A taxi driver injured during the Akihabara knife rampage shows his wound to the press:

A translation of the results from a poll currently being conducted on Yahoo! Japan:

It may be an unscientific online poll, but I’d say it’s a pretty good indicator of the fact that a majority of Japanese people care about the abductee issue and don’t want North Korea to be rewarded until the problem is resolved.

[hat tip to Darin]

If you are looking to escape the heat and humidity of Japan, Hokkaido is the place to be in the summer. There are many places worth visiting and summer time is the perfect time for a lot of these places. One place that will be publicized this year is the hot spring resorts of Toyako, where this years G8 Summit will be held July 7th-9th.

This photos was taken just after sunset and just before the daily “festival” that they have during the summer. If you make the trip to Hokkaido, it would not be a waste of time to check out Lake Toya. For more photos check out the Japan Photo Guide or the gallery.

This photograph was taken by Evan Pike.

The Saga District Court ruled yesterday that the government’s 253-billion-yen Isahaya Bay drainage project had caused major environmental damage, ordering the government to open the drain gates that dried up a big area of the bay in 1997:

Presiding Judge Ryuichi Kamiyama recognized that the dike’s closure of the bay was substantially responsible for the “devastated environments for boat fishing, clam fishing and aquafarming.”

The judge also harshly criticized the government for failing to follow up on the Environmental Dispute Coordination Commission’s request to conduct a mid- to long-term assessment of potential damage from the reclamation project.

He said the government’s lack of effort to document possible damage “almost constitutes interference in the claims of the plaintiffs and betrays the rules of faith at a trial.”

Although the court acknowledged that periods of red-tide outbreaks grew longer in the Ariake Sea after the government closed the dike in 1997, it said there was insufficient scientific evidence to confirm a correlation between the project and damage in the entire area.

About 100 fishermen who gathered outside the court building applauded the ruling and called on the government not to appeal.

“The court finally recognized the critical realities of our sea, where we can no longer catch fish and harvest seaweed,” said a weeping 49-year-old seaweed farmer and resident of Shimabara, Nagasaki Prefecture.

It is a major victory for citizens fighting against environmentally destructive public works projects, and hopefully the government will choose not to appeal the decision.

Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan has a section about the Isahaya Bay drainage project. Here’s an excerpt from it that appeared on the New York Times’ website:

The original idea was to provide new fields for farmers in the area. But the number of farmers, which had begun to drop in the 1960s, fell rapidly thereafter, and was reduced to almost half between 1985 and 1995. That nobody would farm these new fields posed a serious problem for MAFF, because the Isahaya drainage project, at ¥237 billion, was a very large civil-engineering program, a keystone of the ministry’s construction budget. So it relabeled the plans a “flood-control project,” even though experts believed that the last flood, in 1957, had been of the sort that comes only once every hundred years.

Major projects involve decades of bargaining with vested interests as to the amount of their payoffs, or “compensation,” and at Isahaya this long preparatory period ended in the early 1990s. The fishing and farming groups in Isahaya could not refuse a largesse that amounted to hundreds of millions of yen. But this compensation was the gold for which such local groups sold their souls to the devil, for once they received the payoff they could never refund it. Many towns in Japan, having decided to reconsider a dam, nuclear plant, or landfill they have agreed to, learn to their sorrow that the citizens have received more money than they can possibly repay. In the late 1980s, a group of environmentalists began to object to the Isahaya drainage project. Opposition grew, but MAFF went on steadily building the seven-kilometer dike that shut the wetlands off from the sea. By the time the villagers began to question the project, it was too late.

Enter the Environment Agency, whose role shows how the Construction State has led to strange mutations in the shape of the Japanese government, rather like those crabs that grow an enormous claw on one side while the other side atrophies. While the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry, originally a minor office, has burgeoned into a great empire with a budget surpassing those of many sovereign states and with almost unlimited power to build dams and concrete over rivers, the Environment Agency has shriveled. Starved of a budget and without legal resources, it has ended up a sleepy back office with a dusty sign on the door and very little to do, having been reduced to rubber-stamping the projects of its bigger and stronger brother agencies.

In 1988, only a year before construction of the Isahaya dikes was to begin (but decades after MAFF began planning and negotiating the payoffs), the Environment Agency made a “study” of it all, followed almost immediately by approval with a few minor restrictions. When MAFF closed the dikes in April 1997, it was clear that the Environment Agency’s study had been a cursory travesty. Assailed by the media, the only comment of agency chief Ishii Michiko was this: “The result might have been different if the assessment had followed today’s environmental standards…. But it is unlikely that we will ask the Agriculture Ministry to re-examine the project.”

In other words, although the Environment Agency was aware that the drainage of the Isahaya wetlands was a disaster, it did not move to stop the project. And why should it? Allowing Japan’s last major wetland to die shouldn’t concern anyone. MAFF chief Fujinami Takao commented, “The current ecosystem may disappear, but nature will create a new one.”

