Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on February 2011

KIDS THESE DAYS

• A 22-year-old Kanazawa University student who called the cops and claimed he’d been stabbed later admitted he had knifed himself in a failed suicide attempt because he didn’t have enough credits to graduate.
• A couple of 10-year-old girls—Miu Hirano and Mima Ito—broke table-tennis prodigy Ai Fukuhara’s record as the youngest players to win a singles match at the national championships. Ai-chan was 11 when she won two matches at the 1999 ping-pong nationals.
• At the other end of the age spectrum, 40-year-old tennis player Kimiko Date-Krumm was reduced to tears after blowing a 4-1 lead in the third set of her match against 21-year-old Pole Agnieszka Radwanska at the Australian Open.
• A nasty monkey named Lucky, who bit more than 100 folks in Shizuoka last fall, escaped house arrest at a park in Mishima, causing officials to warn local residents to stay inside and keep their doors locked. The rampaging primate was caught a day after ditching his cage.
• In an awesomely named place called Bungo-Ono in Oita Prefecture, the local government is planning to let wolves loose in an effort “to control wild animals that destroy agricultural crops.” Can’t wait for the reaction when a wolf chows down on a local farmer instead.
• Five middle-aged men in Tohoku filed a fraud suit against three international marriage brokers in a Sendai court, claiming they got unexpected home visits from South Korean women accompanied by the brokers, who convinced the lonely dudes to let the women “homestay” with them for a week or so.

THE MOTHER OF ALL SUMO SCANDALS

Photo by Benjamin Parks. Photo illustration by Phil Couzens

• A 63-year-old woman who was arrested for her role in a betting ring involving sumo wrestlers said she took part in the affair because she had incurred “massive debts.” Her son, a wrestler, was also busted.
• Kokkai and Gagamaru, a pair of sumo wrestlers from Georgia, got into a drunken brawl with one another in the early hours at an Indian restaurant in Tokyo, smashing a glass partition in the process. Save it for the dohyo, boys.
• Hard-throwing closer Marc Kroon is switching Giants, jumping from Yomiuri to San Fran after the Tokyo team cut him loose in the offseason. The 37-year-old reliever signed a minor-league contract with the World Series champs and gets an invite to spring training.
• Tatsuya Ichihashi, the guy charged with murdering Lindsay Ann Hawker in 2007, admits in a new book that he spent some of his 2-plus years on the lam on a small island in Okinawa, where he lived in a hut and “caught fish to survive.”

CRIME DOESN’T PAY… BUT SOMETIMES CRIMINALS DO

• After a man in Hyogo stumbled upon a thief burgling his home, the would-be robber offered to pay the resident to forget about the whole thing. The perp then ran away but the homeowner chased him down and said, in essence, “Hey, where’s that money you promised me?” The robber handed the man ¥90,000 and took off again.
• A prosecutor in Fukuoka indicted a local man for twice riding a bicycle without brakes. Whoa… call the Feds!
• It was revealed that Japanese immigration officials “offered to give special resident status to Myanmar nationals in return for withdrawing their lawsuit demanding refugee status.”
• Authorities said heirs to the estate of a wealthy Japanese lawyer hid some ¥2.5 billion in Swiss bank accounts to avoid paying the inheritance tax.

WHALE OF A DEAL

• A Hanshin department store in Osaka held a promotion to sell about three tons of whale meat “in a bid to protect and maintain Japan’s traditional food culture.” Gee, good thing there’s no history of cannibalism here.
• Ron-ron, grandfather of bipedally dexterous lesser panda Futa, kicked the proverbial bucket at the age of 15 at a zoo in Hiroshima. Ron-ron was no slouch himself, as he could also stand on his own two feet.
• A Tokyo court confirmed an earlier ruling that DPJ lawmaker Kazuyoshi Nagashima “touched the breasts of the wife of a local city councilman at a party held after a grade school event in Kawasaki.”
• Meanwhile, a Chinese woman who worked as a trainee at a farm in Chiba filed a claim against the farm’s operator, accusing him of sexual assault.

GO FIGURE

• Researchers with the Riken Brain Science Institute in Saitama have discovered an area of the brain that “instinctively works when a professional shogi player finds the optimal next move.”
• A counting snafu at a drawing for spots in a primary school in Shizuoka led to all 37 applicants being admitted, not just 35 as originally planned.
• Softbank and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government have decided to put antennas on subway cars to enable passengers to send text messages and access the internet while riding between stations.
• The 51-year-old head of a local police station in Miyagi went home for lunch one day and didn’t return to work. He was later found hanged at his official residence, next to a suicide note.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING

• The Supreme Court declared that it’s illegal to provide Japanese TV shows, either recorded or streamed in real-time, to overseas viewers.
• A research group run by the communications ministry is developing a system to locate folks trapped under earthquake rubble by using IC chips like those found in train passes.
• An education ministry survey found that just 20 percent of teachers of oral English at Japanese high schools were conducting classes “mostly” in English in 2010, not even close to the 100 percent target set for 2013.
• Bottom Story of the Week: “Shell Fossils Lead to Discovery of Oldest Species of ‘Pupillidae’ Snails Ever” (via The Mainichi Daily News)

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