Thanks again to the lovely Mrs. Adamu for the photo.
The Kayan (or Padaung) people live an uncertain existence in refugee camps on the Thailand/Burma border, where a chief activity is venturing outside the camps daily to wow foreign tourists with their freakishly long necks.
Mrs. Adamu reports that the girl pictured was especially skilled at attracting attention. You have to admit she has a sense of style.
Mrs. Adamu brings us a highlight from her trip to Cambodia:
More from Mrs. Adamu and my own trip to Thailand in days to come.
UPDATE: For those of you who thought this might NOT be the hotel being cheap about stolen towels, here are the $7 towels in question:
Added facility? Sure… for me to poop on!
Exercise of the FOIA process by the Asahi Shimbun reveals a “customary” practice in the Diet’s Lower House of using funds meant for the investigation of corruption for lavish meals at fancy restaurants:
Lower House spent 100 million yen in tax money for food and booze in fiscal 2002 and 2003
05/25/2006
The Asahi ShimbunLower House members and secretariat employees spent about 100 million yen ($886,839) in taxpayers’ money for food, drinks and parties often at posh establishments in fiscal 2002 and 2003, according to government documents.
Ironically, the money came from a secretive budget that is supposed to be used to investigate wrongdoings of government officials.
The expenses were listed under such categories as “consultation meetings,” according to the documents disclosed to The Asahi Shimbun.
Many of those so-called meetings took place at exorbitant restaurants, nightclubs, bars and hotels in some of the most expensive areas of Tokyo.
The misappropriated funds are used not just for the wrongdoing of government but also to investigate major scandals such as the recent scare over falsified earthquake safety data.
More lurid details of some of the misused funds (massive amounts of liquor consumed, time spent at Chinese hostess bars, etc) can (as usual) be found at ZAKZAK, the most entertaining news resource on Japan available outside the country. I may update this post with translations of some of them but not right now.
Speaking of book news:
Young LDP Diet member Taizo Sugimura (PR, South Kanto) has admitted that a post on his personal blog was plagiarized from the autobiography You Aren’t an Idiot After All. ZAKZAK has the story:
This Time Taizo is Suspected of Plagiarism…Just before his marriage
Blog Post Closely Resembles Popular Yoyogi Seminar Teacher’s Autobiography
A post on Lower House member Taizo Sugimura (age 26)’s blog was found to closely resemble the autobiography of popular teacher at the famous exam preparation school Yoyogi Seminar (Keisuke Yoshino, age 39). (Sugimura has since admitted to the plagiarism).
The blog post, uploaded at 11:32pm on May 10, starts out “It was my last night as a single man.” Sugimura describes that when he was 19, he “seriously hated myself,” went to a snowy mountain to kill himself, and “lay down on the snow, quietly waiting for death.” However, he returned to his car after being unable to withstand the cold. He tried going outside again, but ended up going home after thinking “At this rate I’ll catch a cold!”
Yoshino’s memoirs, You Aren’t an Idiot After All, were published in 1991 and were reprinted in paperback. A passage in the book, in which the 19-year-old author attempts suicide by going to the Shigakogen plateau, and after going in and out of his car a few times returns home after realizing he’d catch a cold – the resemblance is consistent even in the story’s punchline.
Yoshino, a former biker gang member, participated in a discussion group for NEETs (people Not in Employment, Education, or Training) held by Sugimura. During the discussion, Yoshino reportedly told that story.
The eery resemblance became a topic of discussion on the Internet, and by May 23 the offending passages were deleted.
(liberally abstracted from ZAKZAK 2006/05/23)
Thank god for the Internet. If you watch the video in which he admits to the plagiarism, you’ll notice just how little he seems to care that he’s a freaking dumbass for ripping off a popular book.
It sounds like he thinks it’s all over since he just deleted the passages in question. Doesn’t he realize it’s too late?
I just got to Thailand on a trip to visit Mrs. Adamu. The flight over on Korean Air was awesome. Let me tell you why:
All in all a great ride and I highly recommend it – they don’t seem to have a restriction on carry-on bags either.
Today I was poking around Japan’s National Diet Library (more or less equivalent to the US’ Library of Congress) website, and the amount of amazing material that’s available to anyone who can read Japanese and navigate their search engines is simply breathtaking. I’ll be bringing you highlights from time to time:
Imperial Diet archives – Way back in 1889, when Japan was actively aping Western culture in a mad scramble to avoid colonization, a legislature called the Imperial Diet, based on the Prussian and British systems, was established. While the body had only limited powers and was only briefly considered to serve its purpose, to this day the Japanese government claims bragging rights as “Asia’s oldest democracy.”
Anyway, as part of its (exhaustive) Birth of the Constitution of Japan online exhibit, the National Diet Library has made public the Imperial Diet records from September 1945 (after the Allied forces first landed in Japan) until March 1947 (when it was shut down leading up to Japan’s new constitution). I certainly hope they’ll release the rest of the records going back to 1889. Incidentally, the entirety of Japan’s laws dating back to the Meiji constitution is available here in case you were wondering.
