(techno music)
There have been a rise in incidences
of tourist using rideable suitcases.
So a few weeks ago, we had a Chinese lady.
She was using her motorized suit case
to travel around the sidewalk in Japan.
I think it was in Osaka.
She was arrested because she
was violating the Motor Vehicles Act.
She said, “I don’t
consider this a vehicle.
” And I thought that was
a very interesting defense
because I don’t think it’s that thing,
therefore you can’t arrest me for that thing
is a very interesting
way of thinking about it.
It’s sort of the entitled nature
of the modern person, I think.
But because these incidences
of becoming more common,
it’s important to know how things
are classified in the country you’re in.
So motorized suitcases are
classified as motorized bicycles.
So anything under 50cc, so electric bikes,
these electric suitcases, all these things,
if they’re probably under 50cc engine,
they are all classified together right now,
probably electric scooters
as well, as motorized bicycles.
If you wanna ride one, you need to
have a license in the safety equipment.
So of course, what does that mean?
What kind of safety equipment do you need
to ride your suitcases down the sidewalk?
Well, I think actually the first problem is
you shouldn’t be riding
this thing down the sidewalk.
That’s one of the rules
of motorized bicycles.
So you need to register your vehicle.
So you bring your suitcases to Japan,
you need to register it if
you wanna ride it around.
It needs a rear view mirror.
It needs turn signals.
So these are really small.
I don’t think, like, their
turning circle is so small.
I don’t think anyone
actually have a chance to like
dodge out of the way if
you actually were signaling.
I think the whole point is
that these are supposed
to be ridden on the
road and not the sidewalk.
So rear view mirror, turn signals.
You need liability insurance,
and you have to wear a helmet.
So if you wanna ride your suitcase,
you gotta get your helmet on.
You gotta get your license
and registration ready.
You have to have insurance
in case you have an accident,
and you have to have a rear
view mirror and turn signals.
That is gonna be one pimped out suitcase.
And I think we now have
our new show for Luda Chris.
I actually now forget that
joke would have worked
if I could have remembered who was actually
the guy who did the “Pimp My Ride” show.
I suppose I could look it up.
I could, the power of editing
means I could look it up.
And then like erase that mistake.
And it would seem as if I
knew my pimped my ride culture.
But I think I’m pretty
comfortable in knitting I don’t.
So we had the Ubisoft
releasing Assassin’s Creed.
I think it’s shadows,
it takes place in Japan.
And there was a petition.
So we did a story on a
petition again a few weeks ago.
These are all sort of the update bits.
The petition got to about 80,000
signatures, which is a lot of signatures.
They’re basically
saying you are being
inaccurate in your
depiction of Japanese history.
You are being dishonest
in your presentation
of Japan as a culture,
that kind of stuff.
I, my counter argument was I am currently
playing a game called Like a Dragon Ishing.
And it is your samurai and you go around
and you beat people up and take their money.
I may be that is accurate.
Anyways, I would say a
lot of things that happen.
Culturally in video games are not accurate
and that’s kind of the whole point.
Ubisoft came out with a statement
to try to respond to all of this.
I said, “While Yaski, so Yaski is
one of the two main protagonists.
“There’s a female ninja
and this black dude samurai.
“He’s actually
very famous, Yaski.
” Now the problem has come up,
it’s turned out in like about 2015.
This guy wrote a book called Yaski, the
true black samurai or something like that.
The original black samurai,
maybe the first black samurai.
I didn’t get the title.
Turns out that guy who wrote that book
edited the Wikipedia page to say some stuff
that would match better with his book as
opposed to maybe being factually accurate.
That’s some pretty shady stuff.
That shouldn’t reflect too
poorly on Ubisoft in this case
because this is an author
trying to change the narrative
so that his book could be more popular
’cause he’s maybe he’s discovered something.
But Ubisoft has said like look,
there’s a lot of people talking about this.
Some people seem to be upset.
Let’s clear the air.
