Archive for January, 2011

Making Stuff With Your Feet

The grand prize on last night’s Kasou Taishou competition went to a guy who made neat images with his feet:

His act wasn’t mind-blowing or super awesome, but it was amusing. I think they gave him the top prize as a sort of lifetime achievement award, since he’s been a regular in Kasou Taisho competitions for years now, always doing amusing finger or foot art performances.

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

Tiger Mask Hero Helps Japanese Orphanages

Something very cool has been happening in Japan in the last few weeks. Someone, or several people, have been making donations of toys and school supplies to orphanages in the name of Naoto Date, the main character of “Tiger Mask,” an anime series that aired in the 1960′s:

In the popular animation, Naoto Date was an orphan who grew up in a welfare facility and donated money to the facility after becoming a professional wrestler.

“I suspect that someone around his 50s or so, had similar experience with Tiger Mask and sent the gifts for us. We don’t plan to search for him, out of respect for his feelings,” Matsuba said.

After the gifts were reported in December, child welfare facilities in Kanagawa, Nagano, Gifu, Okinawa Prefectures have received school bags or donations from “Naoto Date,” one after another.

The latest donation, a set of 7 pricey randoseru school packs, was made to an orphanage in Nagasaki. A note attached to the donation said it was from “Nagasaki’s Naoto Date (hibakusha).” The person who left the boxes was apparently an older woman:

The geographic spread of the donations seems to indicate that there are several people acting in the name of Naoto Date. All the press coverage given to the donations is probably helping inspire copycats.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the “Tiger Mask” anime, here’s it’s opening sequence:

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

Japanese Foreign Minister Honors American War Dead

Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara visited Arlington National Cemetery to leave a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns on January 7th:

Maehara was in America to meet with Hillary Clinton and other American officials about how to strengthen the U.S.-Japan Alliance.

Here’s a video of him giving a speech in English at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

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

Bunny Chihuahua

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

Health Care Fraud in Japan: Welfare Recipients Given Unneeded Operations

An investigation into the activities of a hospital director in Nara prefecture has discovered many cases of the government health insurance system being billed for heart operations that patients didn’t need:

Footage of the stenting procedures was recorded automatically by an X-ray photography device in the operating room of the hospital. Discs containing the footage were among materials seized by Nara prefectural police in the fraud case and were later returned to the Osaka municipal government.

In the case of stenting operations, hospitals can only claim remuneration from the national health insurance system when 75 percent or more of the diameter of a coronary artery is blocked.

The municipal government asked a university hospital to examine the discs, and a panel of seven doctors of cardiovascular internal medicine concluded that 98 of 116 patients did not need the stenting surgery.

The Sakai and Higashi-Osaka municipal governments in Osaka Prefecture and the Kyoto municipal government also conducted similar examinations of separate footage and concluded that 42 stenting operations were unnecessary.

“There was footage of operations on patients [whose coronary arteries] were not clogged at all. They are obviously fraudulent,” an official of the Osaka municipal government said.

[...]

Yamamoto Hospital accepted welfare recipients, including homeless people. The Osaka and other municipal governments, which suspect the remuneration made from welfare payments to the hospital was improper and excessive, have filed a claim in court and are trying to gather evidence.

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

Drunken Fish in Japan

The city of Tonami in Toyama prefecture recently held a festival in which carp are made to drink sacred sake:

I could not find any English language article’s about this year’s festival, so here’s a little info from an article about the 2008 festival:

The fish were the drinkers in a strange ceremony dating back to the Edo Period in which lively carp are made to consume a large dose of sake as they symbolically take on people’s calamities. After drinking the sake, the fish are released into a river.

[...]

Filled up with sake, the carp at first turned belly-up on the surface of the water. But they soon recovered and swam off.

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