Police have busted a naked policeman found tied up on stage in a BDSM sex club, charging him with public indecency – apparently on the grounds that the club was not a properly lisensed brothel.

The incident occurred in Sapporo when a 28-year-old head warden at a local police station paid a visit to a BDSM club named “Club Patio,” situated in the centre of town.

He took to the stage, took off his clothes, and was bound in place with a red rope by a female member of staff, when police suddenly raided the premises.

The officer was subsequently taken into custody at 1:25AM on charges of public indecency.

He admits the charges, saying “there was no doubt that I was naked at the time,” although at the time of his arrest he was apparently not forthcoming about the fact he was a police officer as well.

Police say there were “about 15″ male and female patrons at the establishment watching his on-stage antics when they arrested him.

Police explained their own presence at the club by saying that they were investigating the club for providing sexual services when they only had a late-night restaurant license (brothels and sex clubs normally have to pay to “register” with police if they wish to remain unmolested).

The rather lurid details of the incident and the pathetic way in which Japanese police shake down brothels by “licensing” them has provoked much comment online:

“I can’t believe this made the national news!”

“If he is M then he is only going to enjoy being arrested.”

“Ruining his dignity as a policeman is the ultimate reward for this guy.”

“He wasn’t actually naked though – he was tied up.”

“That’s what the place is for. Let them be already.”

“Wouldn’t they normally cover up his name in the reporting?”

“He probably wanted it this way.”

“How is nudity in a private SM club ‘public indecency’ in any case?”

“If this is illegal public indecency then every bathhouse in the country is illegal.”

“I wish they’d leave these people to their harmless fetishes…”

“Don’t they have anything better to investigate? They should overlook this sort of thing, it’s completely harmless.”

“If the patrons were in an establishment they believed to be a sex club, how can you arrest them for being naked?”

“Arresting patrons for being in a joint which was improperly licensed is low. How would they know what kind of license it ought to have?”

“No victims arise from customers paying to engage in consensual sex play. If they are adults and consent, the authorities should not be interfering whether it is gay sex or BDSM sex or whatever…”

“They have really been abusing the definition of public indecency lately, haven’t they?”

“How do they call being naked in a room indoors in a private club an act of gross public indecency…”

“You can’t even get naked at an SM club. Being a pervert sure is harsh.”

“Arresting people for being naked at an SM club is kind of crooked thinking.”

“So this would have been legal if the club was properly licensed as a sex club!?”

“There was really no need to release his name for something like this. There are so many other dodgy coppers whose names they never release, after all.”

“What’ll his family think of him now…”

“For a true masochist all this is probably heaven.”

“When I see news like this, I am reminded why I am glad to be S and not M.”

A small child has reportedly fallen victim to China-quality coinage, with the currency exploding in his hands for reasons unknown.

The exploding money was encountered by a 3-year-old boy in China’s Fujian province, when it blew up in his hands.

According to his mother, he had just learned how to pay for the small rides at local shops, and she had given him a 1 yuan coin for this purpose.

No sooner had she taken her eyes off him as he went to play on the rides than she heard a loud bang and a scream, and came running over to find the boy surrounded by smoke and the remains of the coin on the floor.

The boy escaped with minor burns to his hand.

Similar incidents involving small children, exploding currency and electric vehicles were reported in 2007 and 2008, leading some to speculate that some combination of electrical mishap and dubious coinage may have been at fault.

Online there is some glee at this latest entry to China’s explosive hall of fame:

“Explosive inflation!”

“The bubble is finally bursting!”

“What sort of monetary policy do you call this?”

“What the hell is going on in China…”

“Who could have imagined this?”

“Next up, exploding notes. China, you can do it!”

“How can a lump of iron or nickel explode like this?”

“Fake coins and explosive ingredients… what a country.”

“This is China’s version of a financial big bang.”

“You can only look forward to hearing what will explode next, can’t you?”

The explosive dangers of China have once again been amply illustrated by this widely circulated video of a manhole cover being blown skywards in a huge explosion, with an unfortunate man being sent flying by the force of the explosive gases released.

The video, which shows a 20kg manhole cover being blown sky high and the man having his clothes blown off and being flung several metres from the blast.

The incident was caused by a sewer gas explosion in China’s Hunan province, and was captured on a security camera.

The man suffered serious burns, but survived, whilst his sons are said to have escaped injury.

The (huge) gif.

Scandalous allegations about what goes on at idol handshaking events are once again being made, this time describing the extremes of perversion some ultra-creepy otaku engage in at the expense of their beloved idols.

Various industry journalists and other connected experts supposedly maintain the AKB handshaking events are the source of considerable ills, ranging from distorting sales to utter perversion:

“CDs come with one handshaking event coupon and you need several to get an actual ticket, so many fans will buy a great many CDs in order to get this. Once they have it they just throw the CD away or sell them off at dirt cheap prices. I doubt many of these fans buy them to actually listen to the music.”

“Rapidly increasing numbers of fans are actually resorting to shoplifting to get the CDs. One person even got arrested for going around at an event intimidating other fans into giving him their coupons.”

“Their discs get to number 1, they have repeated million-seller chat-topping hits. But that’s because their fans are incredibly desperate, sometimes buying 10 discs each.”

“Only the promoters get anything out of all this. Some of the latest handshaking events are being referred to as ‘touching events,’ and increasing numbers of their more reckless fans are busy groping their breasts and sticking their hands up their skirts. That’s why idols like Tomomi Itano have reputations for hating their fans and find any excuse not to attend the events.”

“Before the handshaking, they go to the toilets and onanise there, and attend the event with it on their hands. When one of the members goes to shake their hands, thinking them an ordinary fan, they get a sudden sticky sensation. Some members responded with a shocked ‘What the hell is this!?’”

