As everyone probably knows by now, American-born Japanese heartthrob Leah Dizon recently announced that she is both married and pregnant.

Instructive in this announcement is the childishness with which dating, male-female relationships, marriage, and pregnancy is treated in Japan.

Here is a video of Leah’s announcement at a recent concert. Note the screams of shock and disbelief that a young 22-year-old woman would do such things. At the end of her announcement, Dizon says she will take some time off to have the baby, after which she plans to start performing again. She ends with a plea to her fans not to “toss her aside.”

With attitudes like this, it is no surprise that young people in Japan are shying away from marriage and that the population of the country is declining.

In an Italian trial for a murder in which the victim was found in her bed with her throat slit a day after she wore a bloody vampire costume to a Halloween party, a prosecutor is arguing that a brutal slaying was inspired by a violent manga comic.

Manga also have been linked to a death in Belgium, in which a note found next to the victim’s mutilated body referred to a Japanese comic called Death Note.

Manga also have been connected with the murder of British teacher Lindsay Hawker after piles of pornographic comics were found at the suspect’s flat.

An let’s not forget that Taro Aso is a manga fan…

Full story here.

SiteMeter provides us with visitor data grouped by, among other things, country, referral, and continent.

I was surprised to note on the continent graph for JAPUNDIT visitors recently that we are even getting visitors from unknown continents. And to think that I have been going through life thinking that the world had been completely charted centuries ago. . . !?!

So my Japanese roommate and her friend (also Japanese) were browsing through my bookshelf one day, looking at my English language literature, when they stumbled upon an old paperback of Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road). They picked it off the shelf wondering how haiku, something so intimately Japanese, could be translated to English.

After just a few minutes browsing through the pages, my two fluent-in-English friends burst out into laughter. I overheard the uproar in an adjacent room and went over to ask what the fuss was about.. Apparently, the original message was so unbelievably lost in the translation from Japanese to English, they thought it was downright hilarious. They said it was way too modern and conjured up images of Basho wandering the forest with an iPod Nano, mobile phone (with bluetooth headset), and Macbook (which he of course used to write his haiku).

I have decided to take this idea and run with it for haloween. I’m tentatively calling it DJ Basho, and it’s gonna be rad.

More to come.

In order to avoid confusion that would be caused if we require separate logins here on the Japundit Blog and on the Japundit News Page, we have decided to open up commenting to the general public on the blog.

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This in from Mr. Pink.

The following is the winning entry in an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term: This year’s term was Political Correctness.

The winner wrote: ‘Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end’

R.J.Wiedemann.LtCol.USMC Ret.

Don’t know if the story is on the level, but the definition is spot on!

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Right now, the number of votes required for promotion from the Upcoming page to the Top Stories page is 4.

Is this enough?

Should I change it to 5?

Or even higher?

What say you, JAPUNDITs?