Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Surfing Al Gore’s interwebs and came across the following interesting Japan related news stories.

From the British Times website: Ochone! Japanese whisky is voted the best in world. I find that a bit hard to believe, but then I have never really been a big fan of whiskey. I remember on the ferry to China that a couple of Japanese backpackers, long-haired and already a little smelly had a large bottle of Nikka whiskey which they were sharing. Very kind of them. Anyway the Californian photographer who had the bed next to mine had a few too many and ended up passing out on the ferry’s helipad. It was a little disturbing when the ships stewards carried him in around 3 am. He wasn’t in good shape, but luckily he kept it all down.

The BBC news website has a story Japan PM’s party in poll defeat.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been defeated in a key by-election, dealing a fresh blow to the leadership of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

LDP candidate Shigetaro Yamamoto was easily defeated in the vote in Yamaguchi prefecture.

Senior opposition MP Kenji Yamaoka told Japanese media the result was “the beginning of the end of LDP rule”.

Hopefully this will mean a return to a Japan lead by people with interesting haircuts.

Japan detects bird flu in four wild swans from Reuters. I think I can discern the beginning of a newly revised Tchaikovsky ballet in this story. The swans were discovered near Lake Towadako which is in Akita, closish to where I used to live. Quite sad really.

Lastly the most disturbing of the stories: Japan: Where has all the butter gone?

No butter = no toast = no breakfast….

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A friend of mine from Canada, Pierre Nadeau, who lives down in Wakayama and is currently apprenticed to the Japanese sword smith Kiyota Jirokunietsu has been featured in the February issue of the Hir@gana Times. It is a nice three page article with plenty of detail and insight into the life of a Japanese sword-smith’s apprentice.

Hir@gana Times is an English-Japanese bilingual monthly magazine published here in Japan. It costs 390 yen an issue and is available from all good bookstores. One great thing about the magazine is, if you are learning Japanese, the articles are translated into Japanese, and they have furigana (kanji readings), so it is a good way to develop your Japanese language skills.

Subscription information for the Hir@gana Times is available here.

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Pretty strange piece of news this morning in the Christchurch Press. It appears that someone dressed up in a panda costume was involved in a hit and run and unfortunately a woman, quite unconnected to the said panda was injured during the incident.

Will the People’s Republican Army be mobilised? Will there be an initial bamboo relief supply drop over Christchurch?

Panda impersonator sought after hit-and-run
By JO McKENZIE-McLEAN - The Press | Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Police are on the look-out for an injured panda impersonator who was involved in a hit-and-run in Christchurch.

A person dressed as a panda, hanging out a front passenger window, was one of up to four occupants of a car that ploughed into a pedestrian without stopping at 2.25am on Saturday in Riccarton.

Constable Moira Wyeth said the woman was getting into her white Toyota Vitz, which was parked on the west side of Riccarton Road beside a dairy near Wainui Street when she was struck from behind.

“As she partially opened her door she was hit in the back by a vehicle.”

The impact of being hit caused the woman to be thrown into the front seat and her front driver’s door was ripped off.

The woman, who was alone, sustained back injuries. A passerby waved police down.

The vehicle is described as a red, four-door sedan, mid-1990s and last seen heading west on Riccarton Road.

There was a blonde woman sitting in the back seat, and the panda possibly sustained upper body injuries, Wyeth said.

Anyone with information should contact Wyeth on (03) 3637400 or contact her via email: moira.wyeth@police.govt.nz

Photo taken from Cousin Bujur’s From America to Turkey Blog. The entry with the Panda costume photos is here. Çok teÅŸekkür ederim!

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The pink rabbit English School chain Nova is in the news again, this time with two stories - one about their failure to supply teachers to public schools in Osaka, and the second about the resignation of 4 of their senior executives. I have posted about the demise of Nova before, and it seems the ship is sinking slower than a Texan can form a decent sentence.

The first story, Cash-strapped NOVA fails to honor contracts to public schools after teacher exodus, reveals how Nova has been unable to meet its’ contractual obligations to the Osaka Board of Education.

The Japanese Ministry of Education initially worked with CLAIR (the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations) to set up the JET Programme which gave a great number of boards of education throughout Japan the opportunity to hire foreign assistant language teachers (ALT’s) for their students.

At the beginning of the program, these instructors were often the first westerners to live in the town or village and the program provided many Japanese people with the chance to speak with a foreigner for the first time.

Generally the program was a success, and it is still in action today, however “market forces” in recent times have meant that a reasonable number of boards of education have outsourced the hiring of ALT’s to third parties at a lower cost. In most cases this is without problem, however there have been cases of unscrupulous companies and questionable business practices leaving the students in the lurch.

Cash-strapped NOVA fails to honor contracts to public schools after teacher exodus

OSAKA — Scandal-hit major English school operator NOVA failed to dispatch English teachers to local public schools after many teachers quit or took leave because they didn’t get paid, officials said.

By Monday, NOVA had cancelled its planned dispatch of English teachers to five municipal elementary schools and five municipal junior high schools at least once.

The education board is now considering canceling its contract with NOVA.

You can read the rest of the story here (Mainichi).

The second story is more straight-forward with 4 of Nova’s senior executives walking the plank after being unable to reach Nova President Sahashi (å…ƒSaruhashi):

Labor body hopes to grill Nova chief on pay missteps

OSAKA (Kyodo) An Osaka labor standards watchdog wants to question the president of scandal-hit English-language school chain Nova Corp. over delayed wage payments, but meanwhile four executives of the firm have resigned because they can’t get ahold of their boss, Nova said Wednesday.

The Osaka Central Labor Standards Supervision Office has quizzed foreign teachers and other Nova employees about the delays, and wants to hear from President Nozomu Sahashi, suspecting a violation of the Labor Standards Law.

A union representing Nova’s foreign teachers said the firm has failed to pay wages to some 2,000 Japanese employees since July and to about 4,000 foreign teachers since September, and wages that were supposed to have been paid on Oct. 15 are on indefinite hold.

You can read the rest of the story here (Japantimes).

One hopes for the sake of both the students and the staff that this matter is cleaned up in the not too distant future.

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I put up some Japan News feeds using the wordpress plugin I mentioned in the last post. Trying to make this site a little more useful for myself! I used to use an RSS feeder within the Firefox webbrowser but they updated it…

I want to add some feeds for events in Tokyo - TokyoArtBeat has some good listings, but I would like to set it up on a daily basis, with things like movies and poetry readings, concerts and bands, dj’s as well.

Anyone know any good RSS feeds they can recommend for what is on in Tokyo?

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