally the government wants to control it,” said Kazuo Hizumi, a former journalist who is the Tokyo city lawyer.
The Japanese government denies they are trying to implement a system censorship on the Internet.
“The criticism that the report amounts to a call for censoring the Japanese Web” is completely unfounded, the Communications Ministry said in a statement. “Furthermore, the report takes the position that Japan should abstain from adopting regulations aimed at promoting government censorship or restriction of Internet content, such as blogs, and calls for examining the creation of a framework for promoting voluntary action by ISP and others as a means of dealing with illegal and harmful material.”
I am sure that everyone has, at one time or another, has felt that “something should be done” to stop some of the more egregious abuses being promulgated on the net. But as Alex Kerr likes to point out, the thing that the Japanese ship of state seems to be lacking are brakes, and once it starts heading in a particular direction there is little hope of ever stopping it.
Will bloggers in Japan rise up and beat back the government’s curtailment on their freedom of speech? Don’t bet on it. . .
“I’m afraid ordinary citizens don’t care about these lack of rights, consequently the Internet in Japan is heading for the Dark Ages,” Hizumi said.
This is a video asnwering the question that is often asked of people who live in Japan which is basically ”Why do you like Japan?”
Mainly my three reasons are:
Plus I also like the food, hot sake, and cold Sapporo beer.
When I first came to Japan, I didn’t have the economic security to spend much time getting around or getting into the culture. I slowly came to acquire a love of Japan rather than coming over here head-over-heels with Japan to begin with.
On my trials and tribulations during my first year, check out my Ronin Teacher Saga.
Background music by Super Girl Juice. I meet them in Tokyo and bought their CD last year.
North Korea reportedly has invited legendary rock guitarist Eric Clapton to play a concert in Pyongyang. This would make Clapton the first Western rock start to be invited to play in North Korea.
“Eric Clapton is a well-known musician and guitarist, famous throughout the world,” said [an] official, who declined to give his name. “It will be a good opportunity for Western music to be understood better by Koreans.”
A spokeswoman for Clapton, however, says that no agreement has been reached, yet.
“Eric Clapton receives numerous offers to play in countries around the world,” she said. “There is no agreement whatsoever for him to play in North Korea, nor any planned shows there.”
Though North Korea has long shunned rock music and pop culture, it is rumored that Kim Jong Chol, the son of national leader Kim Jong Il, is a big Clapton fan.
It’s interesting, looking at Japan through some of the “firsts” in its history.
Like John Kendrick, the ship’s captain who participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War then went on to be an explorer, eventually becoming the first American to visit Japan.
Or Horace Wilson, a teacher at the predecessor of Tokyo University, who thought it’d be fun to teach his students to play baseball back in 1873, which was the beginning of the long history of the sport here.
The first English teacher in Japan, if you’re curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country’s sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood.
He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki.
The Japanese had a long relationship with Dutch traders, but none of them could speak English, despite the recent rise in power of England and the United States, so the officials got the idea of having MacDonald teach English to a class of fourteen students. The studies paid off, and when Admiral Perry showed up in 1853, students trained by MacDonald were able to communicate.
Today there’s a commemorative statue in Nagasaki thanking Mr. MacDonald for his contribution, and if I know Japan, I’m pretty sure they sell little cakes or rice crackers with his face on them, too.
For Pocky devotees, here’s the latest version. “Omikuji Pocky” which you can roughly understand as “Fortune Telling Pocky.” Omikuji is a kind of fortune telling that you can find in Shinto shrines.
You pay some money, a priest hands you a barrel and you pull out a stick with a number. The number corresponds to a fortune. You then tie this paper fortune onto a tree to try to bring you teh good luck you’ve selected–or pray against the bad luck you might inadvertently have chosen.
The Japanese are really into this kind of thing, and you can see omikuij papers all over the trees of shrines. I was really into omikuji as a kid, but now I don’t like letting some random piece of paper determine my future.
I’m afraid I’ve eaten most of these omikuji Pocky. And I didn’t consult my fortunes very much or tie them anywhere. Most had to do with my romantic prospects and . . . well . . . I’m married now.
At the end of his book, “Princess Masako,” Ben Hills ominously declared that there would be no happy ending for Princess Masako, her husband the Crown Prince and their daughter, Princess Aiko. The strangled, cloistered world in which they all lived would never change. In “The Commoner,” John Burnham Schwartz’s fictionalized account of the life of Empress Michiko, the doom and gloom is resolved when one Crown Princess and her Imperial daughter escape via a jet plane to the land where all people are free and happy. That would be New York. There are no Amber Alerts issued and the US government doesn’t vow to help its Japanese counterpart uncover the missing royals. Apparently, none of the thousands of Japanese expats living in America recognize the Princess either. They just fly off like “two cranes.”
Seriously.
I would feel bad about spoiling the ending for you, except that it is honestly so ridiculous, so tacked on and so obviously the kind of plotting intended to appease baby-adopting westerners who fret over the subjugation of women in Asia, that, well, I simply don’t feel bad at all. In this novel, Schwartz just fulfills our fantasies about the exotic and oppressive East. This is to say: we like Asia to be beautiful, and we like to lament how cruel it is to the independent spirit. Beyond that, we don’t care, thank you very much, about who these people are. And if we believed they had any independent spark, which we don’t, we wouldn’t want to read about that anyway, because, well, apprehending that would require effort.
