I used to be pretty amazed to see golfers in Japan imbibing beer, sake, shochu, and whiskey early in the morning before venturing out onto the golf course, but at least the tipplers were getting some exercise in the open air.

But now the latest thing in Tokyo seems to be golf bars, which let you enjoy bashing golf balls without all of the troublesome stuff like walking and going outside.

My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.
- Lee Trevino

This is old, old footage taken before I had a video camera. I shot these scenes with a digital photo camera so they’re very low-res. So watch it in HQ.

Anyway, these are some scenes from the first day of the Aoba Festival in Sendai which is several hundred miles north of Tokyo in the Tohoku region.

The festival celebrates the founder of the city - Date Masamune who was a warlord from the 16th-17th Century.

Japan’s defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today. Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways “taboo,” and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in the 1970s and asking what that Vietnam War thing was all about…no one seemed to want to tell me.)

One interesting mechanism the Japanese have evolved to allow them to deal with the subject of war has been an unlikely one: animation. While the traditional image of a “soldier” used to be tied to black and white photographs from the historical Pacific War, this has changed somewhat after three decades of popular culture in which the idea of “war” was more likely to be defined in sci-fi terms, such as the One Year War of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, in which spacenoids living in orbital colonies fight for independence from Earth.

While it’s not generally possible for Japanese to wax romantic about the real war, which they lost, you can probably find fans within a certain age range who could tell you about the First Battle of Jaburo between Char Aznable-lead Zeon forces and the Federation in great detail, or a Space Battleship Yamato fan who can get misty-eyed about the Battle of Saturn, when dozens of Andromeda-class battleships were destroyed by the Comet Empire.

If you asked Japanese who they considered the most respected “military heroes” of the country were, you might find some who would answer Amuro Rei or Bright Noah or Captain Okita/Captain Avatar, the legendary characters from these war-oriented anime series. It’s not unlike the original Star Trek, which was able to tell stories about race relations and other difficult topics that couldn’t be discussed in the 1960s unless they were disguised as science fiction tales far off into the future.

Sega Toys has come out with a new plastic plant robot thingy that apparently is designed for people who have no one to talk to.

The Pekoppa sits there like a regular plastic plant until you talk to it, which will cause the stem to bend, creating the impression that the plant is nodding in agreement with what you are saying to it. The effect is achieved by an IC chip in the pot that identifies rhythms of human speech. Electrical current causes the stem to bend and stretch.

Thanks to Len Cullum

A black watermelon was auctioned for a record 650,000 yen recently, the highest price paid for watermelon ever in Japan.

The 8-kilogram premium “Densuke” watermelon, grown only on the northern island of Hokkaido, was purchased by a marine products dealer who said he wanted to support local agriculture, according to Kyodo News agency.

How can a watermelon cost so much?

Its unusual black skin, [Kazuyoshi Ohira, a spokesman for the Tohma Agricultural Cooperative in Hokkaido] said. Inside, the watermelon is crisp and hard. And, he says, it has unparalleled taste.

“It’s a watermelon, but it’s not the same,” he said. “It has a different level of sweetness.”

The girl on the left of the above image is supposed to be Jesus Christ, who is is the object of the um. . . affections of the boy on the right.

A scanlation is can be downloaded here and here.

Via Topless Robot.

For some reason, there’s a lot of interesting culture to be found at the porcelain altar, between the seatless Japanese-style toilets that present foreign visitors with their first major culture shock in Japan to those wonderful “Washlet” toilet seats that clean and dry your rear end while you do your business.

Once I went to a restaurant with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and had an interesting experience. She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, but came out a minute later saying she was too scared to go because there was a “strange sound” in the bathroom. She insisted I come in with her, so I ducked inside to see what this scary sound could be.

It turns out it was a device called Oto-hime (a play on the name of a goddess from Japanese mythology, Otohime、written with different characters that mean “Sound Princess”), which makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go. Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water. Since males don’t usually go into public ladies’ rooms, the existence of these strange sound-emitting devices is quite mysterious to men in Japan.

Here’s a video of how they work. Just wave your hand over the button and the sound of water will come out of the device, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with without nervousness of people listening to the sounds you make.

As you can deduce from reading JAPUNDIT and just about any other Japan blog, Japanese TV commercials are pretty popular the world over. . . Except in Japan, where people tend to tune them out.

So what do Japanese advertisers decide to do? Produce a TV commercial about TV commercials, of course.

Not enough Hello Kitty in your life yet?

Well, get ready for more as the mouthless wonder has been named a government envoy.

Japan’s tourism ministry on Monday named Hello Kitty as its choice to represent the country in China and Hong Kong, two places where she is wildly popular among kids and young women.

Officials hope tapping into that fan base will lead to a bigger flow of tourists into Japan and push the country closer to the goal of attracting 10 million overseas visitors every year under the “Visit Japan” campaign.

Last year the number of foreign tourists traveling to Japan hit a record high of 8.35 million, up 60 percent since the government began the marketing effort in 2003.

Arrivals from China and Hong Kong, who accounted for 16.5 percent of visitors to Japan last year, are poised this year to become the second-largest group of tourists after South Koreans.

At a press conference, Sanrio Co. President Shintaro Tsuji, whose company created the toy cat, called Hello Kitty’s new appointment “an honor” and pledged the feline would “work hard to attract many visitors.”

Big thanks to RTN.

