Vancouver In The Eyes of Taiwan

Nothing like goofy animation to describe a news event.
Canadians are known to be polite people.

Well at least we used to be! :P

Dehli 2010: XIX Commonwealth Games

Absolute disaster! It's sad but every bad stereotype about India is being shown for the world to see. Corruption is clear as the games have gone over budget, the athletes village is filthy. Terrorist attacks, bridges collapsing, holes in roofs, bad roads on and on.

You hear racist things about India all the time, this doesn't help.



That ladder doesn't look very safe!



Just embarrassing.

If you were in Vancouver earlier this year, be proud. Those Olympics were amazing!

Japanese cityscapes with monster-sized wildlife

Source: Pink Tenticle

Artist Shuichi Nakano's "Searching for Paradise" paintings depict Godzilla-sized animals towering over the urban sprawl of Japan.

These are so awesome! Japan should remake all the Gozilla movies with all the CGI available today. Doesn't even have to be Godzilla, could be these animals! Don't let Hollywood keep making cheesy movies!

Taiwan Commercial: Boyfriend Working Overtime

OOOPS!

2010: A Case Odyssey

Phone commercials get weirder and weirder.

Kid torches his own house, OVER GUNDAM

Source: Yahoo

A Japanese man has admitted to burning down his family home after his mother threw away some of his favourite robot toys from the "Gundam" animation series.

Yoshifumi Takabe, aged 30 and living with his mother, said he had become suicidal after she dumped some of the robots, of which he had enough to fill 300 boxes stacked to the ceiling, the Sports Nippon said Wednesday.

The blaze on August 9 last year completely destroyed their two-storey wooden house in Kasai, Hyogo prefecture, but no one was injured.

"The Gundam figures are like the partners I spend my life with," he reportedly said after pleading guilty at western Kobe's District Court. "I wanted to die with them in a fire if they were to be thrown out."

The Mobile Suit Gundam series, based on an animation TV series which started in the late 1970s, is about space wars fought by gigantic robots.

I won't totally blame the kid here. Parents just can't just ignore things and let it get out of control. 300 boxes! Obviously he like Gundam! Perhaps mom should have said something at 50 boxes? 100 boxes? If it's a concern, put a stop to it. It's been 30 years! At this point, it's too late and drastic actions will result in drastic responses.

Have you ever been a mascot!?

Source: AsiaOne

JAPAN - A company in Konosu, Saitama Prefecture, that specialises in making full-body costumes is riding a wave of popularity for adorable yuru-kyara mascots.

Yuru-kyara are cute, relaxed and unsophisticated--literally "loose" (yurui). As an increasing number of such mascot characters are promoting localities or other entities, the small firm Funny Craft is growing to be one of the leading companies in the industry.

The firm boasts "a lovely look, exactly the same as imagined" when filling orders for mascot suits. It receives a wide range of orders ranging from famous manga characters to a mascot for a prefectural police force. "Our full-body suits fit you so well. They aren't 'loose' at all," said the firm's president, Junjiro Kamijo, 69.

Five employees work steadily at its about 500-square-metre factory, which is filled with paper patterns and basic costume parts made of polystyrene foam.

In its about 30-year-long history, the firm has made thousands of full-body suits. Five years ago, it began to receive orders in excess of its capacity, and sometimes could not accept new orders.

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I love mascots, they're so cute! I'm one of those who always runs up to greet and hug mascots!

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Recently, Japanese TV aired this hard-hitting investigative report about Japan’s various police mascots:



Their research team contacted police offices across the nation and determined that there are at least 42 different police mascot characters in Japan. Some of the police mascots are national, some are prefectural, and a few are for city/town police forces.
What exactly is the point of having cops dress up in weird mascot costumes? Here is a ranking of the top issues they try to spread awareness about:

