Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the “kanji of the year,” the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months.

Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers’ victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise, meaning “fake” or “fraud,” due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they’d look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based “Meat Hope,” which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products.

So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue. The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production. In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more — bleah.

or yet another entry in my long series of crap that no one reads

in response to the horrible stabbing spree in akihabara, tokyo, japan a few weeks ago the japanese national police agency has once again shown why policy changes proposed during the height of public panic and tragedy have such a reputation for being well thought out, logically consistent, and effective in practice.

it has been decided that the most effective way to prevent such incidents from happening in the future is to help strengthen the familial and social bonds within japanese communities to reduce feelings of alienation and bitter isolation in the nation’s citizenry. to educate citizens on what to watch for in individuals that might indicate possible instability and what to do. to take steps to decrease the stigma associated with mental illness and the shame which prevents families and friends from reporting strange behavior to get counseling and medication for their loved ones. to increase the penalties for those who commit violent crime, and to revamp laws to favor self defense and empower people to stop criminals like this before hostile situations get further out of hand. all while recognizing that no matter what legislation is enacted, not all murders can be prevented or tragedies averted.

no, i’m just kidding, they want to ban double bladed knives and increase the restrictions on guns. to quote the article:

A panel of legal and other experts has submitted a report to the National Police Agency, saying daggers and other double-edged knives should be banned “to prevent their use in serious crimes. Such knives are “originally intended for stabbing and are highly dangerous…The panel…also recommends tightening laws on firearms

obviously all such incidents and stabbings could be prevented if only the authorities only took away every dagger, hunting, bowie, butterfly, switchblade, exacto and pocket knife, church key, and letter opener in the country. maybe they could melt them down into a healing image of hello kitty to commemorate the loss of lives in akihabara. i mean its not like people could find an alternative murder weapon. or that single edged knives could possibly hurt anybody. or that any of these blades have legitimate uses besides stabbing people. or that knives in japan are already regulated to help prevent crimes like this. or that those laws failed to prevent this massacre. or…

while they’re at it why not just outlaw the wedge? it is after all the most evil of the simple machines.

and i think we can all make the logical conclusion that a madman running down innocent people in a car, then getting out of the car and stabbing others with a knife until stopped by a heroic group of officers carrying firearms, is really an issue resulting from lax gun regulation and slap on the wrist gun crime laws. we all know that had hunting rifles been illegal the aum attack would never had happened. and if paintball guns didn’t exist, neither would takuma. seriously though, wtf?

i guess they’ll be coming after video games next. it would complete the trifecta of stupidity after all. if only children weren’t allowed to see violence they wouldn’t be violent, etc., etc.

but if japan wants to insist on banning items that can be used as weapons and strengthening laws on items already restricted then i’ll help them with my own non-comprehensive list of things to be banned.

i think this would be a good start, murder would probably vanish, and the ignored mentally ill would most likely join hands and sing songs under a rainbow.

It’s official! Osaka prefecture has been declared the sexual assault capital of Japan according to statistics maintained by Japan’s National Police Agency.

According to the data, last year one in every 4,200 female residents of Osaka was raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. This compares to one in every 4,600 in Tokyo.

The Osaka rate is double that of Kanagawa Prefecture, which has a similar number of female residents, and nearly five times that of Yamagata Prefecture, which is the safest prefecture for women in Japan.

According to the police, many victims of rape or other sexual assault last year lived alone in apartments. Most of them were attacked from behind soon after opening the door of their apartment. Some offenders managed to enter buildings equipped with auto-lock systems by waiting for a resident to open the door, and then hid in stairwells until they found a target.

Many victims also were attacked on the street while talking on their cell phone, an activity police said can give people a false sense of security about their personal safety.

“People let their guard down when they are on their way home, or talking to people [who they feel close to]. It’s the most dangerous moment,” a police officer said.

So what steps has Osaka taken to deal with the situation? Well, the prefectural police force has assigned two full-time female police officers to a telephone consultation service called Woman Line.

Feel any safer?

The New York Times has a report about Huang Qi, a Chinese human rights advocate who, ironically told National Public Radio recently that there have been great improvements in the human rights situation in China.

BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”

There is no official death toll for the children who died in schools during the Shichuan Province earthquake on May 12. According to estimates by the Chinese government, seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed.

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.

An Osaka man has been arrested for a string of convenience store hold-ups that netted some 587,000 yen, which he used to feed his two dogs, five cats, five turtles, two snakes, and tropical fish.

Dubbed “The Dogman,” Takaharu Kawata would rob convenience stores at knifepoint while wearing an oversized black-and-white dog mask.

