Courtesy of YouTube, some old-school Japanese hip-hop so charming in its lameness that it’s begging to be sung at karaoke on the next office trip.
Unarguably the group’s biggest song, selling millions. The lyrics are often thought of as simple with no heavy social commentary. (Although this is similar to a lot of Japanese hip hop of the time.)
Da yo ne.
The Asahi reports that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, while having a dinner meeting with attendants including LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe on the evening of July 6th said, “I’m glad that the Taepodong didn’t come flying while I was at Elvis’s estate.” One attendee said in response, “The Prime Minster does have good luck,” to which several others agreed.
Earlier post on the PMs visit to Graceland here.
I have a running bet with a former colleague that “man purses” will catch on among American men in the near future, similar to their popularity in Japan. For some reason, he thinks that American men, with their embrace of such tasteful fashions as pink polo shirts with the collar popped, have more dignity than to carry a purse. That I find to be a somewhat insulting view of the Japanese – Americans are just as capable of making horrible fashion decisions as any other people of the world. So it was with great joy that I saw this story from a British tech news site:
Rise of the manbag: Are gadgets to blame?
We’re carrying too many techie toys…
By Will Sturgeon
Published: Wednesday 5 July 2006
The number of gadgets we’re carrying around on a daily basis – from BlackBerrys and mobile phones to iPods and PDAs – means men in the UK may be forced to embrace the metrosexual phenomenon of the ‘manbag’.
Smaller than a sports bag and often more stylish to boot, the manbag is becoming a must-have item for all UK gadget fans keen to stow their multiple devices.
And while four per cent of men surveyed for a piece of research from business communications company Damovo still go for the ‘batman’ utility belt approach of clipping their gadgets around their waist, it seems that stereotypical image of the gadget fan at large is being killed off by the manbag.
A third of respondents (32 per cent) still manage to get their techie toys into a pocket but by far the most popular option is putting all the gadgets into a bag.
I spotted this on a few gaming related blogs, but I think it’s important to note the similarity to Koizumi’s subtle attack on the President’s war policy.
President George W. Bush received an early birthday present on Wednesday from Nintendo. The game developer sent the president one of their DS Lite portable gaming machines and a copy of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day.
No word on whether Bush, who turns 60 today, is a fan of the company or video games.
In the letter addressed to the presidential birthday boy, Nintendo points out the game will help the president “keep your mind sharp” and suggests President Bush should try it out on his next long flight aboard Air Force One.
Included in the gift pack was this letter:
Dear President Bush:
Happy Birthday!
Don’t worry, turning 60 is an exciting milestone. As you know, you’ve joined millions of other baby boomers in an invigorating new decade of your life. And, like many boomers, you may be looking for ways to keep your mind sharp. That’s where we come in.
Please accept our gift of a new Nintendo DS Lite system and a copy of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day. You now join millions of people around the world who have fun challenging themselves with Brain Age. If you have never played a video game before, don’t worry. Brain Age is part of our new Touch Generations brand, which includes games that are easy for people of any age – regardless of their video game experience – to pick up and start playing immediately.
It’s obvious you don’t have a lot of time to play games, which makes Brain Age such a great activity for you – just a few minutes a day with more than 15 daily training tests will help keep your mind sharp. Training tests include categories like math, reading and memorization. Try it for a few days and watch your score improve. Brain Age also comes with more than 100 sudoku puzzles – these could make your next long flight on Air Force One a bit more fun! (Perhaps copies of Brain Age for journalists joining you on your next flight would be a nice distraction!)
Have fun exploring Brain Age with your Nintendo DS Lite and be sure to let us know your brain age!Have a tremendous birthday!
Sincerely,
Your Friends at Nintendo
So the new head of Starbucks Japan has made a threat promise to open 100 stores per year for an unspecified number of years, up from the current 624 outlets. This is all well and good, except for one thing-Starbucks in Japan doesn’t offer any wireless internet service! While I suppose wifi access in Japan must be better than it was a few years ago, after living in Taiwan-a country where every cafe, KFC and subway station has free and open wifi connections-for most of the past year it seems rather dreadfully difficult to get online with a portable computer when traveling in this country.
I moved into a new apartment in Kyoto on Friday, about a two minute walk from the Sanjo Keihan train station and five minutes walk from downtown Kyoto, the edge of which can be thought of as the Sanjo Bridge, which in the days of the Samurai was the designated location for the beheading of the most heinous of criminals (such as Christians). Being Kyoto, this former killing ground is of course marked by a sign, but more people probably know it for the adjacent Starbucks. (pictured below)
Living so near to downown I assumed that I would be able to walk into any number of establishments with my laptop, once again able to run off battery sans AC adapter thanks to my clever repairs, only two days before my departure, and naturally this Starbucks was the first place I tried.
To my surprise, Starbucks Japan offers no kind of wifi service whatsoever! Neither does Dutour, a Japan-based cafe chain with a large presence in Taiwan. The menu is basically the same, but of course in Taiwan you always see a few patrons tapping away on their keyboards thanks to the free internet.
I ended up strolling up and down Kawaramachi and the immediate environs with my open laptop, Netstumbler running, in search of an internet connection that I could glom onto. In fact, there were plenty of connections- easily dozens. But all of them were corporate networks, for internal business use and were correctly encrypted to restrict access from non-authorized users. I did find one eventually, weak but slightly usable for a few minutes at a time, between service interruptions-accessible while sitting on a bench near Sanjo Kohashi (pictured right). After about fifteen minutes of highly frustrating internet use it started to rain, and with no options left I sprinted under a store canopy with my laptop tucked under my right arm, stowed it in my laptop carrying-case-backpack, and scurried through the rain back to my apartment.
