NinjaNewsJapan

It’s gonna be a short one.

May has already started out to be a bit of a bust.

I have to go to Canada next week, so there

will be no news in Japan next week, maybe

even for the next two weeks, because I’m

gonna get back on Monday night, I record on

Tuesdays, just so everyone knows what’s going on.

Ah, that’s life, life is tough.

Sometimes.

10 million yen.

10 million yen was founded a recycling center in Sapporo.

So recycling center, I’m assuming it’s just like general garbage, things

that can be recycled, so glass and stuff.

I am wondering what it was in.

It sounds like it was just wrapped up in something else.

There’s a three month deadline for claiming the lost money.

So the police were actually looking for an owner.

At May 1st, so beginning of this month, the

money became the city of Sapporo ‘s money.

Over the course of the three months, 16 people tried to claim the money.

Now this is the bit I was interested in.

So I would love an extra 10 million yen.

Like just pass that over here, 10 million yen.

It’s not gonna totally change my life, but it would make it better for at

least a little while I’d have a lot, you know, I’d pay off all the bills.

Great.

Ah, so I understand the instinct to try to claim the money.

What we got work up of like reasons why people would claim the money.

Because you’ll be interesting to me like what kind of things the police

would ask, questions and stuff to confirm that this is your money.

So 16 people called up the Sapporo police and said, “Yeah, that’s my 10

million yen.”

One, the first one I really enjoyed was I went shopping as I walked in a

parking lot.

I dropped the 10 million yen that was wrapped in newspaper.

Why?

My question is please officers, why are you walking around with 10 million

yen wrapped in newspaper?

Now this is not as weird as it may sound at first.

When I bought a house, technically bought a house.

I haven’t paid off the house yet because I have a mortgage.

So when I attempted to start buying a house, which ends up being a multi-

year process because

of it mortgage, if we paid a massive down

payment in cash, we got, I mean, paying more

at the beginning is better because it means your mortgage is lower overall.

And also we got like a discount essentially by giving them a massive amount

of accounts.

We went to the bank and they wanted cash, which as a Western person feels

very shady, but

in Japan it’s very normal.

They don’t do checks and things like that.

So we went to the bank.

If I remember correctly, we took a 19

million yen, my wife and I pulled our money.

Had a stack of money as big as my head.

So I don’t know.

It was, it was, how do you measure ahead?

The height is bottom to top.

So I guess it’s width from the back of my head to the front of my head.

So I actually have a picture somewhere of me laying on the ground with 19

million yen stacked next to my head.

It’s the same, a sum width is my head.

This is the closest I’m going to get to a

wrap video where I’m like showing off how much

money I have on my bands as it were.

But like I knew I would never have that much money in my hand again or at

least I assumed.

I mean, I guess I’m not dead yet, but the likelihood of me having more than

19 million yen in my possession at one time is very unlikely.

You took it to the construction company, the place that it built the house.

They had that machine that, machine that counts the money.

When the point was I did actually carry that 19 million with me.

I put it in a bag, in a brown paper bag and then put it in like a backpack

and then held the backpack like I hugged it like a fragile child.

Because if I dropped this money somehow, I was not going to financially

recover for years

and years and years and years.

And we wouldn’t be able to be living in the house I live in now.

So the explanation I was walking in a parking lot and I dropped 10 million

yen wrapped in newspaper.

Rapt in newspaper is sound suspicious, but I put mine in a paper bag.

I didn’t want to put it in something

else that would make it more suspicious .

So I actually wrapped it up in something

non suspicious and put it in my backpack.

Then again, I was I was hugging this

like it could be taken from me in a moment.

The second explanation was I put 10 million

yen in my closet and now I can’t find it.

I might have thrown it out, which is the same sort of thing.

It’s like I’ve got 10 million yen.

I put it in the closet.

I cleaned out my closet, maybe forgot that

the 10 million yen was there and it ended

up at the recycling center.

That one is slightly more reasonable.

Again, because Japan has still got a strange relationship with money.

There’s still a lot of people who believe in cash.

They don’t actually want to put money in the bank.

Banks, I think most banks now don’t really offer anything significant in the

way of interest anyways.

The cash sitting in your closet is kind of more liquid.

It’s more available.

So a lot of people think about it that way.

A lot of old people in Japan keep cash in their house.

17, I think was the biggest amount of money found 42.5 million yen was found

in the garbage

in good amount.

Their suspicion is that a man died.

His house was demolished and as they took

all the stuff out of his house either before

or after.

It just ended up in the garbage.

This older man had just kept that money in his house.

This is what I’m saying.

There is a different relationship to money than we would have in the West.

The explanation for this is that there are older people who hide their cash.

So let’s say I’m older.

I have my 42 million yen.

I open up a speaker for my stereo and I stick

it in the speaker or I hide it somewhere.

I’m not going to tell where it is because

that’s the whole point of hiding it.

But then I die.

It’s not like you usually prepare for your death in this way.

So you don’t tell anyone where your money is so they don’t know.

So they start throwing out your old stuff.

They’re not going to think like, oh, I should open up these speakers.

And check for money.

Yeah.

It puts you in a weird position.

Let’s say I have my father in law or my parents in law.

They die.

Should I start breaking down all their stuff

to see if they’ve hidden any money in the

house?

It seems weirdly mercenary at this.

But at the same time, of course, I don’t want to throw out 42 million yen

that could benefit my family or someone

else in the family who maybe deserves it.

It suddenly felt like crypto to me.

They’ve just stored it somewhere else where no one else can get it because I

have a tiny amount of cryptocurrency.

I was big into cryptocurrency and then it really started to turn out like it

wasn’t going to get used the way they were promising it.

It became like an investment thing and not like something you use where for

me, the idea of Internet money, something you use was really appealing.

So I have like basically left over money

in crypto and then the price all tanked.

So it wasn’t really worth, you know, going back to it the moment.

If it seems like it’s going to take off again, maybe I’ll look at it again,

but I really

want it to be something you can use, not something that just sits there and

it becomes like an investment opportunity

that may or may not hold value over time.

But that means I have like a USB stick

with, let’s say, a 500 bucks crypto on it.

If I die, that’s gone.

If that had been like where I was storing my money, if I was taking my

savings, putting

in crypto and I die, you’re not going to break the security to get in there.

It’s got like whatever, 15, 20 word pass codes that you have to find and

know the right order and stuff.

Yeah.

So this is similar.

It’s the old version and the new version is almost the same thing.

Anyways, no one convinced the police it was there 10 million yen.

The police have reverted the money to the city.

And so that’s it.

We did a story a little while ago that if

you, someone turns in the money, you have to

give them an award, like a reward, a thank you.

It was between, I think it was five and 20% of the value, which means the

person who found

this, if someone had claimed it, they would have got as a minimum five

percent of the money they were supposed to have found 10 million yen.

But because it goes back to the city, maybe they don’t get anything.

I wonder if there’s a reward for the

city worker who found the 10 million yen.

I sit there and I go like, man, because I’m not rich enough to throw away 10

million.

If I found 10 million yen when I turn it in, I assume if I found that much

money, it was from someone nefarious.

It was like a yakusa, lost it or something.

So then I wouldn’t feel bad, but then I don’t know what’s the yakusa.

So it might be the situation where it was like 40 million yen.

A family member died and that family could really use it.

I would feel bad about that.

I don’t want to steal from a family.

I wouldn’t have problems stealing from yakusa.

But I think my assumption is if I find money somehow on the street of that

volume that it.

was someone doing something in the first place.

So maybe I got to readjust my attitude

and be a more honest and better person.

Probably won’t happen today though.

There’s nothing dishonest about keeping money you find.

I mean that’s technically a possibility.

The problem I’m what I actually mean is when it’s 40 million yen and I find.

it and I would

benefit from 40 million yen, but there

could be a family that has that money .

Okay wait, I have to restart my sentence.

There is a family out there who let’s say like the father died and that the

kids need more that money more than I do.

That’s all.

I’m saying there’s a relative morality there that’s a bit of an issue from.

I have a family too, but I am able to provide for my family.

So what I’m saying, there might be a family out there that cannot provide

for the family

as well.

And 50 million yen would benefit them more.

Like it would make their life better.

Whereas my family would be like icing on the cake.

So I’m just saying like I don’t want to take food out of someone’s mouth to

put icing on my cake.

Okay, you’ll do it.

Okay.

Well you wait, wait, wait.

By managing the money for me, do I get the money?

I don’t know, I’m a little concerned about this.

The guy who threw the pipe bomb at the prime minister, he just got a new

warrant served.

So he threw the pipe bomb, got arrested right away.

And then they release you.

This is, this was not really what’s happening is not that interesting.

So he’s got basically the police went to his house, they searched his house,

they found gunpowder.

And then just this week reissued a new

warrant for his arrest over the gun powder.

And this is something it’s not again, it’s not a surprise that he had gunpow

der in his house if he was making pipe bombs to throw at the prime minister.

It’s a surprise that they didn’t do it all at once.

Now what the police in Japan do is they stagger their warrants.

Now this could be seen as a form of

harassment, which I think in some cases it is.

I don’t know about this one.

One you get into pipe bomb territory, I

don’t feel too bad if the police are asking.

But there’s a system in Japan where they can arrest you.

Without charging you, they can hold you for

basically a month, I think it’s 24 days.

Then they have to let you go.

But what they do is let’s say they have three or four charges, they will.

hold you for 20

days, release you.

As you walk out the building, they will re-arrest you on the second warrant

and bring you back in, hold you for 20 days.

This was a system designed to disrupt a drug dealer’s business.

So let’s say I’m a drug dealer.

If I’m off the street for two to three months, like one month basically each

, they will disrupt

my ability to sell drugs because all my customers are going to go find

another drug dealer.

If I have a day job, I’m going to lose my day job.

So it’s very disruptive to my life.

The Japanese police do this on purpose to

extend the length of time they can basically

hold you.

It also helps them, it gives them time to build a case or whatever without

actually arresting

you because once they arrest you, they have to put the evidence forward and

they have to go to trial.

This is another reason why the Japanese conviction rate is so high is

because they’re essentially

giving themselves so much time to build the case they want to build.

I don’t think the fact that we have this guy on video throwing a pipe bomb

at the prime minister, it’s a pretty open and shut case.

I was just surprised that they dropped another warrant now, but I’m betting

it so they can

look more into his background and stuff because

this guy has still not made a statement.

A lot of the crime stories we do on the Internet is Japan.

The thing you hear about is the statement.

The statement is always immediate and to me relatively amusing because it’s

like, “Yeah, I did it.

I’m proud of it.”

Or then they go to jail.

I don’t remember because I was drunk, which

is a very common defense in Japan, which

actually doesn’t work.

Because I don’t think you not remembering it gets you off the hook.

I think I guess the idea is that if I say I don’t remember it, there’s no

point in them asking me any further questions.

I’m not helping their case at all.

I’m assuming that’s what they actually mean is I don’t remember so that you

can stop asking me questions because you keep asking me questions.

I’m just going to keep saying I don’t remember.

I’m not helping you build a case against

me, which is again the criminal’s job.

If you’ve committed crimes, your job is to not help the police arrest you.

Keep that in mind.

This guy, I just thought it was interesting

that they’re going to drop a warrant now.

A month from now, we might hear a new warrant drop for another thing.

Another thing, another thing.

Because they’ve gone through it through his house.

They now have all the things in his house

that they were, that he had illegally.

The gunpowder would have been illegal.

The pipe bombs he made would have been illegal.

That’s two charges, two warrants right there.

It also means they can get more invasive into his house.

In this case, again, I’m pretty, actually think it’s pretty justified.

He threw a pipe bomb.

He could have killed not only a prime minister

as target, but everyone around 20, 30,

innocent people.

Yeah, I’m okay with this.

It’s a weird question though.

Justice.

Very much like my feeling about taking

money that I just found on the street .

Justice should have be applied equally, but then at the same time, it’s like

, we know this guy’s guilty.

So you have to worry about whether we harass or not or keep him in jail

because they should be keeping him in jail.

What I just realized though is what my morality is fluid.

Which is bad.

When you’re talking about laws and stuff, it should be like, yes or no, it

shouldn’t be like, well, in this case, yes, in that case, no.

Maybe that’s Ignat’s idea about me keeping the money I find on the street,

finders, keepers rules.

But again, my feeling is in some cases, it would be perfectly justifiable

taking money from the Akhuzah.

I wouldn’t feel bad about that.

But if the family’s poor and I take money from them, I wouldn’t want to do

that inadvertently as the… Anyways, next story.

Upskirt photos.

We’ve talked about this a billion times in Japan.

It’s surprisingly how often cops get arrested for taking upskirt photos.

Photo voyeurism is going to be made illegal.

It’s going to be banned.

My first thought is, what?

How is upskirt photos not already illegal?

So when you take an upskirt photo, so I’m on the escalator, always happens

on escalator.

The lady in front of me is wearing a short skirt.

I take my cell phone out, I take a picture of her skirt, and I get arrested.

I wasn’t getting arrested for taking the photo.

I was getting arrested for harassing the person, which I didn’t realize.

Like I’d actually talked about the story a million times and yes, you’re

getting arrested for harassment.

But the actual taking of the photo wasn’t

the crime, which I’ve only realized now.

It’s shocking that in Japan in 2023, taking a unsolicited photo of someone’s

essentially genitalia without their permission was not illegal.

But that was the case.

This is going into a bill that’s expanding all the sexual crimes.

I have talked on a previous episode about how the definition of rape is

being expanded.

In Japan, up until very recently, it was only really rape if you could prove

you tried to defend yourself.

You could prove that you fought back.

Now we know that’s not always the case.

We know it’s not always possible.

But it also meant that if I bill Cosby to Lady, that was perfectly legal

because she didn’t fight back against it.

That’s why so many of these cases are so frustrating for women from a woman

‘s point of view.

So the definition of rape is being expanded.

So all the things I just mentioned are now going to be illegal.

Upskirt photos and other similar things are

not going to be just part of harassment to

build a case.

It’s going to be illegal in itself.

So it would be, harassment is charge one.

Upskirt photo is charge two.

If they do something else gross, that’s probably another charge.

Gruming minors will now be illegal, which was not illegal before.

I think the problem with grooming minors was the definition of grooming min

ors and the definition of minor in Japan was

actually pretty vague because you get all

the creepy dudes to point out that like the

age of consent in Japan is 13, it’s not.

It used to be.

It’s not anymore.

So just be aware of that creepy dudes listening in in Japan, which is.

probably a lot of you.

If I take an upskirt photo of a woman, which is now going to be referred to

as photo voyeurism,

I can get up to three years in prison and a three million yen fine.

In 2021, there were 5,000 arrests for upskirt photos.

But again, this was harassment or maybe those guys just got off because it

wasn’t technically illegal.

That is three times more than 2010.

And I think the rise in that crime comes down to the availability and sort

of technological level of cell phones and cell phone care.

I don’t think my obsession with older men who commit crimes is going to go

away because as I come into my golden years, I’m going to be 51 very soon.

So my is my brain going through a transition is kind of the underlying

question of every

time I do a crime story involving a 50 plus year old man, is it going to

happen to me?

There’s a concern and a piece of entertainment value because I am a

relatively moral person.

I’m not going to say good because again, the underlying theme of this whole

episode has been that my morals are fluid.

So in one instance, I would say something

is dead wrong, you should never do it.

But then change the circumstances.

I’d be like, yeah, maybe it’s okay.

I think that’s true for everybody.

But I think most people are not as honest about it.

And I struggle with what is right and wrong.

But that is all governed by the chemicals in your brain.

And the chemicals in your brain change over time.

So am I over the next three or four years going to change in such a way that

I end up in a situation.

The one that got me the most was the 50 year old man who saw a high school

girl in a shopping mall, got down on his

knees and just started licking her shoes.

Part of his brain, the chemicals in his brain was telling him that this was

a good idea.

Another part of his brain was like,

she might even like it and be like into it.

So that was always like, is that where my brain is going at some point is a

question I have.

Anyways, this 53 year old man goes into a

store and he shop lists a skirt, walks out

and they don’t catch him.

But the security guy, the guy in charge of

the security cameras, he’s checking that he

actually stole the skirt.

And so he knows the guy’s face, he knows the skirt that the guy stole.

He knows sort of the general situation.

And this is like, at this point, we’re not going to go chase him.

He’s gone.

So whatever.

The problem is the man returned later that afternoon and he was wearing the

skirt that he stole.

And again, part of me goes like, did he think he was getting away with it?

Did he think he was going to go back and steal more clothes?

Did he think no one was going to notice?

Has his brain taken him to a place where he’s so disconnected, he thinks, I

‘m going to get away with this?

Or does he actually want to be arrested?

Because there are another part of his brain that’s going like, this is going

to get you arrested, let’s go do that.

Maybe that’s what he wants.

It could be one of these situations where the guy’s been in prison in the

past.

And he’s actually now at this point in his life more comfortable in prison.

He might be a homeless person who struggles to survive and actually prison

is going to be more comfortable in the life he’s living now.

All those are terrible things.

So I don’t want to make jokes about them.

But if he was dead serious, I’m going to steal this skirt.

I’m going to put on this skirt.

They’re going to think I’m a different

person because I’m wearing different clothes.

I’m going to go back to the same store, maybe steal some more stuff or just

do some casual shopping.

I would love to know what was going on through that guy’s head.

So we have one more story, a little quick story.

It’s what Otaku think is going to happen when they have kids.

So first of all, they have to assume they’re having kids.

Otaku in Japan, it’s pretty relatively famous that they’re not.

They’re essentially in cells.

If you have kids, are you going to maintain your current time and money put

into your hobby?

This is the question that was asked.

So 82% of Otaku said if they have kids,

they would spend less time on their hobbies.

That is pretty reasonable.

You have other people in your life.

You have to spend more time on them.

You have to give up some time.

You give up time on your hobbies.

Same.

So I’m going to spend the exact same amount of time on my hobbies, 16%.

I’m going to spend even more time on my hobbies, 2%.

I think those people are deluded in getting themselves.

By adding more people into the mix, you just get less time.

That is, the people are always astounded by the fact that I can produce this

podcast and seeming to be in other things.

And they’re like, where do you find the time to like, I carve out a schedule

when people are not in the house.

Otherwise I just can’t do it.

I’m also weirdly self-conscious about doing

a podcast while other people in the house.

They just hear me talking.

They’re like, let me be downstairs.

So they don’t really hear anything.

There’s no, but I’m always like, I have a different feeling when someone

else is around.

Will you spend less, same or more money once you have kids?

