For a gloss on Trey Desolay’s post about the character of Japan as reflected in the blog MasaManiA, I though I might take the temperature of the times there by posting some current headlines from the Mainichi Daily News

Celebrity academic faces prison for peeping up schoolgirl’s skirt

He spotted a high school girl and approached her from behind, the indictment says.

Uekusa stood on an escalator just behind the girl and had put the hand mirror below her skirt when the officers arrested him, according to prosecutors.

After serving as an associate professor at the state-run Kyoto University, Uekusa became chief economist at Nomura Research Institute. He often appeared on TV as an economic commentator.

Child welfare worker nabbed for playing with himself in public

Investigators said the man, Sumio Ishii, 53, unzipped his trousers on the sidewalk in Aomori at about 8:55 a.m. on Thursday and exposed his lower body parts. He then began playing with himself.

At the time there were about three or four people around him, including a high school girl.

Aomori Gov. Shingo Mimura expressed his regret over the incident.

“This is extremely regrettable. We apologize to all residents in the prefecture, and will do our best to manage human resources so that this sort of thing does not happen again,” he said.

Quizzed former Seibu Railway president hangs self

Former Seibu Railway Co. President Terumasa Koyanagi who hanged himself at his Tokyo home on Saturday had been distressed about continuing investigations into the company’s concealment of top shareholders’ stakes, colleagues said.
. . . .

After the TSE de-listed the Seibu Railway stock from its First Section in December last year, Koyanagi came under fire for denying the company falsely under-reported the ratio of its top shareholders’ stake.

“The contents of the reports were incorrect, but we didn’t do it intentionally. Nor was the company involved in the case as an entity,” Koyanagi said at the time. Moreover, he declared that Seibu would begin preparations to list its stock in JASDAQ.

He came under harsh criticism for not sufficiently reflecting on the incident.

Young pitcher Darvish sent to dormitory for smoking, playing pachinko

The Nippon-Ham Fighters have ordered rookie Yu Darvish to stay in his dormitory after he smoked cigarettes while playing pachinko.

Darvish, 18, from Tohoku High School, has received extensive coverage from the media since he was signed as the team’s No. 1 draft pick this season.

. . . .

Questioned by officials from the Nippon-Ham Fighters, Darvish admitted that he visited pachinko parlors several times in Okinawa and smoked cigarettes there.

“I think I did something that could betray fans’ expectations of us. I feel really sorry,” the Nippon-Ham farm team manager and another top official quoted Darvish as saying in a statement here on Sunday.

In a symbolic form of punishment, the team will have Darvish leave the camp and stay confined in the farm club’s dormitory in Kamagaya, Chiba Prefecture.

Teen killer of teacher says he doesn’t know why he did it

When officers asked him whether he knew that the victims could die when he attacked them with a sharp knife, the boy reportedly replied, “I didn’t try to murder them.”

The boy bought two knifes in Neyagawa at about 2 p.m. on Feb. 14, and visited the elementary school from which he had graduated.

He initially asked staff members about a male teacher who was in charge of the boy’s class years ago, but the teacher was not there at the time.

The boy then went to a restaurant before returning to the school shortly after and then went on a stabbing rampage, police said.

‘Dead’ woman’s heart starts beating in mortuary

The 27-year-old woman, whose name has been withheld, was whisked to a hospital after it was confirmed that she was alive, and she later regained consciousness. She is reportedly making a recovery.

Police said the woman’s body was found near an embankment of the Muka River in the Hokkaido city of Kitami shortly after 10 a.m. on Sunday.

Officers were called to the scene and a paramedic examined her body. She was unconscious, showed no pulse or pupil movement, and rigor mortis appeared to have begun to set in.

More Japanese men prefer sitting whizzes

Almost one in every four Japanese men sits down on the toilet to urinate, according to a survey by Toto Corp., the country’s biggest manufacturer of toilets.

Toto’s poll of 2,312 adult men from across Japan discovered that 23.7 percent sat down while having a pee.

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Toilet researcher Junichi Hirata blames the spread of Western-style toilets on the increasing prevalence for Japanese men to sit on the toilet even while only urinating.

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Sitters have also influenced changes in men’s underwear. Where it was once normal to have men’s briefs with an opening in the front to provide easy access at times of urination, now less than half the 20 types of men’s undies available from catalog clothing seller Cecile Co. offer such access.

“With so many guys in their teens or 20s sitting down every time they use the toilet, the demand for briefs with openings just isn’t there anymore,” a company spokesman said.

Not everybody is happy with the trend.

“Men are structurally designed to piss standing up,” Chiba Institute of Technology Associate Prof. Yoshiyuki Ueno, who has studied toilets for more than three decades, said. “I wouldn’t recommend anybody sitting down on a Western-style toilet to urinate. I advocate bringing back household urinals and solving problems regarding cleanliness by getting guys to be responsible for cleaning up.”

Pet crematorium on wheels is hot-to-trot

Japan’s sudden discovery of pets in recent years has sparked a boom in furry creature businesses like pet life insurance and pet therapists, but one new entrepreneur in the domestic darling business has given an entirely new meaning to the concept of a hot dog stand, according to Spa! (2/22).

“When I was younger, my family used to have about 100 Akita dogs. When one of them died, we had to take them to the vets, but the corpses of the dogs we dearly loved all ended up just being hurled onto garbage dumps. The other alternative was to take them to a pet crematorium that was miles too far away from us. That’s why I started this line of work,” Katsuhisa Masuda, Japan’s only mobile pet crematorium operator, tells Spa!

Seedy Shibuya spawns new breed of dirty little schoolgirl

Pagyaru, schoolgirls who hang out on the streets of places like Tokyo’s minor Mecca Shibuya while decked out in stuffed animal suits, are the latest “breed” of trendy teen in Japan, but their burning yearning to be accepted is also making them vulnerable conniving kid capitalists, according to Weekly Playboy (2/1).

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“I get most of my money from enjo kosai,” 14-year-old Megumi tells Weekly Playboy, referring to the euphemism meaning “compensated dating” that refers to schoolgirl prostitution. “I don’t go all the way, though. That’s a bit risky. But I’ll take some old bloke out the back of a building and let him put his hand up my skirt or smell my undies if he gives me some money.”

‘Hysteric Blue’ guitarist handed 14 years for rape

The guitarist of the now-defunct rock band Hysteric Blue was Monday ordered to spend 14 years in prison after being convicted in the Tokyo District Court of raping and molesting nine women, including a high school girl.

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Akamatsu was convicted of jabbing his car key into the back of a high school student as she was walking home in a parking lot in Tokyo’s Meguro-ku in November 2003, and saying, “If you make a fuss I’ll stab you with this knife.”

. . . .

In addition, Akamatsu was convicted of using the same tactics to sexually attack another eight women ranging in age from their teens to their 20s.

Teen rapists terrorize 100s of women in Western Japan

Japan’s Kinki Region has recently been rocked by the arrests of two minors who’ve both admitted to raping and robbing over 100 women or girls, a shocked Asahi Geino (2/17) says.

Neither of the confessed rapists can be named as they’re legally still children, but they will be tried as adults, though they can be jailed for no more than a decade.

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