1. Bank Transfer Fraud
2. Traffic Safety
3. General Crime Prevention
4. Pickpocketing
5. Purse Snatching

It might seem pretty stupid to have police officers assigned to mascot duty, but those wacky costumes can be pretty useful whenever the police want to distribute fliers. A mascot draws everyone’s attention, and people who would otherwise ignore police officers seem more willing to approach them when a mascot is around. Even if people throw away the fliers without reading them, there is a chance that they will still remember encountering the mascots, many of whom have names that are puns based on the message they are trying to promote.
Issues 2 to 5 are focused at children and the general public, but the #1 issue is targeted at elderly people. For years now, telephone fraudsters claiming to be relatives in distress have scammed many elderly people into sending them large sums of money. Many ATM’s in Japan now have posters featuring mascot characters that warn users about scams, and several police forces have been sending their mascots to post offices and banks to spread awareness among the elderly.

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Are there alot of mascots where you live for different sort of things? Have you ever been a mascot and what was it like? Tell us your best mascot stories!

Have you ever been a mascot?

U.S. Census

What's this US census thing going on right now? The US government wants you to mail in a 10 questionnaire about your family. If you don't do it then they have to go door-to-door to find you. If they know where you live, then why do you need to send information in? Also being the US, everything political and the Republicans are protesting and not sending their questionnaires in. It's supposed to save money right? But then I see ads on TV, doesn't that cost money? And the ad said mail it in. Mail? Who uses mail in 2010. People are too lazy to mail anything. If I could do my entire unemployment claim online, surely people could do a questionnaire online right?

I don't get it. In Canada, they go door-to-door once every couple of years just to make sure no numbers have changed too drastically. I think they use tax returns too to count people.

Shouldn't the US have a year-round government organization that number-crunches year-round? Here we have Statistics Canada and they have all sorts of stuff. We hear it on the nightly news all the time that 69% of Canadians are this, or 57% of Canadian are that. Or something like Toronto now has more non-white people than white people.. stuff like that.

What do you think?

Top 10 Reasons to Learn Cantonese

Source: Due-East

A friend of mine just sent me a link to a New York Times article about how Cantonese is slowly dying out in New York’s Chinatown. I couldn’t help but get a little sad reading it. Sure, it’s a ridiculously difficult language to learn (which is why it should be spelled Can’t-onese), but it’s also an amazingly interesting language brimming with character. So, here I make my case for why people should try to learn it in addition to Mandarin. Here you are: My top 10 reasons to learn Cantonese!

Reason 1: The Wow Factor – As I said above, Cantonese is ridiculously difficult. Nobody seems to agree on exactly how many tones it has. Some people say 7. Some say 9. And some say over 11, referencing so-called silent tones. Sorry, but if it’s silent, it’s not a tone. But the insistence on the existence of these so-called silent tones only ups the ‘cool factor’ of Cantonese. If you can master it, you’re pretty much an unstoppable language learning force. Native speakers will lavish you with praise, giving your self-esteem a temporary boost (at least until you say something wrong and get made fun of. See reason number 8). And also, I’ll be really jealous of you.

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Cantonese is a very cool language. I like it much better than Mandarin. It's clear and easy to understand, even if it sounds a little hard. Mandarin sounds very lazy, lots of words slurred together.

I was totally convinced that Mandarin sucks when I heard Mandarin speakers try to speak English. It's awful. Sure we all know the Cantonese accent for English sounds pretty funny.. but at least it's understandable. I was on China Airlines and the way they spoke English on there with their slurred words and their purposely high-pitched voices.. I might as well have been listening to Mandarin. Didn't understand a word! What if there was a important announcement like... the plane is falling? It was very frustrating.

So yeah. learn Cantonese. Don't let it die!

"I am proud to be a brick in the statistics building of the PRC"

Source: Foreign Policy

As part of the myriad activities planned to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, the normally staid National Bureau of Statistics is letting its hair down a bit.
The NBS has launched a call for submissions of writings celebrating the PRC’s big birthday as part of campaign called “Statistical Feelings: Together We Go – Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of New China.” The campaign is intended to boost the patriotic feelings and confidence of statisticians in their work.

One essay, submitted by an employee of the NBS industrial division, is titled “I Am Proud to Be a Brick in the Statistics Building of the PRC,” and reads like a prose poem, each paragraph leading with the title’s refrain.

