Police were called to a domestic disturbance on Saturday night in Atsuta.
Six officers were dispatched to the scene and the man walked out onto the road to greet them, carrying an 18-liter jerry can filled with kerosene. He walked about 200 meters along the road, pouring kerosene over his head as he did so on three separate occasions, using about 5 liters of the flammable liquid.
Incredibly, rather than arrange for the man to have a change of clothes, the police interrogated the man while he was still wearing the kerosene-soaked clothes. They then gave him cigarettes and a lighter when he asked them. The report then becomes a little unclear, but it appears he was then left alone in the interrogation room for 15 minutes during which time he smoked several cigarettes, without by some miracle setting himself alight. It was only later being interviewed by three more officers that the fateful spark occurred.
Deputy Chief Michiharu Kondo, in criticising the officers, added rather inappropriately that the man shouldn’t even have been given cigarettes because the police station has a no-smoking policy.
There’s a report in the Mainichi entitled Booming popularity doubles accident rate at Tokyo’s Mt. Takao, which tells that “there were 43 reported accidents on the mountain last year, almost double the average number from each year from 2004 to 2006.”
Those who go unprepared come in for a roasting from Kenichiro Maruyama, head of the Takao Police Station’s Alpine Rescue Taskforce who says, “OK, so it’s only a small mountain, but it’s a mountain nonetheless. Not thinking enough about what’s needed for mountain climbing is inviting trouble.”
Quite so.
Police are urging anybody visiting Mt. Takao to take appropriate preparations beforehand, including having a plan on how to get down the mountain, preparing sufficient equipment such as water, rain gear and flashlights, understand that mobile phones won’t always work in the area and make reports on planned hikes on Mt. Takao before setting off.
To further underline this point about lack of preparedness, the report states that “many accidents are reported among [...] women going to the mountain while wearing high-heeled shoes.”
A group of Japanese mountaineers setting out on an expedition, yesterday
planning on visiting japan?
thinking you can get by on your bank of america card and local atms?
think you’ll be fine because you told boa’s fraud department you’d be in japan during the dates of the trip and will be making regular withdraws?
For those needing another statistic indicating that the Japanese population is aging, the National Police Agency (NPA) has revealed that people 65 and older accounted just about half of all traffic fatalities last year.
The poll showed there were 2,727 elderly people who died in traffic accidents in 2007, making up 47.5 percent of all traffic accident fatalities across the nation, which stood at 5,744 in total. The figure was the highest since records started being kept in 1967.
Meanwhile, traffic fatalities involving young people aged between 16 and 24 stood at 670 in 2007, about one-third of the figure reported in 1997.
Before giving the impression that demented geezers are dying because they are running into brick walls in their Toyotas, it should be pointed out that half of the fatalities involved seniors being killed while they were on foot.
Two men died after choking on traditional mochi rice cake in Tokyo on Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting authorities to issue a warning for elderly people who eat the sticky New Year’s treat.
The Tokyo Fire Department said Wednesday that 13 people had been taken to hospital after choking on rice cake during the two days. Of them, a 59-year-old man of Ota Ward and 83-year-old man of Adachi Ward died.
Department officials said seniors should eat mochi in the presence of others after cutting the cake into pieces.
Five people died in the Kanto area on Tuesday and Wednesday after choking on sticky “mochi” rice cake, it was learned Thursday.
In Tokyo, a total of 13 people were rushed to hospital on New Year’s Day and the following day after choking on mochi, according to the Tokyo Fire Department. Two of them — a 59-year-old man from Ota-ku and an 83-year-old man from Adachi-ku — died on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.
A 71-year-old man from Oyama, Tochigi Prefecture, a 76-year-old man from Tomioka, Gunma Prefecture, and another man living in Yokohama also died after choking on the bubblegum-textured rice cake.
Mochi is traditionally served during the New Year’s period in Japan.
A 76-year-old man choked to death at a railway station in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, on Thursday afternoon, after choking on a mochi rice cake, police said. Tomosaku Ohira, from Saitama City, abruptly fell at JR Kawagoe Station around 2:10 p.m. and was rushed to a nearby hospital after paramedics found the mochi stuck in his throat.
Ohira was pronounced dead at the hospital three hours later, police said. Ohira went out alone at about 10 a.m. without telling his family where he was going.
49-year-old Toshihiro Nagoya, of Nagasaki, was arrested on Sunday night after being discovered in a stranger’s bathtub.
Nagoya told police he sneaked into the house through a back door. The house’s owner, 47, and his wife were in another room and didn’t notice anything until they heard water splashing. Nagoya told police he had been drinking and wanted to take a bath because it was so cold outside.
I would have thought that splashing water about would have been the quietest part of drunkenly breaking into someone’s house, running yourself a bath and diving right in, but apparently not.
After three years of study, the Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission has determined that Shinkansen train sflying along the rails at 200 kph are “vulnerable to earthquakes.”
The panel also reported that “safety measures should be worked out to prevent high-speed trains from veering sharply from their tracks in order to minimize any ensuing damage from an earthquake.”
Glad to see that the all that extra anti-terror training is obviously going to good use.
