Cool ad for a film festival.

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This is one of those strange cases that came out of left field for me. I read about it and scratched my head in puzzlement. Ok here’s the story. A 37 year old Chinese woman working in a sex shop in Japan was kidnapped by a group of 4 to 5 men. The woman was apparently beaten and manhandled by the group.

She was released by the group only to be arrested for illegally living in Japan for the past five years. The Mainichi has additional details here.

An interesting compilation of some tricks from magicians in Japan. Some of the material is very very cool.

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It’s golden week in Japan. A time for people to take a week off work and relax. Most people I know use this holiday to travel. Narita is usually really really busy during this time and sure enough I found an article from Kyodo News that describes what traveling can be like during this crazy time.

A massive exodus of holidaymakers started at Narita International Airport near Tokyo on Saturday, with its operator estimating some 727,000 people will go through the airport during Japan’s Golden Week holiday season through May 6.

According to a major travel agency, China is attracting many tourists from Japan as it enjoys a robust economy prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, while Hong Kong and Macao are also popular destinations.

Hiroko Morita, 35, from Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture, said before departing for Greece with her family, “I’m planning cruising in the Aegean Sea and looking around monuments there.”

The Mainichi is reporting that a supervisor for an online bulletin board is facing criminal charges for allegedly not deleting a message that said a junior high school girl was “ugly”.

I don’t know about Europe, but in North America there’s been a giant push by government on both the federal and province/state level to curb smoking. In Japan there are quite a few signs and anti-smoking sites and things but nothing in my estimation that even compares.

But whatever anti-smoking campaigns there are, they don’t seem to be affecting Japan Tobacco Inc. who on Friday reported huge profits at the end of their fiscal year. How much you ask? Here is what the Associated Press are reporting:

Net profits rose by 4.6 percent to an all-time high of 210.7 billion yen (1.77 billion dollars) in the fiscal year to March on revenue of 4.77 trillion yen, up 2.8 percent, the company said in a statement.

Operating profit jumped by 8.2 percent to 331.9 billion yen, also a record.

Japan Tobacco Inc, which recently bought British rival Gallaher Group for 2.25 trillion yen, said that overseas sales remained the main driver of profit growth, with revenue outside Japan up 13.4 percent.

The article mentions that places where the company saw some of its highest growth were The group saw strong sales of Camel in Italy and France, Winston in Russia, Spain, Iran, Turkey, and Ukraine, and Russia. It’s good to know that with all the things people fight about and kill each other over, at least they can all agree that people seem to love smoking.

Hidekazu Ichinose, a famous Japanese actor, has broken his right leg while filming an NHK drama at a studio in Yokohama, the public broadcaster said. Click here for the painful details!

US first lady Laura Bush and Akie Abe, right, the wife of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pose for the cameras. (I didn’t realize Akie was that tall.) Photo by AP.

The Mainichi is reporting that traces of fossilized dinosaur skin have been found in Japan. This is the first time that such a find has been done in Japan. Exciting! Maybe Spielberg and company will see that a Jurassic Park Park 4 could be done about it? We’ll call it “Jurassic Japan: Jurassic Park 4…!” Eh, no, never mind.

(Ok, I’ll work on the title. But think of the carnage of one of those T-Rex’s in Shinjuku… Oh hell, I’m totally off topic aren’t I? ugh, sorry about that.)

Anyways the fossilized skin traces are quite small measuring between 3 to 4 millimeters in diameter. They were found in Katsuyama (勝山市) in Fukui prefecture, and date to about 120 million years ago.

“We’ve had to rely on overseas data for reproducing dinosaur skin, but now domestic data is available. There is a possibility that clearer fossils of dinosaur skin traces will be found in the same area,” said 57-year-old Azuma, who holds a doctorate in paleontology.

(Ok I got a new title.. What about “Jurassic Park 4: Tokyo Terror“. Ohh that’s not half bad… hm, nah that doesn’t work… Ok I give up… Anyways, read the damn article. Its quite interesting!)