A poem, “Love the Homeland, Love Statistics,” includes the following stanza:

Life
Some mock me for doing statistics
Some loathe me and statistics
Some don’t understand what statistics are
Why is it that statistics
Put a calm smile on my face?
Because of statistics
I can solve the deepest mysteries
Because of statistics
I will not be lonely again, playing in the data
Because of statistics
I can rearrange the stars in the skies above
Because of statistics
My life is different, more meaningful
I love my life, my statistics

That's pretty messed up. People can make a poem about pretty much every eh? Even statisticians need love right? They are very proud to be just part of the whole Chinese system!

Japan Back Then, Japan Now

@IainDelaney sent me this.



Where did it all go wrong?

What's Behind Japan's Love Affair with Robots?

'Miimu,' a HRP-4C robot, models a wedding dress by Japanese designer Yumi Katsura at Katsura's 2009 Paris Grand Collection in Osaka, Japan, on July 22, 2009

Source: TIME

If Japanese engineers had their way, we might soon be cheering on a robotic World Series. Every year or two, Japanese researchers roll out a new robotic invention — the latest to grab headlines earlier this month was a mechanized baseball duo of a batter and pitcher that can throw 90% of its pitches in the strike zone. And while the majority of Japanese robotic inventions — from the dazzling to the horrifying —have largely been unable to break into the mass market, Japanese scientists aren't likely to short-circuit their robotic ambitions anytime soon: Robotic technology plays a larger role in Japan than anywhere else in the world.

In the past several years, Japan has committed several tens of millions of dollars to an industry whose revenues it hopes could surge to nearly $70 billion by 2025. Japan already employs over a quarter of a million industrial robot workers —more than any other nation — in an effort to counter high labor costs and to support further mechanization of its industries, and would like to see that number go up to one million over the next 15 years. "Robotics is to be for the Japanese economy in the 21st century what automobiles were in the 20th," says Jennifer Robertson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

After all, this is the land where salarymen pour over comic books on their way to work and where stay-at-home moms are also videogame afficionados. In many ways, robotics combines two of Japan's biggest cultural crushes: technology and animation. Some experts say the roots of the national love of robotics are in Japan's Shinto religion, which blurs the line between the inanimate and animate and in which followers believe that all things, including objects, can possess living spirits. "Robots have a long and friendly history in Japan, and humanoid robots are considered to be living things and even desirable members of families," says Robertson. While popular culture in the west often casts robots as forces of evil that pose a threat to world peace — or worse, job security — Japan "tends to see robots as a force for good," says Damien Thong, a technology analyst with Macquarie Securities in Tokyo.

I would agree with this article although using Shinto religion might be a stretch. I would also add that after WWII, Japan was stripped of everything and they needed something to get the workforce going again. Cars, gadgets and robotics were the solution. Once that got going, Japan strived to be #1 in those categories and hat is where we are now.

Alarm over sharp rise in Japan suicides

Source: AsiaOne

Japanese activists sounded the alarm Wednesday over a sharp rise in suicides after a police report said the number of people who killed themselves up to June rose 4.7 percent on last year.

Urgent changes are needed to cope with the intensifying social problem, said Yasuyuki Shimizu of non-profit group Life Link.

In the first six months of the year, amid Japan's worst post-war recession, police recorded 17,076 suicides, up 768 or 4.7 percent from the same period last year, according to the National Police Agency.

Roughly 30 percent of suicides were linked financial problems, it said.

At the current pace, the figure could reach or possibly surpass Japan's worst annual record of 34,427 suicides, recorded in 2003.

For the past decade, Japan has seen more than 30,000 suicides every year.

The recession has taken its toll on many, especially men, said Yukiko Nishihara, founder of Tokyo Suicide Prevention Centre.

"On our suicide hotlines, we are hearing that people - some of them young men in their 30s - are tired of living and working and being laid off and trying to find jobs again," she said.

"We have to do something to help before people become so desperate."

Shimizu cautioned that people "take their lives for a complicated mix of reasons" and criticised fragmented government prevention programmes.

