Slate.com alerted me to a new movie which may be of interest to many Japundit readers. Sukiyaki Western Djando sounds bizzare to me but RottenTomatoes.com, my movie website of choice, attributes an impressive 68% positive reviews and the Slate.com review is positive as well.

Rotten Tomatoes’ synopsis is as follows:

Two connoisseurs of violence–prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike and American icon Quention Tarantino–team up for this genre mash-up. SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO follows two clashing clans in Japan as they both try to lure a talented shooter to their side. Tarantino makes a brief appearance in this film that pays homage to both the spaghetti western and classic Japanese cinema.

Highlights from Slate.com’s review:

Welcome to Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look), the English-language Western by Japanese director Takashi Miike. The all-Japanese cast, augmented by Quentin Tarantino in two cameo roles, learned their English dialogue phonetically and attack their lines as if the words were small furry animals that need to be beaten into submission. The dialogue is crammed with weird, Christopher Walken-esque line readings and bizarre placement of emphases—phrases like “You old biddy,” “Dang!” and “You reckon?” become hilariously divorced from meaning. But, like an alcoholic reduced to drinking sterno, the more you drink, the more brain cells you fry, and the better it tastes. Before long you not only start to understand Miike’s “through the looking glass” English but also to appreciate the cadences. It’s something like the dialogue in Deadwood or Cormac McCarthy’s writing: stiff, alien, occasionally silly but not without a hypnotic elegance all its own.

But why? The answer is simple: It’s a Takashi Miike film. The hardest-working man in showbiz, he’s made close to 80 movies, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly, and if he’s going to make a Western, then it’s going to pay tribute to the truth that Westerns have never been solely an American undertaking—they’re an international language. With a title that’s one part Japanese (sukiyaki: the everything-in-a-bowl beef dish) and one part Italian (Django: the title character of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti-Western classic), Miike offers up an explosion of influences that mocks the idea of a monoculture that’s immune to foreign influence. Sukiyaki Western Django is a blend of Buddhist philosophy, film noir fatalism, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, and Japan’s very own 12^th-century Genpei War. It’s a Wild West pageant of American history seen through Japanese eyes, reducing our entire frontier mythology to an ultraviolent grab for gold.

Miike’s Sukiyaki Western is a way of paying homage to this cross-cultural melting pot, and he shuffles and reshuffles iconic images like cards in a magician’s deck: a victim of a lynching hung from a torii gate; cowboys wearing six shooters and wielding samurai swords; a saloon keeper slinging edamame. It may not make literal sense, but emotionally it feels right. Comic-book writer Alan Moore once said that if we could really view the past it would look more like science fiction than history, and the distancing effect produced by Miike’s style blows the cobwebs off the genre with a burst of machine gun fire.

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post penned a thought-provoking article about modern Japanese women that touches on many topics which have been raised here on Japundit. It asks why women are postponing or even eschewing marriage and children; a trend which I, too, have seen. Off the top of my head, I can name about 10 single Japanese women friends in their mid-to-late thirties; far fewer than the number who are married.

Takako Katayama has not closed the door on marriage and children. When she meets girlfriends for dinner, they ask each other, “Where are the good guys?” But she refuses to settle for a man who works long hours, declines to share in child-rearing and sees marriage mainly as a way to acquire lifetime live-in help.

“I want a mature, equal-partner kind of marriage,” she said. “Anyway, there are complete lives without a baby.”

Therein lies a dismal prognosis for Japan and for many of the other prosperous nations of East Asia. In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth. In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980.

“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in an interview in May. “I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front.”

This year, Fukuda’s government is pushing a “work-life balance” program that addresses the country’s famously punishing work ethic. It pressures companies to shoo workers (primarily men) out of the office at night. The intent is to improve the quality of family life and, in the process, make more babies.

