State Of The Nation

It's like every week is the worst week of Aso Taro's life. All news reported yesterday has been, without exception, utterly horrific. As Gwen Stefani would say, "This shit is bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!" So let's look as some of the stories!

One story (that even the BBC was covering) is the shrinking of Japan's GDP - it's contracted by 3.3%, annualized at 12.7%, in the fourth quarter. Now, if you're like me then you won't have any idea what that means. Luckily, I've done the research for you and the upshot is: the economy really sucks. Apparently this is the largest GDP contraction since the "1974 Oil Shock", and that has the word 'shock' in it so it must have been pretty bad. And this is almost as bad as that. Which actually still doesn't tell you how bad this is... Hmmm. Well it doesn't even matter! Because as long as they've got a diligent and incisive Finance Minister they've got nothing to worry ab- oh wait.

"Finance Minister Nakagawa Found Drunk At G7 Conference". Well. That's certainly a more visceral way of showing people how fucked they are. His excuse was that he was jet-lagged and had been taking cold medicine. But there's no smoke without fire, and these are some pretty thick clouds:

You can kind of understand why he might be drunk - not only is he faced with these huge, glaring negative figures, he also has to understand what they mean and then pretend to the public that he has some idea of how to fix things. And also he's an alcoholic. Still, he'd have done far less damage to his and the cabinet's reputation if he'd called in sick or something rather than going ahead with the press conference.

Finally, an NTV survey has shown that Aso's approval rating has fallen yet again! It's a veritable approval-rating-limbo he's dancing over there - he's now bending backwards to the vertebrae-crunching tune of 9.7%. Presumably to piss-off the remaining fraction of the country who isn't sick to the teeth of him already he'd have to literally take a shit on the national flag. But don't think he won't do it. I have total faith. Dream the impossible dream, Aso.

Aso's "riding-high-on-a-tenth-of-the-electorate" face

Akebono Vs. Tokyo Marathon

Akebono, the retired sumo superstar, plans to run the Tokyo Marathon on the 22nd of March. He's written on his blog that he's turning 40 this year, and that at 220kg running a 26mile marathon will "feel pretty tight". Apparently they stop giving finishing times after 7 hours, so he's aiming to finish before then. How hard can it be? He only needs to keep walking, right?

Still, good to see he's keeping active. His blog shows him training at home in Hawaii in a regimen that includes lots of food and some treadmilling. He might be approaching this challenge the wrong way.

Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Day! A day dedicated to obligatory, and therefore hollow, acts of affection.

In Japan, Valentine's Day is slightly different. It's a day where girls give guys they like chocolates. They then have a festival called 'White Day', which is "celebrated" exactly a month after Valentine's Day, in which men who received chocolates have to give the same amount back, thus completing the cycle. The average amount spent on Valentines gifts by women in Japan is £65. Yes, £65. Let's put that in perspective: £65 could buy you 6,500 penny sweets. For £65 you could have a man killed in East London. £65 could buy you one and a half Xbox games. Or an R4 cart, which would then enable you to play every DS game ever made for free. Is a box of chocolates worth any of those things? When you could just as easily say, "Um, sorry, I forgot..."?

Anyway.

Anyway, anyway, anyway. There's been a lot of coverage of Valentine's Day in Japan on blogs that have the professionalism to impart actual information. What Japan Thinks has an absolutely frightening number of statistics on the subject (ie. 15 sets of statistics). AltJapan has a picture of the chocolate beetles you can buy for the man in your life who's slightly wrong in the head. Shibuya246 has found non-chocolate chocolate-towel rolls. Japanator has found real, honest-to-goodness chocolate tools. And Japan Probe has found Ultraman chocolates, pictured above.

I don't want to call it a "carnival of horrors". But it is. It's exactly that.

...

...WHY DID NO-ONE GIVE ME ANY CHOCOLATES?

:o(

Sport

After much deliberation I've decided to provide some sport coverage in this blog. Not golf or swimming or basketball or tennis or rugby, because they're shit. And not cricket because Japan doesn't play cricket, to its eternal detriment. And not football, unless there's an international football tournament going on - at any other time football is numbingly tedious. I shall be covering baseball and some sumo wrestling.

The baseball season hasn't started yet, so I'll probably use this time to get my tiny readership up to speed with the rules and the teams. And then you can forget all about the teams, because the team you need to support is the Tigers. And I'll be telling you why later. The actual coverage will probably start with the World Baseball Classic series in March, in which Japan are going to shit on everyone else, including America, just like they did three years ago. Osu!

Asama Eruption

Should've have posted this when it was relevant, but at least it's still kind of cool. You'll no doubt be aware that the volcano Mount Asama erupted at the beginning of this month, and there was ash scattered over a few cities because of that. But you probably only read about the eruption... so... you wanna watch it? Because Maechan uploaded some awesome time-lapse footage of the eruption.

Click for the video
Different angles (but not such good quality video) can be found here, here and here.

Don't get that with the Yomiuri Shimbun, do you?

Factories And Lights

I haven't blogged in a while due to my time and energy being taken up with fun. I'm going to get back to blogging just as soon as I get some sleep.

While I'm gone, though, here are some pictures from Seilbleu, Hanazuc, Totoon and Beef.200%, who all take pictures of factories. It may sound a bit rubbish, but the pictures are beautiful.

A lot of them look a bit like sci-fi villain fortresses - especially the last two with the clouds hanging over them. Go their Flickr accounts for more - you can't really start to appreciate the pictures until you see them at double their size here.