Archive for August, 2011

Gigantic Sushi

Video of a sushi restaurant in Aichi prefecture that is famous for its ridiculously oversized sushi:

It’s mega sushi roll has 20 different foods wrapped inside 2 meters of seaweed and rice. It costs 15,000 yen and requires a reservation 2 days in advance.

For the same price, you can also order a giant set of nigiri sushi (together with a super tiny set). The slab of tuna on top of one blob of rice could make about 40 normal-sized maguro nigiri-zushis.

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International Media Coverage About Honest Japanese People

Japan’s Asahi TV reports about some of the English language media coverage of about Japanese people turning in cash they found in tsunami wreckage:

Honest Japanese return £50million found in earthquake rubble to tsunami victims

Their honesty was revealed as Britain’s courts are clogged scores of looters following the orgy of theft that accompanied last week’s riots.

In the five months since the disaster struck, people have turned in thousands of wallets and purses found in the debris, containing nearly £30million in cash.

More than 5,700 safes that washed ashore along the coastline have also been hauled to police stations by volunteers and rescue crews.

Inside them officials found about £20million in cash. In one safe alone, there was the equivalent of £600,000.

It’s a weird pattern: the domestic Japanese media was probably first to report about the money, then foreign media picked up the story, and then the Japanese got to pat themselves on the back by mentioning the positive foreign media coverage of the same story.

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Jenny Talks About Life in Japan

A commercial for Seiyu (Walmart Japan) that has been airing a lot on Japanese TV recently:

Jenny, a resident of Japan, is visiting her family back in her unspecified country of origin. Dad asks her how she’s enjoying her life in Japan, and she breaks down, complaining about how she cannot shop at Japanese supermarkets whenever she likes. Meat, eggs, frozen food, and other items are cheap on separate days of the week! (But she’s wrong: it’s not like that at Seiyu, where prices are low all the time.)

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Belgian Soccer Fans Taunt Japanese Player With “Fukushima” Chant

A Belgian soccer match had to be halted after some fans mocked Lierse goalkeeper Eiji Kawashima with “Fukushima” chants [the incident occurs five minutes into the following video clip]:

….visiting Beerschot fans threw a projectile in the direction of Japanese international ‘keeper Kawashima before insulting him with chants of “Kawashima-Fukushima! Kawashima-Fukushima!” the Belga agency reported.

Following protests by Kawashima, the referee decided to bring play to a halt for several minutes until order was restored.

The match ended in a 1-1 draw, but Kawashima, 28, left the pitch at full-time in tears, and spoke of his anger at the chants.

“I am prepared to forget about a lot of things, but not that. It is not remotely funny,” he said.

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A Kamikaze Pilot Who Survived

A news report about Toru Mizukawa, an 89-year-old man who was one of the few “kamikaze” pilots who survived the Pacific War:

As Japan’s situation became desperate, Mizukawa and his classmates at Ritsumeikan University were drafted into the Imperial armed forces. Mizukawa became a member of the Himeji Naval Air Group, a unit that would send 63 pilots on one-way “special attack” missions between April 6 and May 4,1945 (during the Battle of Okinawa).

Mizukawa and the other pilots knew that Japan wasn’t winning the war, but they were prepared to die for their country. He would wake up each day, wondering if his name would be called for participation in the next suicide mission. Luckily for Mizukawa, that day never came. The squadron ran out of airplanes before it ran out of pilots.

Every year, Mizukawa visits the graves of his dead comrades. Although he knows that he didn’t do anything wrong, he feels guilty about having survived when so many others went off and died.

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DNA Evidence Suggests Nepalese Man Was Falsely Convicted of 1997 Murder

In 1997, Govinda Prasad Mainali, a illegal immigrant from Nepal, was arrested for allegedly strangling and robbing a 39-year-old Japanese woman:

Govinda, who has maintained his innocence, was acquitted by the Tokyo District Court in April 2000, only to be found guilty by the high court after prosecutors appealed, even though the only physical evidence linking him to the victim and the vacant Shibuya Ward apartment where her body was found was circumstantial.

[...]

Govinda came to Japan in 1994 and worked at Indian restaurants with the dream of building a home for his wife and children back home. He was arrested after the victim was found dead on March 19, 1997, in an empty apartment near where he had lived.

Although acquitted, Govinda was never set free.

While still in detention awaiting deportation, the Tokyo High Court, in a surprise move, approved a request by prosecutors to keep him in custody as they sought to overturn his acquittal.

The state offered no new evidence, but the high court nevertheless found Govinda guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

While he has been serving jail time, people have been fighting to have his case re-examined. They finally were able to conduct a DNA test on some of the evidence, and it has raised very serious questions about Govinda’s conviction:

DNA analysis shows that semen taken from the victim’s body did not match that of a Nepalese man who has been convicted of killing her and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is seeking a retrial.

According to results of the new tests, the semen’s DNA type matched that of a body hair found at the scene of the crime, an unoccupied apartment.

This fact shows that someone other than the convicted man might have been with the victim at the murder scene.

It raises serious doubts about the ruling of the Tokyo High Court that overturned a decision by the Tokyo District Court acquitting the defendant. The high court said it was hard to believe the victim entered the apartment with a person other than the defendant.

According to an article in the Mainichi, if the case is re-tried, prosecutors might argue that his is nonetheless guilty because “DNA test results do not immediately prove that the other man, whose DNA matched that found on the victim’s body, murdered her.”

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