Osorezan! “The Mountain of Fear.” Ain’t it quaint. It was the first stop on my recent tour of northern Japan with Curzon (who’s still wandering around the back roads of Hokkaido).

Although some misguided websites call it a mountain, it’s actually a temple in a valley surrounded by mountains. The temple is surrounded by rocky terrain lying atop a very sulfuric hot spring, which releases smelly gas from vents in the ground.

When pre-modern types saw this, they assumed that they were seeing spirits escaping the underworld. So legend has it that this is a natural gateway to Hell, and many pilgrims come to leave little offerings for the dead. One common sight around the hot springs is little stone statues dressed in children’s clothes—memorials to dead young’uns.

Anyway, if this is what going to Hell looks like, maybe I need to maintain my life of evil…

Mixi, the 5 million-strong Japanese social networking service, is getting ready to go public with an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Mixi expects to get ¥6.9 billion from the deal, about 7 years’ profits at the current rate.

In case you haven’t tried it, it’s a mighty fine service. While it has the usual features—you can make a profile and leave comments about others—its real strength is in its communities and their message boards, and there’s one (or more) for just about anything imaginable. Kind of like Orkut meets Yahoo Answers. The diaries are also pretty popular, although I tend to avoid them because they’re just not that interesting.

We thought GREE was cool as hell a year and a half ago, and now we just look at it and laugh at its lameness.

One investment I might make soon is one of these new security hanko gadgets.

A hanko, for the uninitiated out there, is a personal seal that serves as your signature for most official purposes in Japan. It looks cool, but suffers from a major drawback: it’s very easy to forge. A person can get a color photocopy of your seal impression, or just take your hanko and seal all sorts of stuff in your name. Like, say, a divorce agreement. That wouldn’t be fun.

So Uniball’s new hanko uses a special security feature: you dial in a two-digit combination, which changes a pattern of marks surrounding your name. Unless a person knows the proper combination, they can’t get the seal to duplicate your registered seal impression.

But, according to Mobile Ojisan:

Mitsubishi Pencil recommends Dial Bank Hanko only for bank use. Some local government outright refuses to register this metal hanko as one’s personal seal.

Brilliant. Now I could protect myself from seal thieves, if only some mildly retarded guy at city hall wasn’t making up rules. “No, no no, your seal has to be ivory.”

That’s the gist of his latest interview. Maybe he just wanted to make the otaku cry.

If you go out in the world, it’s filled with sensitivity, and it’s much more interesting. For example, there is no fun in seducing a female robot who only acts in a certain way. But it’s fun to seduce a human, because you can only predict, but not know what will really happen. When it comes to seducing, it is fun to think how you can successfully reach the heart of the target.

Lest you be misled, he still knows where Japan’s strengths lie:

My plan for the Olympics is to fully utilize robot and computer technology. For example, it wouldn’t be too bad of an idea to have Astro Boy fly with the Olympic torch.

Copyright be damned, this one is best in its entirety:

Man accused of telling US airport security penis pump was a bomb

CHICAGO (AP) — Prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately did not want her to know he had packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.

So he told security it was a bomb, officials said.

Madin Azad Amin was stopped by officials on Aug. 16 after guards found an object in his baggage that resembled a grenade, prosecutors said.

When officers asked him to identify it, Amin said it was a bomb, said Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Lorraine Scaduto.

He later told officials he lied about the item because his mother was nearby and he did not want her to hear that it was part of a penis pump, Scaduto said.

Amin has been charged with felony disorderly conduct, said Andrew Conklin, a spokesman with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Amin faces up to three years in prison if convicted.

UPDATE: What actually happened was that he tried to say “pump” in a really bad Arabic accent and it came out sounding like “bomb.”

A while back I noted the superiority of Yahoo over Google for mapping Japan. Nowadays, I find that I have to keep both Google and Yahoo Japan as home pages because there are a lot of things that Google hasn’t yet figured out how to do. For instance:

• Very few of Google’s products interface well with Japanese mobile phones. Take Google Calendar. It can only send alerts to Gmail, or to a U.S. mobile phone by SMS. Yahoo, on the other hand, can send alerts to any e-mail address, including my phone’s (both the English and Japanese versions of Yahoo are capable of this). Yes, Google Calendar is shinier-looking, and the ability to automatically pull events from e-mails is pretty cool, but how hard can it be to broaden the e-mail alert function?


• Also, maybe it’s just my phone, but Gmail and other mobile Google sites almost never display properly on it—they either get moji-baked or they fail to load entirely.


• I keep Tokyo weather on my Google home page, and half of the time, it’s totally wrong—i.e., the system doesn’t know whether it’s day or night, or thinks that it’s 100°F outside when it’s really 80°.


• Google Finance, Google News, etc. are incapable of telling me how the Nikkei is doing. Granted, this is a two-way problem, as I can’t see the Dow on Yahoo Japan either—in fact, the only website I know that can seamlessly provide both is good ol’ Bloomberg. (Love you guys!)

I know Google is busy saving the world and all that, but can’t they save the world for people outside the U.S., too? Sheesh, guys, get off your high hammocks and get with the picture.

Today’s left-wing text-blob of hate:

Our 54-year old Auckland resident made his fortune in a housing related business back in Shikoku. There was a time when he felt a certain pride that the money he paid in taxes went to support his homeland, to provide education and build roads.

But he became disillusioned when growing budget deficits dried up cash flows to rural areas such as Shikoku.

It increasingly became apparent that all resources, be it people, things or money, got sucked up by Tokyo and big corporations.

Awww! All the money this guy made from his corporation ended up going to someone else’s bigger corporation? Shucks. He just needed to be friendlier with politicians. (Or, y’know, aim his marketing at Tokyo and big corporations to “suck” the money back.)

Back in February I took a look at the top blogs in the Japanese blogosphere based on Technorati ranking. But I happened to glance at the standings again recently, and things have changed. While many of popular blogs are still in the top 20, there are a lot of new contenders. Here’s the new top 10 (as of August 23):

1. Akiba Blog – cutesy anime stuff from Akihabara (“Akiba” for short), Tokyo’s electronics district. Seems to specialize in erotic action figures.
2. Shoko-tan’s Blog – celebrity blog, up from #6 last time.
3. Ouch News – Posts stories from Japan’s news and then reprints relevant commentary from 2ch, Japan’s massive anonymous forum site. This is actually a pretty good site for those who don’t feel like sifting through all the anti-Korean comments.
4. Gigazine – tech, fast food, convenience store drinks, etc.
5. WTF LOLOLOLOLLOLLLLLL!! – Comedy site that also picks up the best from 2ch. Recent post: “Mr. Amazon, this doesn’t look good…” Links to a strange “Amateur Train Rape” (NOT SAFE FOR WORK) DVD sold on amazon, with uncensored genitals on the cover (illegal in Japan).
6. Kotaro’s Blog – Flash games, animations, videos, etc.
7. New Akiba Dot Com – More cutesy Akihabara stuff, less porn. As you may have noticed, Akihabara is now known almost more for otaku culture than electronics these days.
8. Kaori Manabe – celebrity blog, down from #2 last time.
9. PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” – the title sums it up pretty well. There’s also an English version.
10. Mumur’s Blog – Politics blog “Supporting” DPJ senior official and Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly member from Edogawa District Akihiro Hatsushika. He is apparently famous for telling people “You’re messed up in the head so you should go to the hospital.” More on this a little later.