An elderly woman walks along a slope near
Tokuyama village before it was flooded in 1995
to make a reservoir. By Tomoko Otake, from The Japan Times - Shortly after being relocated to other towns in the late 1980s to make way for Japan’s largest dam, about 10 aging former residents defiantly returned to the abandoned village of Tokuyama, in western Gifu Prefecture, determined to live there as long as possible. They sheltered in their old homes or makeshift huts; they tended their vegetable fields, peeling the bark from trees to make all-purpose kampo (medicine); and they caught fish with handmade bamboo traps set in a nearby creek.

Photographer Nobuo Onishi visited the group many times over a period of 15 years, and next week his documentary “Mizu ni Natta Mura (A Village That Changed Into Water)” will be screened in cinemas in Tokyo, Gifu and Nagano prefectures — ahead of the multipurpose Tokuyama dam beginning full operations next spring.

Life in Japan has been closely aligned with dams ever since the nation’s first — now known as the Sayama-ike reservoir in Osaka — was built in the seventh century. They serve as a life-saving resource for regions whose people perennially suffer from droughts, and are also a powerful buffer against floods in areas with too much rain. After World War II, dams became a symbol of Japan’s economic recovery and industrial prowess, providing water and electricity to the regions they served. In recent decades, however, they have come to represent wasteful expenditure on the part of the government, which critics say is incapable of scaling back or nixing outdated projects. The media have also spotlighted the impact on the lives of people forced from their homes.

Onishi’s film, however, is far from depressing. He captures the villagers laughing and talking as they freely share the benefits of their life experience with the young director. They are joyful and content, as one elderly woman remarked, while soaking in her old outdoor bath: “I feel guilty for all the happiness I have. I owe my happiness to the ancestors. I am so happy.”

Read the rest of the story at The Japan Times

By Norimitsu Onishi, from The International Herald Tribune - NAGANO, Japan: The two-day mock trial resembled, more often than not, a college seminar with the three judges acting as professors and the six jurors as freshmen. Sitting stiffly around an oval table, they were deliberating whether the defendant had intended to kill a taxi driver in a botched robbery.

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

To win over a skeptical public, Japan’s courts have held some 500 mock trials across the country, including six here in Nagano, the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Still, polls show that 80 percent are dreading the change and do not want to serve as jurors, a reluctance that was on display among the mock jurors here.

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity. When a silence stretched out and a judge prepared to call upon a juror, the room tensed up as if the jurors were students who had not done the reading.

“I think there is also the matter of how much he has repented,” one of the judges said. “Has he genuinely, deeply repented, or has the defendant repented in his own way? What’s the degree? I mean, some could even say that he hasn’t repented at all.”

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence. “The way the defendant expresses himself and such, it could be viewed as someone who’s not good at it,” she said. “So there’s no way for us to know what is the degree of repentance from how he has repented in his own way.”

After it was all over, only a single juror said he wanted to serve on a real trial. The others said even the mock trial had left them stressed and overwhelmed. Under the proposed system, randomly chosen citizens will sit on the bench next to judges, decide cases together and hand out sentences. Supporters predict that the direct involvement of ordinary citizens in the judicial process will have far-reaching consequences for Japan’s democracy.

Read the rest of the story at The International Herald Tribune

By Jasper Sharp, from Midnight Eye - “Tora, Tora, Tora! Pearl Harbour was our only choice. Our race was corrupted from the day we lost the war…” Karin Amamiya, lead singer of ultra-nationalist hardcore punk band The Revolutionary Truth looms centre stage, barking out aggressive but heartfelt anti-American sentiments to a dwindling audience.

Troubled music for troubled times, one might think, though on the surface at least, there seems to be little immediate to worry about for the citizens of modern day Japan, currently one of the safest places on the planet. However, in recent times, and especially since the death of Emperor Hirohito marked the end of the Showa Period in 1989, the Heisei Period has seen a marked revival in the nationalist movement.

Nationalism, with its indelible associations of racism and the military right wing is a fairly dirty word to most people, and a subject which most would prefer to waft aside without giving a second thought. But for documentary maker Tsuchiya, who stood amongst the cowed observers at the gig with which the film opens and viewing the proceedings firmly from the other side of the political fence, there’s something more heartfelt about Amamiya’s plea. “I shivered. I don’t know why. I felt her pain, somehow, like a reflected light beam stabbing the heart.”

The New God documents Tsuchiya’s attempts to delve beyond the political rhetoric and intimidating facade of the fascinatingly complex figures of Amamiya and guitarist/band-leader Hidehito Itoh of The Revolutionary Truth, in the process discovering that all three of them have a lot more in common than their seemingly diametrically opposed standpoints might first lead one to believe. Handing Amamiya a DV-camera in which to film herself in a series of talking head shots, over the course of little over a month, he manages to get a whole lot more than he initially bargained for…

Read the rest of the story at Midnight Eye

By Elaine Lies, from Reuters - An elderly man nearing death who wants to give something back to the world, or just a prankster?

The mystery of who is leaving envelopes of 10,000 yen ($82) bills in men’s toilets at government offices around Japan has gripped the nation this week despite the existence of far weightier issues, such as a looming election.

Since April 9, some 4 million yen ($32,720) has been found in men’s rooms from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to the southern island of Okinawa, Japanese media say. Virtually all has been found in government office buildings.

The bills are individually wrapped in traditional Japanese “washi” paper with the word “remuneration” handwritten on the outside in ink.

Each comes with a handwritten letter in formal wording evoking Buddhist language, saying the giver hopes the money will be “useful for your pursuit of knowledge.”

Newspapers have devoted lengthy articles to speculation about the identity of the unknown benefactor, and the mystery dominated evening news programs Wednesday. One domestic news agency even sent out urgent alerts as the number of bills found mounted.

The only thing everyone agrees on, given where the money is found, is that the person leaving them is a man.
(more…)

Doki Doki Majo Shinpan, already toping Amazon
Japan’s “Best Seller” list due to pre-release sales. By Dennis “Corin Tucker’s Stalker” Farrell, from Something Awful - The problem with witches is that they look like ordinary 13 year olds, which gives Japanese men no choice but to corner and feel up every young girl they come across.

In the newly released Nintendo DS game Doki Doki Majo Shinpan (which was surprisingly developed in Japan and not in Germany as the name implies), you play the part of a modern day witch hunter. Instead of employing antiquated methods of witch finding such as drowning, burning, or asking someone if they’re a witch, you use the touch screen to grope underage girls to determine their witchiness, then grope them some more to disable their magic powers.

This is causing something of an uproar in the U.S. for the obvious reason that our culture is woefully ignorant of the looming witch threat. For far too long these magical broads have gone unburned, avoiding detection for so long that their very existence is mistakenly considered a fable, much like dragons and the deaf.

Even if we did accept the presence of witches in the modern world, Doki Doki Majo Shinpan still wouldn’t go over very well in the U.S. because the ability to uncover them through touching is an ability that’s unique to the Japanese. While our tactile senses do little beyond reporting pain and pleasure and cardboard to our brains, a Japanese person can determine absolutely everything there is to know about an object by merely touching or fondling it. No one knows how this physiological phenomenon came about, but it has been the basis of many DS games thanks to the handheld’s touch screen interface.

Doki Doki Majo Shinpan english website