Sadly many are by now unsurprised at the lengths some fans apparently go to:

“This is your doing guys! Give it a rest.”

“Of course creepy otaku are creepy. If you’re deliberately marketing to them what do you expect?”

“The stuff about the semen made me laugh. What kind of hero does that?”

“Give them a break, they deserve something for being forced to buy all those trashy CDs.”

“What is with that article…”

“They only buy those awful CDs to get the chance to do all that perverted stuff.”

“What do you expect if you employ sales tactics like that?”

“Make it into a fellatio event and you’ll get rid of all those guys with semen on their hands.”

“Can’t they just arrest the ones who do this stuff?”

“I bet there were always guys doing this stuff.”

“Being suddenly hugged and kissed by some maniac is what being an idol has always been about. They do get paid a lot for it.”

“Give it a rest, it’s basically a form of prostitution so what do you expect?”

“Having to buy 10 CDs to shake hands with them for a few seconds, you’d kind of expect this stuff really.”

Forget Japan and its ganguro girls – China’s notorious extremes of triangular beauty are back, and still nobody can work out where her face ends and the Photoshop and makeup begins:

A man charged with animal abuse for torturing kittens to death has been re-arrested and charged with fraud after outraged cat lovers submitted a petition to police demanding harsher punishment.

45-year-old “self-styled” company employee Katsumi Hirose, a resident of Kawasaki, was convicted of killing 3 kittens in November, having come to police attention when the 52-year-old woman who had given him a kitten visited his house and discovered a discarded cat carcass near his apartment, and subsequently alerted police.

At the time of his initial November arrest, he told that police that “I did it because I got mad when it made a mess on the floor. I got about 10 of them over the Internet since May, one I threw into the river, the rest escaped.”

He is thought to have posted a lengthy and gleeful account of how he tortured a kitten to death on 2ch’s notorious “animal hater” board (which consists in large part of animal abuse stories and advocacy, excused on the board as being “only fantasy” but widely derided on the rest of 2ch as being a “gathering of psychopaths” and a “breeding ground for animal abusers”).

Posting under the name of “Hammer,” his posts include graphic details of how he broke the cat’s legs and repeatedly maimed it with pliers.

He refers to this cat as “kusoneko five,” suggesting he has been pursuing his ghastly hobby for some time, and evidently took great delight in the distressed reaction of both the cat and 2ch. Earlier writings by “Hammer” include details of him torturing another cat with hammer, lighter and pliers over a protracted period.

With the chance of a jail sentence for animal cruelty almost non-existent, outraged cat lovers soon organised themselves, culminating in a petition with over 2,600 names being forwarded to the local police station, demanding more severe punishment (although 2ch’s many entreaties that he be subjected to the death penalty seem likely to be ignored).

Police were apparently sufficiently persuaded that the kitten “was of great value” to its original owner, and took the unusual step of charging Hirose with fraud for obtaining the kitten under false pretences. He is also likely to be sued in civil courts by the cat-owners he “defrauded” of their kittens.

The fraud charges centre on him deceiving a 52-year-old woman he met on an online cat adoption board into letting him adopt a male kitten from her, saying he would take good care of him when he in fact intended to torture and kill him.

Hirose told police that he tricked the woman into giving him the cat, saying “I pretended I liked it” and admitted that “I had no intention of looking after it. I needed to let off some stress, so I wanted a cat to abuse.”

He signed a pledge to “lovingly rear the cat as a member of my family” when he took custody of the animal. He then tortured it and threw it into a nearby river the next day.

Animal cruelty carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a million yen in fines (although prison sentences are unusual and most cases apparently end with charges being dropped), whereas fraud carries a maximum sentence of 10 years and is viewed as a considerably more serious offence.

Just what sentence fraudulently adopting a kitten for the purpose of torturing it to death will attract is not clear, although cat lovers are hoping that he may now actually face a jail sentence.

Japanese police insistence that a man found dead with his penis severed and thrown under his bed was a clear case of suicide seems to be hardening, with investigators unable to find any evidence that his death was suspicious, and with one expert even suggesting that “he may have thought it was a monster and tried to cut it off.”

The case, reported previously, centres on a 49-year-old taxi driver recently found dead in his Tokyo apartment.

The man was found dead in his bedroom by a concerned superior, wearing nothing but a pair of socks. Both he and his room were “covered in blood.”

His penis had been cut off and was found under the bed he was lying on, though his body bore 4 other knife wounds in his neck and chest.

His apartment was unlocked and he had been dead for approximately 2 days when found.

Colleagues report nothing abnormal or untoward about him at work, but neighbours say he had a history of noisy and at times violent relations with women. Police were repeatedly called to his residence after domestic altercations.

Police however were reportedly “unable to obtain any useful information” from interviewing his various female acquaintances.

Police investigators still insist they “cannot eliminate the possibility of suicide,” having found no evidence of another person at the scene of his death and no marks on his body consistent with any conventional struggle.

One investigator’s insightful analysis runs as follows:

“All of the wounds on his body were in places where he could have inflicted them on himself. The extent of the wounds was not enough to kill him instantly, so he was able to move around his room.

So, we think he may have inflicted these wounds on himself, then walked around his room until he eventually died…”

No note or other definitive evidence of suicide was found, but autopsy results did find traces of “stimulants” in his body, along with injection marks.

This has prompted fanciful speculation from medical experts – one professor of forensic pathology at a Japanese university provides the following analysis:

“If he cut off his private parts whilst he was still alive, there would be a correspondingly large amount of pain and blood loss.

