Category: Japan

“I wore a 41-pound body of bees for those islands!”

A Korean bee farmer was stung over 200 times in a puzzling statement of protest over Japanese claims to the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands:

bees 050206.jpg

“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.”

The young poisoner confesses

The following brief article was in Saturday’s Japan Time.

SHIZUOKA (Kyodo) A 17-year-old girl admitted at the Shizuoka Family Court that she poisoned her mother with thallium, reversing a denial she made following her arrest in October, sources close to the case said Friday.

“I made my mother take thallium,” the sources quoted the girl as telling the court. Thallium is a highly toxic substance used in rat poison and other pesticides. The mother is in a coma.

The family court will decide by next Tuesday whether to send her back to prosecutors to face criminal charges or to send her to a juvenile correctional facility.

The girl, a prefectural high school student, was arrested Oct. 31 on suspicion of attempting to kill her 48-year-old mother at their home in Izumonokuni, Shizuoka Prefecture, by putting thallium in her food between August and October that year.

The girl’s name is being withheld because she is a minor.

Unfortunately, the Kyodo piece leaves out pretty much everything that makes this story so grimly fascinating.

What they don’t say is that the girl had been poisoning her mother in emulation of Graham Young, whose real life story of experimentation with poisoning schoolmates and relatives as a teenager was made into a movie called The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, which I rather enjoyed when I saw it several years ago without knowing that it was based so closely on a true story.

To make the story even more disturbing, the girl had kept an anonymous blog which included details on the progress of her mother’s condition as she was slowly being poisoned. While she never quite said that she was responsible for her mother’s condition, someone who had read the journals of her earlier experiments with using poison on rodents would probably be able to draw the correct conclusion from her disquietingly cold tone.

The Times (UK, not NY) has a more extensive and rather good article about this story from a few months ago, shortly after the girl was arrested. The end of the article includes the following brief excerpts from the girl’s journal, as well as some stats on Graham Young.

WEB DIARY OF A HIGH SCHOOL GIRL

July 3
“Let me introduce a book: Graham Young’s diary on killing with poison. The autobiography of a man I respect. He murdered someone at the age of 14.”

September 4
“To kill a living creature. The moment of sticking a knife into something. The warmth of the blood. The little sigh. It is all a comfort to me.”

September 26
“My mother will go to hospital tomorrow and nobody has yet found out what the cause is. To my regret, she is not covered by good insurance, so life will be a little difficult.”

October
“I took a photo of her today as I did yesterday. My brother said I had a penetrating stare and that he was horrified.”

October
“According to my aunt, my mother has started having hallucinations. She seems to be suffering from insects that don’t exist or white shadows by the door.”

GRAHAM YOUNG
* As a child he was fascinated with poisons and their effects, and the Nazis, becoming a worshipper of Hitler

* In 1961, at the age of 14, he started to poison members of his family, enough to make them violently ill

* In 1962 his stepmother died of a lethal dose. Young was arrested and jailed for 15 years for the attempted murder of his father, sister and friend

* On his release in 1971, he found a job and poisoned several co-workers, killing two of them. He was convicted in 1972 and given life

* He was dubbed the Teacup Poisoner but wanted to be known as the world’s poisoner. He died in 1990

* The film The Young Poisoner’s Handbook (1995) was based on him

Now, the girl’s blog was of course erased from the web server upon its public discovery after her arrest, but luckily for us the administrators did a terrible job of cleaning up after themselves, and some wonderful Japanese netizen used a combination of various search engines and caches to reconstruct the entirety (or at least close to it) of both of the girl’s journals.

If you have the ability to read Japanese and a taste for the macabre, a mirror of the original journals as well as a collection of other materials related to the case can be found here.

I’ve been thinking about translating them ever since I discovered the site a while back, but since I haven’t done it yet I shouldn’t make any promises.

Plumber wanted

I get a couple of email newsletters on jobs in Japan. I noticed that today’s Gaijinpot has the following job listing.

Shin-ei is looking for a Plumber who has at least more than 5 years of experience. Must be experienced in welding and plumbing works.

Description:
Plumbing work for the American Embassy building facilities.

Salary is negotiable based on your skill

Working hrs:
08:30-17:30

Why do they need a foreigner to do the plumbing? Are they flushing classified documents down the toilet?

Horie: Before and After Prison

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.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Aso: Japanese Animation Readies Humankind for Robot Slavery

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))

Takebe Telling Bad Jokes on the Campaign Trail in Chiba by-election

I don’t know about you guys, but this neck-and-neck by-election in Chiba prefecture has me riveted! (Click link for background though it’s pretty obviously biased against the DPJ). Somehow new DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa has made the press almost completely forget about that sloppy screw-up Tony Blair wanna-be predecessor of his Maehara.

ZAKZAK, as usual, has some interesting coverage (good parts summarized — best digested by reading link above for background first):

Takebe Telling Meaningless Bad Jokes in Chiba by-election
Limp LDP Showing Leaves Takebe’s Leadership Spinning its Wheels

OtaOzawa’s DPJ is strengthening its offenses for the Apr 23 by election in Chiba’s 7th district. The new opposition president (63yo) has reportedly ordered members of his party to skip meetings in favor of supporting candidate Kazumi Oda (26yo) who has upstaged LDP contender Ken Saito (46) in the polls.

In response to Ozawa’s full court press, the LDP’s very own “honorable yes-man” Tsutomu Takebe has taken the reins to try and turn things around.

Along with the popular figures like Prime Minister Koizumi and Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe offering words of support, “Koizumi children” including Taizo Sugimura have joined the fray by passing out leaflets in front of train stations.

Saito But a certain lack of vitality can’t be denied.

An LDP prefectural office official admitted, “Conflict over candidate selection between the prefectural chapter and the central party has had an effect [on the atmosphere]. The lackadaisical prefectural assembly members are also an issue. The fact that Takebe keeps telling bad jokes like ‘rock paper scissors KEN SAITO!’ (『最初はグー、斎藤ケン』 in Japanese) is killing the mood for some activists.”

Continue reading Takebe Telling Bad Jokes on the Campaign Trail in Chiba by-election

Quick lesson in METI ineptitude: The PSE Law explained

Yes, the PSE Law (which would have banned the sale of some used video game consoles and almost all vintage musical instruments) has been thoroughly declawed. Thank god. But weren’t you the least bit curious about how this all got started? I was, so it was especially interesting for me to come across this article in the 3/25/2006 issue of Japanese business weekly, Shukan Toyo Keizai (Weekly Oriental Economy, link opens PDF file). Some highlights (translated where it was easy, abstracted where it was a pain):

Something’s Wrong Here, METI! (Part 2): Used Goods Sold No More?! Analysis of METI’s teeter-tottering over the PSE Law

A scandal began when a used goods dealer asked a question to the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI).

It was October 2005 when a letter arrived at the headquarters of major used goods chain Hard Off Corporation. It said: “Pursuant to the Product Safety Electrical Appliance and Material Law (PSE Law), electric appliances without the “PSE label” can no longer be sold as of April 1. Please take note.”

The sender was Victor JVC. It was addressed to vendors stores selling the company’s products. Hard Off, though mainly dealing in used goods, sells some new items, so it was as if by chance that the letter made it there.

President Ken Nagahashi of Hard Off was worried: Does “can no longer be sold” include used goods? What are the stipulations for used goods? He looked on METI’s website, but no matter where he looked he could not find anything about used goods.

He then directly asked METI, but the person at the Product Safety Division who received his question could not give an immediate answer as to whether used goods were included. Hard Off was at a loss.
Continue reading Quick lesson in METI ineptitude: The PSE Law explained