March 2010
15 posts
Unhappily occupied →
I freely admit that I’ve tended to think of the US occupation of Japan as having been a fairly cordial affair, with the military and population getting on, largely, pretty well. It’s not a period the Japanese media touches on much, except for documentaries that deal with stuff like high-level negotiations between GCHQ and the nascent postwar government.
It seems, partly, that this...
“Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time”
– Alan Moore in Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories (via thedaytheytriedtokillme)
Reading list
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Boneshaker - Cherie Priest
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard - Chip Heath and Dan Heath
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer - Neal Stephenson
さよなら絶望先生（1） - 久米田 康治
Say again? →
Chunichi Dragons pitcher Maximo Nelson was arrested at Naha airport on February 26 on suspicion of having a round of live ammunition in his luggage (whether the suspicion refers to its nature or existence is unclear; presumably the former).
He has now been released and won’t be prosecuted due to lack of evidence.
So (and here we return to the question of nature versus existence) did the...
Sekuhara, pawahara, akahara →
Latest in the “-hara” family of Japanese abbreviations for various types of harassment is akahara, standing for academic harassment. In the case in question, a professor gave one of his graduate school students the nickname 脂肪肝 (“fatty liver”), wrapped ethernet cables around his neck, hid his PC and cellphone, and — this one will shock you to the core — forcibly...
Viacom makes itself look extremely daft →
Turns out Viacom, which is suing YouTube for allowing supposedly illegal uploads of its content, had itself employed marketing agencies to upload clips to promote its shows. In effect, Viacom is suing YouTube partly to get it to take down stuff that Viacom itself posted. In other news, Viacom is changing its corporate slogan to “Litigious. Morons.(tm)”.
3.14: White Day --> Pi Day →
For reasons that should now be abundantly obvious from the format used to express the fourteenth of March in the headline, there are moves afoot to designate White Day “Pi(e) Day”. Actually, not all the reasons are abundantly obvious; another factor is Pi’s unendingness (my brain is failing to supply the correct term for this), which has been pressganged into symbolising eternal...
Local voting rights: If you insist... →
Hatoyama, as ever on the back foot, says that he won’t push during this Diet session to pass a bill giving foreign permanent residents the right to vote in local elections.
This issue makes me uncomfortable. A fellow Englishman, one Alan Higgs, may have been the first foreigner in Japan to sue the government for not letting him vote (or rather the mental distress he suffered as a result),...
“All Nippon Airways (ANA) — which has the same problem — has begun sewing...”
– Japan Airlines faces boom in black-market demand for stewardess uniforms - Times Online
Transforming badgers →
Another excellent post in Pink Tentacle’s series on Japanese urban legends. This time, the focus is on the Meiji era. Badgers transforming into phantom trains? Electric power cables insulated with virgins’ blood? The Tentacle giveth.