PeriBorg has created something called the Ore-Commander.
Strap a vibrator to your thumb and you can hit the ‘fire’ button 22 times a second. Watch a video of the Ore-Commander in action here.
I’m really puzzling over whether or not you can show this video to children. Due to a slightly relaxed sense of propriety (badgers with big balls, the obsession over women’s underpants, kancho wedgies) when compared with prudish Western moral standards, almost anything goes in the world of Japanese children’s entertainment.
But the video’s distributor, Alice Japan (naw, I don’t feel like linking to it - Japundit is frequented by underage perverts, after all), is a fairly well-known porn merchant.
But if you really want to see more, check out the following link. Warning, the link may in turn link to adult content.
Hard Gay Man appears in Rakugaki Oukoku (Graffiti Kingdom), a Taito game available on PS2.
More on Hard Gay Man here.
Watch out for anyone who grew up reading manga comic books in Hong Kong in the early 1970s. These people may be dangerous.
Better, horrifically graphic images here.
As reported in an earlier Japundit post, certifiably “alien” Nippon Ham Fighters baseball star Tsuyoshi Shinjo spends his off-time out-of-uniform modelling underwear.
The Shinjo campaign is notable for being affiliated with the Japanese government’s “Warm Biz” energy saving initiative, and also for the life-size, beefy Shinjo manikins used to sell underwear in department stores.
GUNZE, who’s Wild Body line of underwear Shinjo touts, has really gotten into the goofy spirit of the ad campaign, and has recently started a blog that follows a life-sized Shinjo mannikin as it travels around Japan.
The blog is a whole lot of fun, and, if you can navigate the Japanese, is full of neat little easter eggs to discover.
Natto. I used to hate the stuff, and I especially hated the days at school when natto was served as part of lunch. The teachers would take the uneaten portions of natto and store the little styrofoam packages in their desks. The school office would reek for days of unwashed socks.
Actually, I’ve since changed my opinion of natto. It tastes good. It tastes healthy. It tastes all right.
My son, who just turned three, likes natto, and that’s fine with me, although the problem is that in Canada natto quickly sells out at the supermarket, so my wife makes it in the oven. The delicous, musky aroma then fills the house for days.
Japanese consumers, however, may be having second doubts about natto due to fears that the soybeans used to make it may be genetically modified.
Japan Today has more here.
Weekly Teinou Woman gives us the heads-up on Jason’s Pink Movie Poster Page.
Pages and pages of Japanese softcore movie posters from the Showa Era.
Ah, Fukui, how I miss ye. I chose my handle to celebrate one of Fukui’s better-tasting sake brands, KokuRyu, or Black Dragon. It’s a nice little touch of heaven (if you ignore the nuclear power plants) halfway between Kanazawa and Kyoto.
It’s not heaven, however, if you’re a fisherman. As they’ve done for about the third or fourth winter in a row, giant Echizen jellyfish have invaded the waters of the Japan Sea and are ruining the lucrative yellowtail fishery. Yellowtail, or buri, as the fish are called in western Japan (what do you call it in Kanto? And don’t say hamachi), are a popular winter delicacy, and wild-caught fish regularly sell for 8000 yen a head in the supermarket.
Anyway, the large Echizen jellyfish, which weigh about 200 kilograms apiece, or about 500 lbs, are causing significant problems. Not only do the jellyfish sting the more valuble catch, thus spoiling it for sale, they also get caught in the nets and are time-consuming to remove.
Asahi.com reports that the Echizen jellyfish is here to stay. Their proclivity is due in part to development in China - agricultural runoff into the East China Sea is causing a plankton explosion that in turn fuels an explosion in the jellyfish population. Echizen jellyfish, once found mainly in the Japan Sea, are starting to appear in the waters off Japan’s Pacific seaboard.
This may be a blessing in disguise. Wild fish stocks are fast disappearing, and even jellyfish populations are being depleted by overfishing. So perhaps Japan’s winter buri treat will be replaced by something a little more rubbery.
There’s even talk of using the jellyfish for fishfeed or fertilizer.
If you’re in Tokyo on November 17 and 18, you may want to check out (or even set up a booth at) the 19th WORLD GENIUS CONVENTION and Education Expo 2005.
