Herro Flom Japan

There's a chain mail message making the rounds in Japan claiming that a three year old girl with leukemia at the Showa University Hospital in Tokyo can't receive a life-saving operation because there isn't enough type B rh negative blood. Both the Japan Red Cross and the hospital have been receiving so many calls that they both put up notices on their web sites saying that the mail is bogus. What's more, the hospital's message says that even if the child was a patient, they'd be legally restricted from revealing that information.

When I was growing up, all we ever did was make crank calls and tape record them. It never made headlines, but we laughed ourselves silly listening to them over and over for months.

Link

Here's the original heart-wrenching message:

>>私の知人の三歳の子が急性リンパ性白血病になってしまって、昭和医大に入院してるそうです！
ＲＨマイナスＢ型の血液不足にて手術受けれない状態で、誰かＲＨマイナスＢ型の方いませんか！？
是非協力おねがいします！
１人の幼い子の命がかかっていて、とても危険な状態だそうです！
最寄りの献血センターで献血できるようなので、是非是非協力おねがいします！
分からないことあればいつでも連絡ください！
よろしくおねがいします！！
私の携帯
090-××××-××××
友達にまわしまくってもらって結構です。
是非そうしてください！
なかなかない血液みたいで、私だけの人脈だと間に合わないのでおねがいします！
〇〇　〇〇子!

What I don't get is why a message like this serves as a call to arms to hundreds of people willing to help, but if you stand a 80 year old woman on crowded train, everyone who's sitting down ignores her.

Supposedly similar posts:

• Pinhead posts death threat for LOLs, gets arrested
• Judges Refuse DiMA’s Request to Reconsider Major Flaws in Internet Radio Royalty Decision
• Okinawa is mighty pissed off
• Save Net Radio Before May 15
• Pennsylvania Police Find Middle School Principal Naked, Watching Gay Porn In Office

Somebody better get fired over this. In happened in of all places, Dallas.

Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.

Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.

Link 

Supposedly similar posts:

• Burma: Thousands dead in massacre of the monks dumped in the jungle
• We do crazy better than any other country on earth
• Pinhead posts death threat for LOLs, gets arrested
• Pennsylvania Police Find Middle School Principal Naked, Watching Gay Porn In Office
• US Marines in Okinawa still at it

This is getting ridiculous. The first incident was intolerable, what are we up to now, four in the past month?

Details are sketchy, but a Philippine woman living in Okinawa claims that she was attacked by two US marines in a hotel on the night of the 17th. Police are investigating, and the two marines have been identified and detained.

Meanwhile, since February 20th military personnel and their family members (over 55,000 people in total) stationed in Okinawa and at Iwakuni near Hiroshima have been forbidden to leave their bases until further notice. I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever, and I completely understand the indignation felt by the citizens of Okinawa. The military either needs make a very, very serious effort to get its act together or leave Okinawa entirely, preferably the latter. At this point, it seems like the entire country is against them being there.

Link

Update: Looks like Asahi got some of the facts wrong. Today it's being reported that the local police are seeking an arrest warrant for only one person in the US Army, and it's being investigated as a rape instead of an attack.

And we all know that the US military isn't going to pull up stakes and leave, no matter how many crimes are committed by its members. The common perception among citizens and politicians from Okinawa is that every time someone in the military commits a crime, US officials offer a token response but nothing ever really changes.

Link

This BBC article has a more level-headed report on the latest incident and how the Japanese media is focusing a disproportionate amount of attention lately on crimes committed in Okinawa by members of the US military. For example, here's something I haven't read on any Japanese news site:

Last year just 46 US military personnel were arrested on Okinawa in connection with criminal cases, a tiny proportion of those stationed there, and that figure was less than half the number five years ago.

Supposedly similar posts:

• Okinawa is mighty pissed off
• Another US marine in Okinawa arrested
• Crimes by foreigners on the rise in Japan
• We do crazy better than any other country on earth
• Pinhead posts death threat for LOLs, gets arrested

There are a number of official lists of kanji. I'm not an expert by any means, I'm just going by information gleamed off the net.

• 教育漢字(kyouiku kanji): The 1oo6 characters students must learn by grade 6. Essentially, knowing these characters is a good start, but you're far from finished.
• 当用漢字(touyou kanji): A list of 1850 characters published first in 1946 approved for use in public documents and the media. Many characters that were in use until then were simplified; for example, 學 became 学.
• 常用漢字(jouyou kanji): Last updated in 1981 and the successor of touyou kanji, 1945 characters that basically you ought to know as a literate adult. Used in legal and public documents, newspapers, magazines and broadcast media.
• 新聞漢字表(shimbun kanji hyou): A standard agreed upon among newspapers based on jouyou kanji, but removing some characters and adding others. The link is to a Japanese Wikipedia article, but the explanation and outline that appears there is possibly under copyright and could be deleted from the site in the future.
• 人名用漢字(jin meiyou kanji): Characters approved for use in people's names. As of 2004, when the government had a heck of a time trying to update the list, there are 983 extra characters than can be used in addition to what's already in the jouyou kanji list, or that are variants of jouyou characters, and most of them are really, really hard to read. The only way I'll ever learn them is if I get a chip implanted in my brain someday.

Incidentally, mainland China also simplified their characters sometime after WWII but for obvious reasons they didn't give a rat's ass about how Japan went about doing the same thing, so in many cases the two countries simplified the same characters but in different ways.

Summing up, if you're pretty smart, my guess is that you know around 3,000 characters or more. Multiply that number by a few factors to approximate how many readings you'd need to know for all those characters.

As for me, when reading a novel in Japanese I have to look up an average of five characters per page, and I can get through around 15 pages in 2-3 hours when I'm reading to learn. It's tedious, frustrating, labor intensive, tiring, and makes me feel learning disabled, which is why I avoided serious studying for far too many years.

Supposedly similar posts:

• Bimoji Training for Nintendo DS
• Oh. My. God. (Unbelievably bad kanji tattoos)
• Announcing "The Japlish Podcast"
• Fixed!
• Crazy Japanese podcast

Garrett from Trans Pacific Radio wants me to post this. (You owe me a beer.)

Black Stripe Theater, a team of independent artists, performers and technicians based in Tokyo, will be performing David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross (in English) from Friday Feb. 22 through Sunday Feb. 24 at Theatre Iwato in Shinjuku. Tickets are ￥3,000 for adults, ￥2,500 for students or seniors, or you can contact TPR for a pair of free tickets if you act fast.

Supposedly similar posts:

• Tokyo event: Video Blogging Night and Sanyo Xacti Touch-and-Try