so you may have missed me you may not have you may not have noticed i was gone
but over the summer vacation in japan i didn’t do anything there’s a lot of changes at home
and one of the things i did was sort of reassess the podcasting because i’m paying for hosting
i’m paying for domain names and other stuff i’m not really making any money off the podcast now i
don’t really care about not making money but i have to care about spending money on something i
get no return on so i will be making some format changes i am after this episode going to roll
ninja news japan into the same feed as cmcb now you as the listener might not have to do anything
so basically what’s going to happen is maybe in a week or two your podcast catcher is going to
search for ninja news japan it will be automatically redirected to the new feed now the new feed is
going to have cmcb and ninja news japan in it and if i come off with a side idea or just want to try
something or do something it’s all going to just be in the one feed so my recommendation is if you’re
not interested in cmcb just skip those episodes uh i would actually prefer if you gave them a shot
i mean they’re pretty good they’ve actually been improving since uh jordan and i have been started
talking to each other but again i can’t some people are here for the news now the people who
listen to cmcb they’re having the same problem maybe they don’t care about the ninja news japan
episodes someone’s not going to be happy i mean that’s really the short version and i know it but
i pay for hosting and i don’t want to pay for that anymore so i found a free host that would do like
one feed i can redirect everything over to there i’m not going to hold myself to a strict schedule so
see ninja news japan might be just when there’s interesting stories might be once a month might
be twice a month i don’t know yet because i’m trying to balance out like five different projects
i want to do and i want to do all of them which means i have to commit to doing a little bit of
everything as opposed to just one thing i don’t know it’s it’s the it’s the problem of having many
things you want to try and many things you want to do and just not having the time to do everything
you want because the ideal the dream for me would be monday this podcast tuesday write on a book
wednesday just do experiments make t -shirts or something like that like learn graphic design
a day for learning i’m trying to learn how to uh get this ai thing to post links automatically
because i’m really bad at social media and i keep forgetting or missing certain spaces where people
could be notified about like i just went live i don’t know if anyone got a notification for it
and so hopefully ai can do that for me it’s the only thing i can see ai being useful for
me in my life would be doing the dirty work i don’t want to do begging for people to come and
listen to my stupid voice and thoughts stupid voice and stupid thoughts i don’t want to make
those mutually exclusive exclusive yeah so there’s going to be changes coming up i did want to make
sure there was a final clean ninja news japan on its own feed so that anyone who does listen to it
they want to get super upset they can just quit i don’t know i’m making it as easy as possible for
people to abandon the podcast i’m not doing that but i i just i think i have a sense of understanding
of like people don’t like change and so i’m i’m prepping you that there is going to be a change but
i think the change will be better in the long run i think the ninja news japan episodes will be more
focused the problem i’ve been running with an engine japan we’re like 370 some episodes so we’re
talking like six years seven years maybe more you do about 50 episodes a year i think i’ve said
everything i can about the stories that come up regularly like the stealing panties off someone’s
balcony and then they go to the guy’s house and he’s got like a million bags of like vacuum -packed
panties i had a lot to say the first time i read that story i don’t have a lot to say about it anymore
except the same thing i said before so my natural instinct is well i’m not going to talk about that
but then how picky am i going to be about the news so that’s the problem is i want to talk about
the stuff that is interesting different culturally appropriate as opposed to just doing the same
almost clickbaity story over and over again hoping people see the word panties and then like want to
listen to the podcast it’s integrity but it’s integrity is actually a great way to not get people
to listen to your stuff if i’m being really honest so we’re going to do this episode it’s going to be
lovely uh i’ve chosen some great stories over because i’ve had three weeks of stories to choose
from so i’ve chosen the ones that i was most interested in that i would like to dig into a
little more detail hopefully you feel the same way hopefully you come with me on the ride to the new
podcast channel because you don’t have to do anything i also was thinking about like deleting all the
youtube videos all the old ones because nobody watches them but i was like uh yeah the people who do