So their statement is,
“While Yaski is depicted
“as a samurai in Assassin’s
Creed shadows, “we acknowledge
that this has been a matter
“of debate and discussion.
” So the not saying he
wasn’t, they’re not saying it was.
A lot of people are saying
that Yaski was not a samurai.
Maybe he was a lower
level tier because again,
Japanese society at that
time was very hierarchical.
He was maybe an assistant to a samurai,
maybe not on par with a samurai
I think is what they’re saying.
Back to the quote, “We
have woven this carefully
“into our narrative and with our other
lead character, “the Japanese Shinobi, Noi,
“who is equally important in the game,
“our dual protagonists provide players
“with different
game play styles.
” So they’re not apologizing.
They’re just saying, look, there’s
a story that this guy’s a samurai.
We thought that was pretty neat.
We also got a girl, you don’t
even have to play the guy,
I bet you have to
play the guy a little bit.
But essentially, why are you
focusing so much on the guy?
We got a hot girl in it.
You guys focus on the hot
girl, forget about the guy.
Some boss fight clip came out
and he walked out to rap music
and a lot of people were
deeply offended by that.
I think it’s dumb but I
wasn’t offended by it
’cause I don’t know, maybe
Yaski would’ve liked it.
That’s the problem is we don’t
know what he would’ve been down for.
And we can’t trust
Wikipedia because we know
the author of the book to
promote this character’s history
altered in order to
coincide with the release
of the book so that it
would be more accurate.
Then it came out that
this was being discussed
in the government in Japan
and I thought, wow, that’s weird.
The government in Japan
discussing video games
because again, they
don’t discuss Mario Kart.
They don’t discuss like a dragon Yakuza.
These are media properties,
whether they’re accurate
or not, it’s kind of
irrelevant to the government.
So what happened was there’s
a guy, he’s part of the NHK party.
The last month, maybe we’ve
talked about the posters that the
NHK party has put up for the
gubernatorial election in Tokyo.
They are making a mockery of the elections.
They’re putting up porn stars.
They’re putting up lonely people.
They’re selling the spaces
to just anyone so like a
social media influencer
wants to put their poster up.
They would sell them their space.
They don’t take it seriously.
So this is essentially a joke party
that tries to find not
significant issues in Japan
and then tries to push
them to the forefront
so that people start
taking them seriously or not.
I don’t know, it’s hard to see
what their actual end goal is
because they’re spending
their time actually doing this.
I guess if I could get paid to
say dumb stuff to the other
members of government,
that wouldn’t be a terrible job.
This guy, one of the guys from this
party that’s essentially a joke party
’cause there’s about
five, six members in the
government ’cause they do
here and there get voted in.
I think that would actually
be like a protest vote,
like everyone else is so
bad we’re voting for the joke.
NHK party asks for comments
because they had concerns
over the historical inaccuracies.
Again, they didn’t do this
for any of the Yakuza games
any of the other samurai, how
many samurai games have I played.
Historical inaccuracies
would just be rife in the game.
Yeah, it’s a fictional thing.
And that’s maybe why I’m like, why
are you spending any time on this at all?
The Japanese Foreign Minister said, this
is not our concern, pretty good statement.
I mean, he’s like, look,
there’s an American video
game company making
video game, it’s set in Japan.
Whether it’s accurate or
not, we don’t give a shit,
we got other stuff to
do, we got North Korea,
we got Russia, we got other actual
things that we have to deal with.
The education minister said,
please don’t violate morals.
So that’s it, like you’re making a video
game, kids are gonna play the video game,
try to keep a certain
amount of morality in it.
I mean, they also know
what video games you like.
So they’re like, not even
saying it too strongly.
They’re like, you know, do
your best, don’t violate sort of
humanity and morality and
be nice people, pretty accurate,
pretty fair statement from
the Minister of Education.
The NHK party, though I just
found out, lost their political
party status this year because
two members were expelled.
