I was intrigued to note that the classic WWF’s own Iron Sheik is actually known by his real name, Khosrow Vaziri, in Japan. Apparently, the former bodyguard for the Shah did not get the same villainous characterization in Japan.

Of course, the Iron Sheik has popped back into the public eye with the release of some amazing interviews with him:

↑ This shit is CLASSIC, people.

I guess the official English title of this is “Wizard of Earthsea” but the title I’m using is a direct translation of the Japanese title, Gedo Senki. Anyway, here is the section of Yomiuri’s interview with Ghibli Studios producer Toshio Suzuki relevant to the issue I care about: why Hayao Miyazaki was against his son directing this film! (Interview is from 12/26/2005)

UPDATE: More info on the film in English at the Ghibli site by the book’s English translator. And apparently someone already posted a translation of this interview, but mine is much better.

Q. Why was Goro-san chosen as director?

Suzuki: The precondition of all this was the future of Ghibli. Isao Takahata is 70. Hayao Miyazaki is almost 65. Together they’re 135! Add my age in there and it gets close to 200 (lol) ! At this rate it will be the end of Ghibli. However, this company was created because they wanted to make movies as a pair, and I am also satisfied with this. There is a part of me that thinks “this might be enough” but we also have a responsibility to the young people who are a part of the studio, after all. However, Hayao may be a genius on the creation end, but he is not necessarily good at teaching. If you drive with him in the passenger side, you’ll understand. He keeps saying stuff on the side, so most people end up getting neurotic about it. I have seen it in the production stage many times, since different people were slated to direct “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989) and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” but eventually Hayao took the helm. Of course there is no ill-will from Hayao. But there are actually people who ended up with ulcers (lol). That is why I thought of Goro. With him, I figured it might go well.

Q. But, he has no animation production experience…

Suzuki: That didn’t bother me. Even when he created the Ghibli Museum following Hayao’s drawings, he might have had landscaping experience, but he didn’t have any construction experience, did he? First of all, I think that if anyone can observe they can draw. That comes from when I was making the magazine “Animation Monthly.” I would have editors who normally did not draw do self portraits for their editor’s notes. They all said it was impossible at first, but once they started carefully observing their faces, they were able to finish drawing [the self portraits]. What’s more, there was enough appeal to have them work their hardest. Goro often drew caricatures during meetings, so I thought that he, as someone who can observe, could draw pictures.

Q. Did Goro always have an interest in animation?

Suzuki: I don’t know. Normally, people dislike working near their fathers, but there was probably an interest in his father’s work somewhere. I felt that when he accepted the job at the Ghibli Museum.
Read the rest of this entry »

ZAKZAK!

Man Dials Emergency Hotline With City Hall Bomb Threat after “Being Denied Public Assistance”

The Tokai Precinct of the Aichi Prefectural Police arrested an unemployed male (55) on suspicion offorcible obstruction of business for calling in a bomb threat to the Obu City Hall on April 9.

According to the police’s investigation, the man is suspected of calling 110 [emergency hotline similar the 911 in the US] from a public phone from 12:12 until 12:23 on April 9 and reported that “the Obu City Hall building will be bombed at noon on April 12,” obstructing business. He was arrested by police from the Tokai precinct, who rushed to the scene while he was on the line.

The man has explained, “I applied for public assistance, but I was denied.”

ZAKZAK 2006/04/10

Meanwhile, unnamed foreign students in Burma apparently don’t get that it’s supposed to be an April Fool’s joke:

Myanmar junta says bomb was April Fools joke

Published: Monday, 10 April, 2006, 11:56 AM Doha Time

YANGON: Myanmar’s military junta said yesterday that a time bomb found at an upscale international school last week was likely planted by foreign students as part of an April Fools joke.

The bomb, similar in design to explosives that killed 19 people in the capital almost a year ago, had been found and defused at the International School of Yangon on Thursday, security personnel said.

Brigadier-General Kyaw Hsan, information minister of the ruling State Peace and Development Council, told a press conference that investigators had to consider other factors since the students of diplomats from the United States and other foreigners working in Myanmar attend the school.

Good one!

This subway ad is just begging for a Riding Sun caption contest.

