Culture – Page 21 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

Women flee Japan, as the men evolve into a different species

Of course, the female population could simply be falling more or less in line with the overall population, but let’s not let that get in the way of an anonymous ministry official’s speculation (thank you Kyodo and Nikkei):

Population Of Women In Japan Sees 1st Decline On Record

TOKYO (Kyodo)–The number of females in Japan fell for the first time on record as of October last year, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said Monday.

The female population was estimated to be 65.44 million as of Oct. 1, down 20,000 from a year earlier to mark the first decrease since 1950, when comparable data were first recorded.

”More Japanese women are going abroad for extended periods, and this is thought to be one of the reasons,” a ministry official said.

This might be a good time to tell you that I very much enjoyed attending Patrick Macias’ lecture on otaku culture held a couple weeks ago at Temple University Japan. You can listen to it in full on his website. The lecture is a broad overview of the development of Japan’s otaku culture and the American obsession with it. Within, he notes:

Densha Otoko, the dubiously true story of an 2-Channeler otaku who falls in love with a normal woman, follows the storyline of an “interracial romance,” and
The ubiquity of erotic elements in anime and gaming indicate that otaku are leaving normal female companionship behind, in a phenomenon he compares to the “post-humans” of sci-fi anime such as the Gundam series.

It’s an interesting listen!

Another reason to visit Pyongyang

Authentic Nork pizza.

In the late 1990s Kim brought a team of Italian pizza chefs to North Korea to instruct his army officers how to make pizza, a luxury which is now being offered to a tiny elite able to afford such luxuries in a country that cannot feed many of its 24 million inhabitants.

Despite the food shortages high-quality Italian wheat, flour, butter and cheese are being imported to ensure the perfect pizza is created every time.

“Our people should be also allowed to enjoy the world-famous food,” the manager of the Pyongyang eatery quoted Kim as saying, according to the Tokyo-based Choson Sinbo newspaper.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution)

No retrial for Asahara – clock ticking

Tokyo Court Rejects Aum Cult Leader’s Retrial Plea, Kyodo Says

By Stuart Biggs

March 19 (Bloomberg) — The Tokyo District Court turned down a request for a retrial for Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult who was sentenced to death for the murder of 19 people in sarin gas attacks in Japan, Kyodo News reported.

The retrial plea, filed in November by Asahara’s second daughter, was turned down because what it claims is new evidence wouldn’t be sufficient to overturn his sentence, Kyodo said, citing unidentified people familiar with the case. The report didn’t provide further details of the contents of the plea.

Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, was sentenced to death in February 2004 for the attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12 people and another attack in the city of Matsumoto a year earlier that left seven people dead. The group is alleged to have killed 27 people in total.

Asahara, 54, lost a final appeal against the death sentence in September 2006, Kyodo said.

14 years later, Asahara might face the gallows this year…

Michelle Malkin – Kabuki, stage left

(Updated below)

Wow, politics as theater. What a deep and insightful insight!

The Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage

Michelle Malkin – Wed Mar 18, 3:00 am ET

All the world’s a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and in the world of Washington, the curtains have opened on the most elaborate farce of the year. Welcome, taxpayers, to the Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage — where D.C.’s histrionic enablers of taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts compete for Best Performance of Hypocritical Indignation.

… Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, the corporate crony who is the largest recipient of AIG donations, is now leading the charge to tax the retention payments in order to recoup the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit.

But Dodd, it turns out, was for protecting AIG’s bonuses before he was against them.

Fox Business reporter Rich Edson pointed out that during the Senate porkulus negotiations last month, Dodd successfully inserted a teeny-tiny amendment that provided for an “‘exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009,’ which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are seeking to tax.” Pay no attention to what his left hand was doing. Dodd’s right fist is pounding mightily, mightily for the sake of the taxpayers.

…

If Washington’s newfound opponents of rewarding failure want to do taxpayers a favor, how about giving back their automatic pay raises? How about returning all their AIG donations? How about taking back all the bailout money to all the failed enterprises, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG, the automakers and the big banks? Barry? Harry? Nancy? John? Chris? Bueller? Bueller?

Exit stage left. The curtain falls.

Are there even curtains at kabuki performances?

BTW, as Glenn Greenwald notes, one of the central themes of this piece – that Chris Dodd was key to ensuring that these bonuses could be paid – is part of a falsehood-based smear campaign (UPDATE: Apparently not baseless after all…) (UPDATED AGAIN: Dodd “accepted responsibility” for agreeing to the Obama-Geithner plan to pay the existing bonuses… whatever!):

…here is a February 14 article from the Wall St. Journal on the debate over executive compensation limits:

The most stringent pay restriction bars any company receiving funds from paying top earners bonuses equal to more than one-third of their total annual compensation. That could severely crimp pay packages at big banks, where top officials commonly get relatively modest salaries but often huge bonuses.

As word spread Friday about the new and retroactive limit — inserted by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut — so did consternation on Wall Street and in the Obama administration, which opposed it.

Can that be any clearer? It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future.

Ironically enough, Malkin’s own eagerness to repeat wingnut talking points is about as staged and scripted as anything on Capitol Hill, not unlike a certain traditional Japanese dramatic form. But I guess since she uses blogging software instead of the Senate floor, no appropriate cliches have arisen to describe the right-wing noise machine.

(Thx to M-Bone for pointing this out)

UPDATE: So Dodd did push to pay the committed AIG bonuses?

UPDATE AGAIN: Dodd “accepted responsibility” for agreeing to the Obama-Geithner plan to pay the existing bonuses… whatever!

Fighting fire with fire – ominous divine eye silently watches, condemns Saitama litterers

Here is the image that will be in my nightmares from now on:

If you think you can toss your waste in the Minuma Rice Fields nature preserve, think again – the red torii are watching you. Judging you.