The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times is back with another interesting article, this time on foreign workers in Japan. One thing I have noticed in my time in Japan is the consternation many Japanese feel towards foreigners. My wife trains foreign workers (largely in Japanese language and culture) who are employed by Japanese companies both here and abroad and it opens a window for me into these attitudes. Soon her organization will be training a large group (50 +/-) of Indonesian nurses and the hand wringing continues…

With one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates, Japan is facing acute labor shortages not only in farming towns but also in fishing villages, factories, restaurants and nursing homes, and on construction sites. Closed to immigration, Japan has admitted foreign workers through various loopholes, including employing growing numbers of foreign students as part-timers and temporary workers, like the Chinese here, as so-called foreign trainees.

The labor shortage has grown serious enough that a group of influential politicians in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party recently released a report calling for the admission of 10 million immigrants in the next 50 years.

The foreign work force in Japan rose to more than one million in 2006 from fewer than 700,000 in 1996. But experts say that it will have to increase by significantly more to make up for the expected decline in the Japanese population. The government projects that Japan’s population, 127 million, will fall to between 82 million and 99 million by 2055. Moreover, because the population is graying, the share that is of working age is expected to shrink even faster.

The large presence of the Chinese workers has unsettled some Japanese here even as they have become increasingly dependent on them. Some vaguely mentioned the fear of crime, though they acknowledged that crime rates had not risen. No Japanese interviewed welcomed the idea of immigrants here or elsewhere in Japan.

“I feel a strange sense of oppression,” Toshimitsu Ide, 28, a lettuce farmer who had not hired any Chinese workers, said of seeing large groups of Chinese hanging around town. “They seem hard to approach.”

Perhaps because of the Japanese unease, the Chinese workers were given directives apparently aimed at curbing their movements, even before they arrived. They said they were told to go home by 8 p.m. and not to ride bicycles except for work. Some even said they had been instructed not to talk to young Japanese women.

“Though I’m in Japan,” said Toshimitsu Yui, 57, who works in construction, “I feel this is not Japan anymore.”

A link on Washington Post’s website took me this article about travel in Japan on a website called Budget Travel. It was written by a woman who went to Japan with her husband and teenage son for about a week and a half.

The article doesn’t exactly blaze new territory but it is well written and offers a few things one might not have known. For example, her description of Miyazaki’s Ghibli Museum in Tokyo makes me want to check it out during the upcoming Obon holidays.

Slate.com has a nice gallery of Hiroshi Hamaya photographs to accompany a post about his retrospective book (Fifty Years of Photography 1930-1981).

Born in 1915, Hiroshi Hamaya began his career studying aerial photography and started his Yukiguni (Snow Land) series, which focused on farming practices and daily life in the remote mountains of Niigata prefecture, in 1940, then followed it with his Ura Nihon (Japan’s Back Coast) series in 1954. His work was included in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Hamaya later became the first Japanese photographer to work for Magnum, in 1960. After covering the demonstration against the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, he returned to aerial and landscape photography, personally adopting an anti-government stance.

The normally excellent reporter for the New York Times, Norimitsu Onishi, recently wrote a rather bland, meandering article on lawyers in rural Japan.

It is interesting to note the contrasts between Japan and more litigious societies. For example, Onishi states that there are 1/3 as many lawyers, per capita, in Japan than in the U.S. It’s also interesting that the Japanese government intervenes in the concentration and coverage of lawyers in the country.

Thanks to a national campaign to raise the number of lawyers, and to dispatch them to lawyerless corners of Japan, Yakumo welcomed its first one in April.

In Japan, other legal professionals, including notaries and tax accountants, often perform the duties that fall to lawyers in the United States. Still, even including those professions, Japan has only about one-third of the lawyers found in the United States per capita, according to the federation.

Beyond that, half of Japan’s lawyers are concentrated in Tokyo, leaving only one lawyer for every 30,000 Japanese outside the capital, according to the federation.

Like many Japanese who consult lawyers, the four seemed embarrassed about doing so

“Japanese by nature don’t want to publicize their problems,” Mr. Hirai explained. “And coming to see a lawyer is to admit that there are problems inside your home or workplace.”

The New York Times recently reported on a new trend in Japanese tourism, both those visiting Japan and Japanese going abroad. While fewer Japanese are traveling outside the country, more foreigners are visiting; most of whom are coming from Asian countries.

