FIFA, the world’s soccer governing organization, ruled that North Korea’s home qualifier against Japan will not be played in Pyongyang, but in a closed stadium at a neutral venue. The decision not to play in NK was made as punishment for crowd violence at matches against Bahrain and Iran in Pyongyang last month.

The Japanese side welcomed the decision and expressed a desire to play the match in Malaysia. Japan does not want to play the game in China, due to the anti-Japanese atmosphere that was ignited by disputes over Japanese textbooks, territorial disputes, and other disagreements between the two countries.

Some in the West think it’s no longer appropriate to refer to China as a Communist country now that they have instituted free market reforms.

It’s true they may no longer have a true Communist economic system, but old ways die hard. Philip P. Pan in the Washington Post reports that President Hu Jintao has emerged as a hardline ideologue in his third year on the job. China has resumed purging professors who criticize the government and is requiring university students to take more classes on Communist theory.

One passage in the article was particularly revealing:

Nothing more needs to be said, does it?

China is claiming that Japan broke a “gentlemen’s agreement” reached 20 years ago under which the Japanese prime minister was not to visit Yasukuni Shrine.

The deal was allegedly reached in 1985 after then-prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone made an official visit to the shrine. Japan, however, is denying that such an agreement ever existed.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone denied that there was any such informal agreement between Japan and China.

There’s good news and there’s bad news for Chad Rowan, AKA Akebono, the most dominant sumo wrestler of his day. The good news is that he finally found a sport in which he can compete since his retirement from sumo. The bad news is that the sport is professional wrestling.

As we explained in January, Akebono was one of the most important figures in the sport’s 2,000-year history. A native Hawaiian, he was the first foreign-born rikishi to be promoted to the rank of yokuzuna, or grand champion. In addition to being a champion in the dohyo, or sumo ring, a yokozuna has to exemplify the character and personality traits the sport’s elders and fans demand.

Akebono was a winner on both counts. His rise from a novice to become the sport’s only yokuzuna took just 30 tournaments—the fastest in history. He won 11 tournaments, the 7th highest total ever at the time of his retirement. He also was enthusiastically accepted by Japanese fans for his demeanor, a qualification just as important as his fighting skills.

After retiring from sumo, he inexplicably decided to become a K-1 fighter. One can only imagine the Sumo Association’s shock and dismay on hearing the news. It did not turn out to be a happy decision for the fighter, either. In six straight matches, Akebono was handed his lunch by his opponents, some of whom were lightly regarded in K-1 circles. His matches seldom lasted more than a couple of minutes.

Then the SmackDown! Xprofessional wrestling show made its way to Japan this February. Akebono attended and was invited into the ring by one of the wrestlers, Big Show. The two shook hands and exchanged pleasantries before Akebono left. But Akebono didn’t leave it there. In a story familiar to anyone who has ever been a 10-year-old boy, there was a report that SmackDown’s announcer “tracked Big Show down backstage and told him word out of Japan was that Akebono wanted to face Show at WrestleMania 21 on April 3 in Los Angeles.”

Big Show accepted the challenge and the match was arranged. It was to be a sumo style match, which naturally gave Akebono an advantage. Perhaps the organizers did not want Akebono to flop as badly in professional wrestling as he did in K-1. Another possibility was suggested by wrestling commentator NormanB: “What’s going to happen: Akebono wins, because celebrity pseudo-wrestlers NEVER lose to sports entertainers. Examples: Lawrence Taylor, Jay Leno, David Arquette, Mr. T, Kevin Greene…”

During a weigh-in that must have used cattle scales, Akebono showed up at 504 pounds while the seven-foot-tall Big Show tipped the scales at a mere 493. The Big Show has a sense of humor about his size. He told an interviewer, “We have to take these small commuter planes, and I feel like I’m wearing the plane, not sitting in it.”

The interviewer asked him if professional wrestling was fake, recalling that another wrestler once told him the moves were choreographed but the pain was real. Here’s Big Show’s answer:

Who is this Big Show? His real name is Paul Wight, and he played basketball at Wichita State University. I found some biographical information on the Web that I’m going to let you have straight, no chaser:

Once, Akebono was the most respected member of a 2,000-year-old tradition, a record holder, and a true pioneer. A little more than a decade later, he’s challenging Big Show to a match in WrestleMania 21. The result? Big Show briefly picked up Akebono up off his feet, but after one minute and two seconds, Akebono shoved his opponent out of the ring. A victor again, though this time it was probably scripted. And I’m sure the pain was real.

Wrestling fans were not impressed. I leave you with the verdict of another commentator, “Judge David Packard”:

Read all about how it was made here.

