Archive for November, 2010

The Welcome-to-Japan Tourism Bra

Triumph International has held a press conference to unveil latest in its line of bizarre gimmick bras. This time it is lingerie that welcomes international tourists to Japan:

A row of three electronic push buttons running down the centre of the garment triggers audio greetings in English, Chinese and Korean.

“Furthermore, tour guide flags are inserted on each side of the bra,” the company said. “When not used to guide tourists, the flags act as side stays, providing good support and creating an attractive bust line.”

The most risque feature is a short skirt attached to the dark blue outfit that flips up to reveal a map of Japan.

Like its previous gimmick bras, it will never be produced or sold to the general public.

Here are a few video clips of it:

This year’s bra falls short of the wacky creativity seen in previous gimmick bras such as the marriage preparation bra, solar bra, golf bra, and chopsticks bra. It seems like Triumph’s marketing department ran out of ideas. Surely they could have thought up something better than a normal bra with a couple of postcards attached to it…

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Coast Guard Officer Faces Criminal Charges for Senkaku Video Leak

Police are questioning a 43-year-old Coast Guard officer who has confessed that he was “sengoku38,” the YouTube user that leaked the video footage of the Sept. 7th ramming of two Japanese patrol ships by a Chinese trawler. He will likely be charged with violations of the public servants law and a law prohibiting unauthorized computer access.

The discovery did not come as a result of police investigation. Instead, manmade the confession to his commanding officer:

Sources familiar with the investigation say the 43-year-old officer, who is based at the 5th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in Kobe, told his commander Wednesday morning that he had leaked the footage. In police questioning, the officer said he had visited an Internet cafe in Kobe where investigators believe the videos were posted online, the sources say. But he reportedly gave only vague answers on how he obtained the videos and his motive for releasing them.

It may seem strange that an officer in Kobe would be able to get his hands on a video that was filmed down in Okinawa. However, it appears that there weren’t many security restrictions in place, and many copies of the video were burned onto discs and passed around within the Coast Guard for purposes of training and education. It would not have been impossible for the video to get into the hands of an officer stationed in Kobe.

Sympathy towards the coast guard officer remains high, and some scholars even doubt that there is a strong case for charging him with a crime:

Although the motive for the leak is unclear, novelist Kaoru Takamura said that if the Kobe coast guard officer was responsible, he likely felt anger at the government’s handling of the Chinese trawler captain’s case.

“Coast guard officers’ duties are to crack down on intrusions into territorial waters. They must have felt considerable anger and stress, caught between their duties and diplomatic problems,” she said.

The Japan Coast Guard arrested the captain after the collisions in September. However, the Naha prosecutors, apparently under government pressure, released the skipper without indictment amid increasing anger from China.

Masao Horibe, a professor emeritus of information law at Hitotsubashi University, also doubted that the leak of the video clips constituted a criminal act because posting them “did not violate the confidentiality obligation.”

He said that even before the clips appeared on YouTube, the public was well aware of the situation surrounding the collisions based on the coast guard’s news conferences. He also noted that the images were already shown to Diet members, who in turn described them to the media.

As the contents of the video had already been described to the public in great detail, it will be difficult to argue that the video clips themselves were a secret that needed to be protected.

According to NTV, one of their reporters had talked to the officer. Here are his comments in Japanese:

　山川記者「（接触したとき）非常に警戒しているという様子はうかがえた。話をする前に、今回のことについては『海上保安庁、あるいは検察庁、周りの職場の人に大変大きな迷惑をかける』と率直に話していた。事件そのものに対する憤り、政治的に現在の内閣にダメージを与える、そういうものは全くないと（海上保安官は）話した。ただ『この映像は国民には見る権利がある』ということを私に話した」

　また、海上保安官は「隠しておいていいのか。闇から闇に葬られ跡形もなくなってしまう。これは国民が知るべきものであって、国民一人一人が判断したらいい。誰もやってくれないなら自分でやるしかない」などと説明し、刑事罰に問われることに関しては「映像を流出させれば、職を失うことは覚悟していた」「本当に私がやったことが国民全体の倫理に反することであれば、これは甘んじて進んで刑にも服します」と語った。

I don’t have time to provide an adequate translation right now, but he basically said that he didn’t want to see the government bury the video and felt that the public had a right to see it He is prepared to accept the consequences, and expects that he’ll lose his job.

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Pirated Chinese Translations of Murakami’s 1Q84 Sold Through Apple App Store

The Asahi reports that scanned copies of the Chinese translation of Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84″ have been illegally sold via the Apple’s App store:

The “1Q84″ version is identical to the Chinese translation published in Taiwan in November 2009.

In response to a query by The Asahi Shimbun, an official of the Taiwanese publishing company, China Times Publishing Co., said: “Although the contents are the translation that we published, we are not involved in any electronic versions. That is a pirated version.”

The Japanese publisher of “1Q84,” Shinchosha Publishing Co., also said it had no idea how the electronic version came about.

Murakami has so far written three parts to the “1Q84″ work. Printed copies sell in Taiwan for the equivalent of about 1,000 yen ($12) per volume. However, buyers of the pirated version can acquire all three parts for a paltry 230 yen.

Other pirated versions available in Chinese include the works of Kenzaburo Oe, who won the 1994 Nobel Literature Prize.

In all those cases, the copyright holders were unaware that the electronic works had been created.

[...]