The records (written in old-style Japanese) are a rather difficult read, but here’s a random sample from Japan’s first postwar prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida:
November 29, 1945 (When Yoshida was Foreign Minister):
State Minister Shigeru Yoshida: As to Mr. Fuke‘s question, I regret that there was a problem with my answer, I apologize… so I will answer once again. The whereabouts of our compatriots in Manchuria and North Korea is extremely important, I worry on it night and day, and we are making all possible efforts by various means, but while it is truly regrettable, we have not as of yet been able to acquire accurate information. We do receive bits of lopsided information from time to time. According to what we’ve received, depending on the region, conditions are better than imagined in some places and cause us concern in others. In other words, in Southern Manchuria and other areas, it seems that even order has been gradually restored, and there are even those who are calmly attending to their work in some parts. However, we cannot definitively know the actual conditions, so it is truly regrettable that we are not at a stage where we can give satisfactory explanations to our citizens who have families in the various areas. When we are there, we will report such through the Diet, and as we receive information, we will report it in an appropriate manner. (applause)
Hm, not the best random sampling, but believe me this is a good thing.
Little-known fact: The word “baka” (idiot) was uttered 173 times in the Imperial Diet’s final year and a half, often (based on a cursory glance at the results) in reference to dangerous left-wing elements such as labor unions. Compare that to the 7 times the word’s been said in the modern-day National Diet in the past 5 years.
A Korean bee farmer was stung over 200 times in a puzzling statement of protest over Japanese claims to the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands:
“The honeybee dares to abandon its life when enemies are attempting to attack, to protect its own home. From now on, I hope these bees will contribute to protect our Dokdo”, Ahn Sang-Gyu said.
An impressive feat, not to mention a very creative way to attract attention to the issue.
While it can’t really be considered a “beard” of bees, the sheer number and weight of the bees beats out Grandpa Simpson‘s old fictional record of 15 pounds. Since Ahn wore a “symbolic” 187,000 bees, that means his bee suit weighed in at 41.1 pounds, assuming an average weight of 100mg per honeybee.
UPDATE: WOAH – this story is way cooler than I imagined – this guy wasn’t just standing around in a bee suit – he did a full-on cannonball on the Japanese flag covered in bees!
DOUBLE UPDATE: This guy is the world record holder for bee beards, so basically he decided to cheapen his accomplishment by rehashing the act to attach a small-minded political agenda to it. Way to go, chump. You’ll regret that on your deathbed, at which time ocean levels will have risen to the point that Dokdo no longer exists.
Update by Mutantfrog:I found a video clip of this online. Enjoy everyone!
This Japanese blog that also linked to the video has a little more to say.
* He first stood on a scale model of Dokdo and stripped off his outer hanbuk and stood in place for two hours so the bees could settle in place, and then jumped from a 60cm high platform onto a Japanese Hi no Maru flag that was laid out on the ground, so that the bees would “attack” it.
* The 187,000 bees represent the cumultative 187,453 square meter total of the Dokdo islands.
* He was stung in over 200 places, but isn’t allergic and the pain has faded in the 2 days since the stunt.
* He said, “No matter how much it hurts, I will not run from Japan’s provocation,” and “I wanted to show that not jus the people of Korea, but also the bees are angry.”
Horie got 95 days in jail before he was even considered for release. I’m not even going to risk jaywalking in Japan from now on (though I’ll probably still scam the train from time to time):
Before:
After:
The news media surrounded Horie’s van with motorcycles on his way back to his home in Roppongi Hills. Scavengers, man.
I can’t believe I’m going to see this guy next week:
The word “robot” is said to have come to us from the Czech word robota, which means “labor” or sometimes even “drudgery,” and thus is a word that originally carried a negative connotation.
But through Japan’s Astro Boy or the cat-like robot Doraemon, the meaning of the word “robot” shifted, instead becoming a benevolent friend who helps human beings. In Asia and elsewhere around the globe, robots came to be understood as the “white hats” -the good guys.
The impact of this situation is that countries with an affinity for Doraemon do not have workers who reject industrial robots, and thus in those countries, industrial productivity rises. In addition, you find that Japanese-made industrial robots sell well.
Yaskawa Electric Corporation and the other firms of Japan’s “big three” hold a market share of half the global market in the area of robots for welding or applying coatings. Of course, Astro Boy and Gigantor-what we in Japan know as “Tetsujin 28”-are there in the background to all this. In other words, what created the climate in which all this could take place was Japanese culture, and I am continually speaking of culture’s significant contributions in this area.
(Picture: Aso – 2nd from left – giving some kind of award to Bulgarian sumo wrestler Kotooshu (I’ll let you guess which one he is))