(... Japanese people are funny …)

MUST READ!

AMAZING stuff from a thread at the Something Awful forums. A White House staffer has apparently snapped and decided to spill the beans, albeit in a carefully guarded way. It starts like this:

This is all good information, personally verified or witnessed by none other than me, but I will not answer any questions about it or go into any detail other than what I’ve already typed out. I may reply with more information or anecdotes if I see fit, but I’ve pretty much already scraped the barrel of my experiences.

These are some facts I have witnessed and learned through my employment. Take it at face value, believe it or don’t believe it, because I’m not providing corroborating pictures, details, or evidence beyond my own testimony.

Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

President Bush uses anti-depressant medication, a lot of it, at a stupendous dosage, and he is hiding it from the American public. This is the real reason he stopped drinking. Because of the dosage, he is also impotent.

Tom Ridge carries 20 credit cards with him at all times, each one with a very low limit. I have never heard of him using one, ever, but he has them. He also wears his socks inside-out, and will flip the fuck out and walk strangely if he is forced to wear them properly, because it drives him crazy. All of his socks must be laundered right side in and then turned inside out before they are returned to him. He gave specific instructions about handling his food, and not allowing his vegetables to touch any other food item on the plate. His utensils must be steamed over boiling water. He will not eat soup which hasn’t been boiled within the past 20 minutes or which he has not prepared himself. If any of these rules are violated, he flies into a rage, turns beet red, and will not eat a single thing. He has his personal attendants confirm over and over that the food is as he likes it. He also shaves his forearms and hands because he can’t stand the idea of body hair on his arms. He demands that his bedsheets are bleach white and changed fresh every night and he sleeps in a separate bed in a big, tight, body-length nylon sleeve, with a fan blowing over him at full power. He is terrified of animals which have fur or hair longer than one inch, and will not go near curly hair of any kind, even on people. At one time he ran from his office and demanded that someone look under everything for a rodent which did not and could not exist, then he had the entire place wiped down with disinfectant and vacuumed twice. While this was done he couldn’t even bear to look at the door, or come within 20 feet of his office. He was in hysterics.

President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.

Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.

Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.

There is a sealed room in the whitehouse which once held a half-ton block of cheese for about 30 years.

The White house is planting its own men among the press agents at press conferences.

The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.

Despite all of this craziness, there is nothing strange whatsoever about Condoleeza Rice. She is completely balanced and normal, if slightly robotic in her personal demeanor. She smells very nice at all times. She does, however, constantly check her investments online from her office when she thinks that nobody is looking, and she has slept at her desk on multiple occasions.

There is an administrative law judge who sits in an office in a building near the white-house, earns around 200k per year and has a secretary, and he does nothing except sit, read, and listen to classical music all day. His secretary likewise does nothing. He gets meals taken to him from the White-house kitchen, and is so lonely that he latches on to whoever gets sent and talks to them for hours about the korean war. His family is all dead and his secretary hates him. In a drawer in his desk he has an old revolver, which he got in there somehow despite that he shouldn’t have been able to bring it in. I think he will shoot himself one day.

The “undisclosed location” is usually a local police officer training ground or state trooper college. Shh.

I can’t tell you if much of it is true or not, but it certainly rings true. Plus, it’s funny as hell!

What convinced me he knew what he was talking about was when he mentioned that a lot of our “foreign policy” is us using our economic power to twist foreign govts into enacting policies that benefit US companies. If you know anything about the USTR, that should hit home.

Readdressing an age-old question: how does a visibly non-Japanese person deal with living in Japan?

Everyone in my office is bilingual to some extent, but the lingua franca is Japanese. When the three foreign employees use English in the office, people almost seem surprised at how good we are at it. Or, in the words of my boss, they seem to be thinking: “Wow, he isn’t a retard after all!”

But every day I have to go outside, into the Real Japan, where speaking English to a foreigner is a much more natural feeling. Hell, it’s practically a legal presumption now. I can tell you from personal experience that bureaucrats definitely treat you better when you speak to them in English. Even in our office, our Japanese clients are put at ease when they can practice their English on a foreign lawyer, but have the option to switch back into Japanese if the conversation starts getting difficult.

