We recently have had people posting in the comments section of the Japundit News Pages about an organization called Automart Japan.

Japundit has never done business with Automart Japan and so we are not in a position to comment either way. However, we are providing this space as a public service to those who have been posting notes on the news pages.

The whole thing started with the following post by member dmogwe.

Early in August this year while looking for a bargain of a used car I came across this site http://www.automartjapan.com. I then made enquiries regarding a particular vehicle that I was interested in and subsequently I was sent an invoice for US 2,300.00. the Name of this company was AUTO MART JAPAN and i was dealing with some people called Richard Bent and Suzuki Junko. subsequently i wired the funds on the 19th. August 2008 and some days later the website changed and these guys were silent. I have tried to get help from The Japanese Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association without any success. The details of the bank where I wired the money are:
The bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFG Ltd.
Ueno Brach,
1-14-4 higashi Ueno, Taito Ku, Tokyo, 110-0015 , Japan
the account holder: Auto Mart Japan
Account Number: 5463066

to date no one has helped me in getting to the bottom of this.

On October 1, 2008, Japanese manufacturing giant Matsushita Electric officially retired both its corporate name and the National brand and brought all of its product lines under the Panasonic label. The Matsushita and National brands had previously been used–mostly in Japan–for industrial parts and equipment in the former case and kitchen appliances in the latter (called shiromono in Japanese, or “white goods”).

The National/Panasonic distinction remains pretty fixed in my mind. My little National rice cooker (white enamel finish, natch) is a quarter century old and still works fine. I have a Panasonic VCR and DVD player. At least for the time being, it’s weird to see “Panasonic” on a toaster or refrigerator. I expect there to be a radio in it or something. Then again, computerized toilets are big in Japan, so maybe it’s not that big a reach.

Official press release

Eugene Woodbury

www.eugenewoodbury.com

You can pick almost any area to compare Japan with the U.S.: history, culture, sports — or if you like, convenience stores. The modern combini came to Japan in 1974 with the opening of the first Seven-Eleven here, a project which got its start when Japanese businessman Hideo Shimizu took a bus trip across the U.S. looking for the “next big thing” and fell in love with the idea of stores that offered items customers might need to buy on short notice, sold in a uniform way. Now there are dozens of convenience store chains here, including Lawson (“your town’s hot station”), Sunkus (the name is a bizarre merging of “sun” and “thanks”), FamilyMart, MiniStop, Heart-In, and Yamazaki Daily Store.

While most of the foods sold at U.S. convenience stores are pre-packaged and highly processed, many of the offerings in their Japanese counterparts are downright wholesome, with traditional Japanese-style food (bento and onigiri), Western favorites like cucumber and strawberry sandwiches, bread products including sliced bread as well as specialty items like Curry Pan, a good selection of salads, dozens of types of bottled Asian and Western teas, aloe-flavored yogurt, and so on.

Convenience stores are the salvation of the single male since there are enough healthy choices that you can usually eat pretty well there without resorting to that most famous of bachelor foods, instant ramen, although they sell that, too.

You won’t find the iconic Slurpee or Big Gulp at Seven-Elevens in Japan, but I’d give them up any day in exchange for niku-man, a steamed Chinese bun filled with meat that’s great in the winter.

Combini offer other forms of convenience, too, like a full color copier and digital photograph printer, the ability to pay your electric and phone bills at the cash register, shipping services for sending packages, and increasingly, real banking services, including making cash withdrawals and deposits using the smart ATM.

That first pilot store back in 1974 has really paid off: Seven-Eleven’s parent company Seven&i Holdings purchased its parent company in 2005 and now owns the brand worldwide.

I remember my first payday after coming to work as a teacher in Japan, being handed an envelope containing my entire month’s salary in cash, which was quite a surprise to me.

Japan has always been a very cash-oriented society, with no equivalent to personal checks or money orders, and when making purchases most people will pay in 10,000 yen bills. Credit cards exist here of course, but they’re much less common than in the U.S., and to get one you need to pass a strict credit check and have been employed at the same company for at least a year — a far cry from the pre-approved credit cards I’d get in my mailbox back in college.

A few years ago, we bought the plot of land behind our home, I remember going to pay for it in cash, counting out the bills for the previous owner as we finalized the contract.

Of course, the only thing constant in the world is change, and Japanese are slowly adopting alternate ways of paying for products, such as Suica, a rechargeable contactless smart card that can be used to pay for train tickets, food purchases and so on.

One of the most innovative ideas I’ve seen in a long time are the cell phone with Suica cards built into them, so all you need is your phone and you can pay for just about anything.

Great news for all you lovers of wacky Japanese products out there with the announcement that Thanko has added an English portal to their Rare Mono Shop.

Via Akiba Today

And are all of these offensive?

Here is a pizza flavored pretzel commercial from Japanese TV, which uses the Italian word bongiorno, so I guess it insults the honor of two nations with one stone.

British bank HSBC has been accused of the modern mortal sin of (Gasp!!)”cultural insensitivity” for an ad campaign that uses the image of a sumo wrestler in posters like the one shown below.

• A spokesman for the Japan Society, said: ‘My colleagues don’t like this advertisement, and you can understand how some Japanese people in the UK would find this ad offensive.’
• The head of the British Sumo Federation, said: ‘It looks terrible and it is insensitive to have made him up to look Japanese. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to get someone over from Japan who could adopt the proper athletic pose. I turn the page quite quickly when I see it. The whole thing is bloody awful. I’d like them to drop the advert. For a company that size, I would have thought they could use a little more judgment. They’ve shot themselves in the foot.’
• The director of the Anglo-Japanese Society of Wessex, said the advertisement ‘insulted the honour of a nation, ‘ and: ‘The fact that the picture depicts a sumo wrestler who is not actually a sumo wrestler but has been made up to look like one would be considered a high insult to the Japanese community. It is culturally insensitive.’

