Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on June 2010

Slap happy

• Japan world record-holder Masanobu Sato announced that he will not be defending his title at this year’s World Masturbate-a-Thon in San Francisco. His current record for consecutive monkey-spanking is 9 hours, 33 minutes.
• A Japanese restaurateur in Sydney is taking a tough stance with food-wasters: any customer who fails to finish all their grub gets banned from entering the restaurant again.
• The Watami izakaya chain announced plans to open ten low-budget offshoots by the end of the year, with most items costing ¥250.
• On that note, officials revealed that the total market value of shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section fell by about ¥35 trillion in May. Ouch!

YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?

• A man walked into a koban in Itabashi with a kitchen knife and tried to make the officer on duty hand over his gun so he could rob a bank. The copper used his nightstick to knock the knife out of the dunce’s hand and then arrested him.
• TBS censured four staffers for shoddy reporting after a segment aired claiming former farm minister Hirotaka Akamatsu was out playing golf during an overseas business trip while foot-and-mouth disease was spreading in southwestern Japan. An enraged Akamatsu denied the claim.
• It was reported that a 21-story high-rise in Yokohama has set up 32 mirrors to reflect light throughout the building in an effort to cut down on electricity costs.
• Religious officials were pleased to note that the name of the Kandaijin Shrine in Kyoto is written and pronounced in the same way as the courtesy title of new prime minister Naoto Kan.
• A former college rugby player caught a couple of elderly burglars breaking into his house in Den-en Chofu. Eighty-year-old Nobuo Yoshida initially shuffled away (and was later caught), but his 60-year-old accomplice was held at the scene by the victim.

BAH HUMBUG!

• A forward-thinking Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force major-general had his pay cut after trying to dig up a 4m-tall fir tree on a Shizuoka base to use as a Christmas tree.
• A weekly magazine claimed the Imperial Household Agency asked administrators at Princess Aiko’s elementary school to add ADD medication to school meals to calm down “unruly” boys who were scaring the little princess. The agency denied the story, and demanded an apology and a correction.
• Police in Beppu were on the lookout for a sicko who placed a plate of dog food spiked with nails in a local park. An unlucky dachshund had to have a dozen nails surgically removed from its stomach after eating the food.
• The president of a cutlery company in Hyogo was busted for producing “double-edged ninja-style knives,” which are illegal in Japan.
• Tadashi Nakauchi, the former owner of the Daiei Hawks ballclub and son of the founder of the Daiei group, was arrested in Saitama for dodging about ¥200 million in gift taxes. Seems he forgot to declare some ¥500 million his old man gave him before his death.

OH DEER…

• A hunter in Kyoto who was helping to cull deer and wild boars was so distraught after accidentally killing a fellow hunter that he later shot himself to dead.
• Unauthorized expansion work on a golf course in Nara inadvertently damaged four ancient burial tombs. The golf gods likely were not amused… and you really don’t want to piss them off.
• A 4-year-old boy had two of his fingertips severed on a playground ride at a railway museum in Hokkaido.
• A van crashed into a crowded kaiten-zushi restaurant in Otsu, leaving one woman with a broken leg and injuring 13 others. The 59-year-old driver was arrested for negligence.
• A nasty divorce case apparently resulted in the stabbing death of a 42-year-old lawyer at his Yokohama office.

Kohji Shiiki

THE CLOCK IS TICKING

• A defendant found guilty of killing a nurse back in 1997 just marked his tenth year in a coma after a failed suicide attempt while awaiting his appeal. By law, the case is on hold until he’s able to appear in court.
• JAL pilots will have to make their own way to the airport after the embattled airline decided to stop covering taxi fares in a cost-cutting measure.
• Prosecutors in Kyoto filmed a reenactment of a crime in which a 59-year-old man was killed after jumping on the getaway car of two men who had robbed his apartment. Officials are hoping to introduce the video as evidence in their case against the alleged criminals.
• A 61-year-old man in Kanazawa on trial for using a stolen bank card to withdraw cash from an ATM was exonerated in a case of mistaken identity. Although the man bore a remarkable resemblance to the culprit, who was caught on a surveillance tape, he was freed after a police lab “determined that the defendant and the man on the tape were different based on the shape of their ears.”

YOU DON’T SAY?

• The water quality in the Tama River has improved to the point where sweetfish have returned to the waterway. That’s the good news for the fish—the bad news is that many of them are now ending up on the menu of a Kawasaki noodle shop in the form of tempura.
• Eri Yoshida, the 18-year-old Japanese pitcher whose knuckleball has earned her a roster spot on the Golden Baseball League’s Chico Outlaws, will have her jersey and bat displayed in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
• Elsewhere on the diamond, Toshihisa Nishi, the 1996 Central League Rookie of the Year with the Yomiuri Giants, has retired from baseball after a move to a minor league team in the US didn’t pan out for the 38-year-old veteran.
• Renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, who is battling throat cancer, called off his scheduled December European tour on doctor’s orders.
• The health ministry revealed that there were 1.07 million kids born in Japan in 2009, down about 21,000 rugrats from 2008.

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