Once prohibitively expensive, Japan is suddenly drawing soaring numbers of Asian tourists who splurge at the nation’s department stores, lounge in its hot spring resorts or explore remote corners, like this stretch of pristine mountains and forests on Japan’s northernmost tip.

Japan itself was once known for its free-spending tourists, who flocked to boutiques from Hong Kong to Fifth Avenue. But as Japan’s economy stalled for the last dozen or so years, rapid development in countries like China and South Korea raised living standards there.

At the same time, there has been a decline in the number of people going abroad from Japan. The number of Japanese traveling abroad has fallen 3 percent from the peak in 2000 of 17.8 million, the government-run Japan National Tourist Organization said.

By contrast, the number of visitors to Japan from South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong almost doubled last year from five years earlier, to 5.36 million, according to the tourist group. Those four regions alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of all foreign visitors to Japan last year, the organization said.

Many Asian tourists interviewed said they liked to shop here because Japan has the latest fashions first, and at prices way below those in many other Asian countries, where tariffs are steep. They also said they liked visiting Japan because it was close, safe and cleaner than much of the rest of Asia.

During the 1980s, Americans were the largest group of overseas visitors to Japan, but have now fallen to fourth behind South Korea, Taiwan and China. Surveys also showed Asian tourists came to Japan for different reasons than Westerners. While Americans said they came to see cultural attractions like temples, Asians cited shopping, followed by hot springs and nature. Visits to factories are also popular, he said.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Benihana’s (chain of restaurants) founder Rocky Aoki has died at age 69. He was a colorful personality (see below).

 As for the restaurants:

Benihana’s style of food is called teppan-yaki. Eating there is “equal parts restaurant, magic show and performance art,” said David Rockwell.

There is a Benihana’s restaurant near where my family lives in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. We went there from time to time and enjoyed the food and the show. I haven’t been to a restaurant here in Japan, though, which features the style of food at Benihana’s. Does anyone know if it actually exists here, and if so, where?

Back to Mr. Aoki:

He pleaded guilty to charges that he had used an illegal tip to buy stock. He was fined $500,000 and given three years’ probation.

He raced boats, and flew in hot-air balloons. In the summer of 1979, in San Francisco Bay, he had a near-fatal accident on a 38-foot powerboat. During a test run at 70 miles an hour, the boat lost its trim and dived into a wave. Mr. Aoki suffered a ruptured aorta, a lacerated liver and a leg broken in four places.

In September 1982, he was piloting a 35-foot Active Marine racer in the Kiekhaefer St. Augustine Classic in Florida. He suffered leg injuries when the boat, going 80 miles an hour, hit a swell and shattered.

His love life was as tumultuous as his racing. He had six children by two women. Mr. Aoki’s third wife, Keiko Ono Aoki, survives him, along with all of his children.

One of the most baffling things to me about Japanese society is the work culture. I can’t understand how “salary men” prioritize their jobs over their families. Of course, if everyone else is doing it, no one can step out of line or risk getting fired but if the expectation of working until 8 or 9 or 10 pm everyday were the standard in France, for example, riots and strikes would have occurred ages ago.

In any case, the Washington Post ran a story about Japanese work culture last week (I’m behind), specifically about karoshi or working yourself to death.

Death from too much work is so commonplace in Japan that there is a word for it — karoshi. There is a national karoshi hotline, a karoshi self-help book and a law that funnels money to the widow and children of a salaryman (it’s almost always a man) who works himself into an early karoshi for the good of his company.

A local Japanese government agency ruled June 30 for the widow and children of a 45-year-old Toyota chief engineer who died in 2006. While organizing the worldwide manufacture of a hybrid version of the Camry sedan, the man had worked nights and weekends and often traveled abroad — putting in up to 114 hours of overtime a month — in the six months before he died in his bed of heart failure. The cause of death was too much work, according to a ruling by the Labor Bureau of Aichi prefecture, where Toyota has its headquarters.

For decades, the Japanese government has been trying, and largely failing, to set limits on work and on overtime. The problem of karoshi became prevalent enough to warrant its own word in the boom years of the late 1970s, as the number of Japanese men working more than 60 hours a week soared.

