Category: Current Events

“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.”

As Mel Brooks once said,

Tragedy is when I get a papercut on my finger, comedy is when you fall down a hole and die. Case in point, in a moment.

Between Aum Shinrikyo and “thallium girl” (as she was often referred to in the Japanese press) there is a rather disturbing trend towards stories involving poison. But they needn’t all be; there is comedy too.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Two hapless Chinese thieves gassed themselves to death with cyanide along with five intended victims while trying to rob a gambling den in the city of Ruichang, the Xinhua news agency reported Saturday.

A court in nearby Jiujiang Thursday sentenced their three surviving accomplices to death for the robbery, carried out last June.

One of the three passed out for several hours from the effects of the gas — but still remembered to rob the dead of 15,950 yuan ($1,990), five mobile phones and a gold necklace when he came around, Xinhua said.

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.

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

Another Iraq War lawsuit bites the dust

Some people think that the U.S. has a monopoly on stupid lawsuits. Japan has its share, too. The main difference is that the Japanese courts usually tell the plaintiffs to get lost. Yomiuri reports on the dismissal of one such case in Nagoya:

The plaintiffs sought the termination of the deployment, claiming that “the SDF deployment to Iraq, in addition to being an act of war in violation of Article 9 of the Constitution, violates the right to peaceful existence provided in the Preamble to the Constitution, and has caused psychological damage.”

Similar lawsuits are pending in eleven other district courts, including Sapporo and Tokyo; the plaintiffs’ suits in Kofu and Osaka have also been dismissed.

“Dismiss” (却下 kyakka) means that the court found no legal standing for the suit. Article 9 has been the subject of many lawsuits ending in a dismissal, going back to the predecessors of the SDF in the early 1950s. While many citizens might object, few people can prove any injury resulting from the government’s alleged constitutional violations.

One notable exception to this was the Sunakawa Case of 1959, which challenged an arrest made under a law based on Article 9. The plaintiffs, who had been arrested for trespassing on Tachikawa Air Base in Tokyo, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before their case against Article 9 was conclusively thrown out.

Aiful dog to be put to sleep? One can only hope!

It’s about damned time the FSA did something about legal loan-sharking in Japan:

Friday, April 14, 2006

FSA To Slap Business Suspension Order On All Aiful Outlets

TOKYO (Nikkei)–The Financial Services Agency has decided to impose a business suspension order of up to 25 days on all domestic outlets of consumer credit firm Aiful Corp. (8515) as punishment for aggressive collection tactics, The Nihon Keizai Shimbun learned Thursday.

This administrative punishment, unusual in its harshness, will be the first-ever disciplinary action by the FSA against a major consumer credit company. The measure is likely to have a major impact on calls for tougher regulations for the sector.

The decision may be formally announced as early as Friday. In addition, Aiful was allegedly obtaining powers of attorney from clients without their consent. The suspension will be 20-25 days for the Hokkaido and Kyushu branches where improper activities took place, and three days for all other locations. Aiful operates nearly 1,700 outlets across Japan.

But here’s the kicker: Aiful plans to cancel all advertising for the time being. Rejoice!

Aiful is deepening its equity and business ties with banks through mergers and acquisitions. It has also been cooperating with several regional financial institutions in the business of loan guarantees.

The firm will rush to clean up its act by cutting management salaries and reviewing management practices. It will also cancel all advertising, at least for the time being.

The ads were extremely annoying – a man sees a cute chiuahua at a pet store, imagines himself in all kinds of whimsical situations with the dog, and apparently decides to go heavily into debt to get the little dog. Another tactic used by most of the companies is to use attractive spokeswomen to showcase the “good service” they offer. I, for one, will not miss the cloying fabrications.

Of course, the practice of super-high-interest loaning is still legal – the loan sharks are just not allowed to start acting like Scientologists in their collections policies.

This practice of usurious lending has humongous social ramifications in Japan. Just about every other story on ZAKZAK is about some schmuck with a pachinko habit who started embezzling or robbing people to pay back “consumer debt.” Ads for the numerous companies block the mountains, and one can find “ATMs” which are actually unmanned loan application terminals, on city streetcorners, never far from a pachinko establishment. Meanwhile, the founders of these companies have made themselves billionaires.
Continue reading Aiful dog to be put to sleep? One can only hope!