Update on Miss Universe Japan’s national costume, surveillance society, and taxi driver murder
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 opinions we got from many supporters and other people concerned, we decided to make the hemline of the costume longer,” IBG Japan, which operates the local Miss Universe contest, said on a posting yesterday on its Web site. -Bloomberg.com
[via JapanSoc]
Big Brother caught him
Remember the security camera-equipped vending machine that was vandalized last year? Police have caught the person responsible. It was a teenager:
A 19-year-old company employee arrested on Sunday admitted to vandalizing the nation’s first vending machine equipped with crime-prevention functions on five separate occasions, police said.
He told police that he broke a security camera and a sensor light of the vending machine and also sprayed it with graffiti slogans, such as “Kanshi Shakai (Big Brother society).”
The suspect was quoted as saying he was angry about the way security cameras were being used to monitor people.
Because he is under 20, he’ll be charged as a minor.
Sailor goes to jail for murder
A US sailor who murdered a taxi driver while he was AWOL last year has been found guilty and will be serving a life sentence in Japanese prison. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that 6 members of the US military are currently AWOL in Japan. Some have been on the run for months.
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Categories: General Japan
Apprenticeship of Big Toe P
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 a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous “apprenticeship” has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiancé after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.
Amazon’s US site lists its release date as January 2010. Those who can’t wait that long can order it from Amazon Japan (where it has a August 5th 2009 release date).
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Categories: Books
General Election 2009 – The Trailer
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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Categories: Politics
Japanese babies enter the sumo ring
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. Futeno merely held each baby as he did some ritual movements within the sumo ring. Some cried, some didn’t.
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Categories: General Japan
A loud neighbor
A clip from FTV 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 to prepare evidence for the police. The man was arrested for disturbing the peace.
It was not the first time this kind of thing had happened. The report mentions that he had been arrested twice before for the same crime in the last three years.
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Categories: General Japan
Hokkaido Belly Button Festival
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 the Barack Obama dude!
The Hokkaido Heso Matsuri is:
[hat tip to Ken Y-N]
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Categories: Odd / Strange