Sunday Quick Links

Just got back from a couple days in Chiba/Odaiba. Here’s some interesting links and news items that have come to my attention since I returned and checked my news sources:

-Great news for teachers: A court has ruled that it was unfair for Nagoya University to suspend a professor for having a sexual relationship with one of his students. Apparently it was a “private” matter that his employer should not have punished him for.

-The next time you use a paper shredder in Japan you could lose your hand!

-Pingmag has a cool feature on wacky Japanese inventor/scientist Dr. Nakamats (that’s not a typo, he actually romanizes his name like that) [Hat tip to Jean Snow]

-Mainichi continues to add interesting articles about A-bomb victims to it’s Hibakusha site. The latest is an account of a Japanese doctor visiting South Korean A-bomb victims.

-Various media outlets have reported that YouTube has deleted 29,549 videos at request of Japanese broadcasters and copyright groups. Included in that number are the 20 or so videos I used for previous updates on this site, which subsequently resulted in the banning of my original japanprobe YouTube account. What can I say? Just like thousands of other videos that got removed from YouTube, the vids I uploaded were copyrighted material (especially the 1 minute clip of racially offensive rotating sushi, which TBS promptly had removed from YouTube). Riding Sun has a good take on the issue.

-The most viewed article on the English website of the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo is an article from 2005 about the world’s oldest firm, started in 578 by Korean settlers in Japan, going out of business in January 2006. (Hey, it’s news to me)