(upbeat music)
Last month, there was the
hug event for BTS members.
They had a woman, 50 year old Japanese
woman, went for the hug, it’s a paid event.
I looked into it, it was
basically there’s a BTS member
on stage, you walk up
to him, you say hello,
you have this like really
cursory hug, it’s really very fake.
And then you move on and you’re thrilled
that you got the opportunity
to touch a BTS member.
I assume.
This 50 year old Japanese
woman decided to take advantage
of her opportunity and she kissed
the BTS member on the neck.
Now this went viral in
Korea and South Korea.
Because of the reaction
the young man made facially.
So his face went viral,
’cause he kinda went,
’cause this woman
kissed him, which is not
the reaction you want
when you kiss somebody.
Like if I kiss somebody and then
they went, “Oh, that’d be pretty hurt.
” This is sexual assault though.
So I have, I’m torn with the
issue of your priming people.
So you have a thing for this guy.
You’ve paid money to
get into physical contact
with this guy, you’re
going to hug this guy,
he’s going to hug you, and of
course this is gonna happen.
I don’t wanna blame the victim.
Like true, if a man
kissed an idol on the
neck, I would be probably
far more incensed.
So this is showing some
of my very normative biases.
But I don’t think you
should be hugging people.
All these handshake events, the
hug events, all this kind of stuff.
I’m not really pro, this physical contact,
especially selling the physical contact.
That actually I think maybe
is what makes it worse.
Anyways, this is sexual assault.
Now in Korea, you can submit a claim
to the police even if you weren’t involved.
So if people saw it, they saw it online.
So all these people started submitting
these complaints to the police.
They’re like, please arrest this woman.
She committed sexual
assault on this member of BTS.
Let’s go.
The woman probably didn’t know she
was in trouble until she got back to Japan.
I’m betting she went to Korea
for the concert for that event.
Maybe stayed a day or two and then was out.
She was probably gone before the
police even opened the investigation.
Statement by the South
Korean police is that
if a suspect remains overseas
for two or more months,
it is impossible to investigate,
which is not impossible, it’s just hard.
Like you can’t go to
Japan if you’re a Korean
police officer and try
to investigate them.
But I’m betting this was a fairly low
priority for the South Korean police anyways.
Like, yeah, it’s pretty awful.
The guy, the BTS guy,
he didn’t put in the claim.
The other people did.
They’re like, we’d probably,
they’re on the lookout for.
They’ve probably flagged her passport.
She might not be able
to re-enter South Korea.
I mean, if I’m being really honest, that
might be the biggest fallout from this.
She’s not actually allowed
to go back to South Korea.
If she does try to go back to South
Korea, she might be arrested on the spot.
But they didn’t even like look for her.
They asked for her to turn herself in.
I think realistically, they probably
would have made her apologize.
I don’t know if that’s okay or not, okay.
I’m really torn.
I don’t like these events.
I don’t like this, like
the concepts, I guess.
I feel like you shouldn’t be doing this.
I don’t think it’s worse
when it’s the teenage girl
idols and the creepy dudes
who hand-shaken stuff.
That’s just really off-putting.
I essentially just disapprove.
You need better security for these things.
And you shouldn’t be setting
them up like this in the first place.
(upbeat music)
Another update, Sukiya.
The mouse laden miso
soup of last week’s story.
So it was a couple of
months ago this happened.
But it didn’t get released until later.
And everyone freaked out fair enough.
I mean, there was a
mouse found in miso soup.
I did like the transition
’cause originally it was mouse
and then it transitioned
to rat very quickly.
It may have been a rat, I don’t know.
But that’s the whole point is
just watching the news cycle
try to make more drama in the story
so that more people will click on it.
So more clickbaity.
So if it’s like mouse is in your miso’s bed
or rat in your miso’s way worse.
So let’s change it to rat.
Things like that.
I noticed things like that because I read
multiple versions of the same story now.
So I can see where the authors are adding
elements or dramaticizing it
so that they can get more clicks.
Well, they’ve had an unfortunate
follow up to their story.
This week, a cockroach
was found in some food.
They didn’t say what
food they were trying to,
maybe a little more vague on it or maybe,
so basically someone found a cockroach left
and then called and
complained about the restaurant.
And the company’s
like, we can’t survive this.
We gotta get this taken care of right away.
So they’re shutting down all the
stores and then doing like a deep clean
or trying to make sure
that there’s no rats,
no cockroach is nothing
in the restaurants.
