Here is a video of singer/songwriter Kayoko Takamichi doing Haru, a song from her Greener CD that we featured on Japan Talk #114 last Saturday.

JAPUNDIT has become quite the talk of the Japanese Internet, which has been boiling over with anger over the now-defunct Mainichi Wai Wai.

It seems that someone has picked up on this JAPUNDIT post that quotes from a Wai Wai column we found particularly amusing because it was so incredibly outlandish. Of course, we intentionally inserted the Wai Wai name into the report as a signal to readers that the information contained in it was at the least sensationalized and the most totally made up.

Most of the comments I have seen seem to take issue with the Mainichi for allowing such things to be published under their name in English. Though Wai Wai sourced much, if not all, of its material from Japanese language weekly magazines, most of the ire seems directed against the fact that it was presented in English for the world to see. I did not see much talk of anyone taking issue with the weekly magazines.

Some are saying that Mainichi should be prosecuted for promoting underage sex.

One comment said that since such information is printed in the newspaper, everyone will believe it.

One girl wrote about how, when she read this report while riding the bus, she burst into tears, and ended up crying herself to sleep that night out of shame.

Another young lady declared that she hated the way “Europeans and Americans” were talking about this story, and then went on to complain that the JAPUNDIT slogan (Japan - A whole lot more than raw fish) made her mad because it is insulting to Japan!?!

Blogging sure is fun, isn’t it?

The other day it was a maid cafe in Culver City, now we get word that naked sushi has made its way to Clearwater, Florida.

CLEARWATER — Chef David Keir looks out over the crowd in the dark, smoke-filled lounge, then slowly slides the model’s black kimono off her body.

She’s wearing the smallest of G-strings and tiny flower-shaped pasties. Slowly, she lies down on a small upraised stage.

Illuminated by an overhead light, Keir, 35, places bamboo leaves covered with bright sushi rolls on her nearly naked body. First on her right upper leg, then her left thigh and, finally, her chest.

A line of customers, almost 30 deep, waits in eager anticipation for the free sushi and the accompanying show.

Though the practice seems tame compared to some of the stuff you can freely download on the Internet from U.S. sources, naked sushi seems to leave a bad taste in the mouths of some Americans. Protesters shut down a naked sushi show in Seattle, claiming it was demeaning to women. Clearwater officials have checked out their local version of naked sushi, however, and have declared they see nothing wrong with raw fish in the raw.

[P]olice have checked for violations and didn’t find any.

And officials with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which licenses restaurants, say Keir hasn’t violated health requirements.

Even Mayor Frank Hibbard, who convinced Hooters’ owners in 2006 to reword a sexually suggestive billboard, says he’s letting this one go. He says little about the event other than, “I wouldn’t eat sushi off anyone’s body.”

Chef Keir claims that his naked sushi presentation is “my expression of art.”

“Every time Picasso had a girl pose nude in one of his paintings, was that demeaning? No, I don’t think it was,” he says.

Inside the Dirty Martini, the patrons, half of them women, agree.

Thanks to Mr. Pink.

Japan Talk #114 is now available on the Japan Talk website and at FeedBurner.

* A day late
* Featured artist: Kayoko Takamichi

* Fill out this survey and help us find sponsors

Listener Mail
* Pete Bohan: Diabetes in Japan
* Nate: Japan relations with Korea and China
* Amanda in Texas: I like the music!

Japan News Roundup
* No disclosure on Nork nukes?
* 963 apply to become astronauts
* Space weddings coming soon
* Night

* Ninja sighting closes New Jersey school
* Ambulances used as taxis in Japan
* No Fishing Day. . . But who cares?
* Emergency butter imports planned
* More foliage whacked
* Photos fool vending machine age verification system
* Man arrested for dogging convenience stores
* Local school district refuses government tests
* Japanese tops as tourists
* Japanese tourists from hell

Music (Podsafe Music Network)
* Vegas Hard Rock, by Charlie Crowe
* Haru, by Kayoko Takamichi
* Night, by Kayoko Takamichi

Links of Interest
* Japan Diabetes Society

* Kayoko Takamichi on MySpace

* Mainichi Daily News
* Japan Times
* The Daily Yomiuri
* Asahi Shimbun

* Japan Talk in the iTunes Store
* Japundit

Contact: podcast@japundit.com

News about the following TV commercial for a company named EMOBILE has gotten Obama supporters the world over up in arms.