Well according to the Prime Minister of Japan, yes he can be. The Associated Press is reporting that Abe feels that Kim Jon Il can be reasoned with. That he is a rational human being.

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Japan:

Pardon me for stepping out of line here but for you, the Prime Minister of Japan to play politics and simply state that :

“Kim Jong Il is a “rational” man, but his country is headed in the wrong direction”

is both a ridiculous statement and also really understating what most of the world already knows. I was not aware that rational leaders let their countrymen starve to death by the thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. That doesn’t seem rational to me. His country is going in the wrong direction? Really? You think?

Ok ok. Maybe Kim-san is capable of rational thought as you say. But I suppose a cat is also capable, physically anyways, to play music on a piano. Can’t say I’ve seen that happen too many times though.

Granted I am not a world leader, well not yet anyways, but from what I’ve seen I’m not sure that a policy of dialog and pressure “vis-avis” the North will be effective. Why would it be? Honestly, what makes you think it would be? It hasn’t been in the past at all. So whats changed that would make you, the Prime Minister of Japan think that?

You mean the fact that N.K. has refused to act on its already agreed upon Nuclear disarmament plan until it gets $25 million in cash back from the frozen accounts? Is that a successful dialog? Honestly Mister Prime Minister that just seems to me like we’re playing the same old cat and mouse game the government has been playing for decades with those communist twits.

Mister Prime Minister it’s not that I dislike you. Honestly. I think you have a lot of potential. But for a man who came into power with a hardline stance against North Korea promising action on the abduction issue, so far I’ve seen a lot of smoke but not a hell of a lot of fire.

But more then that, above the politics for a moment, Mister Prime Minister, perhaps you and your LDP members could do us a favor and hire a PR firm. I ask this one favor from you because the more comments you and the Liberals make, the more you sound like complete asses. We don’t need to go into examples now do we? And saying that the North Korean government is going in the wrong direction isn’t just stating the obvious… It makes you look like a lame duck who read that in a newspaper somewhere. But of course that is just my humble opinion.

PS: I hope you’ll respect my letter but not take my visa away… Cause honestly that would really suck.

Those damn North Koreans. Say what you will about them. At least they are a conversation starter. Today American President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush welcome Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie (both of whom are in the middle of the image) for a private dinner at the White House in Washington. What did they eat you ask? If you really wanna know you can click here to find out.

This is the first time Abe has been to the White House. The meeting was scheduled so that the two could have continued talks on North Korea and what American policy makers see as Tokyo’s expanding global role. Unfortunately with Japan stuck in the mire of its own stupidity with respect to the advancement of building a military instead of a self-defense force, that might take a while.

Nintendo helps the Nikkei stock index rise… All Hail Mario! (Psh, leave it to some sewer surfing Italian dude with a big snoze to lead a rally in the Japanse Stock Exchange). Click here for details.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Japanese police have obtained an arrest warrant for an alleged female North Korean spy suspected of abducting two Japanese children and bringing them to North Korea.

Police obtained the arrest warrant for Yoko Kinoshita, 59, for allegedly kidnapping a 6-year-old girl and her 3-year-old brother in 1973 and taking them to North Korea, Kyodo News agency reported. Police refused to immediately confirm the report.

The National Police Agency was to place a request to the Interpol to place Kinoshita on an international wanted list. She would be the ninth North Korean abduction-related suspect to be listed on international wanted lists through Interpol.

This is just another step in a series of things that police and government officials have done to take on North Korea and their abduction. Two days ago, there was a raid on pro-North Korean association in Tokyo that police say is related to this issue. Japanese Prime Minister Abe has made the abduction issue a key priority in his administration.

North Korea admitted in 2002 that it kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s. Pyongyang sent five of them home later that year, but insisted the rest were dead. Japan has demanded proof of the deaths, and says more of its citizens may have been taken.