Thirty years later, overtime rules remain so nebulous and so weakly enforced that the United Nations’ International Labor Organization has described Japan as a country with no legal limits on the practice.

The consequences show up not only in claims for death and disability from overwork but in suicides attributed to “fatigue from work.” Among 2,207 work-related suicides in 2007, the most common reason (672 suicides) was overwork, according to government figures released in June.

The Associated Press has a story of a unique defense against an assailant… a cup of tea. No word on whether the tea was oolong or green. I wonder if sake would have worked as well.

A man who appeared to be a laborer in his 60s allegedly pulled a knife and demanded money from a 30-year-old housewife as she was walking in a hallway at a downtown Tokyo apartment building Monday morning. The woman told her assailant that she had no money but he followed her and forced his way into her apartment, police said.

But rather than screaming, the woman served the man a cup of tea in hopes of calming him down.

The man put his knife away and began telling the woman about his financial hardship and asked her to lend him 10,000 yen ($94), police said.

Police said the woman put a 10,000 yen ($94) bill and a wallet containing about 30,000 yen ($280) on the table. When the man was looking the other way, she grabbed her daughter and ran out the door to call police from a nearby public phone.

I guess not *all* Japanese are eating healthfully. ESPN is reporting that 6-time Nathan’s hot dog eating champion Takeru Kobayashi lost for the second year in a row to his rival Joey Chestnut; this time in an unprecedented overtime period. Kobayashi is 30 years old and from Nagano. Do you think he trains for these contests? The amazing thing is that he is thin as a rail.

Joey Chestnut reclaimed the top spot at the annual hot dog eating contest on Coney Island on Friday after first tying with archrival Takeru Kobayashi in a 10-minute chow-down, then beating him in a five-dog eat-off.

The men tied at 59 frankfurters in 10 minutes, before being made to gobble another five dogs in a last-minute tiebreaker. They consumed 64 hot dogs total and were looking quite peaked after the competition.

Kobayashi had hoped to reclaim the throne after a disappointing three-dog loss last year shattered his six-year winning streak.

As usual, Kobayashi’s strategy was to eat all the dogs first, then dunk the buns and eat them. A pause while swallowing the soggy buns meant defeat.

The two will face off again Sept. 28 at the Krystal Square Off World Hamburger Eating Championship in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Newsweek has an online article about whaling, focusing on Japan and the upcoming International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting. It is an interesting topic which pits national sovereignty against international consensus with no easy or obvious solution.

The Japanese delegation at the IWC parley is expected to lobby other countries to relax the moratorium on worldwide commercial whaling that the body imposed in 1986. No other country has been quite as prepared to risk international opprobrium over this issue as Japan, which is allowed to kill up to 1,000 whales a year for “scientific research” under a loophole in the IWC ban. Tokyo wants the body to acknowledge the right of individual countries to engage in whaling along their own coastlines and has threatened to walk out of the IWC and unilaterally resume commercial whaling if a compromise can’t be worked out by the end of next year’s IWC meeting in Portugal.

Most of the world’s whale populations have benefited from the IWC moratorium, which took effect more than 20 years ago (some species have seen 3 percent to 8 percent growth). One of the most endangered species of all, the blue whale, has shown signs of a modest comeback: Relentlessly hunted by Japanese whaling fleets off Chile’s southern shores as recently as the late 1960s, blue whales have returned to those waters in recent years, and at least 250 individual animals have been photographed and identified. That has inspired plans to create a large marine reserve to protect their breeding ground, which is centered off the northern coast of Chile’s Chiloe Island.

Japan’s insistence on its right to pursue whaling operations infuriates environmentalists and leaves others scratching their heads. Though polls show that most Japanese don’t care much for whale meat, a hardcore minority does and defends whaling as a time-honored tradition that is worth preserving. Japan has ceased hunting endangered humpback whales, but Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has justified the yearly slaughter of hundreds of whales on the grounds of scientific investigation. Advocates of the IWC ban dismiss that contention out of hand, arguing that it isn’t necessary to kill the giant mammals to study them. Tokyo’s case is further undermined by evidence of whale blubber turning up on sushi menus and in Japanese school cafeterias. “You wouldn’t know this wasn’t commercial whaling because all the whale meat from scientific whaling is sold on the market,” says David Phillips, executive director of the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, which has lobbied for stronger conservation measures at previous IWC conferences. “And the so-called science is mostly unnecessary.”

