The school claims the rooms are part of an anti-smoking program the school is doing. The rooms are equipt with ashtrays, however teachers discipline or counsel students whenever evidence of smoking is found.

The school also made the claim that they provided the rooms because they have students who are over twenty years old, and fear a forest fire if the students smoke outdoors.

Commentary:

Although it is true that there are students over the age of twenty, the number of such students is in the teens while the total number of students is about 230. Four “smoking education rooms” are set up in the boys’ dorms.

The small number of students old enough to smoke doesn’t seem to justify the number of smoking areas provided, nor does the fact that these rooms were in areas accessible to students of any age. The idea that students over twenty could legally smoke at the school also contradicts the idea that evidence of smoking would lead to teacher student counseling sessions, considering that the culprits who left ashes in the ashtrays could very well have been the students who were of age.

There has also been news of parents sending their students the cigarettes they’d been smoking. There is no way to buy cigarettes on the school grounds, including the teacher only areas.

This all smells like another case of society giving up on these kids. I would be less disappointed with the school if they argued that because these kids are mostly former dropouts, the school has to make attendance and education a priority over the smoking problem. In a sense, saying that the most important thing was to get these kids in class, and while emphasizing getting them onto the right track, they’d work on getting them to quit smoking.

The school chose however to put a less believable spin on the story bringing the whole school and all its policies under suspicion. If the parents of some students are also aware and accepting of the smoking room policies, then this is a failure of all the adult parties involved, and all the more reason that the school should be forthcoming and tell the truth about everything going on.

If it is indeed, as the worst case situation would suggest, a case of the school taking the easy way out letting the kids have their way (being unable to properly discipline them on the smoking issue), then the school should at least come clean and the authorities should step up to provide the students with the type of discipline and education they need.

Eight students were caught by staff members at the store after stealing several expensive brand bags and wallets. The school apologized to the duty free shop from which everything was stolen and the items in question were returned. However, upon returning to Japan, the school found that thirteen other students had also shoplifted from duty free shops.

Someone associated with the duty-free shop that was targeted was quoted as saying that this was the first time they had ever fallen victim to such a large, organized “group shoplifting”.

Because of the involvement of baseball players, the school is required to file a report with their prefectural baseball federation. When members of a high school baseball team do something wrong, the team or individual members may be suspended or disciplined. This often just leads to a whole lot of cover-ups and tricky wording on disciplinary paperwork.

Some cover-ups also occur just to protect the name of the school and applicant numbers for the following year. It’s high school application time now for most private high schools in Japan so a big controversy could really hurt the application rates (and pocketbook of the school). Even if the schools fill the necessary spots for the following year, application fees are a big source of easy money for many private schools in Japan.

Kudos to whoever blew the whistle, and I hope for the sake of these kids that the hammer comes down on them. It may seem a little cruel to say that, but the education system in Japan right now offers no tangible way for teachers to discipline students.

… and what does it say to the students when a school decides to cover-up what they did?

• It’s OK to lie and cover things up
• What you did isn’t really that bad
• If this happens again, we’ll cover that up too so that our original cover-up stays covered

So how will the school be disciplined for the cover-up? A slight drop in admissions depending on how well they keep this story out of mainstream media, and the baseball team will be forced to sit out the winter (least important in baseball) season.

I’m sure we’ll have some more official details in the morning. This is currently the biggest story in the news right now.

A side note to the story (and before the Popons affair, the story I was thinking about writing) is that pretty much every channel has been trying to hype this story as a case of terrorism. They’d been using the term “renzoku tero” which would translate as “serial terrorism”.

Unsurprisingly, no one I talked to thought the stabbing murders of two former Pension officials would qualify as “serial terrorism”.

Mainichi.jp recently falsely accused a man of murder.

Pension Bureau official Kenji Yoshihara was stabbed to death on November 18. His wife, Yasuko, was also critically injured in the attack. The attack is believed to be related to the murders of another former Pension Bureau official, Takehiko Yamaguchi and his wife, Michiko.

A man using the nickname “Popons”, updated Yoshihara’s Wikipedia entry to show that he had been murdered. Because Wikipedia uses UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) to denote the time of edits on entries, a Mainichi.jp reporter mistakenly believed that the edit of the entry had been made before the actual time of the murder.

No fact checks were done, and an article accusing Popons of the murder went to print, it was even featured on one nationally televised morning news program.

When the truth was known, Mainichi.jp quickly deleted the article and online evidence, and went about business as usual. The ever vigilant blogging (or rather bulletin board commenting) community in Japan kept the matter open.

Popons went to his local police station to apologize for any inconvenience he’d caused (although he’d done nothing wrong), and explain the situation to the authorities.

Mainichi remained silent until today, issuing a very short (and very hard to find) correction which can be seen in Japanese here.

The correction, which should be an apology, fails to mention Popons or anyone who was personally injured by the mistake of the Mainichi.jp staff.

As to their mistake, all that is written is that (my translation) “We reported that there was there was an entry on the internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia which seemed to announce the incident beforehand, however the time of the edit was not before the incident, it was after.”

