Random Japan

HUH?

• Osaka’s last remaining streetcar company introduced a tram line whose color scheme is meant to evoke “traditional Japanese aesthetic philosophy.”
• Lawmakers have enacted measures to combat a fraud scheme known as oshigai, which involves bullying unsuspecting people into selling “precious metal jewelry and other items for unreasonably low prices.”
• Police in Fukuoka say an employee at a work center for people with mental disabilities put a disabled man in a chair, placed a cardboard target above his head, and “threw an awl from about three meters away like he was playing darts.”
• Headline of the Week: “Researchers Find Chemical in Male Mouse Urine that Attracts Females” (via Mainichi Japan)

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stats

• 1,117,592Number of counterfeit goods seized by Japanese customs officials in 2012—a record—according to the finance ministry
• 94Percent of those goods that originated in China
• ¥900 millionAmount of money raised for quake reconstruction projects via a micro-funding plan set up by Tokyo-based Music Securities Inc.

Number 2

Gets The Number 6

Abe Vows

I'll Continue To Be A Dope

Mister Donut's Water

Isn't Tasty 

Anti-nuclear activists protest government eviction plan

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

About 300 people on March 22 protested the government's plan to remove three tents that have served as a rallying point for anti-nuclear demonstrations in front of the industry ministry in Tokyo.

The tents were set up on the grounds of the ministry’s office building in the Kasumigaseki district on Sept. 11, 2011, six months after the Great East Japan Earthquake set off the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

“It's wrong for the government to force us to vacate without reflecting on the Fukushima plant accident,” one of the protesters said near the tents.

Another shouted: “Remove nuclear power plants first.”