Japanophiles’ Innermost Desires Exposed!

The Japan news forum Crisscross has a great new feature in which users list their “goals.” I really don’t see the appeal of this, but it’s a revealing window into the collective hopes and dreams of the Crisscross readership. Let’s take a look:

1. go to Japan (72)
2. Learn Japanese (61)
3. become fluent in Japanese (38)
4. marry a Japanese girl (34)
5. Learn Japanese perfectly (33)
6. get a new japanese girl friend (31)
7. meet new friends in Tokyo (31)
8. teach english in Japan (26)
9. live in Japan (25)
10. be friends with Japanese girls (21)
11. marry a nice sweet Japanese man and shower him with affection and devotion! (19)
12. Be happy (18)
13. learn about Japanese culture (16)
14. see Memoirs of a Geisha (16)
15. get a kitten (16)
16. eat sushi (16)
17. go to Osaka (15)
18. learn aikido (15)
19. completely master Kanji (14)
20. get somewhere with an asian girl before I die (14)

The aspirations of these Japanophiles (presumably so if they read Crisscross) range from the mundane (Read Harry Potter, wear a kimono, grow out my hair) to the horny (“get somewhere” with an Asian girl) to the ambitious (completely master kanji, dance on bin Laden’s grave, hug a friend in a monsoon). But the goals throughout the list definitely center around “go to/live in Japan,” “score with a Japanese girl,” and “master Japanese”.

To many, these goals might represent the masturbatory fantasies of anime nerds worthy of nothing but scorn. But not to me – they were, in fact, my top three priorities at age 17, in precisely that order. Seeing so many like-minded people really takes me back…

I started learning Japanese at 15, and as soon as I mastered hiragana I was completely hooked. Japan and its new and unknown culture, mysterious and forbidding language, and strange women who actually seemed somewhat interested in talking to me came to be an obsession.

Now, at 24, after two years in Japan, a nightmare relationship that all but turned me off from Japanese girls forever, and landing a job as a translator/researcher, I’ve accomplished all three of the above-mentioned “goals” and can look back and see them for the self-absorbed, adolescent, small-minded yearnings of a high school dork that they were. And I’ve changed – even though I’m still a proud nerd, my interests have broadened beyond just Japan stuff, I don’t feel the obsessive need to live in Japan or befriend Japanese people (though I’ll never let my Japanese language skills slip), and I am not worried about “getting somewhere” with women.

It’s been a fun ride, and I don’t regret for a minute the path I’ve taken as a result of my earlier immature ambition. Living in Japan and learning Japanese first and foremost opened my mind to “world things” (as Mrs. Adamu and I like to call them) and expanded my palate for delicious food my friends in the US can hardly bear to look at. But it also served as the stage on which I ended up wrestling with a lot of my high-school era demons – and the process I learned humility, became a little less selfish, and found out who my friends are.

As corny as it sounds, it allowed me to find out “who I am” and become more comfortable with myself, surely moreso than I could have if I just stayed home. And if I may be even more trite, sometimes to get to somewhere interesting in life, you’ve just got to follow your dumb teenage heart. It may well get you killed, but in most cases it’s far preferable to having stayed at home.

A suggestion to Gyao, Yahoo Doga, and Dai-ni Nittere

Competition is heating up among Japan’s big time Internet TV operators, the Yomiuri writes:

More than 10 million people have signed up for Usen Corp.’s Gyao Net TV service since it started broadcasting in April 2005. Yet despite the numbers putting the free service ahead of competitors such as Yahoo, the nation’s largest cable broadcaster’s service is still deep in the red.

Go read it if you care to.

The article goes on to note that this and other services continue to post losses while they compete for viewers. I would like to heartily to suggest that all three services do the following:

OPEN ACCESS TO FOREIGN VIEWERS!!!!!!

(Note: All of the top 3 Internet TV sites in Japan use DRM to keep foreign viewers out)

This way, you could sell ads to a much wider spectrum of merchants (j-list? foreign companies catering to Japanese living abroad?) and quickly boost viewership! Get on it people!

Things I wish happened: Masayoshi Son wrestles bears? Actually, no.

Look at this headline from May 4’s Mainichi online news:


Son scares off bear after elderly dad seriously injured in attack

At first, I thought this story was about Masayoshi Son, Japanese-Korean internet mogul and Japan’s richest man. But no, turns out it’s just some guy’s son who scared off the bear.

How cool would that have been if my first inclination had been true? He’d be a triple threat as the man who: a) Overcame his minority status to rise to the upper rank’s of Japan’s business elite; b) Helped introduce broadband Internet to Japanese households after years of lagging behind to the point where penetration has now outstripped the US; c) Can fend off any bears who threaten his elderly dad. Well, he got two out of three at least.

Rest of the story:

Son scares off bear after elderly dad seriously injured in attack

NIKAHO, Akita — An elderly man was seriously injured after being attacked by a bear while picking wild plants in the mountains here Thursday morning, police said.

At around 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, an adult bear attacked a 69-year-old pensioner who was picking edible wild plants with his son on a mountain in the Kisakata district of Nikaho, local police said. The man suffered serious wounds after the bear scratched his face and left arm.

The 37-year-old son fought back with a tree branch and managed to scare away the beast. The bear fled the scene and disappeared.

At the request of the local government, a local hunter was mobilized to search for the approximately 1.7-meter-long animal while police officers patrolled the neighborhood asking residents to exercise caution.

A residential area is located about 500 meters away from the scene of the attack. (Mainichi)

May 4, 2006

Dietman Taizo Sugimura an Idiot After All? (At least he is an admitted plagiarizer)

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?

Awesome stuff from the National Diet Library – Part 1

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.

“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.

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.

Bomb Threats for fun and Profit: Japanese Terrorist Wants his Welfare, and an April Fools “joke” gone Wrong

Who could wish harm on such a pretty sunset?ZAKZAK!

Man Dials Emergency Hotline With City Hall Bomb Threat after “Being Denied Public Assistance”

The Tokai Precinct of the Aichi Prefectural Police arrested an unemployed male (55) on suspicion offorcible obstruction of business for calling in a bomb threat to the Obu City Hall on April 9.

According to the police’s investigation, the man is suspected of calling 110 [emergency hotline similar the 911 in the US] from a public phone from 12:12 until 12:23 on April 9 and reported that “the Obu City Hall building will be bombed at noon on April 12,” obstructing business. He was arrested by police from the Tokai precinct, who rushed to the scene while he was on the line.

The man has explained, “I applied for public assistance, but I was denied.”

ZAKZAK 2006/04/10

Meanwhile, unnamed foreign students in Burma apparently don’t get that it’s supposed to be an April Fool’s joke:

Myanmar junta says bomb was April Fools joke

Published: Monday, 10 April, 2006, 11:56 AM Doha Time

YANGON: Myanmar’s military junta said yesterday that a time bomb found at an upscale international school last week was likely planted by foreign students as part of an April Fools joke.

The bomb, similar in design to explosives that killed 19 people in the capital almost a year ago, had been found and defused at the International School of Yangon on Thursday, security personnel said.

Brigadier-General Kyaw Hsan, information minister of the ruling State Peace and Development Council, told a press conference that investigators had to consider other factors since the students of diplomats from the United States and other foreigners working in Myanmar attend the school.

Good one!