However, with drug use we cannot deny the possibility that he may have hallucinated that his privates were a monster and attempted to get rid of it by cutting it off.”

This sort of incisive analysis seems only to be convincing many that Japan’s high rates of suicide and low rates of murder may have more to do with police incompetence and malfeasance than a suicidally orderly society:

“Yes, a 0.00000001% possibility!”

“Mine’s Godzilla.”

“This is a new one. You could turn most cases into suicides with it, making their job a lot easier!”

“Maybe he could have thought it was something, but to then cut it off and stab himself repeatedly?”

“They seem really desperate to cover this one up for some reason…”

“It is pretty odd that they are trying so hard to tone this down.”

“Anything’s possible!”

“If they say something as messed up as that I guess there really is something going on.”

“Any idiot can study medicine…”

“So what happened to this woman he was fighting with? She some politician’s daughter or something?”

“The pathologist probably can’t help it, if he gets on the wrong side of the powers that be his university funding will suffer.”

“They may as well just say ‘investigating is too much trouble.’”

“So all we can be sure of is that perpetrator was the kid of someone pretty high up.”

“You can’t deny the possibility that he hallucinated his penis was a mushroom and tried to pick it, either.”

“If he’s a doctor he should be able to tell from the angle and force of the cut whether it was likely him or someone else…”

“Another one of these scholars who act as government tools. I wonder how many suicides they’ve created using this method?”

“What kind of trashy university did they pull that moron out of? There’s no way someone on speed is going to do something like that.”

“They should probably test that pathologist for drugs as well…”

“And what about where he got the drugs? What he was doing with them? Can’t the police even manage an investigation of that?”

“You ‘cannot deny the possibility’ of just about anything.”

“So any case where the culprit looks to be rich or powerful turns out to be suicide, how handy.”

“Aren’t they just trying to co-opt this into their anti-drugs campaign?”

“It’s the perfect crime – dope your victim on speed and then kill him.”

“At least we know why our suicide rates are so high.”

The return of otaku favourite Tantei Opera Milky Holmes has been noted for its rather unusual combination of guro and moe…

Police have warned the public about a man who called a schoolgirl cute.

The incident occurred at 11:20AM in the Osaka suburb of Izumisano, when a passing middle-school girl encountered a stranger in the street who told her she looked “cute.”

The miscreant is described as being in his twenties, wearing a black jumper and of light build.

As always, police advice schoolgirls to carry an alarm and sound it if they encounter any suspicious person.

Whilst previous incidents have included such gems as men being reported to police for walking in the street or asking for directions, online there is some suspicion about the motives of a man who approaches random schoolgirls in order to comment on how adorable they are:

“Don’t bother with 3D.”

“Didn’t they arrest him?”

“A normal man would not approach some random JK and call her cute. She’s right to report this one.”

“But just saying ‘good morning’ is no good, too…”

“So is ‘excuse me’…”

“It can’t be helped for something like this to be reported.”

“He probably actually said something like ‘hey cutie, nice ass you got there!’ or whatever.”

“In Osaka any talking to schoolgirls is out.”

“Osaka is a scary place.”

“Little girls are untouchables. Even if they are in trouble, it’s better not to get involved.”

“In middle school English textbooks, they teach that ‘Americans praise girls they only just met’:

‘Jim: Yuki, you look great in that sweater.’
‘Yuki: Well, Jim always says nice things to me. Is he in love with me?
‘Mike: Oh, … I don’t know. Maybe he’s just very polite.’
Sunshine 2 (平成20年3刷発行) p 39″

“Over here you get reported just for talking to a girl.”

“It doesn’t say whether it was in the morning or at night. If it was at night, wasn’t it her fault for being out so late?”

[It seems the police reports are given in 24 hour format, so the "11:20" reported presumably means it was in the morning - although the report is silent as to what she was doing out of school and whether she was wearing a uniform]

“So a 20-year-old guy trying to pick up a 15-year-old girl on the street is now a criminal? You can see young people doing that anywhere in the world.”

“What can you say, it’s Osaka.”

Japanese police have uncovered what they think may be a highly unusual and doubtless unbelievably agonising case of suicide by penis auto-severance.

Tokyo police discovered the body of a naked 49-year-old man in his apartment, dead from numerous stab wounds and a severed penis. His penis was found under the bed he was lying on.

He was found in his bloodied bedroom with the door open and the kitchen knife used to cause his death in a neighbouring room, all of which would be consistent with a murder.

However, police say his body bore no marks from him trying to defend himself, and there were no signs of a struggle in the room, which would be more consistent with a suicide.

The man was a taxi driver by profession, and had been incommunicado for a week. Police estimate he had been dead for 2 days when they found him.

Locals say he had lived at his apartment for the past 4 years, and had recently been seen engaged in repeated and noisy arguments with a woman thought to be his partner.

Witnesses report seeing the man tossing furniture into the street and engaging in physical altercations with the woman.

The nature of his wounds suggest this would have to be quite a suicide, say grisly crime commentators – “It’s the kind of suicide he would need considerable determination to complete. We have to wonder why it is police are announcing the possibility of him having committed suicide.”

Another comments that “there’s no real need to kill yourself naked, it seems like something you might do to make it look as though someone else was responsible though.”

Noted guro expert Shoko-tan says that the case is “Really unusual, isn’t it? Hmmm, scary, isn’t it?”

Given these puzzling and conflicted circumstances, police are still undecided as to whether the man’s death was a suicide or a murder, and have announced they are investigating both possibilities.

Fortunately, 2ch provides legions of apparent forensics experts ready to shed even more light on the case, as if the opinions of Japan’s notoriously effective police and random TV personalities weren’t helpful enough:

“Who kills themselves by cutting off their own penis?”

