Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2011

Run Forrest, Run!

Phil Couzens

• Natsuki Terada of Kokugakuin University was among the leaders at the prestigious Tokyo-Hakone Ekiden when he took a wrong turn 200 meters from the finish line. After getting pointed in the right direction, Terada got back on track, but his team would wind up finishing tenth. Said his coach: “I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head.”
• Yagi no Boken, an 80-minute movie directed by a 14-year-old Okinawan filmmaker, was released in theaters around the country. The story is about a boy and his goat.
• A horse race in Gifu was thrown into disarray when two maintenance tractors drove onto the track mid-race. All bets were off.
• The Kofu school board determined that a junior high teacher who bombarded a female student with nasty emails and even showed up at her house was acting in a “stalker-like” fashion. Nevertheless, they let him off with just a warning.

Oh, That Explains It

• A 55-year-old Kyoto man who kept his dad’s mummified corpse in a closet for over five years told police, “I left him [in bed] for a week, but he started to smell so I put him in the wardrobe.”
• An Ibaraki man who randomly attacked and stabbed 14 passengers on a bus in Toride said he did it because “he was suffering from an inferiority complex.”
• Police in Osaka Prefecture arrested a 26-year-old jobless man who broke both legs of his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son because the child had the nerve not to say “Itadakimasu” before dinner.
• A supermarket manager in Ibaraki was shot in the thigh for no apparent reason in the parking lot of his store. An unkown man walked up to him, fired the gun, then took off.

Snack Time!

• Two men from Osaka were arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for trying to smuggle over 50 live turtles and tortoises into the US hidden in snack food boxes.
• It was reported that Japan’s stock of whale meat rose to a record level in 2010, apparently a sign that fewer people are chowing down on the large mammals.
• A former manager of an Ito-Yokado branch in Yokohama was sentenced to a year in prison for mislabeling eel shipments in an effort “to hide the fact they were imported by the major supermarket chain.”
• It was revealed that staff from a distribution center for the Poplar conbini chain handed out onigiri to hungry motorists stranded in a 42-hour snowbound traffic jam over New Year’s in southwest Japan.

Here & There

• Yuichiro Anzai, the former president of Keio University, said he was “furious” after being offered the top job at public broadcaster NHK, only to be told to turn down the offer because he likely wouldn’t have been confirmed anyway.
• A Japanese company has stopped selling fold-up bicycles with small wheels after several accidents were reported when the bikes flipped or the frames broke.
• The Japanese government announced that it will not give public servants the right to strike. Yeah, but what if they do?
• Headline of the Week: “Armless, Legless Cheerleader Celebrates Coming-of-Age Day” (via The Mainichi Daily News)

Space Heads

• A Japan-US research team found that the high percentage of a hydrogen isotope called deuterium in lunar rocks suggests that “water on the Moon originally came from comets.”
• Researchers at Tokyo University’s Earthquake Research Institute may have devised a more economical way to glimpse underground fault lines “by using elementary particles that fall to Earth from outer space.”
• A 34-year-old man who stabbed a junior high school student in an Ibaraki parking lot tested positive for an unspecified illegal drug.
• It was revealed that DPJ lawmaker Takashi Esaki sold some 2,000 tickets to a 2009 fundraising party at a hall with a maximum capacity of 300.

News from the Sports World

• “King” Kazu Miura, 43, the oldest active player in the J.League, will suit up again next season for Yokohama FC. Kaz is the only guy to have scored a goal in each of the J.League’s 18 seasons.
• Former ozeki Kotomitsuki is planning on suing the Japan Sumo Association in an effort to get reinstated after he was tossed out of the sport last summer over his role in a baseball gambling scandal.
• One guy in Kotomitsuki’s corner is heavy-metal musician Demon Kakka, who told NHK that he wanted to see the big guy return to the ring. The Demon, who sports Kiss-like makeup, is known for his TV sumo commentary.
• In Hyogo, a 9-year-old boy became a show-and-tell star after discovering a 110-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur tooth from the early Cretaceous period, the Museum of Nature and Human Activities said.

School of Hard Knocks

• A 31-year-old Chinese trainee at a metal processing plant in Ibaraki was deemed to have died from cardiac arrest brought on by overwork. The poor bugger got an average of two days off and put in about 150 hours of OT each month.
• One crewmember died and the captain went missing after a chemical tanker flipped and sank in the Sea of Japan off Niigata Prefecture.
• A right-wing nutjob was so incensed at kabuki star Ebizo for bringing shame on the traditional art form that he demanded the actor be “cast off” from the theater. The man later softened his stance a bit, saying, “If he vows never to drink, I will settle for him just staying away from the stage for a long time.”
• A group of large publishing houses planned to boycott the Tokyo International Anime Fair to show their displeasure over stricter new guidelines governing sexually explicit manga and anime.

Official Business

• Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba decided to let folks know he would not be seeking a fourth term by posting his announcement on YouTube.
• Fifty-year-old LDP lawmaker Seiko Noda gave birth to a baby boy at a Tokyo hospital after undergoing artificial insemination treatments.
• A fire under the Keihin-Tohoku line tracks at Tokyo station took firefighters two hours to extinguish.
• A 47-year-old Tokyo cop who serves as a bodyguard for lawmaker Nobuteru Ishihara was arrested for trespassing after he tried to sneak a peek at a woman in a bath in Chiba.
• Two Japanese coppers on assignment in the Philippines were reprimanded for turning in ¥20,000 in bogus expense charges. Apparently they were out boozing with their buddies, not meeting with the Philippine police, like they said.

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