Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on July 2010

Summer fun

• It was reported that young Indonesian surfers are providing “erotic services to Japanese women and other female tourists who flock to the island for discreet sex vacations.”
• A Chinese health food and cosmetics company is sending 10,000 of its best salespeople and their family members on a free trip to Tokyo as a reward for their good work.
• A 35-year-old native of Nagano became the first Japanese ever to win the prestigious Concurso Internacional flamenco guitar contest in Murcia, Spain.
• A 17-year-old from Kobe and an 18-year-old from Fukuoka won gold medals at the 51st International Mathematical Olympiad in Kazakhstan.
• Asahi led all breweries in beer shipments during the first half of 2010, thanks in large part to “a new way of serving Super Dry at below zero temperatures at bars and other places.”
• However, overall shipments of beer tumbled 4.5 percent due to a “shift in consumer appetite to other drinks.”
• Headline of the Week: “Little Green Aliens Invading Coasts” (via The Asahi Shimbun)

Strange days

• It was announced that a withered tree resembling Seattle Mariners star Ichiro Suzuki has been found in Yamanashi.
• Norio Imamura, a voice actor for mega-popular cartoon One Piece, was arrested for “displaying tattooed genitals on his blog.”
• A tour guide found the fossilized remains of a 30,000-year-old snail while diving off the coast of Chichijima island in the Ogasawara chain.
• A 22-year-old man tried to hold up a police station in Miyagi by threatening the receptionist with a 16cm knife. He was promptly arrested.
• It was reported that parents of unmarried adult children have begun organizing matchmaking parties in order to exchange their kids’ photos and resumes.

War stories

• The Russian parliament declared that September 2 will forever be known as Victory Day, in commemoration of its role in Japan’s defeat during World War II.
• The health ministry announced it would dig up an area in Shinjuku that is suspected of containing the remains of World War II-era victims of experiments on live human subjects. The ministry was urged to act by the delightfully named Association Demanding Investigation on Human Bones Discovered from the Site of the Army Medical College.
• The South Korean government said it was sorry that one of its citizens lobbed a stone at Japan’s ambassador to the country during a press conference last month.
• A Japanese man who was formerly a manager in Taiwan’s professional baseball league pleaded guilty in Taipei to fixing games in 2008 and 2009. The incident has “led to the prosecution of some of Taiwan’s most prominent baseball players.”
• A 66-year-old Gunma woman was arrested for stabbing her 15-year-old grandson to death after an argument.

Here & There

• A research council recommended that the education ministry limit the size of elementary school classes to no more than 30 students.
• Watch out, IBM: just months after Fujitsu announced plans to increase its global share of the supercomputer market to 10 percent by 2015, NEC said it aims to capture 5 percent of the market by 2014.
• Fujitsu also announced that it would spend some ¥100 billion on its cloud computing business by next March.
• The Bank of Japan appointed its first female branch manager. Tokiko Shimizu, 45, is the new head of the bank’s Takamatsu branch in Kagawa.
• During the run-up to last month’s upper house election, a 71-year-old unemployed man was arrested for possessing a gun at a speech by a DPJ candidate in Fukuoka.
• Several pieces of wreckage from JAL flight 123, including one more than a meter long, were found in the woods near the main impact site in Gunma. The accident in August 1985 killed 520 people and remains the worst single-plane crash in history.

School Daze

Eparama Tuibenau

• A 60-year-old woman in Nagasaki broke the nose of an 18-year-old male high school student because he was sitting in a bus seat reserved for the elderly.
• The MPD suspects that a 29-year-old elementary school teacher was involved in five incidents in which he “followed elementary and junior high school girls home from school and forced them into their own houses where he molested them.”
• Two female high school students in Hyogo set a house on fire in a bid to kill one of the girl’s parents.
• A rope stretched across a sidewalk in Chiba by an apparent prankster seriously injured a 17-year-old high school girl riding home from school on her bicycle.
• If you’ve noticed a bunch of eggheads moping around recently, it’s because Thomson Reuters has found that “the frequency that Japanese scientific research papers were cited in the last five years was lower than the world average.”

By the numbers

• The labor ministry announced that 38.9 percent of companies in Japan allow employees to work shorter hours to care for their children or elderly relatives. In 2005, the number was just 31.4 percent.
• It was reported that the number of bankruptcies of Japanese firms dropped 16.9 percent in the first half of 2010.
• It is believed that if a major earthquake were to hit the Tokyo area, Japan’s GDP would immediately tumble 1.9 percent.
• Scientists are stymied by the cause of a mysterious infection that has killed 44 Japanese monkeys in zoos since 2001. The animals “died after becoming extremely anemic and bleeding from mucous membranes in their noses.”
• It was revealed that 21,640 children were on waiting lists to enter daycare centers as of April 1, a 5.5 percent rise over a year earlier.
• Research firm Teikoku Databank said that the number of Japanese businesses in which Chinese companies have invested has “more than doubled since 2005.”
• Meanwhile, China bought a record amount of Japanese government bonds in May—some ¥735.2 billion’s worth.
• Bottom Story of the Week: “1,500th Newlywed Couple has Photo Taken in ‘Ring of Happiness’ Monument.” (via The Mainichi Daily News)

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