The New York Times has an interesting article on Japanese energy technology. What always leaves me scratching my head is how this environmentally-minded country has such lousy windows and insulation which leads to more heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer (and thus more energy consumed and greater expense). I’d also love to see an accounting for all of the energy consumed by the millions of ubiquitous vending machines!

Now, with oil prices hitting dizzying levels and the world struggling with global warming, [Japan] is hoping to use its conservation record to take a rare leadership role on a pressing global issue. It will showcase its efforts to export its conservation ethic — and its expensive power-saving technology — at next week’s meeting in Japan of the Group of 8 industrial leaders.

“Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste give Japan the world’s most energy-efficient structure,” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said. Japan “wants to contribute to the world,” he said.

Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less. It is also the only industrial country that sustained government investment in energy research even when energy became cheap again.

Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Norimitsu Onishi reports in the New York Times that the Japanese government has recognized the indigenous rights of the Ainu people.

The Ainu had lived on Japan’s northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir. But just as with America’s expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or North Sea Road.

And yet it was only a few weeks ago that the Japanese government finally, and unexpectedly, recognized the Ainu as an “indigenous people.” Parliament introduced and quickly passed a resolution stating that the Ainu had a “distinct language, religion and culture,” setting aside the belief, long expressed by conservatives, that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation.

The recognition — coming after decades of opposition by a government fearful of compensation claims — seemed timed to an international conference of indigenous peoples that Japan is hosting this week in Hokkaido. The Ainu’s lack of recognition could have proved embarrassing for Japan’s government, particularly since the conference also comes close to the Group of 8 summit meeting in Hokkaido next week.

In a study by the Hokkaido prefectural government in 2006, just under 24,000 people identified themselves as Ainu. Most were of mixed blood and lacked the telltale fair skin or hirsute features that distinguished older Ainu from the Japanese. But it is not known how many live outside Hokkaido since Japan has never conducted a nationwide census of Ainu.

“In Japan’s case, for better or for worse, the assimilation policies since the Meiji era were so successful that almost nothing remains of the Ainu’s traditional way of life,” he said. In 1869, one year after the start of the Meiji era, Tokyo set up the Hokkaido Colonization Board to encourage Japanese settlers to move to Hokkaido. The Ainu were eventually stripped of their land, forced to abandon hunting and fishing for farming, forbidden to speak their own language and taught only Japanese at school. That history — little known by the Japanese today and even among the Ainu themselves — was repeated later in Japan’s Asian colonies.

A recent California Supreme Court ruling paved the way for gay marriage in the state. Many news outlets, including the BBC, are covering perhaps the most famous person to take advantage of the opportunity, Japanese-American actor George Takei, best known as Sulu from Star Trek. He obtained a marriage certificate and plans to wed his partner of 20-years, Brad Altman, in September. His official and unofficial biographies show a strong connection to his Japanese roots including speaking Japanese, studying at (Edward’s alma mater) Sophia University in Tokyo, and being involved in many Japanese organizations.  He was also one of the many Japanese and Japanese-Americans interned in the U.S. during WWII.

George is former president of Friends of Little Tokyo Arts, an organization that encourages and supports artists. In the international arena, George was appointed by President Clinton to the board of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, where he served two terms.  He is a member of the board of directors of the U.S.-Japan Bridging Foundation. The Government of Japan recognized George’s contribution to the Japan-United States relationship by giving him the Order of the Rising Sun, gold Rays with Rosette. The decoration was conferred by His Majesty, Emperor Akihito, at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in November, 2004.

The things you learn online…  In this week’s issue of Time Magazine there is an um, ah, er, interesting piece on Japanese pornography featuring the elderly.

