世論 What Japan Thinks

After a quick search around the web, I found the official Japan Organ Transplant Network homepage. Send them an email at support+at+jotnw.or.jp with your name, address and number of cards you want, and they’ll pop them into the post for you. For those of you who work in locations with a number of English-speakers around, please order a handful and pin them to a handy notice board or the like.

I’ve applied for mine. If there are any other Japan-resident bloggers (including Japanese nationals, of course!) who wish to take part, or who have already filled in a donor card, please blog about it or give me a shout with your name and web page, and I’ll add you to a roll of honour here.

Japan Blogosphere Organ Donor Roll

your name here!

Ken Y-N

UPDATE: marxy beat me to the punch!

Just a day after my posting of the top 100 natto-related searches, I see that Hakkutsu! Aruaru Daijiten’s producers have admitted to making up the whole story!

Some of the lies and distortions of the truth made by the program included:

1. Some people in the USA did lose weight on a diet program based around boosting DHEA levels, but the before and after photos the program used to illustrate weight loss were of totally different people!

2. A foreign professor from Temple University in Japan was interviewed in English and he did actually make the translated comments attributed to him, but thanks to selective editing, some of his caveats or qualifications of his statements were omitted.

3. They said that two of the eight people they tried the natto diet out on saw drops in their cholesterol levels, but in fact their levels were never measured.

4. They claimed that people eating just one pack of natto per day had lower isoflavone levels than those eating two packs, but they in fact just invented these numbers.

5. Similarly, DHEA levels in the blood of their eight volunteers were also invented!

I noticed via Japan Probe, via Scoop NZ, that there was a press release issued by the Institute Of Cetacean Research, which, if Wikipedia’s article is to be trusted, is basically not much more than a front for the Japanese government for justifying whaling. In the press release there is much statistical jiggery-pokery that I shall try to get to the bottom of.
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Watching Aru Aru Daijiten (“Encyclopedia of Living” is the official translation) on television last night, they were talking about diagnosing problems with internal organs via acupressure, that is acupuncture pressure points, but just pressing them instead of sticking needles in. Whether on not you accept the medical validity or not (I personally do not), the program did, and presented some rather dubious statistics to back up their thesis, and to top it all off, accompanied it with some extremely poor, almost dangerous, advice.

One of the figures that stuck in my mind was that from their 40 guinea pigs, ordinary members of the public aged from 30 to 50 or so, 18 had pain when pressing either or both of the pressure points associated with kidney problems. These 18 were then given blood tests and six were found to actually have unusually high figures for protein in the urine or other kidney problems. Whilst everyone in the studio was amazed, to me that was just one in three who was correctly diagnosed, and there was not even the simple comparative figure of checking the other 22 to see if more or less than seven had similar kidney problems.

Next, when they did liver problems, they claimed (with no evidence to back up this statement) that with a simple one-minute massage of three pressure points one could metabolise alcohol faster and avoid hangovers!

With the people from the sample above where they had detected kidney or liver problems, after just one week of thrice-daily massage of the pressure points, they showed that on average these people had lowered their cholesterol or other indicators by about 5% to 10%, but failed to mention if these people had in addition changed their diet or started taking medicine.

Finally, my pet hate as a holier-than-thou ex-moderately-heavy drinker, was that when two of the regulars confessed to starting drinking before lunchtime and continuing until late at night on a regular basis, they were treated almost with respect for being so strong, and rather than being advised to cut down, massage of said pressure points was the recommended and sufficient activity. There was also no mention of the most basic disclaimer like “if symptoms persist, please see a doctor.”

James over at Japan Probe has highlighted again “Haneru no Tobira” (the closest thing to a sketch show on prime time Japanese TV) and their oh-so-funny “bung on a big nose a blond wig and make like a gaijin” segment; these characters also appear in a Nissan mini-car advert, which has, as a poster named Don pointed out in the comments thread, been voted the most popular television commercial for three months running (Japanese-language link) by the CM Databank.

Desparate to cover up a bullying incident in one of their schools, a Mr Masayuki Akiyama of the Hokkaido Board of Education plucks a few spurious reasons out of nowhere as to why James at Japan Probe should remove not just the allegedly human rights-infringing images, but the whole post as, I suspect, he merely feels it reflects badly on his Education Department. James made a very good and reasoned reply, but now as it seems that Mr Akiyama has the “get English-speaking lackey to email blogger” task ticked off on his to-do list, he has not had the courtesy to follow up on James’ request for clarification.

UPDATE: Trans-Pacific Radio is also covering the same Hokkaido School Board bullying story. Please also digg the stories – see the links in the comments below.

Also, I’ve just seen this good piece on the BBC about the bullying problem.

I read a report today of a Chinese student who got deported from Japan for gold-farming in an online game, that is, collecting in-game items and selling them off for cash, making at least 6 million yen in the process, and possibly up to 150 million. According to the terms of not just the student visa, but most other types of visas, only if you apply for “Permission to engage in an activity other than that permitted by the status of residence previously granted” can you work for up to 28 hours per week on a side job. Now, many of my fellow bloggers have AdSense, JList or other affiliate programs on their sites that must be making them a wee bit on the side, and some of the harder-working bloggers are perhaps putting more than 4 hours a day into their blogs. One might even argue that being a JList affiliate classes you as engaging in a prohibited “visual-transmitting-type adult entertainment business”.

So, if you are getting the click-throughs rolling in, my advice to you would be to either spend your profits locally or get your cash paid into a foreign bank! Except that would still be potentially illegal so I couldn’t condone such activity, and other suitable CYA wording.

An incident occurred a few days ago, and I thought it might be of interest to my readers to hear me thinking out loud about what happened.

Some of you may have noticed that my Performancing Metrics button has disappeared, and been replaced by a Japanblog Ad Network button, but more about the adverts later. I have cancelled my Performancing Metrics account due to me feeling that Performancing has betrayed my trust in them.
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You may remember a couple of months back I wrote about how the Japanese_name article in Wikipedia was a bit naff. Well, just today I’ve been having a number of hits from that article in Wikipedia, which seems mostly unchanged to me. So, rather than be negative again about it, I think I’ll point out all the bits that seem wrong to me.
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I have been a bit worried that my previous article on Doudou Diene’s report may have been seen as being just a bit too negative, so to perhaps redress the balance, I have decided to write this article.

Recently, I have had the pleasure of listening to I Yonbo’s music and talk (sorry, no link – I can’t find anything in English on him!). He has recently become widely known throughout Japan due to him supplying some of the music for the stupidly popular 冬のソナタ, Winter Sonata, a soppy Korean drama starring the soppy Harry Potter-esque Bae Yong Jun.
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