And now for something completely different (as they say)…

Hitotoki: a narrative map of Tokyo.

From Mainichi:

Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine has found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands — a rap song dedicated to kamikaze pilots and using lyrics from their farewell letters written immediately before their suicide missions,

More the Roppongi Hills Gang than the Sugarhill Gang, it’s hardly ‘Fight For Your Right (To Party)’.

Still, those swords can be considered ‘bling’, can’t they?

Just don’t mention the Wu-Tang Clan to them.

Listen to an Arei Raise rap track here.

Well, as the previous music item’s comments section seemed to veer off in a Guitar Wolf direction, would only be fair to put this up.

While we’re waxing nostalgic about Japanese music, crazed rocker Julian Cope has recently published his Japrocksampler (to compliment his earlier but now out of print Krautrocksampler), which, according to the British New Statesman, details the time when:

Tokyo, 1969. The Spiders, the Mops and myriad other identically suited “Group Sound” beat combos making post-Beatles guitar pop are on the decline, as politicised foku geira (folk guerrilla) figures such as the camouflage-clad Dr Acid Seven gain popularity. The city’s Shinjuku district becomes Tokyo’s Haight-Ashbury, filled with young people following the futen ideal - a uniquely Japanese take on the west’s drop-outs, hippies and psychedelic wanderers.

Spotted on a trip to Paris recently…

China is sending out two virtual police officers to patrol the Internet to combat online pornography and other “illicit activity”, state media said on Wednesday.

The virtual officers, a man and a woman, “will appear either on motorcycles, in a car or on foot, at the bottom of users’ computer screens every 30 minutes to remind them of Internet security,” the China Daily said.

But more importantly, has the repressive state apparatus in China gone kawaii?

The X Factor can be a big deal in the UK, being the country that invented the format.

However, the Japanese community in the UK is apparently up in arms about one contestant, “Totoshko’s, claim to have come to audition all the way from Japan (”She’s so Chinese!” I was told), claiming she is in fact a fake.

What do you reckon?

The Scotsman is reporting an invasion of Japanese fans for a music festival featuring 1980s and 1990s British indie acts.

The author Dennis Cooper has something of a Japanese porn extravaganza going on, over at his blog.

Japanese magician Princess Tenko has been seriously injured in a sword trick that went wrong.

The illusionist was trapped in a box by ten metal swords during a show in the Japanese city of Sabae, breaking several ribs and her right cheek.

BBC News

Seriously though, I hope she recovers soon.

GamesBids.com reports that Governor Ishihara unveiled the logo for Tokyo’s stab at hosting the 2016 Olympic Games yesterday.

Looks like an awareness ribbon of some description to my eyes.

OK, everyone likes j-Pop and with songs like ‘My Cuty Boy’, how can this act fail?

Oh, wait, the name. Might want to work on that, girls.

OK, at first this story from Kanagawa reads quite simple:

According to the board of education, the teacher, who is in his 20s, attached the note to the student’s back as punishment after a female student complained that some boys were trying to sneak into their changing room. Without confirming the facts, the teacher accused the boy and made him wear the note which read: “I am an idiot. I tried but failed to sneak into the girls’ changing room.”

Teacher punished for pinning humiliating note on student’s back, yes, I can see why he might merit being disciplined.

However, at no point in the article is there any comment on the fact that the said teacher pulled the student up about his failure to spy on girls getting nekkid. We can only assume had he succeeded then teacher would have given him a gold star.

From Mainichi:

Koichi Toyama, a controversial candidate in the April gubernatorial election in Tokyo, has been arrested for traffic violations, police said.

Toyama, 36, was arrested for violating the Road Traffic Law on Tuesday after he denied the allegations and rejected repeated orders to turn himself in to a local police station.

On Jan. 17, 2006, Toyama was caught riding a motorcycle in the wrong direction on a one-way municipal road in Kagoshima. On July 10, last year, he was also riding a motorcycle at 50 kilometers per hour, 20 kilometers per hour in excess of the speed limit, police said.

Officers issued traffic violation tickets at the scenes, but he denied the allegations. He also refused to pay the fines.

I knew they’d get their revenge. He’s only questioning authority, leave the guy alone.

A Japanese politician has become the first of the nation’s lawmakers to open a cyber office on the internet-based virtual world Second Life, according to the BBC.

Why Japanese women retain their youthful looks well into their 20s?

It’s not mom’s miso soup, that’s for sure.

Update: 08/11/07:
A later article in the weekly Asahi Geino claims that a tug on the sack may be of theraputic benefit to men!

Or so says some sections of the UK press:

It’s no surprise that both police and press are desperate for an angle. What’s more interesting is the spotlight of blame swinging towards such an obscure cranny of the cultural stage. Perhaps manga’s time has come.

What do you think?

Hikikomori by Ellen Kennedy and Tao Lin claims to be the first novel about hikikomori published in English.

You can read it in its entirity here.

Japan Focus has a piece up by Arudou Debito titled ‘Gaijin Hanzai Magazine and Hate Speech in Japan: The newfound power of Japan’s international residents’.

I’m fully aware of what many of Japundit’s readers think to Gaijin Hanzai and Debito’s litigation efforts in the past, but his article does raise some useful points of debate. Why is it so wrong for Japanese women to engage in (consensual) heavy petting with gaijin in public, while perverted chikan on trains go uncommented on? Why is crime perpetrated by Chinese and Koreans in Shinjuku so noteworthy compared to that of the (proportionately higher) yakuza?

Or as the publication itself puts it, “You bitches!! Are gaijin really all that good??” I’ll leave it to female readers from Japan to comment on that one.

They didn’t provide us with any hands-on training or even an instruction manual, so at least in the beginning, the blow jobs we dispensed really sucked — in the negative sense of the term.

Read on…