With all of the action here at JAPUNDIT these days, we have decided to raise the required vote threshold for promotion from the UPCOMING page to the TOP STORIES page from 5 to 6.
So my Japanese roommate and her friend (also Japanese) were browsing through my bookshelf one day, looking at my English language literature, when they stumbled upon an old paperback of Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road). They picked it off the shelf wondering how haiku, something so intimately Japanese, could be translated to English.
After just a few minutes browsing through the pages, my two fluent-in-English friends burst out into laughter. I overheard the uproar in an adjacent room and went over to ask what the fuss was about.. Apparently, the original message was so unbelievably lost in the translation from Japanese to English, they thought it was downright hilarious. They said it was way too modern and conjured up images of Basho wandering the forest with an iPod Nano, mobile phone (with bluetooth headset), and Macbook (which he of course used to write his haiku).
I have decided to take this idea and run with it for haloween. I’m tentatively calling it DJ Basho, and it’s gonna be rad.
More to come.
This in from Mr. Pink.
The following is the winning entry in an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term: This year’s term was Political Correctness.
The winner wrote: ‘Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end’
R.J.Wiedemann.LtCol.USMC Ret.
Don’t know if the story is on the level, but the definition is spot on!
Some exciting news for people who are fond of thinking in terms of hair thickness and ear wax texture.
The Japanese can be genetically classified into two categories–people native to the Ryukyu Islands in Okinawa Prefecture and people native to other parts of Japan–researchers from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Science (Riken), who analyzed the genes and genetic structure of about 7,000 people, have discovered.
Riken’s findings, which were meant to shed more light on the origins of Japanese, were published in the online edition of a U.S. science magazine on Friday.
The biggest genetic difference in these two groups were found to be hair thickness and ear wax texture. People who originated from areas outside of the Ryukyu Islands tend to have much harder hair and drier ear wax and were discovered to be genetically closer to Chinese people.
What does this do to the “homogeneous Japanese race” theory?!?
Snapped by Mr. Pink recently with his camera phone.
The Japanese government is banking on the overwhelming power exerted by nicotine over spineless smokers in its search for new tax revenues.
A report by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare says that the government can expect to earn an additional 9 trillion yen in tax revenue over the next 10 years by raising the price of cigarettes to 1,000 yen a pack.
“Many people won’t be able to give up, even if they want to, so raising the price will lead to an increase in tax income,” said a representative of the ministry’s research team.
The ministry carried out a survey of over 20,000 smokers on the Internet, with results showing that if prices were increased from 300 to 1,000 yen a pack, 96 percent would try and give up smoking. However, a previous survey by the Central Social Insurance and Medical Council revealed that even with the best medical treatment, the success rate of giving up smoking for a year is only 33 percent. So even accounting for those who can cut down, and demand dropping to 36 percent of the previous year, the research team still predicts a net tax revenue increase of 560 billion yen in the first year. In the next year, when many ex-smokers take up the habit again, demand would bounce back by 40-49 percent, with an extra 1.27 trillion yen a year going into government coffers.
The currently-planned price increase to 500 yen is predicted to make an extra 4 trillion yen in tax over the next 10 years.
Akihabara maid cafe Hibaritei (where all of the maids are cross-dressing men) is always looking for new ways to push the envelope.
Their latest “game” is snorting various food products (wasabi powder, hot sauce, etc.) and enjoying the reactions of the snorters as the effects of the stuff they inhale has an effect.
Previously, they had challenges of eating food with a certain extremely spicy “Death Sauce” but that was probably not challenging enough so they resorted to sniffing it into their noses. The first item was wasabi powder. There is no effect when you eat it but you’ll get a headache if you sniff it. At first, you don’t feel anything but it hits you hard after awhile. The shop owners, staff and even customers were involved in this strange challenge. Later on, two more customers came in and were dragged into the third round of the challenge.
After the warm up came the real thing - the Death Sauce. One tiny drop of Death Sauce can numb your tongue so you can imagine the deadly effect it may have to your nose. Suddenly, the whole maid cafe was filled with strange noises as the other customers watched on amused by our strange customs. The boys’ face were all as red as tomatoes and their eyes were bloodshot. If a new customer enters the shop he may be wondering why is everyone crying. Later on, they resorted to using ice to soothe their noses which was a funny sight to watch.
And if a verbal description doesn’t do it for you, here is a video. . .
Via Akibanana
Remember the popular horse riding simulation machine named Joba (here and here)?
Well, it seems that some fan clippers could not help imagining what it would be like to watch their favorite female video game characters riding an equestrian contraption. Some of the kind of NSFW results after the jump.
Koichi Toyama, wild and wacky candidate for past Tokyo governor elections of years gone by, has found a new goal in live. . . Becoming President of the United States!
You know, some of the things he says make more sense than some of the “real” candidates. . .
That is the name of a this year’s campaign held by Japan’s Paradise TV to raise money for research aimed at the prevention and spread of the HIV virus and AIDS.
Events includes five two-handed squeezes of the breasts or buttocks of adult video (AV) actresses for 1,000 yen, as well as servings of food reported flavored using the precious bodily fluids of an AV actress.
Last year a similar Paradise TV event (for which an AV actress demonstrated her handicraft for 3,000 yen) raised some 2 million yen.
All the juicy details are over at Captain Japan’s Tokyo Reporter.
More on this event in the JAPUNDIT Archives here.
Magibon is an internet personality on the video-sharing website YouTube.
As of August 8, 2008, Magibon leads YouTube Japan’s All time top list. Magibon is also a member of the Youtube Partner Program.
Magibon has been invited and flown to Japan by a Japanese Internet TV Station GYAO for a media appearance. She has been interviewed twice by the Japanese Weekly Playboy magazine.
Here’s a video of a guy who figure out how to get his Wii Balance Board to control the movements of his Roomba.
Of course, the next question is why anyone would want to, but. . .
Via The Raw Feed
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.
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
I am always amazed and amused by these things, no matter how many I see.
“Though the dog barks, the procession moves on!”
I had planned to use the following photo for a story the other day that I eventually had to spike, but this thing is just to good not to share.
From Quirky Japan Photos.
A recent exchange about the meat content of processed food products reminded me of my first encounter with a Japanese hot dog back around 1969.
This was a time when imported food products were basically unavailable, and prohibitively expensive when they were. So imagine my surprise when one day shopping I came across a pack of moderately priced hot dogs!
They looked just like the red hots we had in Chicago, so I bought a pack, took them home, popped them into pot of boiling water for a few minutes, slipped one onto a slice of bread, hit it with a little mustard, bit into it and. . . As soon as the frank hit my tongue, the trusty old gag reflex took over, and before I knew it the vile thing that had been in my mouth was flying through the air and headed for the floor.
The Japanese person I was with (who kept saying things like “Are you sure you want to do that?” as she watched me prepare my tube steak) at that point kindly informed me that Japanese hot dogs were indeed made of 100% meat. . . fish meat, whale meat, shark meat, and all sorts of other dregs of the seas.
I think she was right.
Thanks to Mr. T for the photo.
Though I never have run across this myself, I definitely would be willing to give it a try and find out exactly what a chocolate covered salty dog tastes like. . .
Via Noodles and Rice