Closing the drainage gates did indeed cause horrible problems for the ecosystem, but some scientists believe that re-opening the gates and flooding the reclaimed land will eventually improve the situation.

The Guardian reports that eMobile has pulled its Obama-inspired commercial after facing criticism in the blogosphere:

The company, which stressed it had used the macaque mascot in several other adverts, said it had never intended to insult Obama but had decided to pull the “Change” ad in response to criticism in the blogosphere.

“We had no bad intentions, but this is a cross-cultural gap issue and we have to accept it,” eMobile’s chief executive, Sachio Semmoto, told Reuters. “There are African-Americans in Japan, so we decided to take prompt action and shut down the ad.”

Semmoto went further, describing the senator from Illinois as the kind of leader who could benefit not only the US but also Japan. “For two years I’ve been saying Obama has the capacity to change America, the kind of capacity that Japan needs,” he said.

Monkeys are revered in Japan, and their image can be found at numerous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, but eMobile’s choice of animal for this ad did not impress the foreign blogging community.

I understand their decision, but I still stand by my previously written statements about the ad. It’s a shame that so many non-Japanese bloggers took the commercial out of context and screamed about racism.

[hat tip to 空]

A man was arrested in Akihabara the other day for apparently slashing a police officer after attempting to flee from officers that had found a knife in his bag. The knife in question was a tool knife with a 3-inch blade - a weapon that wouldn’t be very useful if one wanted to go on a psycho knife rampage.

The police officer hurt while trying to stop the man suffered only light injuries to one of his hands. According to a post on Akiba blog, the Asahi Shinbun’s coverage of the incident claimed that a police officer may have actually grabbed the knife by its blade when attempting to seize it, effectively causing his own injury:

Around 13:25 on the 26th, when police officers questioned two men, one of them kept a tool knife (the length of a blade was 7.5cm) in his backpack, so police was going to let him get in the police car to ask him to go to the police station voluntarily. Then, he took the knife back from the police and ran away. Police captured him right a way, but since police grabbed the knife, he got injured. Manseibashi Police Station arrested the guy for a charge of inflicting bodily injury and the interference with a government official in the execution of his duties.

Other newspapers were more vague in their coverage, and it is unclear if Asahi’s story is true or not.

One thing, however, does seem to be clear: one should avoid carrying any knives in their bags when going to Akihabara, even if the knives in question are seemingly harmless tool knives. Police seem to be regularly performing searches of individuals, and even knife owners that don’t react like fools have to deal with a lot of BS before police allow them to go free.

Master taiko drummer Daihachi Oguchi has died:

Oguchi was crossing the street when he was struck by the car Thursday. He was rushed to the hospital but died of excessive bleeding early Friday, said Yuken Yagasaki of Osuwa Daiko, the group in Nagano prefecture (state) in northern Japan that Oguchi had led.

Oguchi helped found top U.S. taiko groups, including San Francisco Taiko Dojo, which has performed in Hollywood movies and on international tours since its founding 40 years ago.

A former jazz musician, Oguchi was one of the first to elevate the traditional folk sounds of taiko to modern music played in concert halls, not just festivals and shrines.

[ht to Ashe]

Used for a recent Boston Museum exhibition, a lecture about an Utagawa exhibition is embedded here. If you like old Ukyo-e style prints, you will probably enjoy this video. More at the museum’s web page (unfortunately this exhibition is already over).

If a Ron Mueck piece renders it’s head, press play again.

Remember that bowl of tempura soba you ate the other day? If you ate it in Japan, chances are that its ingredients were imported.

Here’s a neat segment from Sekai ichiban uketai jyugyo that demonstrates Japan’s reliance on food imports by showing what will happen to a bowl of soba if you rely on only domestic food sources:

Apparently 63% of soba consumed in Japan is imported from China, and only 22% is domestically produced. The panelists are shocked to find out that 95% of soybeans consumed n Japan are imported. The only exception are negi green onions, over 90% of which are grown in Japan. The bowl of tempura soba is given an overall domestic ingredient score of 20%.

Spaghetti is given an overall score of 16%, and hamburg steak and ramen are given scores of just 13%.

The numbers of young maiko, or trainee Geisha, rose above 100 in March this year for the first time since time since the 1950s. The boom in recruiting follows the establishment of a website by the Kyoto Traditional Musical Art Foundation, which made the music, dance and practices of the Geisha available to those outside the formerly closed world of the courtesans and their clients.

Geisha recruitment hit a nadir of 28 in 1978. In the post-Second World War changes roiling Japanese society, which weakened the monarchy and aristocracy, theirs appeared to be a vanishing world. In the following decades the annual numbers stabilised between 50 and 80.

In the modern world, the Geisha trade is complicated by the easy availability of entertainment in the form of bars, clubs, the internet, access to pornography, and mobile networking. Furthermore, Geisha are expected to be single; if they marry, they retire.