Sez the Expo’s website:
The World Genius Convention is your door to see first-hand the inventions that will change our world, and meet the people behind them. Only the best… winners of the top invention expo awards will attend the WGC. And for inventors, this is one of a kind of opportunity to show your genius talent, inventions, new products, and ideas…. hot new ideas and inventions to estimated 3,600,000 audiences (based on approximately 1,800,000 travelers per day at the exhibition dome by the Tokyo Station official report).
The Expo is being organized in part by the Dr. NakaMats Innovation Institute.
Author of How to become a superman lying down, Think by SUJI, PIKA and IKI, and 101 ways to improve brain activity, Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats is also the inventor of the floppy disk, and recently won an Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition science for taking photos of his every meal for 35 years and analyzing the effects of food on brain activity, health condition and life duration.
So check out the Expo - you may learn something.
British academic Jenny Clegg writes a piece for the China Daily Online - a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party about how, in China, “the wartime spirit (has) passed to next generation.”
As you might expect from someone writing for the China Daily, Clegg is critical of Japan:
China is now concerned that Japan, egged on by the United States, is seeking to remove the “peace clause” from its constitution, encouraging militarist elements and threatening involvement, through the US-Japan military alliance, in a conflict over Taiwan. As one Japanese veteran soldier - a convert to China’s resistance war - said: “Today, 60 years afterwards, the Japanese need to learn from history more than any other time in the past.”
Clegg declines to mention the changes that have occured in Japan since the war: the emergence of an open, democratic society based on free enterprise, freedom of speech and the rule of law, and she also neglects to observe that while Japan enjoys all these things, China does not.
Japan has apologized to China for its conduct during the war numerous times since diplomatic ties were restored between the two countries in the 1970s, and there is also no mention of the significant amounts of cash and investment that have poured into China from its old enemy, Japan.
In a way, it’s good that Clegg, a writer from a supposedly liberal and democratic country like Britain, has chosen to write for a state-sponsored organ like the People’s Daily. It reminds us that not everyone in the West or on the Left (or the Right, for that matter) is interested in promoting democracy, and there are some who, rather than working toward rapprochment, are instead beating the drum for war.
It’s easy to see why Orwell grew to despise the post-war Left, which was so enarmored with Stalinism. And make no mistake - Clegg is no Bethune.
Anthony Faiola has written another rote piece on Japan for the Washington Post, this time about the oft-reported phenomenon of sodai gomi.
Sakura Terakawa, 63, describes her four decades of married life in a small urban apartment as a gradual transition from wife to mother to servant. Communication with her husband started with love letters and wooing words under pink cherry blossoms. It devolved over time, she said, into mostly demands for his evening meals and nitpicking over the quality of her housework.
So when he came home one afternoon three years ago, beaming, and announced he was ready to retire, Terakawa despaired.
” ‘This is it,’ I remember thinking. ‘I am going to have to divorce him now,’ ” Terakawa recalled. “It was bad enough that I had to wait on him when he came home from work. But having him around the house all the time was more than I could possibly bear.”
It’s sort of an interesting enough article - Faiola reports that many Japanese women suffer from a stress disorder called RHS due to the unwanted presence of their retired husbands - but it’s hardly news, especially from a reporter who specializes on Japan topics for the Washington Post. And the issue has been reported on in the English language media in Japan for years.
As well, the entire “love letters and wooing words under pink cherry blossoms” stuff is a little suspect, too. The entire idea of marrying for romantic love is a recent affectation imported from the West. Arranged marriages were the norm for today’s 65-year-old cohort, as were strict ideas about the roles and responsibilities for each partner in the marriage.
Kind of makes you wish the Post and all the other papers out there could find stringers who actually understand Japan and write stories that dig a little deeper, and go beyond stereotypes.
Akibakei seems to be slowly taking over this blog. In celebration, we offer you the Sack II. Even nerds must stay safe. And by the way, otaku are not geeks, per se, they are indeed nerds. Geeks have poor social skills, work in convenience stores; network engineers are almost always geeks.
