Archive for June, 2010

Japanese Screaming Competition

A clip of a screaming competition for Japanese soccer fans (via EuroNews)

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

Sex and the City 2 in Japan

“Sex and the City 2″ hits theaters in Japan this weekend. Here are a couple video clips of the movie’s stars visiting Japan.

First, an English language report:

And now, an interview with a Japanese comedian:

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Another Hereditary Prime Minister Fails

Justin McCurry of the Guardian has written an article that contains a particularly harsh assessment of Hatoyama’s Prime Ministership (and of Japanese politics in general):

Some analysts have speculated that Hatoyama was simply waiting for the right moment to leave a job he had quickly grown to loathe.

He, like his three immediate predecessors Abe, Fukuda and Aso – hereditary politicians all – became prime minister almost by default, and relinquished power with all the genuine grief, at least in public, of a student bidding farewell to his supermarket shelf-stacking duties .

“Hatoyama is typical of the breed of hereditary politicians who take it for granted that they will become leader,” said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

“Most of them have been indecisive because they never developed the ruthlessness you need to win a power struggle. They want to please everyone, but end up pleasing no one. And the voters are paying the price for electing that kind of leader.” [via JapanSoc]

Finance Minister Naoto Kan is expected to become the next Prime Minister. While Abe, Fukuda, Aso, and Hatoyama were all descendants of Prime Ministers, Kan does not hail from one of the grand political dynasties.

A BBC profile from 2004 mentions Kan as having become a national hero of sorts in 1996 while serving as health minister. Kan forced bureaucrats to release documents about how government failures led to the use of HIV-tainted blood in transfusions. He was a pretty popular leader of the DPJ, but a scandal about his failure to pay into the pension system forced him to resign his leadership position and sidelined his career for a few years. [The article also refers to a sex scandal. I could not find any reliable or informative links offering details on the scandal, but I think that this 1999 article might describe the same scandal.]

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

A Graveyard in the Middle of the Road

“Nanikore” discovers a graveyard in Okayama prefecture that is located in the middle of a paved road:

According to the owner of the graveyard, it has existed for 200 years. The area around it used to be a farm field bordering on a narrow road, but about 50 years ago, the road was widened.

It is a side road without much traffic, but the man says that hasn’t stopped cars from accidentally bashing into the graves on a couple occasions.

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

An Early Start on Beetle Hunting Season

Japanese rhinoceros beetles don’t usually appear until later in June, so when a pair of children caught one in Iwate prefecture in the last week of May, it got some national news coverage:

Hunting for big beetles is a very popular summer activity for children in Japan. These kids will be keeping the beetle they found as a pet.
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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Hatoyama Resigned and All I Got Was This Lousy Shirt

Poor Hatoloopyama. He had a dream, involving crazy fashion. Now you can have some of your own to commemorate another fun shuffling of the chairs in the Prime Minister’s office.

Take this one for instance:

Order it on Amazon
The text on it says, “The Heisei era’s tax evasion king”.

You can find a whole slew of them here. Including a few shirts that use everyone’s favorite word for him recently: loopy.

One is particularly harsh though, in the following shirt we see the characters for love and friendship, along with a dove, split in twain.

Buy on Amazon

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian blogs and vlogs about Japan, language, and news at The Hopeless Romantic. He is loopy like a fox and enjoying his urakudari.
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