A Nanboku subway train in Sapporo was evacuated and inspected after a male passenger found a sewing pin on a seat Monday morning and reported it to the carrier, police said. The man noticed the 5-cm pin at around 7:40 a.m. and reported it when he got off at Sapporo Station. No one was injured.
The Sapporo City Transportation Bureau ordered the subway operator to evacuate the train, which had reached Kita-sanjuyo-jo Station, and inspect it. No other pins were found, and the train resumed operations.
No one was injured? Phew, that was close! No other pins were found? Thank goodness, this must have been a one-off pin-terror attack.
Karma is very powerful among monks. If you do some harm to others you will receive equal harm. But this time the karma worked in mysterious ways. First the monk makes a hole in the floor and is injured. Then the poor model falls in the hole is the karma!!
Police are getting ready to perform an autopsy on a human leg, severed at the thigh, that was found recently floating in a river in downtown Tokyo.
Local police are set to examine how it was severed from its body.
Noting that many boats pass through the area as it is connected with the Sumida River, investigators pointed to the possibility that the leg was severed by the propeller of one of the boats.
No word yet on whether anyone has reported missing a leg.
Gizmodo has a scary photo showing a lightning bolt striking an airplane taking off at Osaka’s airport recently, then hitting the ground. There’s an even scarier video on the site.
Apparently lightning is not dangerous for airliners, since the charge just flows around their aluminum skin, but still… Gizmodo says no plane has crashed in the US because of lightning bolts in 40 years, even though every airliner in the country could get hit at least once, according to statistics.
But they also wonder “can anyone explain to this ignorant (me) person how 100 trillion (million million) watts can hit a plane and nothing happens to the electronics inside, while my cell can wreak havoc emitting just a few microwaves?”
The China Daily is reporting that a woman in Taiwan who had undergone breast enhancement surgery three years ago had one of her bosoms deflate after being stung by a bee.
The report claims that she was shocked when her right breast wenrt flat two days after being stung.
Shortly after that, I saw video reports on TV news programs in Japan in which the president to China Airlines, Chao Kuo-shui, apologized to the passengers that were on the plane as he handed each one a red envelope containing a 100-dollar bill as “compensation money.” Though a number of passengers, who lost all of the baggage they had with them in the fire, expressed disdain at such a paltry sum, a China Airlines spokesman said, “We believe the passengers accepted our sincere apologies.”
After the accident, photographs and video footage of the jet continued to appear in news reports, and the company apparently painted over the name and logo to limit further damage to its image.
Before
After
According to a spokesperson from China Airlines, “We followed international procedures. We do not have detailed information.”
Atlus, the makers of an arm-wrestling game, Arm Spirit, have announced its withdrawal from 150 game centres nationwide “as a precaution” after it was revealed that three gamers weren’t just beaten by the game, but had their arm broken!
A spokesperson for Atlus was quick to point out where the fault lay though.
The machine isn’t that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it. We think that maybe some players get overexcited and twist their arms in an unnatural way…
Oh, dissed hard. Not only (well) beaten by a machine, but beaten by a machine that even girls can beat…
Arm Spirit gamers advance through 10 levels, pitting their strength against a French maid, a drunken martial arts master and a Chihuahua dog before reaching the final challenge - a professional wrestler.
Get the machine on TV, I say. Put a handful of shrieking tarento up against Arm Spirit, and let’s have some real entertainment.
Here is one of those stories that seems to totally bear out Mark Twain’s famous remark that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, while truth isn’t.
An off-duty police officer is driving along and decides, for some reason, to run a red light. He is spotted by officers in a patrol car who order him to stop but he takes off. During the chase he runs into a woman on a motorcycle that was waiting at another intersection. Luckily, the woman was not injured, and the off-duty cop continues to flee, eventually eluding the chasing officers and making good his escape.
Except for that one little detail called the license plate number.
After being arrested, the officer said, “I fled because I was scared that they would find out I was a police officer.”
According to an official, the bridge that collapsed recently in China in an accident that killed at least 41 people was made of rocks and concrete in order to achieve “harmony with the environment.”
“While the cause of the collapse is still unknown, a local official at the scene claimed that a ‘traditional and risky’ model of bridge, made of stone and concrete, had been chosen over a steel structure to ensure it remained ‘in harmony with the natural environment’,” the China Daily said.
The 54-year-old man noticed that his right leg had been cut off about 10 centimeters below the knee when he arrived at an interchange on the Hamana Bypass of Route 1 in Hamamatsu. Another motorcyclist traveling with him returned to the median strip to pick up the severed leg. He was rushed to a local hospital with his severed leg in an ambulance.
The video below shows a crash test conducted by a leading Russian car magazine on the Chery Amulet (which some wags say should be renamed the Chery Accordian), one of the top-selling Chinese car models in Russia.
University officials announced the mix-up on Friday. The problem was uncovered after about 80 students at the campus who drank the water in July fell ill, with symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea.
Officials said the pipes for high quality drinking water and low grade toilet flushing water at the gymnasium on the campus had been attached the wrong way around. They said it was believed the pipes had been fitted incorrectly since the gymnasium was completed in April 1993.
Atlus, the makers of an arm-wrestling game, Arm Spirit, have announced its withdrawal from 150 game centres nationwide “as a precaution” after it was revealed that three gamers weren’t just beaten by the game, but had their arm broken!
According to a BBC 