Headline News II

As feedback for the last one was mostly positive, here’s a new Headline News article. …I really feel that you should all listen to Weird Al’s parody song of the same name as you read. It’s what I listen to when I write, and I feel it enhances the experience somehow. If a film were ever made about my life, I would want Weird Al to play me. Sure, he’s not big, or black…but it’s not like Hollywood has never made any colossal casting blunders before. Why get all fussy now?
***
Okay, I’m a bit confused here.

Public broadcaster NHK was flooded with hundreds of complaints from viewers about costumes worn by dancers in a popular annual year-end show on Sunday, which made them look like they were gyrating in the nude, NHK officials said.
Announcer Tamio Miyake apologized for the costume during the program, saying: “We ended up causing misunderstanding to viewers. We’re sorry.” NHK received over 250 complaints from viewers about the costumes, worn by female dancers dancing behind musician DJ OZMA during the annual “Kohaku Song Contest” program aired Sunday night. The costumes were body suits designed to resemble a woman’s naked body.
“Are they dancing naked?” one of the viewers said in a phone call to NHK. “It’s inappropriate as children are viewing the program,” another viewer complained. (Mainichi)

So, let me get this straight.
Nudity in public baths: not a problem.
Old men reading porn magazines on the train: a-ok.
Dancers wearing “naked” body suits: OMG offensive!
…Would it have been better if the dancers were actually naked?
But I guess Janet Jackson can take a sigh of relief. America isn’t the only country that gets all fussy over nipples, be it .001 second of a nipple, or a fake prosthetic one. You know, to ensure that my kids won’t be “traumatized” by any brief incidental nipples, I’m going to desensitize them early. Nipple-themed baby crib, nipple wallpaper, perhaps even a Lego nipple set. This may be a bad idea, but I don’t think anyone’s ever tried it, and you just never know. I’m willing to be a pioneer here.
***
This story is so incredibly Japanese.

KOFU — A man has scattered dozens of 10,000-yen notes from pedestrian overpasses here, police said.
At about 3:20 p.m. on Friday, a passer-by spotted a man scattering 10,000-yen notes from a pedestrian overpass along a prefectural highway in the Marunouchi district of Kofu, and alerted police. Another passer-by picked up 10 of the bills, and submitted them to a local police station.
At about 4 p.m., 35 10,000-yen bills were scattered from a pedestrian overpass over Route 358, about 600 meters away from Marunouchi. Investigators said the same man may have been responsible for both cases. (Mainichi)

Only in Japan, ONLY in Japan would this kind of thing happen. You know what I’m talking about.
Passerby 1: Hey, look…that guy is dumping money out onto the street!
Passerby 2: Wow, he sure is!
Passerby 1: Well, that’s not right…I’ll call the police.
Passerby 2: I’ve picked up about $1000, I’ll go turn it in.
And this was only the first story. They’ve been finding loads of money dumped in all sorts of places around Japan. And everyone’s been turning it in! Who is doing this? Why doesn’t he come to Kyoto? If I found some of these bundles of cash…shit, I wouldn’t be here writing this now. I’d be jet skiing off the coast of Sri Lanka. I’d be sipping daiquiris on a Mediterranean beach. I’d be lining up only the finest, high-quality call girls, as far as the eye could see. All thanks to Ankuru Sukuruuju and his endless supply of money bags.
I honestly can’t believe they just turned it in.

***
If Japan does ever find itself in conflict again, at least they have one unstoppable secret weapon: the little old ladies.

OSAKA — A 70-year-old woman who was attacked on a street in Osaka managed to foil her would-be robber by kicking him in the crotch, police said.
At about 9 p.m. on Tuesday, the attacker grabbed the woman from behind and covered her mouth before pushing her onto the ground in Osaka’s Ikuno-ku, demanding money. However, he fled after the woman kicked him in the groin.
The man was about 165 centimeters tall and looked around 50 years old. He was wearing jeans.
The woman told police that she used her right leg to administer the coup-de-grace as she has trouble moving her left leg. (Mainichi)

…Wow. Just…wow. And she can’t even move her left leg! I’m absolutely speechless.
If some country ever tried to invade Japan, Japan should just send a small contingent of like 300 old women or something. Have this lady at the front, so she can scream “THIS! IS! NIPPON!” as she kicks some messenger right in his fucking nuts.
Messenger: Our arrows will blot out the sun!
Obasan: Then we will fight under our parasols. Bitch.
***
In browsing the news about sending criminals to prison, you may start to find that the sentences are a little light. Like, in this story…