So basically they didn’t have
enough members in parliament
anymore to be considered
an actual political party.
So I’m wondering if that’s
gonna have any effect
on them later, ’cause I
guess you can still try
to run for office even if
you’re not a political party.
But the NHK name now, the
NHK party name is now being
sullied to the degree where even
the joke isn’t worth it anymore.
(keyboard clicking)
There is a bar in Shinjuku called Okubo Bar,
and it is an Italian bar and restaurant.
Not very interesting.
There’s lots of bars, lots of Italian
bars and restaurants in Shinjuku, I’m sure.
This is actually on the
border of what you would call
korea town in Tokyo, on
the window of the restaurant.
This is why they got attention.
They’d written in sort of
that chalk ink stuff marker.
They’d written on the
window of the restaurant.
Although diversity and
tolerance may be fashionable,
and I was like, you
can stop right there.
With the beginning of
this statement laid out
the way it is right there, you
know it’s not gonna get better.
You know there’s not gonna be
an improvement or like a revelation
by the end of this, whatever
paragraph they put on the door.
These are people who
have just made a decision.
We’re gonna sink this ship
as hard in as fast as we can.
Diversity and tolerance may be fashionable.
So they’re actually
saying that there’s a time
when diversity and tolerance wasn’t
fashionable, which in Japan is very, very true.
I would not call those modern times.
Japan, I would not say it’s diverse,
but I would actually say
overall is quite tolerant.
We do get, I’m sorry, Dave’s moving around.
I’m very interested in what Dave does.
This question is used a lot.
I gotta get this used
to check that actually.
Do you want your bed in the corner?
- I can’t get it, shoot.
- I know what my buddy wants.
All right, if I could just
get my shoulder right here
so that he’s his heads in the picture the
whole time would be pretty cool actually.
This might be the new video.
This did be like a good
screenshot of just like Dave.
If he was sitting up, oh
he’s already laying down.
Okay, the statement continues.
We refuse to serve Chinese and Koreans as
it’s unpleasant and saps our will to work.
So there’s been again a lot
of issues with tourism in Japan.
There’s a lot of people feeling
the burden of over-tourism.
There’s a lot of restaurants saying like,
we can’t deal with foreign
people who come in who don’t
try to speak any Japanese,
who don’t learn any Japanese.
How is it our burden, that kind of thing?
There’s been the two tier
pricing has become an issue.
They have a price that’s more
expensive for foreign people
and tourists and one
that’s cheaper for locals.
And then they actually went ahead and said,
no, no, no, the tourist
is the regular price.
We just give a discount to locals,
which I thought was an
interesting way around the problem.
The most interesting, so this is an Italian
restaurant and yet Kimchi is on the menu.
So they have Kimchi on the menu,
but they’re saying we don’t
want Koreans in our restaurant.
And so it was, because it was so specific,
a lot of people on the internet were
like saying like, well, how can you tell?
If it’s a tie or a Cambodian or
some other kind of Asian person
comes in, how are you
going to be able to tell?
It’s the right kind of
person for you to hate.
The tweet with the image of
the picture got 360,000 likes.
I’m wondering if that means
that 360,000 people liked it,
like actually liked it
or they were marking it
or trying to promote it so
that other people could see.
‘Cause there’s one
way like you boost the
performance to say like,
hey, everyone look at this.
And now that everyone’s
looking at it, yeah, I don’t know.
I don’t know what that means.
Likes, ’cause remember the old Facebook,
it had the like and
they’d be like, my cat died
and then you want the
person to know you saw it
so you click like and
I liked your cat died.
So that’s kind of, there’s a
communication issue there maybe.
There’s also the irony
of this being a Italian
restaurant run by Japanese
people and they’re racist.
So if they were, I think a real racist
in Japan should just do Japanese food.
Like if you’re gonna, if you’re
gonna be racist, do it right.
Like just don’t, you wouldn’t
do no Italian, no French food,
you’re Japanese food, you
can only do Japanese food
if you’re being racist or
Japanese racist person.