“As if this is a suicide!”

“No way!”

“Brilliant deductive reasoning from the police there.”

“As expected of our marvellous police!”

“No man would think of killing himself by chopping his member off like this.”

“Perhaps the police just got bored investigating this one and decided to chalk it off as suicide.”

“Who commits suicide by cutting their own penis off and then stabbing themselves repeatedly?”

“Perhaps he killed himself and someone else lopped his penis off? Police should check whether he was alive when it was removed.”

“Oh, Japanese marakiri!” ["mara" is slang for penis]

“Maybe… he wanted to become a woman?”

“The woman probably found his corpse and hacked off his boy to defile it further.”

“All you can tell from that death is that it wasn’t suicide.”

“If he were drugged or tied down there wouldn’t be any evidence of resistance, would there?”

“Some kind of twisted sexual game?”

“He was naked after all…”

“The police can start by firing the morons who call this a suicide. They might get a bit better from doing so.”

“Japanese police: ‘If we can’t work it out, it must be suicide.’”

“He was obviously offed by this woman.”

“I expect the mass media will drop this rather quickly, for obvious reasons.”

“Cops, see if you can explain his motive for hacking off his own member.”

“He could just gas himself, instead he cuts his penis off and stabs himself to death. Cute, police, cute.”

“At least they aren’t blaming it on goblins.”

“Still, I’d respect any man who could pull off a suicide like that.”

“You know, I may have just worked out the mystery of how we can have over 30,000 suicides a year in this country…”

The fact that the little girl pictured above is actually a 22-year-old woman has been greeted with incredulity online, although it has also been hailed by creepy lolicon as a glorious example of “legal loli.”

The line-up presented actually consisted of 22 and 26-year-old mothers dressed as elementary schoolers, and a pair of genuine 11-year-olds:

Japanese courts have ruled that a man with an artificial leg is still capable of raping a schoolgirl after all, after having previously quashed his conviction on the grounds that he had only one leg.

The case in question centres on a 27-year-old Fukuoka prefecture man accused of raping a 14-year-old schoolgirl in the back of his car one morning.

He was initially found guilty and given the 3.5 year prison sentence the prosecution requested.

He appealed the verdict, and the court quashed his conviction after having been persuaded by the defence’s arguments that he could not possibly have raped the girl as he had a prosthetic leg.

However, a judge subsequently threw out the ruling, saying they had not “adequately explored the issue of whether the accused was capable of assaulting the girl as she maintained, whilst wearing a prosthesis.”

The court then concluded that he could in fact have managed to assault her as she claimed, and reimposed the initial guilty verdict.

The defendant maintains that he “never raped her, and never got into the car with her.” The whole case is apparently based on the girl’s accusation.

The latter point in particular  has aroused some scepticism online:

“Only on her testimony? Don’t they have any evidence? No body fluids or anything, just arguments over whether a one-legged man could physically rape her or not?”

“Just how incompetent are our police. To say nothing of the chance that this is a false accusation.”

“Don’t our police even use forensics? There should be some physical evidence in a case like this.”

“I can believe he raped her, but it’s hard to believe he forced her into the car.”

“In the morning and in his car. What the hell?”

“Sounds like enjo kousai.”

“Probably enjo. Her parents would have seen to it that became rape. She got in the car herself, after all.”

“He hires her and comes inside, she gets pregnant and her parents find out, she pretends she was raped, they get her to press charges.”

“What proof does she have that she wasn’t just whoring herself to him?”

“You can’t really tell what was going on from the scant details they’ve released. There should be bodily fluids or hair in the car or something. It’s pretty outrageous to convict someone solely on the basis of a schoolgirl’s testimony though.”

“If he were not disabled he would just have been convicted on the basis of her testimony without ever even making the news. Scary, it’s safest just to stay home.”

“They say Japan’s low sex attack rates are because nobody reports them, but I can’t help but think a huge number of them are false accusations of chikan activity and rapes. Any woman who takes issue with a guy after having sex with him consensually can just accuse him of rape.”

“For chikan convictions they go ahead without any evidence and solely on the accusation of the supposed victim. If you protest your innocence they brand you ‘unrepentant’ and give you an even harsher sentence.”

“All he has to do is hit her, strangle her, or menace her with a knife. It’s not like he has to threaten her with his leg.”

“A false leg is not going to effect his ability to attack her.”

“He could have raped her even with an artificial penis.”

“If there were any actual evidence against him something like this would not be coming up in a trial in the first place.”

“Stop pampering the disabled already.”

“Stop defending a rapist, you creeps!”

“3 years and 6 months does seem a bit light for actual rape.”

“What does he care. After he’s served his sentence he’ll be back on his benefits for life.”

“If he can’t manage an attack like that, what is he doing with a driving license…”

“A false leg wouldn’t fit in any case.”

Fate fans are decrying the hideously grotesque scenes presented in the manga version of Fate/Zero, thanks to its inclusion of “the human umbrella.”

The last panel’s “masa-ni gedou!!” (“truly despicable!”) refrain has also attracted attention for being a 2ch meme of long standing…

A policeman has been arrested after molesting 2 schoolgirls in 15 only minutes, saying he “felt frustrated.”

According to Aichi prefectural police, at 12:15PM a 21-year-old officer forced his way into the Nagoya home of a 13-year-old schoolgirl, who he proceed to grope and molest.

Apparently this did not hold his attention for long – he was finished after 15 minutes, and then immediately proceeded to to yet another residence to grope and molest a 14-year-old girl on her own doorstep.

Police say he admits the crimes, saying “I did it because I was in a bad mood.” He has been arrested and charged with indecent assault.