84% said they would spend less money.

Again, very reasonable assumption.

You have to take your sum of your money and spend it on these humans you

have produced.

I’m going to spend the same amount of money.

Actually not unreasonable.

14%.

Like I put aside this much money for my hobby.

I’m going to keep that much.

And then the other money I make is going to go to the family and stuff.

I can actually see if you actually planted

it out in advance that would work out.

2% I think the same 2% as the first category.

I’m going to spend more money on my hobbies.

So they’re almost defiant that yes, I’m going to have children.

I’m going to spend more money on my hobby.

Now this was the bit that I thought maybe where it would work in.

19% said they would enjoy their hobby with their kids.

So I think maybe that 2% from the previous two surveys is saying that I’m

going to spend more time on my hobby

because I’m going to induct my children.

There was a better word.

I’m going to bring my children up in my hobby.

Therefore I’m going to spend time with them,

spend money with them on the hobby so we

can enjoy it together.

But that might be the route to take.

So that’s like I’ve met lots of families.

So I practice judo.

I’ve met literal judo families where like

every parent, child, grandparents and stuff,

they all do judo.

So they raise the kids in that environment.

I don’t think they force them to do it but there’s like this is what we do.

You can join and they get into it because it’s a family thing.

They’re saying like I’m going to grow up with anime.

Anime is going to be on TV.

I’m going to buy DVDs and stuff or Blue Rays.

The kids are going to see them.

I’ll buy more.

Maybe it will expand what I like or expand to what the kids like.

I’ll buy stuff for them.

So I’ll actually end up spending more money on the hobby.

I make gun to models.

I’m going to do that with my kids.

The kids are going to grow up making models.

We’re going to spend more time and more money on the models.

I’m not going to enjoy my hobby with my kids.

18%.

I actually understand this thinking.

I did not force my children to do judo.

Just my thing, I know judo is a very sort

of unique personality type that enjoys it.

A lot of people will not enjoy getting beat up or beating people up.

I had no problem not sharing my hobby with my kids.

If they were interested, I would have brought them in but I was never going

to force them.

I think that might be where these guys their mindset is, which is good.

Fourcing your kids into your hobby is not a good thing to do.

Either is fine, 63%, which is again, all

three of those I can kind of mentally

justify the thinking they’re going through.

I think they’re all have good points and bad points.

But yes, if you are a nerd, if you listen

to the issues you spend, you probably are.

It is worth thinking about how can I indoctrinate my children into my hobby.

Should I do that?

Do I want to do that?

Do I want to share my hobby?

I think it’s a really nice thing to do.

But I think it’s a really nice thing to do.

If they’re interested in it, I don’t think

it’s a really nice thing to do if you have

to force.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music).

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• Hey fever is a consistent issue in Japan.

It affects 40% of the population in total.

It affects 50% of the people in Tokyo,

Tokyo being one of the most popular cities in the world.

I suffer from hay fever.

So this is a story that they become particularly personal, important to me.

I suffer primarily right now.

So I’m on a ton of drugs.

Actually, I only took two, not too bad,

but I have like spray that goes up my nose

and drips and things.

It sucks.

I actually came to Japan.

I didn’t have allergies for five years.

And then I developed allergies to every sort of plant in Japan.

It sucks so much.

There is a tea called Jammu tea black.

And it’s claimed it was effective for hay feverers.

And I was like, wow, I suffer from hay fever

drinking tea would be a great way to fight it off.

If it’s actually true.

We only sold on the Internet.

It was only sold on the Internet, which is why I was like,

wow, that’s probably why I didn’t find it.

I go around, I buy all the strange drinks that come out in Japan.

Pepsi for years and years and years

every year would release a strange flavor.

Quite recently, Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola had a collaboration.

They made Jack Coke in a can.

I had that.

It was pretty good.

As soon as I finished it, I knew there

was a problem because I already felt dry.

And one can of Coke, essentially one drink.

They must put something in it.

There is a whiskey soda in a can that I tried.

Halfway through that drink I had a headache.

The next day after the Jack and Coke, I felt really dry.

Took some aspirin, drank a ton of water.

I was okay.

But if I’d had like four, normally in a drinking session,

I’m gonna have four or five drinks.

I’m not getting wasted anymore.

I’m not going crazy.

But at the same time, I’m a big dude.

I got to drink a lot to have an impact and effect.

If I drank four or five of those,

I would have had one of the worst hangovers in my life.

That’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about Jammu T Black.

Jammu T Black is effective for a lot of things because it contains steroids.

So Jammu T Black would get my chest press up another 20 kilos.

It would probably make me feel real good all the time.

But one of the side effects of steroids

continued usage is it will worsen infections.

So basically if you drank this tea, let’s

say every day because you have hay fever,

then you get an infection of some sort.

You get an infection, something like that.

Your body would be less capable of fighting

off the infection, which is ridiculous.

That is putting people’s lives at risk and they did not disclose it,

which is probably why it was only available on the Internet.

That is not just borderline illegal.

There’s a lot of problems with having your product,

any product, not just tea, have steroids in it

and not declaring that properly to users.

And the side effect is potential life-threatening death.

So that’s a big deal.

They’re being looked into.

They’re probably not gonna be able to sell

their product online any, which is good.

(upbeat music)

Kishita, the Prime Minister of Japan.

He came out and he said in a meeting that hay fever

is a national problem that troubles many people.

But he didn’t just say that.

He said we need proposals on how to fix it

because they’re saying 40% of the whole

population in Japan suffers from hay fever

and that has a huge economic impact.

Maybe he spoke slightly out of turn.

And the thing is he was talking to a cabinet,

so in the government, and he said we need proposals to solve this problem.

But basically what he did was accidentally elevate it

in status from something we’re talking about

to something we actually need like an action task plan on.

So I think Kishita is actually elevated the severity

of the issue so that the government actually

is now going to focus resources on it,

which I actually think is a good thing.

When it affects 50% of your population, and it really does.

I mean, we’re talking about drug money,

we’re talking about productivity at work.

This is something it should be dealt with seriously.

The thing is it’s hay fever, so people don’t take hay fever very seriously.

Some of the proposals that came out of this just initial conversation were,

they’re going to thin out the cedar trees.

Now the reason cedar trees are in Japan

at all, so at the end of World War II,

there was the bombing of Japan.

There was also every piece of wood was cut down to use in the war effort.

Once World War II was finished, they said we need trees,

we need wood as fast as possible,

we need something that grows fast and

grows very easily, so they got cedar trees,

imported them from other countries and planted them in Japan.

So it’s actually a non-native species in Japan,

and they think that is one of the main reasons why

it’s had such a great impact on allergies in Japan.

‘Cause it’s not native to the country, people grow up with it, it affects.

Again, I developed an allergy through it later in life,

so maybe it’s one of those things that just develops allergies,

but cedar trees produce tons of pollen, so

they think that might be part of the issue.

So one of the first things they’re going to do

is let’s thin out the current number of cedar trees

in Japan and plant some other trees that don’t have as much pollen.

And then the other thing is like coming up with better drugs and stuff.

My allergy medicine, I don’t know if anyone would care

about this, recently was upgraded to a new,

you can swallow it without water, which was weird

’cause I was like one of the least problems I have

during allergy season is drinking water

’cause they drink tons of water anyways.

But yeah, hopefully they do start coming

up with some solutions, it’s not just me.

It is millions and millions of people in

Japan suffer from these allergy issues,

and it’s millions and millions of people who would love a solution.

I would love to not be on drugs all the time.

(upbeat music)

Since we’re talking about Kishida, just a few days ago,

someone took a pipe bomb and chucked it at the Prime Minister.

It is a weirdly terrifying story.

Last year, not too long ago, Prime Minister, former Prime Minister Abe

was assassinated with a homemade shotgun.

Guns are not a significant issue in Japan.

You can’t buy them.

This former military dude made a gun, made a shotgun,

took it out and shot the former Prime Minister.

So this is on people’s minds.

This is an issue.

You have Kishida standing, doing a speech.

He turns around, he looks at the background,

and then you can see a pipe bomb, a silver

bomb, come over and land in front of him.

One of the security guard kicks the bomb away,

opens this like briefcase looking thing,

and it’s actually a ballistic shield.

He holds that in front of the Prime Minister, and then pushes him away.

The first one doesn’t go off properly.

It makes a big noise in lots of smoke.

The guy who has the bomb, it’s tackled by a fisherman,

he’s doing this around the speech was happening around dogs.

That fisherman is now a national hero, ’cause he took out this guy.

The suspect had a second one.

He also was carrying a knife.

He was pushed to the ground by the fisherman and then arrested.

The suspect so far has refused to talk, so we don’t know why he did.

It is a weird way to get attention,

because we don’t know why he’s done it yet.

The fisherman was one of the funnier bits to me, only because he said,

“I did judo in elementary school, but the dude was like 50.”

So he’s the same age to me.

I’ve done judo for 40 years, so yes, I could say that judo

was an applicable skill that I have.

I think he was just a really tough fisherman.

I don’t think the judo he practiced when he was like seven,

had any sort of impact on his abilities now.

But truth be told, he saw some action.

He didn’t run away.

He jumped in and like took down a dude.

I mean, yeah, it deserves to be a national hero.

I was trying to find that video.

I actually saw the video, but I lost it.

It’s the problem with getting so many videos up at the same time.

This is safe.

The concern is that the secret service, the security details, the bodyguards

for the prime minister and such.

In Japan, have primarily been trained to defend against knives.

And they think they need to sort of upgrade their skills.

So they have the security guys who were

dealing with Abe during that assassination.

They didn’t really know what to do.

They had that briefcase thing.

They had one of those, but it was way too late

and obviously the former prime minister died.

You see the same deal.

This guy was on it though.

The security guy, the security guard, had the briefcase open.

And the idea is that if something explodes or someone shoots,

it’s ballistic so it’ll hit that.

And it covers most, it’s about, I don’t

know, four feet when it’s fully open.

So it’s covering essentially the major parts your body, hopefully.

And I got to say the security dude was on it.

The fisherman though, he took out the guy, which is pretty cool.

It is a question though, is this where political protest is gonna go

in Japan in the future?

Are they going to try to assassinate these guys

to the point where essentially what’s gonna happen

is these guys aren’t going to feel comfortable going out in public,

which is too bad because up until the Abe assassination,

Japanese politicians walked out in crowds among people,

they had security details with them, but there was no fear.

And now the fact simply is that there is going to be fear

which sucks because it’s going to change the political nature of Japan.

Two men were arrested.

So we had the Sushi terrorism.

So the people who were like unconverible Sushi,

they were licking their fingers and touching the Sushi.

We had a guy take the soy sauce and drink directly from it.

People being gross, filming it, putting it on the Internet for cloud.

All those people got in trouble, all those people got arrested.

It is shocking to me that anyone is going to do something similar.

We can’t change it.

It has to be changed from Sushi terrorism.

Last week I talked about a guy at a Gudon place,

Yoshinoya, and what he did was Gudon is a bowl of rice

with beef on the top, shredded beef.

He was taking the ginger that is shared,

a condiment, and then sticking his chopsticks

in and pretending to eat a ton of it.

But his chopsticks have been in his mouth.

So he was arrested.

Everyone is getting arrested for this.

It’s ridiculous.

So the fact that people are still doing it,

filming it and putting it on the Internet is terrifying.

Two men were arrested for using toothpicks,

putting them back in the toothpick holder,

complaining to the staff, making them replace the toothpick holder,

and then doing it again.

So they’re basically just like trying to say to the staff

that, oh, I use this toothpick, has used toothpicks in it, it’s disgusting.

Go get me a new one, they bring a new one,

they would do the same thing again and again.

They filmed it.

It blew up online.

I mean, why at that point, you know you’re gonna get caught.

The problem is, you wanna make this video.

You want it to blow up.

It blows up.

The police see it.

They have your face and everything, I assume you’re account.

The police come get you, you’re arrested.

The only way you can get away with this is if your video for Cloud fails.

So the fact is you’re committing a low key crime.

If it gets popular on the Internet, you’re gonna get arrested.

You commit a low key crime.

It doesn’t get popular.

You don’t achieve your purpose, your

primary purpose being to get popular online.

That’s sort of this weird catch 22.

If you’re successful, you get arrested.

If you’re not successful, nothing happens.

But you don’t get the love that you’re looking for on the Internet.

And it isn’t love, it’s all hate.

Everyone in Japan finds this disgusting.

They were found pretty quickly.

The restaurant filed a report.

The restaurant actually didn’t want to press charges

until the video went viral last week.

So this actually happened like a couple months ago.

When the video went viral, you’re going

to damage the reputation of our restaurant.

So we want you to be arrested.

They were brought up on fraudulent obstruction of business charges.

(bell dings)

We put a ding in there for the… I don’t know, man.

I don’t know what you think you’re gonna achieve by this.

I understand youthful practical jokes and being dumb when you’re a teenager.

Both these guys were in their 30s.

As far as I’m concerned, fines aren’t enough.

Send them to prison.

That would actually send a message.

I don’t know what that message would be.

Don’t be a dumb ass.

(bell dings)

• Japanese, in Japan, everything’s taken

away seriously, like sports and stuff.

And that’s the ridiculous part, maybe first of all.

The level of seriousness in high school sports is off the charts.

It is why people quit sports after high school.

My daughter, I think I’ve told the story before.

She was doing gymnastics as a kid.

She really enjoyed it.

And then we got to a point where she was

getting sort of like junior high school.

And the place she went said, she either

has to come every single day to gymnastics

and do it like she’s gonna go to the Olympics or something.

She was never gonna go to the Olympics.

We were just putting her in it, so she would have something fun to do.

She has to come every day or she has to quit.

And we’re like, well, we can’t bring her every day.

Both I and my wife work.

We cannot do the thing you’re asking us to do.

So like, okay, she has to quit.

So my daughter, who was enjoying gymnastics,

had to quit gymnastics because she wasn’t ready

or capable of dating her whole life to gymnastics.

She’s fucking ridiculous.

There was no sort of like, let’s have fun class

in kids gymnastics after a certain point.

You either had to do this like dead seriously

like you were gonna do nothing else, but you had to quit.

So we quit.

And now my daughter doesn’t do anything.

I’m trying to get it into something else like hip hop classes or something,

where it’s like designed to be fun,

but even then, I’ve gone by these open competitions

in like malls and stuff where it’s like

little girls doing hip hop, dead seriously.

You know they’re going every day.

I’m wondering if there is even such a

thing as doing sports for fun in Japan.

A former pro baseball player was a coach of a high school baseball team.

Okay, so that’s really good for the baseball team.

They got this guy.

He was a pro.

He knows baseball.

He’s gonna train you and coach you.

It’s gonna be awesome.

He kicked a player in the butt.

That doesn’t sound too bad.

The next sentence though, he hit the same

player in the head with a baseball bat.

There was no way he could have hit him that hard,

but he is hitting a kid in the head with a baseball bat.

Maybe the kid had a helmet on.

I don’t know.

All I do know is if you hit my kid with a baseball bat,

I would be showing up at the school

and I’d be like, let’s get two bats and work this out.

Like there’s one simple way.

I’m not calling the cops.

You and me, baseball bats, you wanna throw down, let’s throw down.

You’re not hitting kids with baseball bats and getting away.

He was fired.

His statement was, his playing wasn’t satisfactory.

Just to show you how serious it is,

that this is not like an isolated incident.

A different school, there was a running coach.

In February, he slapped a student in the face and gave him a bloody nose.

It just, when that came to light, ’cause

the kid came home with a bloody nose,

there was discovered to be three more cases.

And the coach said, I’m sorry.

Of course, as I’ve said many times before,

the retroactive, I’m sorry, doesn’t mean anything,

because you’re only sorry you got caught.

If you hadn’t been caught, if you hadn’t been told he was doing a bad thing,

he wouldn’t have had like a self-revelation of,

perhaps I’m treating these people too

harshly, because they may be in high school,

but they are still people.

So he resigned.

This is again, how fucking serious it is.

But the parents said, we don’t want you to quit.

You can stay if you promise to not hit the kids anymore.

And the reason was that school had entered

the nationals 43 times, which actually means

they got to a certain level with this school’s expectations

or they were going to the nationals almost

every year, and they’ve won it five times.

So because they were winning, these parents were willing to forgive

that this man abused their kids.

And as long as he didn’t hit them further,

they were saying, it’s okay, you can stay

and be coach of this school, which I’m sorry again,

hit my kid once, you and me are gonna go for it.

I mean, that’s simple.

If my son or my daughter came home today and said, my whatever coach hit me,

I would go to the school and be like, let’s have a conversation,

a private conversation that Jim Nazium just you and me.

You can choose the weapons, but we’re gonna do this.

There’s no way that I would let that pass.

And if that guy got fired, no, I’m not.

I don’t want him back.

He hit my kid.

It’s fucking disgusting.

(upbeat music)

82 year old man.

So I love it.

I love old men.

I’m an old man myself.

I’m approaching super old age, but right now I’m just old.

I haven’t hit like grumpy old man yet, but I’m pretty close.

Maybe my last story though, I’m like,

I’m ready to throw down with anyone who touches my kids.

That’s ’cause there’s still kids and they can’t really defend themselves.

Once they get to, you know, oh my son, he’s like five, 10, five, 11 now.

He’s like 15 years old.

He’s pretty much gonna be 6162 probably when he fishes growing.

He’s gonna be huge.

I guess he never has to worry about it.

He’s gonna be a big dude.

You gotta remember we’re in Japan

where the average height is shorter than other countries.

Anyways, no, we’re relevant.

82 year old man.

He’s driving along, not wearing a seatbelt.

As old men are want to do, the police pull him over.

And as you pull someone over, he goes, let me see you drive his license.

And he is unable to produce one because he had his driver’s license revoked

when he was 20, which is over 60 years ago.

And he’s been driving ever since.

So he was arrested on the spot, of course, for driving without a license.

They can’t compound it, driving without a license for 60 years.

It’s funny that driving without a license is one charge,

not a charge, sort of for every year you’ve driven without a license.

The interesting part was he drove well enough

over the last 60 years that no one noticed.

So if he’d just, like every other crime, kept it on the down low.

If he’d worn a seatbelt and followed all

the rules, he wouldn’t have got pulled over.

He wouldn’t have had the police ask for his

license and he wouldn’t have had to admit

that he doesn’t have one for the last 60

years and he wouldn’t have been arrested.

So if you’re gonna commit a low-key crime

that people won’t notice unless you show off, don’t show off.

