Deface the Newspaper

Sometimes I do this.

Let's Learn Japanese: Tsui ni

This evening in Osaka, Ichihashi Tatsuya was arrested in connection with the 2007 murder of British ESL teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker (which I briefly mentioned in another "Let's Learn Japanese" post from June of that year. Ichihashi had successfully eluded capture since the murder, fueling suspicions that the police didn't really care about catching him.

Less than two weeks prior to his arrest, an updated version of Ichihashi's "WANTED" photo was released, indicating that he had recently managed to undergo plastic surgery to alter his face. The renewed attention to the case is likely to have aided in his being recognized and subsequently captured.

Tsui ni is Japanese for "at last."

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

A Nazi woman and a Jewish guy go to Vegas.

You're right. It's not very funny.

Fun with Bill, Kim and Dick

On Tuesday night, Japanese TV news showed a video still of this week's meeting between Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton. This same striking still also appeared on the front page of yesterday's Yomiuri Shinbun. I failed to find the still anywhere online, so I decided to scan it and post it here.

Check out the grin on Kim. He looks like a twelve-year-old girl whose birthday party was just paid a surprise visit by David Beckham. (Come to think of it, Bill Clinton sort of looks like David Beckham being forced to visit a twelve-year-old girl's birthday party.)

Unfortunately, another person who resembles a child is Dick Morris, who has blasted Clinton for "boosting" North Korea. Apparently Dick Morris thinks that the foreign policy of the United States should more closely resemble the behavior of a child who thinks there are monsters under his bed. Morris would have us pretend that North Korea doesn't exist before he would have us engage them in diplomacy -- even if the diplomacy is successful, as it was in this case.

Dick Morris wants to plug his ears and cover his eyes while repeating the mantra, "If I can't see them, then they aren't there." He also contends that the freeing of hostages Euna Lee and Laura Ling was timed to distract Americans from the health care debate.

Dick Morris is stunningly dumb.

Yahoo to End GeoCities

Yahoo has said it will shut down GeoCities, the free website hosting service it purchased ten years ago, this year.

GeoCities was one of the most popular ad-driven hosts where people built their personal web pages back in the days before blog hosts became the easiest way to do so. It also became known as a virtually infinite graveyard of some of the most pointless, ill-looking and dysfunctional pages on the entire internet. Any time I was looking for information online and found a link to a GeoCities page, my hopes of discovering anything relevant on that page sank considerably. Most of the time the link would lead to a page that hadn't been updated in at least three years, and whose images had all vanished because the user's allotted bandwidth had been used up.

Hallmarks of GeoCities websites included random GIF animations, illogical linking, seizure-inducing color schemes and hit counters that looked like this:

(The way I'm describing it, GeoCities sounds an awful lot like MySpace...but trust me, it was totally different.)

Countless internet users, including myself, can truthfully say that GeoCities was their first ever "home on the web." The service GeoCities offered was perfect if you wanted to build a website with basically no content, and you wanted to do so for free. I took advantage of this perfect storm of pointlessness and created my first website, entitled The Hall of Crushes, in 1997. It was, as you can imagine, a high-tech shrine to unrequited love; kind of like the movie High Fidelity, only instead of my lost loves being played by Catherine Zeta Jones and Lili Taylor, they were portrayed in cute little caricatures I drew myself. It was a vigorous exercise in self-indulgence.

Aren't you glad I stopped being self-indulgent?

Plumber the Reporter

I take offense when Americans who suffer from a chronic case of "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about" syndrome (IDKWTHITAS) find ways to perpetuate the popular image of the Stupid American abroad.

Chromedomed idiot Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, who became famous for no particular reason during the 2008 presidential race, has no experience as a war correspondent, no experience as a reporter, no experience as a journalist and, judging from turns of phrase such as "I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war," not very much experience speaking English.

Yet, for some reason, he's been sent to Israel as a "war correspondent" by conservative opinion website PajamasTV:

"Joe" says, in the above clip, that he "liked back in World War I and World War II, when you'd go to the threater and you'd see your troops on the screen." For someone who went to the threater during World War I, this "Joe" is incredibly well-preserved.

I'm also wondering if maybe his new bosses at PajamasTV couldn't have informed their new correspondent a little more thoroughly before sending him overseas. In this excerpt from a conversation between Wurzelbacher and an Israeli reporter, he attempts to create journalistic drama by manufacturing a "disagreement" (WARNING: This failed attempt at "gotcha!" reporting may cause confusion, dizziness and nausea):

JOE: The story here is people are being killed and the media's slanting it and trying to make it Hamas is, uh, as far as, that Israel's being bad. Do you believe Israel is bad?

