The Blog of Record

At 4:30 they are joined by a very serious Japanese comedian, and the performance becomes more like what you’d expect to see in a Japanese TV show.

(Via Japan Probe.)

I hope the girls giggling at the back were not executed, Sun Tzu style.

From here.

Japanese police are conducting a campaign against groping on commuter trains:

Every year in Japan, some 1,800 men are arrested for groping women on trains. In a 2004 NHK survey of Tokyo women in their 20s and 30s, 64 percent said they had been groped on a train. Only 2 percent reported it to police. In 2008, the police in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama recognized 2,416 cases of groping on a train.

In a stepped-up campaign of intervention, police are apprehending suspects and putting pressure on operators of the growing number of “how to” Web sites for gropers (chikan). These sites offer advice on techniques for groping and escaping as well as online chat rooms where potential gropers can conspire to commit crimes, increasingly in organized groups.

Japanese commuter trains during rush hour are notoriously crowded. You can’t always control where your hands end up when it takes five people to pack you in:

That doesn’t explain the “how to” Web sites for gropers, though.

An airline is using the global warming hysteria to save a few yen on fuel while looking environmentally conscious:

A Japanese airline has started asking passengers to go to the toilet before boarding in a bid to reduce carbon emissions.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) claims that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use.

Airline staff will be present at boarding gates in terminals to ask passengers waiting to fly to relieve themselves before boarding, The Independent reported.

ANA hopes the weight saved will lead to a five-tonne reduction in carbon emissions over the course of 30 days.

I am much more likely to do something if those who ask me to do it aren’t blatantly lying about their motives while assuming that I am an idiot. I’m sure most people are like me.

Unless, of course, by “ask” they really mean “require”. Or maybe that will be the next step.

The swallows have babies twice a year in that bathroom.

(Via Japan Probe.)

I have no idea what the heck they are doing, but it looks like a Japanese advertisement for cute wrist-cutter suicide knives for schoolgirls:

(Via Flares Into Darkness.)

A man survives the bombing of Hiroshima with some burns and goes back home to Nagasaki – just in time to get A-bombed again. He’s now 93 years old and a little deaf in one ear. Oh, and his legs are not as strong as they used to be.

(Via Link Collection.)

Because that’s what a huge government stimulus and job-creation plan brought for the country:

In the 1990s, during the “Lost Decade” that followed the bursting of a real estate bubble, Japan’s government spent more than $2 trillion on public works. In so doing, it dug itself the deepest public-debt hole in the history of the developed world, totaling more than 175 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

All the spending has made Japan’s infrastructure the envy of the world. It has a public transportation system that is unrivaled for convenience and ubiquity. Its fiber-optic broadband infrastructure enables the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else.

But many critics say the government has gone too far, outfitting itself with more dams, bridges, highways, museums and airports than it will ever use. Japan has the oldest population in the world and the lowest proportion of children.

“Our infrastructure is impeccable,” said Takayoshi Igarashi, a professor of politics at Hosei University and an expert on public works spending. “More public works would be surplus to real need. It would not stimulate anything but the construction industry.”

Still, Prime Minister Taro Aso and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) seem to favor another big round of spending on public works. Aso has said that these projects, including building roads, burying telephone wires and thinning forests, have been neglected and will produce much-needed jobs.

Of course the LDP wants a repeat of the stimulus - a lost decade for the country was a gold mine for the ruling party:

There is, however, much more than mere economics involved in Japan’s squabble over more public works.

The LDP, which has governed as a virtual one-party state for nearly half a century, owes much of its power and longevity to decades of generous government spending on infrastructure built outside Tokyo.

Money, jobs, roads and countless numbers of large concrete structures delighted rural voters, while encouraging construction companies to funnel political donations, some of them illegal, to ruling-party politicians, some of whom were convicted of corruption.

The LDP, over the years, designed a government bureaucracy that quietly awarded public works contracts to politically favored construction companies, according to Igarashi, the professor at Hosei University. He also said bureaucrats, when they retired from public service, made a habit of accepting lucrative jobs at construction firms that prospered from government contracts.

In 2001, a charismatic politician with a big-city power base, Junichiro Koizumi, took control of the ruling party. As prime minister until 2006, he cut spending on public works.

In the process, though, the ruling party’s popularity in rural areas declined.

The law requires a national election this year, and both the ruling party and the prime minister appear to be in deep trouble with voters. Nine out of 10 voters disapprove of Aso, according to recent opinion polls.

A massive increase in public works spending, however, could win hearts and minds in rural areas.

Just like in the U.S., it’s a stimulus for the (Liberal) Democratic Party.

That’s one of the sixteen experiments the Japanese public wants the country’s astronaut Koichi Wakata to perform in his free time aboard the International Space Station. I wonder if the ISS is roomy enough for a sumo match. If not, they can always do it outside.

My prediction is that body mass will matter even more than it does on earth.