Source: Boing Boing

Here is an innovative desk (links to Japanese page) that’s the perfect thing for couch potatos and people who wish to use their laptop without getting out of bed.

The Gorone desk (gorone is a Japanese word that means to “lie down and take a nap”) easily adjusts to a variety of different sitting and reclining positions.

Price: 4,980 yen

Source: Akihabara News

Police have arrested a 39-year-old man for forcing his seven-year-old daughter to perform obscene acts on him so he could film them and send the images to a friend.

The man used a mobile phone camera to film the scenes, which he sent to another man he met through a child porn site on the Internet.

It’s official—the political winds in China have now changed direction.

For nearly a month, the government tacitly encouraged and abetted the anti-Japanese demonstrations that raged across the country. Fueled by anti-Japanese propaganda in the media and the culture at large, the demonstrators were awarded official approval and provided with such amenities as professionally printed signs and bottled water on street corners. The police escorted the protesters down the streets and then stood by and watched as they damaged private property and injured Japanese citizens.

Now, however, the government has thought better of its actions. Officials have urged the protestors to “show their patriotism” in other ways, such as studying or working hard. The Public Security Ministry warned people against participating in other demonstrations. As this AP article in the Washington Post describes, authorities have detained 42 for “disturbing social order”, and 16 of those were formally arrested.

Also, Kyodo reports that the Peoples’ Daily is calling on citizens not to boycott Japanese products. The newspaper says that the economies of the two countries are so closely connected that a boycott would wind up hurting the Chinese as well.

Finally, the latest developments have a decidedly sinister cast. The International Herald Tribune carried an article by Joseph Kahn in the New York Times that begins:

The editorial in the state-run Liberation Daily of Shanghai implied that the protests were used either by antigovernment groups for their own purposes or by some ruling party members in an internal political conflict. This marks a change from previous media comments that characterized the demonstrations as a spontaneous popular uprising.

Kahn’s article quotes one source as saying the editorial is reminiscent of a People’s Daily editorial in 1989 when the pro-democracy demonstrations were about to begin. Kahn notes the earlier editorial provided evidence of a power struggle in the party.

What’s the reason for the about-face? It’s apparent even to the Socialist Worker:

It should be apparent by now that the reason the Japanese government remained calm in the face of the hysteria is that they knew events would unfold in this way. They know that the Chinese government is afraid of its own citizens and would have to stop what they helped start before events got out of hand.

How typical of the mass media that they didn’t, or couldn’t, see beyond the immediate spectacle of turmoil in the streets to realize that when the Chinese government postured against the Japanese, they showed that their reach exceeds their grasp.

The sakura zensen, or cherry blossom front, indicating the leading edge of blossoming cherry trees when the weather warms in the spring, has reached the northernmost areas of the country. Happy picnickers are taking advantage of the pleasant temperatures to bring bento boxed lunches to cherry-viewing parties in the parks of…Seoul? South Korea? Where just two weeks ago demonstrators were launching flaming arrows at the Japanese embassy?

Yes, they have hanami in Seoul, reports Masataka Harada, Korean correspondent for the Nishi-Nippon Shimbun. As they do with all things Japanese, Korean attitudes toward the cherry trees run the gamut from hatred to love. Some consider cherries a disturbing legacy of the Japanese colonial era, while others look at them and see that the Japanese empire also left behind some beauty.

Most of the cherry trees in Korea were planted during the Japanese occupation. After the country was liberated, the Koreans chopped almost all of them down in a “felling campaign”. Linguist Iksop Lee, writing in The Korean Language, witnessed this activity:

The Korean antipathy toward cherry trees changed, Harada reports, after the spread of the theory that Cheju Island was the origin of one of the more popular varieties cultivated for viewing. This led to the resumption of cherry planting in the country in the 1980s.

Harada was invited to a hanami in Seoul this year, at which everyone ate bento lunches of tonkasu, a word derived from the Japanese tonkatsu, or pork cutlets. This is not the usual Japanese fare for picnics beneath the cherry trees, but both the food and its name originated in Japan, so perhaps it was natural for the Koreans to combine it with a Japanese activity. The Japanese, after all, have a custom of eating chicken on Christmas, though chicken is not associated with Christmas dinners in the West. It seems to be used as a substitute for turkey, which is not often eaten in Japan.

The correspondent heard a conversation during the picnic that summed up for him the all the elements of current Korean attitudes toward things Japanese. Korean pop singer Ryu Si Won has just released his first single in Japan, and the song’s title is Sakura. While some Koreans at the party thought it was disgraceful that Ryu would release a song with a Japanese title, others chose to overlook it, saying, “Business is business”.