Basically, every restaurant
was gonna be closed for one
day for a check, except for
the ones in shopping malls.
Now it’s not that those ones are cleaner.
I, you know, shopping mall food
is gonna be the cleanest food ever.
Now it’s the reality
is that they can’t close
the store for the shopping
mall, but they could.
But the reality is something
could come from the KFC
and X-Dore and crawl into
your food and it wouldn’t
really be Suki as fault but
Suki would still get blamed.
Or vice versa, Suki is a rodent and roach
problem might crawl into the KFC next door
and your new chicken nugget is special.
Please don’t think about that
while you’re eating junk food.
I hope you’re not eating
that kind of food right now
while I’m saying this because you may have
ruined your meal and I apologize for that.
But the reality is every time you put
something in your mouth, you are taking a risk.
The Imperial household is going
to launch a YouTube channel.
Last year, they started an Instagram
where they were posting thirst traps.
It was like the Empress and
booty shorts and the Emperor,
you know, with a shirt off
doing dead lifts, that kind of stuff.
It was, it’s awesome.
I mean, if you haven’t looked at it,
you should absolutely go check out
the Imperial household of Japan’s Instagram
page and just, just, you know, get horny.
This year, they’ve decided
that that wasn’t enough.
The income from that isn’t enough for them.
They have more media in them.
They are going to start a YouTube channel.
The YouTube channel is going
to include press conferences.
Nature walks around the palace.
And I’m assuming pranks galore.
That’s right.
It’s going to be the Emperor
pulling down the Empress’s pants.
It’s going to be putting flower
in the Empress’s blow dryer.
So when she blows her head at all, it
gets all turns white on, it’s crazy stuff.
There’s a prince in there somewhere.
I don’t know what he’s going to
do, but I’m looking forward to it
because press conferences
sound really boring
and nature walks around
the Imperial Palace.
That’s very nice, but I don’t
imagine myself watching it
until we get some
pranks, just a prank, bro.
This week, because this story includes AI,
it just dominated the headlines
for the last like three days.
So deep A, I open AI.
The names of all the AI’s are very similar.
So anyways, Chachi
BT is what it’s actually is.
Started doing image.
So we have other image
and things where it’s
like you type in your
image you want it to make.
It makes the image, it’s really cool.
And it ruins the lives
of artists everywhere.
Well, open AI couldn’t be left in
the dust, couldn’t be left behind.
They created an image generator.
And one of the styles you
can do is a jibbly style image.
And this apparently has
overwhelmed the servers.
Like the guy who runs it,
Mr. Open AI, chat, Mr. GPT.
He said Tim Apple, I actually
probably have his name
written down and then I
now am refusing to say it.
And even if I could remember
it right now, I would not say it.
He was saying that there
were so many people generating
jibbly style pieces
of art, that it was like
melting their servers,
melting their CPU.
So they actually were
going to put a limit on it.
They were going to make
sure that people didn’t go crazy.
But that means this is
now flooded the internet.
Now, this is taken on because
me asaki, the guy who created
essentially the very noticeable
jibbly style of art, he hates AI.
They keep cutting to a clip where
he’s talking about how disgusting AI is.
But that’s actually out
of context a little bit.
So there’s this clip that
goes around with this
because he’s like, oh,
this lacks humanity.
And I would rather die
than see this and stuff.
These guys were doing
a presentation for him.
And they had an AI basically take a
structure and try to learn how to walk.
So it was walking in this
really awkward, creepy way.
And they were saying
like, if for your animation,
you could use animation like
this for the monsters and whatnot.
And then he got really offended.
And he actually was relating
it to a friend of his who
has physical difficulties of some
sort and who isn’t able to walk.
And he’s like, I wonder how
he would feel if he felt saw this.
I wonder, like, and
then he actually took it
off in his very honestly
unrelated direction.
But they’re taking that out of context.
So it’s kind of related, but it’s sort of,
I don’t know, I wouldn’t say
tangential, but more like parallel.
What he’s talking about is parallel
to what they’re actually
talking about in these news
stories, but they take
the clip and they put it in.
So this is sort of your media awareness.
I’m sure me as Aki actually hates the
idea of AI and art and things like that.
But the clip they’re showing
of him getting really angry
at these poor guys who
are really uncomfortable,
who are just presenting some
technology they had created.
This is about five, six years
ago before the whole AI boom.