Mr Kawata, who is unemployed and living on welfare, was arrested in March while he was attempting to rob a convenience store. He is suspected of having robbed two stores previously.

Despite receiving monthly benefits of 120,000 yen ($1170), Mr Kawata said he did not have enough money to cover the basic necessities for him and his pets.

He was reportedly without the mask when he was arrested, saying that his beagle - which he apparently bought with stolen cash - had ripped it up.

WARNING

The video after the jump is very graphic.

Japanese authorities have executed Tsutomu Miyazaki, a killer who murdered four little girls in the late 1980’s, ate their remains, drank their blood, and sent parts of their remains to their parents.

Miyazaki’s death sentence was finalized in February 2006, when the Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions that ruled he was mentally competent to take responsibility for his crimes committed in 1988 and 1989 in Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture.

“He had killed four girls to satisfy his sexual desire,” the Supreme Court ruling said.
During his trial, Miyazaki repeatedly claimed that “a rat man” appeared before he killed the girls. He also said he ate the wrist of one of the girls.

His victims ranged in age from 4 to 7.

Miyazaki reportedly remained unrepentant of his crimes right until the end. In fact, he wrote a letter to Kyodo News shortly before Japan’s Supreme Court upheld his death sentence claiming that he had done “a good thing.” According to one of his defense attorneys, Miyazaki was quite happy to be on death row, because it allowed him to read comic books all day.

Details about Miyazaki’s crimes here.

It’s been quite some time since we’ve had an armpit update here on JAPUNDIT, so without much further ado. . .

[A Singapore man has been arrested for molesting] 23 women over the course of 15 months, smelling their armpits and touching them in lifts, staircase landings and their homes[.] He was caught after a housewife reported him to the police.

The man has been sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strokes of the cane for his offensive offenses.

After the dreadful knife attack in Akihabara last week, it was discovered that the killer had announced his intent on an internet message board, but his threat was not taken seriously.

Well anything in that vein is being taken very seriously now. On Monday, police made two unconnected arrests of idiots posting online death threats.

Yo Suzuki, 29, of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture, was arrested after posting his intent to “to unleash an attack to ‘kill 100 people’ on the streets of Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district” on the 2-Channel bulletin board.

“I saw the TV coverage of the case in Akihabara and thought I’d create a bit of a stir,” Suzuki told the police, referring to the June 8 case where a random killer’s rampage on the Akihabara district of Tokyo claimed seven lives.

“I did it half as a joke,” he said.

Meanwhile in Fukuoka, a 17-year-old girl was arrested after using the same message board as Akihabara killer Tomohiro Kato, to threaten -

I intend to carry out a massacre at a station in Kyushu which will go down in history. I’m the same as Kato. I feel sympathy for him. I will be executed because I will kill more people than he did.

She too later claimed, “I was just joking. I didn’t imagine it would turn into such a big deal.” Well you got that wrong then didn’t you.

The Sankei Shinbun via Mainichi Wai Wai says it all.

Before his name appeared, he was only referred to as a patrol sergeant in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, age 41, who was on duty at the Akihabara “koban” (police box) on June 8.

Sergeant Ogino, who appears to be of medium build and height and who wears spectacles, is a 21-year veteran of the MPD. He is said to hold a 3rd-degree black belt in judo. The print and broadcast media has been full of photos, mostly taken at the scene by onlookers with cell phone cameras, in which he is shown pursing, confronting and overpowering Kato.

When the trouble began, Ogino unhesitatingly took action. This, of course, is what policemen are trained to do; but putting theory into practice is not always easy. Many Japanese cops might serve for an entire career and never be called to do anything more perilous than intercept a bicycle thief.

According to eyewitnesses, Ogino pursued Kato down a side street and confronted him with an extensible riot baton. Kato resisted, and the two clashed in what was described by one onlooker as looking like “actors in a samurai movie.”

In a detail left out of most of the news accounts, former prosecutor Atsuyuki Sassa, a well known media commentator, wrote in the Sankei Shinbun’s June 11 “Seiron” column that sergeant’s Ogino’s protective vest was ripped at three points where Kato’s dagger had struck, but was unable to penetrate.

While extending the riot baton in his left hand, Ogino then backed away from the perpetrator, unholstered his 9mm New Nambu revolver and ordered him to drop his knife. The assailant was then wrestled to the ground by Ogino and two other men, including an off-duty officer in plainclothes from a police station in neighboring Taito-ku Ward.

In most countries, the name and photo of the heroic cop would be splashed on the front page of every newspaper in the city. But to the best of this writer’s knowledge, it has appeared so far in just one weekly magazine — Shukan Shincho (June 19) — and one newspaper opinion-editorial, by the abovementioned Mr. Sassa. (Who remarked in the same op-ed piece that because the “Electric Town” is a major attraction to foreign tourists, “It’s a relief at least that no foreigners were among the victims.”)