Think of any non-existent monster creature, and there’s an old mummy or two of it in Japan. Oh yeah, and Buddhist monks who mummified themselves alive.

He dances with a fat chick, and then politely declines a request to donate one of his testicles to another participant. Even his interpreter is having a great time.

More clips from this show here.

(Via Japan Probe.)

A sign that Japan has not been playing an international role fitting its economic weight. Or maybe that they need to train their cops better:

A teenager in Tottori Prefecture who wears a veil (see above picture) due to a skin condition was stopped and questioned by a police officer who accused him of being a member of the Taliban:

The officer from Yonago Police Station stopped the boy as he was riding double on a bicycle near JR Yonago Station on Oct. 28 last year, accusing him of being “strangely-dressed” and asking him, “Are you a Taliban member?”

The chief of the prefectural police headquarters later admitted that he was stopped because the veil looked suspicious, not because he was riding double.

“Why is Japan so bloody chuffed about its recent diplomatic interactions with the United States?”

The Japanese seem unimpressed by Apple’s wonder-phone:

There are no official statistics available as how well the iPhone sells after Apple started offering it in the Japanese market in July last year. Now Softbank Mobile, one of Asia’s biggest tech companies and the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan, thinks sales need a boost and decided to give away the hardware basically for free [JP].

Following a price cut in August last year, SoftBank will launch a special iPhone campaign on Friday that runs through the end of May. New subscribers signing up for a two-year contract will be able to get a 8GB iPhone for free (the old price in Japan was $235). The The 16GB model will be discounted to $118 from $350.

Another thriving subculture that’s unique to Japan — the close-up magic bar scene:

This type of bar isn’t found outside of Japan’s big cities — a trawl through entertainment listings for various cities around the world turned up one other magic bar, in the US city of Baltimore. While magic is found in cities such as New York and London, it’s more likely to be performed at a comedy club or a theatre restaurant. So why is it that Japan has so many?

It was done on a grand scale, and the only results were a decade-long recession and a public debt totalling 180 percent of the economy.

By waking up and releasing its full potential:

Japan, it seems, has become the Hamlet of Asia, endlessly fretting about its waning world influence while failing to do much about it. Some analysts explain the diffidence by pointing to the drawn-out recession of the 1990s, which left the country demoralized and mired in debt. Others suggest that Japan’s half-century military reliance on the United States created a culture of dependency and timidity. Some even blame the lack of mojo on the country’s aging population, or its strikingly mediocre politicians.

Japan’s financial system is relatively intact by the global crisis, so the potential is there, as are the resources to contribute more to global security:

U.S. diplomats have already signaled that the Obama administration hopes to get more help from Tokyo. But there is virtually no appetite for overseas military involvements in Japan.

That doesn’t mean Japan still can’t contribute. As Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University in Tokyo, puts it, “When they say ‘boots on the ground,’ it doesn’t have to be military boots. It can be the boots of construction workers, teachers, health officials.” In the years to come, he says, “nothing is going to be more important than contributing nation-building capabilities and humanitarian aid” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s an area where the Japanese have already shown that they know what they’re doing, in projects ranging from irrigation to health. And the payoff for doing more, in Washington and around the world, could be huge. So the only trick now is to persuade Tokyo—under its current leaders or its next ones—to take the plunge.

The planet’s second largest economy could be doing much more for the world than exporting great cars, if it only had the will.

Japan’s obsession with blood type and how it determines personality:

In Japan, “What’s your type?” is much more than small talk; it can be a paramount question in everything from matchmaking to getting a job.

If anything can make garden work fun, it’s this:

The nanny state and universal healthcare:

Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further “reeducation” and their communities subject to stiff fines.

Is this some nightmarish dystopia?

No, this is contemporary Japan.

The Japanese government argues that it must regulate citizens’ lifestyles because it is paying their health costs. This highlights one of the greatly underappreciated dangers of “universal healthcare.” Any government that attempts to guarantee healthcare must also control its costs. The inevitable next step will be to seek to control citizens’ health and their behavior. Hence, Americans should beware that if we adopt universal healthcare, we also risk creating a “nanny state on steroids” antithetical to core American principles.

Other countries with universal healthcare are already restricting individual freedoms in the name of controlling health costs. For example, the British government has banned some television ads for eggs on the grounds that they were promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. This is a blatant infringement of egg sellers’ rights to advertise their products.

In 2007, New Zealand banned Richie Trezise, a Welsh submarine cable specialist, from entering the country on the grounds that his obesity would “impose significant costs … on New Zealand’s health or special education services.” Richie later lost weight and was allowed to immigrate, but his wife had trouble slimming and was kept home. Germany has mounted an aggressive anti-obesity campaign in workplaces and schools to promote dieting and exercise. Citizens who fail to cooperate are branded as “antisocial” for costing the government billions of euros in medical expenses.

As I wrote a few days ago on the subject of British healthcare: when the government pays for your healthcare, isn’t it logical that it dictates your lifestyle?

(Via Dr. Mark J. Perry.)