Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on December 2010

Sino of the times

• City officials in Niigata have reneged on plans to sell municipal land for the construction of a Chinese consulate because “citizens’ feelings toward China have worsened.”
• It was reported that Chinese buyers purchased 96 Japanese racehorses this year—“the first that domestic farms have sold to China.”
• Sentence of the Week: “China has sentenced a woman to a year in a labor camp for ‘disrupting social order’ by retweeting a satirical message urging Chinese protesters to smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, an international rights group said.” (via The Mainichi Daily News)
• The defense ministry released a letter requesting that civilians refrain from making political remarks when visiting SDF facilities.

The medical files

Illustration by Eparama Tuibenau

• It was reported that NTT Communications and a consortium of other companies are developing a system in which users can get calorie counts of the food they’re about to eat by taking a picture of the dish with their keitai.
• A 22-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested for terminating her pregnancy using the “abortion pill” mifepristone, which is illegal in Japan. The woman, who was five months pregnant, bought the drug over the internet at the urging of her boyfriend.
• A 37-year-old anesthesiologist in Yokohama was busted for possessing and injecting himself with fentanyl, a narcotic “around 200 times stronger than morphine.”
• It was reported that Japanese households consumed a record 21.25 billion kwh of power in October, thanks to the “lingering summer heat wave.”

News from the animal kingdom

• A group of eight king penguins at an aquarium in Niigata “delighted” visitors by marching in a procession with red bowties.
• A 29-year-old motorist in Kagawa Prefecture hit a family of six wild boars crossing a road, killing all of them. The man’s car suffered so much damage that it was immobilised.
• Seibu Railway sponsored an event in which 120 dogs and their owners were shuttled from Shinjuku station to Seibu Amusement Park, about an hour away. The carriages were provided with special “dirt-proof sheeting” for the trip.
• A research team in Kobe has developed a method for using DNA to test the origin of beef. The farm ministry said it will use the test as early as fiscal 2011.

Cause & Effect

• Days after the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced that the Hayabusa space probe had collected extraterrestrial particles from an asteroid in June, the government’s cost-cutting panel said it wouldn’t touch JAXA’s budget.
• Prime minister Naoto Kan unveiled a website called Kan-Full Blog, with a video component dubbed Kan-Full TV. DPJ officials “den[ied] that the timing of the launch had anything to do with his recent political difficulties.”
• A US congressional report warned that China’s modernization of its missile arsenal means that American bases in Japan are within range of the weapons.
• A 61-year-old Hyogo man who was suspected of murdering an architect and his wife leaped to his death from his apartment building after strangling his wife and setting their home on fire.

Your tax dollars at work

• A 7-year-old female Chihuahua named Momo was one of six dogs to pass an examination to become a member of the police search-and-rescue team in Nara. Three other canines failed the test.
• Yuki Mori, the eldest son of former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori (2000-2001), was busted for DWI in Ishikawa Prefecture and ordered to pay a ¥400,000 fine. He also resigned as a member of the prefectural assembly.
• Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku apologized for referring to a newspaper photograph of his papers taken during a budget committee session as a “spy shot.”
• The DPJ is considering a plan to scale back Japan’s limitations on arms exports, though the exports would still “be restricted to weapons of limited lethality.” Well, thank goodness for that.

Here & There

• The justice ministry said it paroled six men in 2009 who had been sentenced to life in prison, including one who had spent more than 37 years behind bars.
• The ministry also revealed that the average sentence served by the six men was 30 years and two months, compared to an average of 21 years and two months for lifers who had been paroled in 2000.
• The National Police Agency said it had busted 181 people for “transporting drugs by plane” between 2009 and June 2010.
• A sumo stablemaster was “severely reprimanded” by the sport’s governing body after video surfaced on YouTube of one of his wrestlers driving a car. Apparently, sumo wrestlers are banned from hopping behind the wheels of automobiles.

Award season

• Kyoto University professor Shinya Yamanaka, 48, picked up the Balzan Prize in Rome for his work in producing pluripotent stem cells. The prize, which he shared with three other academics, is worth 1 million Swiss francs, or ¥84 million.
• A pianist from Hiroshima became the first Japanese to win the top prize at the Geneva International Music Competition, a prestigious contest that’s been held since 1939.
• Haruka Tsuboi, a 24-year-old senior at Tokyo’s International Christian University, won a nationwide contest in which college students give five-minute presentations on their favorite books. His selection was Erving Goffman’s nonfiction work, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.
• Fuji TV announced that it would air Japan’s first-ever 3D TV show next year, a ten-episode “airport drama” called Tokyo Control.

Compiled from reports by Bloomberg, Jiji, AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, International Herald Tribune/The Asahi Shimbun, The Mainichi Daily News, The Tokyo Reporter, The Daily Yomiuri and Kyodo