No admission of wrong doing, no mention of Popons, and no one taking responsibility for such a careless breech of journalistic standards.

Does Mainichi (one of the three largest news media outlets in Japan) even realize that it accused an innocent citizen of murder in their national paper, and on national television?

I think a stronger apology is needed, and specific mention of Popons who was a completely innocent victim of Mainichi’s gaffe.

Yasuko is still hospitalized. Also murdered was Takehiko Yamaguchi who was also an administrative vice health minister at the Pension Bureau, and his wife Michiko.
Wednesday morning’s Mainichi print newspaper reported that Yoshihara had been described as “assassinated” in an update to his Wikipedia page six hours before the attack even took place.

Mainichi must have thought they had quite a scoop there to have put it into the morning news and on their online edition without a ton of fact checking.
Mainichi splashed headlines with accusations of murder against “Popons”, the person who updated the Wikipedia site.

If Popons had really marked the people as “assassinated” six hours before they were even dead, certainly Mainichi would have had a scoop on their hands. The problem is that Wikipedia is set to UTC time, not Japan time. Thus, the timing of edits is in UTC, not Japan Standard time. Popons actually edited the Wikipedia entry.

When Popons found out he was being accused and that a big deal was being made of his editing the Wikipedia entry, he went to his local police station and apologized for causing all the trouble.

Needless to say, no one really thought Popons should have had to apologize for anything. The real problem is Mainichi, whoever wrote the article, and whoever did the fact checking (if they do that kind of thing at Mainichi at all).

As far as I know Mainichi has yet to apologize to anyone or even write a retraction.
On top of all this, many Japanese morning news shows feature the morning headlines… so Popons was in the end accused on one nationally televised morning news show (which must have been the only news show to have gone on the air without checking the internet for the reliability of the Popons story).

A common theme in the Japanese Twitter world, BBSs, and blogs can be summed up by saying,
“Poor Popons.”

Another big topic on the net was just how large the word Popons was written. Mainichi must have thought it had the scoop of the year with this one!

This particular article ends with the claim that the police are hot on the trail of a fleeing “Popons”. Completely false.

1. Car
2. Job
3. Educational Background
4. Watch
5. Qualifications and Licenses
6. Suit
7. Where they shop or eat
8. Where they live
9. Beautiful wife or girlfriend
10. Shoes

Number five is probably unique to Japanese because of all the testing here. There is a test or qualification that people must pass in order to claim proficiency in something. There are tests for language proficiency (and one for non-Japanese to prove proficiency in Japanese called the Japanese Language Proficiency Test). There are also tests to show proficiency in various computer programs, word processing, Excel, and others. Basically a Japanese resume lists these qualifications and the levels achieved, for example Level 2 of the German Proficiency exam and Level 3 of French.

If you haven’t been to Japan, I hope this provides food for thought or questions or comments about the culture as a whole. Table manners is a fine window to look through if you want to see what your neighbors hold important.

Some of them may surprise you, some of them may make you say, “I don’t see anything wrong with that!” Keep in mind these are things that are considered wrong in Japanese table manners so there are probably even things that people in Japan do that are not on this list, but would be considered discretions in other countries!

So here we go with the list then taken from this Goo Ranking (link is in Japanese).

1. Eating while reading a newspaper or magazine
2. Saving the thing you like the best for last.
3. Licking the cellophane wrapping of a cake.
4. Talking with your mouth full.
5. Pouring miso soup over rice and eating it.
6. Cracking a raw egg directly over rice (without putting into a separate dish first).
7. Eating with elbows on the table.
8. Wandering Chopsticks. (Thinking about what to eat next while holding your chopstics over the food.)
9. Pushing things you don’t like over to the side.
10. Smelling everything first.
11. Pulling the paper at the bottom of sponge cake off with your teeth.
12. Not eating “triangularly”… meaning not eating things in turns… meaning eating all of one thing and not eating everything together in turns.
13. Licking remaining sauce off the plate.
14. Dipping bread into the remaining jam or butter container to scoop out the last of it.
15. Licking your chopsticks.
16. Putting too much spice or pepper onto your food.
17. Eating ramen directly from the pot.
18. Going to the bathroom during a meal.
19. Stuffing a lot of food into your mouth.
20. Moving your mouth toward the chopsticks or spoon (as opposed to properly bringing the utensil to your mouth).
21. Setting your chopsticks directly on the table.
22. Eating noisily.
23. Noisily slurping spaghetti. (Note that eating ramen noisily is supposedly OK.)
24. Putting spices on food before even tasting it.
25. Leaving the crusts of bread or pizza.
26. Chewing with your mouth open.
27. Putting mayonnaise on everything.
28. Making noise with your knife while cutting.
29. Passing food from person to person using chopsticks.
30. Sucking on a toothpick while eating.

I could comment on a lot of the things here, but I’d like to point out number 27… people who have never been to Japan will be very surprised when they get here and see just how much mayonnaise is used here. I’ve even seen people drink it straight from the squeeze bottle!

