Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on February 2012

SPEAKING OF YU

• Former Nippon Ham Fighters ace Yu Darvish showed up in Texas to meet local media and baseball fans wearing what many in the US deemed to be a bizarre T-shirt featuring a large silk-screened marijuana leaf. It was actually a Japanese maple leaf, which looks just like a leaf from a pot plant, accompanied by the phrase, “I will survive.”
• In other diamond dust, former Yakult Swallows pitcher and current player agent Terry Bross found himself in a bit of hot—and steamy—water when it was revealed that he used the “services” of porn star Bibi Jones to help him land several clients.
• A story on The Tokyo Reporter website claims that more and more seniors are frequenting Japan’s soaplands these days, with one “fashion health” massage joint being visited regularly by an 85-year-old geezer.

JUST WHAT WE WANTED TO HEAR

• The brainiacs at Tokyo University put the odds of a major earthquake hitting Tokyo in the next four years at 70 percent. An exact date would be appreciated…
• But in a bit of good news, the National Agricultural Research Center, or NARC, said that sunflower oil from seeds harvested in the Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone contained almost no cesium.
• A government panel has recommended that Japan finally get on board with the Hague Convention concerning child-custody battles between Japanese and their foreign (ex-)spouses, but that kids should not be returned to foreign parents if it appears that they have violent tendencies. Fair enough.
• Two of Japan’s favorite pastimes have converged with all-girl pop group AKB48 apparently being the inspiration for the government’s new anti-suicide campaign, which goes by the moniker GKB47. (Don’t ask.)
• Two sisters in their 40s, who were too poor to pay their heating bill, were found dead in their Sapporo apartment. One had frozen to death and the other died of a brain hemorrhage.

YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…

• A joint research team from Hokkaido University and Tokyo’s International Christian University managed to snap a rare pic of albatrosses cleaning the bodies of sunfish near the surface of the ocean. The photo op happened off the coast of Aomori Prefecture.
• Two men, including a former Tokyo assemblyman, were arrested for selling illegal drugs through social networking site Mixi.
• Two brothers were reunited in Kyoto after nearly 60 years, having been separated when their dad died in a fishing accident. One grew up in California and the other in Japan.
• A Kanagawa brewery has come up with chocolate-flavored beer served in an edible chocolate mug for Valentine’s Day. And the best part—8.5 percent alcohol.

GET ON WITH IT

• Prosecutors in Saitama made 11 opening statements in a murder case against Kanae Kijima, 37, a nasty piece of work accused of bilking, and then killing, her boyfriends and lovers.
• Tokyo’s first snowfall of the year on Jan 23-24 resulted in 53 people being hospitalized with snow-related injuries, most caused by slipping and falling.
• Italy’s Consul General in Osaka, Mario Vattani, was caught on tape fronting his band Sotto Fascia Semplice (Under a Simple Fascist Banner) at a rally organized by extreme right-wing group Casa Pound last May in Rome. A heavily tattooed Vattani was also filmed “praising… the black flag symbol that is a notorious fascist symbol, and giving the stiff-arm fascist salute.”
• A former US Navy serviceman was picked up in the US and held after Japanese police issued an arrest warrant for him “on suspicion of leading a group that smuggled drugs into Japan in 2004 through the military mail service.”
• Medical researchers, including a team from Kyoto University, say they have “confirmed that dopamine-generating cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells survived for six months in a monkey brain affected by Parkinson’s disease.” We’re guessing that’s a good thing (unless you happen to be that monkey).
• When the No. 5 reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata was shut down for scheduled maintenance checkups, it meant that only one of TEPCO’s 17 existing reactors was in operation.
• Of the 54 commercial reactors in Japan, only three (not including TEPCO) are currently in use.
• An 8-month-old Siamese cat in Saitama named Nyako is turning a few heads because it looks like it has two faces. On its belly appears to be another face “created by a creepy fur coloration pattern and a pair of nipples that do double duty as eyes.”
• On Jan 25, major train lines in Tokyo, including the Yamanote Line, were suspended after a train driver reported seeing smoke on the tracks, delaying some 110,000 commuters.
• But wait, there’s more! With passengers furiously calling and texting to let people know they would be late, NTT Docomo was overloaded and service went down for a while. Talk about your basic shit-show!

NICE TRY

• A debt-ridden 58-year-old Tokyo man was arrested for trying to switch identities with his dead brother in an effort to get out from under a mountain of bad credit.
• Harvard-educated lawyer Naomi Koshi became the youngest woman ever elected mayor in Japan. The 36-year-old Koshi is mayor of Otsu.
• School was out early in Osaka when several explosions in a primary school science lab caused fires to break out. While 250 kids and teachers were forced to evacuate, no injuries were reported.
• A suit was filed in an Osaka court by 37 former and current shareholders of Olympus demanding the camera maker cough up some ¥220 million “for losses incurred as a result of the sharp decline in its share price following the revelation of accounting fraud.”
• A writer and a photographer, both from Britain, completed a 100-day tour of every prefecture in Japan and kept a blog of their journey to help boost post-March 11 tourism here. Their blog has had over 50,000 hits in four months.
• Doctors at Shizuoka Children’s Hospital who operated on a 7-month-old baby boy born with a triple congenital heart disease said the wee tyke was recovering well from the 12-hour procedure, which could be the first success of its kind in the world.
• Two cops pleaded not guilty of murder after they shot and killed a man fleeing in a getaway car from a burglary in Nara in 2003.
• Some 60 percent of respondents to a Mainichi poll said they are against plans to raise the consumption tax to 8 percent in April 2014 and 10 percent in October 2015.
• Meanwhile, 37 percent were in favor of the tax hike.
• Elsewhere, the health ministry aims to reduce the smoking rate in Japan to around 10 percent from the 23.4 percent in 2009. Yeah right… good luck with that.

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, The Telegraph, The Asahi Shimbun, The Tokyo Reporter, The Mainichi Daily News, Daily Yomiuri, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo.