Earlier this week, Japundit reported that Miyoko Kawahara, the 58-year-old Nara woman who harassed her 64-year-old neighbor with incessant shouting and loud music day and night for nearly three years, recently pleaded not guilty to the charges of inflicting violence and injury on her neighbor.

Trouble started when Kawahara developed a grudge against her neighbor in 1989 after the older woman’s family moved in but did not come over to greet her, as is often the custom in Japan. A light that was reportedly too bright, a car that was parked the wrong way, and other incidents Kawahara perceived as slights added fuel to the feud over the years, apparently driving Kawahara over the edge and firmly into the realm of battydom.

Kawahara’s antics really have to be seen to fully appreciate her utter insanity. A video (WMV, 16MB) can be downloaded by clicking below. Enjoy!

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By the way, for anyone who is unfamiliar with Japundit, I highly recommend checking out their site. Quality content, frequent updates, and a big ol’ rising sun logo. What more could anyone possibly want?

Well, it seems that innovation just doesn’t stop over at SolidAlliance, the makers of the wonderfully appetizing SushiDisk USB drives. They’ve taken their unique designs to the next level with the creation of a new, thumb-shaped drive called the “YayDrive”:

According the company, the inspiration for the design was the apparent practice in the West of referring to USB drives as “thumb drives,” something that results in frequent confusion for Japanese businessmen when interacting with their Westerner counterparts. The YayDrive was created to help eliminate this purportedly common communication problem and also to give Japanese people a clear image of why Westerners use the term “thumb drive.”

As for the name of the product, it appears to be based on SolidAlliance’s humorous suggestion for how one should respond when asked for a “thumb drive” by a foreign colleague:

Foreign person: “Do you have a Thumb Drive?”
Japanese person: [whips out the device] “Yay~!”

Uh. . . yeah.

The YayDrive is definitely much cooler than the cheap-o looking ones that were selling on eBay last year. Modeled after a real thumb, not only does it look neat when plugged into a computer, but it can also be decorated to one’s liking as well as used for silly magic tricks. Can you do that with your USB drive?

LINK

Wow, there has been a huge influx of visitors to this site recently. Just within the past few days, the Smoking Manners gallery has been linked on over 30 100+ other blogs and message boards, drawing traffic of nearly fifty times the usual average. The funny thing is that aside from the seven new ads added last week, the gallery itself has been up for nearly a year now already.

A lot of people have been asking whether the ads are real, and the answer is yes. They can be found throughout Tokyo, and I would imagine in other cities as well. It really is a great campaign — it’s a unique way to present the anti-smoking message, and the unintentional hilarity makes it a joy each time one encounters a new ad. It’s obvious that a lot of time and effort were invested into making them, as they are the first (that I have ever seen, at least) to feature grammatically-correct (albeit slightly odd) English. Who wouldn’t love a job writing copy like that, eh?

Anyhow, I just wanted to clear that up. To any new visitors: Welcome to the conbinibento.com and thanks for stopping by. The photos here suck and the writing is even worse, but please feel free to browse the rest of the site if you haven’t got anything better to do.

One of my coworkers was scolded by his boss today for not wearing a tie. The guy was just sitting at his desk quietly doing his work, when all of a sudden his boss started telling him off, saying, “When you’re at work, you must wear a tie!” and “If we were called to an urgent meeting, we’d have to wait for you to put on your tie!” My coworker apologized profusely and proceeded to retrieve the tie that he keeps in his desk drawer and put it on.

I guess that means my company has officially rejected the Cool Biz campaign.

It serious is ridiculous, though. All day long, the AC is blasting, yet we’re all sitting around with our sleeves rolled up and ties loosened, sweating like pedophiles on a playground. What’s a person got to do to cool off around here?

Something I’ve never fully understood is the phenomenon of the sex doll. What a person could possibly find sexually arousing about a “woman” with a fixed vapid expression, plastic breasts and a hairless minge, I do not know (and yes, I am aware that I also just described the average American porn “actress,” but I don’t see how anyone could find them attractive either). It would seem to me that the only people who would be interested in pounding away at an inanimate object with the anotomical appearance of a woman would be 12-year-old boys (since, frankly, most would probably hump a mound of warm mud given the opportunity), however most kids that age don’t have the thousands of dollars necessary to buy a sex doll.

