July 25, 2012

July 25, 2012

July 25, 2012

This week’s required reading

By

Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on July 2012

STRANGE DAYS

  • Scientists at the Riken research institute have developed a head-mounted “substitutional reality” system so effective that wearers cannot distinguish between “real-life scenes and recorded ones.”
  • Government and police sources say they don’t suspect foul play in the hanging death of a foreign ministry official who was “in charge of collecting information on terrorism and nuclear proliferation.” Which is exactly what we’d expect them to say.
  • An unidentified man of about 30 “wearing a suit and carrying a business bag” was found crushed to death under a car elevator at a four-story parking facility in Matsudo, Chiba.
  • The mayor of Izumisano City in Osaka Prefecture is considering a tax “to provide funds to clean up dog and cat poop.”

THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT

  • A 17-year-old BB-gun enthusiast who was busted for possessing a cache of illegally modified firearms told police, “I thought it would be OK if I didn’t aim [the guns] at people.”
  • Cops in Tokyo arrested three teenagers at an AKB48 concert for beating and choking a 19-year-old student in a bathroom and stealing 500 photos of the pop group and other celebrities.
  • At the same show, a 17-year-old boy was taken into custody for scamming another fan out of ¥36,000 in exchange for nonexistent tickets.
  • The MPD arrested four men aged 20-48 for distributing child pornography. The cops found 20,000 DVDs of smut in their apartment in Itabashi.

IDIOTS IN (CYBER)SPACE

  • Sentence of the Week: “The hacker group Anonymous may have mistakenly attacked the Kasumigaura office of Japan’s land ministry in Ibaraki Prefecture after confusing the location’s name with Kasumigaseki, an administrative district in Tokyo, according to a statement the group apparently posted online Thursday.” (via Kyodo)
  • Police in Kawasaki admitted that an officer had once visited the apartment of AUM Shinrikyo fugitives Katsuya Takahashi and Naoko Kikuchi during a routine patrol, but took no action because he failed to recognize them.
  • It was reported that up to 30 percent of foreign residents in Japan may be living somewhere other than their registered addresses.
  • The World Intellectual Property Organization says Japan ranked 25th in terms of “global innovation” in 2012, a drop of five places from the previous year. Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore topped the 141-nation ranking.

BIG BUCKS

  • Former Casio chairman Toshio Kashio was the top-earning executive in Japan last year. He took in an impressive ¥1.33 billion, but unfortunately won’t get to spend it—Kashio died last month at age 87.
  • Nissan president Carlos Ghosn, who topped the list the previous two years, was the second biggest earner, at ¥987 million.
  • Government officials say ¥5.8 trillion in funds allocated for reconstruction following the March 11 disaster went unspent in fiscal 2011. That’s 40 percent of the total recovery budget earmarked for the year.
  • The DPJ gave the go-ahead for the construction of three new shinkansen lines, at an estimated cost of ¥3.04 trillion. The routes will run between Hakodate and Sapporo in Hokkaido, Kanazawa and Tsuruga in central Japan, and Isahaya and Nagasaki in Nagasaki Prefecture.

PAY TO PLAY

  • It was reported that an increase in the consumption tax might cause a rise in the cost of tickets on the Yamanote line. The last tax hike in 1997 saw the railway’s base fare creep up from ¥120 to ¥130.
  • To coincide with the debut of budget airlines Jetstar and AirAsia, two Kanto-area transportation companies are offering super-cheap bus fares from Tokyo to Narita. A one-way ticket starts as low as ¥800.
  • Japanese polar scientists are scrambling to close a ¥2 billion shortfall in the budget for this year’s Antarctic expedition, which is scheduled to begin in November.
  • A Kyoto University professor who was awarded ¥3.4 billion in government grants for research on “genome-based pharmaceuticals” was arrested for misappropriating the funds for personal use.

SALARYMEN BY THE NUMBERS

  • A survey by Shinsei Financial found that the average amount of o-kozukai—the household allowances that women give their husbands—rose 8 percent during the past year, to ¥39,600 per month.
  • Still, that’s down nearly 50 percent from the go-go days of 1990, when salarymen were given ¥76,000 a month to play with.
  • Despite their straitened circumstances, male workers in Japan still manage to go out boozing with their coworkers an average of 2.4 times a month… probably to complain how little money their wives give them.
  • They spend about ¥2,900 per drinking session—the lowest ever recorded by Shinsei.

HERE & THERE

  • The first beluga whale born in captivity at Yokohama Hakkeijima Sea Paradise was shown off to the public last month, but customers were asked to keep their distance to “prevent causing the calf stress.”
  • Officials at the labor ministry says they’re bummed that only 50,800 people signed up for their new vocational training program. The ministry anticipated a turnout of 150,000.
  • JAXA has developed a spherical device called the i-Ball for monitoring spacecraft as they reenter the earth’s atmosphere. The machine can withstand temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Celsius.
  • The education ministry has found that 25,516 kindergartners and schoolchildren were forced to change schools this year because of the March 11 disaster.

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