Archive for November, 2009

Obama wants to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki

President Barack Obama says he wants to visit the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime during his presidency, but will not have time when he travels to Japan later this week.

In an interview with Japanese broadcaster N-H-K, Mr. Obama said he would be honored to have the opportunity to visit the two cities that were devastated by U.S. atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

For decades, Hiroshima and Nagasaki city governments have called on world leaders to visit their cities and learn about the horrors of nuclear war. Now that Obama has been awarded a Nobel Peace prize for statements he made in favor of nuclear disarmament, the expectation that he will visit the two cities has grown and there is hope that he might actually achieve significant steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.

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DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa: Islam is better than Christianity (but Buddhism is better than both)

“European and U.S. societies with a (historical) background of Christianity are bogged down,” the ruling party’s No. 2 leader told reporters after meeting Yukei Matsunaga, president of the Japan Buddhist Federation, in Wakayama Prefecture. On Islam, Ozawa said, “It is better than Christianity but it is also exclusive.”

But Ozawa praised Buddhism, saying, “It teaches us a state of mind and way of life from the start about how human beings should be.” He added that the cause of the current social turmoil in Japan is that Japanese people are losing their original spiritual values.

No word yet on where the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster stands in Ozawa’s grand ranking of world religions…

[via JapanSoc]

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Quentin Tarantino stars in Softbank commercials

[hat tip to stears]

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Tatsuya Ichihashi arrested in Osaka

The Yomiuri says that a man who “looks like” Ichihashi was arrested attempting to board a ferry. I am not sure why their news report is uncertain, as TBS News was quite confident in proclaiming that it was Ichihashi. TBS scooped all the other networks by calling and delivering the good news to Bill Hawker, the father of Lindsay Hawker (see 1 minute into this video clip).

Japanese police had apparently not yet contacted Hawker. He expressed shock at the news that the man who killed his daughter has finally been captured and thanked the Japanese police and the Japanese media for all their hard work. On their first try, TBS had nobody on hand to translate what he was saying, so Bill got to talk for about 2 minutes in English before they stopped him to apologize to viewers about the lack of translation. When the interpreter was ready, Bill repeated his statement of thanks.

Update 2: The man has told police that he is indeed Tatsuya Ichihashi and a fingerprint check confirmed it. Sponichi.co.jp reports that he was arrested at the ferry terminal because someone had spotted him and called the police. I hope that person gets a share of the reward money.

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Android coming to SoftBank in spring 2010

At the bottom of SoftBank’s spring line up:

スタイリッシュなデザインに、3.7インチ有機EL液晶と1GHzの高速CPU「Snapdragon®」を採用したハイスペックなAndroidケータイ。Google™の各種サービスやAndroidマーケット™が利用可能。Wi-Fi対応

It will have a 3.7 inch OLED screen, a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, wifi, and access to the all google services including the market.

This phone appears to be neither of the two phones making news in the Android community, the Motorola Droid, which has a 3.7 inch LED screen but a 550 MHz processor, and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which has a 1GHz snapdragon processor but a 4 inch screen.

It will be interesting to see if there is a significant difference in the credit checks of each company once Docomo and Softbank are offering very similarly priced phones.  The guy at “softbank sucks” seems to think this will be the case.

More info (in Japanese) here and here.

Hat tip to Tagosagu

—
Contributor Bio: Steve has been splitting time between the US
and Japan for the past 10 years or so and is now a post doctorate
fellow at a large, lumbering University in Tokyo, where he gets paid
to play with dirt.

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This product is endorsed by the people of the Edo period

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