It’s actually very similar to our first story

where the only reason those guys are being arrested

is because they got viral on the Internet.

They got the clout they were looking for.

That brought the police’s attention.

If you’re going to commit crimes, ingenues

Japan criminal advice for this week,

don’t draw attention to yourself,

don’t do the things that will draw police’s attention.

(upbeat music)

This is really interesting because I’m wondering what’s gonna happen.

In Japan, you turn 20, you are an adult

and they’ve actually recently lowered that to 18

but there’s still some issues going back and forth

because not everything is caught up with it.

That’s actually relevant in this story.

There’s a person who was arrested for stealing a wallet in a bar.

They were arrested and produced a mind number card

which is your social insurance number, essentially, in Japan.

The social insurance number said they were 20 years old.

They were being prosecuted and the prosecutors started to get weirded out

because whenever they were interviewing, oh no, it was the defendants.

So her lawyers started to get confused

because when they were interviewing her acquaintances,

they started getting like confused answers

that didn’t match up with her story.

They took a second look at her, turns out she’s a 17 year old,

a Thai national who spoke basically perfect Japanese.

So they didn’t even know she wasn’t Japanese.

But she was being charged as an adult

because she had been impersonating an adult.

Didn’t admit to not being an adult or the impersonation

and revealing that she was 17 years old.

The confusion here, okay, she was being arrested as an adult

which means she’s going to be tried as an adult.

In Japan, if you’re not an adult, the charge is way lower.

So if she had had copped to the fact

that she was impersonating someone else,

if she had copped to the fact that she was impersonating

someone else, she actually would have got a lower charge but more charges.

So there’s the confusion.

So if the charge was theft, theft as a minor,

is a very small thing, probably slap in the wrist, you get released.

Thiefed as an adult, you could actually go to prison.

So the question is, what would have

been the better course of action for her?

Should she have gone through and taken the

charge as an adult but kept up her persona?

Or should she have copped to, I’ve been impersonating adult and theft,

but I’m a minor and gotten maybe lower charges on both.

I actually think the better course of action,

again, we’re now getting to Ninja, New Japan, advice for criminals time,

is always take the charge as a minor because

it gets expunged when you turn an adult.

She was 17, it was actually going to be not a problem for her next year.

The fact that it came out, I don’t know if that causes

more issues, is they had to discover it on their own.

I think if you admitted it, you get a lower charge as well.

I have no idea how this is gonna play out.

Do not ever, if you have the opportunity,

take a charge as an adult because you are always

going to get off in a better situation as a minor.

(upbeat music)

Two guys return a rental car, no problem.

They called the rental agency and

said, we forgot something in the car, okay?

That happens all the time, no problem.

We’re gonna come back and get it.

Also, very common, you’ve forgotten something in the car,

you’re gonna come back and get it.

We’ll not rent out that car again, absolutely, sir.

Don’t you dare look fucking inside.

Okay, now that’s a little weird.

That’s not what people normally say

when they’ve forgotten something in a car.

So of course, the staff immediately

went and looked in the car, found the item.

It was 15 bags of weed.

They called the cops.

Cops show up before the guys who’ve rented

the car because they don’t have a car.

They probably have to take public transit to get back there.

Pops get there first and they’re arrested when they arrive at the place.

If you had done, if you just played the game normally,

said, we forgot something in the car,

we’re on our way back, we’ll pick it up and said nothing.

They may have looked at the car, but they may not have.

They may have just held the car for you.

Because you drew attention to the thing and made vague threats to the staff,

they immediately went and checked the car and found your weed.

And weed in Japan is still, every drug charge is treated equally.

So cocaine, heroin, Molly, marijuana in Japan,

it’s a drug charge, it’s all exactly the same.

So these guys are gonna be up for whatever the 15 bags are.

They just have to try to figure out

where they trying to sell it was for use on their own

because those are different charges.

Buying it and then using it’s bad,

buying it and selling it is worse, criminally in Japan.

But again, this is gonna be like a full on criminal

advice episode of Ninja News Japan.

If you are trying to hide your stash and

you misplace it, don’t draw attention to it.

(upbeat music)

This has a rule I didn’t know.

So it’d be good for people to learn

about if you’re ever gonna come to Japan.

Man found a wallet with 430,000 yen in it.

That is like $4,000.

And he turned it into the police.

Very honest, very kind of him.

And it was returned to the owner the same day.

Now, there is a lost property law that I didn’t know about.

Where the owner must pay a reward

between five and 20% of the value of the thing returned.

So he should have paid him between five and 20%

of 430,000 yen.

So honestly, if you’re gonna go on the low end, five percent of 430,000 yen,

it’s like, you know, 20,000 yen, 30,000 yen,

I know I can do the math, but it’s not that much.

If you have that much money, if you’re

carrying that much money around in your wallet,

you have a lot of money.

The guy calls him.

So the guy who found the wallet calls the owner of the wallet

and says, you know, I returned your wallet.

The guy says, I’m busy and hangs up and then refuses to take his calls.

So the man who found the wallet sued him and the settlement was 70,000 yen,

which is probably the high end of the

percentage that he would have had to pay

if he had just been nice and paid it anyways.

The man who found the wallet said, I didn’t want the money.

If he had expressed gratitude, I would have let it go.

Well, I actually believe, because if that guy was greedy,

he would have just taken money out of the wallet

in the first place before trying to get into the plea.

I actually do believe that the guy, if he

had just expressed some form of gratitude,

wouldn’t have had to pay anything at all.

My sister was in Japan.

She found a wallet, turned it into the police,

and then the next day, a cake showed up at her house.

Now that cake was at worth 5% to 10% of whatever we found.

I have no idea.

I didn’t check.

I was like, oh, we got a cake.

Let’s eat the cake and I was happy.

I’m, the cake probably was way cheaper than the amount of money inside,

probably less than the 5%.

But we didn’t care.

We got a free cake and we were having a good time.

That’s all that mattered.

The show of gratitude will overwhelm your brain

so that you don’t actually think about the value of the thing.

I had a boss who clearly did not understand this as a concept.

I had done some overtime as a volunteer thing.

I was gonna get paid for it.

I didn’t expect to get anything.

My boss came and put 500 yen on my desk.

I was in there.

My coworker comes over and goes, what are you doing?

And he says, oh, well, he was very nice.

I’m gonna give him this 500 yen coin.

And then my coworker says, you should buy him a Coke or something.

Something that he likes to drink.

And he’ll be happy about that.

You should not leave 500 yen as a coin on his desk.

And she goes, but the drink, probably

120 yen is worth less than the 500 yen.

So she doesn’t understand.

And then he’s like, but it’s the presentation, the thought that counts.

And she was really confused.

And then she went and bought the Coke and left it on my desk

with a note that said, thank you.

And I was really happy about it.

But yes, if you’d left 500 yen on my

desk, I would have been weirdly insulted.

The human mind is an interesting thing ’cause

it doesn’t work logically all the time.

Because she was working on pure logic whereas he understood the gesture,

even if it’s a cheaper gesture, the

more thoughtful, the better the gesture is.

If you ever lose something or find something in Japan, keep that in mind.

There is actually a law in place that you have to pay a reward.

Let’s say I lose 100 yen, I have to give you five yen.

(upbeat music)

So this guy shows up at a track meet

and he starts videoing the participants.

He is then arrested because there is actually rules in place

that you are not allowed to film people at these sort of track events.

What he’s trying to do, he’s a voyeur

and he’s filming girls in their tight track leggings

or short shorts or whatever they’re wearing at the time.

Sorry, the meet prohibits photography.

And this becomes, this is a common problem now in Japan

where you have athletic events where women wear bathing suits,

let’s say it’s swimming or track events are wearing really tight clothes

and then these creepy old dudes, it’s

guys 40 years old, show up at the event

and just start videoing them.

And they get their favorites

and they start following them around and it’s super creepy.

And I’m glad he got arrested.

(upbeat music)

Okay, this is gonna be a post one just for the video.

Travis Scott was recently in Japan and

what he did is he thought he was famous

as famous people often do.

And he shows up at one of these really busy crosswalks in Tokyo.

And at the crosswalk, he stood in the middle

assuming that people would recognize him.

He has his crew take a video of it.

And people like freaking out like, oh my God, Travis Scott, Travis Scott.

Like that’s really awesome.

The problem being that Travis Scott is not particularly

recognizable to Japanese people.

So this is what happened.

(upbeat music)

So like he walks up to a couple of people.

He actually walks up to the only foreign people

in the crosswalk, stares them in the face.

They ignore him and walk away probably because as far as

they’re concerned, some like weird dude

just like walked up and stuck his face in there.

Then he realizes no one here is going to recognize him.

Make sort of like an embarrassed walk away.

He does a smile and then he takes off.

(upbeat music)

So here’s the problem.

You may be super famous in America.

And you are not famous in Japan.

You may be famous in Japan, but then you

absolutely may not be famous in America.

One of the more interesting things I do is we hire

a lot of people from overseas, come to Japan.

And then we’ll talk about famous people and they will be absolutely shocked

that I don’t know who someone is.

And the thing is that person is probably not famous in Japan.

The comments in this hit that sort of weird racism area

that makes me a little uncomfortable to read them out loud.

But I’d have to know who he is before recognizing him.

I doubt anyone would recognize him unless he or as big as Michael Jackson.

So Michael Jackson is famous enough in Japan

that people would recognize him on this.

I only know that he’s collaborated with Nike.

So he’s a musician.

So people asking literally who he is

other than the fact that he’s done some fashion stuff.

He’s only popular in America.

He’s probably minor on a global scale.

That one hurts.

Foreigners aren’t noticed unless they have more of an aura and stature.

I love Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga.

But I doubt they’d be recognized with

their short stature if they were something

like Uniqlo clothing.

So what they’re saying is if like, Ariana

Grande showed up and she’s a tiny person

and she just wore normal clothes.

People in Japan wouldn’t recognize her.

I don’t know any rappers.

That’s fair.

This is the one.

All blacks have the same face, but I’m sure we all look the same to them.

I was like, at first I read that first sentence.

I was like, ooh, but then the second one, does it make it better?

I actually don’t know.

‘Cause like, I have face blindness for black

people is actually what they’re saying.

But then they don’t back it up.

They say that I assume they have face blindness for me.

I don’t know.

I was really uncomfortable reading that

one ’cause I’m like, I’m sure it’s bad,

but also because they don’t assume, they assume the same for themselves.

Is it not bad anymore?

There’s a couple of other ones.

He’s that Fortnite guy.

So that’s actually a bit of an insult.

And then the last one, the last comment.

I only know that this guy’s night shoes get flipped for ridiculous.

If you want to show up in Japan and

you want to, and you think you’re famous,

please be careful because you may not be as famous as you think you.

Now the actual end of this episode.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music).

The central government thinks that young people’s incomes

should be raised to reverse Japan’s birth rate.

Stating our traditional measures to raise the birth rate

have focused on helping people raise children and get married.

This is the minister for child-related policies.

It’s a new position that was created in Japan

because of the serious issue of the declining birth rate.

I, maybe the minister, as a new minister, is an introduced Japan.

I don’t, I wanna do it.

I told you so.

I have been complaining essentially.

that their focus on the birth rate seems to be on helping people raise kids,

not actually getting people to a position

where they want to have kids in the first place.

Like it’s great to have all these policies

to help people raise children.

It is completely pointless to have a policy to help people raise children

if they don’t have children in the first place.

So at least the government seems to be shifting

and thinking they’re starting to get the right idea.

And that is very important because that is

the shift that is going to make the change.

Now, the first thing raising incomes, yes.

If you raise incomes of people, they are more likely to have children.

But they’re still missing the core element

that I have said on Ninja News Japan a million times.

So much so that I almost was getting ready to say,

like I’m not going to talk about it anymore.

They have to give, they have to have a shift

in work culture in Japan.

So the young people, or just people in general,

have time off to form human relationships.

The work culture in Japan is designed

to keep you in the workplace and exorbitant amount of time,

so much so that it’s actually pointless

to formate, to form any sort of actual

relationship with another human being.

So more money is a step one because then if I have money, I can do stuff.

But the next step is I need to be able to have time

to do stuff with all that extra money I’m making.

So I think the government is shifting in the right direction.

The new minister for child-related policies has the right initial idea.

They need to take a step further.

The problem is the step further is work culture.

in companies in Japan.

That have you work unnecessarily long hours to no benefit

because all the people I know who do

work actually these stupid hours in Japan.

They say they don’t do anything.

They’re productive for about six hours a day.

And then after that, they don’t do anything.

This matches up with the timing of a survey

of unmarried people who are under 30.

It turned out half of those people under 30

who are not married do not want children,

primarily because of economic concerns.

So they’re basically saying, I don’t have enough money to have kids,

so why would I even think about having kids?

400 respondents, that’s actually not a massive sample size.

18 to 29, that is the appropriate age range.

49.5% say they do not want kids.

53% of men say they don’t want kids and 45.6% of women

say they don’t want kids.

This is causing great anxiety about Japan’s future.

because is there going to be a Japan?

Elon Musk made the brilliant statement

that if things keep going the way they are,

there will not be a Japan anymore.

There’s Elon Musk.

He’s such a genius he can do basic math.

If numbers go down, eventually you run out of numbers or you hit zero.

(upbeat music)

Sushi-do, there’s been in the news, we’ve talked about it many, many times

because they are the victims of the food terrorism.

There is a food terrorism story coming up soon.

But they’ve done something else that’s very interesting.

So Sushi-do isn’t just Sushi.

It’s not just, it’s kaiten Sushi conveyor belt Sushi.

You can order lots of other stuff.

You can order French fries, you can order deep fried chicken

or lots of stuff from Sushi-do.

Sushi-do will use, it’s used cooking oil

in conjunction with another company

to create sustainable jet fuel, which is pretty awesome.

There are 680 restaurants in Japan.

And from 2025 they’re going to take all the oil they use.

Maybe they’re just putting the system into place now.

All the oil they use, that’s gonna be about 900,000

liters annually, and use that to create 750,000 liters of jet fuel.

I of course don’t understand the science

or anything behind it, as I’m an English major.

So I could talk about, when I read the news story,

I could talk about the tone of the article.

and sort of the read between the lines and that kind of stuff.

The science far, far beyond me.

But it is cool to take something that’s

been used and make it into something else.

That is a very positive net for the world.

But now we’ve talked about Sushi terrorism,

we have to actually get to some Sushi terrorism.

Yoshinoya is a beef bowl place.

So basically beef bowl, it’s gudon, it’s bowl of rice

and they put some shredded meat on top of it.

That’s the short version.

It’s really, really good.

It’s great late night food, it’s great food for drunk people.

There was a viral video, you think people would have learned

after a whole bunch of people just gotten in trouble

for this stuff, of a man eating directly

from the ginger container with chopsticks.

So basically they have the bowl that it’s yours

and then on the table in front of you, there’s gonna be condiments.

And one of them is ginger, you open up a little container,

you take ginger out, you put it on your food,

you mix it up, you eat it, you’re happy.

This guy thought, ah, you know it’d be really funny

with all the news of people doing gross stuff

and getting in trouble for it, I will do a gross thing.

So September 29th, 2022, he did this.

I do have the video up, second, let’s see.

So it’s the man, he’s got the bowl on his face,

he’s eating it, he’s got his chopsticks up, he’s eating it like they do.

I would actually say in the Chinese movies, when they’re really hungry,

they’re just shoveled and I chewed into their mouth.

He’s not actually eating that much,

he’s just shoveling a few into his mouth,

but those chopsticks have been in his mouth

and then those chopsticks are going back

into the shared condiment ginger bowl in front of him.

That’s gross, I don’t want that man spit on my ginger.

No one else does either and again, so after all this, was it worth it?

Well, the viral video got really popular so

the police noticed so they were arrested.

Now this is technically not illegal,

but it’s being filed under interfering with store business,

which I guess is an obstruction of business charge.

So he’s probably not gonna get arrested

because it’s not illegal, like he’s been arrested,

but he’s probably not going to get prison time

or anything like that, it’s gonna be a find him some sort.

But Japan is taking this really seriously.

They take all this communal stuff is being ruined

by these viral videos and this communal nature of eating

is a big part of Japanese culture, so I think they’re really offended by it.

And that’s of course why it’s so viral on the Internet,

which is what these cloud chasers want.

I don’t think they realize though, if it gets popular enough is guaranteed,

you’re gonna get noticed and therefore

guaranteed you’re going to get arrested.

(upbeat music)

Last week on C. McBee podcast, the other podcast I do.

I talked about the congressional trials and TikTok

and the congressional trials with Google four years ago

and how they were similar and different

and what the actual point was.

They’re talking about banning TikTok in America.

There’s really no, in a country that claims

to have like freedom of choice and freedoms like that

where you can buy guns, it seems unlikely

to be able to actually ban an app.

I did say quite clearly ban it on government devices,

100% behind that because it’s not your device, it’s the government device.

If you work for a company and the company gives you a phone

and they say don’t put TikTok on it,

I am 100% on board with that and keep it ticked on.

Tick-tock on it and you get fired.

I agree.

But personally, if you say I can’t use this app

because it’s going to track my information and stuff,

well every app tracks my information, I

don’t see how Tick-tock having my information

as opposed to Google or Facebook

or any other social media website.

How is that different?

So I don’t see the benefit or the choice of actually banning TikTok.

I’m not a massive TikTok user.

I have an account and you can go to Chuck McBeath

Chess on TikTok and watch basically

it’s clips of this and some gaming clips.

But it seems counter to the nature of the American ideal

to ban an app without more proof than they

actually showed the congressional here.

So I don’t think that’s actually going to go through.

Japan has decided to ban TikTok on tick-tock

on government devices when those government devices

have confidential information on them, which I think is perfectly fair.

I think that’s actually a bit loose.

Because it’s actually saying if my company,

or if I work for the government and the government gives me

a phone and I don’t handle confidential information,

I’m actually allowed to use TikTok on my government phone.

I actually think that’s stupid.

I think you should just clear cut ban it

on government phones and you’re done.

And I actually think companies should do the same thing.

But personally, if you want to use TikTok,

I think if you understand the risks,

go ahead and use TikTok.

Currently, it is not on any government devices.

So I’m assuming they did a little inventory and check

and they said, okay, none of our government

employees have put TikTok on their phones.

We’re just gonna say don’t do it now.

Everyone’s on board.

The government doesn’t allow the use of

external services on their phones at all.

Which again, I think is a good idea.

I shouldn’t as a government employee be putting anything

for my personal entertainment, Tinder, Facebook, Instagram,

Snapchat, whatever you want.