A citizens’ group in Saitama prefecture has set up dozens of these unsettling warnings to try and stop litterers from ruining their greenery and historical farmland. A member of the group commented that they would prefer not to set these things up since they understand the negative effect on the scenery, but the move was taken out of frustration after signs and cameras didn’t work. The group claims it has been effective in reducing the amount of trash. I mean, what’s worse – hellish, gazing torii or mountains of construction waste in one of Japan’s precious nature preserves?

Torii (often translated as “traditional Japanese gates”) are traditionally placed at the entrance to Shinto shrines and symbolize that you are venturing into sacred space. In recent years, the practice of using torii (or mock torii with distorted proportions) to ward off potential litterers has grown as word of mouth has spread with the help of positive TV coverage. The added eye was an original innovation of the Saitama group. According to Wikipedia, this custom is predated by the use of tiny torii to keep public urinators in check.

My trip to Nagoya

On March 1, after 4 years in Japan, I finally made it to the country’s third-largest metropolitan region for the very first time. As far as tourist destinations, Nagoya ranks pretty low due to an almost total lack of old buildings or noteworthy landmarks, but like anyplace else there is a certain local quality, the experience of which is itself worth the visit.

In retrospect, I had perhaps one of the most peculiar two-day visits to Nagoya that anyone has ever had. The first day began with a brief Shinkansen ride from Kyoto Station to Nagoya Station, at which point Aceface picked me up in his car, took me briefly by Nagoya Castle, and then drove over to the heavily Brazilian Homigaoka public housing project. (I did a separate post on this part of the visit which you can see here.) After seeing Toyota City’s Braziltown, we made a brief stop at the Toyota City Hall on our way back to the Nagoya, where we joined Aceface’s Mongolian wife and their son, as well as Younghusband and his wife, for a Tsagaan Sar, aka Mongolian New Year, party. (Younghusband blogged about this party.) Much lamb was involved, as well as Mongolian karaoke, being made to dress up in traditional Mongolian robes, and the drinking of Chinghis (Ghenghis Khan) brand vodka.

Here is a Flickr-Flash slideshow of the Mongolian party, in which you can see me and Younghusband being dressed up (although photos with his face are left out for his blog anonymity).

Continue reading My trip to Nagoya

Reverse alchemy in action

UPDATE: Nevermind, this is apparently something to do with the real World of Warcraft!

I thought this ad for a bottom-feeding gold buyer had an interesting Heavy Metal theme to it. I guess they want people to think of their “service” as medieval-style alchemy, only in reverse:

Or maybe the WOW is supposed to stand for “World of Warcraft.” Are they expecting unemployed lardasses to pawn their mom’s jewelry so they can keep playing?

But let’s be serious — NEVER sell your gold to a random site on the Internet — they won’t pay good prices!!! Here is a good debunking of the scam:

A little online sleuthing finds that I’m not the only one who figures that if Cash4Gold has this much money to spend on TV ads, someone’s getting the short end of the stick, and it’s probably the people sending in their family heirlooms to be melted into ingots. The folks at Cockeyed.com put Cash4Gold to the test, rounding up a bunch of old rings, necklaces, and earrings, and taking them to a regular pawn shop to be appraised. The offer: $198 for the lot. They then sent the items to Cash4Gold and waited for a check in the mail. It arrived within a few days as promised… in the amount of 60 bucks. (You don’t have to accept the check; the deal isn’t done until you cash it.)

That price alone is practically criminal, but that’s where the truly slimy part of the operation begins. First, if you call Cash4Gold and ask for your stuff back, you abruptly get a better offer: In the case of the above experiment, the offer was a whopping $178. That’s a better deal, but still not market rate, though the caller was told that Cash4Gold could “manipulate the numbers on their end” to make it appear that more product was sent than was in reality. Bizarre, but it’s really the only way Cash4Gold can cover its behind to convince you the original offer wasn’t a wholesale ripoff.

Oricon Survey – professional Japanese want to get more exercise, stop wasting money, quit their jobs

ZAKZAK reports on a recent Oricon online “monitor” survey of professionals aged 20-49. When asked a multiple-answer question on what activities they want to “graduate from” (read: grow out of), they gave the following top responses:

Lack of exercise (37.9%)
Wasteful spending (27.8%)
Being too easy on myself (26.4%)
Between-meal snacks (23.3%)
Negative thinking (20.4%)
Being single (19.9%)
Wasting time (18.8%)
My current workplace (18.3%)
Habit of skipping things/being lazy about doing things (18.3%, tied for 8th)
Staying up too late (16.5%)

The poll is positioned as a list of graduation season resolutions, as March is the time when most schools hold their graduation ceremonies just ahead of the new fiscal/scholastic year in April.

Oh hell yeah

I don’t know who had the insane idea to make a Japanese live-action version of Spiderman, but I’m just glad that it exists. And glad that Marvel has, for some reason, decided to stream episodes for free on their web site. There’s also a very odd Spiderman manga I’ve read a bit of, which may or may not be based on the plot of this show.

Good morning

I was awoken at around 6 or 7 this morning by a brief earthquake, and then again at about 8:30 as a series of monks, in their straw sandals and wide-brimmed woven-reed conish hats, starting wandering back and forth down the road, chanting at the top of their lungs. I wonder perhaps if there was a causal relationship, some sort of special prayer or spell given in the wake of an earthquake to calm the restless earth dragons. Even some of the Japanese neighbors seemed startled and amused by this curious occurance, and the entire family in the house just across and over from mine got out to watch in mild wonder this anachronistic scene, and one monk stopped to give a personal blessing to their little girl.