He also admitted to further offences, saying “I did other girls” – police suspect he is responsible for other reported attacks on schoolgirls in the same area, and are investigating.

He began his career in 2008, though it is not clear how long he had been abusing schoolgirls. Police do not say whether he was on duty or in uniform when he committed his crimes.

The local police chief for once avoids calling the incident “regrettable” – instead he promises to “deal strictly with these unworthy acts.”

Osaka police are hunting a man for walking on the same street as a schoolgirl, whilst wearing a mask.

The police advisory warns that an Osaka middle school girl was unfortunate enough to encounter a suspicious man as she was on her way home at 6PM.

She reported the man, helpfully describing him as “over 20, of medium build, with short black hair and wearing a black sweater, white gloves and a white mask.”

Police advise the public to dial 110 should they see this man or any other suspicious persons, and to carry emergency buzzers.

Osaka police’s famous advisories are fast becoming the stuff of legend:

“So it’s finally come to this.”

“What a horrible world we live in.”

“What a dangerous individual!”

“You lot!”

“So now just walking down the street is suspicious…”

“You can’t even walk in the street with a mask now?”

“He was reported for wearing winter clothes?”

“You’ll be reported just for breathing in public…”

“At least write what it was that was suspicious about them.”

“White gloves are a little suspicious.”

“It doesn’t actually say if he was wearing trousers.”

“Just how are you supposed to avoid being reported?”

“So now just being a man is a crime.”

“At least they aren’t exposing their faces online yet.”

“What are we, Jews living under the Third Reich?”

“The UN ought to investigate Japan’s discrimination against men.”

“This girl is going to be busy falsely accusing men of groping her on the train when grows up, isn’t she?”

“Oh come on, he obviously just had a cold.”

“Why don’t those useless human rights whiners actually do something about this stuff.”

“You could always try dressing up as a woman.”

“Where is this country headed…”

Two Japanese women complaining of a group of men on a train failing to yield their seats to them have ignited a furore online after they denounced all Japanese men as “scum” and proceeded to post photographs of the men online in an effort to shame them.

The incident began when two women began complaining vociferously on Twitter about a lack of chivalry on the part of Japanese men, after four men apparently ignored them on a train rather than leaping to their feet and offering up their seats:

“Japan – where four young men won’t yield their seats to old and pregnant women.”

“Japanese men are the lowest of the low.”

“They wouldn’t give up their seats for two pregnant women. Despicable.”

“I was stood in front of these bastards with Mai, two pregnant girls, and an old lady. That guy was looking at us. He wouldn’t give up his seat. There are hardly any good men in Japan. #assholes”

They also decided to publicly upload photographs of the offenders in an effort to shame them (all photos were originally posted with blurs or bars).

As some have noted, this may actually have constituted a criminal offence itself, as Japanese law grants strong likeness rights and there are also a wide variety of anti-voyeurism ordinances used randomly against men taking photographs of women in public.

Online all this has provoked a furore – and not just from the harpies on Twitter:

“Japanese men are all so tired though.”

“Don’t try and force virtues onto people, scum.”

“Tell it to the elderly on their way back from their latest picnic. Young people are stuck working themselves to death.”

“Why didn’t these trashy women just tell them themselves?”

“Ask them already, fatties.”

“Shameless.”

“The women didn’t give up their seats either. So why are only ‘Japanese men’ scum? She’s just saying what’s convenient to her views.”

“They’re no worse than some Jap bitch who won’t ask them to give up their seats and instead tries to shame them in public on Twitter.”

“Get over to the priority seating you scumbags.” [Japanese trains usually have priority seating specifically designated for the elderly and infirm]

“Go find one of your precious women-only carriages.”

“Exposing them like that is just low.”

“Getting yourself knocked up is a choice, so don’t force people to do stuff for you. But people who are injured deserve sympathetic treatment.”

“So she’s smoking and due to have kids? It’s clear where her priorities lie.”

“So now we live in a mutual surveillance society? I’m afraid to go out…”

“What’s with all those Japanese commenting on this whilst pretending to be foreigners?”

“The women complaining:” [Taken from their various online postings]

“Who’d give up their seat something like that.”

“You can’t tell whether that one is obese or pregnant.”

“She just looks obese to me.”

“A tattoo?”

“Ahhh, she even has a tattoo!”

“Pointless ‘one-point’ tattoos like this are so tasteless. What kind of idiot tattoos a plane on their arm anyway?”

“Harsh. She’s no woman.”

“Poisonous creatures evolve gaudy appearances to warn others about themselves.From the looks of it, she’s deadly.”

“She sounds like someone with a complex about westerners…”

“I’ll only give up my seat to beautiful black-haired virgins. Die bitches.”

“If there are many young women who won’t give up their seats, isn’t it sexist to blame only men for this?”

“When did they make virtuous behaviour into a rule? If you force people to do it, it is not exactly virtuous. Japan is so full of people who think this way.”

“Men who don’t yield their seats are scum, no doubt, but so are women who take photos of them like this.”

“Isn’t this way equality of the sexes?”

“Forcing kindness upon people. Disgusting.”

“Leaving aside those four guys, how is this representative of all Japanese men?”

“You can’t even let your guard down on a train now? What brave salarymen to travel on them.”

“Is standing on a train that much of an ordeal?”

“How many pregnant women have died from standing on a train? How many corporate slaves are worked to death every day?”

“If you’re so desperate to sit then stay at home rather than on a train.”

“They paid their fares just like you did!”

“In a country which works salarymen as hard as Japan, it’s the elderly and pregnant who should be giving up their seats.”

