Japan News for December 22, 2006
Some news/links for this morning:
-The results are in for Ameba’s Blog of the Year 2006. Check it out here! The page in Japanese, but just click each winner’s picture to see their blog. [Cat-eating girl is one of the winners.]
-Here it comes, Mr. Top Robot of 2006! Congratulations Fuji Heavy Industries/Sumitomo Robotic building cleaning system!
-The Chinese government is optimistic about the joint history research project between Japanese and Chinese historians, which will begin this coming Tuesday. The two nations’ foreign ministers have agreed to release the outcome of the study by the end of 2008.
-Japan and China on Thursday agreed to set up a joint group to clear an estimated 660,000 chemical weapons abandoned in China by Japan’s Imperial Army at the end of World War II.
-To mark the sale of more than 100 million copies of the manga Slam Dunk, a scholarship has been set up to give budding cagers a chance to fulfill their hoop dreams.
-Japan’s chief envoy to North Korea nuclear talks said Thursday that North Korea’s refusal to disarm before US financial restrictions are lifted meant there were no prospects for an agreement on dismantling the communist state’s weapons. “The situation remains severe and there is no prospect for a breakthrough,” Kenichiro Sasae said after the fourth day of six-nation talks in Beijing.
-On this day in 1885, Ito Hirobumi, a central figure in Japan’s Meiji era modernization and a noted womanizer, began the first of his four terms as Prime Minister after reorganizing the government along European lines to establish a cabinet. More details here.
Afternoon Update:
-Police have searched the home of the operator of a Tokyo-based agency dispatching men carrying or wearing advertising boards on suspicion of illegally obtaining permission for road use. The agency reportedly contracted with moneylenders that impose illegally high interest rates and dispatched the sandwich men with boards advertising the firms’ loan services to an area near JR Kanda Station in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo.
-Newly released statistics reveal that the proportion of Japanese school children suffering from asthma has more than doubled in the last 10 years to the highest level ever.
-The Tokyo District Court on Thursday ordered Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co to suspend publication of Robert Whiting’s “Tokyo Outsiders — Tokyo Under World II,” as it contains a picture without the approval of the photographer. The court accepted the claim by a woman, who now lives in the United States, that the Tokyo-based publisher should suspend publication of the book. The book contains part of a photograph of her former husband, which was taken by her in Malaysia in 1970, and identifies him as an ex-CIA official.
-The New York Times has an interesting article on the photography show, “Gangs of Kabukicho,” at the Andrew Roth gallery in Manhattan of works by Watanabe Katsumi, a semi-obscure itinerant street photographer who took pictures of Tokyo’s prostitutes and drag queens and rockabilly types and supertanned ganguro girls and tough-guy yakuza in the 1960’s and 70’s.
-A $1.7 million civil suit proceeding started Wednesday with family members and a bevy of attorneys saying a sailor, the government of Japan and the U.S. Navy were to blame for the Jan. 3 fatal beating of a Yokosuka woman by a USS Kitty Hawk sailor.
-An editorial in The Australian sympathizes with Takafumi Horie’s anti-establishment position, noting that Japan’s business world needs a “changing of the old guard.”
-Some Christians in Japan say the government has debased the country’s peace-seeking constitution after the upper chamber of parliament approved the promotion of patriotism in the classroom by changing the country’s education law.
