Category: Japanese Society/Culture

The most fucked up article you’ll read this year

WARNING: The article linked to below is graphic and nauseating, especially if you’re digging into a chicken sandwich like I was this morning.
WHO’S HUNGRY? – PART 1 An Interview With Issei Sagawa, Cannibal
This was a hugely famous case in Japan (and all over the world I imagine – I was only 7 when it happened). An insane Japanese exchange student killed and partially ate a female student at the Sorbonne and not only got off scot-free in France, but also in Japan because the French authorities protected him. I was aware he was writing books during my long stay in Japan, but it never occurred to me that he had any kind of following. Rather, he seemed to be a source of shame to most Japanese I spoke with – one (ignorant) person even cited this case as a reason Yoshi Hattori might have been shot in Louisiana ten years later.
One of the tamer excepts:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I want to eat human flesh again, though. I mean, it’s delicious stuff. It’s widely believed that human meat doesn’t taste good, but they only spread that rumor because it’s a taboo that can’t be crossed. If people found out the truth, I’m sure that men would all start eating women. So they don’t talk about it because it will create pandemonium, but I tell you, human meat is extremely tasty.”

You know what’s really fucked up? Everyone, including the perpetrator himself would have been better off if he’d been punished for his original crime… Instead, he roams free and is still profiting from his original crime. The Japanese should strip him of citizenship and send him back to France.

Escolar aka Butterfish aka Hawaiian Walu aka the Ex-Lax Fish…

…aka Oilfish aka the “It” Fish aka Shiro Maguro aka Abura Bozu aka Abura Sokumutsu aka Mutzu.
I have finally found a fish that Japanese won’t eat (raw, at least), and is in fact prohibited to be used for that purpose in Japan, and it turns out it’s all because eating it may make orange jets of oil (specifically, indigestible wax esters) shoot out of your ass.
And yes, I speak of that as a bug, not a feature.

Missing Osaka

The idea being tested: Even strangers in Osaka will play along when you pretend to shoot or cut them down.

Some of these seem staged; I’ve seen crazier stuff though, and if nothing else, the fact that it seems possible is why Osaka is so fucking cool.
For the record, I’ve never seen this done to a stranger in Japan, but you see it all the time among friends. Come to think of it, among friends at least, everybody overacts like they’re being shot. An alternative to the standard ban! (bang!) is firing an imaginary revolver dry. That sounds something like this: ban! ban! ban! ban! ban! ban! kacha.. kacha.. kacha!
(via)

Foreign tw@ts at Tsukiji

Earlier this year I wrote about how foreign tourists are no longer really welcome at Tsukiji fish market. To better understand why this situation came about, I present this video sent by KTY:

At first I was going to title this post French and English tw@ts at Tsukiji, but really it’s just dumb luck that the video happened not to feature douchebag Americans. I would have paid money to have the old man slap the shit out of Pierre at the end, though, right after he claimed to not speak Japanese:
WELL THEN DO YOU SPEAK FOOTINYOASS, BIIIIOTCH?

Exercising Atrophied Illustrator Muscles

Well it took a whole day, but I finished our nengajo (traditional Japanese New Years cards) design! Yay! Max helped out by drooling on my keyboard and now all we have to do is get them printed, handwrite addresses and short greetings (mommy’s job), and send them out in the post!
Since we changed addresses from last year we want to get the drop on everybody before they send cards to our old address… But to be quite honest, we have been bad analog correspondents – we haven’t sent cards since we left Japan (didn’t send very consistently then either, although we did the very last year we were there).
Time to take a nap with baby until midnight.

Shin Sekai Redux Repeat Rehash

There used to be a blue traffic sign if you drove into Shin Sekai from Namba welcoming you to SIN SEKAI. It might even still be there.
When we were in university there was still an indoor “fishing park,” archery range, and competing all-night dirty film theaters in the immediate vicinity of Tsutenkaku tower. Our first trip there was most notable because on the way to eat kushiyaki we walked right by a big Yak loudly berating and repeatedly slamming a woman against his S-class stopped in the middle of the street. People stopped to watch, but nobody said (much less did) shit – even the security guard standing in a nearby parking lot. It was grimy Osaka as fuck.
Passing through such places at night, you can get a glimpse of the hidden underside of an already dark and foreboding area: The police patrolling the perimeters, but not really entering. A skinny wretch of a dog chained to a seemingly abandoned food stall. The shabu junkies clutching greasy banknotes and buying bags of rock sugar at the corner store.
The greatest Tsutenkaku story I ever heard, though, is that back in the seventies or eighties they had an exhibition in the tower and turned it into a zoo of sorts, with caged animals displayed all the way up the staircase. I would have paid money to see that (Hell, come to think of it, my Crown might have been a taxi cruising the streets of Tennoji back then.).

Mahoroba is Japanese Arcadia

Max was overtired and sleep-deprived today, so he just threw a big fit on and off for a couple hours. It was impossible to get any work done, but I still love him with all my heart.
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Sometimes, though, I stay in the bathroom longer than I need to… And I’m not even reading. The ceiling fan turns and water from the shower drips with a steady rhythm… I’m hesitant to leave my sphere of tranquility. It seems that Thailand is my new Yamato and my bathroom is the precise location of Mahoroba.
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See? I’m not the only one hesitant to emerge from my hiding place:
Amaterasu_Emerges.jpg

Murasaki Inu

A lifetime ago (13 or 14 years ago to be a bit more exact) I sat in a stuffy classroom in Tenri, Japan, and started penning my first essay in Japanese. Not having yet learned any kanji, I wrote it entirely in the phonetic alphabet known as hiragana. It began something like this: One day I walked to the main worship hall and saw a purple dog…
Thus, the legend of the murasaki inu (purple dog) was born. It was a recurring theme in later essays (four years worth to be exact) as well as many blues/enka jams (anata ha tashika ni aru / watashi no murasaki inu) when Cosmic Buddha would rock abandoned parking lots, smoky music studios, and our guitarist’s cram school late at night.
Well guess what?
I saw a purple dog today. A purple dog, here in Mahasarakham, Thailand. (Nam and I were taking my mom to see the fish sanctuary, so I have witnesses.)
I don’t think it was naturally purple. It looked like purple iodine solution (used for disinfecting wounds) had been liberally applied to a shaggy white dog, but that’s not the point. It was a purple dog.
That is all.