Archive for March, 2010

Chimpanzee feeds a penguin

On Saturday night’s episode of “Shimura Zoo,” genius chimpanzee Pan-kun learned how to feed fish to a penguin:

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

Snow monkeys terrorize Shibu Onsen

Shibu Onsen, the town in Nagano that is world famous for its snow monkeys that bathe in natural hot springs, has a bit of a problem:

It would seem that some of the monkeys have grown so used to humans that they no longer fear running into houses and stores to steal food. In some cases, they make off with boxes of souvenir snacks, which they supposedly bash open later and eat.

Residents of the town are frustrated by the thieving monkeys, but most shrug off their acts. After all, those same monkeys are responsible for drawing large numbers of foreign tourists to the town.

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

World’s shortest man dies at age 21

Pingping, the 21-year-old man who was a mere 29 inches tall, has died:

The Chinese-born man, who became a record-holder in March 2008, was taken to hospital in Rome for treatment but passed away on Saturday. It is understood he died of heart complications.

Here’s a video of PingPing when he visited Japan last year:

If you haven’t seen it already, also check out this 2007 Japan Probe post about Pingping and a very tall Chinese man traveling around Japan and having fun.

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Toyota’s technical problems: exaggerated for the sake of Japan bashing?

A FTV report about the American media’s sensational coverage of safety problems with Toyota vehicles:

The report focuses on the very questionable claims made by a man who called 9-11 screaming about how his Prius was out of control. [See these two articles for details.]

It goes on to tear into Southern Illinois University engineering professor David Gilbert, who rewired and reengineered the electronics inside a Toyota until he could “replicate” a runaway acceleration situation. Toyota engineers have proven that the same alterations would produce similar effects in several vehicles made by rival automakers. In reporting about Dr. Gilbert, ABC News apparently used some previously-filmed footage of a parked car’s surging tachometer to add some scary drama to the story.

One of the news anchors thinks that the media coverage is just plain Japan bashing. The other anchor, Taro Kimura, sees some parallel between this and something GM/Chevy did in the 1960′s [Could a reader with greater knowledge of the automotive industry fill me in on what he's talking about?].

Also worth considering: A disproportionate number of reports about “sudden acceleration” by Toyota vehicles seem to to have come from elderly drivers:

In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89–and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

[...]

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly, just as the sudden acceleration of Audis and GM autos did before them.

Megan McArdle, business and economics editor for The Atlantic, has also mentioned some other strange statistics about the victims.

[hat tip to Shisaku]

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Al Jazeera English report about porpoise hunt in Japan

Charlie Angela of Al Jazeera files a highly misleading report about how a species of porpoise “may become endangered” because it is being hunted by fishermen in Iwate prefecture:

If the reporter had bothered to go beyond the press release handed to her by animal rights activists and actually checked IUCN data from 2008 she would have found that the species is nowhere near close to endangered:

The species is widespread and abundant, with current range-wide population estimates of more than one million animals. The species was killed in high-seas driftnet fisheries operations during the 1970s and 1980s, but these fisheries have now been banned, and by-catch levels were not considered sufficiently high to cause population declines. While incidental and directed takes in Japanese coastal waters as well as incidental takes in Russian waters are ongoing (with combined removals on the order of 20,000 annually), neither threat is likely to have caused a range-wide decline sufficient to warrant listing in a category of threat.

The information about unhealthy levels of mercury in the meat may indeed be true, but coupling it with exaggerations about the status of the species in question does not help their case.

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Commodore Perry likes Daihatsu

Don’t worry about those ominous black ships in the harbor, Commodore Perry is chillin’ and relaxin’ inside this Daihatsu “black ship,” so he must like Japan:

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