The couple got to have this unique wedding because they had submitted the prize-winning entry to a contest celebrating the 400th anniversary of the castle. A local tourism NPO helped set everything up, so the ceremony only cost 30,000 yen ($337).

For tourism info about Matsue, check out this page.

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Of course, this will have little effect on those who are buying and wearing these masks. Even when confronted with evidence that the masks are probably ineffective, people said they were going to wear the masks anyway because they need any protection they can get.

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Nothing nightmare inducing about this.

Aw, I didn’t ruin your post-beauty-queen-sex-scandal spirits, did I?

If this product has convinced you that you need an ultrasonic ion brush, you can buy it here, but I think the sound will melt your brains.

I could go on about the infamous dentata of the Japanese archipelago, but I am sure the comments will take care of that.

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The creature was found on October 6 at a depth of 161 metres (528 feet) in Manado Bay off Sulawesi Island, where the Indonesian coelacanth was first discovered, according to the researchers.
Video footage showed the 31.5 centimetre (12.6-inch) coelacanth, coloured blue with white spots, swimming slowly among rocks on the seabed for about 20 minutes.

“As far as we know, it was the first ever video image of a living juvenile coelacanth, which is still shrouded in mystery,” said Masamitsu Iwata, a researcher at Aquamarine Fukushima in Iwaki, northeast of Tokyo.

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[via Zaeega]

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Thousands of commuters pass through Kyobashi Station in Osaka every day. For 600 of them the singular highlight is a sausage.

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In the specific case of which Shibuya is accused, he registered his address as that of one member of the group between September and October last year, and received two items of mail addressed to her. The deception was uncovered in May this year after a member of the group reported to police that her mail wasn’t being delivered.

An ensuing investigation found that he had registered his address as that of 11 members of the group in total, after getting their addresses from other fans. There are over 40 members in the group. He said the post office never asked him for the pop group members’ ID.

[...]

Police say Shibuya managed to get his hands on around 200 pieces of mail in total, including mobile phone bills and training schedules.

“I just wanted some of their stuff, I didn’t care what,” he said.

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Related Colbert Report clip:

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Hiroko Mima, who was crowned Miss Universe Japan 2008, and Anya Ayoung-Chee, who was crowned Miss Universe 2008 of Trinidad and Tobago 2008, are in the middle of the scandal after an intimate video tape leaked allegedly showing them together having sex with Anya’s boyfriend and with each other.

You can download it via the links on Reddit.com.

So Far, only one Japanese news site seems to have picked up the story. It will be interesting to see how the mainstream Japanese media will handle this scandal.

[hat tips go to Pavel and Yogaboy]

Update: A July 2008 blog post by Hiroko Mima confirms that she met Miss Trinidad & Tobago:

彼女は、Miss TRINIDAD&TOBAGOです。彼女のナショナルデレクターは、イネスと大の仲良しなので、世界大会に行く前から私は彼女をネットで見ていたし、私は彼女と会うのが楽しみでした。彼女と初めて会った時に彼女が「あなたと私の顔はよく似ているわねぇ。」と言ってくれました。確かに、この写真を見ると・・・似ていますね！ﾜﾗ〃

She wrote that the Miss Universe national director for Trinidad & Tobago was close friends with Ines Ligron, the person in charge of the Japan pageant. Hiroko had been looking forward to meeting Miss Trinidad & Tobago, and when they met, they commented on how they look alike.

Update 2: Gawker is reporting that the woman having sex with Anya Ayoung-Chee and her boyfriend is not Hiroko Mima. Anya’s boyfriend believes the video was stolen by a tech support person, and that’s apparently how their threesome partner was misidentified as Miss Japan.

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The plug-in scooter needed 33 hours and 10 minutes to make the journey (with 5 battery charging stops). A gas-powered scooter made the same trip in 12 hours and 4 minutes. The gas for the trip cost 425 yen, while the battery charges totaled a mere 53 yen.

