Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on December 2010

Karma-rific

Illustration by Shane Busato

• A senior citizen trying to steal coins from a donation box at a shrine in Tokushima fell and hit his head while attempting to flee the scene. He later claimed his six stitches were “punishment from God.”
• A 35-year-old Japanese man was caught at the airport in Bali with 6kg of hash. Apparently, he recently served time in an Indian prison for a similar offense, and now faces the death penalty under Indonesian law.
• The 19-year-old son of an American soldier stationed in Japan was found guilty of seriously injuring a 24-year-old Tokyo woman by stringing a rope across a roadway in 2009, causing her to fall off her scooter “just for laughs.” Three other American kids involved got off without charge.
• Three Tokyo teens, meanwhile, were arrested for breaking into a couple of cars using a method they had learned on YouTube.

It’s Getting Hot in Here

• Researchers at Yamagata University said global warming may kill off the white “snow monsters”—creepy figures of ice and snow attached to fir tree branches in the Zao mountains—over the next 40 years.
• Lingerie maker Triumph debuted its new “Welcome to Japan” bra and skirt, complete with reversible map of Japan and push buttons that activate a voice greeting people in English, Chinese or Korean.
• Police providing security for the recent APEC summit in Yokohama were apparently on edge after “revelations that several citizens have made bombs using information from the internet and commercially available chemicals.”
• A realistic-looking “female” robot known as Geminoid F had a starring role in the Tokyo stage play Sayonara. The drama co-starred American Bryerly Long, a real life honest-to-goodness human actress.

Strange Days

• Believe it or not, 86 incidents were reported of people injuring themselves in Japan over the last 10 years by taking pills before removing the plastic packaging. They musta been smart pills.
• A 24-year-old bank employee in Sendai committed suicide by hanging himself, and streamed video of the act online. Some viewers reportedly told him to hurry up and get on with it, while others urged him to reconsider. He didn’t.
• Thai authorities said an initial investigation into the shooting death of Reuters cameraman Hiroyuki Muramoto during unrest in Bangkok last April has revealed that Thai security forces may have fired the fatal shots.
• In Los Angeles, an 84-year-old Japanese-American woman, who had spent time in an internment camp during World War II, was pushed to her death on some train tracks by a deranged homeless woman.

Here We Go Again

• A year after Seattle-based Kyodo sportswriter Keizo Konishi deprived Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer of unanimous selection as American League MVP, another Kyodo sports reporter based in the US has gummed up the works. San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey was the overwhelming choice as 2010 National League Rookie of the Year, but for some bizarre reason Kyodo’s Yasushi Kikuchi didn’t even see fit to include him on his three-player ballot. Time for a new beat, Yas.
• According to a Russian newspaper, Moscow has decided that it will not, after all, return a couple of disputed islands to Japan “in line with a 1956 joint declaration.”
• Furthermore, the daily Kommersant reported that the Russkies “will no longer negotiate with Tokyo over the matter” and claimed “Japan has an ‘anime-like’ illusion” that it will get the islands back.
• An amazing goal by Japan’s Kumi Yokoyama, in which she danced through half a dozen frozen defenders in an Under-17 Women’s World Cup soccer game against North Korea, was shortlisted as FIFA’s Goal of the Year.

Yummy!

• The 26th annual “crab memorial service” was held at a Sapporo temple, attended by some 80 employees and chefs from a local crab restaurant chain who just wanted to honor the crustaceans for tasting so damned good.
• After putting a stuffed green turtle up for auction on a Yahoo! website, government officials in the Fukushima village of Kita-Shiobara were red-faced to discover that the animal was on the protected list. The turtle was seized from a tax dodger.
• Sapporo’s Maruyama Zoo was closed down while authorities investigated the death of a bear cub that was mauled by an older bear. Sounds like an open-and-shut case of bear-on-bear crime to us.
• It was determined that a spate of recent deaths of Japanese Macaques at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute was likely caused by a virus they contracted from Crab-eating Macaques, which were also kept at the facility.

Laying Down the Law

• “Now where did I put that dang thing?” A 59-year-old cop accidentally left his loaded handgun in a toilet stall at a Tokyo restaurant while he was grabbing a little lunch.
• Three hostesses filed suit against a Ginza hostess club over docked pay, with one of the girls claiming that her daily wages of ¥46,000 were often cut drastically “for reasons such as late arrival, leaving early, and failing to reach targets for bringing in customers.”
• After a man was sentenced to four years in prison for sexual assault in Sapporo, one of the lay judges complained in a post-trial press conference that the sentence was far too light.
• A 33-year-old Japanese man was arrested in Cambodia after villagers said they saw him having sex with two underage boys. The chief prosecutor in the area said the man admitted paying the lads $10 each for sex.
• An 8-year-old Labrador retriever in Kagawa Prefecture named Kinako passed the test to become a police dog on her seventh try. Her story has already been made into a movie.

Compiled from reports by Japan Today, The Japan Times, International Herald Tribune/The Asahi Shimbun, The Daily Yomiuri, The Mainichi Daily News, AP, Kyodo, AFP and Reuters