Then there were people
coming up with the
issues of what if you
have a Japanese person,
what if you have a second
generation Chinese person?
So someone who’s born
in Japan speaks Chinese,
is ethnically Chinese, but
speaks Japanese perfectly.
So you can’t tell the difference.
Are you still going to refuse them service?
This is kind of the issues
of they’re making statements.
I think just to push people away, but the
statements are so broad and so unclear.
This is one of the
problems with racism is
they don’t tend to
define themselves for you.
One of the problems with racism,
they don’t really go through the efforts
that I would like to see people
put into defining themselves.
This is, in essence, illegal in Japan.
There’s the Japanese
constitution, guarantees equality.
So you technically can’t
refuse service based on ethnicity,
but at the same time management
does have the right to refuse service.
So that’s one of those sort of issues that
comes up like, is it okay, is it not okay?
You can refuse specific
customers who cause problems,
but I think they have to
cause the problem first.
So if I just walk in as a foreign person
and you say, I don’t want to serve you
because you’re a foreign
person, that’s illegal.
If I walk in and I knock over
some tables and you say,
I don’t want to serve you
because you’re knocking over tables,
the fact that I’m a foreign
person is now a relevant.
So it’ll be interesting to see if this
restaurant adapts its philosophy or goes under
or if there’s any sort
of real problem at all.
I actually, this came out
at the beginning of last week
and I haven’t heard about it since,
so I actually think it’s a non-issue now.
I think people have just decided,
I’m not going to that restaurant.
Dear Rome Nara.
So Nara City is famous for the deer that
Rome, they’re essentially domesticated.
They wander around.
At Golden Week, I went to a place called
Miojima, which also has a similar thing.
It has a lot of deer on this
island and they all roam around.
They’re all very plump.
They are vaguely interested in
you to see if you give them food.
I was walked with a couple.
It was actually very nice.
They’re very calm.
It’s very soothing.
They’ll stop.
You can take pictures with them.
They’re very, very used to
people and tourists and getting fed.
There’s a video that went a little
viral in Japan of a man in Nara.
He’s walking through a small herd of deer.
So they’re on the sort of the sidewalk.
They’re wherever the people are because
that’s again, where they can get food.
When one gets in the way and doesn’t
move immediately, he kicks it in the butt.
No, he doesn’t kick it hard, but he does
kick a deer and the deer is fairly innocent.
And if you just walk up to them,
they do move out of the way.
They are not looking for
any sort of confrontation.
These are deer.
These are not like angry animals.
They are just like trying to chill out.
They just want to live their lives.
They want nothing.
They just want food.
I mean, that’s all they really want
is to be fed all day every
day until they explode.
He moves on.
Same deer still in front of him.
He kicks it again.
Another deer looks at me.
Slaps the deer in the face.
So this went viral because you
beat the shit out of some deer.
What’s wrong with you?
Like the deer will get out of your way.
You don’t need to hit them
or kick them or do anything.
If you just nudge them, they’ll
just start to walk out of the way.
We can all agree, dick move.
But in Japan, these deer are
considered natural monuments.
So they’re actually
protected by the government.
It’s a crime to abuse the deer in any
way, which means that they are protected.
Abusing them can get you
up to five years in prison.
There’s no info on how far
the police are on in this case.
But I do know the police
are actually looking for him.
There is a video of him
with a full face on camera.
So I actually think he will not
be too hard for them to find.
An eight-year-old girl
was riding her bicycle.
A guy jumps out and
tries to steal her backpack
from the basket at
the front of the bicycle.
She stops.
She shouts to the guy, shouts stop.
She grabs her bag and she holds on them.
The guy takes off.
He’s later arrested.
Turns out it’s an American guy.
I just want to know, what are you
trying to steal from an eight-year-old?
Like, what does an eight-year-old
have that you think you’re going to steal?
Like, in that backpack.
I can tell you that when
my kids were eight years old,
they had nothing of value
or interest in their backpack.