Shukan Shincho must be credited for its efforts to go where the rest of the media has not. Its short piece (less than one full page of the magazine) quoted two police sources who favorably critiqued Ogino’s arrest technique.

“Making a perpetrator raise both hands and then sit down on the ground presumes the use of a handgun and could be said to be American-style,” a police source tells the magazine. “This method is also okay in Japan. But Sgt. Ogino should be praised for his judgment in deciding when to draw his revolver, after he’d chased [Kato] away from the main street where there were lots of people, and confirmed that there were no civilians in the vicinity.”

“His technique was textbook perfect,” a second police source tells the magazine, pointing to photos. “Look at the position of his riot baton. He struck the perp in the solar plexus and rammed him against the wall. He’d been rendered helpless. You can tell from the photo that [Kato] was in agony and about to crumple.”

I discussed the MPD’s reluctance to parade their heroic officer before the media with several of my colleagues in the fourth estate, and we generally agreed that although no amount of caution could have prevented Kato from going on his deadly rampage, the MPD still regards what transpired as a failure on its part. After all, seven people died and another 10 were injured in the space of a few minutes.

At the moment, the families of the seven victims are in mourning, and it would be inappropriate for the police to engage in self-congratulatory behavior.

Nevertheless Sassa feels Ogino warrants a prompt commendation from the top.

“As a former police official,” he writes in the Sankei, “I feel that many officers today are lacking in courage.” He goes on to cite several recent examples of overcaution and timidity by police.

Did his quick action make Ogino a rare exception?

“Of course,” opines Shukan Shincho’s writer, “for Sergeant Ogino, his gallantry in making a splendid arrest will never be forgotten.

The knife attacks in Akihabara on Sunday which left 7 dead and 11 injured, have made news the world over. Here is some of the coverage from the New York Times article:

A 25-year-old man who told the police he was tired of life went on a killing rampage in a popular shopping street in central Tokyo on Sunday, plowing his truck into a crowd of pedestrians before stabbing passers-by with a survival knife.

The police identified the attacker as Tomohiro Kato, who was living by himself in a small apartment in Shizuoka, just west of Tokyo. According to reports in the Japanese news media, Mr. Kato told the police that he had grown tired of life, “hated the world,” and had gone to Akihabara to kill people. “Anyone was O.K.,” he told the police, according to the reports.

I’m just glad he didn’t have a gun - the carnage could have been much worse.

The New York Times has an interesting article on whistle-blowing* in Japan.  The article contends that until recently whistle-blowing was unheard of in Japan for a variety of reasons including strong loyalty between employees and employers and a culture of not making waves.

The first high-profile instance of a corporate whistle-blower was in 2000, when an employee at Mitsubishi Motors exposed the company’s cover-up of accident-causing defects, including failing brakes and leaking fluids, generating investigations that led to arrests of executives and near bankruptcy for the automaker.

In one of the biggest recent scandals, a meat processor called Meat Hope collapsed in July after revelations that it had mixed pork, mutton and chicken into products falsely labeled as pure ground beef.  

Recent high-profile cases exposed by whistle-blowers include the cookie maker Ishiya Trading, which admitted to selling expired products, and luxury restaurant chain Senba Kitcho, which closed its four outlets after admitting it served leftover sashimi and expired food to customers.

*Bringing (usually illegal) wrong-doing to the public.

A Tokyo trucker, Masahiro Fujiwara, 47, has been arrested on charges of counterfeiting after using a colour photocopier to produce about 10 ¥10,000 notes.

His plan was to replace the bills in his wife’s purse with the fake ones, and go out drinking.

His wife, of course, had no notion that the money in her purse was fake, and spent two of the bills later. Which is when the fireworks started.

He reluctantly turned himself in to police after he was grilled by his wife, who suspected that the bills in her purse were fake, according to investigators.

Ah, the image that that sentence conjures up…

Japan’s criminal justice system is in the international spotlight this week with the release of a film produced by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) entitled ‘Presumed Guilty - Creating False Confessions‘ in which “former defendants talk about how they were forced to confess by investigators during interrogations.”

Tokyo lawyer Shinichiro Koike said “I hope many people [...] will watch this film and realize that confessions are ‘created.’ And I expect it to contribute to improving Japan’s judicial system.”

Koike, the lawyer, who has been working to improve the criminal judicial system for the past 30 years, said, ‘‘I have come to a new realization our system is in a terrible state than I thought through producing the film.’’

