A recent study by the Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has shown marriages in which the couple is already expecting are currently 26.8% and seem to be on the rise. Some wedding planning companies are saying that number may be as high as 40%. There is a movement to rename the shotgun weddings…
Karaoke shops in Osaka are reporting that their shops are packed with students who are off school (and supposed to be at home studying) for the H1N1 influenza outbreak here. Some of the karaoke shop owners are troubled, saying they are concerned about the flu being passed on at these large gatherings, while other owners…
All schools from kindergarten to college level in Hyogo have been closed for the week. You have to feel bad for the kids who happened to be at schools for which this was just announced. Much of them went to school only to be sent home, and if Hyogo prefecture is trying to hold off…
At least one case (possibly 3 at the time of this writing) cases of H1N1 influenza have been verified in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture. The significance of these cases is that none of the high school students involved have been abroad recently, thus the flu must have come through a source in Japan. (The other cases…
CNN reports that American Poet and University of Wyoming Professor Craig Arnold is missing after setting out alone to climb a volcano known as Kuchinoerabujima. The CNN article above mentions that Arnold was on a fellowship in Japan doing research for a book on volcanoes. Not much is mentioned about Kuchinoerabujima (or Kuchinoerabu Island). The…
Sometimes things happen in movies and everyone in the audience just thinks, “No one would ever do anything like that in real life.” I think this is one of those things that’s hard to believe anyone would ever really do… So here’s the scene… It’s about 7:20am on August 6th in Saga Prefecture. Husband walks…
At about 5:35 pm, in Niigata a snake caused a black out in about 1,190 locations for as long as 2 hours in some places. The snake died of electrocution related injuries. A representative from the Tohoku Electric Company commented that the snake, which had worked its way into a plastic safety covering on the…
I once watched a tv show with “true crime” stories. One of the stories was of a woman who accidentally broke the thin plaster wall between her apartment and her next door neighbor’s. She only broke a little of it, but enough to see how much nicer his apartment was than hers, he had a…
So a kid got a capsule toy out of the vending machine here. The capsules toys are called “gashapon” in Japanese… you can find them everywhere. Some of them have interesting toys or balls, most of them are very disappointing. The kid, 2 years and 10 months old) got a ball out of a machine…
This time they throw in the term “geisha guys” for creditability. Check the article here, entitled: Japan’s ‘geisha guys’ the latest accessory CNN could report on stories about the Prime Minister’s approval rating, the murder of the taxi driver by a U.S. marine, even the murder of the Filipina hostess I wrote about just today…
Granted, some of these cases could be people going to hospitals that did not have the facilities to deal with a particular emergency, but this is a huge number of people being refused. But these are just the EMERGENCY patients! What about the non-emergency cases in which people are left taking cabs, subways, or driving…