Last week’s Koizumi mail magazine started out like this:

[Lion Heart—Message from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi]
(Provisional Translation)

Autumn at the Prime Minister’s Office

Junichiro Koizumi here.

Yesterday morning, a clear and crisp autumn day, I was taking my usual walk from my official residence to my office when I spotted mushrooms amongst the shrubbery in front of my residence. Looking closer, I found an assortment of mushrooms scattered about, whose varieties ranged from large-capped mushrooms to small mushrooms that were nearly hidden by the shadows of the weeds. I am eager to look them up to learn whether they are edible.

A poignant moment of reflection for the PM right before his dream of postal privatization is about to be realized, right?

Well, thankfully for Koizumi he didn’t have to take time out of his busy schedule to look up what kind of mushrooms those were. According to Super News (anchored by the stunningly intense Yuko Ando—check out her awesome Fashion Calendar!), the mushrooms growing outside the Prime Minister’s official residence are actually hallucinogenic drugs that were legal in Japan until 2001 or so!

On a completely unrelated note, a friend of mine has pointed me in the direction of FNN (English explanations, Japanese videos [wtf??]), Fuji TV’s online video news site. This is the only site of its kind I have seen that offers high quality video that you can actually pause and let load so it doesn’t stop in the middle.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Curiosities, Japan, Media. 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.