It would seem that the plug-in scooter is a really cheap way to make short trips in areas without steep hills.

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• Work is progressing on the giant red copy of the Tokyo Big Sight China Pavilion. (The Japan Pavilion will look like an ugly pink dome.)
• As work on massive infrastructure construction projects progresses, some older-looking buildings are being covered up with fake facades.
• Shanghai is trying to convince its residents that wearing pajamas in public is not polite.
• Some stores are selling ridiculously expensive gold medals to commemorate the expo. Street merchants are selling illegal knock-offs of official expo merchandise.

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These aren’t sophisticated in the least, but then, when aimed at children under ten (they’re available for children under seven at the hagwon), they don’t need to be. Showing these images to children who are too young to critically evaluate them does nothing but inculcate hatred for Japan.

Read the full post here.

[via ROK Drop]

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An interesting flashback, brought to you by ABC News and Life Magazine:

At their 1971 meeting in Alaska, the first visit of a Japanese Emperor to America, President Nixon bowed and referred to Emperor Hirohito and his wife repeatedly as ‘Your Imperial Majesties.’

Yet, (and?) Nixon gets the bow right. Slight arch from the waist hands at his side.

Obama’s handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush’s back-rub of Merkel.

Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.

The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms….The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.

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The LA Times went through the 1000+ comments left on its blog post about Obama bowing before Emperor Akihito to pick its favorite ten one-liners:

We mostly enjoyed what readers had to say about the president’s greeting — a mixture of outrage and patriotism, snarky one-liners and more serious diatribes.

Here are the top 10 best comments so far (leave your own below):

1. Mitch wrote: Obama to Emperor of Japan: “May I shine your shoes, Sir?”
2. Plain Jane wrote: Obama WASN’T bowing – He SAW a Japanese Yen on the floor and went to pick it up because it might be Worth More Than Our Dollar!
3. Veteran wrote: Was that before or after he appologized for World War 2?
4. bmcc wrote: Palin would have winked at him. You betcha!
5. Maripo wrote: I’m surprised he didn’t curtsy.
6. MP wrote: Whatever happened to the good old days when we could count on a Republican in the White House to puke on foreign dignitaries?
7. marty1234 wrote: I wish are first black president had been a rapper at least he’d have some attitude…
8. Wax on wax off wrote: Look eye! Always look eye! -Mr. Miyagi
9. helen roach wrote: I wonder why they didn’t run the dust mop over the floor. It would have looked much nicer in the picture.
10. Xavier wrote: See, Obama is not a Muslim. He’s a shintoist.

[hat tip to HamachiMan]

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Japan has some of the world’s strictest controls on immigration, and Hatoyama admitted that he was broaching a “sensitive issue”.

But he said that as well as introducing pro-family policies, Japan should attempt to encourage migrants to live and work there.

“I think Japan should also make itself a country attractive to people so that more and more people, including tourists, hope to visit Japan, hope to live and work in Japan,” he said on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit

“I am not sure if I can call this ‘immigration policy’, but what’s important is to create an environment that is friendly to people all around the world so that they voluntarily live in Japan,” he said.

Just talk, or a sign of serious policy change in the future?

Immigration-related news link that doesn’t deserve its own post: Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese mother of “Balloon Boy” has avoided deportation by pleading guilty to a class three misdemeanor.

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In this video you can see the Toguchi family holding candlelight vigils outside of Camp Schwab, appearing on radio shows to talk about the evils of the base relocation plan, and giving a speech before a crowd of anti-base protesters. He also takes the Fuji TV reporter to the campus of Ryukyu International University, where a American helicopter crashed in 2004. No Japanese were killed or injured in the accident, but that didn’t stop locals from erecting a monument on the spot of the crash [the burnt remains of a tree that lost its life that day are at the center of the monument]. Noguchi talks at how heart-wrenching and terrible it is to think of the loss of life that might have happened if the timing of the crash had been a little different.