seo and stuff are like well it’s better to have it there in case one takes off i don’t see that as being
a realistic thing like do you want to watch a video five for this five years old about news that
was happening five years ago i don’t think so so i think that should be rotated out after a while as
well is irrelevant this is just some of the stuff that was going on uh in my life over the last three
weeks because of big holiday stuff and yeah i need to reorganize my life it’s something you should do
every now and then as well sit down and go like is there anything i want to change anything i want to do
more anything i want to do less i want to keep doing podcasts i love doing podcasts i want them
to be better so i don’t want to get any feeling of burnout or lag or redundancy in my efforts so
that’s just to put that right up front you could stop and just not listen to the rest of this episode
this is a the very weird chunk of beef chest attitude towards telling people stuff is like you don’t
have to do anything you don’t have to listen you don’t have to join you don’t have to but i have a
lot of projects i’m working on and i want to spend a fair amount of time on all of them which means
reducing some of the stuff that takes the most time the japanese air self -defense force so this is
like the air force for japan uh they have a mascot i didn’t know about but it’s actually been retired
he was retired i think in two years ago in 2024 uh it is odd looking it’s a furry looking anime cat boy
so we had a story a couple months ago and it was like an ai generated elephant with a machine gun
that this like unit used as their patch but they ended up not using it because it was you know
weirdly offensive furry cat boy that doesn’t match my image of the air force either so i think there’s a
real balance issue going on with the people who are designing these like mascots and logos but this
cat boy called omaneko was apparently very popular they did in recruiting posters commercials all this
other stuff and anime is a great way to communicate to people in japan they are just very attuned to it
it’s just a really natural way make a cute character communicate to the your audience with a cute character
everybody’s happy but maybe you were really into omaneko and you were really into
the cat boy that represented the air self -defense force in japan well he’s not gone because they
are making a figurine that you can buy so this is going to be like a figure it’s going to be poseable
and stuff uh what does it come with it comes with a rifle boots camo jacket digital camo jacket and
it’s like a sky color it’s all sort of blue themed because it’s the air force uh digital camo my
understanding is it’s actually been proven to not be very good but i don’t know it’s just internet
news so i don’t know if that’s true they will have four faces you can show so face plates you
could pull off and put on so you have four expressions to choose from and seven different
hands so they’re holding things doing peace symbol i don’t know what else they actually do
for the figurine it will cost 9 460 yen but you can only buy it if you’re in japan so i could buy when
you need a person in japan’s residency to send it to so these are going on sale they’re pre -ordering
now so if you would like one if you would like your omaneko figurine if you send me i should make
see like here you go this is integrity i’m not trying to make a profit off this but then my first
i was like oh maybe i can provide a service i could order it for people send it to my house and then if
you send me your address i’ll send it to you and i’m like immediately didn’t think about making a profit
but yeah if it’s 10 000 yen i would also have to pay postage so you’re gonna have to cover the
postage of course i’m not gonna like pay for your postage for your figurine throw me a thousand
yen two thousand yen ten percent markup that seems pretty good i mean i’d be willing to do that it’s
if it just comes to my house i just have to repackage it and send it on again that’s not too much work
for me so i’d be willing to do that so uh you can send me a message on all the channels or you can
send a message to chucklebeefchest at gmail .com if you want an omaneko figurine 10 000 yen plus whatever
we work out with postage and a little bump up for me uh and there’s my new business is scalping
figurines i wouldn’t be doing that i would not again integrity it’s going to be the new catchphrase
of new japan we have integrity that’s why it’s boring but um
yeah i would be i would order one and get it for you if i can uh they might put a restriction on it so
it’d be like maybe only one per household i could probably get two or three sending to my friend’s
houses but i mean i don’t think anyone’s going to take me up on this offer because it’s a weird
little furry cat boy but there might be the one person out there who wants it uh send a message
and i’ll uh try to do that for you there’s a story that’s come up dozens of times over the last few
weeks the temperature in japan has gone insane uh the office i work in the air conditioner broke the
