Ignoring Asia: Random Japan

Thursday, July 19, 2012

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

A newly released poll found that66 percent of Taiwanese people feel ties with Japan have “deepened” since the March 11 disaster.
At the same time, 51 percent said they “plan to refrain from traveling to Japan for the time being.”
An investigation by officials in Saitama uncovered 1,257 cases of welfare fraud in 2011, worth a total of ¥610 million.
A newly unveiled supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US has supplanted a Japanese machine as the world’s fastest. The new record holder, named Sequoia, can process 16.324 petaflops of data. (One petaflop is the equivalent of 1 quadrillion operations per second. Please don’t ask us how many zeros that is.)

stats

180,000Number of ayu sweetfish spotted in the Tama River in the spring of 1983, according to a TMG-funded science institute
12,000,000Number of ayu spotted this spring thanks to improved anti-pollution efforts, according to the institute
¥6 billionAmount of overseas development aid pledged by Japan during the years 2013-2015
10,000Number of personnel the government will send abroad during that time to help developing countries make the “transition to a green economy”

Police officials in Tokyo say Chinese diplomats asked them to cover up the arrest of a Beijing man who allegedly destroyed a commemorative plaque attached to a cherry tree at Yasukuni Shrine. The suspected vandal, who works at a botanical garden in China, told the cops he “could not stand the cherry tree being treated badly by the plaque,” which was donated by a military group before World War II.
A Chinese man was arrested for his role in a scam that involved using tiny wireless earphones to help compatriots pass the notoriously difficult Japanese drivers license test. Suspicions were raised after one examinee scored 97 percent on the test despite having minimal Japanese skills.
Police in Fukuoka busted five Chinese men for using a computer virus to steal the passwords of online bank accounts, then withdrawing money from the accounts via ATMs. The scheme netted “tens of millions of yen.”
Two Japanese men in Kanagawa were arrested for filching designs for automobile engine parts from a local firm and passing them along to a Chinese rival.