Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on October 2010

WHACK JOBS

• Tokyo’s former chief medical examiner claimed that there are approximately 200 cases of people masturbating themselves to death in Japan each year, with 20 to 30 in Tokyo’s 23 central wards alone.
• In other matters of the heart and hands, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology organized a tennis date for singles looking for a love match. Apparently it’s all “part of a project… to improve the nation through sports.”
• A 33-year-old therapist from Kyoto was crowned champion of the Z-1 Grand Prix floor-wiping competition in Ehime Prefecture. Koichi Fujiwara set a new record of 18.23 seconds pushing a wet rag through a 109-meter-long hallway at the Uwa Rice Museum.
• A computer armed with the “Akara 2010” system beat the top women’s shogi player, Ichiyo Shimizu, in 86 moves in a match staged at the University of Tokyo.

WILD KINGDOM

• Police in Toyama are on the lookout for the nasty pranksters who buried a dog up to its neck on the banks of a canal.
• Two giant panda cubs born at a Wakayama zoo have been named Kaihin and Yohin. Their Chinese characters mean “seashore” and “sunny beach,” respectively.
• Trouble in the ranks. Kiwi Peter Bethune has claimed that the Sea Shepherd conservation group told him to scuttle its own high-tech protest boat after he collided with a Japanese whaling ship “to gain sympathy… and create better TV.” Sea Shepherd head Paul Watson says that it was Bethune’s call to sink the trimaran.
• Over 350 JAL pilots and co-pilots were given empty flight assignment schedules in October, “de facto pink slips” that were designed to get the flyboys to leave the hemorrhaging company.

SMOKE ANOTHER ONE

• Canadian filmmaker Coalhouse Campbell has combined speed and weed, producing a new documentary called Ja Ja Rock’Dem Sock’Dem, which is “about reggae, hockey, Canada and Japan.” This we gotta see.
• Three air traffic controllers in Fukuoka caught flak when it was revealed they had let a couple of junior-high students on a job-shadowing program read instructions over the radio to approaching passenger jets.
• Oops! The Yomiuri television network was left red-faced after airing footage of the wrong man when it was announced that a Japanese scientist had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They showed Kyoto University professor Susumu Kitagawa, but the prize was won by Akira Suzuki and Eiichi Negishi, along with American Richard Heck.
• Japan’s Fast Retailing Group unveiled its first Uniqlo outlet in Taiwan, attracting about 2,500 bargain-hunters on opening day.

ROLLING THE DICE

• Police in Osaka arrested 10 people on suspicion of illegal gambling “at what is believed to be the nation’s largest underground casino.”
• A couple of guys made off with ¥37 million on a motorcycle after robbing a Saitama pachinko prize exchange booth.
• At the request of the Japanese government, a court in Lima sentenced a Peruvian man to eight years in prison for stabbing a Japanese man to death in Gunma Prefecture in 2001.
• A bar owner from Aichi Prefecture was in hot water for registering a bogus marriage between a Japanese man and a Filipina. He also registered the birth of their nonexistent child and pocketed the child allowances.

IT’S ABOUT TIME

• Japanese-American soldiers who fought for the US in World War II were finally granted the Congressional Gold Medal when President Barack Obama signed the necessary legislation in Washington, DC.
• North Korea’s official news agency has reported that the issue of illegal abductions of Japanese has been settled. That’s probably news to the friends and relatives of the still-unaccounted-for abductees.
• The Bangkok Post reports that a lengthy battle over merchandising rights to the character Ultraman will soon wind up in a Tokyo courtroom. The case was initiated in 2006 by a Thai businessman, who claimed he held exclusive rights to Ultraman movies and characters outside of Japan based on a 1976 agreement with the former chairman of Tsuburaya Productions.
• For the first time in ten years, not a single Japanese ballplayer is taking part in the MLB postseason.

NAUGHTY GIRL

• Renho, the half-Taiwanese former TV presenter who is now cabinet minister for administrative reform, got the opposition boys all riled up when she posed—fully clothed—for a Vogue photo shoot in Japan’s parliament building.
• A JAL flight attendant who was arrested for buying illegal drugs from her boyfriend said she did it “because I was insecure about my company’s future, and out of curiosity.”
• Researchers have found what might be extraterrestrial dust particles from the asteroid Itokawa in a sample capsule from the Hayabusa probe, JAXA announced.
• Princess Aiko Update: the previously traumatized only child of Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako took part in her school sports day, folk dancing with partners for eight minutes and running in short-distance sprints and relays.

THAT’S SOME COLD S**T

• The dead body of a woman was found in a freezer at a Gifu training facility of the Nagoya-based “religious corporation” Dotoku Kaikan.
• Searchers have recovered the body of one of three Japanese climbers who went missing after an avalanche struck Mount Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas last month.
• Meanwhile, the body of a 68-year-old Japanese tourist was found floating in a canal near the Mountain Museum in Pokhara, 200 kilometers west of Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka Kathmandu.
• Osaka prosecutors have indicted a 62-year-old Argentinian man for indecent assault for allegedly “wrapping his arms around a hotel employee.” Seems innocent enough to us, but apparently the young woman “was actually rigid with fear, and was unable to resist the obscene behavior.”

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