Archive for July, 2006

Japanese error on the Wikipedia logo?

I saw the following post on digg today, which claimed that there was an error in the Japanese puzzle piece of the Wikipedia logo:

Examine the Japanese symbol above the “W” in the logo of Wikipedia. This is not the actual symbol used in Japanese to approximate the “Wi” sound in Wikipedia’s name. While the logo uses use ku, or plausibly wa, followed by the small i symbol, in actuality, the “wi” sound is approximated by putting a u symbol next to a small i symbol.

It does look like a “wa” with a small “i” next to it, which I doubt would be pronounced as a “Wi” in “Wiki”. In fact, the Japanese Wikipedia site uses ウィキペディア as its official spelling, not ワィキペディア. Did wikipedia’s artist screw up on the Japanese portion of the logo?

Japanese ‘Jesus is Wonderful’ music video

Ever wonder what kind of hip songs Japanese christians rock out to? Check out this video:

The group is called “Joyful Noise Singers”. Can you feel the joy in the noise they are singing?

South Korean Sekisui House employee sues customer

I went over to Crisscross Japan News today to see if there were any new negative articles about Japan. Sure enough, there was one:

OSAKA — A South Korean Sekisui House Ltd employee filed a lawsuit Monday seeking 3 million yen from a customer said to have made discriminatory remarks to him. The home builder said it will cover the litigation expenses of So Mun Pyong, 45, and allow him to attend trials during business hours.

So presented the customer with his business card, written in Korean and Japanese characters, in Osaka Prefecture in February last year, the complaint says. The customer then said to So, “How much money are you sending to North Korea? People like you cause abduction problems,” according to the complaint.

Wow, what an ignorant customer. He should know that it’s the South Korean government and pro-North Korean groups in Japan(Chosen Soren/pachinko parlors), not South Korean passport-holders who work for Sekisui House, who send money to North Korea, geez.

Man who helped kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto dies at age 88

In non-rapist Yamamoto news, one of the American pilots who helped shoot down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto(Number #37 on Japan’s list of favorite historical figures)’s plane in 1943 has died. The Miami Herald reports:

Lt. Col. Besby Frank Holmes, a World War II fighter pilot who took part in the successful 1943 mission to kill the Japanese admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, died last Sunday. He was 88.

Holmes, who lived in San Rafael, died of a stroke at Marin General Hospital, according to the Marin County coroner’s office.

Holmes was a member of the 67th Pursuit Squadron, which flew fighter planes against the Japanese during the Guadalcanal campaign. In October 1942, Holmes blew up a beached Japanese ammunition ship.

His most famous mission came after American cryptographers cracked a Japanese naval code in early 1943 and retrieved a message revealing the itinerary of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. His was among the 16 fighter planes that ambushed Yamamoto.

”Granted, it was a wild gamble with many odds against success,” Holmes said in the 1996 book Aces Against Japan II.

“But most of us were pretty good gamblers by then, having gambled our lives on the early days of the invasion of Guadalcanal.”

For more information about the amazing operation in which Yamamoto was killed (“Navy kō incident”(海軍甲事件)), read the Wikipedia or WW2 Database.

Koda Kumi’s Pedo Dance Extravaganza!

UPDATE:The videos should all be working now. I apologize on behalf of the idiots responsible for the downtime. If you know of a good alternative to YouTube, please let me know.

Tonight on the NTV program Utawara, pop star Kumi Koda hosted the first ever Chibi Ero Dance competition, a competition in which little girls imitated Kumi Koda’s sexy/erotic dance style. Girls between the ages of 2 and 12 dressed up in sexy costumes like Koda wears in her videos, put on heavy make up, and danced their hearts out. The webmaster of What Japan Thinks, Ken Y-N, was cool enough to e-mail me with advance notice about this spectacle, so I was able to record all of the performances. Here are the all nine entries in their pedophilic glory(can you stomach to watch them all??):

Entry number 8: In what can only be described as horrible torture, this 2 year-old girl is forced by her mother to perform in front of Japan. She mumbles into her microphone while looking startled. At the end they keep asking “what’s your name?” just to hear her cute answer.

This is absolutely shocking. I’ve never seen such an amazing display of pedophilic child fetishism on tv! It goes without saying that such a thing would probably not be aired on network television in America, although it did remind me of video of creepy child beauty pagents I had once seen in a news report about JonBenet Ramsey back in the day. You’d think that Japanese parents, who are so concerned that they make elementary schoolers wear helmets to walk 3 blocks to school, might be a bit concerned about turning their 7 year-old daughters in to objects of sexual fetishism. Am I preaching too much here? Edit: I don’t believe this videos to be pornographic or obscene, they are merely disturbing.

New world record!

Here’s a video I ripped today with the aid of my new Hauppage WinTV PVR USB2:

The TV show as about setting new world records, and this particular clip is of a Japanese guy attempting to beat the world record for long distance trampoline slam dunking. Can he pull it off? [Watch it here.]