July 2011
15 posts
5 tags
This summer's mystery
There is a road called Midōsuji in Ōsaka along which you can admire 29 bronze statues.
On the morning of the 25th, Ōsaka woke up to discover that 19 of those statues were wearing red dresses.
The dresses exactly matched the size of each statue. They were casual wear all dyed in red.
Further investigation revealed that a security camera filmed somebody (probably a woman) on a bicycle...
7 tags
Be careful of what you write on the net, your...
So what ? Would you think.
Well, a third year student at Fukuoka University has been expelled for 3 months because he wrote on the net he drove his bicycle when drunk.
Japanese laws are really strict about drunken driving and the University considered the student’s behaviour damaged its honour. After the student tweeted about coming back home drunk, the University received 18...
5 tags
Why is foreign languages instruction always done...
Todai (Tokyo University), from which I wouldn’t mind receiving a job proposition, announced a very special entrance examination session : for the first time, the whole examination will be set in English.
It will be for a special programme of education in the English department, whose lessons, starting next year, will also exclusively be hold in English. The begining of the lessons...
7 tags
494 days in space and counting
お久しぶりです。
So what happened in Japan while I was job hunting ? Typhoon, earthquakes, baseball all-stars matchs… Nothing that really stands out from the ordinary.
Furukawa Satoshi (Astro_Satoshi) is currently on the ISS, that’s no news either. But thanks to him, today the number of days spent by a Japanese in space has reached 494 : Japan became the third nation in the...
9 tags
Nadeshiko Japan
I slightly pondered whether I should deal with this since I started this tumblr with the idea of focusing on (interesting) news that do not figure in the headlines. But running a site about Japanese news and ignoring the event everybody is currently talking about would be quite pointless. (I mean, there is a typhoon, and nobody cares because :)
Nadeshiko Japan won the FIFA Women’s World...
12 tags
The first tsunami since the Big Tohoku Earthquake...
Don’t panic, there’s nothing dramatic. At about 10:00 this morning an earthquake occured in the Sanriku zone. The epicenter was 34 kilometers deep and even if the magnitude was of 7.3, the earthquake was of level 4 at most on the Japanese earthquake scale.
The Japanese earthquake scale has nothing to do with magnitude, but considers the way the earthquake is experienced and the...
13 tags
The end of an era
This is no news that analog television is coming to an end. As Kusanagi Tsuyoshi always says “Chideji no junbi, dekimashitaka ?*”. All Japan will have switched to digital broadcasting on July the 24th (except Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, that were granted a delay, for obvious reasons).
So everybody is buying a new television. And is throwing away the previous one. In the...
6 tags
Well, it was tanabata...
So, yesterday was tanabata, my favourite summer festival in the world. You should have expected a related post.
Have a look at this wonderful picture of the Milky Way taken in Osaka :
Yes, they recreated the Milky Way in the river, with 50.000 plastic balls emitting blue light, nicknamed “stars to pray on”.
There is a quick report of the event on MBS News site, here.
...
10 tags
This is the reason why I love Japan
There are sacred trees ! And zarusoba, but that’s another story.
There is a Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) in Rikuzentakada that is the only tree the only thing that stood after the tsunami flooded everything. It’s a sacred tree from Imaizumi Tenmangu shrine that is 800 years old. It survived the tsunami, but was still in great danger and a squad of landscape gardeners...
5 tags
Hard times for Crested Ibis...
Crested ibis (Nipponia nippon) is not, despite its latin name, the national bird of Japan, since it is the green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor) BUT… I bet even Japanese people are pretty sure the title belongs to crested ibis…
The last wild specimen have been observed in 2003, but reintroduction of captively bred ibis(es ?) to the wild began in 2008. This programme has...
5 tags
Astro-G project abandonned
It seems that the JAXA (Japanese Space Agency) Astro-G project has been abandonned.
Astro-G was supposed to be an incredibly big orbital radio-telescope, with an antenna of 9 metres diameter. In cooperation with the terrestrial radio-telescopes, it would have created a “virtual” radio-telescope whose diameter would have been three times the Earth’s one. The precision of the...
7 tags
Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki visit devastated...
Studio Ghibli’s Miyazaki Hayao and film director Anno Hideaki visited the devastated areas on the 2nd and 3rd of July. They proposed the inhabitants of Kessennuma in Miyazaki prefecture and of Rikuzentakada in Iwate prefecture with a preview screening of the latest Studio Ghibli film “Kokuriko saka kara”.
Suzuki Toshio, producer of Studio Ghibli said they answered the call...
4 tags
「疲れた～」
It seems that 「tsukareta」 (meaning “I’m tired”) is tweeted 27.241 times a day. It means one time every 3 seconds !
And in one week, it is more tweeted on wednesday than on the other days. This result is interesting since in accordance to the plan launched for the conservation of electricity measures, most of the entreprises chose wednesday as “No overtime work...
8 tags
Lord of the Flies 2, the return
So, a few days ago I reported the fact the number of flies was increasing on the Sanriku coast, putting a(nother) threat to the refugees’ health. Fortunately, Itou Hironobu saved the world. And with pet bottles ! As great as McGyver !
Itou Hironobu is one of the temporary prefectural staff employed to cope with the disaster in Oofunato (prefecture of Iwate). He made flies...
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Summer has come ! Summer has co・・・ haven't I just...
The Mount Fuji is opened again ! Essentially for security reasons, the access to the Mount Fuji is closed during winter.
About 400 persons gathered this morning at the summit to welcome the first “sunrise-viewed-from-the-mount-Fuji” of the season. They began the ascension yesterday afternoon, allowed them some naps in the shelters on the road and gradually arrived at the...
