As of this writing the tainted gyoza (chinese dumpling) is unsolved. It’s not known whether the chemicals were put into the gyoza in China or Japan. Needless to say that when the story first broke, it was all about China. I blame the reactionary, business-minded media… luckily Japanese and Chinese officials are talking about the…
I’m going to start trying to keep a record of all the bad teacher stories I find in the news. I’m sure I won’t get them all (as I’m sure they are not all reported), but if a story comes up, I’ll drop a link to it. Here’s number one: Vice Principal Held for Stealing…
Obviously McDonald’s decided to appeal the ruling that said a McDonald’s manager doesn’t have enough autonomy over his own hours and the people under him to be exempt from the laws that require overtime payment. I say “obviously” because if they take this ruling, they’ll end up paying tons of yen to over a thousand…
Google is not limiting itself to courting just one cell phone company in Japan… ads on AU by KDDI are urging people to make gmail or igoogle their mobile homepage… AU’s PC email service, AU one is all run through gmail, and now the SMILEYS for all three major providers are supported in gmail. This…
Companies always find creative ways around paying overtime to employees. Apparently America based companies are no different… though to be fair, because of Japanese economic policies it’s hard for foreign companies to enter Japan without some kind of Japanese base. (Hence pepsi is put out by Suntory, Walmart bought into Seiyu…). Anyway, teachers are among…
CNN Reports this story in its U.S. edition. Boy, 16, enjoys champagne, hostesses This is why only people that understand Japanese and that made a sincere effort to learn about the real Japan know anything about Japan. Even in the English language newspapers in Japan you have news about the 14 year old girl with…
The story in a nutshell… a drunk driver speeding hit a family’s wagon from behind and pushed the wagon off the road and into Hakata Bay in Fukuoka. The 3 children aged 4, 3, and 1 died from drowning. The mother and father lived. Prosecutors asked for a 25 year sentence, but the court decided…
22 Year-Old Japanese Student Believed World’s Youngest to Clone a Mouse(article in Mainichi Daily News) Hey! I don’t want any more young people cloning any more things! It’s bad enough when they have kids and then bleach their hair! What’s next, the guys going to create a bunch of pocket monsters and we’ll have a…
In the U.S., Google’s doing a lot of things geared toward the iPhone… in Japan Google seems to have a connection with KDDI AU for cell phones. AU uses Google Search, and its auone.jp email services (which I suspect uses imap) is powered by gmail. That’s why in a previous post (“The iPhone in Japan?“)…
So Apple is talking to DoCoMo about selling the iPhone in Japan…(according to Forbes and lots of other news agencies.) My phone can do anything the iPhone can do, and even more (although I’m not sure if you can hook up the iPhone directly to a tv to watch your downloaded videos on a big…
This is an update for the post: Sasebo Shooter was NOT a Foreigner The guy (a 37 year old Japanese man) had a gun permit because he was a competitive skeet shooter. That explains the gun. There are also a lot of reports from people in the neighborhood that say he liked to walk around…
UFOs ‘definitely exist,’ Machimura asserts (Japan Times) So the Japanese government must be really itching for a way to pull a nice “these aren’t the droids your looking for” on the public to take attention away from the pension problems. Here’s the deal in a nutshell. Everyone in Japan has to pay into a national…