Daijoboots comments

Our ocean is dying Mr Prime Minister and when the ocean dies, we will follow. We cannot live on this planet with a dead ocean.

Because of a statistically insignificant whaling catch? Are these people serious? They can't be. I don't think they are trying to be. How do they survive on this planet without logic or reason?

Hopefully this warning by the eco-terrorists constitutes a threat and submarines jointly developed by Aus and Japan are used to blow holes in the SS, or Sinking Ship as they also like to be called.

Ahh way to tarnish the word Australia with your self-satisfying emotional blah blah.

Anyone notice that the poorly constructed notice re: entry was shown when she came back a few days later after causing trouble the first time?

A notice of those who disagree being unable to enter is wrong and poorly played, but what's this -

museum's barring of "foreign-looking visitors"

She was there days before!!!! Causing trouble. Not hard to spot her again down there. The sign doesn't say anything about appearance either.

Typical twisting of fact and playing of pretty much any card available to get that emotion going.

Yep some nice very saves by the Mexican goalkeeper, especially the one that denied Neymar's header by centimetres, and some "lucky" saves by being in the right place and the Brazilian attack sending it straight at him. But even then he kept them out, as opposed to a certain keeper who has soy sauce fingers and lets goals in as if to say, "I'll shoyu the money."

i can make comparisons all day! In other words get real!

No in other words you're taking issue with comments about a fat monster and taking them personally.

Why are Japanese so obsessed with how others see them and their creations?

Thank you for your grand extrapolation.

Who cares if the monster's a little 'fat' -- he's a MONSTER.

Who happens to be fatter than the original.

As a guy who runs a company, the endless number of meaningless holidays in Japan is getting to be a problem.

Meaningless as I just want to work all the time, or as in I can't fathom the part that mountains have and continue to play in Japan?

Japanese holidays tend to be arbitrary affairs named after random things like the ocean

How did that thing come to surround the archipelago anyway?

Once Mountain Day is enacted, June will become the only month in Japan without an official public day off.

Well something needs to be done about this.

The troubled Canadian pop prince

Surely this is irrelevant if he was visiting the shrine in a personal capacity.

There may be areas where the line has been paved for the bus to run, I took the BRT from Kesennuma to Sakari about a year ago so can't remember exactly, but from memory there were sections of new single lane road which were exclusively for the BRT, whether that was over the line or next to it or both...I think it was both.

The BRT bus is much cheaper to run than the train and has been up for over a year now. Rebuilding the Ofunato line is gonna require 40 billion yen or so, and that's just to get it up and going again.

I didn't see anything about when or if that one is being rebuilt.

JR may restore it and hand operation over to Sanriku.

Does anyone know the status of the Sakari / Kesennuma section?

The BRT bus is still running and will be for some time at least; rebuilding of the Ofunato line there hasn't started.

Which assets please?

Are you serious? Pick an invasion of your choice and then label opposition by residents as "insurgents".

@Daijoboots both yokozuna were injured, i'll bet next basho it will be not so easy for kakuryu.

@Dennis Bauer yes there will be no need for special favours then either.

Brute force has been winning conflicts since conflicts began.

And let's remember that the U.S. has and continues to use it in spades or insinuate it's eventual use to ensure they get the assets they want.

after he crashed through his opponents with a 14-1 record at the most recent tournament

While I welcome his promotion, his bouts with fellow yokozuna Mongolians Hakuho and Harumafuji were hardly honest bouts, with both of the yokozuna clearly not giving 100 percent against Kakuryu, nor with their bouts with ozeki Kotoshogiku in order to hand the Japanese ozeki his kachikoshi before he faced Kakuryu on the last day.

Don't beat yourself up about it. They both do weird stuff. Easy mistake to make.

Yeah. Still that morning haze had a role to play. I notice smithinjapan took issue with my comment when it was unintentionally re: Gaga, and I can imagine his reaction would be quite different re: Pamyu Pamyu.

Both are superstars of the universe, eh smithyboy?

Are the cherry blossoms in Okinawa of the somei yoshino variety? They're the real cherry blossoms.

Somei yoshino opened up in Kochi, Shikoku, last week. That's Japan.

She had a concert in Sydney yesterday, full venue of about 2,000 people. Told the crowd: "I'm koala!"

Sorry this was about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and not Lady Gaga. They are, um, different people.

She had a concert in Sydney yesterday, full venue of about 2,000 people. Told the crowd: "I'm koala!"

Congrats to Kakuryu on his first championship and impending promotion to yokozuna. Wouldn't have been possible without the non-efforts of his compatriots Hakuho and Harumafuji in their bouts with him though!

It is believed that the "Japanese Only" sign was directed at Lee Tadanari, a Japanese born Japanese player (4th generation Japanese of Korean descent)...................................................................

By who? The banner was in a corridor within the stadium which led to the "sacred ground" for some half-wit supporters at one end of the field. It was not facing the ground.

NHK News7 spent a good five minutes on this tonight. The actions of a few morons have produced a lot of good vis-a-vis anti-racism in Japan, much to their chagrin I imagine.