However, anyone can be a nerd - you just have to have an unnatural passion that can be briefly satiated by collecting things. I’m a nerd, and am fond of Buddhist kitcsh. I collect Books Esoterica.
From demonbaby.
While China has complained a lot about the state of Japanese textbooks, China has being doing a little historical revisionism of its own. Reports the Chosun Ilbo:
Ever-vigilant over what it sees as Japan’s distortions of history, China is pushing ahead with some rewriting of its own to suppress mention of a separate Korean identity in its textbooks. The Chinese Foreign Ministry in August last year erased reference to some pre-1948 Korean history on its website, and now all accounts of pre-modern Korean history, including the Koguryo kingdom, are gone from a world history textbook for ethnic Korean- students in Yanbian, Jilin Province.
More here.
Wikipedia on Koguryo.
We’ve all been there before: graduate from college, hop on a plane to someplace in Asia, and make a few bucks teaching English. Lesson plans? Whatever. Create interesting activities that help students learn the language? They don’t pay me enough. Respect the local laws that force you to seperate your garbage? Get real - I’m a foreigner, and I’m immune from such rules.
Sound familiar? Well, if you’re an English teacher in Korea, that’s all about to change.
The South Korean government is starting to crack down on “illegal English teachers” in that country (good Heavens!) reports the Globe and Mail, and to get rid of these nincompoops the authorities have compiled a dossier “an inch thick” lisiting foreign ESL teachers practicing their trade in Korea with forged diplomas:
Nearly 50 English teachers from Canada have been detained, deported or investigated on allegations of visa fraud in South Korea, a country seeking to purge itself of young Westerners increasingly regarded as unqualified, unruly and unwelcome.
Long a magnet for foreigners drawn to working overseas, Korea has arrested hundreds of them in the past couple of weeks. Immigration officials have been rounding up dozens of teachers at their homes, work, or at the airports.
While as many as 10,000 foreigners legally teach the language at private English schools in Korea, the nation’s media have been full of exposés about teachers with dubious credentials.
Many of the foreign teachers, if not most, are Canadian.
What’s more pathetic: teaching English in Korea without a degree, or persecuting people who teach English without a degree?
Chase out the White Devils!
Kotobuki is one of those amazing bands you discover in a fair trade shop in Kanazawa that changes your life, at least for a little while. The band is made up of Nabi, who hails from Hiroshima, and Yoshimitsu, who’s from Okinawa, and the duo has been playing together for close to twenty years.
While they claim to be inspired by reggae, funk, the blues and world music, Kotobuki is first and foremost an Okinawan band. About half of the songs on Tsuide Yukumono (We inherit the past and continue on) are sung and played in the Okinawan style, and the whole CD dwells in the by-turns hushed and elegiac world of island life.
An Okinawan boy experiences his first day at school and realizes he doesn’t know how to speak Japanese, the sound of insects in a moonlit night, the sight of clouds soaring above Karayama - Nabi’s broad, beautiful voice soars and calls, while Yoshimitsu plays an assortment of traditional Okinawan and contemporary instruments..
When I came into the world, everyone was glad
In the enveloping night, there was the light of the moonWhen you died, everyone was weeping
But even on that spring evening, there was the light of the moon
An amazing band to listen to while driving home from work on a snowy Hokuriku night, with the only sight outside the car windows driving snow, a glowing metallic sky and frozen fields, stretching out into the dark.
Aki wa shokuyku, as they say in Japanese - Autumn really brings out your appetite.
Japundit has displayed quite a sexual appetite recently, and we’d like to continue this by introducing you to Erobun, a company that makes perverted office supplies. Mr. Old Butt (above), is intended to serve as a twisted pencil holder.
Once you get to the site, click on the links (Erobun, like many Japanese websites, uses an archaic, frames-based web design) to find out about some goofy things to stick in your pencil case…and other places.
And bug Peter Payne at the simply superb J-List to start carrying them.
Remember the Giri Giri girls? How about the T-Back craze that swept Japan in the early 90’s? Sorry you missed it? Well, you’re in luck - RobPongi has kindly posted Japanese TV T&A highlights from yesteryear here.
Check it out before all of his bandwidth is gobbled up!
