Some Japan News/Links this morning:

-Manichi has an article chock full of information about teachers and education officials who don’t have the balls to punish bullies. It looks like suspension is never going to gain ground when teachers are too afraid to enforce discipline and make schools a safe place for learning.

-Four Japanese executives on Monday admitted illegally exporting equipment that can be used to build nuclear weapons and wound up in Libya and possibly Iran. Great.

-What Japan Thinks has translated the top words or expressions to come into vogue in 2006.

-War-displaced Japanese from Hyogo Prefecture and their lawyers held a sit-in Monday in front of the welfare ministry in Tokyo, asking the state not to appeal a court ruling last week which ordered the government to pay damages to them.

-Perhaps you’ve heard about thieves stealing metal drainage grates across Japan? Well, now it seems scrap metal thieves are going even further: by stealing railway communication cable.

-A man has been arrested for leaving the scene of an accident after running over and killing a drunk police officer who decided to sleep in the middle of a road.

-Japan’s disgraced Internet mogul Takafumi Horie, who boasted at the height of his fame that he would one day try to buy Sony, has purchased a PlayStation 3. (He’s also gained quite a bit of weight.)

-Analog TV broadcasting is set to end in 2011, but most Japanese people have yet to upgrade their televisions. Maybe it has to do with the fact that digital TV sets are really expensive?

-Japan’s Defense Agency is to develop a miniature superlight reconnaissance aircraft, based on ideas from a paper plane. The plane will measure just 60 centimeters (24 inches) in wingspan and will weigh only 400 grams (14 ounces), and will carry a tiny camera.

-NTT DoCoMo, Inc. will launch a mobile contents service early next year that contains pictures and videos of Bae Yong-joon(Yon-sama), the South Korean heartthrob popular among old Japanese housewives.

-Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has announced its top ten list of finalists for the 2006 Robot Award.

Asia Exile discusses Charisma Man and white femi-nazism among female expats.

-Fuji TV will air a TV special drama, “Iwo Jima: mailman in the battle field,” on December 9th to capitalize off the hype over Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima,” which opens the same day in Japanese theaters. A shameless ploy, but I might just watch it anyway…

-Was Pearl Harbor a direct result of Perry’s opening of Japan? This historian argues that it was.

-Police have arrested two junior high school boys in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, for threatening their classmate and forcing him to buy 12 cakes. The boy is also believed to have been repeatedly bullied. I guess the two boys didn’t get the memo from the ministry of education that bully was wrong..

-China will spend $136 billion on R&D this year, placing it ahead of Japan at $130 billion and behind the U.S . at $330 billion.

-Trans-Pacific Radio’s news post/podcast for December 5th!

Afternoon update:

-While many at the UN are saying the opposite, Japanese U.N. Ambassador Kenzo Oshima has expressed regret at the news that John Bolton will step down as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

-Baidu, the largest Chinese-language search engine, has announced plans to introduce a Japanese edition of its service next year.

-A draft of guidelines worked out Monday by a panel of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine gives doctors a choice to remove respirators from terminal stage patients based on their consent.

-Korea and Japan’s Defense Ministers will probably meet sometime next year. Their previous meeting had been canceled due to Japan’s outrageous insistance that the Dokdo/Takeshima islets are Japanese territory.

-Occidentalism has posted a recently aired Japanese television program that explores the Dokdo/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks dispute. Very educational for those who can understand Japanese (those who can’t understand Japanese can find some translations in the comments section).

-A sewing factory in eastern Japan required an Indonesian Muslim trainee to sign a note promising to forgo praying five times a day and Ramadan fasting as a condition of her employment. Oh, and the trainee was forbidden to send letters or money home, go out after 9PM, or travel in vehicles. Wow, what a great working experience!

-The struggle of one Iranian family, who have lived in Japan since the early 1990’s, continues. The Justice Ministry will convey its decision on their residency to the Iranians on Friday when the temporary permission for them to stay in Japan for a month is set to expire. However, their chances don’t seem good, as the Justice minister told a press conference today that he would like them to “go home.”

-The wife of an elementary school teacher has been cheated into paying millions of yen to a man who fictitiously said that her husband beat up a student.

-Mainichi’s WaiWai column features “Sore Demo Boku ha Yatteinai (I Still Didn’t Do it),” a movie about a man falsely accused of groping a female commuter. The film, directed by the man behind “Shall We Dance,” will take a very critical look at Japan’s “guilty until proven innocent” legal system.

-Pictures of monstrously pimped-out Japanese minivans!