A few updates to stories we’ve posted about before:

A change of clothing for Miss Universe
Miss Universe Japan Emiri Miyasaka’s shocking “porn star” kimono has been getting a lot of negative attention from fans and the press. Sankei Sports reports that pageant officials have decided to change the design of her national costume.

“Considering the [...]

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, a bizarre bestselling Japanese novel, will soon be released in English translation. I’ll let the plot summary speak for itself:
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naïve twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into [...]

An intro that TBS evening news has been using for its coverage of 2009 election news:

Sadly, the actual coverage is nowhere near as exciting as the intro would suggest.
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Tamana District in Kumamoto prefecture held a sumo event for babies over the weekend:

The event takes place every year when Futeno Izumi, a professional sumo wrestler from the region, returns home. Unlike the naki zumo events mentioned before on this blog, the object of the event was not to make the babies cry. [...]

A clip from Fuji TV of a loud drunk man caught on camera as he walked around his neighborhood shouting threats at his neighbor:

The man is angrily shouting insults while accusing his neighbor of theft and damaging his car. This was apparently a regular occurrence, so the victim set up a security camera [...]

The city of Furano held its annual Heso Matsuri (”Belly Button Festival”) yesterday. Participants took to the streets with a variety of amusing faces painted on their bellies.
Here are a few belly button parades video clips that folks have uploaded to YouTube:

The second clip is the best. Gotta love those Dragonball bellies and [...]

How Nomura Holdings treats its female employees (from the Wall Street Journal, via Foreign Policy):
Japanese brokerage firm Nomura Holdings Inc. kicked off a training session for new hires in April by separating the men and women. The women, including Harvard graduates hired by Lehman Brothers before it collapsed, were taught how to wear their hair, [...]

Two interesting diet advice books from Japan for all of you out there that want to slim down this summer:

First we have Sayonara, Mr. Fatty, a book of advice from an otaku who was once fat:
In this uplifting memoir, famous Japanese pop culture “King of the Geeks” Toshio Okada tells of the diet and lifestyle [...]

Remember our post a couple days ago about problems in a New York Times magazine piece about “2-D Love”? It looks like Lisa Katayama, the author of the article, has returned from her vacation and seen Adamu’s fact-checking post.
Unfortunately, Katayama has chosen to announce to the world via twitter that she won’t respond [...]

NTV’s “Real Time News” sometimes airs some pretty dumb special reports, but it also devotes considerable time to serious issues. Here’s a very good report on how using dispatch companies to employ foreign English teachers is killing the quality of English education in Japanese public schools and making foreigners endure poor working conditions (subtitled [...]

Tokyo Metro has been running some interesting commercials lately. Each commercial features tourists from a different country being told about the convenience of the Tokyo Metro system in their native language. Japanese subtitles are provided.
Here are the French tourist / Chinese tourist commercials:

There are also English and Korean versions of the commercial, which [...]

It would seem that a lot of internet users are upset about the “Japanese” national costume that Miss Universe Japan 2009 Emiri Miyasaka will be wearing in the big competition.
A ZakZak article introduces the controversy to Japanese readers, revealing that many comments have criticized the design and American blogs are calling it something a porn [...]