Random Japan

 WUTHERING HEIGHTS

 

• Tamae Watanabe, a 73-year-old who broke her back in 2005, became the oldest woman to scale Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. (Or, for fans of Monty Python, “The mountain with the biggest tits in the world.”)
• For the first time since stats were kept in 1988, the number of cellphone subscriptions in Japan is greater than the population of the country at 128,205,000, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has revealed.
• Many teachers at Japanese junior high schools are reportedly shakin’ all over since the education ministry made dance compulsory, with hip hop among the options. “Some of the teachers faced with the prospect of busting their moves in front of classes full of skeptical 12- to 14-year-olds are getting nervous,” said a report on The Asahi Shimbun website.
• Masaru Shishido, a 43-year-old actor who formerly played a superhero in the Super Sentai series on TV, opened a bar called Crystal Sky in Tachikawa where he has his waitresses dress like characters from the show and he “insists they call him Taicho (captain of the squad).”

stats

• 1,228 Remains of unidentified Japanese soldiers killed in World War II that were laid to rest in Tokyo’s Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, mostly from Iwo Jima, the Solomon Islands and Indonesia
• 356,632 Total number of war dead now enshrined at Chidorigafuchi cemetery
• 1,238 Soaplands in Japan, according to a 2011 police white paper, 10 fewer than in 2006
• 5 million Tons of debris in the Pacific Ocean initially generated by the March 2011 tsunami, according to Japanese guesstimates
• 1.5 million Tons of garbage and waste still floating after much of it already sank

A GUY’S GOTTA EAT

 

• Ousted Olympus CEO Michael Woodford is asking for $60 million in a UK court over his dismissal by the camera maker after he brought up some pretty major financial irregularities at the company.
• Thieves made off with a dozen samurai swords worth some ¥15 million from an antique store in Osaka.
  A Japanese mini-submarine sunk in Australia’s Sydney Harbor after attacking some Allied warships moored there in 1942 is now opened to curious divers, after both governments gave the OK.
• Nikon was under fire after cancelling a planned photo exhibition by a Japan-based Korean photographer focusing on Japan’s use of wartime “sex slaves.” The camera company wouldn’t cite any specific reasons for pulling the plug but did say it had gotten “complaints by mail and telephone.”
• “Is it all right for a large corporation like Nikon to permit such a wimpy reaction?” asked one outraged journalist, who called the move “Nikon’s self-censorship.”
• Hu Deping, son of Chinese reformist Hu Yaobang and a politician himself, scrapped his plans to come to Japan to promote a TV documentary “featuring secret episodes of friendship between Japan and China” that he helped produce. Rising tensions over disputed islands, Uyghurs, etc., were the likely culprit.
• Slumping Yakult Swallows slugger Wladimir Balentien was issued a “stiff warning” by the ballclub and sent down to the minors after updating his Twitter account during a 10-0 loss to the Seibu Lions.