I’ve been horrible about updating my blog. I think part of the reason is because I’ve gotten into updating my status on Facebook, and a lot of times, a line is all you need to share your thoughts with the rest of the world. But I finally found something that I need a little more space to write about.

Fourteen years ago, a good friend of mine — an American who was living in Japan for some time — got together with a bunch of his buddies to do a spoof of the Japan Times on April Fool’s Day. After going through a lot of trouble finding a printer, who was willing to print this, they ran several hundred copies and dropped them off at all of the government ministries in the early morning. The brouhaha, as a result, even made it on the ten o’clock news. My friend had given me a copy years ago, but I had all but forgotten about it until recently. The paper, however, is timeless in many respects, and definately priceless.

The paper has winners like the following:

Headline — Politicians Come Clean

In a bid to improve its flagging image, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party launched a policy of confessing to all prior crimes and infractions to demonstrate sincerity and deep regret. This follows last week’s announcement of a temporary amnesty program where all politicians confessing to sufficiently serious crimes will be eligible for discount fines, suspended sentences and frequent flyer miles.

The front page story about how the Kansai International Airport, which was being built at the time (on landfill) disappeared during unusually heavy rains while the construction crew was at lunch. The picture was of surfers riding past a floating control tower.

But the one that I couldn’t stop laughing about, even though it had nothing to do with Japan, was the tiny section at the back of the paper called “Today’s Chuckle”. It posed the question, “If a person, who eats vegetables is a vegetarian, does that make Jeffrey Dahmer a humanitarian?”