Random Japan

PUPPET MASTER

• The tiff between Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto and the local bunraku community continues. After slashing the annual budget for the city’s puppet-play association by 25 percent, Hashimoto then attended a show and declared that the “staging was unsatisfactory” and “the last scene was plain, and lacked something.” To which one of the performers responded with a classic line: “Mr. Hashimoto says that if we create something interesting, people will come to watch, but I wonder if that’s the right approach to take.”
• The labor ministry is considering a proposal to raise the minimum wage from ¥737 to ¥744. Even if that happens, though, minimum-wage workers in Miyagi and Hokkaido will earn less than welfare recipients.
• The operator of Tokyo Disneyland says the park generated record sales (¥87.46 billion) and profits (¥3.04 billion) in the April-June quarter.

CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS

• A Tokyo man who disappeared for nine years after being found guilty in a 2002 hit-and-run accident resurfaced last month and offered an excuse: “I thought that even if I didn’t appear in court on the sentencing day it would be OK to go later.”
• In deciding not to bring charges against four cops over an incident at a local karaoke bar, police officials in Kanagawa have deemed, somewhat incredibly, that even though the men forced a female colleague to change her clothes in front of them and kiss them, their actions “do not constitute indecent assault or any other sex-related crime.”
• The only foreigner officially certified as a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was found to be living in the US. Tomiko Shoji, an 86-year-old Taiwan native who acquired Japanese citizenship in 1985, currently resides in Ohio.
• In response to “a series of life-threatening accidents involving consumer products and services,” the government has decided to… set up a commission to investigate the issue

OFFICIAL BUSINESS

• The government announced it will introduce a national ID system in which each citizen will be allotted their own individual personal identification number. The scheme’s Japlish moniker—“My Number”—is predictably lame.
• The foreign ministry says it will upgrade its African affairs office into a full-fledged bureau. The office had previously been part of the Middle Eastern and African Affairs Bureau.
• The government-run Japan Finance Corp. announced that the number of loans it’s given out to new businesses has skyrocketed 9.2 percent during the past year. Many of the loans have gone “to establish hair salons and restaurants.”
• The Council on National Strategy, meanwhile, says the keys to revitalizing the Japanese economy by 2020 will be “the fields of energy and environment, medical care and welfare, and agriculture, forestry, and fisheries.”

stats

• 83.5Percent of Japanese men aged 20-24 who drink alcohol, according to the health ministry
• 90.4Percent of Japanese women aged 20-24 who drink booze
• 2,134Number of people who played ukulele simultaneously at an event staged by Guinness World Records in Yokohama last month
• 323.7Weight, in grams, of a record-setting plum grown in Yamanashi