I shouldn’t be putting any of those things on my government issued phone.

On your personal phone, honestly, none of my business,

none of the government’s business, do what you want.

It has not become a Japanese version

of the congressional trial because Japan’s

pretty reasonable about this kind of stuff.

(phone ringing)

So an idol got in trouble.

And I do enjoy idol news because it’s such a weird world.

She went to a baseball game and they have an order system

with a QR code where you scan the QR code

and then you go, you just choose what you want to buy

and then you go pick up and you go.

So I think you can already guess what happened.

She tweeted out a copy of the QR code and said,

please buy me chili shrimp under my name.

I eat a lot, so please order it so I can like pick it up.

And then I want to eat some fried rice and kanage.

Kanage is like deep fried chicken balls, not testicles, balls of chicken.

So of course, fans, we’re paying attention

to her tweets constantly, bought her a ton of food

that a whole bunch of other fans complains.

Like, this is abuse of your fandom.

This is, the fandom of idols is taken very seriously

and there’s a lot of rules and stuff.

You can’t have a boyfriend and stuff.

We’ve talked about that in the past.

You can’t, you have to like, a lot of them,

you have to maintain a certain weight.

There was an idol group that actually was complaining

about that recently that they weren’t allowed to eat the stuff.

It was unhealthy ’cause they had to maintain a weight

of like 40 kilos, despite the fact that girls were all really tall.

So it didn’t really make sense.

The management company has already made her apologize

for the trouble she caused.

I found this interesting because I stream on Twitch.

I don’t have a massive fandom on Twitch.

I’m actually streaming to Twitch right now.

So I record this podcast.

But if a girl did the same thing on Twitch,

there would be no comment because it’s almost expected.

But as soon as you have a management company behind you,

there’s a certain amount of decorum and rules that need to be put in place.

So you have to be careful of that.

I found that interesting because if she had just been independent

and she had been streaming or live streaming

that kind of thing and that was her career choice,

she would have been fine.

But because she has a management company

behind her, she has to follow certain rules.

She does something bad.

It makes the management company look bad.

This is the kind of thing.

There was the girl who was a pro gamer

and she started crapping on short men.

She got fired because essentially her

pro gaming career was linked to a company.

And as soon as she got sheety with,

keep thinking I have an earthquake,

but it’s actually just big trucks going by.

(clock ticking)

In Japan, there are things called advertising trucks.

And they’re basically just rolling billboards.

They’re trucks and then instead of actually carrying cargo,

they put a big sign on the back.

where the car is, the trailer and they light it up.

So it’s basically, you can see it.

Some of them will play music and stuff.

There’s sound laws you have to be careful of.

In Tokyo, you see a lot of these, probably more there.

I’ve seen a few around where I live and where I work.

But in Tokyo, you see a bunch of them.

And the rule is that if you want to have a rolling billboard,

one of these advertising trucks in your in Tokyo,

it has to be approved by the city.

So I can’t have like my only fans with my like,

butthole on a billboard rolling through the downtown Tokyo.

That has to be approved and they’ll be like, “Oh, here’s butthole’s gross.

We don’t want that on a billboard.”

And only fans isn’t like the appropriate thing

to advertising all that kind of stuff.

So that makes sense.

There’s a loophole though.

And they actually deem, sorry, I have to say before that,

they actually deem advertising host and host as clubs.

Kind of the same thing.

Kids shouldn’t be like being encouraged to go to host clubs.

It’s not, can really the best way, it’s not, it’s CD.

How about that?

And so you shouldn’t really be advertising CD stuff

on the streets around Tokyo where everyone can see it

because that’s not really, that’s not really cool.

But there is a loophole and the loophole is,

if your truck is not registered in Tokyo,

it doesn’t have to like follow these rules.

So I get my truck in Chiba and I register

there and I make it an advertising truck

and then I start advertising a post club in Tokyo

because it’s a Chiba truck, it doesn’t have to be registered.

So the government, the local government in Tokyo is like,

well that’s not cool because they’re still

doing the thing we don’t want them to do.

They’re advertising the stuff we don’t want them to advertise.

So what we need to do is close that loophole.

So now they’re currently talking to neighboring districts

and saying, and you make the same rules we make so it’s like cohesive.

And if everyone has the same rules,

then even if you have an advertising truck in Chiba,

you’re not going to be able to roll it into Tokyo

and advertise stuff we don’t want people to advertise.

That’s interesting.

I didn’t actually think that there would,

these are local laws in rules that I didn’t know about.

I’ve seen the advertising ones, usually it’s for,

I don’t actually know what it’s for.

It’s usually got like little anime pictures on it

but I think it’s actually a hostess club

and they’re trying to like soften what they’re doing.

It’s really hard to tell because they roll by

and I don’t pay attention that I’m like, “Huh, what was that?”

That’s how effective that advertising actually is.

(upbeat music)

A great way to get the Internet to sort of dunk on your shit

is to tell the Internet to not dunk on your shit.

That is actually a guide.

So if I said like, “Hey, please don’t say anything negative

about an engine news Japan.”

I would expect the next day to be at least one negative

comment about an engine news Japan somewhere on the Internet.

And then if that got popular,

he could actually again go viral but in a negative way for me.

Maybe I should try that.

Maybe that’s the problem is I keep like not pushing people

to say anything positive or negative.

And but if I said like, “Oh, please,

only say positive things about an engine news Japan.”

And then people would all say negative things.

It would go viral and then more people would come to the show.

I think I just found my way to get famous.

Which is pretty awesome.

The producer of the Common Rider movies.

Common Rider is one of these, it’s like Sailor Moon.

It’s a character and he is a regular person

and he transforms into a hero usually with some complicated toy

that you can sell to children.

The movies are essentially extensions of

the kids show so they’re not great movies.

They produce them probably two or three a year.

They’re not great.

I mean, I’m not shitting on them.

They’re four kids, kids enjoy them.

That’s great.

If you’re gonna talk about quality cinema or filmmaking,

these would not fall into the art category of that.

That’s not to say it’s a bad thing.

As long as it makes kids happy, that’s all you’re really looking for.

The thing is people grow up and they still love Common Rider.

So they keep talking about Common Rider and they still go to the movies.

But somehow they haven’t really stuck in their head

that because I’ve grown up, these movies should grow up with me

whereas the movies are actually servicing

a group of let’s say eight year olds

and the group of eight year olds stays the same every year.

It’s just new eight year old.

The producer of these movies, his son had a really good idea.

He said, “What I’m gonna do is I’ll go on the Internet.

I’ll tweet.”

Yeah, please refrain from posting negative comments

on social media where an unspecified number of people can see them.

So what he’s saying is don’t tweet out negative stuff

about the new movie because then people who haven’t seen.

the movie might think it’s not a good movie and then I’ll go to the movie.

So of course the immediate storm that followed

was people saying, “You can’t tell me what to do.”

A lot of these people actually weren’t shitting on the movie.

They were just shitting on the comment.

They’re like, if you basically what you’re saying is

only say positive things about this film, that’s not really fair.

You can’t tell people to not do that.

If it’s not a good film, people should know it’s not a good film.

So maybe you should focus more on making quality films.

But this isn’t even like the director

or someone involved in the movie in any real way.

This is the producer of these films, his son.

So I’m assuming that his whole lifestyle is actually

built on the fact that these franchises are successful.

He wants people to only say good things

so that his dad can make more money so that he can have more money

sent to him or whatever that relationship is.

But if you want to make stuff and put it on the Internet,

an important piece of information to keep in mind is

not tell people to not do things on the Internet

because the Internet is inherently contrary.

They will naturally do the thing.

You tell them not to do.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(upbeat music).

(upbeat music)

Student, we talked about hair a lot.

But it’s about students because it’s about school rules and hair and stuff.

And it’s weird how much play these stories get

because it just keeps happening again and again and again.

That’s kind of the issue.

When there’s sort of one resolution,

like if you are not born with naturally black hair

in Japan and the school rules you have black hair,

should those students be made to dye their hair?

It’s sort of a spirit of the law versus the

intent of the law, the letter of the law.

I’ve forgotten my idioms now.

But always, it keeps coming up because there’s always a new way

to interpret rules that surprises me.

And it’s because again, one of the problems with a lot of Japanese rules,

this is not necessarily laws.

Japanese rules is that they are purposely vague.

So there was a graduation, high school graduation was very recently.

And a student was told he couldn’t sit with his friends because of his hair.

He was made to wait on the second floor by himself.

And when they called his name, they said,

don’t come downstairs and respond to your name being called.

It’s actually really disappointing.

So he left halfway through the event.

So he’s like, well, like if I can’t participate

in the graduation, if I can’t actually do the whole thing,

that I’m supposed to do while I’m here, why stay here?

So he left.

Now what was so egregious about his hair?

He actually went to a salon the previous

day to make sure his hair was sort of tidy.

Now the school rule was that no further than your ears,

hygienic and appropriate for high school.

So no further than your ears, that’s very specific.

So it has to be shaved sort of above your ears,

which I assume would include sort of the napier neck

has to be clean and all that stuff.

We actually saw that, I think it was just last week,

with the elite high school where your bangs had to be a certain length.

They couldn’t touch your eyebrows, but naturally.

So if I push my hair down, I don’t have

enough hair to actually demonstrate with.

If I push my hair down and it touches my eyebrows, that’s too long.

Where the teachers were abusing that by pulling hair forward.

And then at that school, if your hair

was inappropriate, you could be expelled.

Hygienic, so if he washes his hair, that’s taken care of.

So it’s the appropriate leaves it open because what does that mean?

What is appropriate hair?

And he went to a salon the day before to

get his everything sort of taken care of,

so it would be appropriate.

This kid, he’s half Japanese, and his father is African-American.

So he has not an Afro per se, but his hair grows out.

And so what he thought, ah, what I’ll do is I’ll go to a salon,

I’ll take the time, and I’ll get cornrows so that it’s all tight and neat,

and therefore follows the rules, hygienic, and appropriate for school.

The teachers, of course, being Japanese

teachers, they don’t see cornrows very often.

So they’re like, well, that’s not normal,

that’s not usual, therefore that’s not appropriate for high school.

So you have to go be excluded from your graduation ceremony.

You have to go stand up in a room by yourself

and just stay there for the entirety of this ceremony.

This, like many of the rules, is like,

the kid was literally trying to follow the rules.

Their opinion differed from his, ’cause

he’s like, well, I want my hair to be neat.

I don’t wanna shave it.

He went to his father, his father looked up some cornrows.

He’s like, this is what sort of black people

do to keep their hair tight to their head

without cutting their hair.

So he did that, which is incredibly appropriate thing to do.

He actually went to his dad, he’s like that.

I wanna do this.

Went to a salon, paid probably extra.

I know cornrows take forever.

So paid extra, took all that time, and

then someone’s like, no, I don’t like it,

’cause I haven’t seen it before, therefore it’s not appropriate.

This is Cosbyter of Bruhaha.

All these rules coming to the forefront

and being exposed in his way are causing

Bruhaha’s, which is a good thing, because really we have to examine

is the rule appropriate, and what does appropriate mean?

If you can’t keep vague rules and expect people to,

attempt to follow the rule, get in trouble

for it, and then there’d be no backlash.

If you want it to be appropriate, you

have to explain what appropriate it is.

Now, I’m betting they’re gonna say anything

that isn’t just a standard Japanese haircut

with standard Japanese hair is not appropriate,

but then you run into the problem of,

there’s just too many mixed kids now.

They don’t have naturally black hair,

and they don’t have naturally straight hair

that falls on their shoulders or whatever, like Japanese kids do.

Principal had to do a press conference after that.

And he said, it’s not like the student

couldn’t attend because he had to go elsewhere,

which is almost a nonsensical statement.

He couldn’t attend because the teachers made him sit in another room.

So the teachers enforced this rule, and

it is very frustrating because Japan is now

kicking and screaming, being forced into modernity.

It’s being pulled into a modern culture that is now mixed,

and it means the rules that were just accepted and given,

’cause if everyone has the same type of hair,

these hair rules were very easy to interpret,

appropriate, but my hair doesn’t do anything,

so basically if I just show up and it’s

been cut and washed, it’s appropriate.

Now you got kids who have different hair, those rules do they apply?

Because now appropriateness is called into question.

I think we’re gonna see a bunch of

this, and then it’s gonna become a case of,

because in the previous story,

it was civil rights, human rights is what they were talking about,

and you might be like, well, human rights and haircuts,

I mean, they seem kind of far away, but no, it’s like basic dignity,

if you’re being forced to go to an educational institution

because you have to go to school.

And I don’t look like everyone else is that appropriate and acceptable?

Well, I’m sorry, in a culture where we’re supposed

to be accepting of other people’s differences, which Japan does claim to be.

They really do struggle with that,

because the reality and the claims are often different.

This is gonna happen again, and it’s gonna keep coming up,

and the bit I’m enjoying most is it’s every single time

it comes up, it’s surprising me in a way.

The last week was teachers abusing the rules.

This week was just a kid with hair they’d not really dealt with before,

which goes all the way back to that

kid in Osaka who had naturally brown hair,

who was forced to dye her hair and then sued the school board.

There was one girl who had her hair Photoshopped black in the yearbook.

We’re gonna have to start maybe accepting.

Kids aren’t the same, especially as Japan’s,

honestly, as the population shrinks,

you’re gonna get more mixed kids,

’cause immigration’s going to make up the difference.

And this is the bit that the Japanese government isn’t willing to accept.

Immigrants are going to come to Japan

and fill the rules that aren’t being filled by Japanese people.

They’re going to marry Japanese people,

you’re gonna have more and more mixed kids,

which means these rules.

Now the rule itself becomes inappropriate.

(clock ticking)

I learned something.

So the Bar Association brought a case to change discrimination rules about,

prisoners being held detainees.

Up until now, so this hasn’t gone through yet,

so the rule is still technically in place,

but it’s being challenged by the Bar Association.

If you were being detained by police, so I’m being detained by police.

Before a trial, I couldn’t go buy anything.

I had basically, I could get, maybe close,

brought to me from my home, from my family,

and I could wear suit or something appropriate to a trial.

Women, on the other hand, could get skin lotion before a trial.

So basically, if you are a female being

detained, you could spend your own money

and have skin products brought to you before your trial,

so you could look best for your trial.

But that rule was not in place for men.

So this is an interesting, again, social

bias that men don’t need skincare products.

I have to moisturize every day or my skin falls off.

I am growing beard currently.

If you watch the video, you can see it’s

got some very distinguished gray in it now.

That’s a bigger patch than it was three years ago.

Last time I actually grew a beard.

So I’m interested to see how it ends up looking.

Men don’t need that, so they don’t get it.

Now, the Bar Association says this is discrimination.

Now, this came to light because a trans woman

was being detained and wanted skin toner

and moisturizer before the trial, which as

a woman, you’re supposed to be able to get.

But Japan is still really struggling with

the relationship of trans people to society.

So is it a man?

Is it a woman?

Legally, I would bet this trans woman,

and actually I don’t know, they don’t say.

But someone is like, well, that’s not a woman,

that’s a man, therefore they don’t get skin care products.

But legally a woman, therefore, should get skin care products.

But it actually brings up this other thing where, well, what if I,

to talk about beef chest of Ninja New Japan and being detained?

Why don’t I get skin care products?

So either the rule is going to be interesting

because I don’t know what the Bar Association is arguing for.

Are they arguing for everyone should be able

to get skin products before their trial?

Or nobody should get skin products before their trial?

It’s a very interesting conundrum.

It also comes into play like there is a weird financial bias.

So since I have to use my own money,

let’s say I am now allowed to buy skin

products as a man who’s being detained.

So I can buy better skin products and make myself look good.

Whereas a person who’s poor, can’t buy

skin products and they don’t look as good.

And as much as people would like to deny it,

appearance is very important in sort of the impression you give.

And it’s just, it has an impact on society.

The pretty privilege is a proven fact that the more attractive you are,

the easier your life is overall.

You get the sort of like more benefits.

You get treated better.

You get more promotions.

Being attractive has benefits.

I mean, this is why my life has just been so easy

on the whole time because people just look at me.

They see sunshine and they just want more sunshine in their life.

So I get everything I want.

But the argument could be made that if some people get skin products

and other people don’t, that’s an unfair bias when they go to trial.

So either they should argue that skincare

products are provided by the government,

which I don’t think that is a valuable use of taxpayer money.

Or you can buy skincare products,

but it has to be like a set range that everyone can afford,

which the rich people would complain about.

Donald Trump recently being indicted would be interesting

because if he couldn’t buy his clear like spray tan skin toner

stuff to make him like his oranges he is,

like when he comes out and he’s really pale like I am,

would that give him more negative or more

positive impression is actually the side.

But according to the rule, if he was being detained in Japan

because he’s been indicted, he’s not being detained.

You know what I mean?

He wouldn’t be able to get the skin thing

that he uses to make himself look orange.

So he would come out of that prison less orange than when he went in.

Which is a very interesting concept.

It’s a very interesting idea of what he would end up looking like

and would that have a positive or negative impact on his trial?

Because that’s kind of what they’re actually arguing for

is that you can’t have some people

get stuff and other people don’t get stuff.

Are they gonna make it available to everyone?

I’m actually interested to see how this plays out.

And it’s also very interesting that it’s a

trans woman that set this all in motion.

(upbeat music)

A US report on Japan’s human rights,

specifically talking about Japanese textbooks.

Now Japanese school boards choose textbooks.

This is something that happens in most countries with school curriculums.

They tend to choose textbooks that sort of ignore

or gloss over Japan’s militaristic history.

And this has been a complaint from surrounding countries.

Certainly the ones sort of, you would say,

victims to Japanese imperialism, Korea, China.

They always say like your history books are inaccurate.

They don’t represent what actually happened to people

who were under Japanese imperial rule, that kind of stuff.

And I think that’s pretty legitimate.

I think that history books should be sort of as accurate as possible.

It’s very hard to produce a book.

Video I saw the other day, I think it was on TikTok or something.

And it was basically young people didn’t recognize the swastika.

Because they’d never learned about it in school.

They didn’t know about World War II.

They didn’t know about the Nazi party.

They certainly didn’t know about Japan’s role in World War II.

And maybe this some of the things it did as a member of the exes powers.

That’s, this story comes up every year.

I suddenly this year found it very interesting

because if I remember correctly, America

maybe shouldn’t be calling out countries

for their book policies.

Because if I remember correctly,

there are certain elements within the American educational system

that are vying to band books.

And there have been several pictures posted online

of empty shelves in school libraries.

