Random Japan

MILESTONES

For the first time ever in Japan, a woman who received a kidney transplant has given birth. The new mom, who is in her 40s, delivered a baby boy at Osaka University Hospital.

Ahead of next week’s APEC summit in Yokohama, a police bomb unit conducted Japan’s first-ever antiterrorism drill on a shinkansen. The exercise took place at Shin-Osaka station.

Sign of the times: a mass electronics retailer will operate a shop in Ginza for the first time when Laox opens a branch inside Matsuzakaya department store.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has unveiled a massive container ship that cuts CO2 emissions by 35 percent. The vessel uses an “air lubrication system” to reduce the “frictional resistance between the hull and seawater by running air bubbles along the bottom.”

JAXA announced that it will shift the focus of its astronaut training programs to Russia ahead of NASA’s planned retiring of its space shuttle fleet next year.

STATS

64

Percent of elementary and junior high school students who “help out with the housework,” according to a survey by the National Institution for Youth Education

51

Percent who said they help out with chores in 1998

¥200,000

Amount that the city of Mishima in Shizuoka paid a 33-year-old local resident who captured a macaque that was responsible for 118 attacks on people in the area during the past two months

34

Number of prefectures in Japan that have banned bicyclists from wearing earphones, according to a newspaper survey

UH-OH

Investment guru J. Kyle Bass, who made a mint on the US subprime collapse, said that “Japan’s economy may unravel in the next two to three years” and that “investors could make 50 to 100 times their capital betting on Japanese interest rate swaps.”

In its annual assessment of gender equality, the World Economic Forum has ranked Japan 94th out of 134 countries. That’s actually an improvement over last year, when Japan ranked 101st.

For the 13th time since it was installed in August 2001, the “peace clock” at the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima has been set back following a test by the US of a nuclear device in September.

It was reported that workers at the Monju nuclear reactor in Fukui have made 24 unsuccessful attempts to remove a 12m-long, 3.3-ton piece of equipment that was accidentally dropped during maintenance work and became lodged in an opening in the reactor vessel.

This Logic  

Fails Me

Spitting

Mad

Death Tax?

What Death Tax?  

Tachikawa the next Akihabara for anime fans



BY NOBUYOSHI YONEZAWA THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Tachikawa, an area in Tokyo’s western reaches, has fans of anime seeing things.

Many are flocking to see the “real” locations that inspired scenes in their favorite television animation series.

Next to the Akihabara district of central Tokyo, the area around JR Tachikawa Station is most often used for background settings in “Toaru Majutsu no Kinsho Mokuroku” (Index of a certain magic) and its spin-off, “Toaru Kagaku no Cho-denjiho” (Railgun of a certain science), both animated TV series.

Devoted fans consider Tachikawa to be a “holy ground,” snapping photos that they later post to their blogs along with descriptive comments.

Senkaku collisions video leak riles China

Tokyo probes how footage got to YouTube

By MASAMI ITO and MIZUHO AOKI

Staff writers Saturday, Nov. 6, 2010

A video apparently taken by the Japan Coast Guard of the Sept. 7 collisions between a Chinese trawler and patrol vessels off the Senkaku Islands has shown up on YouTube, prompting China to express “concern” over already strained bilateral relations.

The 44 minutes of footage, uploaded on the video-sharing website in six parts, shows the Chinese boat bumping into Japanese cutters twice while coast guard personnel can be heard repeatedly issuing warnings in Chinese and Japanese.

The government launched an investigation into how the video ended up on the Web.