REPORTER: Do I believe it?

JOE: Yeah, do you?!

REPORTER: I'm Israeli, so...

JOE: So answer the question!

REPORTER: No, I don't think Israel is bad.

JOE: Do you think Israel has every right to protect itself?

REPORTER: Yeah.

[pause]

JOE: You do?!

REPORTER: Yeah.

JOE: Have you said that on air?

REPORTER: I'm just a reporter.

Plumber, get out of the reporter's way before a rocket falls on your head. Your every action since last October has been designed for one purpose only: To get attention. What other explanation can their be for someone becoming a war correspondent and then using their airtime to decry the existence of war correspondents? Oh wait, there is another explanation. YOU'RE A PLUMBER.

Fifty Years of Tokyo Tower

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of Tokyo Tower, the tallest man-made structure in Japan. Though foreigners' first impressions of the tower often involve the words "Eiffel" and "rip-off," a person residing in any part of Japan today would likely pick Tokyo Tower as Tokyo's most emblematic landmark. In celebration of this big, red jumble of TV antennae, Chorus, Isolate, Confirm presents: FUN FACTS ABOUT TOKYO TOWER!

FACT! The 333-meter tower's ribbon cutting fell on December 23, 1958 (Showa Year 33). Whether this numeric alliteration was intentional or not is unclear. It had been determined that, for a single tower to serve the TV broadcasting needs of the entire Tokyo area, that tower would have to be at least 380 meters tall. Out of concern over high winds shaking the tower, however, the height of the final design was scaled down.

FACT! A public survey was conducted to collect suggestions for the tower's name. There were a total of 86,260 respondents. Among those, Japan Tower, Peace Tower, Showa Tower, Prince Tower and Space Tower were popular suggestions. For some reason the name Tokyo Tower was selected even though only 223 respondents (0.26%) had so voted.

FACT! The tower's original nighttime lighting scheme consisted entirely of incandescent light bulbs lining the tower's four corners from top to bottom. In 1989 those bulbs were replaced with 176 floodlights surrounding the tower's base. The colors used in this lighting scheme are periodically changed in complement with the season.

FACT! A five-story building called Foot Town lies nestled between the tower's "feet." Foot Town houses an aquarium, a wax museum, a Guinness World Records museum, an optical illusion gallery and a convenience store.

FACT! It costs ¥820 to ride the elevator to the Main Observatory (at a height of 150 meters). To continue from there to the Special Observatory (250 meters), it costs an additional ¥600.

FACT! Being the emblematic structure that it is, Tokyo Tower has been destroyed in various Japanese monster movies, including Mothra (1961), Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, (1964) Gamera (1965), Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972) and Godzilla vs. Mothra vs. Mecha-Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003).

Palin? "Nailing?"

In this clip from Fox "News," reporter Carl Cameron BLOWS THE LID OFF!!! the dark, sticky underbelly of the McCain-Palin campaign. Bill O'Reilly halfheartedly defends his polar bear-killing sweetheart, but it's clear he's rearranging deck chairs on the already sunken Titanic. Among the amazing deficits in Sarah Palin's expertise:

She couldn't identify the countries that constitute North America.

She thought that Africa was a country, and South Africa just a region within that country.

She threw tantrums, despite being an adult (at least in the physical sense).

Lady, there are only three countries in North America. At least take a wild guess...you're bound to get at least one of them right!

(Huh huh huh..."nailing.")

Well Done, America

The US has been broken for eight years. Step 1 of its repair: Complete.

I spent this morning following the election coverage online, cheering in my chair for every republican defeat. I feel like I can finally take a long-overdue timeout from being frustrated. Let's hope the reduction of stress doesn't harm my ability to blog in any way.

Warm congratulations to Mr. Obama, and to everyone who helped him become President-elect.

Manager of Burning Mangakisa Cut Fire Alarm

A development in the story of one man's failed attempt to say "goodbye, cruel world," about which I blogged one week ago:

Some blame now apparently rests on the shoulders of the elderly mangakisa employee who, upon hearing the fire warning, assumed it was a false alarm and turned off the system.

I don't want this to take away from my thesis about Japan's tendency toward ultimately inconvenient suicide methods (nor from the fact that Ogawa Kazuhiro put dozens of people in needless danger with his own attempt to escape his life), but it seems only fair of me to give appropriately thorough coverage of the story's development.

Man Kills 15 Instead of Self

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If Japan is going to continue to be the world leader in annual suicides, then people have to stop being so careless about how they off themselves. Early Tuesday morning, a man started a fire in Osaka with the intention of killing himself. Instead, he survived and the fire killed fifteen other people.

