Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2012

NICE STEAL

• Curtis Terry, an American guard with the Akita Northern Happinets of basketball’s BJ league, was cut by the club after he got caught stealing a few cans of chuhai from a local conbini.
• Keiichiro Kawahara, a 27-year-old volunteer from Japan who is touring the world by bicycle, was touched after a huge groundswell of support on the Chinese version of Twitter helped locate his stolen bike in Wuhan.
• A 14-year-old kid in Aichi Prefecture stabbed his mom after she took away his new video game. He was arrested for attempted murder.
• A man with gang ties, who had recently shot another man to death at a Denny’s restaurant in Chiba, was himself found dead in his car of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
• Rubbed bare as a stripper’s love patch, the grass at Tokyo’s Chichibunomiya Rugby Ground has pretty much disappeared in large chunks due to overuse of the field.

DID HE JUST SAY THAT?

• Takashi Kawamura, the mayor of Nagoya, raised a few eyebrows when he told a Chinese Communist Party official visiting from sister-city Nanjing that he “doubts a massacre of civilians by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers occurred in Nanjing in 1937.”
• Not surprisingly, the city of Nanjing later said it would “suspend exchanges with Nagoya for the time being over recent remarks.”
• An official of Nadeshiko League women’s soccer team INAC Kobe Leonessa was quoted as saying, “It’s important for female athletes to look good.” Gee, and all this time we thought that it was important for female athletes to be good at sports.
• Not to worry. A disgruntled employee at gyudon chain Sukiya said he didn’t really spew in the pot after all, after claiming earlier that he had, indeed, hurled in the vat.

LAND SHARK

• A 1.5-meter shark found in Yoyogi Park wrapped in a blue sheet was left there by a photographer, who apparently got the animal from a nearby sushi restaurant.
• The editor-in-chief of weekly Toyo Keizai magazine was arrested for groping two gals on a Keihin Tohoku train. Naoyuki Mikami told police, “I was drunk and don’t remember anything.”
• “Black Widow” serial killer suspect Kanae Kijima said in court she had “mistress contracts” with lots of lonely guys, likely including the three she is accused of bilking and killing in 2009.
• Shiseido has come up with Tokyo Sky Tree Parfum, “a fragrance inspired by the 634-meter Tokyo Sky Tree.” The bottle is shaped like the broadcasting tower it is named for, and 634 bottles will be produced to be sold for ¥63,400 each. Get it… 634?
• You knew it was only a matter of time, but a high-ranking Japanese executive with Olympus Medical Systems in India hanged himself in a children’s park at his luxury high-rise apartment complex in New Delhi. Did ya have to do it at a kids’ playground?

DEAL HIM OUT

• High-powered gambling kingpins Steve Wynn and Kazuo Okada, former partners and a couple of the richest guys on the planet, are on the outs after Wynn accused Okada of “making improper payments to gambling regulators in the Philippines.” Okada denied it, but the value of his company, Universal Entertainment, took a big hit just the same.
• In other gambling news, our Headline of the Week, courtesy of The Mainichi Daily News: “Pachinko’s popularity in disaster zone raises gambling addiction concerns”
• Japanese freestyle wrestler Takahiro Shimonaka was banned for two years after testing positive for Tamoxifen, a drug commonly used “to counter the side-effects of steroids.” Shimonaka said he took the substance by mistake and that it belonged to a woman he lives with.
• Japan midfielder Shinji Kagawa told a German TV station that he had no interest in leaving his current club Borussia Dortmund for English Premier League side Liverpool. “I’m having a terrific time … I want to stay. I feel so good here, why should I go?” the sought-after 22-year-old said.
• The number of cellphone contracts in Japan has passed the total population of the country. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said there were 129.87 million cellphone contracts in Japan as of December while the nation’s population was 128.06 million.
• A couple in their 60s and their 30-year-old son were found starved to death in their Saitama apartment. Police who discovered the bodies said they were “extremely thin and there was almost no food or money in the apartment… the fridge was completely empty.”
• It was determined that a 26-year-old restaurant employee in Yokosuka leaped to her death from an apartment building because she had been forced to work 140 hours of overtime in the month leading up to her suicide.
• A Dutch activist with ties to the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling group was acquitted of assault by a Wakayama court after he had been accused of hitting a man during the dolphin hunt in Taiji.
• Lee Soon Gi, an ethnic Korean businessman arrested in Tokyo for illegally exporting computers to North Korea, reportedly went to Pyongyang in 2009 and hooked up with officials of a government body “suspected of involvement in cyberattacks on Japan.”
• So Man Sul, chairman of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, otherwise known as Chongryon, died of heart failure at his home in Tokyo at the age of 84.

GUESS THE WEDDING’S OFF

• Already on trial for embezzlement, a former post-office worker was arrested for stealing firefighting gear from Setagaya Fire Station. He said he “needed to show a photo of himself dressed in firefighting clothing to a woman he met because he had lied to her that he was a firefighter.”
• Divers located the body of a third victim after an accident in an undersea tunnel at an oil refinery in Okayama Prefecture. Two people were still missing at press time.
• Commemorative ¥1,000 and ¥10,000 coins will be issued in fiscal 2015 for “investors holding bonds being sold next month to support efforts to rebuild areas hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami,” the government said. The coins will feature the lone “miracle” pine tree on one side with “Gambaro Nippon” on the other side.

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