Random Japan

Here’s how Zen meditation changed Steve Jobs’ life and sparked a design revolution
BUSINESS INSIDER
When Steve Jobs showed up at the San Francisco airport at the age of 19, his parents didn’t recognize him.

Jobs, a Reed College dropout, had just spent a few months in India.

He had gone to meet the region’s contemplative traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism — and the Indian sun had darkened his skin a few shades.

The trip changed him in less obvious ways, too.

Although you couldn’t predict it then, his travels would end up changing the business world.

Back in the Bay Area, Jobs continued to cultivate his meditation practice. He was in the right place at the right time; 1970s San Francisco was where Zen Buddhism first began to flourish on American soil. He met Shunryu Suzuki, author of the groundbreaking “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind,” and sought the teaching of one of Suzuki’s students, Kobun Otogawa.

STATS
6
Asylum seekers who were granted refugee status in Japan in 2013, according to the justice ministry


¥67.9 billion
Value of unused beer coupons held by Japanese households, according to liquor industry groups


60
Ratio of foreign tourists who visit Tokyo, Mt Fuji, Kyoto and Osaka during their trips to Japan

POLITICS, SCHMOLITICS

Just 3.4 percent of Japanese Twitter users posted election-related tweets during campaigning for the Diet elections last month.

Meanwhile, political operatives say the low rate of internet use in rural areas caused them to abandon online campaigns targeting the regions.

High school administrators say they’re trying to get “largely apathetic young people” interested in politics by holding mock elections and using newspapers as teaching tools.

A news organization survey has found that 49 percent of voters oppose the government’s new secrecy law and 51 percent are against the idea of Japan exercising the right to collective defense.

Just What Japan Needs

More Textbook Censorship

These Birds Didn't Come

Home To Roost

How Inhuman Of You

Giving Birth While Handcuffed

Ex-reporter seeks damages over magazine's 'comfort women' articles

TOKYO (Kyodo)
A former Asahi Shimbun newspaper reporter sued a magazine publisher and a university professor on Friday, claiming that their criticism of his decades-old report on a former Korean "comfort woman" triggered threats and other serious violations of his rights.

In a suit filed with the Tokyo District Court, Takashi Uemura demanded that Bungeishunju Ltd., which publishes the weekly Shukan Bunshun, and Tsutomu Nishioka, a professor at Tokyo Christian University in Chiba Prefecture, to pay a total of 16.5 million yen in damages and issue apologies.

Uemura was involved in the newspaper's reporting in 1991 of accounts provided by a South Korean woman who had worked at a brothel providing sex for Japanese soldiers during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.