Harada concludes that Japanese-Korean relations are just like the weather in Seoul these days—three cold days alternating with four warm days.

Doctors in Thailand removed 50 maggots from the ears of an 84-year-old man who went to the hospital complaining of itching.

Doctors kept the man in the hospital for observation in case more eggs hatch.

Police have arrested a 22-year-old woman in Tokyo after she attacked an elderly woman who criticized her for putting on makeup on a subway platform.

According to police, the younger woman grabbed the elder by her shoulders and shook her, which caused the older woman to stumble against the train that was arriving at the time. The older woman suffered head and chest injuries.

Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Firearms and even ammunition are strictly controlled, and private ownership of handguns is virtually unheard of.

This means there should be no gun crime in Japan, right? Well. . . If you are a gangster you really don’t care what the law says, which was proven when two men where gunned down Monday at a “family restaurant” in Chiba prefecture.

Police suspect that the two men are gangsters who got into a dispute with a rival group at the restaurant.

For all the fuss that South Korea makes about Japan coming to terms with its past, it’s ironic that the country should be embroiled in a controversy fueled by certain segments of society who want to cover up an aspect of national history they’d rather ignore: Kim Il-sung’s role in the resistance movement during the period of Japanese colonization.

As this article in the International Herald Tribune explains, Kang Man Gil, the head of a government committee preparing for the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, answered a reporter’s question by stating:

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Some people don’t see it that way, however. the Free Citizens’ Alliance of Korea shot back:

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On the one extreme, people consider him a war criminal who had nothing to do with establishing the independence of what they consider the only legitimate country on the Korean Peninsula. The North Korean propagandists take care of the other extreme by making some outrageous claims: that Kim liberated the nation by himself, that he turned pine cones into hand grenades, and that he took his troops across a river using a tree leaf he turned into a boat.

There’s got to be a happy and historically accurate medium in there somewhere.

Here’s a random question: North Korea is one of world’s largest manufacturers and exporters of the date rape drug, and they also manufacture and export illegal amphetamines to Japan. What are they bringing back on those cargo ships? If the North Korean propaganda ministry is sitting around coming up with stories about Kim Il-sung turning pine cones into hand grenades and tree leaves into boats, the government’s got to be supplying them with reefer.

I can’t believe they could come up with that stuff and expect people to believe it if they were sober.

Takayuki Oka, a technician employed by the Tochigi Prefectural Government, is known as a hard and serious worker. That is why is co-workers were shocked when he was arrested wearing a miniskirt for flashing a young woman in a laundromat.

According to police, Oka was waiting at a laundromat dressed in women’s clothing when a 25-year-old woman came in. At that point he raised his miniskirt to expose himself to the women.

Japan’s Social Insurance Agency is going after English-language teaching companies, suspecting them of failing to enroll their full-time foreign workers in mandatory national pension and health insurance schemes. Nova, Japan’s largest English school chain, may end up having to pay billions in back payments.

The issue came to the attention of investigators after a union filed a complaint. According to a union official, “The purpose of this action is not to punish the companies but to make sure that the people who work for these companies are getting adequate health care. It is expensive; it doesn’t offer the coverage it should, but it is better than not having it at all.”

For as much as the Japanese love to organize and conduct international exchange activities, homestays, and programs for studying abroad, they sure are squeamish and short-sighted about the inevitable result of these activities—borderless romance.

That’s the story from the Daily Mainichi, who passes along a report from the weekly Shukan Gendai that officials at the Aichi World Expo are beside themselves trying to prevent nature from taking its course along the boulevard of international amity. Apparently, there was criticism in some quarters about the opportunities participants took for cross-cultural exchange at the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 and the Tsukuba Science Expo in 1985.

Short of issuing chastity belts, how are they trying to keep things platonic?

Really, if I saw someone who inspired me to learn about life in another part of the globe, an etiquette manual and reminders about cultural differences wouldn’t prevent me from probing the possibilities of the situation. And if someone were to caution me about cultural differences, I’d be inspired to explore just how deep cultural differences can go. Not that far, I’d wager.

As it turns out, Expo staffers and I have a lot in common. The Shukan Gendai reports that Eastern European women in particular are on the lookout for Japanese boyfriends to show them the sites on their days off. They also confirm the old saw that opposites attract by telling us that men from the Middle East and women from South America are getting along famously. Heck, if I were from Saudi Arabia, intercultural harmony would trump cultural differences every time once I’d seen the samba.

It’s ironic, but the two kanji used to write the name of Aichi Prefecture mean “love” and “to know”. So how come the folks running the show in Aichi are the last to know?

