shirokuma2011 comments

Twitter user @onda_natsue said the arrest showed how unsophisticated Japanese culture is.

Or rather, how unsophisticated contemporary Japanese culture can be. It wasn't always this way.

What, no shaved head this time??

And "Dr." Nishikawa can just shut her pie-hole, sheesh... kettle kettle, black black...

Well, they were selling them at a gallery, so perhaps they thought the work would be classified as "art" and allowed to slip in under the regulatory radar...

Still, sometimes less is more...

At my income level, the real connoisseurship lies in being able to tell a decent 120-yen-a-plate sushi place from a dangerously iffy one.

But I'm still looking forward to seeing "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," which is finally showing in Tokyo. A shokunin in the best sense of the word.

You can buy at Costco, prices a little better than in the overpriced gourmet supermarkets like Seijo Ishii and The Garden, and The Meat Guy has a few varieties at even more reasonable prices.

I saw a similar drill in progress during a rare trip to Ueno Zoo a couple of years ago. They were chasing down a "panda."

Not to mention all the "who are you??" questions you'll have to fudge your way through the whole time you're there.

That hotel seriously needs to be brought into the 21st century--Prince Hotels built a luxurious, modern tower just a few blocks away but has allowed this former flagship to languish, and it shows in the facilities and the food service practices.

It's amazing, really, that 23 of the top 25-selling singles in Japan in 2012, as measured by Oricon, were either from AKB48 or one of their affiliated groups, or from one Johnny's band or another.

Clearly he wasn't a rocket scientist, but a tire scientist. Still, it's great to see 脱サラ (datsu-sara) stories like this once in a while.

He'll get jail time just by virtue of his continued assertions of innocence (or conversely, his refusal to admit guilt). You know, all through both Olympics and other domestic and international competitions, on the mat and in interviews, he always came across as such a paragon of gentlemanly character and virtue. The disappointment alone will nudge the court toward the top end of the sentencing request.

And it comes in a bizarre, much-ridiculed shade of bright pink, too! For any Mary Kay reps out there, I guess...

Hopefully his son Shichinosuke will take over the name at some point!!

Cross dresser -- (generally) heterosexual men (and women, too, I suppose) who are into wearing clothes of the opposite sex

Drag queen -- (generally) gay men who wear women's clothes, but take it to a more dramatic level, so to speak, often as part of a performance.

Transvestite -- generic term that has somewhat fallen out of use, not to be confused with transgender, which only incidentally has to do with clothing choices.

Sounds like this place is going after the whole, ahem, rainbow of possibilities. They might do good business--I imagine there must be a fair number of secret cross-dressing salaryman types who've been looking for an excuse to dress up in a public venue.

Ahh, the flexibility of youth...

Who else but Rocket News would use a phrase like "tear ~ a new one" in an alleged "news" report...

One issue in America, I imagine, is that with the average home now having at least one toilet for every bedroom, and often more, it's just not affordable to outfit every one of them with a washlet. Maybe they can reserve it for the "special" guest bathroom or master bath... high-end European manufacturers are already getting in the game in the U.S. (and in Europe, of course, they've had "analog" bidets for a century or two).

@Alladin:

This goes to show everyone that the Japanese people no longer have good imagination skills when trying to create something new. To come up with an idea to make a national stadium look like a bike helmet. Come on now!!!! Can't the Japanese come up with a better design!!! I guess not!!!!!

The structure, designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid

"Herb" may be the slang term for these so-called loophole drugs, but they are clearly not herbs as the article would seem to imply. If anything, they are more often powerful synthetics adulterated with what may or may not be some herbal substance. To refer to them as "the herbs" only perpetuates the myth of their relative harmlessness.

I like his work (check out the "KIZUNA" graphic), too bad his representative/agent didn't bother disclosing his own business relationship with the artist in this effusive article.

Apparently she attempted to board the elevator when the doors opened, but fell down as the elevator started to move, before the doors were completely closed, and thus was trapped half-in, half-out and between the bottom of the doorway and the top of the compartment.

Not sure what discussing the matter with local residents will accomplish, short of delaying the bomb's safe disposal... are there people living near the runway??

Kuriyama, who has described Otani as having the potential to “be another Darvish”, said the youngster needed time to develop his talents.

Meaning, of course, the youngster needs time to have his arm completely worn out so he'll be less valuable to the MLB seven or eight years from now.

The NYT's David Pogue raved about the hardware, but pretty much ripped into the software too--and he's the one writing one of the first third-party manuals for Microsoft 8...

He can always come back to Japan if it doesn't work out, but he won't be able to play here for a couple of years after due to restrictions established for just this kind of situation. Glad to hear he's determined to stay the course, though!!

Something tells me hoarding has yet to be recognized as a real psychological problem here in Japan...

If all you're buying are paperbacks, I'd recommend going with the Kindle, or at least the Kindle app on iPad (I have both, but once I got an iPad, my Kindle has seen very little use...). And apparently with the new Kindle app for Japan, you can synch all your purchases, from both Amazon U.S. and Japan (assuming you are registered with both.).

At this point I buy books in print form only if I need them for business or reference (it's really hard to flip through an e-book like you would a dictionary or other reference), or if they're special books that I particularly want to keep in hardback (certain nonfiction, biographies, collections, special editions, etc.).

Of course if you're interested in all of Amazon's other proprietary digital content, you'll probably want the Fire, but rights restrictions will severely limit what U.S. content you can access if you live in Japan.

Tanaka's "ties" to mobsters are rumored to be more extensive, and recent, than he's letting on, including the use of mobster connections to squash reports of an illicit affair (par for the course, I suppose). This is what comes from putting politicians, rather than field-specific professionals, in charge of government ministries. I don't care how well they're supported by platoons of "professional" bureaucrats, Cabinet ministers should be held to higher standards than the average politician, and at minimum should know something about the work they'll be responsible for supervising.

Old technology--several companies were doing this over PCs 10 or more years ago, but it never took off. Those versions worked kind of like printer ink tanks, with several essential, base compounds in a single, partitioned tank that could be combined for a supposedly limitless number of variations, triggered by software code identifying each scent for mixing...

I don't think they're on to anything significant here.

This reminds me of NTT DoCoMo's almost $10.0 billion investment in AT&T Wireless back in 2001, although that stake brought them less than 20% of the company. In 2004, they pulled out of the investment by selling the stake to Cingular, netting them an investment gain but bringing them no closer to any real business in the U.S.