SIC TRANSIT
An 82-year-old man in Osaka drove his car a distance of 1km along railway tracks on the Nara line. The man said he “panicked” when, after accidentally steering onto the tracks, the crossing gates began closing ahead of an approaching train.
A quick-thinking passenger was credited with averting a disaster when he grabbed the wheel of a tour bus whose driver fell unconscious on a highway in Hokkaido.
A government study group has recommended that air traffic controllers be banned from bringing PCs and cellphones to work to prevent the leak of “sensitive information.”
Hawaiian Airlines issued an apology after one of its planes improperly taxied onto a runway at Kansai Airport, forcing an approaching ANA cargo plane to abandon its approach a mere two minutes before it was scheduled to land.
The Metropolitan Police Department says that the increase in the number of people who commute by bicycle following the March 11 disaster is responsible for the drastic rise in bike accidents in Tokyo. There were 56 such crashes in April 2010, but 400 during the same month this year, according to the MPD.
Stats
25 million
Number of foreigners the government hopes will visit Japan in 20199.44 million
Number of foreigners who visited Japan in 201022.79 million
Smokers in Japan, the lowest number on record, according to Japan Tobacco300
Estimated number of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings living in North Korea
THOSE PESKY FOREIGNERS
It was reported that locals in Shin Okubo’s Koreatown are fed up with “the bad manners” of visitors who have been swarming to the neighborhood during the recent K-pop boom.
The defense ministry says that, from April to September, its fighter jets were scrambled 83 times in response to Chinese aircraft approaching Japanese airspace.
The government announced that it may lift some of the restrictions it had placed on imports of American beef following an outbreak of BSE in the US in 2003.
The justice ministry said it was planning to “greatly simplify” the immigration procedure for foreign tourists.
Your Membership In The KKK Can’t Be Far Off
For A Worlds Record
TEPCO
Cyclists feel under siege with new rules
KUCHIKOMI NOV. 03, 2011No wonder cyclists feel aggrieved. Their conveyance of choice consumes no limited resources, pollutes no air, leaves no carbon footprint, and gives bracing exercise besides. And yet nobody likes them.
To motorists they’re a nuisance, to pedestrians a menace. “They terrify me, the way they barrel down the sidewalk,” one pedestrian, evidently speaking for many, complains to the Ehime Shimbun. The Nikkei, in a similar vein, bemoans cyclists “weaving in and out” among people on foot, “ringing bells in the faces” of honest citizens and, as often as not, lost in their own exclusive universes of earphone music and cell phone jabber.
Maybe the pride they take in helping to save the planet has gone to their heads. The police seem to think so, and are lately cracking down hard on scofflaw behavior they have long winked at.
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