And the novel is beautiful. It’s a wonderful chance to borrow from Japanese aesthetics to make everything beautiful. A burn victim “wore his painful strangeness, like his unseasonable coat and his skin lost to fire, as a flag not of suffering but of distinction.” Get it? He’s deep and he’s beautiful in that wabi sabi way, even though he’s a burn victim. Oh, he becomes a painter too. After a firebombing “the wind continued to blow, scattering perfectly formed corpses of ash, mothers and babies alike, into unrecognizable shapes, and finally into dust.” Be still my impermanent Buddhist heart.
But there must be some kind of plot, right? Beyond all the prettiness? Here, then, is the big question the novel asks. Why does Haruko, the novel’s stand-in for Empress Michiko, marry the Crown Prince of Japan, and how does she survive? What kind of a person can go through this kind of emotional journey?
Schwartz doesn’t know. You can tell. He knows his aesthetics and he bombards us with those, but try reading this novel for a truly three-dimensional understanding of human behavior, a true insight into Japan and you won’t find it. Case in point. At the start of novel, we are told: “On these matters, as on so many others of terrible important, I held no opinion that I can recall, and, of course, no one ever asked me to speak my mind.” Really? Was there no gossip at home? Did her father not express his opinions? How does this person of no opinion square with the girl who decides to keep beating the Crown Prince at tennis, even when she is told not to? It’s an inconsistent portrait.
New research coming out of Japan seems to indicate that people with very low cholesterol are at increased risk of developing stomach cancer.
A study that followed 2,600 residents of a Japanese town for 14 years revealed that after accounting for age and gender, stomach cancer rates rose significantly with descending cholesterol levels.
For example, among subjects with the highest cholesterol levels, the gastric cancer rate was the equivalent of 2.1 cases per 1000 persons per year; among those with the lowest cholesterol, the rate was 3.9 per 1000 person-years.
Reasearchers concluded that people with low cholesterol should undergo regular checkups for gastric cancer.
Man arrested after rolling up to renew driver’s license while quaffing beer
A Fukuoka man was arrested yesterday after turning up at the Driver’s Licence Centre there “to renew a permit to drive - albeit not his own,” police said.
Shigeo Tanita, 55, apparently drove past police officers directing traffic at the centre while he was swigging from the can. Officers simply waited for him to park up and then arrested him.
You might want to check out the latest addition to our Japan blogroll, jDonuts, a blog by an Australian living in Japan.
A little something for the fans of Japanese schoolgirls. . .
A strange story from Jaipur, India, where a Japanese tourist “had registered a complaint with the police alleging she was raped by the employees of the hotel last night”.
In an intriguing turn of events, a Japanese on Monday complained to the police of her rape in a hotel by its staff but withdrew the charge within hours saying the term ‘rape’ was used for use of force for taking away her mobile phone and not for sexual assault.
The woman explained later “The word rape used by me in the complaint is meant as application of force for taking away my mobile phone.” I need to buy me a new dictionary, as it seems mine is hopelessly out of date.
The big talk of Japanese news right now is the arrest in Saipan of Kazuyoshi Miura, a businessman who was once convicted of complicity in the murder of his wife in Los Angeles in 1981, only to have his conviction overturned by the Japanese supreme court in 2003. Saipan authorities arrested Miura for the murder of his wife 27 years ago at the request of authorities in Los Angeles.
Miura has always maintained that he and his wife were attacked by unknown assailants. Miura sustained a gunshot wound to leg in the alleged attack, and his wife was shot in the head. At the time, Miura made numerous statements to the press about violence in the U.S. While he was playing the grieving husband in front of the cameras, however, he also was filing claims on insurance policies totaling 160 million yen that he had taken out on his wife shortly before her murder.
The police both in Japan and the U.S. were not fooled, and immediately started treating Miura as the main suspect in his wife’s murder. According the Daryl Gates, chief of police in L.A. at the time of the killing:
“I remember the case well. I think he killed his wife,” said Gates, who had not heard about Miura’s arrest before he spoke Saturday afternoon. “We had Japanese police come over; they believed he was guilty, we believed he was guilty, but we couldn’t prove it.”
Miura did go on trial in Japan and ended up sentenced to life in prison by the Tokyo District Court in 1994. However, his conviction was thrown out by a higher court, despite the fact that it also found him guilty of a previous conspiracy to kill his wife.
Miura reportedly was shocked at his arrest in Saipan, saying that he thought his acquittal in Japan had ended the affair. However, police in the U.S. are citing “fresh evidence” in the new warrant.
It may have been 4° in my living room when I got up this morning, but a neighbour of mine assures me spring is just around the corner.
And with good reason.
Yes, it’s time to kick off the blankets and kick up the nature worship again. Parts of Japan might shivering be under feet of snow, but here in central Kyushu the plum trees are blooming red, white and pink. Which means not long now until the debauchery of cherry blossom hanami season! Don’t know about you, but I can’t wait.
(Picture can be seen full-size here.)