Japan has one of the world's highest suicide rates, behind only a group of former Soviet bloc countries, according to the World Health Organisation.

Very sad. I would guess most suicides are working men who have lost their jobs or young school girls under pressure from their studies. Japan's always been 'tolerant' of suicides but with this spike, they should perhaps come up with some prevention programs. First step would be to outlaw these internet suicide groups that feel suicide alone is too lonely.

Japan's women flirting for cash

Source: Salon.com

While the recession is driving some women in the U.S. into the sex industry, it's pushing Japan's young ladies into the less extreme but nevertheless historically taboo work of hostessing. We aren't talking about simply standing at the front of a restaurant and politely seating customers; the country's hostesses are professional flirts often paid big bucks to party, chat up customers and look pretty in gentlemen's clubs. (And, depending on who you ask, they are sometimes pressured into sex for money.)

Paying anywhere from $100,000 to $300,00o a year, they are "among the most lucrative jobs available to women" in Japan, according to a trend piece in the New York Times. Things weren't so great for women before the economic collapse -- nearly 70 percent in their early 20s held precarious positions with scant benefits -- and now they're in dire straights: "More women from a diversity of backgrounds are looking for hostess work," Kentaro Miura, a club manager in Tokyo, told the Times. The upshot: These gigs are becoming wildly competitive.

No surprise there. What's puzzling, though, is that reporter Hiroko Tabuchi also ties the recession to the fact that hostesses are "gaining respectability and even acclaim." He summarizes the situation dramatically: "Japan’s worst recession since World War II is changing mores." Certainly the recession is pushing some to consider work they wouldn't have otherwise, but it's seems a stretch to link that desperation to hostesses' rising cultural stock.

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The part about girls not getting the jobs they want during a recession and having to do something else. For example, I can't find a job as an accountant or in the oil industry so now I have to clean house in a bikini. I get that.

What I don't get is, if Japan is in it's worse recession since WWII, what guy has the money to pay for these thrills like a hostess and maybe more. Are the top echelon guys in Japan still filthy rich while the rest are looking for work? Sad that they spend this foolishly while others can't make money.

Animated Short: Water Brain

A Cartoon produced by students of Guangzhou (Canton) Academy of Art, about how Chinese middle school students suffer from the work load. In our six years of middle school studies, we study Chinese, maths, English, geography, physics, politics, history, chemistry and biology (not including PE, music and other subsidiary subjects), all of which are mandatory. We can not choose what we are interested in. Also, the studies are memory based and test oriented, which means we have to remember tons of theories, concepts, terms in order to pass exams.

Youtube Link


Youtube Link

Doesn't this remind us all of our school days? Late nights studying, runny noses, heavy books, paper airplanes. All that to become the office rats we are today :P

I really enjoyed it. The art work is cool and I especially liked the musical score attached to it

Japanese boss accuses woman of stealing his pants

Source: China Daily

A Japanese businessman was ordered to apologize publicly and pay "spiritual damages" to the tune of 1,000 yuan ($146) to a woman he wrongly accused of stealing his trousers in Wuhan, Hubei province.

The woman, an employee of the Japanese businessman, dragged her boss to court last December after he publicly announced she had stolen his trousers and fined her 50 yuan, which were cut from her wages.

The Donghu Development Zone People's Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, saying the defendant had hurt her feelings after he perfunctorily circulated the notice of criticism.

Love the "spiritual damages" part! That's like psychological damages in the US right?

"Donde Este Mis Panthalones?"

One of three missing Chinese students found

Source: Toronto Star

One of three teenaged Chinese exchange students who went missing last week, has been found safe and sound, said Toronto police. But the search continues for the remaining two.

Const. Wendy Drummond said Qian Hu, 15, was found on Friday but would not elaborate further.

Hu, Zhiyong Chen, 17, and Kangjuun Fu, 13, arrived in Toronto on July 7 from Changsha City, in Hunan province, for a four-week English as a Second Language program run by the Toronto District School Board.

Thirty foreign students had registered for the Toronto District School Board summer exchange program.

