見たmorphosis

I’ve been waiting to get some accurate numbers and information on this before posting about this, and it looks like the final toll is 7 dead, 10 injured – 6 men and 1 woman, ranging in age from 19 to 74.

To sum it up, 25 year old man Tomohiro Kato rented a 2 ton truck from Shizuoka and drove it 150km to Tokyo and into a crowd of people in Akihabara. He then got out of the car and started stabbing people at random with a survival knife. The police showed up, overpowered him and took him away while ambulances showed up and took the wounded to various hospitals.

He claimed to have been acting alone and there were initially reports of him being a gang member, but those claims appear to be false. The reasons given for his rampage were “I was tired of life” and “I wanted to kill anyone” (in the sense of “I wanted to kill people and had no particular target in mind” rather than “I wanted to kill everyone”).

The Akihabara area is of course plenty busy on Sundays with shoppers buying up on games, computer gear, anime/manga merchandise, porn etc. and the station itself (where the murderer was allegedly heading towards) is a reasonable sized transportation hub linking something like 4 above ground train lines and 2 subway lines. That coupled with the Sunday tradition of closing the main street to form a pedestrian mall meant that there would be plenty of foot traffic to target. Though I suspect that tradition is going to come to an end very shortly. Which is a shame, given that I keep meaning to go and always wind up in Harajuku on Sundays instead. But I digress.

Interestingly there’s also this piece of news on the NHK site – Advance notice of murder found in website – that posts were found on “a bulletin board” warning of the attack. It doesn’t specify what board and the only outlet reporting this is NHK so it’s a bit dodgy (then again, it’s from this morning’s news a few hours ago), but it’s an indication that this may go a bit deeper. The coming days will tell, I suppose, I don’t really want to speculate too much.

There’s a fairly in depth article on The Guardian, if you want to know more/my summary was crappy. I wouldn’t trust CNN on this – they’re using the same AP article as Fox News with an equally sensationalistic headline (”Man on ‘murder mission’ stabs 17 in Tokyo” and “Man Plows Into Crowd, Goes On Stabbing Rampage; 7 Reported Dead” respectively). I wonder when they turned into such a piece of shit. Though their T shirt scheme cracks me up. I alternate between thinking it’s a terrible idea and a brilliant one.

Via BBC, NHK, Kotaku (well, kind of), The Guardian and Yomiuri Online

Tags: akiba, Japan, tokyo, wtf

I want a Totoro shaped cream puff so bad right now.

Apparently what appears to be a Ghibli licensed patisserie, making nothing but Totoro shaped cream puffs, has showed up in suburban Tokyo. This image is making me hungry. The details, in case anyone who reads this is anywhere near Tokyo:
3-21-21 Takaido Higashi, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, and the map shows it as close to the Takaido station off the Keio Inokashira line. The hours are 11am-7pm with Wednesdays off. Website: http://www.shiro-hige.com

Of course, I’m far more likely to end up there than at Patisserie Swallowtail. Even if… mmm, delicious…

Except, goddamn, now I’m craving omu-rice. With something cute drawn on the top in tomato sauce, or something. Which of course any self-respecting maid cafe in Japan, or even less self-respecting places outside of Japan would do.

Of course, there’s other novelty cafe options in Tokyo. I don’t exactly make a habit of trying them all (maybe I should?) because so many of them are temporary affairs, but there’s always this place:

The menu is… a bit odd. There’s a disconcertingly large amount of pasta on there, and there was also a photo of a burger containing kiwifruit. And to top it all off, there’s an Outback Steakhouse next door *shakes fist*

The address, in case you’re interested, is 6-1-3 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo. It’s fairly close to Roppongi station on both the Oedo line and Hibiya line, and there’s more info on the site if you need it.

Probably my favourite of the places is Jackson Hole from the live action film, anime and manga franchise NANA. It technically doesn’t count as a novelty food place, given the bar existed before the manga, but it’s still nice because the entire place is exactly as it appears in the show. And of course there’s the Jackson Burgers, which are kind of small and kind of expensive, but oh so tasty.

Unfortunately, they closed their original store at the end of March this year and moved, and I can’t find their new address. It’s on the north side Chofu station on the Keio line (changing at Shinjuku is the easiest way to go) in Tokyo though, as opposed to the south side where it was previously. I don’t know if they’ll keep the decor or anything, but no doubt they’ll still have the burgers.

