My Japanese ranging from non-existent to the merely serviceable when faced with the ordering of raw fish, I’ll defer my summation of this to PinkTentacle:

According to this NTV news report, the life-sized humanoid robot was developed as a realistic training aid for medical workers.  In addition to sporting a suit of human-like skin, the robot sweats, convulses, moans, cries tears, and exhibits symptoms not unlike a real human patient infected with the H1N1 virus.  If the robot does not receive the proper treatment, the symptoms gradually worsen until it stops breathing.

Reuters video is carrying the English version of the story.  To watch its unembeddable footage, click here.

 
(via Pink Tentacle)

Executive Koala is a Japanese movie from 2006 which stars a typical salaryman… typical in every way except that he is actually a giant koala. After a girlfriend is murdered, he descends into a world of psychosis marked by increasingly violent fantasies where his koala-rage is given full expression, and in which his only hope are a giant frog and a giant rabbit.

It’s well twisted. See trailer below:

Astounding clip features cat contestants lifting an increasingly heavy series of weights aka fish. Nice!

(Via Pat Fish aka The Jazz Butcher)

It would be next to impossible to do one of these for Hedorah, (AKA “the Smog Monster”) as its made of pollution. For a real culture shock whiplash, here is a German version of the movie trailer:

Via Hunting Lodge

Thanks Wilson Smith!

Shun Akiba, a former high-level foreign reporter, has identified hundreds of kilometers of Tokyo tunnels whose purpose is unknown and whose very existence is denied.

During the Gulf War in 1991, Shun Akiba was one of only two foreign journalists reporting from Baghdad, along with Peter Arnett of CNN. With such experience and expertise, it would be reasonable to imagine him in great demand right now. Wrong.

Shun is on some kind of invisible blacklist. His book “Teito Tokyo Kakusareta Chikamono Himitsu” (“Imperial City Tokyo: Secret of a Hidden Underground Network”), published by Yosensha in late 2002, is already in its fifth edition. Yet Shun has found it impossible to get the media to take serious note, write reviews or offer interviews.

(Ncafe: Seven riddles suggest a secret city beneath Tokyo)

 
Japan Probe alerts us to a recent Moonwalking Championship, held, presumably, before the death of Michael Jackson himself.   To make more seamless the homage, some of the contestants opted to perform in blackface—a stylistic choice that still has the power to shock (witness the Mad Men “moment” of three weeks ago, here).

Como fazer peras em formato de buda!

Update: Apparently these pears are grown in northern China’s Hebei province

(via bookofjoe )

Japan’s next prime minister might have been nicknamed “The Alien” (because of his prominent eyes) but he’s got nuthin’ on his wife who claims to have had a close encounter of the third kind! From Reuters:

“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

“It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.”

Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party’s crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party Sunday.

Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled “Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered.”

When she awoke, Japan’s next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.

“My current husband has a different way of thinking,” she wrote. “He would surely say ‘Oh, that’s great’.”

Your current husband is obviously a fine politician, Yukio-chan!

Japan’s new first lady says rode in a spaceship

Following on from yesterday’s essay about the seismic changes in Japanese politics, today Dangerous Mind pal, Charles Hugh Smith wonders if a Third Party voter’s revolution would be possible in America. His conclusions are thought provoking and may surprise you:

Here are the key ingredients of a viable new party:

1. The usual suspects which fund the Old Guard must not find a new home: that would be the unions and all the other Power Elites: the investment banks, the pharmaceuticals, the “Defense” industry, the trial lawyers, etc. Their money and their participation must be politely rejected lest they co-opt and thus destroy the new party.

2. A few break-away Old School politicians who could provide credible leadership while the party grew.

3. Consumer advocates—middle-class citizens of all ages who are tired of being lied to and manipulated, tired of being ripped off, etc.

4. Young activists who are willing to devote their energies to investigating and exposing all that the political and corporate/banking Elites strive to keep obscured and secret. When the corruption, cronyism and collusion have been exposed, year after year after year, then eventually the general public—poorer, more insecure and frustrated than ever—will finally let go of the comforting illusion that they share any real interests with either of the two corrupt parties of collusion.

5. Insiders willing to expose the machinery of collusion and cronyism. The Status Quo will move rapidly and violently to suppress whistleblowers, but without these courageous citizens then the full extent of the rot cannot be exposed.

If these parts slowly self-assemble, a viable national party could become possible. We should note that it took 15 years for the process to reach critical mass in Japan; there were many half-starts and disappointments along the way.

Could a Viable Third Party Emerge in the U.S.? by Charles Hugh Smith

Not being able to read Japanese there is not much I can write here, but I think a picture is worth a thousand words in this case! Damien Hirst take note.

Via Japan Probe

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith has posted an essential essay to read today at Of Two Minds if you want to understand the voter’s revolution that just occurred in Japan. The ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) is out, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is in and over 50 years of domestic and foreign policy is about to be turned on its head:

Transparency has no place in central planning. The major banks were crippled with massive bad debts, yet the planners moved glacially to force write-offs and renunciation of impaired debt. Even now, no one really knows how much uncollectable debt remains on the books in Japan, Inc.

One reason is cultural. Declaring a bank insolvent is a major loss of face for everyone involved. Thus the preferred solution was to keep “zombie banks” alive as a face-saving measure.

The tricks used were plentiful and clever. Say a commercial real estate loan went south and the borrower stopped paying. Hmm, that looks bad; why not loan the firm more money, as long as they agreed to use part of it to make some token payments which would allow the bank to keep the loan off the “in default” ledger?

Never mind the additional loans only made matters worse; face was saved and time was bought.

After 20 years of malaise, the citizenry’s patience finally ran out. Things are dire for the Japanese economy and nation: the birth rates have fallen dramatically, social security costs on the exploding elderly population are climbing, and an entire generation of younger workers has been relegated to dead-end part-time jobs at 7-11. Like other global manufacturers, to remain competitive Japan’s firms moved production to China and other parts of Asia; automation in Japanese factories eliminated many of the remaining domestic jobs.

Japan’s Bloodless Coup: Devolution of the Export/Central Planning Model

You have to hand it to the Japanese, they know violence sells and they market it like no other country can.

But this has to be the dumbest sport in history, two fat guys pounding each other with neon-rods until they?

The Cove, a shocking, gripping documentary that plays like an action film opens this weekend. It was the winner of the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

From Alternet.org

Ric O’Barry almost looks crazy. He is driving a car, with a mask over his mouth, crouching low in his seat, hoping not to be recognized.

If the authorities catch him, there’s no telling what will happen to him. He’s cruising through the misty streets of Taiji, Japan, a small town with a really big secret, he says. And it’s a secret that the town’s fishermen want to hide from the rest of the world at all costs.

This is how the documentary, The Cove, opens. And it turns out O’Barry is not crazy, he’s on a mission—probably one of the most important in the history of conservation. And it’s personal.

He used to be a world-famous dolphin trainer. He captured and trained the five dolphins who played Flipper in the hit TV show of the same name. The show’s popularity sparked a dolphin craze that has continued since the 1960s and has grown into $2 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

But while places like Sea World might be raking in the cash, O’Barry has spend the last 35 years trying to end dolphin captivity—having had a change of heart after the tragic suicide of one of the main dolphins in Flipper. (If you want to know how a dolphin can commit suicide, you’ll have to see The Cove.)

The Cove (official website)

Japan Has a Dark Secret It Hopes the World Will Never See by Tara Lohan