Noguchi wants President Obama and Prime Minister Hatoyama to not build a new airfield that would destroy the environment of his beloved hometown. He doesn’t want his children’s future marred by the presence of such a base.

During Obama’s visit to Tokyo on Friday/Saturday, talk of the Futenma relocation was avoided in favor of discussion on easier issues that both countries could readily agree upon.

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The other images show people-like shapes or parts of people that were supposedly not visible when the photo was taken. As most photos like this can be easily faked, they’re pretty much worthless. At some points, even the celebrity panelists didn’t seem to impressed.

Side note: You may remember paranormal studies expert Bintaro Yamaguchi from his prior appearance in the “Kappa Attack” post.

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Afterwards, Obama had lunch with the Emperor and Empress. It was the first time an American President had dined with the imperial family since Clinton’s visit in 1998.

At around 2:30PM, Obama got on Air Force One to fly to the APEC meeting in Singapore.

Update: I Just noticed that the Drudge Report and some American bloggers are attempting to twist Obama’s polite greeting to the Emperor as a extraordinary display of an American president groveling before a foreign monarch:

“To those arguing that in Japan bowing is a friendly gesture akin to the holding of hands in Saudi Arabia: the Emperor did not return the bow. Also, if my memory serves me correctly, the Queen of England did not receive a bow. This President’s habitual bowing is a manifestation of his anti-Americanism. He bows to all things foreign to us.” -J.R., in a comment left on the LA Times Top of the Ticket blog

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A little bit about exchanging business cards in Japan. Stack up on your cards if you are coming over to do business over here:

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[via JapanSoc]

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Related link: Don’t be surprised if you encounter these characters in the streets of Tokyo. Aflac has decked out an advertisement truck with giant Santa cat-ducks.

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A fly-on-the-wall documentary about Steve, an Englishman who starts his adventure as an English Conversation instructor for a large Eikaiwa chain in Japan.

[via Lets's Japan dot org]

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The paper announced that the murder had “cast a sinister shadow” over Tokyo’s entire female expatriate community. “In Japan,” it proclaimed, “British women constantly have to put up with unwanted male attention – such as the endemic groping on the trains”. Later, it interviewed another British teacher who cautioned women to be “wary” before travelling to the country.

Others have also capitalised on this crude stereotype. In September 2008, Radio 4 broadcast a play by John Dryden and Miriam Smith entitled A Tokyo Murder, which was loosely based on the Hawker case and which trotted out the same xenophobic caricatures about an uptight society with an underlying streak of insanity that refuses to co-operate with western forces of reason and justice.

This year Clare Campbell included a discussion of the Hawker case in Tokyo Hostess, an investigation of the Roppongi bar scene and the Lucie Blackman murder – even though Lindsay Hawker had nothing to do with hostessing. As Susanna Jones commented in a review of Campbell’s book, the only thing the murders have in common is that Blackman and Hawker were “targeted by horrifyingly dangerous men”. To imply that the presence of two psychopaths makes a whole country dangerous for foreign women is to leap to the most preposterous of conclusions.

And it is not just the Blackman and Hawker cases that invite this approach. The same ignorant stereotypes are rolled out at any opportunity. Newspaper reports of the Nomura sex discrimination case emphasise the fact that the bank is Japanese, even though sex discrimination is endemic in banking and companies of every nation are routinely sued for it. Television programmes seek out oddballs to portray as mainstream, eating live fish, doing cosplay or collecting hentai manga. And cinemagoers would be forgiven for thinking that every other Japanese was a geisha or a yakuza. Any half-informed piece of disinformation seems to suffice where Japan is concerned.

Found via 空, which also directs readers to Jeffrey Levick’s “Japan in the U.S. Press: Bias and Stereotypes.”

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Fukuoka City Museum
Tuesday, Jan. 5, through Sunday, March 7, 2010
Yokohama Museum of Art
Saturday, March 20, through Sunday, June 13, 2010
Nagoya City Museum
Thursday, June 24, through Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, Sept. 11, through Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010
Sendai City Museum
Thursday, Feb. 10, through Sunday, May 8, 2011

Check this page for details.

