Archive for April, 2007

The Little Gaijin (Video)

Apparently the JET’s in Innoshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, have way too much free time on their hands. Luckily, they used it to create one of the best videos about life as an ALT in Japan (and the funniest musical about foreigners in Japan I’ve ever seen):

The Little Gaijin is stuck on the island and longs to go back to the real world. Does that exist over the bridge?

Snopes: The Poodle Story is Not True

Yes, the rumors were flying recently that Japanese women had been bamboozled into buying sheep that they thought were poodles. One has to wonder, what does it say about those of us that went for this rumor? One would either be gullible, or think Japanese women are, and that line of thought may well make one are a bit prejudiced. Either way, people who believed this rumor have got some introspection coming.

The notion that anyone who had ever seen a dog (which is most everyone) could be fooled by sheep proffered as poodles is as implausible (if not more so) as the idea that anyone could really mistake a rat for a dog. (The claim that “sheep are rare in Japan and most people do not know what they look like” is just silly: even schoolchildren who have never seen live sheep learn to identify them from pictures and drawings and can recognize them as something distinctly different than dogs.) And in this case the tale is not something that supposedly happened to the indefinite “some tourist” in “a foreign country,” but to thousands of Japanese in their homeland, people who were reportedly shelling out the equivalent of $1,600 per sheep-dog before anyone caught on to the scam and blew the whistle.

[Full article]

Golden Week Holiday

The Golden Week holiday starts this weekend in Japan, meaning that millions of people will be going on vacation and clogging the roads and airports. As I post this, I am about to leave for Narita Airport to join the masses there. Since I’ll be out of the country for a week Update: Since I was forced to postpone my trip abroad, I’ll be traveling around in Japan instead, so there will be news link posts every day during golden week. However, I have prepared some content which should be auto-posting while I am away. The number of daily updates will probably be lower than normal, but there will be new posts for you all to check out each day for the next 7 days. Have a great Golden Week, everyone!

P.S. Here’s an old Japanese commercial of PeeWee Herman from the 1990′s:

The freakish stomach size of professional eaters (Video)

Earlier this week, a TV program explored the science behind the super eating abilities of professional eaters Gal Sone and Nobuyuki “Giant” Shirota. Not suprisingly, doctors found that both of them have freakishly large stomachs:

Here are some clips of the program, if you can stomach it:

Part 1 (My, my, what big so stomachs you have!)

Part 2 (Eating tons of sushi and getting a check-up)

Japan News for April 27, 2007

Today’s Japan-related news links:

• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed regret Thursday about the misunderstandings caused by his remarks on the sexual exploitation of Asian women by the Japanese military during World War II. He made the comments during a meeting with U.S. congressional leaders upon his arrival in Washington for a two-day visit for talks with President George W. Bush. [Link]
• Japanese police obtained an arrest warrant Thursday for an alleged North Korean spy suspected of abducting two children to the communist country decades ago, according to a media report. [Link]
• The Japanese and U.S. governments have agreed to issue a joint document stating their determination to boost bilateral technical cooperation in tackling global warming and other environmental problems. [Link]
• Japan has said it aims to launch its first magnetic levitation – or maglev – rail service by 2025. With a top speed of more than 500kph (310mph), the trains will run between Tokyo and the central city of Nagoya. [Link]
• The Japanese government authorized the spending of about 4.18bn yen Thursday to finance another half-year extension to Nov. 1 of the Maritime Self-Defence Force’s mission to provide fuel and water to US-led coalition forces in the Indian Ocean in support of the anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan. [Link]
• Japan’s foreign minister Taro Aso will visit the United States, Russia and Egypt on an eight-day trip starting this weekend. [Link]
• Wikipedia already has thousands of people logging on at their homes and offices. In Japan, those looking for instant answers now need look no further than their mobile phones. [Link]
• An indebted Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) officer has been arrested for robbing a post office in Fukuoka of more than 1 million yen in March. [Link]
• Time Magazine has written of the dwindling profits Japan’s Yakuza gangs are facing in an article entitled, “Crime Doesn’t Pay (As Much) in Japan.” [Link]
• A condominium complex in Nagoya that a scandal-tainted architectural company calculated quake-resistance data for has proven to be substandard. [Link]
• The Japanese government yesterday donated 3200 tons of rice to The Gambia Government, at a ceremony held at State House, Banjul. [Link]
• A child modeling agency Atlas Promotion has fired most of its employees and closed down several of its branches over a tax evasion scandal. [Link]
• South Korea and Japan said they will resume joint history research to broaden mutual understanding for each other. The joint project had halted in 2005 due to disagreements between both countries. [Link]
• The Party’s over for western hostesses in Japan, claims the Times in an article about the decline of hostess bars. [Link]
• Thousands of rich Japanese women have been conned by a firm into believing lambs were valuable miniature poodles, claims the Sun. [Link via LeonJP]
• Androgenic hormone levels of male company workers are lowest in their 40s and 50s, generally the prime of their careers, according to a survey conducted by a doctor at Teikyo University Hospital in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo. [Link]
• Another former chamberlain wrote in diaries that late Emperor Showa had stopped visiting Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo because he was displeased at the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals with other war dead, it was learned Thursday. [Link]
• “The Testimony to Grandchildren,” a book published annually by Shimpu Co. of Osaka to hand down memories of the war to succeeding generations, marks its 20th anniversary this year. [Link]

Japan Shark!

Two days ago, a friggin’ huge shark was captured off the coast of Ibaraki Prefecture. Fisherman attempted to bring the huge fish to an aquarium, but it did not survive the process. At the time, the news media was unsure of exactly what type of shark it was, but it has since been identified as a basking shark. The shark was 9-meters long and weighed over 4.5 tons, making it the largest shark of its kind captured in Japanese waters. Here’s a video of a very excited Japanese reporter at the scene of the gigantic shark corpse:

The workers in the video are busy scraping the guts out of the shark and putting them in buckets so the creature can be stuffed and put on display at an aquarium. They aren’t exactly ethusiastic about the reporter’s “WOW THAT’S A REALLY BIG SHARK! WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE BEING IN THE BELLY OF A GIANT SHARK? LOL” questions.

Here’s another clip from a news program that built a 1:1 scale mock-up of the shark in their study. It gives viewers a much better idea of just how big the shark was:

Once it’s stuffed, the shark will be going on display at Aqua World Oarai. No word yet on whether they’re planning to put the buckets of shark guts on display too…

[Hat Tip to Japanjin for the article link and information.]