[the story]

Ogawa Kazuhiro allegedly became "tired of life" and set fire to a newspaper in his private room at a mangakisa called Cats. Then, as his room filled with smoke, he claims he became frightened and fled the scene. Meanwhile, fifteen people Mr. Ogawa had probably never met before (and who were probably sleeping), died from carbon monoxide poisoning and burns.

English news articles vary in their description of the business where this crime took place, with labels ranging from "video rental shop" to "adult video theater." From the description I saw on the TV news here this evening, Cats is (or was, until its fiery baptism) a relatively typical Japanese comic/video/relaxation center. These mangakisa are routinely used as hotels by businessmen, as they tend to offer cheap overnight rates and often have private rooms with comfy reclining chairs. They also tend to be needlessly labyrinthine, and allow their guests to smoke, making for some real grand fire hazards.

I patronized a mangakisa several times during my first six months in Japan, when I had no internet connection at home. But I never tried the private room type, so when I went, I had to breathe the secondhand smoke of everyone around my while I checked my email and read the news. I guess I should count my blessings; at least I didn't die there.

Mr. Ogawa has been arrested on charges of arson and manslaughter.

Cal Thomas: Terrorizer

Every once in a while I get really sick of people trying to convince me that I'm in grave peril. Generally my worries in life are limited to issues such as the condition of my laptop, the possible inaccuracy of the weather forecast and the remote prospect of my apartment being destroyed by an earthquake. These are real, understandable apprehensions with basis in fact. But, once in a while, along comes some Cassandra who thinks I should also be worried about something really outlandish. Let me introduce you to one such fellow.

Creepy-looking conservative columnist Cal Thomas is trying his damnedest to make you spend every waking minute in fear of terrorism. He wants you to live in terror. He's a...I can't think of the word for this kind of person, but it's something like "terrorizer."

So, terrorizer Cal Thomas wrote last week that the US is under imminent danger of a terror attack (are you terrorized yet?). Every paragraph of his pessimistic little sermon entered my brain like a massive injection of some drug whose main side effect is uncontrollable eye-rolling. The subsequent headache I suffered might have been caused by said eye-rolling, or just by the inane content of the column. Probably both. Among the key points of Thomas's doomsday prophesy:

• "Enemy combatants" (redundant, I know) will, upon being released from Guantanamo Bay by "liberal judges" (exaggeration, I know), kill us all
• 9/11 OMG CHANGED EVERYTHING (cliché, I know) and is still sufficient justification for the US government to hold your grandmother prisoner indefinitely without charge
• The US's "War on Terror" (stupid, I know) is happening solely because of "their" hatred for "us," but not ours for them
• Be afraid, be very afraid (movie trailer language, I know)

Maybe the most disturbing thing about this article is something Thomas didn't intend to scare us with: At the end of the column, he says

The next attack... will come in a shopping mall, or a school, or on Wall Street, or possibly all three. It will occur simultaneously in many places and probably kill more than the nearly 3,000 who died in 2001.

You can start fretting about your lunch plans at Panda Express if you want, but I'm more concerned about something else: Just how does Cal Thomas know so much about how the next terror attack on the US will happen? By failing to cite his source, isn't he obstructing justice and protecting those who would carry out this most heinous food court/lunchroom/stock exchange onslaught? When will Cal Thomas publicly admit his links to terrorizers?

It used to be that only Cal Thomas's appearance frightened me. In most photos, he looks like an embalmed cadaver, or at least an elderly man wearing make-up. But the truth is far more sinister.

This summer...Cal Thomas IS....Terrorizer.

Rated PG-13 for jingoist rhetoric, blatant fear-mongering and brief nudity.

Scary as he sounds, we can't let grumpy, old biddies like Cal Thomas have any impact on our daily lives. Try as he and his ilk may to convince you to cancel your shopping trip, home-school your kids and stay the hell off Wall Street, it's incumbent upon us all to ignore those mouthy Chicken Littles. For on the day that the fear of terrorism affects your actions and habits, the terrorizers have already won.

Akistabara

Today, disgruntled 25-year-old Kato Tomohiro went to Akihabara and started stabbing people at random.

There is a stereotype that Japanese people are interminably polite, but when they lose their minds, they often do so in a decidedly inconsiderate manner. Consider the common occurrence of people jumping in front of the JR Chuo Line, thereby delaying thousands of commuters. Or the woman who threw herself off the roof of Parco in Ikebukuro last fall ("last fall," indeed), striking a pedestrian in the process and putting him in a fatal coma. Or the Saitama woman who, in 2006, decided a the last second not to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, but rather to push a nearby stranger onto the tracks in her place. I can't find an English-language news link to that last example, so you're just going to have to take my word that it happened.