That’s not actually
what he’s talking about.
He’s talking about this thing
you’ve made is like grotesque.
And I don’t think it has
any place in this sort
of the hopeful animation art style that I
try to create when I’m making my stories.
So that’s something to be aware
of if you read one of those stories,
not from an engineer’s Japan,
where they’re not going to
give you that excellent piece
of background information.
Yeah, the CEO of OpenAI,
he changed his profile pick
to a jibbly style version of his own face,
which is showing that even he’s like aware
of the actual distinct
style that’s being created.
Now the problem is the
argument about AI in the first place.
How did OpenAI learn
to make jibbly style art,
if it did not take jibbly
style art and learn
from it directly, which
is copyright violation?
This is kind of the problem
they’ve been talking about.
Like so clearly jibbly art
has been fed into this open AI.
Open AI is taking it and learned from it.
That’s okay.
What they’re supposed to do, but they didn’t
pay jibbly for the art that they used.
They didn’t ask if it was
okay to use this version.
They just went ahead and did it.
This is going to probably be a lawsuit.
Like if anyone’s going to sue
them, jibbly probably could do it
and could probably do it
successfully because I don’t know
if they’ve copy written the
style, but it is very distinct.
And it is every movie they
do has the very similar style.
Miyazaki is also quite famously a hardass.
So when they took, uh, I
forget what movie it was,
one of the older ones,
Mononoke, maybe they took one
of the jibbly movies and they
were going to release it in America
and Harvey Weinstein wanted to
cut it down to make it a little shorter.
He’s like, you know, all this is like
stupid emotion shit that you got in there.
Let’s cut some of that
out, make it a shorter movie.
It’ll grade it’ll fit better into
sort of the slots for the movies.
We maybe show more movies during the day.
It was that kind of like fiscal version
of movie making that Harvey Weinstein
would be on the side
of Miyazaki sent him a
samurai sword with a
single note that said no cuts.
And that is kind of a
threat that I will stab
you with a sword if you
try to cut up my movie.
So he is a bit of a hardass.
And again, he was just looking at a
technical presentation from some guys
and he went in them about how
inhumane it was and he was really awful.
He was actually really
awful to them because
he could’ve just said
this isn’t really for me.
I don’t really like this.
It doesn’t really apply
to what I would like
to do with my company
or my art and move on.
He didn’t.
He like reamed them
for how gross it was and
everyone was very uncomfortable in the
room and it was weirdly quite fun to watch.
Auto thefts are on the rise for
the third year in the row in Japan.
So in 2024 there were 6,080
auto thefts that’s up 318 from 2023.
Most of these cars do
not get like resold in Japan.
This is actually one of the more interesting
things I found about car theft in Japan
is what they do is they take the car and
they put it on a boat and they’ll take it
to like Vietnam or Cambodia or some
other country and they’ll resell the car
or they’ll break it down
into parts and then ship
it off to another country
and then rebuild it.
And the most popular car is to steal.
Like you would think
it was fancy luxury cars
mostly but actually it’s
like mini vans and stuff
more utilitarian things
because again they’re
going to sort of these
developing nations
and they want to sell them stuff they can
use so a mini van is far, far more useful
in a third world country than like a sports
car when you’re on dirt roads all the time
and what you really
need to do is transport
people to a worksite
or something like that.
Most of the thefts quite
sensibly are around Tokyo
and one of the biggest
problems is the technology
they’re using they’re
saying in three minutes
they now have this
basically car remote hacker
and it can like unlock
your car and start the
engine then they can
drive it away with that.
They can then you know copy the
key or remake the key or something.
So basically it’s all being
done with computers now.
It’s not like a cool guy
runs up and he jacks
the window and then
gets in the car and like
rubs two wires together
and starts the car.
Now it’s a very nerdy
doing on a laptop or
something and he unlocks
the car from a distance
using Wi-Fi and then
they get in and they drive
away and again they’re
driving it to a port
and this is in Aichi
this middle part of Japan
where the Toyota city is which was
actually created by Toyota the company.
There’s a lot of car
thefts there because
being a port city they
can actually steal the
car get it into a boat
really quick and then
get it out of the port and
on its way to its destination.
I don’t know how many
cars they put on a boat
but I’m assuming it’s a
lot which is this is like work.
Apparently in IT there are a lot
of luxury cars on the road which
is the ones they can sell to
China and other places like that.
