I am sure many of you have climbed, or attempted at least to climb Mount. Fuji, Fuji-san, Fujiyama or whatever you feel like calling it. But I doubt any of you had tried to climb the highest peak in Japan with an iron, an ironing board and a 25 kg power generator. Well, of course unless Hitoshi Matsuzawa is a faithful reader of Japundit, that is.

The 38-year-old office worker is a veteran of extreme ironing , in which people take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing, as defines it Wikipedia.

“There was a therapeutic effect and sense of fulfillment of being on Japan’s highest peak,” he said.

Well, by looking at the picture, I can say that it’s really worth it!

(via Mainichi)

149… is the number of child-abuse cases reported or detected by the Japanese police in the first half of 2007, a surge of 24.2% compared to 2006 and a record hight since police started collecting such data in 2000. Among these cases, 27 were sexual abuse and 10 were a lack of care in the upbringing of the kids . What is even more worrisome is the fact that 32 of the victims were aged 1 year or under. It is also to note that 93 of the offenders were biological parents.

As for child pornography, which was also included in the bi-annual report, the Mainichi cites:

“Police said that 718 child prostitution cases were reported during the period. The number of child victims in these cases totaled 651. Two of the children were elementary school students, 210 were junior high school students and 265 were high school students.”

“In 129 of the cases, children were photographed naked. In 68 of these cases, the children were lured though messages on Internet bulletin boards or similar means.”

This is what you get when you grow lenient with the production and the circulation of U-15 idols DVDs and photobooks!

(via Mainichi and Japan today)

Nintendo are advancing in their plans of world domination. Their ultimate weapon: Games that appeal to everyone, including my older sister, my mother, and even my grandma!  The latest hot casual-game in Japan seems to be a “face trainer”. After the brain trainers, it’s time to work out those face muscles of yours “to have nicer smiles and livelier expressions”. The game comes bundled with a digital camera that sticks out of the GBA slot of the DS, and that allows the user to see his, most likely her, own face in the touch-screen of the handheld.

You can check out these videos in the official website to see the software in action.

It seems also that like the brain training softwares designed by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, this one is devised by a well-known beauty expert Fumiko Inudo. This is a clever move by Nintendo to appeal to women in their twenties and thirties, but I bet that it won’t get as much hype as the Brain trainers. Let’s face it, this “facening” software  would make you freaking weird sitting alone in your room doing wacky grimaces in front of a handheld!

A good idea to encourage people to go and vote in the upcoming Upper House elections ! A campaign run by the the National Police Department featuring a wordplay on a famous quotation of Amuro Ray, a Mobile suit Gundam character, “Amuro, ikimaasu” (Amuro will go!), replaced by “Elections, ikimaasu”!

Are you a lonely man looking for a beautiful Japanese woman for marriage, dating or any other purpose that I haven’t bothered thinking of? well, your task might become a lot easier if you know where to start your search, that is the prefecture with the highest concentration of Bijin, beautiful women. A online survey conducted by Livedoor in which more than 4000 Japanese net user from different parts of Japan answered the question” what is the prefecture you think is most renowned for feminine beauty?” by picking one of the 47 prefectures. The results have led to the following top ten:

10. Hyogo pref.
09. Aomori pref.
08. Niigata pref.
07. Kanagawa pref.
06. Fukuoka pref.
05. Okinawa pref.
04. Kyoto (metropolitan are)
03. Hokkaido pref.
02. Tokyo (metropolitan are)

any guesses for number one?

01. Akita pref.

As for the 5 last prefectures in the ranking:

43. Tokushima pref.
44. Yamanishi pref.
45. Tottori pref.
46. Kagawa pref.
47. Gunma pref.

Agree? Disagree?

Can anyone guess why Abe is sweating this badly?

Could it be the next Upper house elections?

Click to enlarge

Taro Aso seems to be really serious about his “subculture democracy”, as he set up an International Manga Award destined to notable foreign manga cartoonists.

“I want to make the award something like the Nobel Prize for manga creators. Not as much money will be given as for the Nobel Prize, but we’d like to invite the winners to Japan.”

