Archive for November, 2009

Vending machines taped shut to prevent terrorism

During President Obama’s visit to Japan, about 16,000 police officers were mobilized to provide extra security around Tokyo. Here’s a video clip showing some of the security measures taken:

The report says that trash cans, coin lockers, and vending machines were put out of service at many train stations. The primary method of preventing the use of vending machines appears to have been duct tape.

[via JapanSoc]

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Japanese Obama fans try and fail to meet Barack

A group of Barack Obama fans from Obama City in Fukui Prefecture attempted to meet the U.S. president as he entered his hotel on Friday:

They were disappointed to discover that he did not enter the building through the front lobby. Later, they were able to wave at him from the side of the street as his motorcade passed by. Apparently they did some hula dancing.

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Christmas version of Japan’s hit Aflac Maneki Neko Duck song

The song from an Aflac commercial that has become a minor hit in Japan now has a special Christmas version:

The full version of Aflac’s new X-mas commercial can be found on Maneki Neko Duck dot com.

Related link: Don’t be surprised if you encounter these characters in the streets of Tokyo. Aflac has decked out an advertisement truck with giant Santa cat-ducks.

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A Day In The Life – English Conversation School In Japan

A comedy video about life as an English conversation teacher in Japan:

A fly-on-the-wall documentary about Steve, an Englishman who starts his adventure as an English Conversation instructor for a large Eikaiwa chain in Japan.

[via Lets's Japan dot org]

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Has international media coverage of Hawker murder peddled an ugly strand of uninformed stereotyping?

The Guardian has featured a letter to the editor by Jenny Holt, a lecturer at Meiji University who believes that the international media has used the Lindsay Hawker murder case as an excuse to “indulge in practically the only form of overt racism still tolerated today – the demonisation and denigration, en masse, of Japanese men.” Here’s an excerpt:

The paper announced that the murder had “cast a sinister shadow” over Tokyo’s entire female expatriate community. “In Japan,” it proclaimed, “British women constantly have to put up with unwanted male attention – such as the endemic groping on the trains”. Later, it interviewed another British teacher who cautioned women to be “wary” before travelling to the country.

Others have also capitalised on this crude stereotype. In September 2008, Radio 4 broadcast a play by John Dryden and Miriam Smith entitled A Tokyo Murder, which was loosely based on the Hawker case and which trotted out the same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.

This year Clare Campbell included a discussion of the Hawker case in Tokyo Hostess, an investigation of the Roppongi bar scene and the Lucie Blackman murder – even though Lindsay Hawker had nothing to do with hostessing. As Susanna Jones commented in a review of Campbell’s book, the only thing the murders have in common is that Blackman and Hawker were “targeted by horrifyingly dangerous men”. To imply that the presence of two psychopaths makes a whole country dangerous for foreign women is to leap to the most preposterous of conclusions.

And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity. Newspaper reports of the Nomura sex discrimination case emphasise the fact that the bank is Japanese, even though sex discrimination is endemic in banking and companies of every nation are routinely sued for it. Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream, eating live fish, doing cosplay or collecting hentai manga. And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.

Found via 空, which also directs readers to Jeffrey Levick’s “Japan in the U.S. Press: Bias and Stereotypes.”

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Pompeii in Japan

NTV news reports on a press conference that announced an exhibition of artifacts from Pompeii that will be coming to Japan next year:

Fukuoka City Museum
Tuesday, Jan. 5, through Sunday, March 7, 2010
Yokohama Museum of Art
Saturday, March 20, through Sunday, June 13, 2010
Nagoya City Museum
Thursday, June 24, through Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, Sept. 11, through Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010
Sendai City Museum
Thursday, Feb. 10, through Sunday, May 8, 2011

Check this page for details.

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