I don't know what it is about life in Japan that causes these unexpected explosions of violence, but the fact that today's attack happened in Akihabara -- not to mention past incidents of otaku gone bad -- suggests a link between the otaku lifestyle and dangerous mental instability. If you know anyone who could be described as otaku, do the world a service: Grab this person by the collar, slap them across the face and tell them, "Snap out of it!" Then congratulate yourself for saving the lives of countless innocents.

Don't Be So Idiomatic

In 2005 and 2006 I put quite a bit of energy into slamming former White House press secretary Scottie-Scott McClellan. I saw him as a mushy marshmallow of a man whose career hinged on his ability to repeat whatever lies he was fed. And in regard to McClellan's capacity as the president's mouthpiece, I think that was an accurate assessment, "marshmallow" and all. Now, more than two years after his resignation from that post, McClellan has once again exploded onto the political scene with What Happened, his "oh no you di-int" account of the Bush Administration's misbehavior.

I'm not sure how interesting a book whose thesis is "Get this, the Iraq War is built on lies!" could possibly be, but I'm ready to read this book and let Scott McClellan redeem himself in full for all the times I cussed at his image on TV and drew goofy facial hair on his image in the newspaper.

Not everyone is as supportive, however, of McClellan's attempt to turn over a new leaf. Former White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy had this colorful comment about McClellan:

"Here's a guy who rode the president's coattails to the world stage and now is [urinating] on his political grave, all the way to the bank."

Now ignore, for a moment, the fact that the press secretary's job is to stand on the "world stage" in lieu of the president. Ignore the fact that riding the president's coattails is an inevitable side-effect of lying on his behalf. And ignore the fact that "deputy press secretary" sounds like a made-up title you'd bestow on a little girl on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Ignore all that and take a good look at Duffy's maelstrom of idioms. You've got coattails, a stage, a grave and a bank, all in the same sentence! How exactly does one [urinate] to the bank, anyway? If you're [micturating] on a grave (even if it's a political grave), while simultaneously going to the bank, doesn't that make it pretty tough to hit your target?

Maybe I've misunderstood. Maybe McClellan is laughing so hard all the way to the bank, that he's started [whizzing] involuntarily. That happens sometimes, even to grown men.

I hope Trent Duffy writes a book, too. And I hope the whole book reads like that quote.

Boat Graveyard

In Japan there is a well-known phenomenon called gomiyashiki ("trash mansion"), wherein people (usually elderly people who live alone) are found occupying horribly filthy homes, often piled high with wall-to-wall garbage. This story, however, puts a new twist on that issue:

At the mouth of the Nomikawa River, near Haneda Airport in Tokyo's Ota Ward, city officials are working to clean up a site that was occupied for eight years by an elderly "drifter" (if you'll pardon the pun).

The occupant of the site, described as a man in his 60s, had amassed a fleet of 45 abandoned boats, mooring them all together in the waters north of the airport in what can only be described as a "boat graveyard." When confronted by reporters, the man claimed he was responsible for the boats' repair. He appeared to take offense when the press asked him about his suijou seikatsu ("marine lifestyle").

In addition to the boats, the man had accumulated a large quantity of trash and abandoned materials and used it to fashion a multi-level "home" on the waterside. The man used strategically positioned stepladders to get from boat to boat and from one level of his shelter to another. 30 to 40 dogs, many of whom seem to follow the man wherever he goes, were also discovered living in the shelter.

The video below is in Japanese with no English subtitles, but it gives you a sense of the Herculean task faced by the clean-up crew. They expect to finish the job this Friday, March 21.

Continued Intrigue in the JT Gyoza Scandal

The scrutiny I wanted Japan Tobacco to undergo following their poisonous gyoza screw-up has all but materialized.

News outlets reported Saturday that, just prior to the public announcement that tainted gyoza had been sold, JT's stock dropped dramatically due to a sudden leap in sell volume. This suspicious 8% drop in stock price has, in turn, sparked suspicions of insider trading among shareholders who knew bad news was about to be made public.

I really wish I could look at this revelation as good news, but there's a major problem: The Japanese government, whose job it is to investigate this kind of unsavory business, happens to own 50% of Japan Tobacco. Would it be silly of me to expect someone to do a criminal investigation of himself...and do it well?

Yes, I guess so.

So rather than the satisfaction I might have gotten from knowing that JT's corruption would be appropriately punished, I am left with an increased feeling of agitation when I hear nationalist knuckleheads badmouthing China for producing some gyoza that made a handful of people sick. If those people really feel their safety has been compromised, I cordially invite them to cut back on the gyoza and shut the hell up. Meanwhile, here we are standing around like fools waiting for our leaders to investigate themselves for criminal negligence and unethical business practices.

