News for November 23, 2006
New links for this morning:
-The Catholic church has urged Japanese catholics not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine. I guess it’s okay for them to visit other shinto shrines, though.
-The Iraqi who beheaded a Japanese backpacker in 2004 has been sentenced to death.
-Why is the LDP letting the postal rebels back in their party? Money, money, money.
-The World Economic Forum has ranked Japan 79th on its gender gap rating list. The report measured the extent to which women in the polled countries and regions have achieved equality with men in four areas — economic participation and opportunity, education attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. Japan ranked well in the latter 2 categories, but not so well in the others.
-Two in five Japanese people are taking their vitamins, according to What Japan Thinks.
-Elderly Japanese men who live alone have very lonely lives, according to the Yomiuri Shinbun.
-A show entitled “Japan through the eyes of children in Uzbekistan” opened this week at the Academy of Arts in Uzbekistan. Any Uzbek readers out there who can report on this?
-A principal in Nara prefecture has been forced to apologize after spanking and “injuring” a student. Unfortunately, nobody is making the parents of the child apologize for raising a deliquent who throws food around in the classroom.
-Several teenagers having a good ol’ fashioned iron pipe fight were injured in Kanagawa after one youth rammed a stolen car into them.
-A second Japanese man has contracted rabies from a dog he came in contact with while visiting the Philippines, igniting media panic. Please, please show more special reports on the dangers of rabies!
-Cell phones “cloned” by using IC cards from NTT DoCoMo Inc.’s FOMA handsets are being used in China and other countries illegally. Docomo has previously claimed it was technically impossible to clone their phones. I guess they were wrong.
-Another excellent political/economic news update from Trans-Pacific Radio.
Prime time update:
-Another student suicide: a 16-year old high school student jumped off the roof of her school in Yamagata today. She left a message on her cell phone stating that she had been verbally bullied.
-Teenage gangs attacked and robbed homeless people in Aichi prefecture, leaving one woman dead.
-A Chinese student has been arrested for violating the terms of his student visa by working. What was he doing? Selling virtual items in an online RPG. He would have got away with it, but a bank worker noticed that the Chinese guy was frequently wiring large sums of money to China and reported this clearly suspicious activity to the police.
-Michelle Wie performed miserably in her first day at the Casio World Open.
-Is the Tokyo Disney Resort in danger of losing lucrative sponsorships? I hope so.
-Japan’s smoking rate appears to be dropping.
-Oh crap, rice prices are getting lower. Better cut production! I guess it’s better than the current vegetable situation, in which good weather has resulted in a larger-than-expected crop, forcing Japanese farmers to throw away tons of vegetables to keep prices from dropping.