NJ dot com (New Jersey dot com) has published an article about how ‘enslaved women’ of World War 2 had setup ‘Comfort Stations’ specifically for American GI’s.

Eric Talmadge of The Associated Press wrote this article which if found to be factually accurate could have severe consequences in the world of American politics which respect to how they deal with the issue. Not to mention the fact that American GI’s would be guilty of rape and soliciting prostitution. Of course some troops no matter what country will get drunk while on tour and do stupid things. Right, human nature I guess. But the issue here in this article is that the author is suggesting that Americans took advantage of ‘Comfort Women’, defined as being a selection of woman forced into prostitution.

Here is a portion of Mr. Talmadge’s report.

An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.

Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.

Rather bizzare news today being reported that Suzuki Tamotsu, the 54 year old police station chief in Nikaho, Akita prefecture was found dead in an apparent suicide.

Here is a portion of what the Mainichi Daily news had to say about it:

At about 8:10 a.m. on Tuesday, officers at Nikaho Police Station visited the official residence for prefectural police personnel after director Tamotsu Suzuki, 54, failed to come to work and found him hanged in his room, investigators said.

A suicide note to his family that was found in his room did not say why he took his own life.

Prefectural police officials said they do not think he had any trouble involving his work or health problems.

Wow. And you thought broadband was fast? Pshh, that’s so old-school. Associated Press is reporting that a group of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has broken Internet speed records. In fact they’ve done it twice in two days.

So what does that mean? Well the researchers (aka; Uber-Geeks) have built what they call a “high-speed Internet2 network” that has the capability to send data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols. And that was only their first test. The second test using “modified protocols” gave the team the capability of sending data over the same 32,000-kilometre path at 9.08 Gbps. Holy smoking network batman!

That likely represents the current network’s final record because rules require a 10 per cent improvement for recognition, a percentage that would bring the next record right at the Internet2’s current theoretical limit of 10 Gbps.

However, the Internet2 consortium is planning to build a new network with a capacity of 100 Gbps. With the 10-fold increase, a high-quality version of the movie “The Matrix” could be sent in a few seconds rather than half a minute over the current Internet2 and two days over a typical home broadband line.

Researchers used the newer Internet addressing system, called IPv6, to break the records in December. Data started in Tokyo and went to Chicago, Amsterdam and Seattle before returning to Tokyo. The previous high of 6.96 Gbps was set in November 2005.

Don’t let size fool you. This is the meeting of two badass dudes. On the left is American actor Mark Wahlberg and on the right, we have Mongolian sumo grand champion Asashoryu Akinori.

In this photograph by Koji Sasahara, we see the two shake hands in Tokyo. Wahlberg is in Tokyo to promote director Antoine Fuqua’s latest film about a former Marine sniper called ‘Shooter.’ I presume Asashoryu is there to lend legitimate support for the film. But naturally the meeting of the two begs the question: Who is the bigger badass?

After a little bit of searching I found this website that had the following to say about Mark Wahlberg:

His parents divorced when he was 11; his mother has since blamed her own emotional neglect for her youngest son’s descent into juvenile delinquency during the next several years. At 14, Wahlberg dropped out of school and began making his living on the streets—hustling, stealing, and selling drugs. Two years later, he hit rock bottom when he was jailed for his role in the savage beating of a Vietnamese man. Although the crime was believed by many to be racially motivated, Wahlberg has continually denied that race played a part in the attack.

I have no idea if that is true or not. I never got the impression that Marky Mark was a raciest. For Asashoryu’s part, he was considered relatively lightweight for a sumo at 129 kg when he first came on to the scene. Of course that was in 2001. He began bulking up to 131 kg in 2002, 140 kg by 2004, and is now about 148 kg (326 pounds), right on average.

So who is the bigger badass? You decide.

China has officially surpassed the United States to become Japan’s biggest trading partner.
Read about it here.

With Boys Day (Tango no Sekku) just around the corner, we thought we’d celebrate a bit early with something totally off the wall…