Man, are we stupid.

Clean Movies, Dirty Life

Misguided Utah man Daniel Dean Thompson thought it would be a good idea to edit nudity and harsh language out of Hollywood films and then rent them out for profit. Apparently, he also thought it would be a good idea to have sex with a fourteen-year-old.

Thompson's film censorship/rental enterprise (operating under various names including Clean Flicks and Flix Club) was targeted by Hollywood studios who were, not surprisingly, irate with the man's practice of making money off his own "clean" versions of their films and put an end to his business at the end of 2007. That, however, didn't stop Thompson from exploding onto news pages once again. It turns out his own sexual antics are more obscene than the stuff he claimed to be protecting kids from with his rental business. He ended up in jail for sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity with a minor.

The linked news article calls this a "shocking discovery," but I beg to differ. The people who put themselves in charge of advocating for your kids are also the first ones to be found fornicating with your kids. The next time you hear someone talk about fighting indecency, obscenity or profanity, you know that's someone you don't want little Johnny and Susie hanging out with.

Japan Tobacco Wants Us All Dead

Many thanks to all those who offered guidance on my iPod replacement adventure. I will consider every option (even those goofy music player shoes from outer space).

My daily musical goings-on have been superseded by the far more pressing issue of DEATH GYOZA! This week saw dozens of "claimers" (corrupted English for people of a litigious nature) who stood up and said, "me too" after some imported Chinese gyoza dumplings were reported to have been the cause of unconsciousness in some Japanese kids. Apparently, these pesticide-flavored gyoza are very popular in elementary school lunchrooms...and kids, as we all know, come runnin' for the taste of pesticide.

The Japanese press has gone out of their way to let you know that these gyoza came from China. Incredibly, the incident seems to have reinstated China as the #1 perceived threat to Japanese people, a position long occupied by North Korea. What gets some (although not enough) attention is the fact that the domestic distributor of this tainted food is none other than Japan Tobacco, whose slogan is "JT: The Delight Factory." From now on, however, JT's slogan in my mind will be "JT: The Narcotic Gyoza Factory."

Japan Tobacco has bothered me for a long time now. Ignoring the fact that they're an inherently evil cigarette giant, they grab my annoyed attention every day with their inane TV ads. They have ads with U2 playing in the background (somebody call Bono) bragging about how JT is contributing to scientific progress. They put ads on the train admonishing people who don't practice "good manners" when they smoke. Oh, and by the way, their top seller is a happy little product called "Delight." Buncha clowns.

The good news is that, with all the media coverage and repeated airings of the list of products consumers who don't like the tangy zip of pesticide should avoid, JT Foods will have to be more careful about their importing practices, lest people see that the Delight Factory is also the Unconsciousness, Nausea and Vomiting Factory.

Suddenly I'm hungry for gyoza.

Japan's Safety Level Same As Before

Today marks the first day of Japan's newly tightened airport security procedures (fingerprinting, photographing and interrogation) for all foreigners entering the country -- even those with legitimate visas. Japan is the only other country besides the US to introduce such measures since 9/11.

Visa holders like myself have cause to be annoyed. With these new "safety" measures, all foreigners are required to go through the same tedious re-entry process and invasions of privacy associated therewith, regardless of whether they live in Japan or are just visiting. This, in turn, makes foreign residents in Japan angry, which makes the country less safe.

Nice going.

Bear in mind that Japan hasn't yet suffered a terror attack at the hands of foreigners. If that happens now, it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that anti-terrorism legislation doesn't have a positive impact on actual safety. The new rules are also being prematurely touted as having a crime reduction effect. Guess we'll have to wait and see whether or not another English teacher gets put down for a sandbath by some crazy, disappearing Japanese guy. Come to think of it, wouldn't crime in this country decline if Japanese police stopped sending the message, "Don't worry, we'll never catch you?"

[the story]

Best Idea I Didn't Ever Have

In case you haven't heard, there is now a website called FoxNewsPorn.com. This website is devoted to the task of collecting and presenting all the titillating material that Fox News (America's favorite non-news organization) injects into their daily broadcasting. How much titillating material does Fox inject into their daily broadcasting? Well, enough to make a separate website out of it, apparently.

Keep in mind, FoxNewsPorn.com doesn't show anything that Fox News doesn't show, and Fox News is a basic cable station (which means there isn't really any porn, per se). But after viewing some of the site's videos, one wonders why Fox hasn't changed its name to "News Gone Wild."