Roy and I were walking in the Nippombashi area of Osaka when we stumbled across a suspicious-looking cigarette machine. The first thing we noticed was that it wasn’t wired for Taspo age-verification cards (as it legally should be). Then we noticed it was selling Chinese cigarettes (Chunghwas, to be exact).

Upon further examination, we realized that the cigarette machine was not actually working, which explained why it wasn’t wired for Taspo. Or perhaps not being wired for Taspo explained why it wasn’t working.

Anyway, it turns out that we had not only stumbled across a Chinese cigarette machine—it was guarding the entrance to a seven-story Chinese superstore called the “Shanghai China Maul.”

This was not the only Engrish on display: there were “flesh vegetables” on sale upstairs. Besides cigarettes and vegetables, the place also has:

1. A massive karaoke room which was apparently running at night for public singing orgies (free for ladies, ¥1,000 for men)


2. Right above the main lobby, there’s an immigration lawyer (gyosei shoshi) and Softbank sales agent working next to each other at very similar-looking open counters. I guess this is so you can get your Japanese visa and your mobile phone in one place…


3. The top floor is a well-stocked Chinese bookstore with a special shelf for Hong Kong news magazines (i.e. Chinese media banned on the mainland), but curiously very little content from Taiwan other than music.


4. One floor was covered with what I can only describe as “random crap,” among it suitcases, electric fans, wooden tables and an oddly-twisted female mannequin torso.

And here you can see Roy wondering aloud why he didn’t bring his digital SLR from Kyoto:

My first trip to Japan was to spend a year in the Rotary Youth Exchange program at a high school in Osaka. The school hosting me was Ogimachi Senior High, which closed its old campus earlier this year in order to prepare for a 2010 merger with Konohana Sogo Senior High. (The two schools will share a new campus near Nishi-Kujo for the next two years.)

Ogimachi was founded in 1921 as a girls’ high school in the Ogimachi district of northern Osaka, just east of Umeda. After the school was destroyed by American bombers in 1945, it wandered around nomad-like to temporary facilities in Temma and Horikawa before getting a new dedicated facility in Dojima, west of Umeda, in 1948. It became co-educational at that time by swapping students with Osaka Senior High School.

The school moved to a new campus on Nakanoshima (between the Rihga Royal Hotel and the science museum) in 1957, and was still located there when I was a student. By that time, the place was basically falling apart: we could peel the tiles from the floor. It was miserably hot in the summer, when only the computer room and language learning lab had air conditioning, and miserably cold in the winter, when we had to hurriedly warm our hands over a gas heater between classes just to keep holding our pencils for the next hour.

As the state of repair might indicate, Ogimachi was not a very high-grade school. I was in the “humanities course,” which sort of resembled what Americans would call a magnet program, but even the kids in that course were lower-middle-class at best and didn’t have particularly high academic or career aspirations. This shattered many of my preconceptions about Japanese education, since I had always assumed (in my teenaged intellectual shell) that they had high levels of ambition in order to put up with the rigmarole of crazy exams.

I try to keep in touch with classmates when I can, and had a chance to meet many of them again at a reunion a couple of years ago. (This was the trip during which I photographed Mount Fuji from the plane.) They were all basically shocked to hear that I was working in Japan, and even moreso to hear that I was working at a law firm in Tokyo. Nearly a decade since we went to school together, here’s where they are:

• Two, who I always considered to be “goofy,” are working as salesmen at a pharmaceutical company in Osaka (I went out drinking with them when they visited Tokyo for a trade show). They were into fishing when we went to school together, but have since switched hobbies to motorcycles.


• One is a JR conductor. At our reunion people were egging him to recite announcements for various trains (e.g. “Do the Yamatoji Rapid Service!”)


• One, who I always considered to be the most intelligent (a Chinese kid from Shanghai who spoke perfect English in addition to Japanese and Chinese dialects), sells AU phones in Shinsaibashi.


• One very otaku-ish girl, who was in the art club and kendo club, is now apparently in the Self-Defense Forces. (I had a crush on her back then and I think the SDF bit has made it stronger.)


• The Judo Nazi, who I wrote about in my very first post at Mutantfrog, has disappeared and nobody seems to know what happened to him.