other day right when we were coming back from the holiday and it was just like it was hotter in the
room than it was outside it was muggier in the room it was like like people say it’s like going
into a sauna as an expression this was literally like going into a sauna like you felt the hot wet
air hit your face when you went into the room you immediately started sweating it was disgusting
i’m all i can do is hope they fix that right away one of the things they did in japan was like hey
maybe companies should allow people to wear shorts to work and then immediately came up with
sunnehara which is hair leg harassment and so the idea is that men’s leg hair is so disgusting it
feels like harassment to the people around them they don’t want to see it they shouldn’t have to
see it so by seeing that disgusting element of your body that’s a form of harassment the harassments
in japan they’ve gotten out of hand like it’s actually now anything that happens becomes some kind
of harassment but this like most internet things a lot of internet stuff you hear about japan
it’s not a real thing because i didn’t hear anyone else talking about sunnehara unless they
were referring to a news story they read online and a lot of people were making jokes about it but
i never actually heard someone say like yes i would find the idea of looking at a man’s legs in
the office so disgusting i would consider that harassment the question is where did this come from
so like chicken at christmas in japan it doesn’t actually work the way you thought it did so what
happened in the 1970s is kfc did a big promotion around christmas saying like hey buy your christmas
chicken kentucky fried chicken for the holiday and that became a thing in japan it became a very
successful advertising campaign and now people grow up with having chicken usually kentucky fried
chicken quite regularly at christmas and they think it’s a almost universal tradition even though
it’s a very localized thing in japan and it’s actually the result of an advertising campaign like
valentine’s day or any of these other holidays that were made up by companies who wanted to sell you
something this came about a waxing body waxing company did an advertising campaign and they coined
the term sunnehara saying if you’re going to show your legs in japan if you’re going to wear shorts
into the office you don’t want to harass the people around you with your disgusting hairy legs
you should get them waxed and we just happened to provide that service so that’s where the term came
from but did anyone actually ever complain about sunnehara a survey of 300 people found that seven
percent said uh shorts are okay the other 93 said i would prefer if people didn’t wear shorts but that
doesn’t mean they were calling it harassment so that’s the actual problem is there’s yeah not many
people are too fond of the idea of other people wearing shorts in the office they just think i mean
let’s face it if everyone wears pants every day for the last 10 generations they’re going to think
you’re supposed to wear pants that’s how it is one of my favorite websites bengoshi .com they looked at
the same thing and they said like is this harassment well showing your legs is not harassment because
women can wear shorter skirts they don’t necessarily have to shave their legs i think it is a cultural
thing that most women if they were going to show off their legs would shave their legs it’s again a
cultural expectation that’s pretty normal men don’t have the same cultural expectation but you can see
they’re also expected to wear pants most of the time so it’s not an issue so you sit this sort of
weird back and forth yes there’s double standards i’m not actually saying one’s right or wrong i think
if you don’t want to shave your legs you shouldn’t have to shave your legs i think if you want to wear
shorts you should wear shorts i’m very free in my ideas but i do like the sort of social idea of
how did this actually come to be is it actually an issue because it doesn’t actually seem like any
point did anyone say this feels like harassment other than this company that was trying to sell you a
waxing service so what happened is the bbc they talked about this issue wearing shorts in
the office uh and then they put in the title a click baity title saying sunay hada or leg hair
harassment or something like that people on twitter picked it up they didn’t read the article which was
actually explaining kind of a lot of the stuff i’m just explaining uh and they took all the stuff out
and they they took all the context out and said like japanese women are freaking out over sunay hada
in the office now that japanese men are allowed to wear shorts which 90 of that is inaccurate but it
makes a way better twitter post that people then can react to like oh men’s leg hair is disgusting oh
they should be allowed to wear what they want let’s fight now so then the fight happens and you get lots
of engagement no actual person has claimed sunay hada as an actual thing uh i know this is very
similar to something that just last week i heard about was nipple harassment and this is men wearing