The voice over has the monkey giving in a speech in which he promises that EMOBILE is committed to change. Obama supporters claim that the monkey is a racist reference to Barack Obama.

The following is from a Washington Post report on the cancellation of a trip to Seoul by U.S. President George Bush due to demonstrations against U.S. beef imports there. Emphasis is mine.

President Bush canceled plans Tuesday to visit Seoul next month amid protests over U.S. beef imports, and his administration made a key concession to North Korea by allowing it to exclude atomic bombs from a required disclosure of its nuclear activities.

You mean this whole exercise was intended to limit North Korea’s electrical power generation options!?!

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has assured Japan that The United States will continue to press for the release of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea.

Japan worries that the United States will remove North Korea from its list of nations sponsoring terrorism before a resolution of the issue.

“We have made very clear that the United States is not going to set aside or forget the Japanese abduction issue,” Rice told reporters on the plane to Berlin, where she will attend a conference on security in the Palestinian territories on the sidelines of a donors conference.

“We’re going to continue to press North Korea to make sure this issue is dealt with,” Rice said. “Japan is one of America’s strongest allies in Asia, I should say one of America’s strongest allies in the world and we recognize the sensitivity of this issue,” she said.

Right. . . Just about no one is falling for this in Japan, where the latest U.S.appeasement concession is being met with condemnation by people on both sides of the aisle.

A top LDP politician bitterly criticized Washington for repeating a past mistake. “The United States is doing the same thing over again.”

He was referring to the U.S. government’s failure to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons even though it promoted reconciliations with Pyongyang by dispatching then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang at the end of the Bill Clinton administration that stepped down in 2001.

“The Bush administration has become too lenient toward North Korea as its tenure is approaching an end,” he said.

Many politicians feel that the administration of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has supported the U.S. position even though there has been no tangible progress in the abduction issue because it places top priority on Japan’s ties with the United States.

However, some politicians expressed concern that the U.S. decision to remove North Korea from its list of terrorism-supporting countries could adversely affect Japan-U.S. relations.

Straight from the Japanese Make the Best Tourists Department comes a report that students from Gifu City Women’s College are in hot water for defacing the Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy during an overseas study tour by writing the date, their names, and the names of their friends with an oil-based marker on the marble wall. The cathedral is included on the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage List.

Initially the college suspected a female student and responded by issuing a strict warning, but later three males were identified as the culprits. The three have been suspended.

The college found out about the misbehavior of its students when a Japanese tourist contacted the college via e-mail.

Japundit reader Colin Fletcher writes in to alert us to a report about a maid coffee shop that has newly opened in Culver City, California.

Sandra Westwood, who oversees the cafe, worked most recently at the restaurants Bread and Brown Cafe in Manhattan. Earlier in her career, as a fashion model in Japan and Paris, she discovered the finer points of serving tea, from a customer standpoint. Ms. Westwood spent nearly a year designing the Royal/T menu and training the staff with Danielle Kurtz, formerly of Simpatica Catering in Portland, and the chef Chris Cooke, a veteran of Izakaya in Tokyo and Megu in TriBeCa. “Most of the food at maid cafes in Japan comes out of the microwave, which we don’t use here,” Ms. Westwood said.

Royal/T, which opened in May for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, also serves curry rice bowls, salads seasoned with yuzu and Japanese-influenced desserts. There are Yoko Moku butter cookies and a layered mousse cake with sesame and red bean paste. The heart-shape chocolate lollipops, from Roni-Sue’s Chocolates on the Lower East Side, can best be described as adorable. But then, cuteness is the whole point at a maid cafe.

It can sometimes be near impossible to get a good night’s sleep during Japan’s hot, humid summers. Sleeping under an air conditioner is one option of course, but that often leads to summer colds.

Well, relief may finally be on the way in the form of the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Bed.

The Kuchofuku is equipped with two fans that keep air circulating through its membrane for cool and comfortable slumber.

Price: $399

Via Crave

Big thanks to Betty Woo

Check out this report on gardening in limited spaces in Tokyo.

Thanks to Robert Leonard.

A recent survey by online travel company Expedia.com reveals that Japanese tourists are ranked best overall by hoteliers. The Japanese were followed by the Germans and Britons who were tied for second place, followed by the Canadians and Swiss.

The survey ranked American tourists as the most generous, followed by Canadians and Russians, while the French, British and Dutch were the most “fiscally conservative.”

Britons, Italians and Americans were considered noisy, while the French and Germans were among the messiest hotel guests.