The last of the old takenoko-zoku group still rocks away

Tokyo rockabilly dancers of Harajuku Park

Tokyo’s Harajuku Park has become internationally famous over recent years mainly for its collection of high school students decked out in wild Goth outfits and makeup. Just about every Sunday they can be found sitting around in groups with their similarly attired peers coolly ignoring the camera flashes exploding all about them.

One of the current Harajuku Park denizens

Jake Adelstein, an American reporter who has spend 15 years as a reporter for a Japanese language newspaper, posts a very interesting report about the problems the FBI has trying to get information about yakuza from the Japanese police department.

There’s talk in Japan of criminalizing simple possession, but some political parties (and publishers, who are raking in millions) oppose the idea. U.S. law enforcement officers want to stop the flow of yakuza-produced child porn into the United States and would support such a law. But they can’t even keep the yakuza themselves out of the country. Why? Because the national police refuse to share intelligence. Last year, a former FBI agent told me that, in a decade of conferences, the NPA had turned over the names and birthdates of about 50 yakuza members. “Fifty out of 80,000,” he said.

This lack of cooperation was partly responsible for an astonishing deal made with the yakuza, and for the story that changed my life. On May 18, 2001, the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto — a notorious Japanese gang boss, the one that some federal agents call the “John Gotti of Japan” — to be flown to the United States for a liver transplant.

Goto is alive today because of that operation — a source of resentment among Japanese law enforcement officials because the FBI organized it without consulting them. From the U.S. point of view, it was a necessary evil. The FBI had long suspected the yakuza of laundering money in the United States, and Japanese and U.S. law enforcement officials confirm that Goto offered to tip them off to Yamaguchi-gumi front companies and mobsters in exchange for the transplant. James Moynihan, then the FBI representative in Tokyo who brokered the deal, still defends the operation. “You can’t monitor the activities of the yakuza in the United States if you don’t know who they are,” he said in 2007. “Goto only gave us a fraction of what he promised, but it was better than nothing.”

Thanks to Robert Leonard and Danny Bloom.

“It is prohibited to conduct any group demonstration, to carry flags, placards or wear group participation arm bands. It is also prohibited to assemble, hold group meetings, sitdowns, force interview, or use violence on visitors. In addition, the authorization of the management is necessary for the distribution of leaflets or notes, indoor and outdoor photography, peddling, street and stall vending, and all public activities.

Shin-Marunouchi Bldg”

Presumably, shopping is allowed.

This video is up for votes on Current.TV here.

A chance encounter with a vision from Japan’s past

A vision from the past - A Komuso Zen Priest

While I was in Nagoya last month, I was walking to my temporary home for the night (i.e. an internet cafe) when I encountered a vision out of Japan’s past - a Buddhist priest playing a Japanese flute known as a Shakuhachi.

The Shakuhachi player was dressed as a Komuso, a type of Zen Buddhist priest who once wandered throughout Old Japan playing their flutes for alms and meditation. Like some kind of ghost, the komuso just stood there playing his flute while people walked around the him practically ignoring him as he ignored them. It seemed a thing unreal.

One of my favorite words of Japanese is actually wasei eigo or “made-in-Japan English.” It’s the phrase “going my way,” and it refers to people who live life in their one way without being overly concerned with society all around them, free to ignore social rules as they choose. As with the (Japanese) word “my pace,” it’s used as a fixed phrase no matter what the subject is, which makes for some strange sentences like, “That person over there is really ‘going my way.’”

Another word that changes when imported into Japanese is “free.” While the term most often has to do with absense of cost in English, in Japanese it’s more about freedom of choice, so a “free ticket” here would be a ticket that let you go on any attraction rather than one that didn’t cost you anything. A shirt that says “free size” will supposedly fit anyone (although large gaijin like me know better), and when a Japanese person goes to sell something at a flea market, in his mind he’s really going to a “free market” where anything can be bought or sold freely.

Are you an “about” person? The Japanese use this English preposition as an adjective meaning vague or imprecise.

Messing up English can be fun!

In a follow up to the National Geographic video on fugu (puffer fish) that we posted the other day, JAPUNDIT reader RTN writes in to alert us to a report in The New York Times about poison-free fugu being farmed in Japan.

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan — Poison has been as integral to fugu, the funny-looking, potentially deadly puffer fish prized by Japanese gourmands, as the savor of its pricey meat. So consider fugu, but poison-free.

Thanks to advances in fugu research and farming, Japanese fish farmers are now mass-producing fugu as harmless as goldfish. Most important, they have taken the poison out of fugu’s liver, considered both its most delicious and potentially most lethal part, one whoseconsumption has left countless Japanese dead over the centuries and whose sale remains illegal in the country.

But what could be seen as potential good news for gourmands has instead been grounds for controversy: powerful interests in the fugu industry, playing on lingering safety fears, are fighting to keep the ban on fugu livers even from poison-free fish.

“We won’t approve it,” Hisashi Matsumura, the president of the Shimonoseki Fugu Association and vice president of the National Fugu Association, said of the legalization of fugu liver. He added, “We’re not engaging in this irrelevant discussion.”

Some interesting facts from the NYT piece:

• Shimonoseki controls about half of Japan’s fugu market.
• Health authorities refuse to recognize officially that fugu can be made poison-free.
• Fugu could be made poison-free by strictly controlling its feed.
• Fugu has appeared in “The Simpsons,” in an episode in which Homer accidentally eats poisonous fugu.
• Only one-third of all wild fugu have enough poison to kill.
• Because of overfishing, wild fugu accounts for only 10 percent of the total sold in Japan.

The folks over at BoingBoing TV have written in to alert us to something called TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba.

Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it’s shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details.