Japan is repeatedly found to be one of the most sexless societies in the industrialized world. The WHO reported in March this year found that one in four married couples in Japan had not made love in the previous year, while 38% of couples in their 50s no longer have sex at all. Yet, at the same time, the country has seen a surge in demand for pornography that has turned adult videos into a billion-dollar industry, with “elder porn” one of its fastest growing genres.

Tokuda’s exploits have proved to be a goldmine for Glory Quest, which first launched an “old-man” series, Maniac Training of Lolitas, in December 2004. Its popularity led the company to follow up with Tokuda starring in Forbidden Elderly Care in August 2006. Other series followed, and soon elder porn had revealed itself as a sustainable new revenue stream for the industry. “The adult video industry is very competitive,” says Glory Quest p.r. representative Kayoko Iimura. “If we only make standard fare, we cannot beat other studios. There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers’ hearts.”

Japan’s adult video industry is believed to be worth as much as $1 billion a year according to industry insiders, with the largest rental video store chain Tsutaya releases about 1,000 new titles monthly, while and the mega adult mail-order site DMM releases about 2,000 titles each month. Although films featuring women in their teens and 20s are the mainstay of the industry, a trend toward “mature women” has become evident over the past five years. Currently, about 300 of the 1,000 adult videos on offer at Tsutaya, and 400 out of the 2,000 at DMM, are “mature women” films.

This week both Japan Today and Mainichi Daily News revealed that that a new tower which will be built in Tokyo’s Sumida ward will be named the “Tokyo Sky Tree.” It will be completed in 2012 and will be the world’s tallest tower at 610 meters (2000 feet).  As for the, ahem, unique name:

[It] was chosen after a 10-member panel narrowed down the number of candidate names to six from 18,606 submitted in a nationwide poll conducted online and by mail.

Out of a total of 110,000 votes cast in the poll, ‘‘Tokyo Sky Tree’’ garnered around 33,000. The second most popular name was the ‘‘Tokyo Edo Tower.’’

The Washington Post is reporting that North Korea has agreed to reinvestigate the Japanese abductions.  It surprised the Japanese government but prompted them to pledge to lift some economic sanctions as a result.  The agreement was reached in bilateral negotiations in Beijing on Friday.

The abduction issue is a big deal in Japan and was the subject of an entire documentary film. The subject of the North Korean abductions was the subject of another recent post. 

North Korea also agreed to join in the investigation of the 1970 hijacking of a Japanese jet to the North, where four hijackers are believed to remain, Komura said. 

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda suggested Friday that if the reinvestigation of the abductions makes progress, Japan would ease other economic sanctions.

Norimitsu Onishi is reporting in the New York Times about a new program in Japan to slim down. It’s hard to believe on many levels. First, Japan has to have one of the healthiest and slimmest populations in the world. Second, it’s hard to believe that the government will get away with imposing these measures on companies and individuals with no backlash. Third, I don’t understand how the government has a standard measure for obesity based on waistline regardless of height. One other interesting thing is the introduction (or at least use) of the word “metabo” which they think will be more effective in their campaign.

Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.

Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and having a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.

To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.

The word metabo has made it easier for health care providers to urge their patients to lose weight, said Dr. Yoshikuni Sakamoto, a physician in the employee health insurance union at Matsushita, which makes Panasonic products.

“Before we had to broach the issue with the word obesity, which definitely has a negative image,” Dr. Sakamoto said. “But metabo sounds much more inclusive.”

NEC, Japan’s largest maker of personal computers, said that if it failed to meet its targets, it could incur as much as $19 million in penalties. The company has decided to nip metabo in the bud by starting to measure the waistlines of all its employees over 30 years old and by sponsoring metabo education days for the employees’ families.

Japan has once again made world news; this time with a large earthquake which rocked northern Japan.  The 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck at 8:43 am on Saturday in Iwate Prefecture and killed at least 6 people and injured scores more.  On the Japanese scale, the quake measured 6 out of 7.  I felt the quake all the way down in Yokohama and figured it was a big one based on its long duration.

Coverage of the earthquake:

Google News

Mainichi Daily News

Associated Press

Japan Today

Daily Yomiuri