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Yesterday, NTT East announced the internet-enabled Hikari iFrame (光iフレーム) in a bid to increase the number of households subscribing to its Flet’s Next fiber optic broadband internet service by targeting young women who are unskilled with computers.

The device will cost between 20,000 and 30,000 yen, run Google’s open source Android mobile OS, and double as a digital photo frame.  Third party “widgets” for displaying recipes, news, weather, etc. will be available for download.

NTT is looking for approximately 1000 people to test the device beginning in early December until March 31, 2010.  Application is open until 11/30 through this site.  To apply, you must have a wireless internet connection, though it does not need to be through NTT.

I wonder if men can apply?

More information (in Japanese) at IT Media and product home page.

[Hat tip to Tagosagu]

—

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Their first stop is Akihabara, where they do some duty free shopping. On their way to the high priced brand items, they are distracted by relatively cheap nail clippers equipped with an attached magnifying glasses. They buy a few. Nail clippers are a popular souvenir for Chinese tourists, says one store clerk. Apparently the company that makes the magnifying glass nail clippers sells about 80% of them through duty free stores.

They also buy some other stuff, such as rice cookers. A look at one doctor’s shopping list shows that she wants hair coloring dye, cosmetic products, kairo heating pads, eye drops, and a variety of Burberry clothing and apparel.

Next, they check out some luxury wristwatches. It takes only a few seconds for some of them to decide on which products to buy. Foreign wristwatches are less expensive in Japan. Some are even 40% cheaper than what one would pay in China.

The shopping spree is supposed to last 30 minutes, but several members of the group ignore the clock and keep shopping. Considerate members of the tour group, who went back to the bus at the appointed time, are left waiting. After 40 minutes, the other doctors return to the bus, declaring that they wish they had more time to shop.

We are also shown some clips of Chinese tourists visiting a duty free luxury brand product store. Titanium and germanium necklaces and bracelets are particularly popular among the Chinese tourists, especially since many Chinese athletes wore similar necklaces during the last Olympic games. It would seem that many of them believe the ridiculous pseudoscientific claims about the “power” of such necklaces and bracelets.

We join the Chinese tourists as they have lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Shinjuku. It took them quite a while to finish shopping in Akihabara, but they speed through their lunch in just 10 minutes. After lunch they hit up the nearby Sakuraya electronics store, where at least one doctor buys an iPod Touch.

The next stop is Ginza, an area of Tokyo known for its high class brand shops. At the Burberry store alone, the group of 10 doctors spends close to 1,200,000 yen ($13,300).

The next scene is of them visiting Mt. Fuji. The cloudy weather prevents a nice view of the famous mountain, but it luckily does not stop their shopping. Since a few years ago, many Chinese tourists have been visiting the area, so souvenir shops and hotels have hired Chinese-speaking staff. Even the old lady who serves tea at their onsen hotel has learned some Chinese.

Their story is interrupted for a few minutes to show another Chinese tour group visiting a jewelry store in Yamanashi prefecture. They follow around one woman as she finds a necklace she likes and quickly buys it, paying over 110,000 yen ($1,200) in cash. They also see a man buy a 39,000 yen ($430) set of earrings. In about one hour, the store sells about 300,000 yen ($3,320) worth of jewelry.

The last scene of the report goes back to the original tour group from Shanghai as they shop for jewelry at the same shop. One tourist buys a flashy 137,000 yen ($1,500) ring. During their two-day shopping spree, the group of 10 doctors has spent over 2,000,000 yen ($22,130), which is about 10 times more than the average annual income in China. They were scheduled to visit both Nagoya and Osaka the next day, so they probably spent even more money before going back to Shanghai.

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Fumiko’s Confession is an adorable and exciting short film. What is really remarkable about it is that it was animated by just one person, who is bound to be very successful in the future. You can see more from the creator here.