ASAHIKAWA, Hokkaido — Two 16-year-old boys who appeared in a local family court over the slaying of the mother of one of the youths were Thursday ordered to spend time in a juvenile reformatory.
The Asahikawa Family Court ruled that the teens, whose names were withheld because they are minors, be sent to a juvenile reformatory over the killing of one of the teen’s mothers at her home in Wakkanai, Hokkaido, in August last year. In handing down the ruling, it said a term of about four years of correction was appropriate.
snipped for content…

That’s really only one example. You see it all the time – mom starves her baby son to death, gets 6 years. A woman and her lover beat her 4-year old son, then left him to die in a ditch, because the boy became alarmed when they started having sex in the car – mother gets 14 years. It’s always a little unnerving to me, because these are people who did horrible, horrible things…and in just a few years, they’re going to be back in society. The contract killer above will be out of the juvenile reformatory by the time he’s 20.
Girl: Oh, I love you so much honey!
Boy: Yeah, you’re not bad either sweetcakes.
Girl: Hey, I wanna meet your parents. When can I?
Boy: I’m afraid that’s not possible.
Girl: Why not?
Boy: Mom’s dead. I didn’t like her always getting on my case, so I paid a friend to help stab her while she was taking a bath.
Girl: …………..
Boy: That was about 4 or 5 years ago though.
Girl: ………….
Boy: But don’t worry. I probably won’t do that to you.
Japan must have the greatest prisoner reform system ever, right?
***
Er…maybe not?

MIYOSHI, Aichi — A man who had just been released from prison has been arrested for strangling the wife of an acquaintance after she refused to allow him to stay at her home, police said.
Haruyoshi Arai, 58, is accused of murdering the victim, believed to be 77-year-old Ayako Uchida, at her apartment in Miyoshi.
Arai admitted to the allegations during questioning. “I was just released from jail and had no place to stay. I asked Uchida, the wife of a deceased acquaintance, to allow me to stay at her home. After she rejected my request, I got furious and killed her,” he was quoted as telling investigators.
At about 9:10 p.m. on Thursday, prefectural police received an emergency call from Arai, saying that he killed a woman at her apartment. Officers rushed to the scene and found the woman lying on the floor. She was rushed to hospital where she was pronounced dead about two hours later.
The officers took Arai into custody after he admitted having strangled her. (Mainichi)

Well, so much for the “greatest prisoner reform system ever” theory.
Again though, I love the Japanese honesty here. “Hello, 911? You guys need to come down here and arrest me, I just killed a person.” I used to wonder why there weren’t any good cop shows or legal-based court shows here like COPS, Rescue 911, or Court TV, but I realize now it’s because that shit would be boring as fuck.
Cops: (arrive on scene) What’s going on here?
Man: You’ll notice the body of my dead wife there on the floor. I killed her a few minutes ago.
Cops: Sir, is this true?
Man: Why yes, it is. She didn’t have dinner ready, and refused my request for a blow-job, so I had to put her in her place. I may have overdone it.
Cops: We’ve just confirmed, this woman is most definitely dead.
Man: Well then, that makes me a murderer, doesn’t it? You’d better arrest me.
Cops: Anything else you need to tell us?
Man: I roughed up a cheap whore last week too. She probably isn’t going to say anything…but I just want to clear the air on that one.
(A few months later)
Judge: So you admit to what you did?
Man: Yes, absolutely.
Judge: It is a terrible, and truly disgusting thing to beat you wife to death, the woman you promised to love, cherish, and protect.
Man: Yes, I agree.
Judge: …But a man needs his steak and a good BJ too, so certainly we can sympathize with your situation. I’m going to sentence you to 3 years in prison.
Lawyer: Hmm. Yes, that is very appropriate.
***
Who knows, maybe the Japanese are just way more lax/forgiving when it comes to crimes? I mean, when you read stories like this…

