Hey look! It’s the Gospellers, a popular Japanese R&B group! I had never really heard of them until this morning, when I saw that their new single is #2 on the charts. The above photo is from one of their previous albums. Here is the cover of their new album:
Gospellers: now with more soul.
Notice anything different about them? Apparently blackface minstrels, which went out of style in post-segregationist America, are currently cool in Japan! In a TV interview they commented that they were glad to be back in blackface again, joking about being black Japanese.
Rock on, Japanese colored folk.
They are produced by Sony records. Check out there site here(contains audio samples).
Mr. Jolson would be proud.
The Gospellers don’t hate black people. They probably feel like they are honoring black people by putting on a blackface act and singing R&B in deep voices. It is extremely unlikely that they know about the fact that blackface minstrelry is considered racist in America. When it comes to issues of racial sensitivity, most Japanese are clueless.
Japanese food at its finest?
Boss coffee has launched a new ad campaign featuring Tommy Lee Jones as a space alien visiting the planet earth to investigate humans. Watch it!
Rough translation:
The two Japanese guys are eating and talking about how there are probably space aliens who are on earth, disguised as humans to observe us. They probably watch our movies, and copy the form of farmous actors like Tommy Lee Jones.
The two men leave, revealing that Tommy Lee Jones is sitting only a few seats away. The subtitles under his name reveal that he is ‘Space Alien Jones’ who is observing earth. He notes to himself that the people on this planet are kind of stupid. However, the end of the day(sunset) on this planet is very beautiful.
Yesterday, a ‘shocking’ news story was reported by Mainichi. A 13-year-old junior high school student in Miyagi Prefecture committed suicide because he was being bullied at school:
Bullied junior high school student hangs self after becoming ‘tired of living’
MIYAZAKI — A 13-year-old junior high school student hanged himself in a cowshed next to his home after telling his relatives that he had been bullied at school, it has emerged.
The second-year student committed suicide after taking part in the new term ceremony at Higashikata Junior High School in Kobayashi, Miyazaki Prefecture, on April 5.
He came home from school after 12 noon, and his grandmother found him hanged shortly after 5 p.m. His suicide note said “I’m tired of living. I’m sorry.”
The student was a member of the school’s kendo club. On the night of April 4, he told his relatives that he wanted to quit the club because practice was too tough, and that relationships with other club members were troubled.
Officials of the junior high school questioned the teacher who was in charge of the first-year class to which the boy belonged. The school principal said the student probably hadn’t told anyone at school about being bullied. (Mainichi)
April 22, 2006
The student probably hadn’t told any teachers about being bullied. But even if he had, the teachers probably wouldn’t have given serious punishments to the students involved. Based on what I have seen on Japanese news programs and my own personal experiences as a junior high/elementary teacher in Japan, it would seem that bullying is a serious problem in Japanese schools. It would also seem that most bullying is passively encouraged by teachers intentionally ignore bullying and fail to discipline bullies.
As a foreign privately-contracted English teacher at Japanese public schools, I am not allowed to discipline the Japanese students. Most of my classes are taught alongside a Japanese English Teacher, who is allowed to discipline students. Almost every case of bullying I have witnessed in class, from verbal abuse (“shut up”, “ugly”, “drop dead”, etc.) to outright physical violence, was clearly visible to the Japanese teachers present, who did nothing.
Maybe my horrible western cultural relavitism makes me wrongly believe that students should be punished for bullying other students. Maybe the fact that I was born in America, where there are harsh punishments(suspension, expulsion, detention, etc) for physical violence and harsh verbal bullying, makes me unjustly judge the Japanese education system. Or maybe I have at the unique experience of teaching at 3 Japanese schools that have irregularly high levels of bullying and apathetic teachers. I really hope so.
You probably haven’t heard of the Liancourt Rocks, and if you have, you probably don’t give a shit about them. But let’s pretend that you want to read about them, at least for the sake of laughing at the morons who do.
The Liancourt Rocks are some rocky little islands located somewhere between Korea and Japan in the Sea of Japan. For most of the last few hundred years the rocks have been uninhabited, occasionally visited by Korean or Japanese fishermen and sailors. In January 1905, the Japanese annexed the Liancourt Rocks, incorporating them into Shimane Prefecture as ‘Takeshima’. Prior to 1905 most maps that bothered to show the rocks considered them Korean territory(Since they had been officially declared Korean territory in 1900).
The Japanese didn’t bother telling the Koreans about the annexation, since Korea was a crappy 5th rate nation at the time. The Japanese were in the middle of fighting a war with Russia, which had been attempting to bring Korea under its control. The Russians ended up losing the war and signing the Treaty of Portsmouth in September of 1905, agreeing to hand over Korea to Japan. A month later a few members of the Korean government signed a treaty declaring Korea a protectorate of Japan and officially beginning Japan’s colonial rule over Korea.
