Archive for December, 2011

A Vision of Japanese University Students Today

Marcus Grandon has created this video that uses a class of Japanese students to educate us about their views of university education in Japan:

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K-Pop Group Arrested For Visa Violations

Japanese police have arrested the members of the Korean pop group “Great” – who were apparently working despite having only come to the country on tourist visas:

The group arrived in Japan in October on tourist visas. Despite being aware of the fact that their activities were an illegal violation of the visa terms, they’ve given about 70 concerts in Tokyo.

From the video clip, we can see that the police raid took place at Seichi Entertainment’s concert house in Shin-Okubo. Here are a description of the business from the Mainichi:

Groups of female fans are often seen waiting on a street in the Shinjuku Ward district for performances at the K-pop music hall Seichi, which has been offering three stages a day of young Korean musicians since it opened in April.

The hall, with a capacity of about 200 people and meaning “sacred place” in Japanese, hosts both South Korean and domestically formed K-pop acts.

It is located in the basement of a multiple-tenant building on a street lined with Korean restaurants in an area known as Korea town.

“I think this place is a culture base to sustain the Korean boom,” said Chu Kwang Ho, 56, manager of Seichi.

And here is a YouTube video of them, calling on fans to check out one of their illegal performances:

Judging from the lack of many pictures and videos of the group, it seems that they were relatively unknown and just getting their start in Japan. If they were hoping to cash in on the K-pop boom in Japan, they will have to give up that dream now. After this visa violation they’ll probably be barred from entering the country for at least a few years.

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Japan Selects F-35 Fighter Jet

Japan has officially picked the Lockheed F-35 Lightning (JSF) as the replacement for its aging fleet of fighter aircraft.

As Bloomberg reports, the jets are going to be very expensive:

Japan’s F-35s will replace Boeing F-4s, which were last assembled in the country in 1981. Japan had a total of 362 fighter jets as of March 31, according to the defense ministry’s website.
The initial contract with Lockheed is for four jets in the fiscal year beginning April 1, the Bethesda, Maryland-based contractor said today in a statement. The company will begin delivering jets to Japan in 2016, Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed’s vice president for business development, said on a conference call.

Japan will pay 8.9 billion yen ($114 million) for each of the first four jets, according to Masaki Fukasawa, director of aircraft division at the defense ministry. The nation’s total cost for the purchase, operation and maintenance of the 42 fighters is estimated at 1.6 trillion yen over 20 years, Fukasawa said.

The Pentagon has praised the decision, as it will apparently allow better coordination with United States and Australian forces.

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Chinese Fishing Boat Captain Arrested

The Japanese coast guard have arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that was caught illegally fishing well within Japan’s territorial waters:

Encounters between Chinese fishermen and the Japanese authorities have exacerbated tensions between Japan and China in the past over territorial boundaries in the East China Sea.
The Japanese coast guard said it had chased the Chinese boat for seven hours after finding it trying to collect corals near islands off the coast of Nagasaki. The coast guard arrested the boat’s captain, adding that nobody was harmed in the process.

A few more details:

In total, five coastguard vessels took turns chasing the Chinese vessel until around 5 am, when the boat was stopped for an onboard inspection, the coastguard said.

“We used a speed boat to bring the boat’s captain to (the coastguard’s office in) Nagasaki. The onsite investigation of the vessel is continuing before we move the ship and the rest of the crew,” a spokesman said.

“We are not experiencing any disobedient behaviour from the captain,” he said.
The arrest came after a 42-year-old Chinese fisherman was charged last week with murder in South Korea over the fatal stabbing of a coastguard officer and the wounding of another as they tried to detain him and his boat for illegally operating in the Yellow Sea.

Unlike the ramming incident that took place last year, this boat was within an area that even China does not claim, so there is unlikely to be any protests from the Chinese government.

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Kim Jong-il Dead: Japan Reacts With Caution

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il has died. The Japanese government has reacted by holding some national security meetings:

As the central government’s information gathering operations moved into top gear, the Japanese leader held a telephone conversation with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, the foreign ministry said.

Japan will also be in close contact with China and the United States concerning the issue, government officials said.

A series of emergency meetings between Noda and his key security advisers convened Monday, following Noda’s receipt of the news.

The Japanese government’s response has been one of caution. Prime Minister Noda doesn’t want to do anything that might cause trouble, so he’s just saying he hopes that the situation remains peaceful. Will North Korea be stable under the leadership of the young Kim Jong-Un? Will the new regime be more receptive to Japan’s demands for information about abducted citizens? Nobody is really sure what will happen next.

It has also been a hot topic for users on Japan’s largest bulletin board site, 2channel. Here are a few ASCII art images that have been posted on threads about the news story. As you might guess, their reaction was a little bit different from the official government response.

Beer mugs raised in celebration of Kim Jong-Il’s Demise:

Somebody’s holding a festival:

A Tamori-like character finds that his studio audience is very happy about Kim Jong-il’s death:

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Greenpeace Distributes Radioactive Fish Advertisement Flier

I got to hand it to Greenpeace Japan. They’ve come up with a really great idea on how to publicize the results of some of their radiation tests of fish from Japanese supermarket shelves. A fake advertisement flier, listing the amounts of cesium instead of prices:

And the message it sends is very clear: Greenpeace could not find any fish that contained radiation exceeding legal safety limits. The legal limit for Japan is 500 becquerels per kilogram. The highest amount of radiation they found in one fish was 47.3 Bq/kg, or less than one tenth the limit.

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