FUKUSHIMA — A man appealing a death sentence for killing four people said during a hearing he had killed a fifth victim, but later retracted the statement, saying it was a lie.
Shojiro Nishimoto, 30, an unemployed man with no fixed address, has been sentenced to death for killing four people in Nagano and Aichi prefectures.
“Sometime around April or May in 2003, I was driving a rental car in Fukushima and hit a woman. She was slightly injured,” he said during an appeal hearing at the Tokyo High Court on Oct. 25. “I murdered her and abandoned her body on a mountain because she said she was going to contact the police, and I thought my other crimes would be found out.”
Fukushima Prefectural Police subsequently mobilized hundreds of officers to search local mountains for the body, but Nishimoto recently told officials that he had lied during the hearing.
Nishimoto now says that he wanted to estrange himself from the world by admitting to a murder that never happened.
“If I confessed to another murder, the public and my family would probably estrange me. I want the public and my relatives break off any kind of relationship with me before I die,” officers quoted Nishimoto as saying.
When asked why he chose Fukushima Prefecture as a location of what he now called a fictitious murder, Nishimoto said he had been questioned by officers there in the past. (Mainichi)

…Huh? So, killing 4 people is forgivable, but kill that 5th for extra heapings of shame and admonishment? Seriously, huh?
If he wants people to estrange him, and apparently, killing 4 people just isn’t enough, perhaps we should line up some Hello Kitty dolls for him to drop-kick live on TV. And, while he’s doing that, say how he thought that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, and that the Japanese did terrible things during WWII such as Nanking and sex slaves. If that won’t do the trick, I don’t know what will.
***
And now for a lighter note.

A cross-dressing man who molested a woman on a Tokyo train has been arrested, police said.
Yoshihiro Tanabe, 51, a jobless man living in Nerima-ku, Tokyo, is accused of indecent assault. Tanabe admitted to the allegations during questioning. “I thought I wouldn’t be arrested because I was cross-dressed,” he was quoted as telling investigators. Tanabe, who had long hair, has told police that he loves cross-dressing.
At around 6 p.m. on Wednesday last week, Tanabe fondled the body of a 25-year-old university student on a JR Yamanote Line train while it was traveling between Shin-Okubo and Ikebukuro stations, local police said. The victim overpowered him after the train stopped at Ikebukuro Station and handed him over to police officers. (Mainichi)

At first, I thought this guy was clean out of his mind. But then I thought about it – how many times have I seen Japanese women freely and carelessly groping each other?
Yuki: I think my breasts grew a little last night.
Asami: (feeling Yuki) Wow, you’re right? Mine haven’t grown at all recently.
Yuki: (feeling Asami’s) But they’re really soft! And you’ve got some nice nipples as well.
Asami: Why, thank you. Oh, you know, recently I switched maxi-pads…this new type fits really snugly.
Yuki: …Oh, you’re right! This IS really tight!
The guy may not have been that far off the mark. Except for the cross-dressing part, but still.
I imagine Japan is some kind of All-You-Can-Grope Wonderland for lesbians, but as I have a penis I will never truly know for sure.
***
While cross-dressing is one idea, apparently this guy had the best one.

OSAKA – A court on Thursday acquitted a man indicted for touching a woman’s breast on a train, saying that it was not intentional.
The 57-year-old company executive from Kobe was arrested and indicted for touching the left breast of a 25-year-old woman on a JR Shinkansen train between Himeji and Shin-Kobe stations on March 8.
“We have found that the man’s hand touched the breast of the woman for more than a few seconds,” said Presiding Judge Nobuyuki Yokota at the Osaka District Court. “But the hand didn’t necessarily grab her breast.”
The judge added that the touching of the breast was so faint that no other passengers noticed it. (Mainichi)

The Code of the Train Molester Shinobi:
1. Thou shalt only grab with open palm. No cupping.
2. Thou shalt only grab in short intervals.
3. Thou shalt only grab in the shadows, unseen to all.
Follow this code, and you too may become a Train Molester Shinobi, impervious to silly laws and human rights. I am so totally grabbing me some open palm, brief, unnoticed, perfectly legal breast on the way home today.
***
Quickly, we must mobilize the Gaijin Institute For the Re-population of Japan! I wonder if we get a Bat-symbol like call-to-action thingy? What would it even be?