And there was another ironic story that because it can’t have sex in it.

It can’t have this in it, can’t have that in it.

So someone used those rules to get the Bible banned,

which of course this comes from the sort of Bible positive groups

people in power or legislating these rules.

Tom, a longtime listener, super fan sent in this story to me.

If you wanna send in this story, you can

send it to Chuck Me Beef Chest at tmail.com.

You can go to speakpipe.com/chunkpeakbeefchest.

You could just go on Twitter and send me a direct message on Twitter.

I may not get it right away.

I only check Twitter once or twice a week.

I don’t really engage with social media.

It’s one of the reasons why this is such a small community

is because I don’t spread it properly.

So maybe this is my call to action moment,

which is something I don’t normally do.

If you enjoyed Ninja News Japan, you know someone who enjoys the news,

you know someone who’s interested in Japan.

Please, I recommend Ninja News Japan.

You can get it on Spotify.

You can get it on your podcast catcher.

You can get it on YouTube.

It’s everywhere.

Search for Ninja News Japan.

It’ll probably come up pretty quick somewhere somehow.

I’d appreciate it.

I don’t wanna spend my time going like, like, and subscribe, actually.

That’s a joke with me and my friends.

But at the same time, I do want the podcast to grow.

So if you have someone you know who would be interested

and please give him a recommendation and I’m gonna stop that

’cause I already feel like I’ve talked too long about it.

But, Tom, appreciate the effort.

Sent me this.

It’s tax heaven 3000.

And it’s a visual novel of filling in your US taxes.

So if you live in Japan, you still have to fill in your taxes back home.

And taxes are difficult.

They’re complicated.

And you’re a nerd living in Japan.

So you’re obviously not engaging with legal documents properly

because it doesn’t hold your attention.

This, by creating it and putting it in visual novel form,

will absolutely hold your attention because

you have to get through all the steps

to create the best relationship with your wife.

The interesting thing, there’s multiple endings.

So is it like if you try to lie in your taxes, she doesn’t like you anymore

or if you don’t declare something properly, your relationship falls apart.

And if you do everything right and claim your taxes

and you have to pay money back, she’s disappointed.

But if you do everything right and you get a refund, she loves you more.

That’s the best ending.

I don’t know.

The actual issue with this is that tax

heaven 3000 has been removed from steam.

I did enjoy while I was looking into the game itself.

The quote was, “Let’s pay federal taxes

while having a romance with my wife.”

The interesting thing, I think this is a poor translation

because a romance with your wife might actually be more appropriate,

but I haven’t played the game.

So maybe I am having a romance with your wife as in someone else.

I’m the person using my taxation sexuality

to try to get your wife away from you

and into my bed, creating a new, exciting situation.

But maybe I fail, maybe that’s one of the endings.

The reason it was removed from steam

is because of course it has to ask to fill

in your taxes, very personal information.

The phrase is actually in the game, I want to know more about you,

such as your social security number.

And then of course you have to put your social security number

into the game, it’ll fill out the form for you,

which makes sense, but also can you trust this company

to keep your information private as a connection?

If you play through steam, it’s connected to the Internet.

Now because it was removed from steam,

the creator of the game said you can go to the website

and download it directly to your computer,

which would technically be safer, right?

Because you could actually let’s disconnect from the Internet

I’ll fill in, I’ll play this visual novel, it’ll fill in my taxes.

And then I can send in my taxes separately.

That seems fair, but so it seems like I

don’t want to make any statements of a fact.

It seems like the creator of this game

is not trying to gather your information

because he’s saying download the game to your PC and then play it.

Separate from the Internet is fine, it will still work.

But a lot of people who are like,

as soon as you ask for someone’s social security number,

we can’t really put a lot of faith in you

and trust you that this is all above work,

which I think is fair.

But I would say be safe.

Don’t use a visual novel to file your taxes.

I have seen my future.

So as you all know, I’ve stated many times, I’m a 50 year old man.

And we went through a sequence of weeks

where 50 year old men were doing just the absolute creepiest stuff.

There was one 50 year old dude in some reason,

this is one sticks to my head more than anything else.

And he snuck up on a girl who is just standing around looking

at books or something in a mall and just

started licking her shoes unbinoised to her.

That one, I think, just the level of

creepiness there is why it sticks out my mouth.

But I think I’ve seen my future because a man who is 54 years

old, so only like three, four years in my future,

he was arrested for repeatedly challenging

his neighbor to a one-on-one fight.

And that’s it.

I can totally see myself ending up in a situation where I

spend my free time challenging people to one-on-one fights.

So what happened is a neighbor had warned the man about the noise

his car makes back in December.

And the man– I’m assuming that the car was really loud.

And it was like one of these lights.

He’s tuned it up to make more noise.

The man did not take well to that.

He started harassing his neighbor.

The police actually went and warned him in March and said,

look, you’re doing too much.

You’re causing trouble and distress, and you’re going to get in trouble.

So they just warned him, said, like, you

got to ease off this thing, just give up.

That, of course, incensed the man and made it even worse.

Between March 12 and 13, he went to the

house 13 times, rang the bell multiple times.

So like, each time he arrived, he didn’t just ring it.

He rang it multiple multiple times.

And he left three notes in the mailbox.

Let’s fight one-on-one.

So at least he had a certain amount of

old-style, dueling respects for his neighbor.

He’s like, you got this problem?

Let’s solve it.

Mano, a mano.

The interesting thing is what would have been the resolution.

So like, we go out.

He challenges me to a fight.

I complain that his car is too noisy.

He challenges me to a fight.

I go out and I fight him, and I beat him.

Does he now have to take apart his car and make it quiet?

Or there had to be some sort of resolution.

I assume if he wins, he gets to make as much noises as he

want and gets to call me a woozy or something.

But I don’t think they ever think about the other flip side.

If I win, what do I get other than calling the police

and putting a restraining order on him for

challenging me to fights multiple times?

But I was like, if I win the fight,

this would have to be established before the fight.

If I win the fight, you have to make your car

as silent as possible, which would be actually

the most humiliating end of this situation for a man like that.

But I’m wondering, if yeah, at some point when you hit in your 50s,

there’s a flip switch in your head that flips that just sets you off.

So you either end up being super creepy or super aggressive.

And I’m really, really looking forward to see what happens to me.

If an Indian is Japan as a podcast, just suddenly goes dark one day.

You can assume the reason is because I am probably being detained

and demanding skincare products.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(upbeat music).

(upbeat music)

• Last couple weeks we have talked about

how the governor of ICHI is very upset

that people went to Ghibli Park and took pictures of themselves

grabbing the boobs of the statues of characters from Ghibli movies.

And then put themself in a position

where it looked like they were taking up skirt photos of the statues.

There was some speculation about what

those like what was actually under there,

which is maybe not where we should be going to this story.

And he was furious.

He was in a position where he’s like, I

consider this some kind of criminal act,

even though it’s probably not.

It’s not vandalism.

And he was like, I’m gonna get these guys.

Now, a mutual acquaintance of the dudes who did the acts,

did the deeds, contacted the ICHI government.

It was like, hypothetically.

If I knew some guys who went to the park

and they maybe touched some ceramic boobies

and took some ceramic up skirt photos, maybe they feel bad about it.

So anyway, we could hypothetically make this right.

What he was doing, those guys were too scared to call on their own

’cause they thought they were gonna get arrested.

So this guy calls on their behalf.

Basically then they wrote apology letters.

And the ICHI governor read those apology letters on TV.

Now then the governor said, they seem sincere in their apologies.

I, we consider the matter concluded.

So what he wanted was an apology that he could stand up and say,

like he kind of got justice and he did the thing he was gonna do

and he was gonna bring those guys to the forefront.

And he did,

I’m always a little suspicious of, oh, they really feel regret.

Because if they hadn’t been caught, would they feel regret?

So if they had come forward before the governor of ICHI,

he’d said like, I’m coming after you,

would they be feeling regret at that time?

That’s actually kind of where I am.

‘Cause it seems to me like people do crimes

or do bad things and they don’t feel any regret and then they get caught

and then they feel regret is that regret at the thing you did

or is it really just regret that you got caught and you’re in trouble

and now you don’t wanna be in trouble anymore.

I think we know the reality, which is

why I often feel like prompted apologies,

don’t mean anything.

This goes into the same section as politicians retracting statements.

But I said something, it was horrendous, it was racist, it was awful.

I’m gonna retract that statement, but in my head I’m like,

that doesn’t mean you changed the way you think.

The way you think and feel is exactly the same.

You’re just unhappy that you got in trouble.

So if you’re unhappy you got in trouble, you’re retracting your statement.

That doesn’t seem like a valid course of action to me.

So it’s almost like, what I’m saying is if you’re gonna go to Ghibli Park

and grab the boobies of a character,

you should commit to that and actually grab

the boobies of the character and be like,

I’m a ceramic booby-grabber.

I don’t know if the statues were made of ceramic, I just assumed.

I would actually not have respect for that, but I’d be like,

well at least you’ve chosen a position you live by it.

Whereas basically, oh, I got caught.

I’m gonna get in trouble.

So now I feel bad.

I don’t see that as a legitimate position.

(upbeat music)

There are a record number of foreign residents in Japan.

In 2022, there were 3 million 75,213 foreign residents

that is 11.4% more than previous years.

Just great.

It means people are coming to live in Japan

and contribute to society in a very positive way.

I think it’s there is some Japanese people might not see it that way.

They see it more as a cultural invasion maybe.

I don’t know.

Most of these foreign residents come from

China, then Vietnam and then South Korea.

Most of them are coming here from manufacturing jobs

or working with companies and whatnot,

exporting and importing stuff like that.

Great.

They have non-refugees.

So people who have come from a situation,

they’re not refugees, but they’ve been allowed to stay.

That number went up from 128 to 202.

I was interested in these statistics.

Actual refugees went from 1,180 to 1,760.

Now that is, I’ve always thought the number of refugees

that Japan takes on is really, really small.

Japan is maybe not a first, first world country like this.

I have to wait to see what Dave does.

He might want to sit on me.

He might want to get on the bed.

I think he’s going for bed.

Bed’s more comfortable.

He’s like Dave Settle.

Well, look at that butt.

Oh yeah.

Torken.

He’s gonna have to like wreck my bed.

Then he’s gonna get in his bed and go to sleep.

Or he’s just gonna like flat out take his much space on the bed as possible.

Let’s get out of the way.

Enjoy the show.

(humming)

Gotta get your face in there.

I don’t put a lot effort into making my bed, but I do make my bed.

Dave, when he gets on, cannot accept that.

He has to like pull every, oh, we stretched out like that.

That was long legs.

Sexy.

He’s not gonna be in camera when I turn my chair around.

I’m just too bad.

(humming)

Oh, that’s okay.

(laughing)

I’m gonna turn my chair around, I’m just too bad.

Oh, that’s okay.

(humming)

(humming)

It’s alright, ’cause when I turn my chair on,

you can’t see Dave, it just looks like I didn’t make my bed.

(humming).

Oh, we can just continue the story from where we left off.

Dave, man, just… He’s gotta mess up my bed and his bed.

And then people have come on the stream and actually said,

like, you don’t make your bed.

I make my bed.

Dave unmakes my bed.

There’s a difference.

You just staring at me?

You just, you don’t know what to do?

(laughing)

If I bring him over here, he’s gonna be in, he doesn’t sit down or anything.

He always stands on me.

Getting your bed.

I’m not continuing the show until he settles down.

This happens like every time.

The number of refugees in Japan.

(laughing)

It’s weird to transition from watching the dog get settled too.

How many refugees are in Japan?

The number of refugees in Japan went from

1,188 to 1,760, which is not many refugees.

Japan is a first world country.

It is a fairly rich nation.

I know it’s been in a recession for like 30 years.

And it’s not the richest country in the world.

It’s like, I think I actually dropped to fourth.

But it could take on a lot more refugees.

And I think Japan is a country what they

wanna do is actually send stuff overseas.

So you stay in your country and will help you.

Because they are nice people.

I mean, one of the benefits of Japan is a country.

They are very kind and generous.

But they don’t really want the foreigners to come here

where it actually might be safer.

There is still a lot of tension about how many foreigners live in Japan.

And the fact that it’s gone up 11.4% from last year, or 2021 to 2022,

is a point and issue for some Japanese people.

It is the highest number of refugees since the program was begun in 1982.

So I guess that’s an improvement.

I would like to see, depending on step forward and take on more refugees.

But I think it would just be, it would be

beneficial to the country just to have more,

a more mixed culture.

(clock ticking)

Since we’re talking about numbers, sort

of talking about crime on a regular basis,

the number of Yakusa have fallen below 10,000 in 2022.

This is just sort of like general crime

stats for the year, for last year, for 2022.

There were nine shootings and four deaths in Japan in the entire year.

So I’m betting in the time it took me to say that

there were more than nine shootings in

America and more than four deaths from guns.

In the entire year.

So when they talk about, when they have

one, have the argument about gun control

and gun control doesn’t work,

and the good guys would go on some bad guys would go on some.

There is the issue in America that they already have so many guns in play.

But, Japan is an example of tight gun control.

Nine shootings in total for the entire year and four deaths from shootings.

One of those deaths being the former prime minister,

who the guy who had a homemade shotgun ran up behind him and shot him.

It’s actually surprising that that

shotgun worked if I’m being really honest.

321 handguns were confiscated, that’s 26 more than 2021.

People who are linked to the Yakusa, not necessarily Yakusa themselves,

22,400, that’s 1700 down.

So the number of Yakusa are down,

therefore the number of people linked to the Yakusa are down,

which means organized crime is down overall.

There were 2,141 drug investigations,

that doesn’t actually mean all those people were guilty

or they found drugs every time.

There were 1,424 cases of fraud investigated,

and 1,142 cases of bodily injury,

which I would assume just people beating each other up, investigated.

There were 9,548 foreigners investigated, which is down 1,129.

When they have a crime in Japan, it involves a foreign person.

The country they come from, or the fact that it’s a foreigner,

is put front and center.

It’s given Japanese people a false impression

that foreigners commit more crime proportionally than anyone else,

whereas they are 2% of the population overall,

and they commit proportionately less crime overall in Japan.

But it’s sort of the same bias that maybe I have about America.

So the number of American shootings and how dangerous America is,

I have a strong bias from that, because when I watch the news,

it’s school shooting, school shootings,

downtown shooting, shooting shooting shooting.

In my head, America, the country is no longer a safe place,

where I’m sure the reality is very different,

but that’s actually shown in one of the sort of media biases

you have to be aware of when you’re watching

the news and all this kind of stuff.

There is an elite boys high school, and so the high schools have regulations

about how you can have your hair done, all schools do in Japan.

There are only tales and above the shoulders and stuff like that.

This boys high school only has a single hairstyle you can have,

but it has to have the sort of the nape of your neck is trimmed,

it has to be above the ears, and then if you pull your bangs down naturally,

it can’t touch your eyebrows.

Now there have been claims of human rights violations

based off this hairstyle, not the hairstyle itself,

but the inspections that the teachers do.

Because once you put a rule in place,

the inspections to make sure those rules were being followed.

The rule, the government has decided, it’s not unconstitutional.

So schools can have rules about haircuts because you apply to schools,

so you know those rules before you go in,

so it’s not unconstitutional to have a rule about dress code.

But the students are claiming it’s a black school rule.

So a black rule in Japan is a rule that’s

violating some sort of right that you have.

Now they’ve looked at Article 13 of the Constitution,

the guarantee of individual rights,

so they’re saying that the rule doesn’t violate Article 13.

The monthly hair inspections though,

they, if you fail that inspection, can result in expulsion.

They’re saying that’s going too far,

and then some of the teachers use this

rule to intimidate or bully the students.

So basically saying, “I can make it seem like your hair is out of order,

and therefore I can have you expelled.”

So they’re using that holding that over, because it’s so easy to say like,

“This day the hair touched his eyebrow,

or this day that the hair was too long on the side of his head.”

So he can be expelled for that.

So they’re using that rule to bully the students.

Teachers have actually gone and cut hair of students during inspections,

so they’ll grab the hair and then cut it.

And then some have pulled the hair forward on their heads

so that it forcibly touches the eyebrow,

so that they would fail the inspection.

So basically that is the violation of human rights.

But they shouldn’t be grabbing kids, they shouldn’t be cutting their hair,

they shouldn’t be forcing them into a situation where they might be expelled

from the school that they’ve applied to.

And this is now being reviewed by lawyers.

And the school has not responded, which is I think very suspicious,

because that would imply to me the school knew this was going on.

They knew what was happening, and they weren’t doing anything about it.

They were allowing the teachers to bully the schools,

which probably is a violation of, I

don’t know if I would call it human rights,

but you do have the right to bottle the autonomy.

You have the right to not be touched and have your hair cut forcibly.

And certainly you should not have a school rule used to bully children.

[Bell ringing]

I really enjoy this, I don’t know why,

it’s not a particularly exciting story.

An Osaka employee got a 10% salary cut for six months,

and has been told to return 1.44 million yen for smoking on the clock.

And I think it’s as a non-smoker,

I was always kind of like my friends or my co-workers who were smokers.

They could go out during their shift in smoke.

So in my company, we have an open office.

And the smokers used to, I don’t know if anyone in the office really smokes,

certainly not on the clock if they do, they probably smoke on their breaks.

We had this guy who was in another section,

and he would go out every hour and take a

smoke break, it would be about 10 minutes.

So in a six hour period, he would take almost an hour off,

standing outside in the balcony, smoking.

Now I, as a non-smoker, wasn’t able to do that.

And I sometimes wanted to take a break.

And so one time I went out and I just stood on the balcony,

and he said to me, he literally looked at me and goes, “What are you doing?”

I’m like, “Well, I’m just taking a 10 minute break.”

So you don’t get breaks.

Because at that time, I had a compressed shift.

So it was like a six hour shift.

So in that shift time, there were no breaks.

But he was on the same contract type.

So he actually shouldn’t have been taking breaks either.

So somehow, standing on the balcony, smoking was acceptable.

But standing on the balcony doing nothing

for the same amount of time wasn’t .

And he was like the HR guy.

So he actually was like the guy who tried to enforce the rules.

So the next day, he went out and he took one of his smoke breaks.

And I grabbed his sandwich and I stood on the balcony.

He goes, “What are you doing?”

Like really aggressively.

And I looked at him and I said, “I’m smoking.”

And I just started eating my sandwich.

And we stared at each other for a really long time.

And he knew that there wasn’t really anything to do about it.

