March 28, 2012

March 28, 2012

March 28, 2012

This week’s required reading

By

Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2012

GETTING THE LARD OUT

  • A government survey revealed that 25 percent of people who receive medical consultations for “metabolic syndrome” are able to overcome the condition. Metabolic syndrome is better-known in the West as “being a fat-ass.”
  • A 500kg bull in Kagoshima gored a 56-year-old farmer as he tried to shield his three grandkids from the rampaging animal. The man is in serious condition.
  • Pasmo halted an online service that provided details about the train-riding history of its cardholders to anyone who entered basic information about the user. Apparently, wives and husbands were using the site to check if their partners were cheating on them.
  • The health ministry says Nagano has the lowest death rate of any prefecture in Japan, while Aomori is the spot most frequently visited by the Grim Reaper.

FLYING THE COOP

  • Officials at Tama Zoo in west Tokyo were horrified to discover that one of their 26 northern bald ibises had escaped. The species is considered to be “critically endangered.”
  • Meanwhile, residents in Edogawa-ku were told to be on the lookout for a Humboldt penguin that had escaped from a local zoo.
  • An aquarium in Akita is displaying an anglerfish—one of those freaky, big-toothed monstrosities living in the murky deep sea—that is colored gold instead of the usual light brown.
  • Sentence of the Week: “A film crew from a major Japanese movie studio was caught March 1 using firecrackers to scare swans into the air to get a shot of them in flight.” (via The Mainichi Daily News)

MORE Great escapes

  • The justice ministry says a Chinese man who broke out of a jail in Hiroshima in January did so to call his wife’s parents, who had taken ill. The man was captured days later, but not before causing widespread anxiety among local residents.
  • The former chairman of Daio Paper admitted in court that, yes, he did in fact lose ¥5.5 billion of the company’s money on gambling binges in Singapore and Macau.
  • The former head of the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation was handed a 30-month prison sentence for embezzling ¥287 million from the organization. His son also got 30 months for his part in the scheme.
  • A court in Fukuoka ordered new DNA tests in the case of a man who was executed for murdering two young girls in 1999. Not that it’ll do the guy any good at this point.

The Big One

  • It was reported that if the March 11 earthquake had occurred eight hours earlier than it actually did, the ensuing tsunami would have struck at high tide and breached floodgates in Tokyo Bay.
  • Tokyo police say 83 percent of city residents keep a flashlight handy in case of disaster, while two-thirds make sure they have a radio and drinkable water close by.
  • A healthcare provider in Miyagi Prefecture surprised absolutely no one by reporting that 20 percent of residents living in homes damaged by the earthquake and tsunami are suffering from “insomnia and other psychiatric problems.”
  • A similar survey in Fukushima revealed that the number of people with high blood pressure there spiked 13 percent in the six months after March 11.

PITCHING IN

  • To help fund earthquake reconstruction efforts, the Diet passed a law that cuts the pay of civil servants around the nation by nearly 8 percent. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda will take a 30 percent hit to his salary.
  • Meanwhile, Noda unveiled a Chinese-language version of his official website to “prevent the spread of misinformation that Japanese products are contaminated by radiation.”
  • Cabinet ministers also staged a “global communications liaison meeting” to figure out how to boost the reputation of Japanese brands following the radiation scare.
  • The government said it has bestowed names on all 99 uninhabited islands within Japan’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, thereby assuring the country has “sole rights for exploration of natural resources.”
  • China, in response, named 70 specks of land around the Senkaku Islands, which it calls Diaoyu.

GRIM TIDE-INGS

  • The operators of a popular river cruise in Shizuoka shut down operations one year after an accident in which four passengers drowned.
  • A former NHK cameraman was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a 27-year-old housewife in the neck and dumping her body on a beach in Ishikawa Prefecture last February.
  • The National Police Agency says cops around the country confiscated 426 illegal guns last year. Yakuza members accounted for 121 of the seizures.
  • The agency also reported that arrests for possession of stimulant drugs jumped more than 40 percent compared to a year earlier.
  • Meanwhile, the justice ministry says the number of cases of child abuse and bullying rose to record highs in 2011.

AND FINALLY…

  • The Japanese government said it would pony up €430 million to help the IAEA “raise safety levels at nuclear reactors worldwide.”
  • Officials in Hong Kong announced they will now allow imports of meat and eggs from Fukushima and surrounding prefectures.
  • The National Cancer Center says people can cut their risk of cancer by 14 percent simply by paying attention to any one of five factors: smoking, drinking, salt intake, exercise and body mass index.
  • Bottom Story of the Week: “Anti-nuclear Japanese Farmer Visits South Africa” (via AP)

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, The Asahi Shimbun, The Tokyo Reporter, Japan Probe, The Mainichi Daily News, Daily Yomiuri, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo.