Tag: Random Japan

 BERSERK!

A restaurant owner in Kanazawa was fined ¥300,000 for entering a local primary school, approaching a boy who had been bullying his 12-year-old daughter, and smacking the little punk in the face.

It took eight cops in Hiroshima to subdue an American ex-Marine wielding a pair of kitchen knives and “fiercely” resisting arrest following a domestic dispute.

An Ibaraki man was arrested for trying to kill an acquaintance with a harpoon gun. The suspect apparently got drunk at his own barbecue party and fired the weapon, which (thankfully) missed.

An elderly Yokohama woman who strangled her 43-year-old son told police he suffered from “a disability” and “wanted to die.”

MUCHO MOJO

Two women in western Japan are suing the operator of a yoga studio for threatening them with possession by evil spirits if they didn’t fork over millions of yen. They’re being supported in their efforts by the delightfully named National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales.

A professor at Keio University has developed a robot that can pass along the sensation of the things it touches to human hands.

A trio of climbers was arrested for attempting to scale Nachi Falls in Wakayama Prefecture. The falls and a nearby shrine are both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which led the head of the shrine to say the stunt was “an insult to our religion.”

Meanwhile, a delegation from UNESCO will travel to Gunma to judge whether the Tomioka silk mill is worthy of World Heritage status. The mill was established by the government way back in 1872.

 THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

  A newly released poll found that 66 percent of Taiwanese people feel ties with Japan have “deepened” since the March 11 disaster.

At the same time, 51 percent said they “plan to refrain from traveling to Japan for the time being.”

An investigation by officials in Saitama uncovered 1,257 cases of welfare fraud in 2011, worth a total of ¥610 million.

A newly unveiled supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US has supplanted a Japanese machine as the world’s fastest. The new record holder, named Sequoia, can process 16.324 petaflops of data. (One petaflop is the equivalent of 1 quadrillion operations per second. Please don’t ask us how many zeros that is.)

TECHNOLOGY & ITS DISCONTENTS

   A Japanese man who claims he’s being defamed by Google’s autocomplete function filed suit against the US-based tech giant in Tokyo. The suit says that entering the man’s name into a search bar leads to a display of candidate words “evoking criminal acts.”

   A Tokyo man who’s upset at DoCoMo’s decision to end its mova 2G service was arrested for placing 964 phonecalls to one of the carrier’s shops in Chiyoda-ku between December and February. The man also visited the store, “yelling angrily and begging for continuation of the service.”

   A huge dock that was set loose by the March 11 tsunami washed up on the coast of Oregon-along with “hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish, all native to Japan.” US scientists are describing the potentially invasive species as a “very clear threat.”

   Proving that a fondness for bureaucratic regulation runs deep in Japanese culture, archaeologists in Fukuoka unearthed strips of wood dating from the 7th century that are believed to be the earliest known evidence of a family registry system.

YEAH, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT

Officials in the depopulated town of Takatori in Nara are trying to boost tourism by offering visitors the chance to see “hina dolls in machiya traditional wooden houses.”

Meanwhile, a village in the Oki Islands is offering couples ¥250,000 for the privilege of hosting their wedding ceremony. The town will kick in an extra ¥50,000 if the newlyweds also hold a magodaki (“holding a grandchild”) ceremony.

The Pakistani government says that if an expedition from the Fukushima chapter of the Japanese Alpine Club succeeds in climbing four unscaled peaks in the Karakorum range, it will give the club naming rights to the mountains.

The Metropolitan Police Department has vowed to combat a type of video-game piracy that uses emulator servers to mimic official gaming websites.

THE ANNALS OF SCIENCE

   Pass the Bloody Marys: Researchers at two of Japan’s top beverage companies say drinking tomato juice while getting drunk will allow you to sober up faster.

   In possibly related news, a research team that included scientists from the Kazusa DNA Research Institute in Chiba has, for the first time, fully decoded the genome of a tomato.

   The Meteorological Agency unveiled a supercomputer that can perform 847 trillion calculations per second—30 times faster than its previous machine. Even so, officials suspect it will be obsolete in about five years.