“It’s pretty unpleasant if you offer someone your seat and they refuse to take it though…”

“A 46-year-old Chiba man was recently arrested for taking photos of a woman who fell asleep next to him on a train without permission, under anti-voyeurism ordinances.”

“Of course, this only applies to men, not to women, yes?”

“If a man did this to a woman you can bet he’d be arrested for a ‘peeping’ offence.”

“Not giving up your seat is not a crime. Taking pictures of people without their consent is a crime. Both her brain and womb must be full of maggots.”

“So she’s smoking and apparently drinking as well… isn’t that foetal abuse or something? Is she going to try and say women normally drink whilst pregnant in the west?”

“If they can get away with this, will people give up their seats to me for being a virgin?”

South Korea’s president has threatened to surround the Japanese embassy with “comfort women” statues if Japan does not start coughing up more apologies and cash for the alleged wartime misconduct.

The issue began with a Korean nationalist group erecting a bronze statue of a young girl “symbolising the comfort women issue” directly opposite Japan’s Seoul embassy.

Korean authorities refused Japanese requests that they intervene to stop the statue’s placement.

This soon inflamed Japanese sentiment, but when the Japanese government failed to make any concessions the Korean government decided to up the stakes.

In remarks made to the Japanese PM, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is said to have insisted that “this wouldn’t have happened if Japan had shown some understanding [toward the comfort women issue]” and went on to threaten that “if they don’t take steps in good faith, a second and third one will go up.”

There is strong Japanese resistance to acceding to potentially endless demands for wartime reparations – the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea contained secret provisions in which South Korea promised not to demand further reparations in return for billions of dollars of aid, which Korea chose to spend on economic development rather than victim compensation.

Although the treaty made compensation the responsibility of the South Korean government, it maintains it has no duty to provide further compensation to its people and that the matter is now closed.

Demands for compensation continue in spite of this, most notably by individuals attempting to sue the Japanese government themselves – but provisions in the various post-war treaties normalising relations with other countries and limiting further reparations have been upheld by Japanese courts as making these suits invalid.

As far as the actual historical facts are concerned, although the abhorrent behaviour of the Japanese Empire towards both its neighbours and its own people is beyond doubt, the situation is complicated by the competing versions of history on offer.

Both Japan and Korea boast long traditions of exporting their women as indentured prostitutes throughout East Asia (a tradition which arguably continues to this day in the form of both prostitutes and pornography) – the two opposing versions of this history are that all “comfort women” were sex slaves snatched up from Japan’s colonies, versus “comfort women” largely being simple prostitutes who voluntarily opted to provide sexual services in response to official recruitment efforts.

Koreans claiming victimhood have also been aggressively pursuing large cash settlements with the assistance of Korea’s notoriously shrill mainstream nationalists, most of whom display levels of xenophobia and jingoism which make even the Japanese look cosmopolitan by comparison.

On the Japanese side, those claiming the entire “comfort women” issue is merely a diplomatic cudgel being used to beat concessions out of Japan have generally been aligned with extremes of revisionism, which maintain Japan was an innocent victim, first of American aggression and later of Korean and Chinese propaganda – needless to say, this is the version which now predominates online.

Whatever the historical facts, in Japan there is a strong sense that erecting such statues opposite an embassy is an incredibly crude way of attempting to extort concessions, and one only likely to backfire:

“And if we withdraw the embassy?”

“There’s no point in even taking any notice of people like this.”

“‘Show us good faith!’ – pure yakuza tactics.”

“Bury your wretched country in the statues, please!”

“He’s not ‘warning’ anyone, that is a threat, plain and simple.”

“They just love picking fights with all their neighbours…”

“When I imagine the embassy hemmed in by comfort women statues I can’t help but laugh.”

“Keep at it, and show the world just how crude a nation you are.”

“Make 200,000 of them and you’ll have my respect.”

“Didn’t our government just conclude a 5 trillion yen currency swap in their favour? And this is how they repay us?”

“They will just keep demanding money forever.”

“Only in Korea could a bunch of prostitutes make themselves out to be victims and then threaten an entire government.”

“Make a thousand of them and perhaps in a thousand years they will be Korea’s moai…”

“Can we surround their embassy with statues of all the Koreans who have raped Japanese women?”

“The only people this harms are the Koreans in Japan who are desperately trying to manufacture a Korea boom. Now even the idiots can see how anti-Japanese their country is.”

“More of their threaten-and-beg diplomacy.”

“This is shameful – doing something like that to an embassy, I think it’s good grounds to withdraw it.”

“It takes a particularly kind of country to have their president try to hold another country’s embassy hostage…”

Chinese and indolent capitalists alike have been marvelling at the colourful state of the nation’s rivers, which have lately even managed “red as blood.”

Residents of a city in China’s Henan province recently found a river running through their city “running red as blood.”

The red waters flowed down from a culvert to the north, and residents reported nothing untoward the day before.

Even local environmental officials were surprised, and could only speculate that “upstream rainwater and sewage have mixed to cause the effect,” although they still have no idea what exactly caused the issue.

Online, there is some wonderment at the range of colours, and even textures, now visible in China’s waterways:

1 in every 200 Japanese women have appeared in an adult video, claim pornographers with an intimate knowledge of the industry’s vital statistics.

Amongst Japan’s AV industry the claim has been made that of an average Japanese school year of some 400 students, of the 200 girls at least one will turn out to be a porn star.

An industry insider supposedly explains that the figure is more than just delusional slander against Japan’s admittedly less than pristine womanfolk:

The number of AV titles produced annually, if we include online and underground videos, is said to be in the region of 35,000 titles.

Simple arithmetic suggests 100 videos a day are being released.

