A junior high school in Yamanashi prefecture has come in for sharp criticism after its graduating class’s yearbook ranked students in a number of unusual ways.
The light-hearted rankings are made up every year by the final year students, but this year’s pushed the boundaries of good taste, according to a report in the Mainichi.
Among the […]

Lehman Brothers has filed a $350-million damage suit against the Japanese Marubeni trading company for fraud. Lehman claims that Marubeni employees helped secure a Japanese company for a loan.
Marubeni is claming that the employees acted on their own, that they are also victims, and so they should not be held liable for damages.
In early […]

The Washington Post recently had an excellent recap on the ongoing investigation into the death of Takashi Saito, a 17-year-old wrestler who was literally tortured to death by his stablemaster and mates.
His death, which police initially ruled to be the result of “heart disease,” led to the arrest last month of his former sumo […]

With a looming global financial crisis it’s a very hands-on time for governors of national banks the world over. But in Japan, the top job is vacant while the government and opposition use the appointment as a political football.
That’s the view expressed in a Mainichi editorial published yesterday under the no-nonsense headline “Leaving top […]

A Japan Talk podcast listener named Billy wrote in to let us know about a post he did in May of last year about an experience he has apprehending a chikan at a Tokyo train station. I found the story pretty amazing and Billy kindly gave us permission to reprint it here.
You can check […]

Remember all the controversy some time back about Chinese actors being cast in roles depicting Japanese characters?
Well how about actor Robert Downey Jr. playing a white man who plays a blackman in a movie. . . I think. . .

And that is Jack Black behind him.

The mayor of Meiwa in Gunma Prefecture and seven other members of the town’s municipal assembly have filed a lawsuit against a female Meiwa Municipal Assembly member for defamation, because she is pressing indecent assault charges against another assembly member. The group says that the 52-year-old women implied that they also were involved in the […]

Danwei has an interesting about Björk’s Sunday night gig in Shanghai, apparently only her second ever gig in China, and by the looks of things, very possibly her last.
Adam Schokora writes that Björk “closed the show with a 2nd encore performance of “Declare Independence” – a rousing power-to-the people anthem containing such lyrics as: “Declare […]

Sea Shepherd activists have taken to shooting rotten butter at Japanese whaling factory ships in order to harass them.
“The crew deployed over two dozen bottles of rotten butter, sending a stench throughout the whale-killing ship that will remain for days,” the group said.
They said they also threw packets of an undisclosed “slippery chemical” on to […]

A film company is feeling the heat from Japanese extremists over a documentary they are planning to release about Yasukuni Shrine.
“The threats began about two months ago, when we started press screenings of the movie in Japan,” [Chinese-born director Li Ying] told The Hollywood Reporter in Berlin, where “Yasukuni” screened at the Berlin International Film […]

Here is another one of those stories that pop up every now and again that seem to indicate some Japanese men have a definite problem interacting with members of the opposite sex.
In this episode, Daisuke Nunomura, a 28-year old male employee of Skymark Airlines has been arrested for abusing a female coworker whom he locked […]

Chat Noir, operator of the Caffe Veloce coffee shop in Japan, has sued publisher Kodansha for 11 million yen and an apology to compensate for losses it says it suffered due to a bad review of their coffee.
The October 2007 issue of “The Weekend for Adults” monthly magazine by Kodansha ranked 11 popular cafe […]

Almost 76 percent of the respondents to a telephone survey conducted in Japan by Kyodo News last weekend said they will no longer use food items that come from China.
According to Kyodo, the percentage of people in Japan who use Chinese food items dropped from around 58% last year to only 21.6% after the […]

When the groups Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders published an online report titled Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship about how China is censoring online content, the Chinese government did the only thing it knows how to do. . . It censored the report
Just hours after the report was issued, Yang […]

The British Olympic Association (BOA) reportedly is forcing the nation’s athletes to sign contracts that effectively ban them from speaking out against human rights abuses in China.
The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.
The […]

A recent Japan Times article about warnings eminating from an annual gathering of business leaders in Kyoto over the the political situation here and its affect on Japan’s “place on the world stage,” reveals that some “leaders” in Japan seem to prefer the relative harmony of a one-party dictatorship over a two-party system of checks […]

Andy Young who runs Siberian Light - The Russian Blog, writes in to point us to his post about a long forgotten battle fought between Japan and the Soviet Union in the opening days of World War II. Forgotten, but so significant that it literall altered the course of history.
In August 1939, just weeks before […]

Tokyo is about to lose one its most popular tourist sites as the Tsukiji Fish Market adopts new rules in April that urge visitors to “refrain from coming” voluntarily.
It seems that tourist promotion activities for Tsukiji have been so successful that the hordes tourists showing up each morning create a hygiene risk and are […]

With the government looking determined to push through a tax reform bill that JP reported on last week, it might come as something of a surprise to hear that it’s being reported tonight that they have agreed to drop the bill, or at least the clause concerning “road-designated tax revenues”, which has been facing stiff […]

If you thought you’d seen the last of the Kameda family, I’ve news for you. They’re back. I know. I’ve missed them too.
The demure, urbane and modest Koki Kameda, it has been announced, will return to the ring on March 22 for a non-title bout with Spanish flyweight Jose Lopez Bueno at Makuhari Messe […]