However, public broadcaster NHK reported it was Inose himself who reached out to the Tokuda family, and had asked for 100 million yen before the election.

Wait, I've read many expert comments by people here who go on and on about how NHK is nothing more than a government mouthpiece. Why would they report such damaging information about the then Tokyo governor? Why?

Here's what I said on Jan 27 after the New Year tournament finished.

Kotooshu missed his chance to return to ozeki by getting less than 10 wins. Finished on 8-7 so could have slumped down to komusubi for next tournament. Wonder how long he will linger around at sekiwake before retiring and heading up a stable.

Tearful press conference showed his passion for the sport. At 202 cm no one's gonna make fun of those man tears.

Good that he won at least one championship, remember he came close to a second but lost in the playoff to the sport's ultimate king, Asashoryu.

Energy imports surged after the 2011 Fukushima crisis forced the shutdown of Japan's nuclear reactors, which once supplied a third of the nation's power.

Oh we're getting along just fine without nuclear power aren't we. Oh by the way my dreamy green renewable energy source plan will be practical and sufficient in about 10,000 years, so just hang on a little bit more with that bleeding financial red.

Only thing that is killing the tohoku region is the goverment neglect.

Sorry how is "the government" neglecting people?

You want to know what a major issue is that has contributed to people still living in pre-fab tiny shacks, the slow rebuilding of towns etc. and gets very little mention in the English press? THE LOCAL PEOPLE CANNOT AGREE ON ANYTHING. Opinion is divided on whether to rebuild on higher ground further away from where the heart of the town was, sometimes in seperate areas, concerns about the community falling apart further still. It goes on and on. AND "THE GOVERNMENT" HAS WAITED. The prefectural governments are now going ahead with a 9.9m high sea wall which will total 400 km in length. After this is done there will be no more "where is this going to be?", and it can just be done closer to the shore and you don't have to move and raise millions of tons of earth.

Alas, the people protest about the wall.

Nature originally rejected her research and was quite critical about it, as I recall

From the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog (link above): More seriously, Nature has some heavy-duty explaining to do. An earlier version of the Obokata et al. paper was rejected, but then the problem-beset version published in late January was finally accepted. I'd like to see Nature, while protecting the identity of the referees, disclose (on their website) all of the editorial correspondence (redacted appropriately) and every version of the submitted papers, so we can all judge whether or not the decision by Nature to accept the papers was appropriate based on the information available to them at the time.

Also, for a paper and claim of the magnitude it was, Riken officials should have done their utmost to ensure every word and image of the paper was sound - i.e., they should go down with Ms. Obokata.

Exactly. The Nobel-prize winning president of RIKEN also should have read it. Off with his head.

The net result is that far from being a rock star in the scientific community here in Japan, she is going to be thrown under a bus for the greater good (and rightly so). Moreover, the people in charge of her who let things get out of hand are also for the high jump

Hear hear. She's the lead author, she can be thrown under the bus.

To put it simply, it seems that Obokata was oversold as something she isn't and RIKEN stuffed up as well.

This is the other way round though. RIKEN suck and so do Nature. The Japanese press only took held of this after it was published. It's not really their job to verify scientific findings or make sure process has been followed.

From the guest post on March 13 in the good link above - a damning assessment by Robert Geller, seismologist at the University of Tokyo.

First, to take a random example, the Obokata et al. article refers to "pasture pipettes" rather than "Pasteur pipettes." The existence of such an obvious error suggests that the nine authors, as well as the referees, editors, and copy editors were all, to put it bluntly, slackers.

and further down

Two co-authors of the Nature article, Masayuki Yamato (Tokyo Women's Medical University) and Charles A. Vacanti (Harvard Medical School) were also external examiners for Obokata's Ph.D. thesis at Waseda University in 2011. It is hard to believe that neither they nor the two internal examiners failed to notice the complete absence of cited references in the introductory chapter to the thesis, which could and should have led to the discovery that it was plagiarized from the National Institutes of Health home page, and should have in turn led to an investigation that might well have uncovered some of the other major problems. In view of these problems it is hard to see how this thesis can, on reexamination, be judged as appropriate justification for award of the Ph.D. degree. One hopes that this is an isolated case rather than the tip of a giant iceberg, but probably every university in Japan, not just Waseda, should conduct a systematic investigation of all of their Ph.D. theses, taking appropriate actions in all cases of large-scale plagiarism or data manipulation. This is obviously something most university administrators would rather not face up to, and I personally hope that a large number of problems are not uncovered, but the health of the scientific enterprise demands integrity.

Let's not forget the whee little bit of plagiarism in her Nature paper and her Waseda doctoral thesis as well now shall we.

they have tried to oversell this research (being gladly assisted by those idiots at NHK

NHK just took her to the cleaners and did a better job of breaking down the press conference held by RIKEN today then some of the commercial channels. All in all some 200 media people at the conference.

It's an embarassing mess and all involved deserve it. Obokata said (via the RIKEN brass) that she doesn't remember where the copied (or at least virtually identical) portion of text came from! What a researcher!