Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2010

THE LOVE BUG

• An Akita Prefecture company marked Valentine’s Day with a line of cakes and candies shaped like rhinoceros beetles. Sweets maker Komatsu Honten said the little buggers sell out during their limited run each year.
• While there wasn’t any worm-shaped candy inside, apples imprinted with hearts and love messages did big business for the Caloria Japan Company in Aomori Prefecture in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day.
• A Miyagi couple injected some spice into their marriage, getting arrested for separate crimes on the same day. The husband was nabbed for stealing a game console from a truck, while his wife was taken into custody for allegedly embezzling funds from her employer.
• Versatile winter meal oden still has a prominent place in the hearts of many Japanese, ranked as the nation’s favorite one-pot dish in a survey by Kibun Foods Inc.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

• Men had good reason to curl up next to the TV during the Vancouver Olympics thanks to Mari Motohashi, a member of the Japanese curling team and a (fully clothed) gravure idol in her spare time.
• The scales tipped in the wrong direction for 60kg female luger Aya Yasuda, who was disqualified after failing the compulsory weigh-in following her first run.
• Judo star Ryoko Tani announced her intention to make a comeback later this year, with an eye on competing in the 2012 London Olympics.
• National soccer team coach Takeshi Okada narrowly avoided the firing squad after a disappointing record of 1-1-1 at the East Asian Championships, inspiring a poll in which 88 percent of respondees said they wanted him sacked before the World Cup.

Wolf Boy x Natural Girl

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

• Things got hotter than advertised at a Nerima Ward nightspot after a 27-year-old hostess, dissatisfied with her pay, set a few parked bicycles ablaze, only a month after another suspicious fire outside the same club.
• Proving that “sorry” really is the hardest word, Utsunomiya lawmakers finally got things right as prosecutors issued a public apology to Toshikazu Sugaya, who spent 17 1/2 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of a 1990 murder.
• Visitors to the Abashiri Prison Museum can do the time without doing the crime courtesy of a new exhibit that offers them the chance to walk with iron balls chained to their legs.

THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS

• Four 15-year-old middle school girls in Hyogo Prefecture dined better than they dashed, and were arrested after being caught one kilometer away from a restaurant where they had attempted to skip out on a ¥20,000 bill.
• A Japanese teenager has raked in over ¥53 million from sales of a three-volume novel she wrote on her keitai. Wolf Boy x Natural Girl has sold over 110,000 paperback copies.
• A third-year junior high school student in Gunma Prefecture was arrested for placing a stolen bicycle on the tracks at a railway crossing, where it was hit by a train that was not in service.
• More than 10 percent of Japanese university students are receiving no allowance from their parents, a survey by the National Federation of University Co-operative Associations in Japan showed.
• Knowing that a good woman is hard to find, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science has begun encouraging universities to adopt child-raising support programs in order to retain female researchers with kids.

LIFE IN REVERSE

• Saitama police were left thinking they had seen a ghost after a man presumed dead by the fire department woke up in the autopsy room of the local police station while officials were seeking to determine a cause of death.
• In a bid to bring back the classics, the Kyoto Municipal Government is opening a kimono store in Tokyo with the aim of popularizing the chic traditional outfit among metropolitan women.
• An 8-year-old boy diagnosed with gender identity disorder has been attending school as a girl since last fall at the recommendation of his doctor, the Saitama board of education disclosed.
• A quick-thinking man saved a drunken woman who had fallen onto the tracks at JR Koenji station, positioning the 20-year-old so that an oncoming rapid train passed over her without hitting her.
• Another close call saw passengers on a tour bus avoid a major disaster in Takamatsu by managing to stop the vehicle after the 43-year-old driver passed out on a roadway.
• A solemn apology was issued when a hospital in western Tokyo paid ¥30 million in condolence money to the family of a man who died after mistakes were made during a liver transplant.

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES

• Osaka Gas and Osaka University partnered up to create a robot that can crawl through gas pipes and check for damage, eliminating the need to tear up roads for inspections.
• Mie Prefecture is hoping to spur youth interest in local politics in 140 characters or less, becoming the first municipality in Japan to use Twitter.
• Tokyo-based Index Corporation announced its dog-to-human language translator, BowLingual, will be released as an iPhone application over the summer.
• As if the newspaper industry wasn’t already flying off the rails, a JR Sobu line train dedicated to carrying evening papers to the Boso Peninsula in Chiba will be halted and replaced by trucks to save money.
• An unidentified company in Japan is the proud owner of an uninhabited island near Kure that was once used as a disinfecting station in World War II, after shelling out ¥100 million at a public auction in Hiroshima Prefecture.

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