Random Japan

Casey Baseel 

Do you think Walt Disney ever scratched his butt in public?

Sure, it may not be the classiest thing to do, but sometimes when you’ve got an itch, it needs to be scratched right away. It doesn’t make him a monster, it just means, like all of us, he occasionally his base urges won out against social propriety.

Still, it’s a little hard to reconcile the man responsible for Mickey Mouse having an itchy behind. Just like it’s a little shocking to learn that Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, kept a stash of sexy mouse drawings locked in his desk.


In Japan’s sizeable pantheon of beloved comic artists, Tezuka is Zeus. He’s uniformly referred to as Manga no Kami-sama, literally the “God of Manga.” Despite having passed away more than 25 years ago, Tezuka is still so famous and uniformly revered that fans will come to see exhibitions of things as mundane as a desk he worked at.

stats

• 282Money-laundering cases recorded by Japanese authorities in 2013, a record, according to the National Police Agency
• 11Number of children McDonald’s Japan will send to Brazil to escort members of the national soccer team onto the pitch for a World Cup match on June 19
• 74.8Percent of Japanese high school girls who say they use their cellphones while watching TV, according to a survey by Tokyo-based IT security firm Digital Arts

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

• Cops in Osaka arrested a father and son who spent the last 15 years touring the country with a film projector showing unauthorized screenings of Anpanman flicks to elementary school students.
• German shoppers will get their first taste of Uniqlo early next month when the Japanese retailer debuts a store in Berlin.
• The Cabinet Office says Japan’s population will stay above 100 million—but only if the country “accepts a large number of immigrants and the birthrate improves.”
• Officials at the MPD—along with counterparts in Ibaraki, Gunma, Gifu and Fukuoka—say they’ve deployed a facial recognition system featuring a camera that “can instantly spot a particular person in a crowd.”

All That Money Was For My Private Use
That's Why I Used It For My Campaign

800 Million And A Lucky Charm
What Else Would The Money Be Used For?

Terror And Missiles
Come To Your Mobile Phone

TPP copyright talks could shut the book on otaku fan fiction

March 29, 2014
By SATSUKI FUJITA/ Staff Writer

Tokyo company employee Tatsuya Usami is worried about developments in talks over copyright protection in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade initiative.

The 23-year-old is not concerned that the trade agreement may affect his job, but rather, his hobby.

Usami, an amateur manga artist, sells “dojinshi,” self-published fan fiction that borrows characters from popular manga, anime, video games and other sources.

Like many of his peers in fan fiction, Usami does not obtain permission from the copyright owner over the use of the characters--in his case, ones from a video game.