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)