As one would likely imagine, Japan seems to have a relatively large market for sex dolls (which the natives call “Dutch wives”) even to the extent that there are companies offering sex doll rental services (ew). Recently, while browsing the ol’ interweb, I happened upon what is probably one of the strangest examples of a sex doll that I’ve ever seen. Behold, possibly the world’s first headless, armless sex doll:

Called the seikan kusshon (erogenous cushion) in Japanese, but also possessing the English moniker “Baby Doll,” the doll is composed of 90% powder beads and 10% cotton, all housed within a skin made out of waterproof “wetsuit material” (talk about sexxxy). The doll features independently posable legs, bean bag tits and a drawstring pussy (which has got to be one of the funniest combinations of words ever), and when purchased, arrives packaged in a manguri-gaeshi pose, somewhat resembling the headless hooker I found in a cardboard box behind a dumpster on my eight birthday (yes, I’m kidding).

Variations of the Baby Doll include an underage schoolgirl version, complete with flat chest, white panties and smaller labia; an entirely limbless torso-only version, also marketed as a sleep companion; as well as a version consisting only of a cushion with orifices, which, according to the website, has a fairly large buttocks, allowing for “violent fuck” (hageshii fakku). Prices run about US$550 for the basic model, $400 for the underage, $230 for the torso and a mere $100 for the orifice cushion.

To anyone with a fetish for making sweet love to headless stuffed animals, this is the doll for you.

Well, only six months to go until the big day. I’m pleased to report that we are on schedule with the preparations (although it feels like we’re ridiculously behind) and have been making steady progress with all of the necessary arrangements.

Judy has been going dress shopping the past few weekends with some friends and was allowed to take photos at a few of the shops she visited. Thus, this past weekend I was granted a special one-time-only sneak preview of the radiant vision that I will next see walking towards me down the aisle six months from now. Behold:

Doesn’t she look exquisite?

One would think that the world’s adults would see it as their rudimentary duty to keep the minds of their children pure and free from hatred, malice and all other forms of prejudice that have plagued humanity since time immemorial. Sadly, this is not the case in any part of the world, as we all know too well.

Case in point: These drawings made by South Korean school children that depict strong anti-Japanese sentiment. Certainly amusing on the one hand (especially the one with the rabbit plopping out a smelly Japan-shaped turd), but also terribly saddening on the other. There is definitely a long history of past aggression against the Korean peninsula at the hands of the Japanese, in addition to the current conflicts over Dokdo/Takeshima island, Japanese textbooks and Yasukuni shrine, but I suppose that it would be foolishly idealistic to wish that people would have some perspective to realize that relatively trivial issues such as these are no excuse for polluting the minds of innocent children.

Oh well. . . at least it’s good to know that artistic creativity is still alive and well; some of the drawings reveal quite a bit of talent.

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Remember that “Smoking Manners” campaign that Japan Tobacco launched about a year ago? Well, I happened to stop by the JT website today and noticed that there are a few new advertisements up, so I ganked them and put them in the gallery in the interest of preserving this great campaign that will eventually some day be discontinued and forgotten.

Here are the new ads in all of their Engrish glory:

I think I like the ski one the best.

So there I sat, at my desk. It was late, far later than I had intended to stay at work. The office was silent except for the constant hum of the air conditioner and the occasional shuffling of papers by my equally-exhausted coworkers.

I had just spent several hours straight working on the translation of what I was told was a very important letter. After a long series of rewrites and revisions, every word, every subtle nuance of the original Japanese had been skillfully transcribed into English, leaving nothing ambiguous. I printed out the final version, took the stairs up to my boss’ office and handed it to him with a weary smile. I would soon be going home, where my lovely fiancée would no doubt be waiting.

Five minutes later, the silence of the office was broken by the ringing of the telephone on my desk. I answered with slight hesitation. It was my boss, informing me that he had decided to rethink the letter and therefore he wouldn’t be sending it out tonight after all. “Let’s continue this tomorrow,” he said. “Have a good night.” As I replaced the receiver, I couldn’t help but chuckle at my pitiful plight. “Ah, the life of a translator.”