Because either he had to bring me in an officially complaint

that I was taking 10 minutes I shouldn’t take.

But then I was doing it on the exact same 10 minutes he was taking.

Or you would have to stop smoking.

That was a point of annoyance for me.

He was a nice guy otherwise.

I think he wanted his smoke time to be private time.

And I think he wanted to get his hour of paid smoking time every day.

But this guy in the Osaka company, I don’t know how they figured this.

They must have extrapolated.

There’s no way they kept track of this.

They say he smoked 4,512 times over 14.5 years.

And then I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do the math on that.”

Using the 10 minute time period to figure out how much time he spent smoking

on the clock.

They already did it.

They said he smoked for 355 hours and 19 minutes while on duty.

So I’m wondering if they went and got like CCTV or something.

They figured out when he left his desk

and then just calculated all that time.

I wonder how many days that is.

I’m going to figure that out right now.

235 divided by 24 is 13 days.

So basically one day a year he was smoking and getting paid for it.

Like one 24 hour period, one full day smoking on the clock.

So what was happening?

How this actually came to be an issue?

Is that he and a coworker were taking 10 minute smoke bait breaks regularly.

They got an anonymous tip.

And so you know what they were doing was like I was annoyed that my coworker

was smoking and getting an hour off every day where I wasn’t.

And my coworker was smart enough to when I started you know, challenging him

on it be like,

“I don’t want to ruin my smoke time so

I’m actually not going to make an issue.

I’m just going to let Peter stand on the balcony and eat a sandwich.”

So I didn’t give an anonymous tip to his boss.

Whereas these guys probably were dicks about it.

We’re taking time off.

You can’t take time off because you don’t smoke.

His supervisor gave them a warning.

Like you got to stop smoking on the clock.

But then they ignored that and still smoked.

And I bet that’s why they got in trouble.

I bet their supervisor was like, “I tried

to tell you you’re going to get in trouble.”

This is a great piece of Ninja News Japan advice for anyone who’s got a job

anywhere in the world.

Has nothing to do with Japan.

But if you’re messing around on the clock

and someone else challenges you on it,

you got to make that person happy somehow

so that they don’t get you in trouble.

If your supervisor comes and warns you that you got to stop,

you should actually stop because the supervisor isn’t warning you because

they care about you.

They’re warning you because they’re going to end up getting in trouble or

being responsible if you keep doing it.

So they’re not doing you a favor.

They’re just covering their own ass.

If they’re covering their own ass, you actually want to help them do that.

So your supervisor likes you so you don’t get in trouble.

It has nothing to do with right and wrong.

It has everything to do with do people like you and what you do.

I didn’t care that my coworker smoked.

I just was like, he’s taking six, ten minute breaks a day.

I want one or two and he was like after

realizing what was happening was like,

I’m actually okay with either taking 20 minutes if I’m getting an hour.

I’m not going to complain about that and he immediately stopped complaining.

So there was no issue going forward.

If you’re in a similar situation, you got to take a minute and think,

am I screwing around on the clock but do I keep the people around me happy?

That’s maybe the most important element that people sort of forget.

Talk about not making people happy.

A guy in the city I work in, Nagoya, 50 year old dude, so same ages me.

So this is like really resonated with like, would I do this?

Because this guy’s got a very similar sort of life situation.

Although he lives in a dormitory, so I don’t know what that’s like.

He was arrested because he was caught dumping 30 plastic bottles of urine

so the garbage can at work.

So he wasn’t even pouring them in the toilet.

He was just taking a full bottle, like a Coke bottle.

A pet bottle is like those plastic bottles that Coke comes in.

And just hucking them in the garbage.

Now, why did he have that?

Because he was filling them up at home.

He was filling them up at home because he said it was too troublesome.

His home again is a dormitory.

And so it has a shared bathroom.

It was a hassle to go to the shared bathroom,

so I’m betting it was down the hallway.

But that meant he was collecting these 30 plastic bottles of pee.

And then decided it was easier to carry

them to work and dispose of them there

than to carry them, I assume, again down the hallway to the toilet

and throw them in the toilet or just dispose of them around his house.

Maybe he didn’t want them around his house

like he would get in trouble for that.

So I bet the trash can that he was throwing them in was a public trash can.

The 30 bottles, the website I got this information from,

Woodwave, if you use the smaller 350-millimeter bottles,

was 13.6 kilograms of urine, so 30 pounds of pee that he put those bottles

I assume into a backpack or a bag or something,

and then lugged that to the office to

dispose of them, and it was ridiculous.

When he was arrested, he said, “There is no mistake that I threw away

plastic bottles filled with my own urine.”

And that’s when he revealed his motivation was it was too much of a hassle,

it was too troublesome, to go to the shared bathroom in my dormitory.

These are, it’s a violation of Japan’s waste disposal law.

You can’t just take tons of pee and poo and just throw them wherever you

want in this country.

Which is a good thing. That’s a law I support.

And that actually weirdly relates to our previous story,

because taking a ton of pee and throwing it away in public isn’t going to

keep the people around you happy.

And that’s how you end up causing trouble for yourself and getting arrested.

So I guess the solution is don’t do that.

[Music]

Chat asked why didn’t he throw them

away at a con beanie or a public trash can?

No, I, okay.

N-T-B-T show. That’s excellent name.

It’s nittipit show. I don’t know how to, I’m going to have to come up with a

pronunciation.

I would end up just saying N-T-B or N-T.

It sounds like he was using a public, but I mean,

if he went to the con beanie or train station waste baskets,

I bet you’re getting just as much if not more?

I’m not sure. I assume that if you threw it out at the convenience store,

you would get in just as much trouble.

This guy didn’t seem like a deep thinker. How about that? He, sorry.

He was, I bet going to a secondary location,

so he’s going from home to work to home.

I bet in his mind going, because it’s too troublesome to go to the toilet.

It’s too troublesome to do anything.

I bet in his mind anything beyond the basic minimum,

I have to go from A to B is too much.

This is all extrapolation just from reading that one little article.

But I bet his idea of doing anything extra is too much work, is the problem.

So having a minor deviation from his way to work to a different place

where he could anonymously throw away the urine bottles,

I bet in his mind that was too much.

I don’t know, because I don’t have any more information

information and the stuff I’ve already given.

But I’m betting that’s the case.

So I’ve been following the Gassy story and if I’m being really honest I’m

losing interest in it.

I’m losing interest in it because he’s not doing anything.

There has been an interesting development.

So Gassy said, as I said last week, I would follow up if something happened.

It kind of happened.

Gassy is not, he’s losing my attention.

Let’s put it that way.

Gassy said he would come back to Japan and apologize as per the rules if you

don’t attend for X amount of time in the government.

Now he’s decided he’s not coming back

to Japan and he’s not going to apologize.

The statement he made was a little confusing because he said it was too

early and his safety

was not guaranteed.

Now the reason he doesn’t want to come back

to Japan is because he thinks if he comes

back to Japan he might get arrested or murdered because his YouTube channel,

the reason

he got famous, was exposing celebrity scandals and some politicians.

So he’s actually saying some politicians want to come back to Japan just so

that he can be assassinated.

I think Gassy might be holding himself to a higher…

I actually don’t know because Gassy is a famous Japanese YouTuber and I’ve

never followed

any Japanese YouTube.

So I don’t know how big he is in Japan.

What I did find out though.

So they’re saying he doesn’t have to worry about getting arrested because

lawmakers have immunity during diet sessions.

Which essentially is saying a lawmaker could commit a murder during a diet

session and they could not be arrested

until after that diet session was finished.

Diet… Weirdly I shouldn’t have to explain this.

The Japanese government is called a diet.

It’s not like they.

That’s even a dumb joke if I make it.

I regretted as soon as I started.

I’m actually even finding I’m regretting

a lot of things as I start saying though.

I guess it’s just modern society.

But this actually… That is a very weird rule though.

Like you can do crimes.

You can commit crimes.

And you can’t be arrested during when the government is active.

Which is pretty often.

Nah, I’m a little torn on that one.

Anyways.

Gassie is now facing exposure from the government.

Which I think I could have predicted.

I said like my initial…

The reason I was interested in this story initially was because Gassie was

governing from abroad.

It wasn’t who he was that made me interested in him.

It was the fact that he was doing something

that really hadn’t been done before.

He was going to live in Dubai and govern Japan from Dubai which seems

completely possible to me.

And I was interested in how successful it was.

I didn’t realize even when it was introduced

that he was a controversial person.

But the reason he lives in Dubai is so

that he can’t be extradited back to Japan.

So you can see there’s a whole other layer of stuff that I didn’t actually

know about.

The governing was actually the secondary issue.

So he’s now facing expulsion from the government.

The leader of the NHK party, the party he’s a member of, which is a single

platform party.

They just want to abolish the NHK.

To take responsibility for this he’s going to step down.

I don’t know.

The leader of the party didn’t do anything.

Gassie was voted in.

He was voted in on their platform.

So I don’t think he’s done anything wrong.

Maybe putting him in that position, he’s taking responsibility for that.

This isn’t interesting.

Also side note of Japanese politics.

I don’t know if I agree with this or not.

But they quit every time something goes wrong.

Japan went through a five, ten year period where they had seven, eight prime

ministers because it was every three months to six months.

There would be a new prime minister and something that would go wrong and

they’d quit taking responsibility for it.

But then they never actually fixed any of the problems.

They’re just like, I take responsibility, I quit.

I’m out.

So it seems like kind of a cop out.

I think you should have to stay fixed the problem and then you quit after

the problem’s fixed.

Unless people want you out, I don’t know.

The problem with politics is there’s always going to be like 50% of the

people want you out

anyways.

So maybe it’s just a good excuse to bail.

The fallout from this is very weird to me.

They’re going to change the name of the NHK party.

So it’s not going to be a single platform party anymore or it is and they’re

just changing the name to Say Jika.

Say Jika?

Am I writing so bad?

No it’s Say Jika Joshi, Yon Juhachi Pati.

So the Say Jika is the female, Say Jika Joshi is female politicians, 48

party.

And I was like, why, why 48 is this like the AKB 48?

Is this is what they do now?

And if they are, that’s such a dumb thing.

So they’re going to try.

So and is it all going to be only women politicians?

I don’t know.

This little tack at the end has taken the story in a different direction.

So Gassi I no longer care about.

We’ll just put that out there.

He’s going to get expelled from being a government, the leader of their

party stepping down.

And they’ve made it the name, they’re going to change the name of the party

to this like girl group sounding party of female politicians.

Is it therefore only going to be female politicians?

This is now the more interesting part.

Are they going to use this gimmick to move their party forward?

Or is this like a real platform they’re going to have?

I don’t know.

I’m going to look into the Say Jika Joshi Yon Juhachi Pati.

I don’t know if they say 48.

I think it’s AKB 48.

I don’t know if they say AKB Yon Juhachi.

But that’s irrelevant.

Because I’ve only ever read it.

I haven’t actually heard anyone say a lot of the research I do for Ninja

Ninja Japan is just articles.

So I read them.

Sometimes the name, I don’t know if you say 48 or Yon Juhachi.

Anyways, it’s irrelevant.

What we have now is the formation of a new party which might be really

interesting or might be really stupid.

We can’t tell until the party actually does something.

So I will try to look into when they change the name.

Will their policies change with it?

Is this a new party?

Or is this just some kind of like gimmick to try to keep them in some sort

of relevance so they don’t all lose their positions?

I don’t know.

All we do know is Gassie has been a massive waste of time.

Nine social media influencers.

Social media influencers.

So I do this.

I do podcasts.

Even if popularity is relative, even if I

got like massive, I don’t think I would ever

call myself an influencer.

And then if I did Instagram and Instagram, it’s a different mindset.

I’m old.

So that might be part of it.

But the idea of the social media influencer is very ethereal to me.

I don’t really know what it is despite the fact that there are like them all

around all the time.

I maybe it’s because I have never been

influenced in this way by social media.

I have been influenced.

Everyone gets influenced by stuff around them.

But social media influencers do not have a significant impact on me.

So I don’t consider them influential.

Might be the issue I’m actually having.

There were nine social media influencers, all women in their 30s.

They failed to declare nearly 300 million in taxes for up to six years.

This was one to 30 million for each person.

And they are now being hit with 85 million yen in back taxes.

You’re not escaping the government.

This was all mainly from affiliate marketing.

So they would go on their Instagram or their TikTok or something.

They’d be like, “Oh, here’s my new lipstick that I would like.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, I’ll show you how to put it on.

Maybe something to do like a makeup tutorial, let’s say.”

And then to be like, “This makeup is really good.

You should buy it.”

That’s affiliate marketing.

They were paid for that.

That means you got to get taxed for it.

I did actually find out if you make more than 200,000 yen from any sort of

like secondary income.

So let’s say I have my main job, I’m a teacher.

And I make my main salary and that’s taxed.

And let’s say I do an engine in Japan.

People donate money or people give me money or I do affiliate marketing.

If that exceeds 200,000 yen, I have to start paying taxes on it.

I have to make sure I pay taxes on it.

Getting under that, maybe if I don’t declare taxes, it’s not going to make a

big deal out of it because the taxes would be quite small.

But it’s 200,000 yen for the year.

So that’s important.

So if I made like 200,000 yen a month,

that’s going to be X amount, well, times 12.

So 2,400,000 yen for the year, that would

be significant and I would have to pay taxes

on that.

But if I make 10,000, I don’t know what

would, let’s say 20,000 yen a month, that

would be sort of more close on the borderline.

I have to be really careful.

I would probably have to declare taxes on that, even though it’s like 20,000

yen, like it’s 200 bucks.

So I get $200 from an affiliate marketing.

Doritos, if you’re out there, I would take 20,000 yen a month to market your

product, which is a product I believe in, the Doritos chip.

Only the original flavor, none of this

like cool ranch, any of that other shit.

You have nacho cheese, not boom in nacho cheese, whatever fucking stupid

name you come out with.

It’s nacho cheese, not nacho cheese only, the original stand by.

I will promote that product.

I have a certain amount of integrity.

I will take product, I will take money to promote products.

I have to at least understand that the product is good and cool ranch.

I know there’s a lot of people out there like it.

I don’t, so therefore I’m not promoting cool ranch.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

This is like a free ad for Doritos.

So fuck you Doritos.

I’m not going to even advertise you.

You offer me money now.

I will still take the money because I’m poor.

But I’m going to be grudgingly doing it.

How did that happen?

Oh, we’re talking about taxes.

I did, through a video the other day and it was about like, we were talking

about taxes.

That’s exciting.

Taxes do lead us to very interesting places

because now we’ve hit a moral spot for me.

When would I and when would I not take money?

And for the most part, I’ll take your money.

I was listening to another podcast and they were talking about like better

help and how that they’re not very good in

stitch fix and all these like things that

advertise on podcasts.

I was sort of interested in that as a concept.

And apparently every company now that’s advertising on podcasts is pretty

much a shit company.

So the stitch fix has a limited amount of clothes they can pull from and so

they’ll send you the same clothes over and over again.

So it means they actually have very limited options.

So you’re not actually looking at you and your preferences and sending you

stuff and making

you look good and being really stylish.

Your personal stylist of course has a

finite amount of time to deal with you.

So they’re just picking stuff like from boxes, like checking boxes and that

just gets thrown into your next stitch fix box and the better help people.

Okay, they don’t really want to help you that badly.

They just want to run through the system.

It’s too bad.

These are of course the birthing pains of the Internet format advertising

and companies trying

to find new ways to do things like therapy

online seems like a really good idea.

So let’s say I, let’s say I live in Japan.

I’m an English speaker.

My Japanese isn’t very good and I needed therapy.

I couldn’t go to a Japanese therapist and expect it to really work out

because I can’t express myself well to them.

I might not understand what they say to me.

So me doing therapy online would be a really good idea because I would get

an English therapist

and maybe they’re more sort of in tune with who I am as a person.

Apparently that’s not a very good system.

So better help would have to offer me a lot

of money to screw over the mental health

for another person.

Like a lot of money.

Like I could retire money.

So we know they’re not offering me that much.

I honestly don’t even know why I’m talking about this.

YouTube and Instagram influencers have been hit with back taxes.

You got to be careful with your taxes.

Don’t try to screw the government.

They will come for you as these nine influencers have found out.

There’s a rocket that Japan wants to send to space.

Talk about astronauts last week.

Well how did they get there?

They get there on the rockets.

The new rocket is the H3 rocket.

It was up in the air and it was signal to self-destruct after several.

So they had several delays.

They were having problems with the rocket.

They got the rocket up in the air and then like, ah, something’s gone wrong.

Press a button and it explodes.

This was their second attempt and this is obviously going to cause them

certain problems.

I wrote down a…

I started trying to like pre-plan jokes and

it’s so much worse because then I read them

and I go, “That’s stupid.”

So basically you’ll get stupid jokes on this podcast.

Anything I make, you’re going to get a couple of dumb jokes.

And I was like, “Oh, it would be funnier if I planned out the jokes in

advance, you know, like a proper show.”

And then I read the joke and go, “That’s

so dumb, I’m not going to say that.”

Because the H3 rocket, well there’s also the H3 podcast.

And I was going to make a connection there

and go like maybe with less time on their

podcast and more time on the rocket it

wouldn’t have had to explode in the air.

But now as soon as I read that I’m like, “Oh, that’s dumb.

Why would I say that?”

But it would be dumb if it happened spontaneously.

It would be funny if it happened spontaneously.

It’d still be dumb.

But it would be dumb and funny if it happened spontaneously when you write

it down and you think about it.

It’s not worth doing anymore.

So I kind of have given you a look into the back process of, “As I tried to

develop Ninja News Japan into a better

show because I do want to try to make small

improvements all the time.

I am trying to plan out humorous elements.

But then in the moment I’m now thinking my

own sense of humor is so shit, I don’t want

to do it.”

The rockets crashed into the water around the Philippines.

North Korea is absolutely pissed that Japan’s sort of taken their thing of

shooting rockets into the ocean.

They’re all jelly.

They’re like, “Hey dude, that’s our stuff.

We shoot rockets into the ocean.

Stop copying us.”.

The H3 rocket costs 5 billion yen.

But if you want to look at this in a positive, 5 billion yen is half the

price of the previous rocket and it has

1.3 times the satellite launch capability.

I actually didn’t understand that last part of it to be really honest.

Does that mean it can carry 1.3 more satellites?

Because a 0.3 satellite doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Or can it be used, I guess it’s 1.3 times the payload, so a satellite plus

other stuff?

Or can it be used more often?

I don’t know.

