Japanese Fish Predicts Earthquakes?
If it’s well known that animals have a heightened perception of developing weather patterns, this would be no exception, via motherboard.tv:
Japan is bracing itself for bad times after scores of the usually rare, giant Oarfish have washed ashore and been caught in coastal fisherman’s nets.The sightings started after the ‘quake in Chile and the 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan. The rash of tectonic shifting around the Pacific “Ring of Fire” is causing concern that Japan is next, and these gigantor fish aren’t helping.
The Oarfish is traditionally known as a messenger fish from the sea gods, and it’s tidings are usually grim. The fish can grow up to five metres in length and usually found at depths of 1, 000 ft. Long and slender with a dorsal fin that runs the…
The World’s Top Inventor: Dr. NakaMats
Yoshiro “Dr. NakaMats” Nakamatsu is very well known in Japan. With more than 3300 patents he is the world record holder of patents (more than Thomas Edison, he boasts). He is about to celebrate his 80th birthday, but feels younger than ever with an enormous energy. In fact he is certain that he will live to at least 144 years old. But how will Dr. NakaMats accomplish this? The documentary film “The Invention of Dr. NakaMats” follows this extraordinary Japanese celebrity on his mission to elongate life. All the while he is creating new inventions (he says he invented floppy discs, the CD, the DVD, the karaoke machine, and lots more. Is he for real?
U.S. Government Told Japan: Buy Our Bonds Or We Shut Down Toyota
Max Keiser talks with Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt, about the Fed, the debt and Obama’s budget.
Crazy Japanese Game Show
Crazy Japanese game show: Try to stack as much food as possible on your animal!
Japanese Baby Simulator
Another in the long line of creepily amazing products from Japan — a glowing, sweating, simulated baby (with a large, cartoonish, orb-like head). Want something to love that you can also unplug? This is it.
Human Bones Could Reveal Truth of Japan’s ‘Unit 731′ Experiments
Julian Ryall writes in the Telegraph:
The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.
Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews. The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.
Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit. A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.
Amazing Rice Field Art In Japan
This story from Hemmy.net is one of the first sites I found taking about this. Since then, the Guardian reported on it. Via Hemmy.net:
Every year, farmers in the rural town Inakadate, Japan create rice field art by using red rice in with their regular rice in special patterns. A few others fields in rural Japan also followed the trend of this beautiful rice field art.
Thousands Protest in Tokyo Against U.S. Military Presence in Japan
From The Daily Mail:
Thousands of protesters from across Japan marched today in Tokyo to protest against U.S. military presence on Okinawa, while a Cabinet minister said she would fight to get rid of a marine base Washington considers crucial.
Some 47,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, with more than half on the southern island of Okinawa.
Residents have complained for years about noise, pollution and crime around the bases.
Japan and the U.S. signed a pact in 2006 that called for the realignment of American troops in the country and for a Marine base on the island to be moved to a less populated area.
[Read more at The Daily Mail]
Double Atomic Bomb Survivor Dies
And you thought you had a bad week…Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only human ever to experience two atomic bombings, has died at age 93:
The only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atom bomb. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 190 miles [away], which suffered the second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.
Anti-Whaling Vessel Damaged in a Collision at Sea
Hard to buy this kind of publicity, sometimes you just have to go for it:
via NY TImes
An antiwhaling group’s high-speed boat and a Japanese whaler reported colliding at sea on Wednesday, with each blaming the other.
Video taken from the deck of the Japanese ship, Shonan Maru 2, showed the collision with the Ady Gil, a sleek black trimaran belonging to a group that aggressively confronts the Japanese whaling fleet each year as it plies the waters south of Australia and New Zealand.
The video shows a frothy wake coming from the stern of the Ady Gil, although it is unclear whether the trimaran was moving. The Shonan Maru 2 was directing a water cannon at the Ady Gil before and during the collision, which is clearly seen on the video, and the nose of the Ady Gil was sheared off.
The Institute of Cetacean Research, which overseas Japan’s whaling program, said the Ady Gil had rapidly approached the Shonan Maru despite repeated warnings to keep away, and suddenly slowed down in the Japanese ship’s path. The Shonan Maru could not avoid hitting the front of the Ady Gil, the institute said in a statement.