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Yes, I know, you’ve heard it all before. Nothing’s changed and nothing ever will. If only I were paid by the word or by the hour, rather than the paltry flat fee that I receive for my unwavering obedient servitude.

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I haven’t taken many photos recently. Although I’ve never really had an eye for photography, I’ve always at least made an effort to try to take interesting photos (”interesting” in this case meaning “crap”). However, lately everything I snap seems so dull, so uninspired, so out-of-focus. The truth is, though, that words alone obviously can’t keep this site afloat, so here’s an example of an aforementioned dull, inspiring and out-of-focus photo:

And with that, I sleep.

With their intrinsic convenience and relative affordability, it’s no surprise that cell phones are beyond ubiquitous in Japan. From teenagers who accessorize them with a bulky array of straps and trinkets to middle-aged men who clip them to their shirt pockets or wear them proudly around their necks, cell phones have become so integrated into society that it seems strange for a person not to own one.

Nearly all keitai models released within the past few years have come equipped with an email option, which many people (including myself) tend to rely on nearly exclusively for communicating with friends, since one can send an email to any address for a mere fraction of the per-minute cost to use the phone to actually make a call. However, the huge number of subscribers nationwide combined with an incredibly annoying junk mail problem (requiring frequent address changes) has resulted in the tendency for people to select extremely long and convoluted email addresses, usually comprised of a combination of elements such as their nickname, birth date, random cutesy English word, kaomoji verticons, dimensions of their genitalia, etc.

Anyhow, this is all background information for a conversation I had recently with a friend after exchanging keitai email addresses. The friend’s name is Sachiko, and thus, following the formula outlined above, the address she had chosen was the following:

A clever little portmanteau there, no?

After taking nearly a full minute to write it out, she admitted that the address was tad long even by most standards, and therefore she had shortened it when she set up a web-based email account a few weeks ago. When I enquired as to just how she had shortened it, she wrote down the address as follows:

You know those times when something so unintentionally hilarious happens, that without warning you instantaneously let loose a loud guffaw while a few droplets of urine escape into your underpants? Well, that’s exactly what happened at that moment.

With a quizzical expression, she asked what was so funny and I was thereupon obliged to give a brief impromptu lesson on the variety and versatility of English slang, all the while stifling giggles like a schoolboy on the first day of sex ed. Upon discovering that her email address was likely to give the impression that she is one of the HOT YOUNG SLUTS!!1 that, if spam mail content is any indication, apparently make up the vast majority of the people on the internet (and are just gagging to meet a hot stud like me), Sachiko’s face turned bright red, she thanked me for the explanation and informed me that she would be no doubt changing her address post-haste.

Talk cultural exchange at its best, eh?. Maybe now she’ll be able to see the humor in this.

I caught the end of the music show Hey! Hey! Hey! last night, and one of the episode’s featured guests was the pop-rock group Orange Range. These guys have made a career out of ripping off chord progressions from countless other musicians who possess actual talent, slapping them together to loosely form what might be considered a song and then trying to pass it off as their own original work “with influences.” Their target audience — airheaded junior high school kids with an apparent proclivity for sniffing glue — is completely clueless about the source material and sadly couldn’t possibly even care, and thus, the barely pubescent boys of Orange Range continue to find success, rake in the dough and inspire the creaming of their underage fans’ panties.

Just to set the record straight before I incur the wrath of any Orange Range fans (as I did with that Otsuka Ai post last year) — I have absolutely nothing against Japanese musicians or the practice of sampling in general. The entire hip-hop genre wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the sampling of beats and breaks from earlier songs and incorporating them to create something new and fresh (I’m referring to old school hip hop here; the state of the current scene is pitiable). Whether or not Orange Range properly licenses the riffs they “borrow,” I don’t know, nor is that all that important to my point. I’m also not claiming superiority over naiveté and ignorance of the average Orange Range fan. I myself was young(er) and stupid(er) once; in fact, I clearly remember the first time I played the MC Hammer CD that I won for my performance of Young MC’s Bust a Move in a lip-synching contest. When my favorite tune at the time, U Can’t Touch This, came on, my music buff father commented, “Oh, that’s Rick James [bitch],” to which I rolled my eyes and idiotically replied, “No it isn’t, Dad, it’s MC Hammer” (feel free to laugh at me to your heart’s content, I certainly do).