Japan was stripped of Administrative control of the Liancourt Rocks in 1945 when the American occupation began, but it has never given up its claim on the islands. Korea also claimed the islands, but it didn’t really matter at the time, since they were just barren rocks with nothing on them.
South Korea changed all that in 1953, when it decided the rocks were so important that they needed to build an outpost there. The Japanese coast guard tried to set up an outpost too but the Koreans drove them away with gunfire and mortars. Since then, Korea has occupied the islands, refusing Japan’s requests for the matter to be settled in international courts(it seems that Korea’s legal claim to the rocks probably won’t hold up).
A year or two ago South Korea went into a national rage when some Japanese textbooks claimed that their occupation of the Liancourt Rocks was illegal. Rather than having an international court determine whether it was illegal, the Koreans decided to hold nationalistic protests, burning Japanese flags and complaining about how evil Japan was 60 years ago. Most pathetic of all, South Korean elementary school children were told to make anti-Japanese hate pictures, denouncing Japan’s claim to the islands.
Japan did bad things to our country 60 years ago, so we will teach our future generations to hate them forever.
A couple days ago, Japan decided to send a couple coast guard ships to the waters near the Liancourt Rocks to do some surveying. The Japanese government obviously doesn’t care much about the actual survey results; it is likely an attempt to force the issue’s settlement in an international court. The South Koreans have decided to put their coast guard on alert around the rocks, probably hoping to scare away the Japanese with the threat of violence. In the mean time, Korea citizens have resumed their anti-Japanese rage(did it ever stop?).
One Korean man had a brilliant idea: to protest the Japanese survey ships by killing himself! He decided to kill himself through seppuku, a Japanese method of suicide that would surely shame the Japanese into giving up their claim on the rocks! Sadly, this Korean drama queen didn’t realize that a low quality kitchen knife wouldn’t be enough to do the job. Judging from the picture above, it seems that he also stabbed himself in the incorrect direction. Was he going to commit seppuku by carving his way up? Of course, he survived the ‘suicide attempt’ without life-threatening injuries:
Anti-Japan protester attempts ‘harakiri’
SEOUL: A South Korean protester attempted harakiri (ritual suicide) yesterday amid rising anger over Japan’s decision to launch an ocean survey in disputed waters between the two countries.
Defying South Korean warnings, Tokyo dispatched two ships to the area claimed by both countries, renewing a feud tied to colonial history that has festered for decades.
The South Korean coast guard said 18 patrol ships were deployed around the islets – called Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan – with a surveillance plane ready to scramble.
Police said the protester stabbed himelf in the abdomen in what appeared to be a ritual suicide attempt following an anti-Japanese rally in Seoul.
The man was receiving treatment in hospital where his condition was not critical, police said.
Dressed in traditional Korean robes, the middle-aged man wearing a headband depicting the Korean national flag stripped to his waist, knelt down and then planted the blade in his abdomen in front of a monument erected in honour of a 1919 anti-Japanese uprising.
“He was found groaning alone on the ground when a police officer reached the scene,” a police spokesman said. “We heard he was not in critical condition.”
During rallies against Japanese claims to the islands in March last year two South Koreans severed fingers and wrote protest messages in blood. -Gulf News
It’s kind of sad. Most people in Japan probably don’t even know what is going on, nor do they care about whether their country owns the Liancourt Rocks. Japan’s claim to the islands seems to have very little to do with a desire for renewed military expansionism. To a great many South Koreans, Japan’s claim to the islands represents a brutish menace to their national security, and more importantly, to their massively inflated pride. Rather than allow the international courts to settle the matter, South Korea’s government encourages the spread of hatred towards Japan and the Japanese. Lame.
EDIT: Korea has said it will not submit Korean names for the underwater formations near the Liancourt Rocks, so Japan has decided to cancel the surveying mission. The issue has been put on the back burner for the time being.
You’ve probably been wondering why this site hasn’t had a lot of updates recently. Well, I’ll tell you the reason: NTT sucks.
NTT: bad service, but what can you do about it?
NTT is the gigantic telecommunications monopoly that controls the phone lines in Japan. If you want phone or internet in your house, you will have to deal with them. When I signed up for YahooBB last year, I had to wait 7 weeks for an NTT crew to come to my apartment and do 3 minutes of work to enable my broadband internet. Why did it take 7 weeks? Maybe because NTT doesn’t give a shit about consumers? If you want DSL or fiber internet, you have to deal with them; you have no choice. With a lack of competition in the market, NTT can charge ridiculously high fees for landline phones and forces costumers to wait weeks or months for service. NTT is just another example of Japanese ‘free market capitalism’, in which large corporations cooperate to maximize profits and screw over the consumer.
Since I recently moved to a new apartment, I will be waiting 4 or 5 weeks for an ultra-efficient NTT internet setup crew to come to my building and toy with some wires for 5 minutes. In the meantime I have been forced to use ridiculously expensive wireless dialup internet access. This site isn’t dead, it has just been slowed down a bit while I wait for better internet access. I promise more frequent updates in the days and weeks to come.
