Archive for October, 2009

Life After the BOE (webcomic)

Life After the BOE is a humorous webcomic about the experiences almost all ALTs endure when they come to Japan. Chagrin pays the bills, and anybody that has ever worked in a Japanese school will be able to identify with the comic, but even the layman will find these pretty funny.

This episode reminded me of this post.
[tip of the hat to Brett for the find]
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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic.
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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Japanese woman fears turtles

A Japanese news announcer visits a soft-shelled turtle farm and freaks out when she tries to move around inside a tank of turtles:

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• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Controversal arrest over upskirt photography

Livedoor News reports on a photographer who was apparently arrested because he took upskirt photographs of a paid model:

At approximately 11 AM on the 12th, the two were holding a private photography session at a park in Ichioka Motomachi, Minato-ku, Osaka. Kurosawa, wearing a one-piece, climbed atop a playground slide, while Tanabe filmed from below. The parents accompanying their children in the park found the activity suspicious and reported the incident to the police. The two were arrested.

“It seems that the two met on the internet, where Tanabe ask her to let him take pictures of her panties for 10,000 yen. Kurosawa is denying the charges, however, insisting that she hadn’t given him permission.” [Quote from the Police]

Here are a few selected comment translations from Hatena Bookmark, a popular Japanese link sharing site:

dambiyori: They weren’t arrested on charges of ”public indecency,” but rather for violating the Kyoto Nuisance Prevention Ordinance. The third article specifically prohibits the act of taken pictures of exposed underwear in public places.

mittsun1979: If people can be arrested for this, they can also be arrested for wearing clothing that shows cleavage or miniskirts…

giant-killing: It’s become an oppressive society…

md2tak: This type of Nuisance Prevention Ordinance is really similar to the Peace Preservation Law. How convenient.

konkon1986: The problem is the difference in people’s definitions of what constitutes sexual conduct. So you’ve got the claim, “Nothin’ wrong with just taking a few pics of her panties,” but if you’re doing that in front of parents with their kids at a park, you better believe you’re gonna get called on public indecency. Bunch of idiots.

kenken610: At first I thought this was from some Islamic country…

mnemo: At this rate, we’ll have people being arrested just for making out in public in no time. Society’s just gonna get more and more ridiculous.

bzb05445: Lately, from small stuff like this, it seems like the authority of the police is getting stronger.

[The Japanese news article translations in this post were provided by myGengo's simple human translation system.]

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

Shoplifting Japanese granny arrested for stealing stew

A super market catches an elderly shoplifter [captions added for English language explanation]:

It turns out that this woman is a repeat offender, and has even been featured on a previous news report about shoplifting. (Which says a lot about the obsession some networks have with dramatic feature reports about shoplifting.)

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• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Nitpicking netizens claim that Yu-na Kim is buying her victories

One of the top viewed videos on YouTube Japan today is a video entitled “Why Yu-na Kim’s score is always CRAZY high ? Dirty Korean Money.” It examines footage of Yu-na Kim’s figure skating and determines that there were errors judges intentionally ignored in the scoring process:

It was uploaded by a user called ChinaUniteKorea. The user’s favorites include a patriotic videos about the beauty of China, as well as several classic anti-Korean YouTube clips created by Japanese netizens. The stats for the video show a high number of hits coming from 2channel’s referral url and several hundred views coming from Korean websites that discovered the video.

Last weekend saw some tough competition between Kim and her Japanese rivals at the Paris Grand Prix, and Kim left with the gold medal. The video’s popularity is likely fueled by the fact that Kim set a new world record with her final score at the competition, crushing Mao Asada of Japan by a huge margin.

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

Japanese media reports on Louisiana interracial marriage case

The story of a couple in Louisiana that was denied a marriage license because an official disapproved of interracial marriage has been picked up by the Japanese media. Here’s how on ATV news program reported on the story:

NTV, CNN.co.jp, 47 News, the AFP, and MSN/Sankei have also reported on this case.

Over at 2channel, Japan’s largest online forum, hundreds of comments have been left in response to threads about this news story. Here are some translations of interesting comments from one such thread:

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The Japanese, who sugarcoat international marriage by saying, “love has no boundaries,” should know the current situation in the United States.
It’s too late to realize that after they marry some American soldier and move to the states.
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Louisiana’s that horrible state where a Japanese high school student was shot, but the shooter was sentenced not guilty, right? It’s the state where Caucasians are not guilty even if they shoot Asians.
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I don’t think America has the qualifications to criticize racism in other countries.
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Is it safe for Japanese people to visit the South?
Will stones be thrown at us?
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That America’s pretty much a racist country. If you look at the bulletin boards, they repeatedly call us “JAPs.”
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Response to the above comment: Oh, c’mon, there are tons of people who use terms like “Chon” (=discriminatory word for Chousen-jin, which means Koreans), “Chan” (=discriminatory word for the Chinese), and whatnot lol
It’s hard to bear it when a sweeping statement like “OO is a(n) XX country” is made, just because of certain lunatics online.
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The racism in the deep south is hardcore.
This is where Golgo 13 (= Japanese anime character) comes back on the mound.
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Caucasians are discriminated in Japan too, both in good ways and bad ways.
When I was a student, I’ve seen many half (mixed raced) kids around me and most of them were being bullied.
The ones who bully them again are nothing but the pathetic ones, though.
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The golf superstar Tiger Woods married a beautiful Swedish Caucasian lady since he didn’t like black women, so doesn’t that make him guilty too?

The vast majority of the comments denounced the official in question and expressed shock and/or disgust at the news. A lot of 2channelers seemed to know that the southern part of the United States once had racist laws, but it was hard for them to believe that this could still take place in 2009.

Many other comments inquired about the legality of marriage to 2-D anime characters, a joke referencing some of the most extreme elements of Japanese otaku who use 2channel. One particular user expressed his disgust at the antiquated view of marriage held by the Louisiana official, quickly adding that he himself would like to marry a character from Lucky Star.

There were also quite a few comments discussing how races are viewed in the United States. Some weren’t sure how one would categorize mixed race children: would they be considered white or black? Others wondered how Japanese people were viewed, with at least one user erroneously claiming that Japanese were considered “white” in the United States.

[Hat tip to Rich Pav for coming up with the idea for this post.]

Disclaimer: Comments left on the internet by anonymous netizens should not be interpreted as representative of an entire nation.

[The Japanese news article translations in this post were provided by myGengo's simple human translation system.]

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• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)