Since we see from 2,000 to 3,000 new AV girls making their debut each year, it’s said that 150,000 women have worked in the industry.

There are some 30 million women aged 19 to 55 in Japan, so the 150,000 performers give us the rough “1 in 200″ figure.

Nobody can say for sure whether these numbers are correct, but adding to them the number of women involved in Japan’s enormous prostitution industry – whether formally in quasi-legal brothels or informally as “enjo kousai” harlots – rather suggests that it is at least not implausible to think that a great many Japanese women have such experience.

Online this is treated as old hat, not least with AV performers long since turning up in the most unexpected places, though it evidently also serves as a welcome outlet for venting all the pent up misogyny a lifetime without female company apparently engenders:

“We knew.”

“Wherever you work, play or study, if you look hard enough through enough AVs, you will find an AV of one of the girls – how wonderful.”

“I once picked up a girl who casually admitted appearing in one… it was good as she proceeded to do for me the same things as in the AV!”

“My favourite performer changed her name 5 times though…”

“Japanese girls are easy. Virtually all of them could be AV girls.”

“Why up to 55? Surely it should be up to 30, in which case the proportion is rather higher…”

“And the industry is totally centred on Tokyo, so it should be closer to 1 in 50 there, and much less elsewhere.”

“There’s no real basis for the statistics they give in any case.”

“90% of them come from the sex trade. There are clearly enough of them to give rise to the 150,000 AV girls figure.”

“DMM have 180,000 titles. They’ve been around 10 years, so that is 18,000 a year.”

“Non-virgins are disgusting sluts.”

“I’m embarrassed to be Japanese.”

“I think it is more like 2 in every 400.”

“That’s if you count rank amateurs with only one appearance. But I expect 1 in 3 have experience of prositution though…”

“AV is prostitution, you’re taking money to have sex with men after all. Include prostitutes and sluts and you probably get most women.”

“It’s all those filthy Korean sluts.”

“Most of them are just Koreans!”

“It should be ’1 in every 200 AV girls are Japanese’.”

“Are these people who bring Koreans into every single thread Koreans themselves or something? Give it a rest already.”

“The net right can’t decide whether it should be bashing women or bashing Korea so this is the result.”

“You guys just blame anything inconvenient on the Koreans…”

“Japanese women are the world’s worst bitches. They are worse at doing the chores than English women, more selfish than American women, more arrogant than French women, and as greedy as Korean or Chinese women. And their hobbies are bullying and killing their kids. Cockroaches have more sense of shame than Japanese women.”

“Stop bashing your fellow Japanese – this is all a plot by Korean agents!”

“This topic really set off the net-uyo, didn’t it?”

“Most only have 1 or 2 appearances, I’m sure. Only a tiny number will be professional AV performers.”

“Really, if you include prostitutes you should have 1 in 5 I think.”

“If 10% of Japanese are petty criminals and 1% serious felons, it’s hardly surprising to have 0.5% AV performers. And there are barely enough Koreans in Japan for anything but the vast majority of AV performers to be Japanese, idiots.”

“At 0.5% it is nothing to get worked up about.”

“It’s really worse than that. With Google, all of them are going to be preserved online for the rest of their lives, and beyond. There’s no way to avoid being found out now. What happens when they are wives and mothers…”

“These trashy and baseless articles will be translated and published overseas as part of a plot to ruin the image of Japan!”

A study which found North Americans regard atheists as being as or less trustworthy than rapists has been making waves online.

The study, conducted by the University of British Columbia and published in the scholarly Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, quizzed American adults (14% of whom identified as atheists themselves, and 67% as Christians) and Canadian students on their attitudes to various groups.

According to one set of findings, atheists were regarded as even less trustworthy than Christians, Muslims, Jews, feminists and homosexuals, finding themselves only as trusted as rapists.

The study’s authors concluded that “people did not significantly differentiate atheists from rapists.”

The study was prompted by a 2007 Gallup poll which found only 45% of Americans would consider voting for an atheist president (which raises some interesting questions in light of the above findings).

One of the authors noted that it seems many find non-believers “a public threat to cooperation and honesty,” based on a belief that morality is impossible without a belief in god, an opinion expressed by nearly half of all Americans in a 2002 poll.

Japanese objections to these attitudes towards atheists seem to have more to do with hatred of foreigners than any actual religious or irreligious sentiment:

“This is why I hate religion.”

“This is crazy!”

“This is why Japanese will never be trusted by Americans.”

“Japanese are Buddhists and Shintoists, not atheists!”

“Rapists and feminists at least have a chance to be reformed. Atheists on the other hand are beyond redemption.”

“The guy who said Japanese are atheists is obviously a typical filthy Korean dog. Koreans only believe in rape, so there’s no way they could understand Shinto.”

“I think Japanese would be more considered polytheistic?”

“Japanese are basically atheistic. They happily celebrate Valentine’s Day and Christmas. They only go to shrines for matsuri, and temples for funerals.”

“The only people who have any real faith in Japan are cults…”

“This is why you can’t trust Christians. They just use justice as an excuse to go around butchering the non-white races.”

“Looking at this thread it is clear there are a lot of atheists about…”

“Religion is pure fantasy.”

“I think theists are the more dangerous lot for slapping a label on all atheists and distrusting them for it.”

“They believe the same about reds. Commies = atheists.”

“To be secular and without morals is to be like China.”

“Nietzschean atheism is harmless, but Marxist atheism is dangerous. The former is an individual creed, whilst the latter is a radical agenda for totally reshaping society.”

“Christianity is evil. They used to come to Japan and steal women and girls in Kyushu and sell them overseas as slaves. The Tokugawa oppression of the Jesuits wasn’t just to protect feudalism.”