Kensaku Fukui, a lawyer who specializes in copyright cases, commented: “The App Store has not clearly set the procedures that copyright holders should take to delete works that violate their rights. Since Apple also gains some profits from the sale of the works, there is the possibility that the company could be held responsible for violating copyright. Apple should strengthen its inspection process or clarify the methods for dealing with copyright violations.”

Many of the pirated copies have been on sale for months. If publishing companies want to deprive readers of the ability to buy digital copies of certain books, they’ll have to be more vigilant about piracy.

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World War II Veteran Promotes Reconciliation Between Japanese and British

The Guardian reports that 91-year-old British World War II veteran Philip Malins is being awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for his efforts to promote reconciliation between former British and Japanese soldiers:

The well-documented atrocities endured by many prisoners of war most commonly instilled a long-standing mistrust of Japan among British veterans.

However, Mr Malins spent decades promoting reconciliation and mutual understanding between the two former enemy nations in the aftermath of the war.

Mr Malins, who avoided the fate of becoming a prisoner of war during the conflict, has worked alongside the Sasakawa Foundation to organise reconciliation meetings between veterans.

As well as making several reconciliation visits to Japan, Mr Malins has also hosted representatives from the All Burma Veterans Association of Japan, organised the annual reconciliation services in Coventry and Canterbury and founded the Anglo-Japanese Garden at the National Memorial Aboretum.

In an article from a few years ago, Malins commented on how many British veterans absolutely hate the idea of reconciliation and regard his actions as disgusting:

‘The way the Japanese fought has resulted in a perpetual hatred of them among ex-PoWs that persists to this day,’ said Malins, chairman of the International Friendship and Reconciliation Trust. ‘Reconciliation with the Japanese has been much harder than with the Germans. I was regarded as a nice chap but peculiar, even traitorous, because I was willing to consider reconciliation with the Japanese.’

Malins, who is from Solihull in the West Midlands, has come in for some sharp-tongued criticism and is blunt in return: ‘It is unacceptable to a majority of British veterans. They say: “What about our PoWs?” I say: “What have you done for them? I am the man who initiated the campaign to get them £10,000 compensation. What have you done? You’ve sat on your arse for 60 years and you have the bloody impertinence to ask me what have I done?”

‘It will be a terrible pity if hatred is passed from generation to generation. There are some people who think that by hating the Japanese they’ll get another medal. I say: “If we can find some Japanese who want to fight you, maybe we can sell tickets for people to come and watch.”‘

The official award announcement from the Japanese government can be found here.

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Fried Chicken + Christmas in Japan

The Christmas season is approaching, and in Japan that means it’s time to eat some fried chicken! Kentucky Fried Chicken is the traditional powerhouse of x-mas chicken in Japan, but this year it faces a new challenge from McDonald’s:

McDonald’s Japanese first-ever Christmas set will include two juicy chicken selects, two 5-piece chicken nuggets, two shaka shaka chickens, and some mega-sized fries.

Despite the challenge, KFC reports that reservations for X-mas chicken buckets showing an increase over last year. At the KFC branch visited by the news crew, Christmas Eve buckets were already fully booked.

This is all part of a general trend. Over the last few years, Japanese consumption of chicken has increased, with people preferring it as a healthier and cheaper alternative to other meats. As McDonald’s and KFC battle it out for dominance in the fast food scene, convenience stores are also pushing new chicken products. ( I recommend Lawson’s “L Chiki” boneless chicken + burger bun. )

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Authorities Seek Arrest of Boat Video Uploader

Japanese authorities are trying to find and prosecute the person responsible for uploading the Senkaku boat ramming video to YouTube. Yesterday they apparently “seized” information about the uploader from Google’s offices, and today it has been announced that the IP address has been traced to an internet cafe in Kobe:＜/p>

Investigators have confirmed that the footage was not uploaded from personal computers used by the Japan Coast Guard or prosecutors, and now believe the sender posted it from the Internet cafe so as not to be identified, the sources said.

They will ask the Internet cafe to provide them with information on its users, according to the sources.

If the uploader is captured and charged with a crime, public support will be behind that person. Messages of support have already been flooding in:

As of 3 p.m. Monday, the Policy Evaluation and Public Relations Office of the Japan Coast Guard’s headquarters in Tokyo had received 250 phone calls and 770 e-mail messages, mostly supporting the leak of the video footage, officials said.

Although some inquirers said they were “distressed about the disrespect of control and order” represented by the leakage, the overwhelming opinion was that the leak “adhered to the public’s right to know,” officials said.

They said only 25 calls and messages involved criticism of the coast guard’s handling of information.

The Ishigaki Coast Guard Office in Ishigaki, Okinawa Prefecture, which is the focus of the criminal investigation into the leak, has been bombarded by calls pleading authorities to “stop the manhunt.”

The Internet was also filled with praise for the perpetrator of the leak.

“I would like to express gratitude to the courage and patriotism of the person who uploaded the images,” read one of many similar comments on the video-sharing website YouTube, where the footage of the collisions in the East China Sea was uploaded Thursday night.

The Asahi Shimbun compares this to the case of Takichi Nishiyama, a journalist whose career was ruined in 1971 after he was prosecuted and convicted for writing an article about asecret pact between the United States and Japanese governments.

Update: A 4３-year-old coast guard officer has confessed to the upload. TV news is reporting that he will be arrested shortly.

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