The article on The Japan Times follows up..

No prize money will be given, but winners will be invited to Tokyo for about 10 days, with expenses paid by the ministry. Meetings with Japanese manga artists and publishers will also be arranged for them, the officials said.

Well, while you are at it, why not take it a little bit more seriously and give real prizes to the aspiring Manga artists?

Click to enlarge

Since the day Nintendo showcased the features of the DS, I was expecting such a thing to happen in Japanese schools. The DS will be used in junior high schools in Yawata, Kyoto, during English courses to help students improve their lexicon. I’d say it is rather an intelligent move to introduce new ways of learning , boosting hence students motivation and disposition to learn a foreign language.

When Nintendo DS consoles were handed to third-year junior high school students as part of an experiment using English vocabulary training software, the students’ English vocabulary increased by an average of about 40 percent over five months.

Indeed the Nintendo DS can be an excellent learning tool,but then schools should make sure that kids aren’t hiding a Pokemon cartridge in their pockets, as this wouldn’t be really what the board of education wants!

Japanese just love Mayonnaise. So do I. But then, I would never think of slurping it with a spoon, even less licking it in an ice-cream fashion.

And yet, this is what people come to this place for!

The famous, or should I say infamous, Dr.Yahiro Netsu who advocates surrogate births is under the spotlight again, after having publicly called for volunteer surrogate mothers on Friday, 13th April. Surrogate births are banned by The Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, to which Netsu belongs. “I want to call for people who want to lend assistance to couples like this, and create a system to help couples who want to have children,” he said in a news conference in Tokyo on Thursday. This move spurred from his frustration of the fact that Japanese couples -who have no relatives willing to lend their wombs- can’t help but go look overseas. His “we want your womb campaign” has already started to bear fruits, as 8 women volunteered for surrogacy today, 14th April.

However, Netsu is facing harsh criticism from the detractors of surrogate births, who defend their claims stating that this process threatens the life of surrogate mothers, and that it could possibly lead to women’s bodies viewed as tools. So far, all surrogate births performed in Japan, involved the mother or the sister of one of the parents.
it seems like using a stranger’s womb for your fetus doesn’t sound appealing to some!

This was a viral cmmercial to promote the movie Tsubakiyama kachô no nanoka-kan (椿山課長の七日間) released in 2006… A rather old joke, but it is always fun to see it in a video version (boob ahead!)

As it has been mentioned in the comment section of the previous entry about Kouichi Toyama, the Tokyo metropolitan election management committee ordered several video hosting websites such as AmebaVision and Youtube to remove the campaign movies, for being “unfair”, according to the Public Office Election Law that limits distribution of documents for candidates and bans campaigning on the Net.

(source: The Japan Times)

Blog posts in Japanese have topped the blogosphere , according to Technocrati’s State of the Blogosphere report of April 2007.
Currently, 37% of blog posts are in Japanese, up 4% from the last report. English posts came second with 36%.
Based on my observations, Japanese blogs are often personal diaries, moblogs -content posted from a mobile or portable device- and photoblogs. Even though thematic blogs  have became more and more common as of late, the Japanese blogosphere is still lagging behind its english counterpart when it comes to insightful blogs delving into specific themes.

Hakuo Yanagisawa, Japan’s Health, Labor and Welfare Minister , who -as a sidenote- rose  to prominence after his “baby-making machines” theory , is still reluctant to the ‘baby hatch’ scheme, a project to implement hatches in hospitals where parents can drop off unwanted infants anonymously.

Personally, I have doubts about the scheme, considering parents’ responsibility and its impact on society.While the facility retrofit certainly does not infringe the law, I will carefully watch the development of the situation from now on

This doesn’t quite make sense to me. These hatches seem to fit just well in the ‘babies mass production’ theory coined by Mr.Yanagasiwa.
(source: Japan Today)

Two guys decided to go out and meet Kouichi Toyama himself. They called him and headed towards the place he hangs out every evening.

Unexpectedly, he is a cool guy!