The all the goal of all the rocket systems now, all these companies that are

making things that shoot stuff into space is try to make reusable.

So what SpaceX is all about is making a reusable rocket.

Which is really cool.

Because right now, rocket goes up, rocket

comes down, you have to build a new rocket.

Very expensive.

You could use that rocket multiple times.

It becomes a cost-saving measure, even if that rocket is more expensive

initially.

It’s a bit of a kick in the nuts for the space program in Japan that their

rocket did not work.

The way they wanted it to.

And I feel bad for them because I want the Japanese astronaut space thing.

This is when I should have sounded sort of smart.

This is the benefit of scripted things.

The smart bits will sound smart because you can write in advance.

The downside is the humorous bits when you write them down sometimes don’t

feel as humorous.

I should not write out the dumb jokes.

I should write out the smart bits.

Underestimated my own abilities.

Because I think, ah, I can be smart in the moment.

I should write that down and increase the humor versus the intellect.

The reality seems to be, I’m funny in the moment if I just let it go.

Whereas I am not as smart as I think I am.

And isn’t that just the reality?

I’m completely lost today.

Our water heater may or may not have a leak.

So waiting for the water heating guy to do this.

I’m sort of a little distracted.

It’s going to cost me a ton of money.

It’s going to cost like a hundred bucks for this guy to come out and look at

it and say there is no leak.

And if there is a leak, it’s going to be fixing replacing.

I realized one of the biggest problems.

Japan doesn’t have basements because we have earthquake.

Which means like a thing like a water heater

is outside the house but space is so tight

they’ve created the sliver of space between our house and the next door

house and there’s

like a little fence making it incredibly awkward to get to the water heater.

And that’s got to cost us a ton of money.

So I’m kind of actually just thinking about my own circumstances.

So, ah, if Doritos would like to sponsor

this podcast and give me a ton of money from

my water heater, I’ll promote Cool Ranch.

I mean, I don’t know.

Cool Ranch, I was not saying I don’t like them.

They’re fine.

I would always choose the original.

The original Doritos are way better.

Basically once a year, I get a really

bad craving for Doritos original flavor.

They have a Japanese tacos flavor.

It’s just not as good.

It’s almost, it’s just not quite.

I have to go to the import store and buy the original flavor once.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I missed a number in my notes.

It’s been a tough, tough couple weeks for no real significant reason.

And that’s where I am right now.

So, mentally, I think the problem is, I want to do these podcasts.

I want to keep them consistent, but then I

keep having other sort of real life things.

This is, we don’t know who needs better help.

I just do a podcast and therapist myself.

Yeah, I think what I’ve been looking for.

So, it’s not like I’ve had any losses.

You got to pay money for this.

I got a lot of money trouble, but not like real life trouble.

How do you explain it?

We have a lot of things that are going to be expensive.

We have a lot of stuff.

Our house is like, no, what, 13, 14 years old.

Things are starting to break or need fixed and it’s all very expensive.

So, that’s just resting on my mind a lot.

We’re in no way in financial difficulties.

We’re just, I basically will not have an

entertainment budget for X amount of time.

And then yeah, the water heater broke.

It’s not broken.

It’s actually working fine.

And we check the, the, the, the, because to check for a leak, you get the

like water meter.

And you like check the number and you come

back an hour later and check the number.

Has the number changed?

If it hasn’t changed, it’s not leaking.

It doesn’t seem to be leaking, but there is water coming up from under it.

Maybe that’s just condensation?

I don’t know, man.

Anyways, I’m going to pay like 70 bucks,

100 bucks for some dude to come out and look

at it.

I’m hoping I’m spending 70 dollars for this guy to say that it’s fine.

The story I was going to do before my brain

got in the way is that there was a lawyer

and he was an anti-sexual harassment campaigner.

He was trying to stop sexual harassment.

Given the title, a lawyer who campaigns against sexual harassment, what do

you think he was

accused of?

I do enjoy irony.

I enjoy police committing crimes and getting caught, especially if they’re

really stupid crimes.

I enjoy lawyers getting in trouble for not knowing the law.

This was a sexual or anti-sexual harassment campaigner.

Of course, he’s been accused of sexual harassment.

He represented an actress against the stage director back in 2017, which

actually showed

that he knew that the woman he was about to attempt to sexually harass was

litigious.

She was not going to just shy away and fade into the background and keep her

mouth shut because of the embarrassment.

He knew because he represented her, he knew she would step up and make the

claim and sue the person.

He’s like, “Perfect.

I will sexually harass that person.”

He represented her back in 2017.

They worked together several times and then he kept trying to call her and

get her come over and he coerced her and

he touched her inappropriately and all this

other stuff.

It sounds like he pressured her into actually having sex.

She wants 11 million yen and damages and she said, “I wish to demand he not

work as a lawyer.

for the rest of his life,” which is if he

is representing people in sexual harassment

cases and he is a sexual harassment dude, I think that’s fair.

So basically she’s saying she wants some deep art.

I don’t know if they use the bar at the same

terms in Japanese, but since I’m translating.

even English, I guess it does make sense.

She wants some deep art so that he can’t be a lawyer.

He might think it’s time to switch sides and become a defensive turn, which

is a really awful thought, but it would make sense.

There was a survey given to people and it’s the question of, “Have you given

up on marriage?”

It was broken into men and women.

Men in their 20s, 64% said, “No, I have not given up on marriage.”.

So there’s a 30% let’s say.

I just round off the numbers.

25, 30% are saying, “I still, I have, I

think marriage is not going to work out.

I’ve given up my 20s, I’ve already given up.”

55% switches in their 30s, 55% yes, I have given up.

So I’m trying to do the majorities.

And then people in their 40s who are not married, they say 71% yes, men in

their 40s have given up on marriage.

Women in their 20s already 54% have said yes, I’ve given up on marriage.

Men has this weird idea that you have to get married before your 25, which

is really young.

It used to be normal.

Again, teenagers used to get married and have babies and stuff.

But in Japan, they have this idea like a woman should be married by 25.

And it’s culturally still prevalent.

It’s not like it’s forced or, and I think people understand, you’re like 26,

27, 28, you’re

not married, whatever.

But it’s still there and it’s still part of the cultural zeitgeist, which is

a problem.

Women in their 30s, 52%, so it actually went down by 2%.

So it was 54 if you’re in your 20s, 52 in your 30s.

So 2% of the women between 20 and 30 change their mind.

I mean, I know this doesn’t really work that way.

It’s because it’s right now in their 30s.

They have not given up on marriage.

So 52% yes, I’ve given up on marriage,

but it’s actually the number dipped down.

And then when they hit their 40s, 70% said

yes, I’ve given up on marriage completely.

Some of the reasons for men, it takes time, money and effort to find a

partner, a Tokyo male, 27 years old.

That is true.

And we have over the last like four episodes or five episodes talked about

the declining birth rate.

I have prostilatized many times about my beliefs that Japan and society

needs to change.

It’s work, life, balance, culture if they

want the population to increase at all, but.

that is talking about a complete cultural shift in thinking, which is

probably not going to be possible in a single generation.

It’s going to take multiple generations.

And the danger there is there aren’t going

to be any generation numbers to pick up the

slack in the future.

So even if you make the changes, it might not be successful.

Because I don’t have confidence in my appearance was a man 39 years old

because I don’t feel

qualified enough to get married and a man

39 years old because I want to make the most

of my time alone.

A man 39 years old, which is interesting.

So there were some of them were like, I’m not good looking enough, I’m not

confident in myself, I can’t get married.

So I’ve given up.

There’s other guys like, I just want to be alone.

I want to have my time.

The next one I thought was very interesting because there’s no guarantee.

that I’ll be happy.

But he’s saying that if I get married, I have to be guaranteed happiness.

But that actually implies that you don’t have to put the work in.

So I actually think he’s a little, he

slightly misunderstands what marriage is.

Man 43, I don’t see the benefits.

Man 43, I simply don’t have any connections.

Man 47, my income is too low, which in Japan,

when they talk about marriage, the women

will initially talk about income before happiness and then before love.

I think a lot of people in a lot of other

cultures, they’re not so honest about it.

But a lot of women what they’re looking for is a certain level of comfort

and security.

And they are not shy about it.

So they want, I want a man who makes that amount.

The problem is there’s unrealistic expectations.

The average Japanese salary is between four and five million yen.

And then if you serve a woman, this is

way, I could probably find it, but it’s way

way back.

How much do you want your partner to make?

And they were like eight, nine, 10 million yen.

So the average man was just off the table at that point.

Some of the women’s reasons for giving

up on marriage are pretty interesting.

I did enjoy a female 28 said because there’s not a single advantage to

getting married.

So she’s, she’s really decided that there are no benefits at all.

Now there are tax breaks and stuff, but again, I think that might be not

what she’s talking about.

I got tired of it after my parents objected for the first time.

A female who’s 30.

So she came close to getting married.

Maybe a guy proposed to her, her parents objected and then she’s like, I’m

not doing this again.

Which is very interesting.

There’s a very clear story, singular history there.

I couldn’t find anyone I wanted to marry.

Female 34 years old.

I think that is a very good reason not to get married because if you don’t

want to marry them, that kind of goes back

to the no guarantee of happiness of the

previous.

This guy, but I can’t count on the other person to make me happy.

I have to make myself happy.

I think that is a very legitimate reason because the other party is never

enthusiastic.

39 years old female.

So basically the she’s saying that men don’t want to get married and that is

dampered my desire to get married because

I want someone who’s excited to marry me.

I think that is also pretty fair because I want to work woman 41 because

marriage isn’t everything in today’s world.

Female 41.

So those two women are saying marriage

is just not as relevant as it used to be.

I want to work.

I want to have my own life because I lost the desire to re-marry after

getting divorced.

Female 47.

So basically she had a bad experience.

It doesn’t want to do it again.

100% think that’s a legitimate reason.

I mean, any reason not to get married is

legitimate because what you’re doing, yeah.

If you’re not confident in the idea of

getting married, you who not get married.

It does sounds like that overall Japan is a culture.

People are not confident in getting married, which is again sort of leading

to the population to decline in several

other problems that they have in Japan.

I have put a stop to underwear theft stories only because they are not

interesting anymore.

So this isn’t about the underwear theft.

It is leading into the story.

It is the story of the level of commitment that laundromat owners seem to

have to saving their clients close.

So this is not the first story.

In fact, this one is better than the last one.

So it follows the same steps.

There’s a young, in this case, a 27 year

old man goes into a laundromat around 1230.

He stands looking into the like a trundle thing, the dryer probably.

He reaches in and grabs some underwear and he starts to take off.

The owner goes outside and he starts stopping.

He’s like, “You can’t.

That’s someone else’s stuff.

You’re stealing.”

The guy makes his excuses.

He’s like, “No, it’s cool, man.

Just let me go.”

He says, “I’ll give you money.”

He actually tries to bribe the guy.

He says, “I’ll give you money if you let me go.

I don’t want this to go to court.

Just let me go.

Just let me go.”

The guy’s like, “No, we’re not having it.

You stole from these people.

You don’t deserve to go.”

The guy sort of does a little football back

and forth, gets into his car and starts

to drive away.

The laundromat owner stands in front of the car.

The car does not stop.

It’s not going very fast.

He jumps onto the hood of the car thinking that this guy won’t, you know, he

will stop.

The previous story, the guy drove for a really long time, went quite fast.

The laundromat owner fell off the car and hit his head.

He was in hospital.

The guy was not up for a panty theft.

He was up for attempted murder and panty theft.

In this case, the laundromat owner was not hurt, which is great.

But I think the jumping on the hood of the car is a level of dedication that

I would not

have expected from a laundromat owner over a couple of pieces of underwear.

I would actually say there were cameras all outside that building.

Take a picture of the license plate, send it to the police.

Don’t jump on the hood of the car.

I don’t think that level of bravery is expected.

I was about to say required, but I guess it required.

That level of bravery is not expected for the laundromat owner.

I think maybe if someone’s stealing laundry, get your phone out, take a

picture of the license plate of the car and call it a night.

I think that’s enough.

Ghibli Park.

Ghibli?

Ghibli?

I forget.

I think it’s Ghibli.

I don’t want to have someone send me a

message telling me I said it wrong regardless.

Ghibli Park.

In Iichi, prefecture in Japan, they created

a park and it’s all the Ghibli movies.

So it’s Totoro.

Oh, I don’t know once.

There’s a bunch of others.

I actually have never seen.

But you know, people go there, you go there

with your kids, you see they have statues.

They have the house from my neighbor, Totoro and stuff like that.

It’s Ghibli.

It’s all very innocent.

There’s a lot of sort of purity of feeling that goes along with everything.

Kiki’s delivery service.

Spirited away.

All these main characters from these movies are represented there.

So of course, people are gross.

I don’t know what you expect with Otaku and

Nerds and stuff who sexualize everything.

People have been taking pictures of

themselves or their friends next to a statue.

So of course, some nerdy gross dudes, they grab the booby of the statue.

And then a lot of the characters have sort of flowy dresses so they’ve been

taking upskirt photos of the statues.

This is really pissed off the governor of Iichi.

So the park has a policy to not comment.

And I think that’s actually a good idea because what they’re actually doing

is saying let’s

not bring attention to this because if we bring attention to this, what’s

going to happen

is more gross nerdy Otaku guys are going to come and keep doing that thing.

So we’re not going to talk about it.

The Iichi governor on the other hand, he’s like, nah, my prefecture put up

34 billion yen.

of money to build this park so that people could have a good time.

I’m pissed.

So he’s like, it’s extraordinarily malicious.

It’s like the Sushi restaurant.

So we’ve done Sushi teto a couple times.

I’ve kind of eased off that story.

It may be close to destruction of property.

It’s not.

I mean, they’re touching statues that are out in public.

They’re not destroying anything.

But he’s just trying to say, like, I need

to find a crime that I can charge these guys

with.

They’re going to try to take severe measures against the people if they can

be identified.

So basically you post your picture on social media of you being

inappropriate with one of the statues in Ghibli Park.

This guy wants to send the cops after you, which I don’t know how that’s

going to work out

or not, but I am interested to see if there’s any arrests or any fallout.

I bet this story just goes away.

I bet people just ease off because they’re like,

but then there is the other, the flip side.

of that where maybe people will like, oh, well, now that it’s challenged, I

want to take

it to the next level, which is very much the

attitude of a lot of people out, especially.

on the Internet.

So if you go to Ghibli Park as a tourist, I would say do not try to hump the

statues because

you actually might have some fairly high level government officials coming.

after you.

[Music].

(clock ticking)

I don’t know, I was very busy today.

My son graduated junior high school,

so I went to his high school graduation.

Normally I record this in the morning, it’s now the afternoon.

I don’t know if that’s gonna make it more

rushed or more rambly or maybe better.

I don’t know.

I did prep my notes though.

We are good on the notes.

We’re good on the information.

Oh my God, high school graduations in Japan are dower.

It was, everyone marched in like a funeral procession.

They all sat down and then everyone had

to get up and like, they gave little speech

and then everyone was called by name to

stand up and it was just, there was no joy,

no clapping, no like, woo, nothing.

It was just painful to watch.

And then half an hour in, I had to pee.

So for the hour remaining, probably more,

probably an hour and a half, I was just pent up.

I was like, I hope there’s over and there.

It was speech after speech after speech.

The mayor of the city came, that was kinda cool.

Mayor of the city came and he gave a speech.

Some guy came up and talked about baseball which seemed really unrelated.

Then a teacher got up and started to

cry and then all the kids like shuffled out

like they were being taken to prison.

They were like, okay, that’s cool, it’s over now.

And then they’re like, oh now we’re gonna

show a video and have another speech.

So I got up during the video and went and peed.

It was absolutely ridiculous though.

So that was more than half my day gone already.

That said, we’re here for the news.

That’s my personal Japanese update.

I know people do wanna, they wanna get

a little something about my life in there.

Sometimes they find that the human relations aspect

of the podcast which I think is important.

If you’re watching the video, Dave has a new bed.

You can see his little face stuck in the corner.

I moved the camera to make sure you get that little face

just right there in the corner.

Gassy, we’ve followed the Gassy story.

Nothing is really happening and it keeps popping up

every week like an update on Gassy.

I’m always like, should I talk about it?

But Gassy is a YouTuber in Japan.

Well, actually not in Japan.

He’s a YouTuber about Japan, from Japan.

And he like broke celebrity scandals.

Now currently he lives in Dubai.

He decided to run for government.

He runs on the NHK party, which is actually the anti-NHK platform party.

It’s a single policy party.

Like they have one thing they wanna

do and this is essentially abolish the NHK.

Which I’m not against.

I just don’t think it’s worth having a whole party on for.

Gassy, when you become a policy maker

and assemblyman or whatever, you have to show up.

Now he’s like, I can show up virtually.

And at the time I was like, yeah, he was voted in by the people.

They knew he lived in Dubai.

They knew he would have to attend virtually.

He’d have to vote virtually.

But we’re living in that kind of time now where that’s acceptable.

What’s the big deal?

They have a rule you have to show up in person to vote every now and then.

And then Gassy’s like the problem is

because I’ve pissed off so many celebrities

and some politicians, if I show up in Japan, I’m gonna get arrested.

Now he has agreed and they said, well, if you don’t show up in Japan,

you’re gonna lose your job as an assemblyman.

So he’s agreed to come to Japan and apologize.

So there’s nothing really has happened right now.

But I’m giving an update for anyone who has followed along this story.

After he shows up, if he gets arrested, if something bad happens,

I’m going to follow up on that story.

If nothing happens, I might mention it and move on.

Because then it’s been a whole bunch of harafer nothing.

I was very, very interested in this

because he was voted in under a very certain set of conditions

and the government is saying that’s not acceptable.

His first proposal should be you should be able to govern remotely.

Because I actually think we’ve gone to a stage

in the world where you don’t have to be

physically present to do most jobs like this.

Like if it’s a policy job, if it’s an opinion oriented thing,

where it’s things where you brainstorm

and give ideas or write code, you don’t need to show up.

If you got to pick something up and move it somewhere else,

if you have to dig something, construction,

you got to show up for those jobs.

But if you are designing, computerizing

stuff, you don’t need to be present in person

to do those things.

And again, government, I think as long as you have

all the information, you’re doing things properly.

It’s actually should be fine.

But that’s a question of should they change the rule now?

This being Japan, they absolutely do not want to change the rule.

And I think they’re looking for a way to just get rid of Gasey.

So we’ve talked about Japan changing its defense policies

and the changing defense policies has been primarily like.