However, as I see it, the sampling of riffs and breaks for the composition of a underlying beat used to complement something hip and innovative is completely different from the ganking of a variety of melodies or chords with only the last couple of notes in the progressions changed or the rhythms slightly altered, and then sticking them together with some moronic lyrics and calling it original. It’s a thin line, I’ll admit that, but one has to look at the significance of the new, original material that ideally should compose the majority of the work.

Now, before I make myself sound even more moronic and pretentious than I already do, I hereby enter into evidence a flash animation detailing several examples of Orange Range’s complete lack of creativity here. The text is in Japanese, but one will no doubt recognize several of the original riffs lifted from Western artists such as Queen, Bon Jovi and Kiss, Japanese artists such as Mr. Children and Spitz, and even Dr. Mario (!). In addition, here’s an article with further information about the band and their “mix of influences.”

Just so I don’t come off as a complete crotchety bastard, unlike the generic Boy Bands whose fifteen minutes I wish would hurry up and end already, the guys in Orange Range actually do play their own instruments, so despite their inherent wankertude, I have to at least give them some props for that. They also seem to be quite adept at plucking their eyebrows, too.

This past week, the Japanese government kicked off its new “Cool Biz” campaign to encourage central government officials to shed their suit jackets and neckties during the summer months. The campaign, launched this past Wednesday, was designed to help employees work comfortably following new air conditioning restrictions put in place to reduce electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions to aid in the fight against global warming.

Despite strong support from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the public response to the campaign thus far has been somewhat lukewarm, especially among the more traditionalist members of the population. Most Japanese businessmen feel that suits and ties should be worn at all times — even during the hot and humid summer months — and that casual business attire reeks of unprofessionalism and poor manners. In addition, many still carry bad memories from the fashion nightmare that was the short-sleeved suit, which arrived on the scene following the 1979 oil crisis and was promoted heavily by former Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata.

While I definitely agree that it’s beyond ridiculous to have to wear suits during the stifling Japanese summer, unfortunately I don’t see the “Cool Biz” campaign gaining widespread support, especially in the private sector. In a society rooted firmly in ceremony and tradition, in which every member must wear a uniform (literal or symbolic) to identify their status in order for social interaction to be possible, it’s going to take more than a government initiative to get people to change. I would imagine that even if the ozone layer depleted to the point that the sun’s rays literally scorched the earth, Japanese business men still would not leave their post-apocalyptic subterranean dwellings without first donning navy blue jackets and paisley neckties over their radiation suits.

In my office today, the thermostat was set at a cool 22°C (72°F) and all employees (myself included) were wearing suits and ties as usual, as we will be for the rest of the summer. Even if we underlings were to take it upon ourselves to dress in a manner appropriate for the heat, a swift admonishment from our superiors would no doubt follow, and all of our ludicrous notions of comfort and a perspirationless-free work environment would be immediately abandoned.

I swear, it would likely take an act of almighty Godzilla himself — the total destruction of all formal business attire in Japan (perhaps through collaboration with Mothra) — to get Japanese salarymen to even consider changing their dress habits. Oh well, at least they look passably presentable most of the time; I suppose that’s all that matters (to them).

Well, as hard as it is for me to believe, an entire year has now passed since I made the very first post on this site.

At the time, I had no idea in what the heck I was going to write about (I still don’t), but I’ve certainly had a good time pulling 145 posts’ worth of fluff out of my posterior over the past 365 days. Of course, conbinibento.com likely wouldn’t even be here anymore were it not for the hundreds handful of readers who stop by regularly and skim the uninteresting and poorly written entires and browse the overexposed and pitifully dull photos.

Thanks, everyone.

Yikes, this sounds like an acceptance speech or something. To be honest, right now I’m mainly just surprised that I’ve actually managed to keep up with semi-regular postings for an entire year. For a chronically lazy bastard like myself, that’s no petty feat!

Anyhow, if anyone has any ideas, suggestions, criticism (constructive or otherwise), etc., about the site, I’d be more than pleased to hear it. I aim to please.