Via Nausicaa.net and Yahoo News

Tags: Anime, antipodes, food, Japan, Studio Ghibli, tokyo, travel

The May Sumo tournament has come and gone and as tournaments go, it was an interesting one. It was won by Bulgarian ozeki Kotooshu, who became the first ever European sumo wrestler to win one of the major tournaments, winning 13 out of his 14 matches, 12 of those being consecutive. He also managed to beat the two highest ranking wrestlers in the tournament, the yokozuna Asashoryu and Hakuho. This is epecially surprising given his form was going downhill for a while and he’d been written off as a prospect. Video highlights of his matches (he’s the tall one):

Of course, the other big news of the tournament was this match-up, between the two yokozuna Asashoryu and Hakuho below:

It may not seem like much. But watch it again. Hakuho (the one on the right with the brown mawashi [belt]) had lost at the point where his hands touched the floor of the arena, however notice the extra push that Asashoryu gives him. Then Hakuho gets up, gives him a shoulder barge and they glare at each other.

Living in a land where the national sport is rugby, the fact that the above scene caused a great deal of controversy seems odd. But this is Japan and the sport of sumo isn’t just the national sport, it still has all sorts of ceremonial religious overtones and to certain people, it’s very tied into the national identity. So the only two wrestlers of the highest rank acting in a dishonourable manner sent people into a tizzy and prompted phone calls and letter writing and all that sort of thing. Unfortunately there’s a nasty edge to it – there are racial undertones, given that Hakuho and Asashoryu are both Mongolian wrestlers and there’s some amount of discomfort at the perceived foreign dominance of the sport. Lots of old people watch sumo wrestling, you see. And of course in addition, there are people wondering if promoting Kotooshu to yokozuna will be good or bad for the sport.

So they’re all heading off to Los Angeles next week. It’s not an official tournament or anything, but it will be interesting to see whether Kotooshu can keep up his current form. And I guess getting away from the media frenzy surrounding the Asashoryu/Hakuho thing in Japan will do everyone some good.

Final bit of sumo news. Kotooshu has begun a blog. It’s almost entirely in hiragana, so it should be readable with very basic Japanese knowledge. I know how much of a pain this whole blogging business is, so I don’t know if he’ll be able to maintain it, but if he does it should be a fun read.

Tags: internet, Japan, sumo, tokyo, video

I always like reading surveys from the site What Japan Thinks, and this one especially was relevant to my interests. Sort of. It reminds me of my stack of unread manga in the corner of my room, at any rate.

Turns out that out of a sample of 6399 Japanese people, 95 were reduced to tears by Doraemon. By this dude here:

Doraemon promotes public safety, is an ambassador and an Asian hero. We’re not exactly talking Hamlet here.

I don’t get it… I’m not too sure about Slam Dunk either, though I guess I can grant them One Piece. And Barefoot Gen and NANA are wholly unsurprising – both are tremendous tearjerkers in vastly different ways.

On the “Would Recommend” list, I’m kind of surprised at the high placings of older stuff like Tezuka’s Phoenix and the Rose of Versailles, which my mother was reading at high school. Though I saw some pretty kick ass cosplay of it at the last winter Comiket, so obviously it still has a strong following. Though… no Dragon Ball, which I guess correlates to the surprise I see when Japanese people find out how popular it is overseas. Well, that and it’s a bit too popular over here, but I think that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry altogether…

Via 世論 What Japan Thinks

Tags: Japan, survey

So it turns out that now the Japanese social networking site Mixi (it’s like a Japanese equivalent of Facebook, I guess, so it’s kind of a big deal) have made a Japanese cellphone email address compulsory for all new registrations (this is on top of already requiring an invite from an existing member). This new measure effectively limits it to people resident in Japan only. It makes me rather relieved I already have an account, because as far as I can tell, they’re not enforcing it retroactively.

Maybe I’m just being a bit optimistic about their intentions, but it looks to me like a slightly shortsighted and misguided way for them to cut down on spam accounts, rather than any particular hate for foreigners – like a more extreme version of how US sites occasionally ask for a zip code (12345 and 90210 is how I roll). Still, the end result is that it prevents anyone outside of Japan from registering, and that sucks. Go whore yourself on Stickam instead.

via Tofugu

Tags: internet, Japan, sucks to be you