• My two best friends from the school are working as a social worker and a truck driver.

Anyway, it saddens me to know that one of the key institutions which introduced me to Japan will soon be no more. It saddens me even more to know that the post-merger school will have one of the most obnoxious names ever conceived for a school: “Saku Ya Kono Hana Senior High” (咲くやこの花高等学校).

Oh well, there goes what little alumni pride I had. At least I can still say I went to Carnage Middle School (albeit for about six months).

Mainichi has the report:

JR West employee busted for flashing private parts on train

NISHINOMIYA, Hyogo—An employee of West Japan Railway Co. (JR West) has been arrested for flashing his private parts on a Hankyu Corp. train, police said.

Norio Imasaka, 50, who works for JR West’s Osaka construction office, undid his pants and exposed his private parts on a Hankyu Takarazuka Line train running between Juso and Toyonaka stations on late Saturday night.

Officers arrested Imasaka at Hibarigaoka-Hanayashiki Station in Takarazuka.

Imasaka was apparently drunk at that time and said he didn’t remember what he did on the train. (Mainichi)

This looks like your typical exposure case (sorry no insights into the exotic world of Japanese perversion, this seems more like what a healthy dose of alcohol will do to an already weakened mind), but what makes it stand out to this blogger is that he was arrested right where I used to go to school.

The following is true.

The Osaka High Court on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling that a park can be registered as an address of a homeless man.

Yuji Yamauchi, 56, has lived in a pegged tent in Ogimachi Park in Osaka City’s Kita Ward since around 1998 and received his mail there.

The ward office refused to register the park as his address in March 2004, prompting him to file the lawsuit with the Osaka District Court to demand the local government rescind the decision.

This is interesting on a number of levels.

In many parts of the US, you can register to vote without a proper street address. Usually, you do this by drawing a map showing the location of your home; this is not available on some state voter registration forms, but the federal Motor Voter Act form (which works in all states) has a space on it for map-drawing. This was intended to be used by people in really rural areas that lack house numbering, but it can also be used by homeless people. Indeed, homeless advocacy groups even help the homeless register to vote, using their shelter, park or refrigerator carton as their address.

The Osaka High Court proposes a remarkably different test for what can constitute a “residence.” The Japanese Asahi’s treatment sheds some more light on it:

In Osaka City, which as of 2003 contained the largest homeless population in Japan (about 6,600), it has been revealed that many day-laborers had registered addresses in office buildings in Nishinari Ward. Work is also ongoing to forcibly evict the tents pitched in Nagai Park in Higashi-Sumiyoshi Ward. The High Court ruling seems likely to affect the city’s homeless policy.

...Like the decision below, handed down last January, this decision indicated that a “residence,” as provided in the Residential Basic Registration Act, “designates the center of [one’s] life, with the deepest relationship to [one’s] life.”

That said, to be recognized as a residence, a place will not suffice if it is merely where daily life takes place: rather, the court decided that “it is necessary for its form to meet the standards of a residence, as provided by sound conventional wisdom.”

The court then determined that Yamauchi’s tent “is simply constructed from square timbers and plastic sheeting, and can be easily removed or moved to a different place; it is not connected to the land.”

Some background on the Japanese law at play here:

The residential registration system, or juminhyo, is one of Japan’s three big people-counting systems (the others being the koseki and alien registration systems).

All three are remarkably byzantine in a number of ways. They don’t work together very well, for one thing. A person’s koseki can be in Okinawa (or Dokdo) while they’re living in Hokkaido. More importantly (for us), resident aliens are practically invisible in the other two systems, which leads to all sorts of problems for international families living in Japan (Japanese people married to aliens appear to be single, and their children appear to be bastards). The existence of registration is also Japan’s excuse for not subscribing to child abduction treaties (a fact you should be aware of if starting a family with a Japanese spouse).

As much as I dislike these systems, they are vital in the government’s current way of doing things. They are used to track inheritance, tax liability and property rights, among other things. The systems also allow the government to conduct a proper census every year without hiring additional census takers.