So while I was saying
that isn’t the primary
target it is still a
target there are still
people who want to buy
expensive stolen cars and 2024 44.
1% of the cars were
not found or recovered.
So basically because
they’re being shipped out
to other countries
because they’re disappearing
from the country the
police aren’t able to
find them and again
they’re probably gone that
night or the next day like gone from the
country you will never see your car again.
So if you’re in Japan you
have a car please be careful.
We’ve covered a lot of
arrests on the Indonesia
pan we covered a lot of crimes and we’ve
covered a lot of like what you would call
almost meaningless crimes or
petty crimes or things like that.
This is an interesting one
because this woman was arrested
for taking 160 free items
from a convenience store.
So she basically walked into a convenience
store there’s the self-serve coffee machine
so you usually go to the clerk and you buy
a cup you take that cup and then you would
go to the machine you fill up the coffee
and you take like your creamer you put that
in and pay some sugar whatever
you like you put it in there.
That all those sort of condiment
style things those are free.
She walked in she didn’t buy coffee she had
a backpack she just started taking those
things and filling up her backpack so sugar
and creamers and everything else the like
cup syrup stuff which is I guess
sugar but not sugar I don’t know
I don’t drink coffee so none
of this is really familiar to me.
The total cost of the
160 item stolen was 345
yen so we’re talking
about like three dollars
maybe total but and again it’s the moral is
kind of the issue do you just let this go.
So this clerk went
over and he’s like oh all
the creamers and
sugars and stuff are gone
but we haven’t sold
that much coffee so they
checked the video
camera and they’re like
oh there’s that woman
with a backpack she just
stole it all to be let
it go so they called
the police I don’t know
how enthusiastic they
were like yeah this
lady just stole a bunch
of free stuff that’s not
actually okay they went
and found her picked her
up and she got arrested.
Japanese politicians
are weird now normally I
talk about the old men
normally I talk about
the old men politicians
who say something
gross and when I read
the first half of this
story my mind was oh this is going to be
an older Japanese politician he’s going to
be like in the 70s he’s
really gross he’s out
of touch and then it
turns out it’s a woman
talking to another woman which really sort
of turned it the element so my expectations
were under mine which
is a good thing I guess
so I guess women can
just be just as weird
and creepy as men
which equality I suppose
on March 24th they had
a house of counselors
committee on education
we’re meeting and
they were trying to
how to calculate teachers
over time this is very
important teachers in
Japan do a lot of unpaid
overtime they have breaks
that are unpaid they
do like school activities
as sometimes unpaid and they’re like you
know these people are working fifty sixty
seventy hours a week
but they’re only getting
paid thirty forty hours that’s not right we
have to calculate overtime what counts as
work and not work is
it volunteer should we
expect people to
volunteer stuff it’s a very
important thing Japan
doesn’t have enough teachers
so you need to make
teaching more appealing
and paying them for all
their hours is probably
going to be step one
to making more appealing
counselor stood up said
made some statements
and was very angry and
then another one replied
with I can clearly
understand that committee
member Kita has gotten angry with a truly
beautiful face which is weird I mean it’s
just a weird thing to
say like what does that
have to do with the other bit and why are
you saying it and so again my first thought
was seventy year old
creepy man saying that
like a thirty year old
forty year old counselor
member is beautiful
in his old creepy way
trying to put her down
but trying to compliment
her at the same time because he’s socially
unaware not capable something like that not
turns out this is
essentially an equal and
then it the question
of why like the old men
saying it I can’t understand the group in
a different time they grew up when saying
gross stuff was acceptable they never grew
out of that they never understood the world
has changed but this
is not that this is like
someone who is an
equivalency saying this
is weird creepy thing to
them and then of course
there was a media
protest the the kita said
like hey what is my
face after do it why are
you talking about my
body is inappropriate
of course later there
was the very standard
apology it’s weird cuz
when you call someone
beautiful do you
retract the statement do
you like cuz that’s the
classic Japanese one
as I retract my statement
but I yeah you know
I retract my statement
she’s not beautiful
like what do I say it
that so it’s really weird
I was very standard apology like I shouldn’t
know said that it was inappropriate I’m
sorry for the stress I
caused blah blah blah
when asked about her
intent which is again
the only thing I wanted
answered the response
was there were there was not much intention
which again begs the question of if there
wasn’t much intention why
did you do it in the first place
it just does that head right resting
next to the microphone this guy okay