I’m busy, so I don’t have time to write individual entries on these, so here’s a synopsis of some stuff that caught my eye:

From ZAKZAK, everyone’s favorite online tabloid:

Japan’s favorite pickles NOT kimchee after all —An earlier report that Japan’s #1 pickled dish was in fact Korean kimchee turns out to be false. Asazuke, a general term for Japan’s traditional lightly pickled vegetables such as takuan or umeboshi, is in fact Japan’s favorite. “After all,” the ZAKZAK reporter concludes, “We are Japanese!”

North Korean fans get violent with Iran after losing 1-0
“Kill the foreigners” shout thousands of angry fans; Zico’s Japan shudders

The Marmot has covered this pretty well, but seriously I thought that the DPRK’s citizens were either above it or just too weary to get angry over soccer. Ogura Junji, Vice Chairman of FIFA, expressed surprise, saying, “There was a clear security problem in North Korea.” Kind of hard to believe from the world’s most notorious police state.

Japan is up in arms over the incident as well, and there is a possibility for the location of June’s Japan-NK matchup to be moved depending on NK’s response.

TSUTAYA buys Virgin Japan from Marui, shifts focus from “renting”—Virgin’s “huge foreign investment” selling media products expanded throughout the 1990s, but it could not compete with the consumer’s shift toward renting CDs and DVDs (In Japan, CD rental shops are ubiquitous, unlike in America where I have never seen one). Though Virgin Japan has centered its business on media sales stores on Marui Properties, it will now focus on creating rental/sales combination stores within Marui properties (presumably shopping malls and stationfront properties).

Since Tower Records opened its first store in Japan in 1979, and after the relaxing of regulations on foreign-owned companies in Japan, Virgin and HMV have also joined the market. Opening large stores all over the country, these record stores have become a part of Japan’s youth culture.

Since then, however, consumers’ focus has shifted entirely from buying media to renting it. Marui bought the Virgin chain in April 2003 and had been attempting to revitalize it.

From Excite News:
What the hell is a Weather Certificate?! —The Japanese Meteorological Service provides Weather Certificates to confirm what the weather was like on a given day. Great for when you need a good alibi or when making insurance claims. (Do any other countries do this?)

There are some more articles, but they really deserve their own entry. Expect them later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2005 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Current Events, Japan, Jappanica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.