Number 29 is one of the rules about Japanese table manners that I was warned about before coming to Japan… but notice that it’s way down at number 29. Also notice that a lot of the things that would be considered cardinal sins in the United States are pretty low down on the list, things like numbers 19, 22, and 26.

Lastly, please notice number 3 up there. There are a half a zillion cake shops in Japan and they make all these little individually wrapped, overpriced little cakes that people bring when they visit friends or want to celebrate something. These cakes are all wrapped in a little bit of cellophane, which, through no fault of its own tends to accumulate a little bit of icing and deliciousness. The result of course is a whole lot of cellophane licking, although I’ve also seen people who wanted to be a little more couth about it swipe off the goodness with a finger and then lick that.

There are some cynical ways to view this news. I don’t which, if any, of the following are true, but these are my cynical knee jerk thoughts:

• They never really liked each other and were just formed to get more people to watch badminton.
• Prettier or sexier pairs are being formed to further increase Badminton’s sex appeal.
• One or both are actually going to quit badminton (Reiko Shiota has already commented that she wanted to leave the sport to become an announcer or appear on tv.)
• Somebody’s getting married. (Note that except in rare cases like Ryoko Tamura who became Ryoko Tani who is nicknamed Yawara-chan, married female athletes leave the sport… although on the good side, this trend is decreasing. Consider also Kimiko Date’s recent comeback.)
• Just trying to keep badminton in the news.

Newzjapan is in favor of winning over looking good (ref: White Men Can’t Jump) so we don’t really mind that the pair broke up IF it means the formation of a stronger team… but as you can tell by the above comments, we are cynical of the whole affair.

But here’s a video of Reiko Shiota and Kumiko Ogura making a tv commercial:

Here is part of their last press conference in which Reiko Shiota and Kumiko Ogura talk about going separate ways.

News media are reporting that Hashimoto actually (horrors) responded to them as if they were adults.

At one point a male student of a single mother expressed concern about the possibility of a decrease in public help for students attending private high schools to which Hashimoto responded that if someone chooses to go to a good school, it’ll cost. (I think the implication here is that the kid didn’t have to choose to go to as expensive a private school as he did.)

An exchange with a female student who commented that only a limited number of students can attend public school ended in tears.

A translation of the exchange is as follows:

Hashimoto: Only compulsory education is guaranteed. The wall starts at high school level.

Student: What happens to kids that fall (stumble) there?

Hashimoto: At the end, there’s guaranteed public support (welfare).

In the heat of the discussion Hashimoto said that high school is not structured so that just anyone can go. The girl said he shouldn’t just say it straight out like that and burst out crying.

Just for a little background information, compulsory education in Japan goes up to junior high school. There are a limited number of public high schools in each area. Students that don’t test well or get recommended into public high schools either stop going to school or go to private (more expensive than public) schools. This is a part of the reason that public schools are considered better than private in Japan. The best kids can get a cheaper education in public schools… this is not as cut and dry as it sounds however because several private schools are actually better than surrounding public schools. Some private schools also act as feeder schools for good universities and thus attract some students who could have otherwise been accepted to public schools.

Although Hashimoto’s response was a little callous, he’s making a good point. The education system is not designed to guarantee senior high school education to every citizen. There is a strong push for everyone to complete 8th grade and graduate from the compulsory junior high school level. After that, you’re on your own.

I don’t agree with a lot (most?) of Hashimoto’s education policies, but I don’t know if he’s in a position to guarantee a public high school education to all of the young people in Osaka. It seems that the girl and the boy who spoke before here were more concerned with money than education.

Hashimoto continued to lecture the students on things when other students commented that it’s not fair. He said that in today’s world people have to take responsibility for themselves because no one is going to save them.

When the kids yelled out that that was wrong, Hashimoto responded by saying that that’s the way it is in Japan now and they could either work hard to change the country or go somewhere else.

Most of the responses on the net side with Hashimoto on this issue. (Even though Hashimoto is not exactly popular with the internet crowd.) Some point out that extremely poor families have financial aid options which the girl asking the main questions seemed not to know, implying of course that she was not poor enough for financial aid to have been an option.

(picture from original Japanese story found here)

In reference to the WBC coaching controversy in Japan, Ichiro was quoted as saying that it doesn’t even seem like Japan is serious about fielding their strongest team.

He was also quoted saying that if Japan tries to make the WBC into a chance for “revenge for the Olympics” then we won’t all be on the same page. (Probably referring to the fact that the members of the WBC team and the Olympic team won’t all be the same… including a different coach.)

Japan won the first WBC in 2006 with Sadaharu Oh as the manager. He indicated that he felt Senichi Hoshino, current senior director of the Hanshin Tigers should succeed him.

Hoshino, who coached the Japanese team at the Beijing Olympics, has refused thus far to officially accept or reject the position causing the current state of limbo to which Ichiro refers above. Most insiders think that he is leaning strongly toward refusing the appointment.