A government report adopted Friday describes Japan as a “society where the birthrate has declined to an extreme level,” and regards measures to prop up the birthrate as a priority policy issue.
The government adopted the “White Paper on a Birthrate-Declining Society for fiscal 2006” at a Cabinet meeting on Friday. The white paper cites the tendency of people getting married and giving birth to children at increasingly advanced ages, and an increase in the number of people who remain single as the direct causes of the decline in the nation’s birthrate. It points out that 47.1 percent of men and 32 percent of women in their early 30s were single in 2005, while 90 percent of men and women in their 30s were married in the 1970s.
The total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children that women give birth to in their life — declined to 1.25 in 2005, down 0.04 points from the year earlier. The rate was below 1.3 for the third straight year. Experts define a country whose TFR is below 1.3 as one where the birthrate has declined “to an extreme level.”
In order to deal with the problem, the white paper recommends measures to support child care such as the expansion of financial assistance and changes in work practices. It also calls for the creation of socioeconomic systems that can respond to the decline in the population, and urges the central and local governments, companies and regional communities to cooperate in tackling the problem. (Mainichi)

What I’m wondering is, what exactly are “companies and regional communities” going to do to help boost the declining birth rate?
Company President: Now, it’s time for our annual “End of the Year Party”, but seeing as how the national birthrate is steadily decreasing, I think we should play our part as a company to help tackle the problem. You may notice that all women and men have been given number cards. Find your partner with the same number, and go to your assigned love hotel room. Now, I’m giving you all 20 minutes, and then we’ll rotate partners, as you know, we gotta do everything we can to try and guarantee successful pregnancies. ….Tanaka, what the hell are you doing?! Is that a condom you’re pulling out of your wallet?! Put that shit away immediately.
Japan might become a really fun place to live in the next few years.
***
…What the fuck?

NAGO, Okinawa — A woman was hospitalized after a scorpion stung her on the leg and finger while she was trying on a pair of jeans at a clothing shop here, local officials said.
Health officials were called to the shop, Fashion Center Shimamura in Nago, and captured the scorpion, which was about five centimeters long. They believe that the scorpion is from China, as the jeans involved were imported from there. The scorpion found inside the jeans was probably a Chinese bark scorpion. Researchers at the Okinawa Prefecture Institute of Health and Environment said that Chinese bark scorpions have poison in the tip of their tails, but it is not lethal.
The woman came to the store in Nago on Oct. 26, and tried on a pair of jeans. She suddenly felt pain in her right knee and rubbed it with her right hand. The scorpion then stung her right index finger, officials said. Store clerks called an ambulance and she was taken to hospital, where she stayed for five days.
Employees at the store said that the jeans were from China and were shipped via Tokyo on Oct. 24. The jeans were displayed at the shop on Oct. 26. They added that during the process of drying and pressing jeans, workers use chlorine agents so they don’t believe the scorpion crawled inside the jeans at that stage. “We will investigate how it crawled inside the jeans and try to prevent a recurrence,” one employee at the store said.
Two types of scorpions inhabit the Yaeyama Islands and the Miyako Islands in Okinawa Prefecture and the Ogasawara Islands in Tokyo. But scorpions don’t live in any other areas of mainland Japan and on Okinawa Island. (Mainichi)

I mean, the absolute LAST thing I would expect is to be stung by a scorpion while trying on jeans. That shit just doesn’t even compute.
Woman: Oh hey, these jeans are ni- OWW!
Scorpion: GET OVAH HERE!
Shopping is more dangerous than I thought, apparently.
***
Nature Vs Japan Part II – When Nature Strikes Back

KARUIZAWA, Nagano — A woman suffered light injuries after being attacked by a bear while working in her garden at home here, police said Wednesday.
Police said the 64-year-old woman was bitten on the head and shoulder by the Asiatic black bear at about 6:50 a.m. on Wednesday. Police and a local hunting association have launched a search for the animal. Law enforcers said the bear had a body length of about 1 meter. After attacking the woman, it escaped into a nearby grove of trees.
Officials in the prefectural government’s forest management division said that bears have begun to show up in increasing numbers in the prefecture each year, with 188 incidents reported as of the end of June this year. Officials said the latest incident marked the first time that someone had been injured this year in the area. (Mainichi)

Out of all the oddball news stories I’ve posted today, THIS is the one I just can’t wrap my mind around.
Friend: Oh my God, Junko what happened?
Junko: Well, there I was, working in my garden, when this bear came down and bit me on the head…
Fuck Godzilla, Japan needs to worry about these ninja bears, dropping out of trees and shit and attacking peeps at random.
…A bear. Goddamnit.
Note, however, that this 64-year old woman suffered “light injuries” after being BITTEN ON THE HEAD BY A BEAR. I *told* you little old Japanese women were indestructible, but you didn’t believe me, didja? I can’t imagine how dead I would be if a BEAR just suddenly rained down on me and BIT MY HEAD. But to this old woman? Light injuries.
Forget “a few years from now”, Japan is already an interesting place to live.