Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on June 2011

SAY WHAT?

• Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics’ management department took a lot of heat—as one might expect—for claiming in an article he wrote for Psychology Today that black women were “far less attractive” than women of other races. Guess he won’t be getting much action in Africa.
• A disgruntled job-seeker in Nagoya was arrested after he hit the emergency button at a railway crossing. “My search for a job wasn’t going well, and I was irritated,” police quoted the 24-year-old as saying.
• Former Yomiuri Giants pitcher Masumi Kuwata finished dead last in a low-level pro golf tournament he entered. His scorecard included a 93 and an 87. Ouch!
• Despite ending up 36 over par for the tourney, Kuwata did not three-putt any holes. Go figure.
• Another chucker, ex-MLB pitcher Chan-ho Park, was sent to the minor leagues by the Orix Buffaloes and was told to “stop fooling around” and get serious. The 37-year-old South Korean is in his first—and likely last—season here.

DUNEY TUNES

• They may be littered with debris from the tsunami, but the “singing sand” on Kugunarihama beach on Oshima Island and Kukunakihama beach on Karakuwa Peninsula earned both beaches status as national treasures. When people walk in the sand, it makes a distinctive “kyu, kyu” sound, or so they tell us.
• A video of Kazuyoshi Saito singing “Zutto Suki Datta” (“I Always Loved You”), only with anti-nuke lyrics in place of the original words, went viral on video-sharing websites here.
• A manga series about human-eating giants called “Shingeki no Kyojin” (“Advancing Giants”) has become a huge hit in Japan, with sales already surpassing 4.5 million copies.

BIG VOICES, SMALL BALLS

• Soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Joseph Calleja of New York’s Metropolitan Opera pulled out of a tour of Japan due to “concerns about radiation.” The show went on without them.
• Headline of the Week, courtesy of The Mainichi Daily News: “Study finds young women’s wisdom teeth disappearing”
• Over 1.7 million bedeviled NTT Docomo mobile phone users in the Kanto and Koshinetsu regions could not get service for a few hours on June 6.
• A Nagasaki hospital director and an X-ray technician were arrested for killing the director’s adoptive mother “who had headed a medical corporation that runs the institution.”
• Nearly ¥170 billion in donated relief money collected by the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Central Community Chest of Japan for people affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami was still undistributed as of June 5.
• More than ¥250 billion was collected by the two groups as of early June with just ¥82 billion, roughly a third of the total, handed over to 15 prefectures in need.

TOUGH TIMES

• A Mainichi poll revealed that “an overwhelming majority of the public believe that the Diet is not functioning properly in facilitating the restoration of quake-hit areas as well as local businesses and residents’ livelihoods.”
• The Tokyo Electric Power Co., aka “those TEPCO guys whose damaged nuclear plants scared the shit out of us and ruined the Japanese economy,” is expected to post a “parent-only” net loss of ¥570 billion for the business year to March 2012, “excluding compensation to those affected by the ongoing crisis at its crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.”
• Following a trail blazed by competitor Sony, Nintendo’s website operated by its U.S. subsidiary was hacked and some of the info on its server leaked online.
• Japanese cheerleader Emi Koike won a spot in the New York Jets’ “Flight Crew.” Now, she just better hope that there’ll be an NFL season in which to cheer.
• Koike, incidentally, will become the first Japanese person to cheer professionally in the NFL, NHL and NBA … assuming, once again, that there is a football season.

UH, SORRY…

Phil Couzens

• Journalist Soichiro Tahara apologized to the parents of Keiko Arimoto, a Japanese national abducted to North Korea in the 1980s, for saying on a TV program that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “believed that abductees to North Korea had already died there.”
• A policeman drowned in Yokohama’s Aratama River after going in to save a drunk who had jumped into the river. The drunk was rescued by a passerby and was doing just fine.
• A Japanese woman on a mountain bike tour in the Bolivian mountains died after she fell off a steep unpaved road into a valley. The road she was on has been christened the “death road,” for obvious reasons.
• All’s well that ends well in character kingdom after Sanrio settled a copyright suit launched by a Dutch company claiming that Sanrio’s rabbit character Cathy looked a little too much like Dutch rabbit character Miffy.
• A 49-year-old woman from Japan was discovered alive and well in a cave in northern Nepal 13 days after she went missing when she got lost while trekking.

THIS CAR’S GOT A LOT OF PEP

• Police arrested an automobile dealer and two others for shipping a car from Dubai to Yokohama with about¥4 billion worth of illegal drugs in the gas tank.
• Arrests were made in Japan’s biggest-ever cash heist after one of the getaway cars was found in Ibaraki. Two men with suspected gang ties were collared for the ¥604 million robbery of a security firm in western Tokyo.
• A group from Hiroshima donated a “Stone for Peace,” an engraved paving stone from near ground zero of the 1945 atomic bombing, to Albania’s National History Museum in Tirana.
• Satoshi Furukawa, a 47-year-old flight engineer, was one of three astronauts aboard a Soyuz spacecraft that lifted off for the International Space Station from Kazakhstan.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

• The latest Japanese sign language dictionary contains “some 2,000 new expressions,” among them “mobile phone” and “metabolic syndrome.”
• Four men operating out of a bar in Edogawa Ward were arrested on prostitution charges for letting a Sendai woman “sell her body to a 20-year-old college student in a private room of the bar.” The woman, 39, said she needed the money after the March 11 disaster wiped out her savings and she lost her job.
• Speaking of which, a private credit research agency reported that the earthquake and tsunami disaster “forced 145 companies to either go bankrupt or effectively fail, already topping the number of business failures in the year after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995.”
• Some evacuees from the Fukushima town of Futaba were miffed at local government officials for turning down disaster relief money. After a self-described shaman from the area was arrested for making a 17-year-old girl send him a nude photo so that he could “exorcise her of a vengeful spirit,” the mayor of Futaba thought it would be a good idea to reject the donations “as a form of apology.” Others, however, likely those with little food or shelter, disagreed.
• Cops arrested a Saitama man employed by a television maker for scamming so-called “eco-points” after he forged documents claiming he’d bought a new energy-efficient TV set.
• She’s back! Albertville Olympic silver-medal figure skater Midori Ito, now 41, came out of retirement to compete internationally for the first time in 15 years. Ito, the first woman to land a triple axel in competition, took part in the International Adult Competition, a masters-class event in Germany.

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Asahi Shimbun, The Mainichi Daily News, Daily Yomiuri, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo.