Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2012

DEPT. OF SICK F**KS

• The head of the child studies department at a junior college in Yamaguchi was arrested on a child porn charge. He’s accused of inducing a 15-year-old girl he met online to take lewd photos of herself and send them to him.
• A 59-year-old assistant police inspector in Fukuoka committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in the station’s dojo.
• Last month’s riot at a factory run by a subsidiary of Suzuki Motor in India was allegedly triggered by a manager making “casteist remarks against a worker.”
• A drunk 62-year-old salaryman who fell asleep on a national highway in Saitama was arrested for violating the Road Traffic Law—the first time the statute has ever been applied to a sleeping person.

MUCHO MOJO

• Two women in western Japan are suing the operator of a yoga studio for threatening them with possession by evil spirits if they didn’t fork over millions of yen. They’re being supported in their efforts by the delightfully named National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales.
• A professor at Keio University has developed a robot that can pass along the sensation of the things it touches to human hands.
• A trio of climbers was arrested for attempting to scale Nachi Falls in Wakayama Prefecture. The falls and a nearby shrine are both UNESCO World Heritage sites, which led the head of the shrine to say the stunt was “an insult to our religion.”
• Meanwhile, a delegation from UNESCO will travel to Gunma to judge whether the Tomioka silk mill is worthy of World Heritage status. The mill was established by the government way back in 1872.

THE SENSITIVE TYPES

• A lay judge in the trial of a man accused of knifing two pachinko parlor employees in Sapporo fainted after seeing photographs of the bloody crime scene.
• A newspaper in North Korea—OK, basically the only newspaper in North Korea—accused Japan of entering into a new security pact with South Korea as a pretext for a “reinvasion of the peninsula.”
• Which made it surprising when, the following day, the foreign ministers of North Korea and Japan were seen having a “rare chat” at a dinner party at the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh.
• Government officials say they want to relax the conditions under which SDF troops involved in UN peacekeeping operations can use their weapons. Opponents say such a revision to the existing law would violate the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution.

THE MEDICAL FILES

• The Japanese Association for Acute Medicine says there have been 17 cases during the past two years in which doctors have withheld or suspended treatment to “emergency room patients near death and judged to have no chance of recovery.”
• Two NHK employees in Fukuoka were rushed to the hospital in a “delirious” condition after smoking quasi-legal herbal concoctions. The broadcaster suspended the men and apologized to viewers.
• A clinic in Kobe has developed a method for examining the chromosomes of an embryo produced by in vitro fertilization before implanting it in a uterus.
• Headline of the Week: “High School Girl Struck by Javelin in Head During Practice in Hiroshima” (via The Mainichi)

RED SCARE

• After officials at the Japanese Communist Party purged their membership rolls of anyone who has “not paid dues or no longer appeared active,” the membership tally plummeted from 400,000 to 320,000.
• It was announced that information stolen in a cyber-attack on the Diet last summer was sent to “an email address used by a former senior member of China’s People’s Liberation Army.”
• Government officials are permitting about 100 North Koreans to enter Japan for next week’s under-20 Women’s World Cup. It will be the largest delegation of North Koreans to visit in six years.
• The MPD is sending a team of cops to the Philippines to try and trace a gun that was used in an unsolved triple homicide in Hachioji in 1995. Three female supermarket employees, aged 16, 17 and 47, were killed in the shooting.

FALLOUT

• It was reported that fishermen in Fukushima who are unable to work because of radiation from the Daiichi nuclear plant have taken to “wreckage fishing”—collecting seaborne debris from the March 11 quake.
• Meanwhile, only 49 percent of families of public employees killed in the disaster have received the survivors’ benefits they’re entitled to.
• The Pew Research Center found that the most frequently viewed YouTube videos between January 2010 and March 2011 were all related to the March 11 disaster. In the first week after the earthquake, the videos garnered 96 million views.
• An elaborate effort by the National Police Agency to encourage victims of domestic violence to speak up about the crimes is being credited with a 46 percent surge in the number of cases reported so far this year.

BUSINESS UNUSUAL

• The Yomiuri Giants sued the Asahi Shimbun for libel over a report claiming the team overpaid recruits between 1997 and 2004. It’s worth remembering that the Giants’ parent company publishes the Yomiuri Shimbun, a direct competitor of the Asahi.
• After Sumitomo Mitsui Banking was hit by a phishing scam that cost its customers tens of millions of yen, bank officials alerted account holders to be on the lookout for such scams… by sending them emails.
• Officials at the University of Tokyo say they want to “nurture future Asian leaders” by using the TOEFL test to identify top students and provide them with an “elite linguistic education.”
• Executives at Honda say they hope to double the number of cars they export from US-based manufacturing plants over the next two years.

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, Jiji, The Tokyo Reporter, Japan Probe, The Mainichi, Daily Yomiuri, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo