The New York Philharmonic held a concert in North Korea earlier this week, and the Wall Street Journal focused its story on the spontaneous five-minute applause that occurred at the end of the concert, where there was a lot of clapping, waving and even cheering. The article went on to talk about the lengths that the North Korean government went to in order to prepare for the visitors, and the connections that the musicians felt with the attendees, even as it mentioned the political issues.

By contrast, it was interesting to watch this morning’s news on Japanese television, where there was no mention of the encores at the end, but showed face after face of grim-faced North Koreans during the concert, clapping solemnly. The Japanese network used the images as a way to point out that North Koreans were just acting according to instructions by the government, and how some of the tenseness (and Kim Jong-Il’s lack of appearance) reflected the problems of U.S.-North Korea relations. That evolved into a discussion about how screwed up things were.

Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as impartial coverage, but I found it to be an interesting example where this was very evident. The truth might be somewhere in the middle of the two interpretations, but I was startled by the degree of manipulation on the Japanese network.

If you walk around Tokyo these days, you’ll find that a lot of the kiosks (newsstands) at JR stations are closed.
You may think it must be a holiday or something, but no. I was watching the news one evening when I found out why. Japan Railways went a little bit overboard with its restructuring and discovered too late that it fired, I mean downsized, too many of the part-time workers, who man the stalls. One in three stalls are closed, as a result, which means Japanese commuters won’t be able to readily buy their drinks, candy, and “sports newspapers” aka dirty magazines. I’m trying to think of something clever to say about this situation, but I really can’t. Sometimes, the news speaks for itself.

The other night I rented Prom Night Two: Hello Mary Lou, a very silly 80’s slasher flick. Look, I enjoy scary movies, even when they are not at all scary but instead so stupid they are comedies. Besides, my partner is out of town on business so renting a real scary movie now would mean not sleeping at all.

The first and only time I saw this movie, until last night, was back in high school and given that I’m a gay man, I didn’t remember that the movie included a few vagina shots. Back then they were hairier than their present counterparts and so harder to miss but I wasn’t interested in that. Still, if those ‘gina shots were fuzzed-out when I first saw the movie, I’d be more likely to remember them. How can a pixeled vagina not cause more of a stir than a vagina al fresco?

Here in Japan they disagree, or at least the censors do. The offending vaginas were pixeled (pixelated?) out of view, fuzzed-out, and this offends me. Not only does it make me remember them more than I would if they were not censored, it makes me feel like a stupid child with an overprotective parent looking over my shoulder.

What will the censors do when Babel is released in Japan? When I saw that movie in The States and the Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi bared all, the first thing I thought was “How are the Japanese censors going to deal with this?” Incidentally, her performance was the best one in that movie, with or without a “money shot.”

I’m watching a television show that gives “all you can eat” a whole new meaning — it’s an eating competition. The first round was gyoza, which was won by a relatively skinny guy. I wasn’t paying attention but I think he ate about 26 plates of 8 gyozas. The second round is thinly sliced raw cabbage, a typical accompaniment to pork cutlet in Japan. Stay tuned to find out how much they can eat in 45 minutes (One guy’s technique — use the residual heat from the accompanying pork cutlet, which they don’t have to eat, to soften up the cabbage to make it easier to eat.)

Japan is actually a big producer of eating champions. You may have heard of Takeru Kobayashi, the four-time champion of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. The interesting thing is that the champions are never the large guys.

If you’re thinking that it’s a pretty disgusting competition, you’re right. It’s mesmerizing though. Plus the show is not completely irresponsible. They have a caption that lets viewers know that the competitors are advised to chew thoroughly in competition.

(The cabbage round was a tie by two guys who ate 16 plates of 250g of cabbage. Third round was natto sushi rolls. The winner ate 36 natto rolls, which weighed 3.5 kilograms. If you lined them up, it measured out to be 7.5 meters)

I was watching a morning show yesterday before work, and I tuned on to a show where they were discussing the news about how an orphan newborn in the aftermath of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka (I think) was identified through DNA testing as the child of one of eight couples, who claimed he was theirs.

I can’t imagine how devastated the other 7 couples were, and I assumed most people would feel the same way as I do. But I nearly fell off my chair (figuratively-speaking since I was sitting on the floor) when I heard what flew out of the mouth of one of the commentators. His first thought: “All of the others must be incredibly embarrassed.”

It was a telling statement about how something like this would be perceived in Japan.

I got up this morning to be told that Arafat died yesterday evening Japan time. Like any right thinking person, I thought I’d check the paper to see what the Nikkei (the financial paper of record in Japan) had to say about it since my television had some French Japanese woman, who writes plays and has nothing to do with the Middle East giving her opinion about the whole affair. Imagine my surprise when the Nikkei had just a few short graphs about it in relatively small print on the front page with a promise to tell more on PAGE 6! Arafat’s news was smaller than a story about the restructuring of Seibu Group.

Just as a point of reference — a couple days ago the earnings of a tiny but growing Internet retailer Rakuten got huge play on the front page of the Nikkei for the first time. The company just got approved to start a new baseball team a few weeks ago after lots of lobbying and publicity. Coincidence?

An Oklahoma state judge is being charged for masturbating and using a penis pump during court sessions.

There’s really nothing more to be said about the topic except that it’s apparently not uncommon because when I did a Google search on “judge” and “masturbating” to find a link to a story, I also turned up a story on a French judge, who was caught masturbating in court.

I have to admit to a lack of imagination as far as this is concerned. I have no idea how a judge would get into a situation like this. Do they get turned on by court proceedings? If they were bored, why wouldn’t they do something normal like chew gum or something?

A high school teacher in Fukuoka forced a 17 year old student to write an apology in blood for dozing in class.

He took the boy to the staff room, gave him a box-cutter and told him to get going.

The incredible thing is that there were no repercussions for the teacher and the boy remains in his class.

There are 820,000 alcoholics in Japan, according to a Japanese health ministry survey. That’s about 1.9 percent of men and 0.1 percent of women. The mystery is that in 2001, a health ministry survey found over 2 million alcoholics. It’s unbelievable that there is more than a 50 percent decline in alcoholics in the past 3 years especially since the general perception here is that alcoholism is on the rise as unemployment rates also creep up.

Of course, whichever number is correct, the actual number is probably higher since a lot of alcoholics are in denial. Friday evenings can get interesting in Tokyo train stations. You see women, who are too drunk to walk in a straight line, on their way home by themselves. You see men, who have to get off the train before they reach their destination because they feel sick. I once saw a girl helping her boyfriend throw up in the trash can on a train platform. It’s absolutely disgusting.

The unfortunate thing is that drinking is a fairly important part of work because that’s how you build relationships. I haven’t been going out all that much, but I go out a bit and even though I’m not a big drinker, PMK has noticed that I’m definately drinking more than I had in the U.S..

The Associated Press got caught by a hoax.

I had a near brush once when I was in San Francisco. I was sent to cover an anti-yuppie rally on a weekend, but something wasn’t quite right so I didn’t file the story. It was a good thing I didn’t because it turned out to be an elaborate hoax staged by the SF Weekly to prove that San Franciscans will protest for anything (which is probably true) and that most reporters are frauds. The SF Weekly ran an article the following week that trashed every media outlet that reported on the rally by name, specifically targeting certain journalists at both the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle.

A few years before that when I was a news assistant, I remember editors scrambling to confirm a supposed story about a teenager that committed suicide after her tamagotchi died.