Writing on the Foreigner Japan website, Darren Armstrong has one of those articles that reminds me of Halley’s Comet–here it comes again. Armstrong is a beginning student of Japanese and he invites us to laugh with him in his struggles to master what someone a few generations ago called the devil’s tongue. As with Halley’s Comet, the appearance of articles such as this is almost periodic.

He starts out this way:

“As a novice student studying Japanese, I have some advice for anybody interested in participating in this admirable intellectual and cultural exchange; mo ii yo (forget it).”

And he finishes this way:

“Now at least I know when I try these phrases out on the natives they look at me strangely because what I say is strange, it’s not how I say it.”

Sorry, Darren. It is the way you say it. Mo ii yo is the way women talk.

I can sympathize to an extent, because we’ve all been there–but only to an extent. Japanese may require more time than many other languages, but people can learn it. To do so requires an open mind about how language works and a willingness to go with the flow. It also requires sheer rote memorization. That last one is not very exciting, but there you are.

Surprising to me is the reaction of some foreigners to my language ability. One doctor was astonished that I could read a Japanese newspaper. I explained to him that’s it’s a body of knowledge, just like he had to deal with in medical school. I’m sure that required a lot of memorization, too. I got the same reaction from an old junior high school friend who wound up with a doctorate in electrical engineering and now does classified work involving satellite guidance systems. I was dumbfounded–he was impressed with my body of knowledge?

Darren also says:

“Personally, I don’t put too much stock in learning Japanese by textbooks and tapes.”

If you’re not going to use the essential tools for beginning students, Darren, maybe you should forget about it after all.

Emily Parker has a revealing article in the Far Eastern Economic Review about the effect that Sino-Japanese tensions have had on Japanese companies in China in the past and could have in the future.

Parker describes how Chinese “pride”, a willingness to believe anything negative about Japan, double standards for Japanese companies, and the Chinese media and government have combined to deal a blow to Japanese businesses.

The most instructive example may be that of Matsushita Electric Industrial. The company sold four cell phone models with software that displayed “roc” (Republic of China) when users called Taiwan. For this politically incorrect behavior, the Chinese government banned Matsushita from selling cell phones in China for a year.

Did Matsushita deserve it? The company recalled all the phones using this software and published apologies in the People’s Daily and 29 other newspapers. Matsushita also had worked hard to be a good corporate citizen, helping to develop the Chinese electronics inudstry. When other companies pulled out of China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Matsushita stayed and allowed one of its plants to be used to demonstrate that foreign investors were sticking with the country. Finally, it turned out that not only Matsushita’s phones, but those of most of the foreign companies using GSM, the global system for mobile communications, also displayed “roc” for calls to Taiwan–but only Matsushita’s products were banned.

Why was the harsh treatment meted out to Matsushita despite its efforts to maintain good relations with the Chinese and the presence of other foreign companies committing the same offense? Considering that the ban was put in place near the anniversary of Japan’s wartime surrender and after a month-long media barrage dealing with Japanese war crimes, both Japanese and Chinese observers thought Matsushita’s nationality was the reason.

Parker also points out how popular Chinese web sites fan the flames. She quotes this post:

It bears repeating. No apology or behavior will mollify people in thrall to their emotions.

Here is a site by a South African furniture craftsman who claims that Japanese carpentry tools are the only way to go.

Those of us who live in Kyushu are very aware of the close ties that have existed since ancient times between Kyushu, the Korean Peninsula, China, and Okinawa. The Asian continent is close; flights from Fukuoka to Seoul or Shanghai are shorter than the flight to Tokyo.

It would be difficult to overstate the role of porcelain and ceramics in Kyushu’s culture and economy, and this prominence is due in large part to Korean ceramists, particularly Ri Sampei, or Li Sampyong in Korean. Li arrived in Japan in 1598, brought over by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He discovered kaolin deposits in Arita, Saga Prefecture, enabling him to produce the porcelain made in Korea at the time. This caused a revolution in Japanese ceramics and turned Arita in a major porcelain and ceramics production area, which it remains today.

In addition to style and material, the Koreans also brought with them new kiln designs that gave them the ability to create more sophisticated pieces. This and more is described in Robert Yellin’s article in the Japan Times on the Korean ceramists in Kyushu and an exhibition of their work now underway at the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan) until the first week of June.

I live in Arita and can see exhibits like this all the time, so I can promise you it would definitely be worth the trip to the museum if you’re in Tokyo during the exhibit’s run. Don’t be surprised if you develop a greater appreciation for Japanese ceramics, even if your is interest is minimal now.