I’ve dealt with one court case involving a homeless man in Tokyo, and he kept the registered address of his family outside the city (despite the fact that his family had disowned him). Is that much better? What alternative does a homeless person in Japan have? It’s a pretty big hole in the social welfare net, and I hope the Supreme Court finds a good way to patch it when this case goes up for its final appeal.

Let’s take another look at Google Maps Japan, this time focusing our gaze on Osaka’s Nishinari Park. On the map, it just looks like your average urban park in Osaka:

But look at the satellite photo (click for full size):

What could those be? Why, they’re little shanty houses!

Since the early 1990s, parts of Osaka have become something of a haven for Japan’s homeless people. Colonies of blue-tarped tents and cardboard houses, such as the one in Nishinari Park (located in the Airin area, host to one of Japan’s largest homeless populations) seen above have developed into full-blown communities, complete with electriciy, TV, and corrals of dogs. Residents make ends meet through day labor and collecting recyclables. If you’ve ever visited Osaka Castle, you will likely know what I am talking about.

The colonies have even gained some international attention in recent years (see this excellent BBC pictorial, for example). I suppose they are interesting because while shantytowns are a common sight throughout Asia and the rest of the developing world, they might not be expected from the world’s 2nd largest economy. Plus, it’s pretty neat to see that they’ve made such comfortable lives for themselves considering the circumstances.

One of those homeless colonies, a ten-person, 15-tent compound located in Nagai Park, is in trouble as authorities plan to evict squatters in to begin construction in preparation to hose the 2007 IAAF World Championships in Athletics.

It’s sad to see these generally peaceful groups of resourceful men broken up. The homeless culture is one of the unique aspects of Osaka that gives the city some flavor, and it’s too bad that city officials can’t recognize it as such. Instead, they have brought an expensive sporting event to the city that is likely to plunge it even deeper in debt.

Nevertheless, the order has been issued, and if the homeless do not leave by Jan. 21 they will be forced to remove their tents.

To get a better idea of what’s happening on the ground, MFT plans to send crack Osaka correspondent Roy to attend a festival to be held this weekend by the residents and their non-profit backers. The event will feature stage performances with the homeless residents and young people. Stay tuned for awesome photos!

This type of thing (men in women’s clothing doing weird things) seems to keep happening all the time recently:

B-grade News from Nikkan Gendai: Man in Women’s Clothing Whips Out Penis in Train
56-year-old Amagasaki City Section Chief Arrested

On June 5, the Yodoyagawa Precinct of the Osaka Prefectural Police arrested Hiroshi Ikeuchi (56), Section Chief of the Amagasaki City (Hyogo Pref) Health and Welfare Section on suspicion of red-handed public indecency for exposing his lower body in a train. The man has reportedly admitted to the crime, explaining, “It was a thoughtless act. I will properly make amends for the crime I have committed.”

According to investigations, Ikeuchi boarded a Hankyu train, bound for Hibarigaoka Hanayashiki on the Takarazuka line, at Umeda station. Dressed as a woman, he sat on the bench and exposed his lower body to a female technical school student and others sitting across from him by spreading his legs and so forth.

He ran from the train after the women approached him, but a male rider stopped him at Mikuni station and brought him to the nearby precinct.

Ikeuchi lives with his wife and no children. He has testified that since approximately 13 years ago he cross-dressed by wearing wigs and miniskirts and “felt freedom by wearing women’s clothing.” He reportedly had consumed alcohol at an Osaka transvestite club and was on his way to an apartment he had rented in Toyonaka City in order to drop off his women’s clothes.

According to the city of Amagasaki, Ikeuchi was hired in 1973, and started his current job in April after previously serving as section chief of the Industry and Labor and City Planning Sections. He was, they said, a man who proactively engaged issues.

This is precisely the area where I stayed as a high school exchange student. Always amazing to see what sort of stuff is going on behind closed doors.

Finishing up my weekend photo set:

Sometimes, the bad translation makes more sense than the good translation.

I jest, though. Kansai is my favorite airport in the world, even if it is a colossal waste of money. time and landfill.

I speak, of course, about Kobe Airport, the latest boondoggle in Osaka Bay. I was in the area this weekend and I decided I would hop over for a visit on Sunday.

What a mistake. Read the rest of this entry »