The teens were last seen Tuesday at about 1:30 p.m. during an excursion to Woodbine Beach. A teacher called police when they did not rejoin the group.

The three speak Mandarin with limited knowledge of English and are unfamiliar with Toronto, Drummond said.

Fu's host home was in North York, and the other two were in Thornhill, she said.

Although police alleged that they had planned to go AWOL, they are still concerned about their safety. There were originally rumours that the trio had planned to apply for refugee status.

"They're 13 and 17-years-old in a foreign country," Drummond said. "We don't know if they have any means of support financially at such a young age. Without any means of support it is a definite concern for us."

Chen is described as Chinese, 5'7", 110 lbs., thin build, with short black hair. He was last seen wearing a white cotton T-shirt.

Fu is described as Chinese, 5'7", 110 lbs., thin build, with short black hair. He was last seen wearing a white cotton T-shirt and blue denim pants.

Interesting. So out of the three students, the girl has been found but the two boys are still missing.

Sounds like a poorly-planned defection gone wrong.

Japanese Falling For Pillows

That's just a sad sad sight

Source: New York Times

Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or “big brother,” a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix “tan” to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex. One of the biggest best sellers in the country last year was “Health and Physical Education for Over Thirty,” a six-chapter, manga-illustrated guidebook that holds the reader’s hand from the first meeting to sex to marriage.

.....rest of the story

As discussed before in previous post, Japan has the oldest population in the world. Nearly 50% of it's population is over 60. Why is it that young Japanese have so much trouble navigating romantic life? There's a bazillion Japanese over there, just match up? There must be something fundamentally wrong with a society where men charish a pillow more than a girl. I know the older Japanese generation is upset about Otaku. How does a macho samurai sake-drinking society turn into this?

A declining birthrate is one thing. Alot of Western societies have less kids for various reasons, financial, daycare, women in their careers etccc. But people are still getting married have having a great social life. How can a country have so many single people? Is it the guys who think the girls are needy? It is the girls who think the guys are jerks? Must be something!

Neverland: Chinese Edition

Source: Yahoo!

Chinese developers are commemorating the late Michael Jackson by building a scaled-down replica of his Neverland Ranch on an island off Shanghai, a state-run newspaper said on Friday.

Investors in the project, which will cost about 100 million yuan ($15 million) to build, hope it will open on Chongming island ahead of next year's Expo in Shanghai, the China Daily newspaper reported.

While they are not as popular as the Taiwanese and Hong Kong stars who dominate the music scene in China, Western artists are making inroads in the local market, thanks to young fans.

"By building a Neverland here in China, we want to pay tribute to him and at the same time offer the Chinese people an outlet for expressing their love toward him," the report quoted Qiu Xuefan, one of the investors, as saying.

Jackson, who died on June 25 in Los Angeles, abandoned Neverland -- once filled with theme-park rides and even a zoo -- after his child molestation trial in 2005.

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China has way too much on its hands. This is doomed to fail. How much can you charge a local Chinese person to visit the place before it gets boring and will tourists really want to visit this place when they can visit the real Neverland? The real Neverland won't be abandoned, they'll probably turn it into a similar Graceland.

Japan Is Disabled-Friendly!

Source: BBC

My number one reason for visiting the country was to ride on a wheelchair accessible escalator. I don't mean some special 'crip only' contraption, nor being tipped back and balanced precariously on the steps of a normal one, but instead the kind of escalator where wheelchair users can travel alongside everyone else. I don't recall where I first heard about their existence; maybe these magical moving marvels were the stuff of imagination or perhaps an accessible urban myth I'd once heard? I decided to visit Japan to find out the truth.

On arrival, what I actually discovered was that Japan is without question one of the most crip-friendly countries that I've ever visited. Every pavement had a slope for wheelies and raised markings to assist blind people. I saw disabled people of all ages and impairments going about their everyday lives. People even stared less at me in Japan than they do in the UK.

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This surprises me quite alot. In my experiences, I found Asians to be quite intolerent about someone having a pimple let alone a disability. My dad mocks handicapped people all the time. It's pretty sad :(