We need counter-strike capabilities,

but their version of defense is North Korea

to shoot something at us.

We should be able to shoot the thing that

shot the thing at us in the first place.

And they’ve made a step towards that.

So they’ve increased the budget.

They said they were gonna take it from

cigarette companies and corporate taxes.

So it wouldn’t affect the average person,

although inflation has gone up a lot.

I’m wondering if that is maybe related to this.

Policy change that requires billions and billions of yen.

Japan plans to buy 400 Tomahawk missiles.

Kishita didn’t mention how much they cost per missile.

These are for counter-strike capabilities

and they have a range of 1,600 kilometers.

And what I wanted to do was get a map

up and actually measure 1,600 kilometers.

So we could see what Japan would be able to hit.

Now far away is Pyongyang from Tokyo.

Tokyo.

Oh, it is 1,281 kilometers.

So the 1,600 kilometer strike zone

fits the North Korean capital squarely in the middle.

I may, if I can get some time, actually follow up on this next week.

And then for people who are on the video,

I can throw a picture up on the video

to show what they technically could hit.

If something shot at them from this place,

it would have to be in this 1,600 kilometer ring.

What they could hit back.

And then for the audio listeners,

I could actually mention a few sort of distinct places.

But Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea,

I bet would be the main focus of what they’re looking at

and talking about defending from.

That sentence making any sense?

I, whatever.

(phone ringing)

So last year, do I have the dates?

And last year, they said they were gonna look

for some new astronaut candidates in Japan.

And I was like, I should apply for that.

Ha, ha, ha.

I actually would just like to go through

the exams and the training, not actually.

I don’t really, like I would love to go to space,

but I think doing the training to go to

space would be actually just as much fun

even if you didn’t get to go to space.

And then I found out they were taken,

the guy that my thought was, I’m too old.

So they’re not gonna take me.

And I’m not Japanese, but actually, maybe.

Turns out one of the guys they took was 46.

He’s only a couple years younger than me.

They had applicants up to like 72.

So I may have had a shot.

I think me not being Japanese actually would have been the biggest concern.

They have selected two astronaut candidates

from the pool that they had that applied.

One is a world bank employee.

And the second is a surgeon.

Now the 28 year old surgeon, female, is very impressive.

Just being a surgeon, 28.

I mean, the having of a giant has very little to do with that.

Unless you’re in Japan, where as we had the scandal last year,

where the women’s scores were knocked down.

So if you, my theory at the time then, was that every female doctor

was actually superior to every male doctor.

Because you had to get, if you got a male got 100% on a test,

and a female got 100% on the test, the female

actually had to get like 120 on the test

because they systematically brought those scores down.

So I only wanted female doctors after I read about that.

So like they made it sound like, this is unfair.

And I’m like, yes it is, but also it makes me think that every woman

is a better doctor in Japan than every man.

Jade is putting the chat, “I wish I could go to space I do too.”

That’s actually why I’ve been so deep following this story.

As they are anyways, mm-hmm.

Okay, I don’t know if I want to give full credit or not.

My dog, two years ago I got real sick.

I was in hospital for a month.

My doctor, he was weird, but he was a very

good doctor because he kind of giggled.

And in bedside manner, I don’t know if they actually train that,

but one of the things you don’t want your doctor to do is giggle ever.

And I was, I was in really bad shape.

So when he giggled it was very off-putting.

Anyways, we’re talking about astronauts.

This lady, 28, she’s a surgeon, she’s awesome.

Like she’s just straight up, she’s awesome.

The guy, 46, he’s a world bank employee.

I was like, what are they gonna go to the moon and do some accounting?

I was a little down on that.

But then one of my, I’m like one of

my, I’m like basically an English teacher.

So if they’re gonna take a world bank employee,

like a finance guy, still skills don’t relate.

Maybe they’re gonna take me, I’m a good communicator.

I could play that up.

So that actually made me think I did miss my opportunity

because they weren’t looking for pure, feasible, usable skills in space.

Like a surgeon, you get hurt, a surgeon can help you.

You go up into space, this guy could not, he could fix your finances.

I don’t know what that means.

So it means they were taking people

where the skills they had were not directly applicable

to going to space, which means that actually meant

I did have a chance because my skill set,

has nothing to do with space.

But then if this guy can go, maybe I can go.

So now I just roll that around on my head and go,

I think I missed my chance to go to space.

They are going to do two years of training.

The man is 46, he’s the oldest applicant.

He’s the oldest person they’ve accepted into the program.

And the lady is the third woman they’ve accepted into the program.

One of the goals they have is to put the first woman on the moon.

So we’ve had women in space.

We’ve had men on the moon.

We haven’t had a woman on the moon.

So Japan’s like, oh, here’s an opportunity.

We could put the first woman on the moon.

I think this lady, perfect choice.

I mean, I’m jealous that she’s going at all,

but if she’s gonna go, let’s support her to go all the way.

I wanna see her go to the moon and be the first woman standing on the moon.

I think that’s awesome.

The available age of current astronauts is an average of 52 to 53 years old.

So the average age of an astronaut in

Japan is already two years older than me.

And they retire at 60.

They actually force in retirement.

You can’t keep going, which I understand.

So it means next time they go for

applicants, it’d be like two years from now.

I’m gonna be 52.

And then if I get it, I would be 54.

So I think I’ve actually missed my opportunity to go to space.

So let’s face it, I’m gonna take my dreams.

I’m gonna put them on this woman.

I’m gonna take her dream and I’m gonna inflate them.

If she succeeds, I succeed.

And that’s what I want.

I want her to go to space.

I want her to land on the moon.

And I want her to be the first woman on the moon.

And in a way, I will have gone to space.

And I will have been to the moon.

And I will also have been the first woman on the moon.

(upbeat music)

The baby decline.

God damn it.

This is really downer.

This year, or last year, 2022, they had less than 800,000 babies.

That is the seventh consecutive drop in the number of babies in Japan.

It is down 5.1%.

In 2017, because of the trends, they predicted that this would happen,

the less than 800,000 number would happen in 2033.

So we are a decade ahead in the number of babies dropped.

Not physically dropped.

The numbers of babies born down.

I guess they’re always kind of born down.

Gravity takes place.

The number of babies not born.

The numbers of baby born is the lowest number consecutively.

But they predicted that less than 800,000

was going to happen in 2033, 10 years later.

COVID contributed, financial issues

contributed, all these things contributed.

Last week, we did the story on what the government official saying

that the problem, the low birth rate is

because of Japan’s weak romantic power,

which I agree with, except I don’t think you can define

romantic ability or romantic power.

So that’s a little bit problematic.

They said there are many factors, including financial and security

and less social encounters.

And the less social encounters because of the pandemic

is absolutely true, because people are meeting less people.

The number of deaths was 1,582,033.

That is up 129,744.

And this got Elon Musk to prompt a comment

that if this keeps going, Japan will disappear.

So Elon Musk has a fundamental understanding of math

and numbers that go up and numbers that go down.

So he is a genius.

I said I’m going to say, thank you for this.

He solved the problem.

He said if this keeps happening, Japan will disappear.

We don’t need to worry about it anymore.

Elon fixed it.

I mean, we’re done, right?

This is interesting.

So Kishida got in trouble, the prime minister of Japan got in trouble.

Japan’s ban on the same sex marriage is not discriminatory.

Is what he said.

And this is sparks and criticism.

I think it is a very fair statement to say,

it sparked criticism and it deserves some examination.

Kishida came out and said, I have never stated, I’m against it.

Which I would like to break down that sentence.

So first of all, what is discriminatory is the first thing.

And I would say discrimination is when you take a group

and you apply a set of rules to them, that is unfair.

And what we’re looking at is marriage and what is a definite marriage.

And definition is probably the issue because

in Japan it’s defined as a man and woman.

Actually, maybe I wrote it down.

Okay, no, I didn’t write it down.

It is stated somewhere that a marriage in Japan

is actually sort of a cis traditional heteronormative male, female union.

Whereas I’ve always thought marriage is financial if we’re being honest.

Like you do it because of love, but you’re really what you’re doing it

as far as the government is concerned,

is for tax purposes to bind your taxes,

to take your two estates and put them together

so that if I get sick or my wife gets sick,

you know, they have access and back and forth,

that union has very little to do a gender.

It’s all as far as I’m concerned, finances.

When it comes to the government, when you

come to a religious ceremony or a ceremony

or anything like that, that’s all about

love and the union of two people and stuff.

But as far as the government concerned, this is about taxes and money.

And so I don’t see how a man and a woman,

a man and a man, a woman and a woman

makes any difference when you’re talking about binding your finances.

So that’s again my view.

What I was interested in though is Kishita

said, I have never stated, I’m against it.

I’ve never said out loud, I have never spoken the words, I am an against it.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t against it.

I personally have never stated that I’m against fucking penguins.

I am, let’s just put that out there right now.

But because I never said, I’m against fucking penguins,

doesn’t actually mean I am or I’m not.

That just actually means I might be really pro fucking penguins.

But I know it’s socially unacceptable

to say it, so I’ve never said it out loud.

So coming out and saying that I have never

stated that I am against fucking penguins,

doesn’t mean I am or I’m not.

So you actually have to come out and say it.

This is actually the problem with politicians.

What I want to do is make statements.

I do always, as many times in an English New Japan,

I’ve talked about a politician making a statement

that offends people and then they retract that statement.

And I’ve always felt like that doesn’t actually

do or mean anything because the thought is still in their head.

He’s saying I’ve never said, I’m a discriminatory piece of shit,

but that doesn’t mean he isn’t.

Jay has now put it in apparently a quote by a very famous man,

I have never said I’m against fucking penguins, which is true.

Up until this podcast, the entirety of my life, I never made that statement.

So you could have tried to make the claim.

He is pro, you could have tried to make the claim.

He is against.

It is unsure, everyone is unsure until I actually make a statement.

But stating that I’ve never stated it doesn’t mean anything.

And that’s the bit I actually really enjoyed more than anything else.

Japan is the only G7 nation member

that doesn’t have anti-discrimination laws.

So this will be an interesting one going forward

because there are small groups like in, like there’s a prefecture,

and not prefecture, an area in Tokyo, a ward, I think it’s Shibuya,

and they allow same-sex unions, but that isn’t seen as universally accepted.

So what does that mean?

You could actually get married in this place.

I guess as long as you don’t leave that

place, you can have your same-sex marriage.

It’s very difficult to understand

because what is the point of having one area in a city

where it’s okay and the rest of the city is not okay?

As soon as I leave that area, are we not married anymore?

It’s gonna cause legal complications down the line,

but at least it’s showing that there is a place in Japan

that is thinking forward to thinking that

this is acceptable, that this is the future.

And if two people want to bind their lives

together, maybe you should just let them.

(phone ringing)

72-year-old teacher, so this guy’s been teaching a hopefully a long time.

He wanted to show that there are useful bacteria, common in daily life.

Teach the kids about your gut health and that kind of stuff.

So he mixed some yogurt and milk, and he

took it home and he put it in the fridge.

And then he brought it back to school

the next day, this milk yogurt mixture,

and he gave it to six students.

Two had a headache and nausea and had to go eat taking it to the hospital.

One went to see a doctor after they got home from school.

And two of the, oh, and two staff vomited when they got home.

So I think what we’ve actually learned is

you shouldn’t drink milk yogurt combinations

created by your teacher and brought into school.

It’s funny ’cause here’s the thing, the

reality is, you have this guy, he’s a teacher

and he wants to do something really practical

and show students something and really teach them.

And this is the kind of stuff we want teachers to do.

And then he just totally duffs it.

He takes it and he makes all the kids sick.

Actually, it sounds like only three of the kids, three out of six got six.

So this is a 50% shot rate.

Two staff got six or two staff should, just I don’t know, homemade stuff,

you probably should not be drinking.

I mean, that’s just the short version.

Don’t drink stuff that some dude has made at home.

(phone ringing)

All right, so our last two stories, I’m going to get a drink of water first.

Oh, that’s old man hot water right there.

Not hot water that came from an old man.

I can’t, I really feel like I always have to be very clear.

That is an old man drink.

Old men tend to drink things like hot water.

I’ve really taken a hot water and my golden ears.

What was that sound?

Which one?

You mean the slurping?

Swallowing and then, we can break that up into, you can make a beat.

(claps)

Oh, good lord.

Okay, we got two stories about people having trouble at work.

I bet it was the swallow.

This microphone, I actually was having a

conversation on Reddit about microphones.

This microphone, oh, the, mm, I mean,

that’s the sound of pure satisfaction of an old man.

That is an old man.

See, I don’t get gratification the way you young, young folk do.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t cut into this sexual gratification.

I don’t, I don’t believe in these, these, these drugs

and the alcohol and the, the jazz cigarettes.

I like the purity of flushing out my colon with some piping hot water.

(groans).

Ah, I can’t remember where I heard jazz

cigarettes recently and really enjoyed it.

Anyway, we got two guys who got trouble at work

and I really enjoy people getting a trouble at work.

A city employee was fired for getting 1.54 million in overtime pay.

Dude, I have an end of my story.

It’s such a nightmare.

I suppose I could tell, I’ve told it on the loss of podcasts

which is now essentially the fun podcast.

So I’m gonna hit this story soon, really.

I, forget why.

Oh, I was gonna have the camera shove down my butt

and I had to go to the doctor to do it

and they wanted me, my voice just got a little quieter

’cause I’m talking about my butt.

So they gave me this stuff to drink.

It was like a two liter jug and I got about halfway through

and then I started throwing up and we called the hospital

and I say like, I’m drinking this stuff

but I can’t keep it down, it’s just something about it.

And then the lady on the other end goes,

but it’s the mild stuff and we’re like,

that’s relevant if I’m throwing it up, I’m throwing it up.

So they’re like, okay, we’ll come in and we’ll take care of it

and we’ll take care of it as already an issue.

So we go up and then she gets this like,

it was basically a little bigger than this.

It was like one of those 500 milliliter cans of Pepsi

but it was full of like water and saline solution

or something, she goes, I’m gonna put this up your butt.

Not the thing it had a tube and I was like,

ah, that’s never going on my butt and she’s like,

no, no, it will, I’m like, I’m not like,

I’m on your side on this one but I’ve just never put

anything on my butt before so that volume

is probably not gonna go up my butt successfully.

And then she’s like, okay, well,

I’ve done this a million times, I’m the experienced nurse,

I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna shove this up your butt.

And I was like, all right, you know, I am rooting for you on this one.

She has me rolling on my side, me arguing with her,

I don’t think was really what she was used to.

So she put on the lube, ironically not gently,

the lube is supposed to make that kind of thing better.

She just, and I got in, and she was like,

woo, and then she kind of went up and started doing it

and we got most of the way down and then it started like,

eh, it wasn’t all going up and I was

like, mm, I’m not gonna say I told you so

’cause I don’t really know how to say that in Japanese

but I think my face says it all,

that in weird discomfort ’cause I’ve never done this before.

So then they’re like, okay, well, we have

as much water up your butt as we can.

So you go over and you know, poop it out.

And I was like, great, where?

‘Cause I assume right here right now is how it’s gonna happen.

And so I’d actually, I kind of forgot

to say, I had to put on a diaper before.

The thing is the diaper in Japan, you either

have like tiny people size or sumo size,

there’s no in between.

So I had sumo size diapers on, Ignatius

put in the trick is to clench really hard,

believe me, we’re getting to that part of the story.

So then I’m like, okay, well, I’ve pulled up my not summarize size,

my sumo size diapers, where do I go to the toilet?

‘Cause I actually assumed it was not in the diaper.

And she’s like, yeah, across the hall,

there’s a bathroom, so go in there and go in.

I was like, okay, great.

So I’m clenching as hard as I can.

I have my giant diaper on.

My wife is sitting outside, she sees me walk out

and I’m like literally going, should I pull up my shorts?

This is summertime.

Over my giant samurai, not samurai.

Over my giant sumo diaper, where should I just go through my diaper?

Both equally embarrassing.

Like I’m just feeling humiliated.

This time, masculated, it’s great.

She starts laughing her ass off.

She’s just like, at this point just go.

It doesn’t make a difference.

I go to the toilet, it’s occupied.

And I’ll just let that sit with you, just like it sat with me.

Only there was a lot more pressure on me as I stood kind of doing the like,

it’s like the little kid I have to pee dance,

but it was I have to poop out a cola bottle

of liquid with giant sumo diapers on.

Clenching as hard as I can, ’cause I really don’t wanna poop in my diaper.

And I think this is a preview of what life has in store for me.

Now it’s now back to people gotten trouble at work

and didn’t have problems at hospitals.

A city employee was fired for getting 1.54 million yen in overtime.

The thing is they were not actually doing the overtime.

This is Japan, what he was doing, he was getting the overtime form,

waiting till his boss left, going into

his desk and getting the little stamp,

and then approving his own overtime, and putting it in.

What they found was they could see him leave.

This was the problem with not having invisibility powers.

They could see him come and go.

They realized he wasn’t coming and going

when his time sheet said he was coming and going.

The boss didn’t remember approving so much OT

and then they sat down, figured it out and he got fired.

So I get my problem with crime and stealing stuff.

It’s just the plan seems so poorly thought out.

You’re gonna take your boss’s stamp, you’re gonna do overtime.

You could do a little bit.

I bet you could do an hour or two every month and not get caught.

But when you get to the 1.54 million yen Mark,

you’re going to realize that everything is, you’re gonna get caught.

(clock ticking)

An employee was told to wear a mask.

This was a very normal thing because this was last December

and masks sort of mandates by governments is still in place.

As a country, Japan doesn’t have mask mandates

but it’s sort of a social pressure thing and people are doing it.

Companies do.

So your company’s telling you government absolutely does.

If you work for the government, you have to wear a mask.

This guy clearly did not like wearing a mask.

He was reminded mid-December, so around December 15th,

please wear your mask and he got pissed and

it sort of stewed and he just sat there.

On the 20th, he decided to delete files on

a shared server related to tax collections.

And I was like, “Did he get revenge by saving a bunch of people taxes?”

I know it probably isn’t that simple

’cause they’ll just find the taxes they’re missing and go get them.

These tax agencies don’t mess around.

They always find you.

But it showed to me the attitude of what was going on.

This is a very disgruntled employee

and you know he’s particularly disgruntled

when all of a sudden mid-January, you

get to evaluation period in most companies.

He went to his section chief and he said,

“Consider yourself dead if my evaluation is poor.”

You know what, his evaluation wasn’t poor, he was fired.

And that, I think, is appropriate.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

[Music].