“Slavery was common practice in the Warring States period… although I agree with you about the Jesuits.”

“Unlike Christians, Japanese are tolerant and respectful to other religions.”

“Lies.

Until the Meiji period Japanese were ruthlessly persecuting Catholics.

This is why Japanese are said to not know their own history. Catholic Japanese were killed by fellow Japanese. Japanese are extreme in their efforts to exclude other religions.”

“Japan’s religious repression was worse than ancient Rome’s. Japanese are known the world over for this. People who say Japanese are tolerant of other religions are idiots who know no history.”

“The worst are the ones who just label anything convenient to them ‘god’s will.’ Do Americans really think their precious god would forgive them slaughtering innocents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki using nuclear bombs?”

“If you believe you need to be constantly supervised by a higher power in order to stop you committing evil deeds then you really are scum, aren’t you?”

“West = culture of sin, afraid of God’s eyes

Japan = culture of shame, afraid of other people’s eyes”

“Anime otaku can be thought of as a religion. They believe they can interact with fictional characters, and go on pilgrimages to holy sites. All very religious.”

Even the Chinese may by now be wondering what it is the people designing and building their cities have against blind people, as the “tactile paving” they provide at times looks more like it is intended to kill off the blind than lead them safely to their destination…

See also the previous selection.

Yamakan, in many respects the production staff equivalent to Aya Hirano, is in hot water for his controversial remarks again, this time having spewed some barely decipherable nonsense about the extermination of the Jews…

Some of his remarks, needless to say delivered via Twitter:

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!???”

“This is what anime is now, eh?”

“This is no good. Sorry, sensei. The heavens have shifted!”

“We have to exterminate the Jews!”

“I’m going to the hospital.”

“Everything white only looks black to me. I’ve snapped, I think.”

“Ideology, belief, philosophy, humanity, emotion, they are all meaningless before anime!”

After this screed attracted some attention he attempted to “clarify” his remarks:

“A summary for the people who really don’t understand. I’m saying anime is now controlled by the traditional ancien regime and weird Nazis who all wholeheartedly endorse the extermination of the Jews.

If you still don’t get it, by all means report me to the International Court of Justice.”

Nobody can make much sense of his latest remarks, least of all his wretched anti-following on 2ch:

“What the hell is he on about?”

“What anime is he talking about?”

“People with persecution complexes are better off staying offline.”

“He really does seem to be on drugs.”

“Jews? What anime is this?”

“Please, someone decipher this nonsense.”

“His remarks about Jews are totally out. He’ll be done for if someone over there reports him to one of their groups.”

“There are western anime fans too! This is atrocious, he’s the shame of Japan!”

“It seems he went crazy after the total failure of Fractale.”

“Who is he fighting with?”

“Somebody tell the foreigners about this!”

“He could at least write the name of the anime he’s criticising.”

“Who cares about him, just get on with the second season of Kannagi already.”

“You can’t excuse these kind of remarks about Jews, you idiot.”

Mangaka and artist Rokudenashiko (“rokudenashi” means “ne’er-do-well”) has lately been earning much acclaim (or attention at any rate) for her “Georaman” and other vaginally inspired sculptures, having opted for the direct approach in reproducing her own intimate parts in her work.

A sample of her sculptural portfolio:

“Bug cage”

“MK Girls College” (MK = “manko” or “pussy” according to Rokudenashiko)

“MK Girls College 2″

“MK Bon Festival”

“MK Battlefield”

Some faintly disturbing highlights from a recent interview:

“What prompted you to take so much interest in MK?”

“A friend of mine with a foreigner boyfriend was told that she had to do something about her pubic hair as that is a matter of course overseas. So she went to a pubic hair beauty salon. I heard this and was like ‘They have those kinds of places! I want to try too!’ So I’m shiny and smooth for my current boyfriend.”

“Shiny and smooth… So is he Japanese? Don’t Japanese men recoil if you have no pubic hair?”

“No, he was delighted because ‘she’s made herself so pretty just to have sex with me.’ But after I did that I felt my labia minora was flapping open too much and looked gross, and I decided to have surgery done on it.”

“What was his reaction to your surgery?”

“Well, he didn’t notice at all! Men don’t seem to look very closely at things like that. Maybe it’s like with facial surgery, people don’t really notice. It’s more for the person getting the surgery, isn’t it? So people get surgery over and over until they are satisified.”

“It’s the same with male parts. Men are concerned about being too small or too big, or too fast or too slow, but women don’t care at all. By the way, how much did the operation cost you?”

“About ¥160,000.”

“That’s cheap?”

“There’s a full range. It’s 300,000 at a famous clinic. If you say your labia gets swollen when you ride a bicycle, you can get it covered by insurance for 60,000. I got it cheap by letting the hospital have post-op pictures to monitor my progress.”

Although considered as the tale of her developing a complex about her genitals and feeling compelled to have plastic surgery which nobody even noticed after hearing of a foreign boyfriend making his girlfriend shave it is none too savoury, she has at least created some rather interesting art.

A sample of her manga, for those wondering what else she gets up to:

Her homepage.

Chinese pondering the differences in national character supposedly reflected in the school buses of Japan and the USA need look no further than their own “buses” for some rather painful introspection…

These pictures show a recent accident involving a school bus which collided with a coal truck, resulting in 20 deaths, 18 of which were kindergarteners.

The accident’s severity was exacerbated by the fact that 64 passengers were riding a bus intended to carry only 9, a practice local officials were aware of but chose to ignore.

The final picture shows how to upgrade a bus rated for 7 children into one for carrying 32, China style – simply tear out all the seats:

Refer also to the previously featured US vs Japanese school bus comparison.