The Eye of Patrick

I was reading japanprobe.com and I noticed this article on Shunsuke Nakamaura. He is a Japanese player who is playing in Scotland for Celtic. The reason I found it was interesting, was because when I was in Russia on vacation I met him in the hotel I was staying at. Though just a brief encounter, it was my first time meeting someone famous. But from the article, it seems that Rangers was not so welcoming of their crosstown rivals star.

Celtic fans have been getting agitated about a banner brandished by Ran

gers fans bearing the legend ‘Nakamura Ate My Dog’.

Such faux outrage might have been more credible had the Japanese midfielder not been greeted on his early appearances at Celtic Park by the chorus: ‘He eats Chow Mein and he votes Sinn Fein’.
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Dog, of course, is a Korean staple - at least, it was in more impoverished times - and the consequence of poor agricultural soil, although a recent survey revealed that seven per cent of Japanese respondents admitted to eating dog food, albeit a top-end brand associated with the British Royal Family.

Telegraph

The story simply amazes me because of how incompetent the police were. Isn’t it common sense when you have a mentally ill guy covered in gasoline to not give him a match so he can smoke.

NAGOYA —

Nagoya prefectural police authorities said Monday they are considering disciplinary action for three police officers after they gave a cigarette and a lighter to a man in their custody who had doused himself with kerosene. The man set fire to himself in front of police after asking to smoke during interrogation on Sunday. He died of his burns on Monday, police said.

Hifumi Kubota, 45, was taken for questioning to a police station in Nagoya on Saturday after a woman who was living with him told police that he was acting violently. When officers came to his house, “he poured kerosene over himself in front of police,” a police spokesman said.

Kubota refused to change his kerosene-soaked clothes at the police station and asked to smoke during questioning, according to police.

Despite no-smoking rules in the building, a police official gave him a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. When Kubota stood up, his right knee was ablaze and he quickly turned into a fireball, the reports said.

Japan Times

The Panda will be back at Tokyo Metropolition zoo, as China has loaned  two Panadas  to Japan.  This is  designed as a good will gesture  as China of late has moved away from loaning Pandas out, to actually renting them. It costs about 1 million dollars to rent a Panda for a year. So for Japan to get one for free is a good gesture on China’s part

In a gesture aimed at shoring up friendship between the two Asian superpowers, Hu offered Akihito a loan of two pandas for research purposes, Japanese media reports said. The Tokyo zoo recently lost a popular, 22-year-old giant panda, named Ling Ling, which died last week of heart failure.

CBC News

A long time ago when my knowledge of Japan was very limited, the one thing I wanted to do if I visited Japan was to try Fugu or the poisoned puffer fish. It is the fish that you have to have a special license cook and serve in your restaurant.  But it seems it is becoming last dangerous.

Poison has been as integral to fugu, the funny-looking, potentially deadly puffer fish prized by Japanese gourmands, as the savor of its pricey meat. So consider fugu, but poison-free.

Thanks to advances in fugu research and farming, Japanese fish farmers are now mass-producing fugu as harmless as goldfish. Most important, they have taken the poison out of fugu’s liver, considered both its most delicious and potentially most lethal part, one whose consumption has left countless Japanese dead over the centuries and whose sale remains illegal in the country.

But what could be seen as potential good news for gourmands has instead been grounds for controversy: powerful interests in the fugu industry, playing on lingering safety fears, are fighting to keep the ban on fugu livers even from poison-free fish.

“We won’t approve it,” Hisashi Matsumura, the president of the Shimonoseki Fugu Association and vice president of the National Fugu Association, said of the legalization of fugu liver. He added, “We’re not engaging in this irrelevant discussion.”

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Another story from Japan, it seems tempers flared a little too much in a recent game. Though still nothing compared to the riots in Latin America.

A Japanese referee has been accused by a player of using abusive language, including telling him to ‘die’, during a J-League match. Oita Trinita’s Taikai Uemoto said referee Yuichi Nishimura had also verbally abused him after the game when Uemoto said he would report the incident, Japanese media reported on Wednesday.

Oita Trinita’s Taikai Uemoto said referee Yuichi Nishimura had also verbally abused him after the game when Uemoto said he would report the incident, Japanese media reported on Wednesday.

The club confirmed they were compiling a file to send to Japanese officials, who have promised to launch an inquiry.

Trouble flared when Uemoto asked Nishimura why he had not booked an FC Tokyo player for a foul late in the second half of Tuesday’s game.

Japanese media reported that several players overheard a furious Nishimura snap back: ‘Shut up! You keep quiet and get on with the game. Die!’

Uemoto said Nishimura had made similar remarks and threatened to book him after the game. ‘I was shocked,’ he told Japan’s Nikkan Sports daily.

‘If players said the same thing we’d be sent off. We don’t have cards but that ref deserved a red. He was totally out of order.’ J

apanese officials are likely to take a dim view of the incident which comes days after a Kashiwa Reysol player was banned for four games for shoving a referee.

‘We are taking this matter very seriously,’ Japan Football Association (JFA) general secretary Kozo Tashima said. ‘We will decide on what measures to take after a proper investigation.’ soccernet.com

The Governor of Tokyo is famous for talking without thinking and his latest outburst has targeted panada’s.

Controversial Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara has thrown government plans to ask China for a new panda into disarray with a crude verbal assault on the endangered animals, saying “they’re not gods” and questioning whether Tokyo needs pandas.

Ishihara’s outburst came following the death of Ling Ling, a 22-year-old panda that died on Wednesday at Ueno Zoo, leaving the animal park without one of the enormously popular pandas for the first time in 36 years.

And the governor’s anti-panda rhetoric also coincided neatly with the national government’s attempts to be sound out its Chinese counterpart about the chances of getting a new panda for Tokyo.

“It’s not like (pandas) are sacred or anything. Do we really need them?” the governor told reporters during a regular news conference. “Living creatures die. Pandas die. The world’s not such a big place anymore, so if people want to see pandas, they should go to where the pandas are.”

After Ling Ling died, Ueno Zoo boss Teruyuki Komiya said that he would be delighted to have another chance to look after pandas.

In a related development, meanwhile, Ueno Zoo said it will donate Ling Ling’s body to the National Museum of Science and Nature located near its boundaries. The museum plans to stuff Ling Ling and put the panda on display.

Mainichi News

And I thought checking facebook many times through the day was slacking. This guy had it down to an art form.

A Japanese council employee has set what is likely to remain an unbreakable record for surfing porn at work, after visiting an impressive 750,000 smut websites in just nine months at the rate of 20 pages for each minute he was sat at his desk.

According to the BBC, the unnamed 57-year-old “works” for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan. During his web pornathon, he clocked up an average of 10,000 grumble pages a day, something that went unnoticed because “each employee’s desk was set apart from the others”, as a council official put it.

This superb effort was only discovered when his computer caught a nasty case of the clap - a virus which prompted the powers that be to peruse his browser history. They discovered he’d been most (in)active during July last year, when he “surfed for porn more than 177,000 times during office hours”.

Quite remarkably, no marching orders were forthcoming for the outrage, but rather a demotion and a cut in wages of 20,000 yen (£80) a month - a figure which by our reckoning works out at just 0.096p for every page he’s no doubt still tirelessly examining every four weeks.

The Register

I just watched this wonderful video on youtube. It is from a 12 year old girl at the Rio Environmental summit in 1992. It is a powerful speech and shows that age is not important when you believe in something.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8cmWZOX8Q]