Mrs: JP says: “I don’t see anything wrong with it. If people are so small that they get upset over something like this, we’ll never make any progress in dealing with the larger problems of the world.” (She also made a remark about the people who complain about such things having size problems in certain parts of their anatomy, but we won’t go into that here.)

Check out this photo of a vehicle that belongs to a budget rental outfit in Cairns, Australia, named Wicked Campervans, a company that seems to get a real kick out of thumbing its nose at just about everyone.

Outraged cairns.com.au reader Mark sent a photograph of the van to us after his Japanese wife spotted it parked in their Bayview Heights street while driving their eight-year-old daughter to school.

“It’s terrible. If you walked around in a T-shirt with that written on it in English, you would be arrested,” he said.

His said he and his wife had tried to stop their daughter, who can read Japanese, from seeing the van, which was parked in the street for several days before leaving overnight.

Via cairns.com.au

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.”

according to an article in the new york times online,written by norimitsu onishi, the ashes in a japanese urn are an apt metaphor for the future of the system of funeral buddhism in the country.

where as in the past, the japanese reliably counted on buddhist priest’s and their rituals as a source of comfort during the time surrounding the death of a loved one, many now are choosing to go with services provided funeral homes or cremations with no services at all (preferring instead to dump their loved one’s remains in the nearest ashtray and keep their kaimyo in the toilet in case they need something to aim at when they’re drunk).

photo of a priest staring disinterestedly at a wall, hat tip to the old grey lady

while there are a myriad of reasons for this shift in attitudes towards death and the proper place of religion during this time, to numerous to be discussed in detail here, there are a few notable trends listed in the articles.

1) the accelerated drop in religious belief in the cities combined with their ever increasing populations has led to a large group of people who have no religious belief whatsoever and see no need to start on the day of their death.

2) the rural demographic, where until recently buddhism was still strong, is aging and dying off as the younger generations move to cities and the birthrates are not enough to make up for the exodus of population and businesses. this leaves country temples serving an ever dwindling number of less affluent elderly to serve, thus making many temples financially insecure.

3) the sense of japanese that buddhism doesn’t cater to the needs of the living, thus making them more indifferent to what it teaches about what happens after death; and the lack of change in that area the clerics seem to want to make in this regard.

4) a lack of moral authority apparent in the buddhist temples since the end of wwii when they began to sell prestigious posthumous names to people who paid them enough money, thus denigrating names once reserved for revered buddhist adherents with strong moral characters to an indulgence of sorts. as appropriate in situations like these payments are usually made in unmarked in envelopes on a no receipt-cash only basis.

5) the general expense of traditional funerals combined with new rent a priests employed by funeral homes to provide services for people they most likely have never met before and willing to provide honest listings of fraudulent extravagant titles that can be attained at rock bottom prices and you get a receipt.

all these factors are combining together to create an a daunting challenge to the continuing existence of temples across the country. with funeral expenses being analogous in importance to these temples as tithing is to churches and synagogues in the west in terms of revenue sources, many priests face being the last generation of clerics ministering their religion in japan.

as a consequence many temples are expected to close their doors over the coming decades, taking with them (they claim) a major source of local history and sense of community and continuity in their local precincts. of course some of the major private and state sponsored temples and unesco tourists sites will be unaffected, but many charming repositories of small town rural culture will be disappearing. so if you always wanted to visit that one out of the way zen garden that somehow escaped being listed in the travel guides and is free of tourists, now might be a good time.

soon places like this might be overgrown memories of a different age

few random closing thoughts…
a) what’s going to happen to all the libraries of coin lockers supposedly holding parishioners souls? talk about a crappy afterlife, you’re closed in a hole in the wall until the local priest can’t make ends meet and then bulldozed; lame.

b) i find it darkly humorous that the priests see many of the sources of their decline, recognize they are preventable, and then do nothing. this lethargy in response to their situation seems to come from a certain amount of apathy about their beliefs. they talk about how other religions provide sermons and community services outside of funerals to keep their faith relevant to their congregations as if it would be some theoretically nice thing to do, and then take no action to emulate. has buddhism in japan become this esoteric that it no longer has an application in people’s daily lives? i suspect that it’s just laziness on the part of the priests

c) perhaps this is just the logical conclusion to japan’s seeming cognitive dissonance on the issue of religion. after all if you don’t believe in it and didn’t live your life according to its precepts and went to your death this way, how would having an extravagant funeral change this? it you believe that human existence ends when the lungs stop breathing, the heart stops beating, and the neurons stop firing signals through their dendrites why waste your money to commemorate, dedicate, exalt, and provide a home for a soul you don’t even believe exists? and if you do believe in a deity or higher power of some sort exists, do you really think that a life spent living in sin and unbelief can be made up for by having a really cool name and a nice funeral? i guess these types of services are more for the living, but if that’s true why not remember the dead in your own way? it would be a lot more meaningful and cost effective than spending over ten thousand dollars for a piece of lacquered wood and empty platitudes from some guy who never even met the deceased.

d) think of the boon to the horror movie industry. decrepit buildings, abandoned alters, moss covered statues, rooms with soul lockers; this will be great!