Archive for February, 2011

Ghostly Mirror

This traffic mirror in Yokohama has a mark on it that looks quite frightening at night:

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More Bad Press for Groupon

Barely a month has passed since Groupon took a beating in the Japanese media over one of its New Year’s food deals. Now they’re making headlines again, this time for a deal that was cancelled before most of the customers could use their coupons:

Groupon was offering a deal through which one could purchase 1000 yen worth of taiyaki for 500 yen. The taiyaki store set a limit at 1,700 coupons, but concerns about losing money made it cancel the deal and only accept 400 of the coupons. The remaining 1,300 coupons, which were supposed to be valid until June, are now worthless.

The store claims that Groupon was very aggressive in making them agree to a very high number of coupons, arguing that it would really help their business. Apparently the deal was set up so Groupon would take 250 yen “handling charge” out of every 500 yen sale, meaning that the store only received 250 yen for what would normally be sold for 1,000 yen. The store agreed, believing that new customers who used the Groupon deal would buy extra stuff. Instead, the Groupon customers were supposedly quite stingy and most limited their shopping to the coupon deal. The store says it had to cancel the deal because the survival of the business was more important than honoring the coupon.

Customers who were unable to use the coupons will receive refunds from Groupon.

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iRun Social Media Studio

Joseph Tame shows off the “World’s Most Advanced Mobile Social Media Studio” – the iRun – a device he will be wearing as he runs in the 2011 Tokyo Marathon:

The iRun features four iPhones on rotatable mounts, an iPad, and Android handset, three mobile Wi Fi routers, a four-in-one atmospheric monitor and a heart monitor – all to record his route round the 26-mile circuit.

A post on Tame’s website states: ‘This technology will allow me to broadcast live video on two cameras (using either skype or FaceTime to a local studio for re-broadcast), send live location/pace/heart rate data via Runkeeperon the iPhone, transmit temperature, COx/humidity/noise levels via a custom-made Android app – and do all of this while looking incredibly cool.’

Tame has admitted some of the features, such as the ‘wind turbine’, really a children’s fan, and ‘satellite dish’ on his helmet, actually a plastic bird-feeding dish, are just for decoration, but the rest of the equipment on the iRun is being used to good effect.

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Crazy Woman Screamed Death Threats at Neighbors

A 77-year-old woman has been arrested in Kumamoto after repeatedly screaming death threats at her neighbors:

The craziness had apparently been going on since at least July of 2009. The woman would regularly scream threats at her neighbors, accusing them of theft and declaring that she was going to murder them. She would also sometimes shout stuff about summoning yakuza to get revenge on them for their thievery. The crazy woman also used her garden hose to spray enemies who came too close to her house.

Over the course of 2 years, the woman’s screaming prompted neighbors called the police about 20 times. After failing to resolve the situation by other means, police finally arrested her.

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Excavations Begin at Site of Mass Grave in Tokyo

The Japanese government has begun excavations of a site a mass grave in Tokyo:

The site in western Tokyo is said to be linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which used prisoners for biological warfare experiments.

The excavation was ordered after a former nurse came forward.

Toyo Ishii said workers were made to bury dozens of bodies there after the surrender at the end of World War II.

Ms Ishii, now 88, first came forward several years ago.

A nurse in the hospital’s oral surgery department, she said she had no knowledge of any experiments on humans at the site, which is said to have been the research headquarters of the unit.

But she and her colleagues were ordered to take bodies and body parts for burial in the compound before US troops arrived.

“We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole,” she wrote in a statement in June 2006.

“We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens.”

Excavation of the site had to be delayed until residents had been moved from the area.

“We are not certain if the survey will find anything,” Health Ministry official Kazuhiko Kawauchi told the Associated Press news agency.

“If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731.”

Here’s a short report from TokyoMX tv about this story:

TokyoMX interviewed Kazuyuki Kawamura and Noboru Watanabe, members of activist organizations that had pushed for the government to investigate the site. Both men see this as a big step forward.

Also shown in the report is a monument built at the site of a similar mass grave that was discovered in the area in 1989. The bones found were examined, a panel of experts was not sure about the exact origin of the remains:

According to a 1992 study by then Sapporo Gakuin University anthropologist Hajime Sakura, the bones were those of at least 62 people, and most of them were Mongoloid. In addition, many of the skulls had holes, cuts and other marks indicative of brain surgery.

Sakura performed the study at the request of the Shinjuku Ward office.

The former Health and Welfare Ministry headed the government effort to find the origin of the bones through interviews and questionnaires with 368 former army officers related to the medical school, a ministry official said.

A 2001 report by the ministry, now known as the Health, Welfare and Labor Ministry, said that based on the interviews and the survey, some of the remains were probably bodies kept as specimens at the medical school for educational purposes.

It also mentioned the possibility — without elaborating — that some of the deceased were bodies brought from battlefields.

However, the report concluded there was no solid evidence to link the remains with the activities of Unit 731, and it noted that some interviewees pointed to this possibility while others denied it.

Yoshio Shinozuka, 82, who served as a civilian in Unit 731 from 1939 and 1943, claimed he had never seen the bodies of Chinese victims of human experiments being shipped to Japan or heard of such action.

“But I think we can’t deny the possibility (that some of the bones were the remains of bodies sent from Unit 731) because the epidemic prevention institute was linked with the unit,” he said, noting that the government should get to the bottom of the mystery.

Some people may look at the inability to find a conclusive link between the graves and Unit 731, and the Japanese government official’s statement about the remains how the remains “may not be related to Unit 731″ as evidence of “Japan” trying to “cover-up” or “whitewash” history. It is important to note that disagreeing with the assertion that the bodies are victims of Unit 731 is not a denial of the existence of Unit 731, nor is it a denial of the fact that Unit 731 did a lot of horrendous things. There is little doubt about the fact that Unit 731 was responsible for the deaths of many people in Manchuria. The question of whether victims’ remains were shipped back to Tokyo and buried there is, however, debatable.

Contrary to what one often reads in English language news articles, the existence of Unit 731 is well known in Japan. Mainstream Japanese media have no problem with mentioning the name of the Unit in their reports. Books about Unit 731 are available on the shelves of bookstores across Japan. [One noteable example: The Devil's Gluttony (悪魔の飽食), author Seiichi Morimura's 1981 book detailing the activities of the Unit 731, was a huge bestseller in Japan, selling over 3 million copies.]

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Car Drifting on Ice

A couple Japanese comedians go along for a ride on a car that speeds and drifts over the surface of a frozen lake in Hokkaido:

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