Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on May 2012

SOME BOOZE WITH YOUR BIRD?

• A new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Tokyo comes complete with a fully stocked bar called KFC Route 25, in honor of the highway that runs past the original Sanders Café in Kentucky. Whisky, tequila, vodka, rum all available… Name your poison.
• The Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto Prefecture—along with some help from a nutty professor from Osaka University—has come up with a 600-gram human-shaped pillow called a “Hugvie” that allows cellphone users to “feel closer” to the people they are talking to. You insert your phone in the pillow’s head and conversations will cause the Hugvie’s heart to beat. Really.
• A government survey has revealed that one out of every four Japanese adults has thought of offing him/herself, “with young people more prone to such thoughts than others.” A round of Hugvies, please.
• Researchers at the Shibaura Institute of Technology (we don’t even want to speculate on the acronym for this one) figure that some 40 or so dams in Japan sit above confirmed active fault lines.
• Meanwhile, a network of more than 150 earthquake and water pressure detectors is in the plans for the sea off Japan’s east coast. The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention says the devices will help “to more quickly and accurately predict tsunami.”
• A Mainichi survey found that more than 2,000 bridges in at least 107 local municipalities in Japan have never been inspected, mostly due to “financial difficulties.”

APARTMENTS OF DOOM

• A 23-year-old nurse was found stabbed to death in a friend’s apartment in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture. The friend said he was out with work buddies at the time.
• The skeleton of a 45-year-old man who died more than two years ago was found in a Saitama apartment when the owner of the unit went to check on him… Probably wondering why the rent was so late.
• With up to 14,000 people dying annually in the bathtub—more than three times the number killed in traffic accidents in 2011—the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare will conduct research on bathtub fatalities. At least they left nice, clean corpses…
• Two men in their 60s were arrested for murder after the dead body of another sexagenarian was found dumped in the mountains near Kobe. A financial dispute was apparently the root of the problem, as it so often is in these cases.
• Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko played a little tennis at the Imperial Palace on April 30. It marked the first time the 78-year-old Emperor played the sport since having heart bypass surgery in February.
• A bus accident in Gunma Prefecture that claimed the lives of seven people and left another 39 injured was being attributed to “cutthroat competition in the bus industry and the resulting overwork among drivers.” The driver apparently dozed off on the overnight trip to Tokyo Disneyland.

BRANCHING OUT

• The US is giving Japan 3,000 dogwood trees to mark the 100th anniversary since this nation gave Washington 3,000 cherry trees in 1912.
• In a rare move, the Finance Ministry posted on its website protest letters sent to The Asahi Shimbun over a report detailing “relations between key figures of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and senior ministry bureaucrats.” The ministry said the story contained several “misinterpretations of facts.”
• Around 800,000 new job recruits joined companies on the first day of Japan’s fiscal year.
• According to the stats, 80.5 percent of college students found jobs ahead of their March graduation, a 3.1 percent increase over the previous year, which was the lowest since 2000, says the labor ministry.
• About 60 percent of the people polled in a Mainichi Shimbun survey said they were opposed to the government plan to raise the consumption tax while 37 percent were in favor of the move.
• The same survey found that 79 percent were in favor of introducing “a low tax rate on daily necessities in case the consumption tax is raised in the future.”

ANIMAL INSTINCTS

• A mutt who failed miserably as a hunting dog got a new lease on life when it was enlisted to keep pesky monkeys and crows off a citrus farm in Wakayama.
• Meanwhile, Kotora the cat was given a few days off during Golden Week from his job as a “station master” in Okayama Prefecture to take up the same position at two railway stations in Aomori Prefecture. Can a karoshi lawsuit be far off?
• Two small kids died and nine other family members were hospitalized in the Philippines after chowing down on some poisonous puffer fish, a Japanese delicacy, for lunch.
• A counter-terrorist drill was conducted at the 634-meter-high Tokyo Sky Tree, in which security guards led about 1,000 people to “safety” from the facility’s observation deck at 350 meters. The poor sods taking part in the drill had to descend some 2,000 emergency stairs.
• A Japanese film crew is making a movie about a 1959 incident in which a US fighter jet taking off from the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa crashed into an elementary school, killing 17 and injuring over 200.
• A landslide in Hokkaido left a set of railroad tracks on the JR Sekisho Line hanging—literally—in the air.

SOMEBODY CALL GUINNESS

• Plumbing new depths, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology said its deep-sea scientific drilling vessel, the Chikyu, managed to bore some 7,740 meters below the ocean surface, a new world record for this type of drilling.
• Actor Koji Yakusho, star of such Hollywood films as Memoirs of a Geisha and Babel, was among 674 individuals and 20 groups who received spring decorations from the Japanese government. The 56-year-old was one of 25 people to get the Medal with Purple Ribbon, given for contributions to the arts, academia and sport.

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