I occasionally poke around on mixi when I’m bored, and sometimes I enjoy slipping into the discussions in a group called 英語★できる人＆勉強してる人 (“ENGLISH – People who know it and people who study it”). A high school-aged girl in Yokohama made a post a few weeks back along these lines:

I’m working part-time at a convenience store now, and I get quite a few foreign customers. I don’t know much English, but I’m wondering what I should say to them in English. Any ideas?

There were a bunch of replies, with varying degrees of appropriateness. I decided to slip in the Debito answer to this question at the bottom of the thread:

These are all good ideas. One thing you should watch out for, though, is that many foreign people in Japan want to speak Japanese. So if you see someone and immediately think “Oh, I’m going to speak English to them!” they might not appreciate it. Of course everyone has a different attitude, but there are such people out there.

Now I disagree with that suggestion. I remember poking through a book that advised people learning Japanese to “say you don’t speak English.” That’s an effective response, but it always struck me as extreme. Do I really have to lie to speak in Japanese with people on the street?

The Debito answer isn’t the right answer. The better example comes from Anthony Bianchi, the Brooklyn-born city councilman in Aichi Prefecture who we started talking about a few days ago. He likes who he is. As a result, people like who he is. He doesn’t need to file lawsuits to get his way: he can get himself elected.

In the Campbell hero archetype, this is called being the Master of Two Worlds. This is what you get when you blow up the Death Star, ride your horse into the sunset or accept surrender papers on a battleship in Tokyo Bay.

Now, I started writing this post as a bitchfest after a trip to Wendy’s came out like this:

ME: Bacon burger set.
EMPLOYEE [apparently a trainee]: Uh…. fo-a hee-uh o-a to go-o?
ME: [getting impatient] For here.
EMPLOYEE: [motions vaguely toward the set options part of the menu]
ME: Fries. Pepsi.
EMPLOYEE: S, M, L?
ME: (sigh) I want the small size, please.

The employee proceeded to ring up a small fries and small drink, but no burger. I didn’t want to make the situation any more difficult for him, so I paid my 200 yen, ate and left.

But in the end, there’s a comfort zone in Japan. It’s not enough to be Japanese or American… you have to be able to be both at once. And that’s something I’ll have to work on a bit. Maybe that kid just wanted to speak English; maybe he isn’t a retard after all.

OK, got my first chance to see/hear American-born activist in Japan Arudo Debito by watching an amateur interview at the video blog Yamato Damacy. Here it is.

Now, listen to the latest edition of the Japundit Podcast, by Japanese-English translator JP.

Is it me, or are their voices eerily similar? Does living in Japan for more than 10 years make your English sound a certain way? Not necessarily a bad thing, I’m just curious.

Lucky for you I saw this story at the same time I was listening to Eminem:

Friday, April 7, 2006

Japan Remains Top In Average Life Span: WHO Report

GENEVA (Nikkei)—Japanese remained the longest-lived people in the world in 2004, with an average life expectancy of 82 years, unchanged from the previous year, according to the World Health Report 2006 released Friday by the World Health Organization.

The top spot was shared by Monaco and San Marino, where the average life span increased from 81 years the previous year.

By gender, Japanese women had the world’s longest life expectancy, at 86 years. Japanese men had an average life span of 79 years, with some small European countries, including San Marino and Iceland, trailing closely.

Sixteen of the WHO’s 192 member states had average life expectancies of 80 years or longer, two more countries than the previous year, suggesting that the populations of industrialized nations are progressively aging.

Japan also had the highest ratio of people aged 60 or older to the entire population, at 25.6%.

The country ranked 23rd in terms of the lowest average number of children a woman gives birth to during her lifetime, at 1.33. Ukraine topped the list at 1.12, followed by the Czech Republic’s 1.17 and Slovakia’s 1.18.

Among other countries with lower birthrates than Japan were South Korea, at 1.20, and Germany and Singapore, at 1.32.

Sixty-six countries, roughly one-third of the total, had birthrates of less than 2.1, the level seen as necessary to avoid a population decline.

(The Nihon Keizai Shimbun Friday evening edition)