Even if a person is summoned by police on a voluntary basis, he or she is sometimes questioned for 14 hours a day without a break, and is scrutinized even when going to the bathroom, according to Koike.

‘‘Under these circumstances, anybody, even me, a lawyer, would be exhorted to make confessions,’’ he said.

More details available at Japan Times, which has the same article.

Jake Adelstein, an American reporter who has spend 15 years as a reporter for a Japanese language newspaper, posts a very interesting report about the problems the FBI has trying to get information about yakuza from the Japanese police department.

There’s talk in Japan of criminalizing simple possession, but some political parties (and publishers, who are raking in millions) oppose the idea. U.S. law enforcement officers want to stop the flow of yakuza-produced child porn into the United States and would support such a law. But they can’t even keep the yakuza themselves out of the country. Why? Because the national police refuse to share intelligence. Last year, a former FBI agent told me that, in a decade of conferences, the NPA had turned over the names and birthdates of about 50 yakuza members. “Fifty out of 80,000,” he said.

This lack of cooperation was partly responsible for an astonishing deal made with the yakuza, and for the story that changed my life. On May 18, 2001, the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto — a notorious Japanese gang boss, the one that some federal agents call the “John Gotti of Japan” — to be flown to the United States for a liver transplant.

Goto is alive today because of that operation — a source of resentment among Japanese law enforcement officials because the FBI organized it without consulting them. From the U.S. point of view, it was a necessary evil. The FBI had long suspected the yakuza of laundering money in the United States, and Japanese and U.S. law enforcement officials confirm that Goto offered to tip them off to Yamaguchi-gumi front companies and mobsters in exchange for the transplant. James Moynihan, then the FBI representative in Tokyo who brokered the deal, still defends the operation. “You can’t monitor the activities of the yakuza in the United States if you don’t know who they are,” he said in 2007. “Goto only gave us a fraction of what he promised, but it was better than nothing.”

Thanks to Robert Leonard and Danny Bloom.

It’s a situation that almost beggars belief, but a Nagoya man died on Sunday after having doused himself in kerosene and being given a lighter by police.

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.

Hydrogen sulfide - is there anything it can’t do? You don’t just have to top yourself with it - you can threaten others with it too.

Being the current suicide aide du jour taking Japan by storm, it seems it’s now being touted as an offensive weapon.

An Osaka robber dropped in on a loan company on Wednesday, threated the staff with what was purportedly the oh-so-fashionable poison, and made off with a (small) pile of cash.

At around 1:10 p.m. on Wednesday, the man entered the Nankai-Nanba-Higashiguchi branch of Aifle Corp. in Chuo-ku, Osaka, showed three employees a transparent plastic bag containing a brown liquid, and demanded money, investigators said.

“This is hydrogen sulfide. Give me your money,” he was quoted as saying. He grabbed 77,000 yen in cash from the office before fleeing. Three employees at the office were unharmed in the incident. There were no customers in the office at the time.

Now, you might argue that I’m contributing to the problem by posting this (but I’d argue that at this late stage, and in this language, it makes little difference), but would this whole palaver not have grown so huge if it hadn’t been reported in such lurid detail? I guess you could argue that they would have happened somehow anyway, but I can’t help but feel that the rash of cases of hydrogen-sulfide-facilitated suicides across Japan recently, and now this, are partly the responsibility of those who are so eagerly printing the headlines.

Stories about misbehaving public officials are commonplace - they differ only in the details. But the details usually make interesting reading.

A Wakayama prefecture civil servant has made worldwide headlines with a feat of astonishing dedication.

Tax-payers in Kinokawa wish he could show similar dedication to his job. For it has been revealed in a 9-month period, the horny civil servant clocked up more than three quarters of a million hits on pornographic websites from his work computer.

His superiors were alerted to the problem only when his computer became infected with a virus.

The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, works for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan.

That works out at almost 10,000 pages a day, or more than 20 each minute he was at his desk.

The BBC reports that his habit “reached its peak” last July with more than 177,000 page hits times during office hours.

The man has not been fired.

Remember the story of the U.S. Marine in Okinawa who was accused of raping a 14-year old girl that we reported on here, here, and here?

The Marine claimed he merely forced a kiss on the girl and charges were later dismissed by Japanese authorities when the girl dropped charges against him.

Though it looked like that would be that, the U.S. military apparently has decided, pressed charges or no, the Marine’s actions were serious infractions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and must be punished.

U.S. military charges against Staff Sgt. Tyrone L. Hadnott include rape of a child under 16, abusive sexual conduct, making a false official statement, adultery and “kidnapping through inveigling,” or trickery.

No date was set for the court-martial. The charges were made Monday, but the military did not announce them until Friday.

Big thanks to RTN for sending this in.