Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2011

Kids These Days

• Police say a 15-year-old junior high school student in Yokohama used his Nintendo DSi to post a message on the internet threatening to go on a stabbing spree in Shinjuku station.
• Which seems pretty disturbed, but how about the 500 people who saw the message and gathered at the spot where the boy said he’d launch the attack?
• An 18-year-old female high school student in Shizuoka who was expelled for having sex with a teacher had her punishment reduced to a suspension but will still miss her class’s graduation ceremony.
• Panasonic was named the company that science and engineering students most want to work for, while JTB was the choice among liberal arts students.

Whoa!

• A hospital worker in Itabashi was accused of stealing 34,000 sleeping pills from her employer. She said they were “for her own use.”
• The first day of a deer cull operation at a mountain forest in Hokkaido turned out to be a complete failure, despite the involvement of “40 SDF members, two helicopters and 19 vehicles, as well as 35 hunters and 45 [local] officials.”
• Also in Hokkaido, police in Atsuma suspect that a hunter may have fatally shot a forestry worker after mistaking him for a deer.
• A passenger and a flight attendant suffered broken bones when a JAL jet was rocked by turbulence on a flight from Tokyo to Honolulu.

Foreign Intrigue

• The Philippines deported a 49-year-old Aichi man for arranging bogus marriages between Japanese men and Filipino women so that the women could get spouse visas.
• Four managers at a design school in Saitama were busted for approving the student visas of foreigners who never attended classes. Instead, the “students” worked at local restaurants—some for as many as 75 hours a week.
• A diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow was grilled by authorities from Russia’s foreign ministry over an incident in which right-wing activists in Tokyo “insulted” a Russian flag.
• A military assessment by the US Congress warned that Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution “could restrict Japan’s ability to cooperate more robustly with the Untied States.”

Here & There

• The environment ministry says it is considering a plan to require mandatory recycling of common home electronics—like mobile phones and game consoles—to recover supplies of rare metals.
• Police arrested a 65-year-old Fukushima man for disguising himself as a deliveryman and stabbing to death an 81-year-old Tokyo resident in Meguro in January.
• The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau is said to be investigating claims that around 120 JPMorgan Securities Japan Co. employees “failed to declare a combined ¥700 million of income.”
• On the same day that the IMF warned that Japan “faces immediate danger from its fiscal problems,” Moody’s Investors Service said it would likely downgrade the country’s debt rating.

Geeks “R” Us

• It took just 15 seconds for railway fans to snap up all 306 tickets available for the first run of a new shinkansen route from Osaka to Kagoshima.
• After being arrested for attacking a cop in Mitaka City, west Tokyo, the drummer of rock group Tokyo Jihen said he was too drunk to remember anything of the incident.
• A report by Kyodo revealed that Japanese visit movie theaters just 1.4 times per year on average, compared to “around four in the United States and three in France and South Korea.”
• It was reported that disused public school buildings around the country are being refashioned as art galleries, sports centers “and even a puffer fish breeding ground.”

Traffic Problems

• The National Police Agency said the number of bosozoku gangs around the country fell to 9,064 last year, from a peak of 42,510 in 1982. The NPA says the decline is due to “an unwillingness to submit to the hierarchies within bike gangs and their strict rules.”
• A court in Saitama ruled that two passengers in a car that was involved in a fatal DUI accident in 2008 should be jailed because their “consent to the third man’s offer to give them a lift had encouraged him to drive.”
• Among the automakers that will skip this year’s Tokyo Motor Show are GM and Ferrari, though Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Renault said they’ll attend.
• Honda said it would stop hosting the IndyCar event that had been held annually at Twin Ring Motegi race track in Tochigi since 1998.
• Sentence of the Week: “A Shizuoka policeman is under arrest after he asked his wife to turn herself in over a hit-and-run accident he caused over the weekend, the police said” (via Kyodo).

Welcome to the 21st Century

• During a live talk that was carried by the website Videonews.com, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, “The points I consider important aren’t reported [by the traditional media].” The online appearance was the first ever for a Japanese PM.
• The health ministry reported that some 30 percent of Japanese women in their 20s are underweight, as are 22 percent of women in their 30s and 17 percent of gals in their 40s.
• Four women and a man have filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court challenging the 113-year-old law that “requires married couples to choose just one surname for the man and woman to share.”
• Bottom Story of the Week: “Russia, China Firms Agree to Farm Sea Cucumbers off Disputed Isle” (via The Japan Times)

Compiled from reports by Bloomberg, Jiji, AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, The International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, The Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo Reporter, Daily Yomiuri and Kyodo.