After getting back I took the laptop out and turned it on in my new room for the first time, thinking I might watch a movie from my narrow yellow binder of DVDs, and immediately was hit with a message from Windows saying that it had connected to an unprotected wireless network. The wireless AP had the SSID “YBBUSER,” telling me that it must have been provided for a user of the Yahoo Broadband ADSL service popular in Japan.
Happy ending: I was able to download the latest episode of Doctor Who in under 30 minutes via Bittorrent. Seeing **spoilers removed**meet for the first time was excellent.
Lessons learned: Partly because all Japanese people can check their email from their cell phones free wifi is more difficult to find than in most, if not all other highly developed countries.
Solution: Starbucks can shell out the ￥10,000 for a decent wireless router and ￥4000/month for DSL service in addition to the millions of yen they’ll need to spend on those hundreds of planned new stores.
The High-Lows are a now-defunct Japanese rock band whose sound mixes a tinge of American doo-wop with a mallet over the head dose of youth nostalgia. Though not a huge fan, I picked up one of their CDs back in the day after hearing that they were the successor band to the influential late 1980s J-punk band The Blue Hearts (“Linda Linda” remains one of my favorite songs).
Despite the clear US influences in his band’s music, guitarist/songwriter Masato Mashima felt like 2002 (runup to the Iraq war) was an appropriate time to let us know what he thinks about Americans in his fun piece of album filler entitled “American Spirit” from the album angel beetle. Here’s a translation (lyrics in Japanese available here as culled with some difficulty from utamap.com):
Crush the colored races/Make the rules so they benefit me
Don’t admit my mistakes/That’s the American SpiritKill Kill Kill John Wayne-style
You’re an impudent bunch for a colored raceHey! You say you can’t obey me?!
Hey! Who do you think I am?!American/I’m an American/I’m the World Champion, baby
American/I’m an American/Unlimited justice, babyBeat up the badguys/I even went to the moon, you know!
Ain’t I cool? Ain’t I smart?I don’t understand your sadness,
But please, understand my sadness
“America Against the World,” a recent book based on comprehensive polling data from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, makes the point that our exceptionalism is not exceptional with particular force. While a robust 60 percent of Americans agree with the proposition that “our culture is superior to others,” such self-confidence pales next to that of South Korea and Indonesia, where some 90 percent of the population assents to the idea. The book’s authors, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, also note that “poll after poll finds the Japanese to be the most pessimistic of people, expressing far less satisfaction with their lot in life than might be expected given their relatively high per capita incomes. Yet, compared to other Asians, the Japanese are, like Americans, highly self-reliant and distrustful of government and, like Europeans, secular. It is the Japanese public, not the American public, that is most exceptional in the world.”
Any thoughts?
Yahoo Japan’s “everybody’s politics” section is becoming quite an amazing little site. I mean look at this hot top image promoting their new 2007 Upper House election feature:
It’s like dueling Kim Jong Ils!
Just look at some of these amazing features:
Best of all everything is free and better yet ad-free. Why? My guess: They are gearing up to claim to have a significant impact on next year’s Upper House elections and in the process boost traffic.
One of their newer features, however, indicates a major shift by some of the traditional media content providers – free, full-length articles from Japan’s weekly and monthly magazines! The Japanese internet so far has been pretty devoid of good free political analysis or even in-depth news coverage. This is largely explained by the newspapers and magazines’ reluctance to put their content online for fear of losing readership and, in the case of newspapers, the considerable special privileges they get as so-called public institutions. is “Read and Compare Political Articles” which reprints the main political articles in weekly journals, in their entirety, completely free of charge (or even banner ads, while we’re on the topic)! Downsides: No pictures, and the articles are deleted fairly soon after publication (about a month it looks like). But if you’re diligent you can at least save the articles you want on your computer (or if you’re like me, g-mail them to yourself).
This serves as an essential boon to Japanese and Japan watchers overseas (who can now vote in all aspects of Japanese elections after a court decision), who before could only view headlines for free, unless they wanted to sign up for media companies’ exorbitantly expensive pay services.
There still leaves much to be desired in terms of Japanese media content being available on the web (full newspapers, anyone?). But this is a very helpful step in the right direction!
As if the Niagara Incident wasn’t bad enough (there’s currently a huge controversy in the Japanese media over whether it should be labelled the ナイアガラの滝の事件 or ナイアガラの滝の事変), and now this report!
The “King” never came to Japan, but Japan’s prime minister is making a pilgrimage to Graceland.
Elvis fan Billy Morokawa says Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will likely feel the power of Presley’s enduring energy when he tours the rock-and-roll legend’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, Friday with President Bush.
Did you see that? “Pilgrimage” There’s no way this visit is going to pass the church/state test, and visiting it alongside President Bush the “I was only going in my capacity as a private citizen” defense is never going to fly, particularly when considering his personal history in this cult.
Koizumi, 64, is an Elvis devotee who not only shares a January 8 birthday with his idol, but picked out his songs for a 2001 charity album, “Junichiro Koizumi Presents My Favorite Elvis Songs.” The prime minister appears on the album’s cover standing next to Elvis outside Graceland in a composite picture.
Back in 1987 when Koizumi was a mere lawmaker, he and his brother Masaya, now a senior adviser to the Tokyo fan club, helped raise funds to erect a status of Elvis in the Japanese capital to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death.
Three years ago the prime minister, an eclectic music lover whose favorites also include German composer Richard Wagner, sang his favorite Elvis hit — “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” — with actor Tom Cruise, then in Tokyo to promote his movie “The Last Samurai.”
Let’s just hope that this time the Supreme Court actually has the guts to face the real constitutional question and not skirt the issue on technicalities.