   A professor at Kansai Medical University has developed a treatment for bedsores that involves using the patient’s own blood platelets.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

     Tamae Watanabe, a 73-year-old who broke her back in 2005, became the oldest woman to scale Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. (Or, for fans of Monty Python, “The mountain with the biggest tits in the world.”)

   For the first time since stats were kept in 1988, the number of cellphone subscriptions in Japan is greater than the population of the country at 128,205,000, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has revealed.

   Many teachers at Japanese junior high schools are reportedly shakin’ all over since the education ministry made dance compulsory, with hip hop among the options. “Some of the teachers faced with the prospect of busting their moves in front of classes full of skeptical 12- to 14-year-olds are getting nervous,” said a report on The Asahi Shimbun website.

   Masaru Shishido, a 43-year-old actor who formerly played a superhero in the Super Sentai series on TV, opened a bar called Crystal Sky in Tachikawa where he has his waitresses dress like characters from the show and he “insists they call him Taicho (captain of the squad).”

POLITICS UNUSUAL

   Officials in a small town in northern New Jersey were visited-twice-by delegations of Japanese diplomats urging them to remove a public monument commemorating “women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.”

   Private railways and bus companies in Japan are beginning to grumble about the decades-long tradition of providing free rides to members of the Diet. They say it’s getting increasingly difficult “to secure understanding from [ordinary] users.”

   US President Barack Obama is said to have presented a birthday cake to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at last month’s G8 summit in Maryland. Noda turned 55 during the weekend of the meeting.

   Back in Japan, the PM held talks with the leaders of three Pacific island states. Micronesia’s president offered Noda “two palm ropes as a token of friendship.”

 SOME BOOZE WITH YOUR BIRD?

   

    A new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Tokyo comes complete with a fully stocked bar called KFC Route 25, in honor of the highway that runs past the original Sanders Café in Kentucky. Whisky, tequila, vodka, rum all available… Name your poison.

   The Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto Prefecture-along with some help from a nutty professor from Osaka University-has come up with a 600-gram human-shaped pillow called a “Hugvie” that allows cellphone users to “feel closer” to the people they are talking to. You insert your phone in the pillow’s head and conversations will cause the Hugvie’s heart to beat. Really.

   A government survey has revealed that one out of every four Japanese adults has thought of offing him/herself, “with young people more prone to such thoughts than others.” A round of Hugvies, please.

   Researchers at the Shibaura Institute of Technology (we don’t even want to speculate on the acronym for this one) figure that some 40 or so dams in Japan sit above confirmed active fault lines.

   Meanwhile, a network of more than 150 earthquake and water pressure detectors is in the plans for the sea off Japan’s east coast. The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention says the devices will help “to more quickly and accurately predict tsunami.”

   A Mainichi survey found that more than 2,000 bridges in at least 107 local municipalities in Japan have never been inspected, mostly due to “financial difficulties.”

 IT’S A DOG’S LIFE

       From the “Only in Japan” file: A column in The Japan Times mentioned that many pet groomers in this country now offer “claw decoration,” i.e., having your dog’s nails done. One “dog beauty artist” in Tokyo charges between ¥3,000 and ¥5,000 for all four paws. Apparently, a common request is for dog and owner to get matching nail art.

   Good news for cat lovers. Cat cafés, where customers can “mingle freely with felines in a relaxed atmosphere,” might not have to abide by new Ministry of Environment regulations that limit the hours pets can be displayed (8am-8pm). It’s all part of a plan to reduce the stress level of animals at pet shops.

   And a bit of good news for bald mice, as well. Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science have reportedly been successful in efforts to grow hair on hairless rodents. It’s tough enough to find a mate when you’re at the bottom of the vermin totem pole, but when you’re bald, too…

   Another group of some ten protesters went on a hunger strike in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to show their displeasure over the government’s plan to restart nuclear reactors at the Oi power plant in Fukui Prefecture.

   A Yokohama court gave a “spiritual salon” manager a suspended sentence after finding her guilty of fraud. The 48-year-old woman committed a “clever and malicious crime that took advantage of people’s worries about health and work to scam them out of money.”

   Police were investigating the case of a severed wire in a wing of a Boeing 787 produced at a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plant in Nagoya. The cut appears to have been intentional and is similar to other cases in 2002 and 2009.