Herro Flom Japan

Don't know how it got there, but it sure livened things up yesterday.

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This is pretty old news by now, but I just found out about it. I don't spend much time surfing websites about Japan. When I still lived in the US, I hardly ever followed local news either. I've always been a Time/Newsweek/US News & World Report kinda guy.

For years and years, the English language website for Mainichi News had a section called WaiWai. It translated salacious and bizarre articles from the dregs of Japanese tabloids into English. As far as I know, the authors of WaiWai never made anything up–they left that to the authors of the original articles about such nonsense like a restaurant where you could have sex with a pig then have it cooked for you.

A Japanese person could read the original articles in their original context and considering the source and content easily see through the bullshit, similar to how an American could tell that an article from the National Inquirer or Weekly World News about scientists planning to blow up the moon is most likely not true. But foreigners have a propensity to believe absolutely anything they read about Japan, up to and including the thousands upon thousands of used panty vending machines on every street corner here that don't f**king exist.

Apparently it was the "You screw it we cook it" restaurant story that caught the attention of Japanese bloggers and 2channers back in May. They got fired up about WaiWai sullying the reputation of their beloved country overseas, and from there the mass media caught wind and ran with it.

As reported in Japan Probe, the Mainichi acted all shocked and stunned, as if they had no idea WaiWai even existed, closed down the site, apologized in Japanese and English, and even went so far as to punish the employees responsible for the column. The chief editor, an Australian named Ryann Connell, has become the outraged public's whipping boy and is currently suspended for three months from his job and sequestered in his home with police protection after receiving a number of death threats, as reported in the Australian media.

Here's my take on the whole situation. WaiWai should have been shut down years ago. Republishing tabloid articles under the Mainichi name lent credibility to the articles that were most likely complete fabrications. I used to visit the site a few times a year simply because the articles were painful to read, which is kind of fun in an intellectually masochistic kind of way. They painted a picture of Japan very different from the Japan I know from living here. A news outlet like the Mainichi shouldn't be in the business of publishing stories in a column where a small percentage of them are true and the rest are tabloid trash without any kind of disclaimer attached to the unsourced articles. In the end, the company got what it deserved–a whole lot of bad publicity and a mass exodus of their advertising sponsors.

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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.

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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 

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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.

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