tight shirts so that you can see their nipples and they and some women find that disgusting and they
were trying to equate it but i could see the immediate articles started talking about nipple harassment
no one actually said that i think the women were saying like this is an unappealing thing uh your
nipples are not very attractive i don’t want to see your nipples and then they were like well i need
to blow this up to be bigger to get some engagement on the internet so i’m going to call it nipple
harassment because that gets a lot of traction in japan and that became a story but that one didn’t get
picked up by anybody so it didn’t last very long so while sunay hada leg hair harassment has like
been in the news regularly for the last three or four weeks nipple harassment came and went in about two
days so it’s really just a case of does it pick it up does it get picked up is it popular is it
interesting to talk about is it a weird japanese thing because there’s so many weird japanese wacky
japan stories which is how i started ninja news japan if i’m being really honest because there was a lot
of weird news coming out of japan because it’s a different culture so it’s very interesting but
now i’m getting more into the reality of all this stuff where they make these grandiose statements that
turn out to be basically not true yes there is an element of truth but it’s just not how it works
in real life and you should get used to that’s how it is on the internet
a woman was arrested she placed over 2 000 online orders with zero intention of actually
paying for or getting the items so she spent a year buying stuff from this anime company
manga company and she spent she technically bought 27 million yens worth of product but didn’t actually
pick any of it up uh didn’t actually accept any of it and the way she got around it was you can in
japan so maybe i live in an apartment uh i don’t have i don’t trust my mailbox or i’m going to get a
big package i can actually have it sent to a nearby convenience store and then when it arrives i will go to
the convenience store i’ll show them my receipt they will give me my package i’ll pay them whatever i
need to pay them maybe some postage or maybe nothing at all because it’s included in the actual
service i haven’t actually used it which is why i don’t really know the details too much
but if you don’t show up and pick up the item after x amount of days they just send it back to the
company that you bought it from so it’s returned and you don’t actually have to do anything so this
woman was ordering stuff to the convenience store and then just forgetting about it not picking it up
but the company has to like if you think about the logistics has to send it to the convenience store
has to have it sent back that costs money so they’re trying to say like she’s ordered so much
stuff 27 million oh it was 27 million dollars not 27 million yen like 27 million yen still a lot of yen
but in dollars that’s way way more money that’s we’re talking like billions of yen that she’s actually
spent so she must be buying like rare manga or stuff that’s limited edition and stuff like that
she would uh do cash on delivery and then not pay the cash so the postman would have to just
take it back she had over 238 different accounts so that she could place the 2 000 orders because
i’m sure her accounts would get banned she would start a new one account would get banned she would
start a new one account would get banned and on and on and on infinite in infinitum they’re estimating
that the logistics cost up to 7 .5 million yen alone they lost sales because some items were listed as
not available when they actually should have been available because they were not because they were sent
out to the convenience store and then never actually picked up but that means they couldn’t sell it to
someone else who actually might want to buy it so the 7 .5 million yen would have been delivery costs
for sending it and they have it sent back but then there’s another layer of invisible loss to the
company on top of that where they don’t actually get to sell the item to someone who actually would
have bought it give them the money and actually kept it the woman said this is the most japanese excuse
ever that she did this because of stress and she felt a lot of satisfaction ordering items online
this is considered obstruction of business
and of course she was arrested and it’ll be interesting to see if she gets in trouble how much
trouble she actually gets in because i don’t see them doing jail time maybe some fines maybe she has to
pay she has to pay back the 7 .5 million yen that is a lot of money for a individual to pay back
but i think that actually might be fair and she might stop doing it there is a website that came
out just quite recently that you could go and it sort of mimicked an online retailer and you could
you never spent any money you just pretend to buy stuff you never put in a credit card and you get sort
of the satisfaction of buying stuff without actually losing any money or causing trouble to another
