Archive for September, 2009

Dog travels by balance ball

A “Pochi Tama” clip featuring a dog in Japan that rides around the neighborhood on an exercise ball instead of taking normal walks:

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Creepy robots surrender to the Japanese

A creepy scene of robots discussing surrender to Japan:

“In Singapore’s Fort Canning Park is an old WWII bunker that was repurposed a decade or two ago as a tourist attraction. They installed a number of lifelike animatronic British generals so visitors could experience what it must have been like as they deliberated surrendering to the Japanese. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’ve oiled their robots in a while…”

[via BoingBoing]

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Goldfish catching champions

The traditional festival game of catching goldfish with a tissue paper net was taken to extremes on a recent episode of TV Tokyo’s “Champions.” Here’s a clip of one of their champions catching over 30 fish in three minutes:

Later in the same episode, the champions who passed the speed catching round moved on to face off against each other in a new goldfish catching game. Many parents and children don’t play the goldfish catching games at festivals because it is difficult to care for the fish they catch. To encourage people to keep goldfish as pets, TV Tokyo sought the help of the Sega game designer behind the popular MushiKing collectable card game. He designed a game in which players would compete to quickly catch an entire tankload of goldfish. Each player could bring larger goldfish they had raised at home to the battle, one of which could be added to their opponent’s tank each round. If this game catches on, children may gain a special commitment to raising the goldfish they catch at festivals.

Here’s a clip of the final showdown between the two greatest goldfish catching champions:

—
In case you are wondering: yes, PETA would consider this game to be cruel. They believe that keeping fish inside tanks is bad, and recommend that fish lovers download “realistic fish computer screensavers” instead of imprisoning intelligent fish that can “speak, make tools, and think.”

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Mein Kampf Manga Selling Well

While it is not a best seller, especially by manga standards, the manga version of Hitler’s most infamous writing, わが闘争 (waga tōsō, Mein Kampf) is selling pretty well–45,000 have been sold so far. It is the best selling manga in the publishing company’s “read it via manga” series, which includes an adaptation of Marx’s Das Kapital.

There have been calls recently to allow the publishing of Mein Kampf in Germany, which is something that has been forbidden since the end of World War II. On top of that the work is still under copyright, being held by the Bavarian Finance Ministry, but that will end in 2015. To head off Neo-Nazi groups who would twist the work to their ends, German Jewish author Rafael Seligmann has suggested publishing an annotated version to give readers an historical framework and educate people about the evil that was Hitler. So far, the proposal for lifting the ban has not been accepted. As for the manga version, it has been dismissed by the Ministry as the wrong medium to tell the story in.

Nazis and their imagery (Nazi chic) seem to show up with surprising frequency in Japan. I’ve seen swastikas (of a definitely non-Buddhist variety) on middle-schoolers’ pencil cases. I’ve seen Nazi flags hanging casually in special sections of book stores. And I’ve seen cosplay nazi girls, as well as odd guys in German uniforms* in the park. While I think it’s safe to say that interest in Nazis is by no means the norm, it does not seem to be met with the shock that it would be in the Western world. In short, I hope that the majority of people buying this manga are reading it for the right reasons: to learn and to not repeat the past, which should not be treated lightly in this case.

Japan, as far as I know, has no legally-enforced bans on glorifying it’s own past regime, the Japanese Empire of WWII–something that one foreigner recently tried, and more or less failed, to bring to the attention of right-wingers at Yasukuni. But at the same time, there is concern and criticism from vocal parties that despite the lack of a ban, the Japanese public is not sufficiently educated in school about the horrors of the past.

[Source: ANN]
–
*In this case, the uniform is not of the SS variety, a but possibly a Wehrmacht uniform. It’s still an odd sight.

—
Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic.
—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Hideki Matsui & Godzilla star in coffee commercial

Hideki Matsui joins the monster he was nicknamed after in a new commercial for Fire canned coffee:

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Enjo Kosai : Compensated dating in Japan

A special investigation of the teenage prostitution in Japan (“compensated dating”), from a Japanese TV news program:

The narrator introduces information about a “new” type of underage prostitution in Japan. It is not like traditional prostitution, which usually involved girls working for an adult pimp or brothel owner. Instead, teenage girls go onto the internet and act as freelance prostitutes.

The girls join online dating sites and put up a profile containing slang terms that let men know their age and the price they expect to be paid for sex. Their reporter tries this method and meets up with a 15-year-old junior high school student. When she arrives at their meeting place, the man is shocked by how young and normal she looks. He interviews her, and she claims that she has only sold herself once, for 10,000 yen to a man who was about 25 or 26-years-old. She says it is very easy to arrange it through the internet, where there are a wide variety of message boards and dating sites available. When asked why she did it, she says she wanted money. She doesn’t know any classmates who are also engaging in prostitution, but she guesses there might be other girls in her school who do it. After the reporter gives her a little lecture on how dangerous her actions are, she claims that she will stop. She’s heard stories about girls who have had pictures and video of their encounters put on the internet, and doesn’t want it experience that herself. She also doesn’t really enjoy selling her body. The reporter lets her leave, hoping that she really does intend to quit.

The second clip shows police in Kanagawa prefecture arresting a man who had paid for an underage prostitute. A 15-year-old girl who had engaged in enjo kosai presented police with evidence of her encounter with the 37-year-old customer, so they send a team to his house with an arrest warrant. They wait for him to leave his house for work, apparently because they don’t want to disturb his wife and children. However, once they arrest him, they escort him back into the house and ask him further questions. He is then taken away. It would be pretty safe to say that his marriage, his relationship with his children, and his career have probably been ruined.

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)