Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on June 2010

Whatever floats your boat

• Inax Co. debuted a gold-plated toilet at the World Expo in Shanghai that, according to its president, is “the world’s best toilet, in both looks and quality.”
• A 21-year-old Ehime woman hopes to become Japan’s first female onishi, or maker of traditional gargoyle statues.
• It was reported that recession-hit yakuza have taken to peddling “Viagra, cruise dinners, pornography” to small business owners.
• A survey by Mercer Consulting ranked Tokyo 40th on a list of the “world’s most livable cities.” Vienna was No. 1 overall, while Singapore, at 28, was tops in Asia. Kobe and Yokohama tied for 41st place.
• Headline of the Week: “Sumo Job Requirements: Eating and Napping” (via The Asahi Shimbun)

Police business

• A 45-year-old cop in Niigata was arrested for molesting a 15-year-old girl whose contact info he gleaned from a law enforcement database.
• Police at Narita arrested a former diplomat from the Ivory Coast for running a gambling ring out of his apartment in Minato-ku.
• The 73-year-old wife of former Education Minister Takashi Kosugi was busted for a string of investment scams that are thought to have netted some ¥90 million.
• Two Japanese men were arrested in Bangkok for running a human smuggling ring that “exported Thai people to Japan [and] exported Chinese people to United States or Canada.”
• Talk about chutzpah: police say that a Tokyo-based internet advertising company released a virus that leaked users’ details online, and then demanded money from victims who asked the company to delete the info.
• Police arrested a 45-year-old Hiroshima man for mailing a memory stick containing copies of five PlayStation Portable games to a friend in Tokyo.

Sic Transit

• The National Consumer Affairs Center said that children’s “roller shoes” can be blamed for a series of recent accidents.
• The government released a report showing that seatbelt use has reached 93.3 percent among operators of motor vehicles and their passengers.
• A Tokyo Institute of Technology professor fell asleep on the Yamanote line and lost a bag containing a hard drive with academic results for 1,889 students and applicants.
• The creators of a virtual community called Xing World were suspected of bilking 28,000 members out of ¥10 billion by asking them to invest in real estate in the online community.

Likely stories

• It was reported that a flower dealer in Kanagawa “unknowingly” grew 772 illegal poppy plants and shipped 401 of them to florists in seven prefectures around the country.
• A 52-year-old Chiba man who stiffed a cabbie out of ¥17,710 was exonerated by a Tokyo court because he’s a schizophrenic.
• A 21-year-old Osaka man was arrested for dumping some 170kg of photo albums, videotapes and New Year’s cards into a river in Nara. The man said he “wanted to forget the memories [he] had with [his] family.”
• A survey by the health ministry found that 45 percent of Japanese housewives believe that “husbands should work outside [while] wives stay home and focus on housework and childcare.”
• In 2003, a similar survey found that 41 percent of wives thought so.

Milestones

• A team of researchers at Japan’s National Cancer Center have, for the first time ever, managed to culture liver stem cells outside the body.
• A coalition of universities and home builders have teamed up to develop “gesture recognition equipment” that “enables users to control electric appliances by moving their heads, shoulders or hands.”
• It was announced that JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries had launched the country’s first Venus climate probe.
• The Meteorological Agency said it would start issuing weather alerts to 1,777 separate districts nationwide, up from the current 375.
• A law school in Hyogo that has had only three graduates pass the bar exam since 2006 became the first school to lose its accreditation under a new judicial reform program.
• A court in Kyoto ruled that a metalworker who suffered facial disfigurement while on the job was entitled to just as much compensation as a woman in the same situation would be. Prior to the ruling, it was permissible to award women higher worker’s compensation for facial disfigurements.

Shane Busato

Yeah, good luck with that

• NEC, Casio and Hitachi launched a joint venture that “aims to become the dominant player in the domestic mobile phone market in fiscal 2012.”
• The government said that it would start “promoting private-sector involvement in developing space technology” by increasing funding of space programs from ¥7 trillion to about ¥15 trillion over the next ten years.
• Tokyo-based apparel company Onward Kashiyama has released a biodegradable business suit for men that “decomposes into water and carbon dioxide after being buried in soil for a year.”
• The Defense Ministry said it would extend Japan’s airspace 12 miles off the coast of Yonagunijima, the country’s most westerly island. Currently, the airspace covers only the easternmost third of the island.

Here & There

• After opening its first shop in Korea in 2008, Curry House CoCo Ichibanya says it plans to expand to 15 outlets by next year.
• NHK announced that it would move up its deadline for ending analog broadcasts in an effort “to diffuse confusion amongst viewers.” The new date for the switchover is March 31, 2011.
• Meanwhile, it was reported that 83.8 percent of TVs in Japanese households are digital terrestrial-capable.
• A spokesperson for the British electronics manufacturer Dyson said that, even though 24 users have been burned using the company’s DC12 model vacuum, there is no flaw in the design.
• Citing security concerns, national broadcaster NHK and other TV stations didn’t send any female announcers to South Africa for the World Cup.

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