But the group that owns the Ady Gil, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said the strike was deliberate. Its Australian director, Jeff Hansen, said in a telephone interview that the trimaran “was pretty much at a full stop” and that the Japanese ship deliberately ran into it. He said the trimaran had not sunk, “but it’s in two pieces, and we’re trying to salvage what we can.” One crew member was reported injured.
A companion vessel, the Bob Barker, was used to rescue the crew, Mr. Hansen said. That boat, a former Norwegian whaling ship, was named after the former American game show host who donated $5 million to the group.
The Ady Gil, a former racing boat capable of speeds up to 57 miles an hour, was added to the Sea Shepherd fleet last October. At the time, the group’s founder, Paul Watson, said he would use the boat “to intercept and physically block the harpoon ships from illegally slaughtering whales.”
The Japanese Whaling Association calls Sea Shepherd “a terrorist group.”
New Year’s: Enter The Namahage
We discussed Krampus two weeks ago. The New Year’s equivalent is Japan’s Namahage, another colorful folk tradition that’s all about scarring kids for life. From Wikipedia:
Namahage is a Japanese ritual which is observed…in northern Honshū, Japan.
On New Year’s Eve, a group of young men dressed up as fierce bogeymen, Namahage, visit each house in the village, shouting: “any misbehaving kids live here?” They then scare children, telling them not to be lazy or cry, though little children often do burst into tears.Then the parents will assure the Namahage that there is no bad child in their house, and give food or traditional alcoholic beverages to the demons.
Below, some kids get a visit from the Namahage:
Japan Embroiled in Whaling Wars at New Level of Hostility
From The Times:
Japanese sailors in the Antarctic Southern Ocean fired water cannons at self-styled environmental “pirates”, in the annual high-risk struggle over Tokyo’s controversial whale hunt.
Sea Shepherd, the radical environment group which in the past has engaged in violent clashes with the whaling fleet, reported that it was fired upon with water cannons mounted on the Shonan Maru No 2, a ship which is part of the Japanese whaling fleet. The group’s founder, Paul Watson, said that his ship was then pursued for two hours on Monday by the Shonan Maru, apparently in effort to keep the environmentalists away from the main whaling vessels.
“As long as they’re following us, they can relay our position to the whaling fleet so they can move if we’re approaching them,” Captain Watson said, from…
Japanese Bug Fights
San Francisco’s legendary RE/SEARCH Publications, headed by V.Vale, tipped us off to this site in their newsletter, saying “this might be the best web site i’ve seen in awhile.” Here’s a taste:
Lessons From the Japanese: Time to Stop Borrowing Money and Start Printing It
From Truthout:
Miners used to keep canaries in coal mines as an early warning device. If the air was so bad that it killed the canary, the miners would soon be next. Japan may be the canary for the out-of-control deficit spending policies now being pursued in the United States and the United Kingdom. In a November 1 article in the Daily Telegraph called “It Is Japan We Should Be Worrying About, Not America,” international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:
“Japan is drifting helplessly towards a dramatic fiscal crisis. For 20 years the world’s second-largest economy has been … feeding its addiction to Keynesian deficit spending – and allowing it to push public debt beyond the point of no return. The rocketing cost of insuring against the bankruptcy of the Japanese state…
Japan Creates Legal Waist Limit
Are you too fat for Japan? The Global Post writes on the nation’s new national waist limits: 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women.
In the world’s slimmest industrialized nation, those whose bellies expand beyond the legal limit may be subject to therapy and exercise classes (no jail time as of now).
The goal of the new regulations is to head off metabolic syndrome, or “metabo,” a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Companies are offering discounted gym memberships and developing diet plans for workers, and citizens are buying new metabo-fighting products, such as a $1,400 machine called the Joba that imitates a bucking bronco.
This Mob Is Big in Japan
Jake Adelstein in the Washington Post:
I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan.
I came to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living in a Zen Buddhist temple, and then became the first U.S. citizen hired as a regular staff writer for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese. If you know anything about Japan, you’ll realize how bizarre this is — a gaijin, or foreigner, covering Japanese cops. When I started the beat in the…