[via yonasu]

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[hat tip to Clay]

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If you think this sounds too ridiculous to be true, you’re not alone. A lot of the comments left by Japanese netizens on this YouTube video are calling this out as staged (yarase) news reporting.

[via Watashi to Tokyo]

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The green corset-style garment can be removed and unrolled to create a 1.5m-long putting mat.

When the user sinks a putt into one of the cups, a built-in speaker pumps out a congratulatory “Nice shot!”.
The bra also features pockets for extra golf balls and tees, and a detachable flag pin that serves as a score pencil.
The bra set comes with a skirt with the words “Be Quiet” printed on the rear, which doubles up as a flag for use on the course.

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[hat tip to Adamu]

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For husbands (夫):

夫 死んで欲しい I wish my husband would die
夫 嫌い I hate my husband
夫 小遣い 平均 How much spending money should I let him have
夫 言葉の暴力 Hubby’s verbally abusive
夫 小遣い Husband’s allowance
夫 呼び方 What to call husbands
夫 死亡 手続き The process for a husband’s death
夫 うつ Husband is depressed
夫 失業 Hubby’s got no job
夫死亡く年金 Husband’s death pension

On the other hand, searches for wife (妻) brought up:

妻 誕生日プレゼント birthday presents for the missus
妻 誕生日プレゼント ランキング ranking of birthday presents for the missus
妻 プレゼント presents for the missus
妻 ヒステリー My wife be all hysterical
妻 呼び方 What to call wives
妻 うつ wife is depressed
妻 プレゼント ランキングranking of presents for the missus
妻 謙譲語 Humble language for wives
妻 未届 Failure to report wife [related to de facto marriages, I think]
妻 焼酎 wife shouchuu [a brand of alcoholic drink]

[Matrimonial bliss via Getnews.jp]
[edit: changed and added some stuff at the suggestions of some cool commenters]

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Today’s Dong-A-Ilbo has an English article with the headline “Japan Unlikely to Give Suffrage to Ethnic Koreans.” It claims that the bill will not grant voting rights to the “many ethnic Koreans in Japan hail from North Korea”:

The Asahi Shimbun said the ruling Democratic Party of Japan has set up the framework of a bill on suffrage for expats in Japan, including ethnic Koreans, but this will only affect nationals from countries having formal ties or the equivalent with Tokyo.

Many ethnic Koreans in Japan hail from North Korea, which has no official ties with Japan, so they will be ineligible to vote under the bill.

The ruling party has apparently excluded ethnic Koreans from North Korea to appease negative publicity over North Korea’s previous kidnappings of Japanese citizens and appeal to conservative lawmakers who oppose the bill.

The headline and the content of the article are highly misleading. Ethnic Koreans in Japan who hold North Korean citizenship do so by their own choice. If they want to be considered South Korean citizens, all they need to do is apply: they will be accepted. Their citizenship status has nothing to do with what area of Korea they “hail from.”

That having been said, I would like to repeat my position on this issue. I do not support a bill thank grants voting rights to special permanent residents. If Japanese-born Zainichi Koreans want to live in Japan with all the benefits of citizenship, they should naturalize and become Japanese citizens.

Under the current system, it is very easy for special residency permit holders to naturalize, and thousands of Koreans become Japanese citizens every year. Many who choose not to naturalize do so because they feel it is a denial of their cultural identity. The government should be encouraging special permanent residents to become Japanese citizens and fully participate in Japanese politics. Rewarding them for their refusal to naturalize is not the right answer to this problem.

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President Barack Obama says he wants to visit the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime during his presidency, but will not have time when he travels to Japan later this week.

In an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK, Mr. Obama said he would be honored to have the opportunity to visit the two cities that were devastated by U.S. atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

For decades, Hiroshima and Nagasaki city governments have called on world leaders to visit their cities and learn about the horrors of nuclear war. Now that Obama has been awarded a Nobel Peace prize for statements he made in favor of nuclear disarmament, the expectation that he will visit the two cities has grown and there is hope that he might actually achieve significant steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.

