イリアッド・ジャパン

One of the most dramatic sights in the Otemachi area of Tokyo’s Chiyoda ward is in Sankei Plaza, in front of the headquarters of the Sankei Building Company. It is a massive industrial-style sculpture by the Russian-American artist, Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman (1912-1999). The huge steel complex of bright orange tubes is an organic insect-like structure, 14.2 meters high, called Iliad Japan.

Installed in 1987, it is a conspicuous reminder of the Bubble Era in Japan when big was never big or bright enough, and money was there to be exuberantly thrown. Sigh!


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相撲名古屋場所

The troubled sport of sumo lurches from one crisis to the next ahead of the opening of the annual Nagoya tournament this Sunday.

Rocked by revelations of betting scandals and connections with Japan's underworld, the sport is seeking to restore its tarnished reputation beginning with this weekend's basho.

Champion wrester Kotomitsuki and stablemaster Otake have both been fired from the over 1,300 year-old-sport and 18 other wrestlers have been suspended from the upcoming tournament by the Japan Sumo Association (JSA).

Sumo was already a sport in serious decline before the latest scandals broke: allegations of drug use, the hazing death of a young trainee and nagging accusations of bout-rigging that refuse to go away.

The sport is no longer popular with Japan's youth and the best wrestlers now come from Mongolia, including the Yokozuna Hakuho and the now disgraced Asashoryu.

The public's patience with Japan's national sport was finally snapped by the revelations that 50 gangsters from the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest crime syndicate, had obtained front row seats at last year's Nagoya tournament. The plan was to be seen on national television and thus offer support to senior Yakuza members locked up in Japan's prisons.

When national broadcaster NHK threatened to pull the plug on live broadcasts the hide-bound JSA finally had to act to try and clean out the Augean stables. However NHK has made good on its threat and will not show the Nagoya tournament live for the first time in 50 years, opting for a delayed and abbreviated highlights show each day instead, after receiving 1000s of complaints from its viewers.



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アンビカ　インドの食品



In Tokyo needing basmati or jasmine rice, pickled lime uttam, turmeric cream, mustard oil, coconut milk powder? Almost everything Indian culinary requirement is catered for at Ambika, a well-established Indian mini-market in Tokyo’s Taito ward.

Ambika began in 1998 and is now, according to the Ambika website, “Japan’s premier online Indian grocery shop for authentic Indian spices, groceries, juices, wine, ready to eat curry and herbal products” – all imported from India.


As well as the physical premises, Ambika Trading Company runs an online store for Indian food shopping from anywhere in Japan.

Ambika is located in a small street one block east off Route 462 and one block south of Kasuga-dori Road in Tokyo’s Taito ward.




Ambika
3-19-12 Kuramae, Taito-ku, Tokyo 111-0051
111-0051東京都台東区蔵前３－１９－２
Tel 03-5822-6655

Map to Ambika


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菅直人

Japan's new Prime minister, Naoto Kan, came to office after the resignation of his predecessor Yukio Hatoyama early last month, becoming Japan's fifth premier in only four years.

A native of Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Kan studied physics at Tokyo Institute of Technology and has a background in patent law and as a grass-roots activist.


Kan served as Health Minister in a coalition government headed by the LDP in 1996 and is popular for his role in admitting the Japanese government's responsibility for the spread of imported HIV-tainted blood among hemophiliacs in the 1980s.

Kan has led the DPJ before when he stood unsuccessfully against the LDP's Junichiro Koizumi in the 2003 general election, but stepped down in the wake of the unpaid pension contributions scandal sweeping through Japan's lawmakers at the time. Kan is seen as an opponent of Ichiro Ozawa's influence within the DPJ.


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今週の日本

An All-Japanese Mash Up

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一期一会—再见了，日本队

Caijing

Sumo wrestles with illegal betting scandal

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Zentai, la bonne combine

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Last week's Japan news

Japan Statistics

Cases of School Bullying, by year:

1985: 155,000
1993: 22,000
1994: 56,000
2006: 125,000
2008: 85,000

Source: Japan Ministry of Education

Visitors to Japan, 2009:

South Koreans: 1,835,000
Chinese: 1,230,000
Taiwanese: 1,006,700
Americans: 729,000
Hong Kongers: 422,000

Source: Asahi Shinbun

Doctors per 1,000 people

Greece: 5.4
Belgium: 4
Italy: 3.7
France: 3.4
OECD Average: 3.1
UK: 2.5

Japan: 2.1
South Korea: 1.7


Source: OECD

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台東区役所 外人登録

I had to go to the Taito Ward Office this morning to change my gaikokujin torokusho (alien registration card). It was not very pleasant. First I had to pay 600 yen in the automatic photo booth they have there for the requisite photos - money I begrudge for a card I dislike. Then the woman who first attended to me got all hot and bothered when I didn't immediately and succinctly state my business but showed her instead the notice I'd received from the ward office.

"Is this for a change of information on the card?," she asked. I didn't know. I'd simply got a notice asking me to come down and get a new one. It didn't say why.

She exasperatedly motioned for a middle-aged man to attend to me. And, I mean, how busy are these people? It's 8.30 in the morning, there are only about 4 other Taito ward residents along the counter that runs the length of the vast hall that forms the ground floor, while there's a positive army of office staff behind the partition, sitting on their asses at their desks, doing god knows what with Taito ward's tax money.

The middle aged man came up to me - blustery, brusque, and cursed with the profoundly annoying habit of repeating everything he said in Japanese in loud, breathless, urgent, broken English, at least two of three times over in rapid fire succession, like an old-school teacher rousing a slowpoke pupil.

In the midst of all his rhetorical "giddy-up" exhorting, he had failed to check with me what information on the old card was still relevant, and we ended up going back to square one and refilling out the form. “Chekku, chekku, chekku!” he rattled out in bad breath at me the second time.

In spite of my having maintained our stressful "conversation" in close-to-perfect Japanese the whole way through, and written my occupation, address, etc. in kanji, I was still one of the "new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child" who had to be hastened and incited and pidgin-Englished into doing what I had to do. And his attitude had so browned me off, that that's almost how it ended up being: ill-humored gaijin having to be spurred along by industrious, "gambaru"-ing bureaucrat.

I have to go back in two weeks to pick up my card that proves I’m tagged and tolerated. I will go in my best halo this time, I promise.

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狭山事件

In early May, 1963, 16-year-old Yoshie Nakata never returned from her school near Sayama, Saitama Prefecture. The night she went missing a ransom note was delivered to her house.

Her sister delivered the 200,000 yen (about $550 at the time) demanded to the specified location, with police nearby. A man waiting at the spot spoke to her, and then fled. The police never found him.

Three days later, the girl's body was found at a nearby farm. She had been raped before being murdered.

In a panic, the police went into a nearby Buraku community - Japan's outcaste population - in late May and arrested 24-year-old Kazuo Ishikawa on an unrelated charge. Ishikawa, who was illiterate and a Burakumin, denied those and, later, the murder charges.

However, on June 20 after a month in custody he broke and admitted his guilt.

The police had lied to him, telling him that if he confessed he would be released after several years. Moreover, he never had access to a lawyer during his month-long interrogation.

He was instead convicted and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. He remains in prison to this day, still fighting for a retrial.

His cause has been taken up Dowa (Buraku) groups nationwide. The sign above is outside a public housing project in Demachiyanagi, Kyoto, which lies in a dowa community.

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