They probably had
schoolbooks, maybe a snack.
They didn’t have any money.
They didn’t have anything of value.
I mean, they’re eight years old.
They get what I give to them to take
to school or wherever they’re going.
They don’t get anything else.
I really want to know what
this man’s motivation was
for trying to steal a backpack
from an eight-year-old girl,
only because I don’t see
any value in the act at all.
Like, the theft isn’t valuable.
Why are you attacking
eight-year-old children?
This is weird.
Is this worth getting arrested?
One of the questions I do the most often
when we talk about crime
is was this worth getting
arrested over and this
is one of the ones it’s like,
not only was the crime
not particularly good,
you weren’t going
to get anything for it.
Like, at least if I can commit a dumb crime
and get a ton of money
and I get arrested later.
I have the potential to get a ton of money.
In this case, that
potential’s not even there.
I’m fucking useless.
Three Japanese men.
Age 69, nice.
70, and 80, I shouldn’t
do that job, that’s dumb.
All right, I can’t help it.
That joke has now been drilled into me.
Three men, age 69,
70, and 88, met in prison
and they decided that
once they get out of
prison, they were going
to team up and rob houses.
They had a name.
I love when the police
give criminals nicknames.
These were the G3S.
So in Japanese, if you put those sounds
together, it sounds like grandpas, basically.
So the police were calling the grandpas
and they came up with an
essentially an acronym for them.
This is how far they’d gone.
That’s kind of awesome.
In May, they robbed a
house and they got 200 yen.
200 yen is less than $2 at
the current exchange rate.
They did also get three bottles of whiskey
that worth about 10,000
yen or something like that.
So they went off, they didn’t have any
money, but they had some party time.
Then in June, a month
later, they robbed a house
and they got jewelry
worth about a million yen.
So this is actually a real score.
So those are the two we
know of for sure at the moment.
They are suspected in 10 other burglaries.
So maybe this actually was a very
profitable thing that they were doing.
So as opposed to the
previous story I just did
where I talked about a crime that seemed
to have no value for the criminal at all.
Million yen, I mean, that’s something.
You’re actually gonna
get something out of it.
They even had like what I considered
one of the flaws of most criminals.
These guys had a plan.
They were organized.
Unlike our racist restaurant.
These guys were organized.
So the 88 year old was the
burglar, which is, at first I’m like,
wow, so the oldest guy is gonna go in and
like rummage around the house and stuff.
But maybe that’s what he was sort
of, he could do, he was known for.
The 70 year old was the driver.
So he waited outside in the
car so the 88 year old could,
I was about to say run,
hustle as best he could out of
the house, jump in the car
and they could drive away.
The 69 year old, his job
was to sell the stolen goods.
So this is it.
They had a system, they had an organization,
they had a pattern, they had a plan,
which makes me think
that the other 10 robberies,
why it took 10 robberies
for them to get caught is
’cause they actually kind of
knew what they were doing.
They were actually
doing a good criminal job.
When they were arrested,
’cause there was security cameras,
this might have been something that
when they were back committing crimes
back in the day, security cameras
weren’t as much for the thing.
There were security
cameras on two instances,
which is how they
kind of started to figure
out there was more
than one person involved,
they were older men and
they started to put it together.
They were arrested, apparently they needed
physical support while being arrested.
So the police are there,
they’re arresting the guy.
They’re basically
partially carrying the guy
to get into the police car
because he’s so old and frail.
They ask for his motive.
Again, most of the time
we don’t get a motive,
so I’m very happy
when we get a motive.
The motive for the
crimes was to make a living.
So these are three older men.
They spent time in prison.
They probably couldn’t get jobs.
They’re probably not out of pension.
They need a way to live.
So they went back to what they knew.
They started committing crimes.
So the benefit is that they
get to go back to prison
where they get fed
and are clearly familiar.
And they can try to make a better plan
if they managed to live long
enough together in prison.
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