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“European and U.S. societies with a (historical) background of Christianity are bogged down,” the ruling party’s No. 2 leader told reporters after meeting Yukei Matsunaga, president of the Japan Buddhist Federation, in Wakayama Prefecture. On Islam, Ozawa said, “It is better than Christianity but it is also exclusive.”

But Ozawa praised Buddhism, saying, “It teaches us a state of mind and way of life from the start about how human beings should be.” He added that the cause of the current social turmoil in Japan is that Japanese people are losing their original spiritual values.

No word yet on where the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster stands in Ozawa’s grand ranking of world religions…

[via JapanSoc]

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[hat tip to stears]

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The Yomiuri says that a man who “looks like” Ichihashi was arrested attempting to board a ferry. I am not sure why their news report is uncertain, as TBS News was quite confident in proclaiming that it was Ichihashi. TBS scooped all the other networks by calling and delivering the good news to Bill Hawker, the father of Lindsay Hawker (see 1 minute into this video clip).

Japanese police had apparently not yet contacted Hawker. He expressed shock at the news that the man who killed his daughter has finally been captured and thanked the Japanese police and the Japanese media for all their hard work. On their first try, TBS had nobody on hand to translate what he was saying, so Bill got to talk for about 2 minutes in English before they stopped him to apologize to viewers about the lack of translation. When the interpreter was ready, Bill repeated his statement of thanks.

Update 2: The man has told police that he is indeed Tatsuya Ichihashi and a fingerprint check confirmed it. Sponichi.co.jp reports that he was arrested at the ferry terminal because someone had spotted him and called the police. I hope that person gets a share of the reward money.

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At the bottom of SoftBank’s spring line up:

スタイリッシュなデザインに、3.7インチ有機EL液晶と1GHzの高速CPU「Snapdragon®」を採用したハイスペックなAndroidケータイ。Google™の各種サービスやAndroidマーケット™が利用可能。Wi-Fi対応

It will have a 3.7 inch OLED screen, a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, wifi, and access to the all google services including the market.

This phone appears to be neither of the two phones making news in the Android community, the Motorola Droid, which has a 3.7 inch LED screen but a 550 MHz processor, and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which has a 1GHz snapdragon processor but a 4 inch screen.

It will be interesting to see if there is a significant difference in the credit checks of each company once Docomo and Softbank are offering very similarly priced phones.  The guy at “softbank sucks” seems to think this will be the case.

More info (in Japanese) here and here.

Hat tip to Tagosagu

—
Contributor Bio: Steve has been splitting time between the US
and Japan for the past 10 years or so and is now a post doctorate
fellow at a large, lumbering University in Tokyo, where he gets paid
to play with dirt.

—

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*[yes - that's how they spell their band name]

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Tokyo said Tuesday it intends to grant about $96,400 to upgrade facilities in the eastern city of Nanjing that train in the martial arts, including judo, wrestling and boxing. The money is being offered for the “Project for the Improvement of Japan-China Friendship JUDO Hall in Nanjing,” according to a press release.

The statement said the goal of such grants, made through a body associated with Tokyo’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is to encourage more grass-roots level cultural and educational exchange. The money is earmarked for upgrading a 20-year-old sports facility in Nanjing where top-level athletes are trained for the Olympic Games and other major international competitions.

“The school recruits promising athletes from all over Jiangsu Province and provides them intensive training in judo, wrestling and boxing,” the statement said. A signing ceremony is planned later this week.

The Chinese government claimed it didn’t need or want any war reparations when it normalized relations with Japan in the 1970’s. Since then, Japan has given about $36 billion in aid to China, a policy that some regard as unofficial war reparations.

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You can watch a sample music video of one of the songs at Universal Music Japan’s official Scotty Murphy page.

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