Americans were at the bottom of the list when it came to fashion sense, with Italians and French voted tops.

And who said stereotypes are are invalid?

Thanks to remora.

As an American living in Japan, I know how surprised Japanese can get when foreigners internalize the society around them too much.

Here at J-List, the Japanese staff have gotten used to me doing things like bowing while speaking Japanese on the phone to someone or pulling out a kotowaza (Japanese proverb) to make a point.

According to an interesting online poll, some other things gaijin do that surprise Japanese include speaking using dialects like Osaka-ben, singing enka songs at karaoke, giving dates in the Japanese calendar system (e.g. Showa 43 instead of 1968), drinking fruit-flavored milk with a hand on one hip after a bath (sounds odd, but I do it most every week), and sitting seiza, or in proper Japanese kneeling position. Another thing that surprises Japanese people is when foreigners are polite, or when they line up properly in crowds — it seems sad to me that this kind of behavior be the exception and not the rule.

When Japanese go drinking with a foreigner, they always seem to expect him to order a Budweiser, since that’s what all foreigners drink, right? But I’m much more likely to ask for atsukan, or hot sake, which always seems to surprise Japanese around me.

The holy grail of a foreigner living in Japan is when a Japanese person temporarily forgets how to write a difficult kanji and you casually jot it down for them. That’s only happened a few times to me, but it was glorious, let me tell you.

MSNBC has still another story about the high-tech toilets of Japan.

Japanese toilets can warm and wash one’s bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises that drown out potty sounds. They play relaxation music, too. “Ave Maria” is a favorite.

High-end toilets can also sense when someone enters or leaves the bathroom, raising or lowering their lids accordingly. Many models have a “learning mode,” which allows them to memorize the lavatory schedules of household members.

But this story tries to put a whole new twist on the whole thing by saying Japanese toilets are consuming too much energy.

These always-on electricity-guzzlers (keeping water warm for bottom-washing devours power) barely existed in Japan before 1980. Now, they are in 68 percent of homes, accounting for about 4 percent of household energy consumption. They use more power than dishwashers or clothes dryers.

“For hygiene-conscious Japanese, the romance with these toilets is equivalent to the American romance with the Hummer,” said Philip Clapp, deputy managing director of the environmental group at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington.

Proof positive that there are people in the world wanting to micro manage your entire life, including how you take a s**t.

Thanks to bjair for the tip on the story.

In Asbury Park, New Jersey:

The Associated Press

BARNEGAT, N.J. - It’s the case of the nonexistent ninja. Public schools in Barnegat were locked down briefly after someone reported seeing a ninja running through the woods behind an elementary school.

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword.

Police tell the Asbury Park Press the man was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

The lockdown began shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday and lasted until 9:30.

As a group, the Japanese are fortunate enough to enjoy extremely long lifespans, with the current average being 78.5 years for men and 85.5 years for women. There are many reasons for this longevity, including a healthier diet, an extremely safe society, and a tendency to build lifelong relationships that provide important support in later years. (My mother-in-law is still close friends with women she went to elementary school with six decades ago, something that’s unthinkable to me.)

Another reason Japanese live a long time is the health care system here, in which private institutions provide health services according to highly structured price schedules imposed by the National Health Insurance System.

Currently Japan is going through “Health Insurance Hell” as various changes that kicked in April 1st continue to cause mass confusion.

For starters, Japan used to offer free healthcare to everyone over the age of 75, but this has changed, and under the new system, some elderly users must pay a monthly premium. It’s not clear which groups this applies to, however, and it’s feared that the new system, which makes people pay more for health insurance the more often they use medical services, will keep sick people from going to the hospital.

In addition, the government saw fit to change the Health Insurance Card from a large booklet to a paper-thin card, which is easily lost or thrown away by elderly Japanese.

From an anonymous reader on Slashdot:

“A recently-introduced law in Japan requires all businesses to have mandatory obesity checks (video link) for all their employees and employees’ family members over the age of 40, CNN reports. If the employee or family member is deemed obese, and does not lose the extra fat soon, their employer faces large fines. The legislated upper limit for the waistline is 33.5″ for men, and 35.5″ for women. Should America adopt universal health insurance, could we live to see the same kind of individual health regulations imposed on us by the government? By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women.”

I guess extreme problems call for extreme solutions!

Now, this also worries me. Potentially having to move in Japan soon to follow my love, and me being a bit overweight, will that new law make it impossible for me to find a job?