Japan’s welfare roll climbs to post-World War II high, AFP says

TOKYO (TR) – The number of Japanese receiving welfare benefits in July rose to a record 2.05 million, the highest since the government started recording the data 60-years ago, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry.

The previous highest monthly average was 2,046,646 set back in 1951, AFP said. Read more

Contractors in Japan begin to shovel aside yakuza groups

TOKYO (TR) – News organizations have consistently celebrated the steady rise of the Tokyo Sky Tree in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward. Yet the most interesting aspect to the project, set to reach a height of 634 meters, might be taking place at ground level.

At the base of the steel structure, a signboard, complete with a stick-figure campaign character raising its fists in anger, announces that yakuza criminal gangs are prohibited from participating in the project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2012.

In November, 2008, members of construction companies formed a committee designed to exclude gangster groups. A similar arrangement was conceived for the new incarnation of the Kabuki-za theater in Ginza, Chuo Ward, whose historic building closed this year.

“We have formed alliances with construction companies that are designed to shut off yakuza involvement in these projects,” says Hiroichi Katayama, superintendent of the Organized Crime Elimination division within the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Read more

Tarawa: at world’s edge

(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, March 17, 2010) Read more

Back to basics with Nobel Prize winner Masatoshi Koshiba

TOKYO (TR) – Following his graduation from the School of Science at the University of Tokyo in 1951, a young Masatoshi Koshiba departed on a two-week voyage by ship from Japan, still under Allied occupation following World War II, to the United States. He knew that with his father having served as an officer in Manchuria for the Imperial Army that there would be a psychological conflict. But after landing in Seattle, he was soon overwhelmed by something else altogether.

“The first impression I had of the U.S. was that it was such a big country,” says the soft-spoken Koshiba, 73, sporting a tweed jacket during an interview in April at Tokyo University, where he is professor emeritus. “People were eating a very big bowl of ice cream soda. And for me, during the war, that was something so high up in the sky. If these people are eating this everyday, I thought, it is no wonder that we lost the war.”

He graduated with a PhD in physics in 1955 from the University of Rochester, and through his future work he found more than sweet dreams high up in the heavens. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his observations of neutrino particles, which result from nuclear decay reactions, such as those taking place in stars like the sun. Read more

Closing ceremonies for Kabuki-za in Ginza

(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, April 30, 2010)

TOKYO (TR) – Closing ceremonies for the five-decade-old Kabuki-za theater, located in Chuo Ward’s Ginza district, will be held today.

Entertainment company Shochiku announced in 2008 that the theater, Japan’s home for kabuki since it was founded in 1889, will be rebuilt inside a large office-theater complex by 2013. Shochiku said in an email statement that the Kabuki-za is an aging structure that is susceptible to earthquakes. It added: “Taking into consideration that its facilities are not barrier-free, we decided that it would be in the best interest of our customers for us to rebuild the theater.”

The existing structure was established following heavy damage inflicted during the Allied bombings of Tokyo in World War II. Farewell performances took place Wednesday. Read more

Return to Tarawa

TARAWA, KIRIBATI (TR) – Sixty-six years ago, the Pacific island atoll of Tarawa was a World War II battlefield of billowing black smoke and death’s stench. Allied and Japanese forces blazed through its coconut trees and white sands, today a part of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, and turned it into a charred chunk of earth upon which roughly 6,000 lives were lost — making it one of the most gruesome battles in U.S. military history.

Former U.S. Naval Ensign Leon Cooper remembers that seventy-six-hour period as if it were yesterday. “I still have nightmares from to time,” says the 89-year-old. “A random smell reminds me of the stink of that time. A sudden loud noise makes me jump.”

But with the landscape of Tarawa, the capital of the nation’s collection of coral atolls that are spread over 1,351,000 square miles of ocean, now largely a rubbish pit, Cooper set his demons aside and returned, in February 2008. Read more

Nippon, Nippon über alles?

The grainy black and white photo is surely one of a kind. Seated at a table are two “Aryans” and three Asians, at least two of whom are clad in Wehrmacht uniforms of the German Third Reich, but with rising sun insignias on their upper right shoulders. (The image below is a crop of the photo showing one of the Japanese.) If authentic, this would cast light on something that should stop scholars of World War II in their tracks. Read more

Invasion of the (kid) body-snatchers

Editors of and contributors to the subculture monthly Jitsuwa Knuckles might occasionally be accused of embellishing the facts, but can certainly take pride in that the shock value of their publication is second to none.

Perusing a copy of its February issue — procured for a fraction of its regular 490-yen price tag from a homeless gentleman hawking it outside of a major rail terminal in the Tokyo metropolitan area — your faithful correspondent came across what he sensed was a rather amazing piece of investigative reporting.

While stirring his cuppa hot tea with a spoon, a source going by the pseudonym “Atsushi Ota” informs writer Daisuke Yokoyama, under assurance of anonymity, of the existence of a horrifying type of underground sex business. Read more

King copra

MAJURO – The continually hot and dusty conditions found on the Marshall Islands’ capital of Majuro can be rough on the interior of any car, explains Joe Heran as his brown 4-door sedan taxi rumbles down the main road from the airport.

“I fill this up with coconut oil – $2 a gallon,” he says, producing a spray bottle of light brown liquid from beneath the driver’s seat. “It helps to clean the inside of my car. I just wipe it down.” He then pats the dashboard just below the yellow fuzzy dice dangling from his rear view mirror.

Adding a little sparkle to a car’s interior is just one of the many uses for products coming from the coconut – its dried meat, or copra, has been a major source of income for many resource-poor nations in the Pacific over the last two centuries. Read more

Dr. Strangelove

I first met the man I came to know as Strangelove at Charleston’s in Roppongi. It was early evening on January 20, 1986, a memorable day because it was the same day I enrolled in Japanese school. But more remarkable in that from that point on I could never stop wondering if the man I’d just met was sometime going to set the world on fire.

A Japanese fellow in his early 30s, he sat at the bar hitting on a shapely blonde Askew Agency model whom I vaguely knew. I took a seat next to him. Introductions followed shortly afterwards.

In the beginning of the bubble-era of the ’80s, Charleston’s was one of Roppongi’s hardcore meat markets for Japanese men with a taste for “foreign food.” (For I know it still is, but then again I don’t get out much anymore.) Its patio and open sliding glass doors faced south towards the parking lot across from the Hard Rock Cafe building with the three-meter plastic gorilla hanging off its exterior. Read more

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