company like this so it means you don’t get arrested so this seems like the actual website designed
for this kind of person who gets a certain satisfaction from buying stuff on the internet
but if you knew it was fake would it still be satisfying i don’t suffer from this kind of stress
so i don’t know the answer like if you knew it was not real would it be the same because i get my
feeling is that it wouldn’t be a former world boxing champion he got married back in 2002
he got married back in 2015 uh and it didn’t really go well well they weren’t well suited for each
other so they separated pretty quickly uh by 2022 they were living apart but they were still
technically married the woman the wife in this case did not want to get divorced because she wanted
if something happened to him she would get all his money he is a world champion so i don’t know how
much money he has but he runs a gym he’s probably got like the the money from the purse of the fights
he’s won so he’s probably well off the boxer moved in with his mistress slash model slash receptionist
so you know that’s a very natural progression that you uh have a receptionist who’s really hot in
your gym and he’s got he’s paying the money so they they shack up together but they are together
from about 2022 so they’ve been together for quite a few years but not married because they’re still
not divorced so they can’t get married although they can live together so he desperately wanted
his mistress to get his assets if he died or something happened to him he’s in his 50s
she’s 20 something so there’s a big age difference so he’s actually thinking about
end of life stuff where she’s thinking about beginning of life stuff and he’s trying to take
care of her his wife refused divorce we don’t really know if it was malicious it seems like she
wanted more money from him so if they got divorced she wouldn’t get the money so he came up with a
scheme and boxers get hit in the head a lot so that might be one of the first indications of how
this scheme kind of went wrong he wanted his apparent he wanted his parents to adopt his
mistress which would make his mistress his adoptive sister and that way if something happened to him
he’d be leaving it to a family member and it would be very difficult to contest versus it goes to his
ex -wife because she’s his ex -wife uh i guess not ex -wife it goes to his wife because they’re still
married that didn’t work out or he wasn’t confident enough so then he decided he would adopt her himself
which means he would be living and sleeping with his own daughter she’s adoptive but still his own
daughter but that also meant that his wife who have not divorced with whom he has not divorced would
also be an adoptive parent very technically through marriage so on the adoption form he forged her
signature so the wife found out that someone was going around using the same last name so she went
to the national register which is i think very public and she got the information she could get
his information very easily because she is his wife found out that she had apparently adopted a daughter
that she was unaware of and then said look this isn’t my signature i didn’t sign this and then he gets
in trouble the irony is that the divorce was finalized about a month after he had attempted to
falsely adopt his mistress and make his daughter his lover i’m getting more confused as i say this
uh but the irony is it he if he had just waited another month they actually divorce would have been
finalized and then he could just married his mistress and made her his legitimate wife and there
wouldn’t have been any problem at all there was like an official in akita and he he was dedicated
to his job i mean that’s really important uh akita wanted to get a new data center one of these giant
billion yen data centers that everyone hates but it’s can be good for the economy there’s building
there’s jobs there’s all that kind of stuff and he’s dedicated so he is refusing to miss a press
conference that he’s supposed to be a part of but he joins the press conference via zoom and he says
look i’m at home uh we’ll zoom in i’ll tell you about the data center and what i want to do with it
for people or stuff i don’t know uh and you know i’m wearing very casual clothes so i don’t want to
turn my camera on after a while one of his colleagues is like dude you gotta turn your
camera on you’re you’re talking about the data center and stuff you need to turn your camera on
so we can see your face now he’s wearing a bathrobe so maybe he’s had a very relaxing bath with his wife
because there’s a person in the background who’s also wearing a bathrobe so they’ve had sort of a
maybe a very luscious morning or afternoon they didn’t actually say what time of the day this was
it’s my day off i’m hanging out in a bathrobe with my wife nothing wrong with that
then someone took a look at sort of the background now there’s people watching this
and uh the video went online and someone said you know that wallpaper doesn’t look like normal house
wallpaper like you can see in the room i’m in very boring white wallpaper uh you can’t really see that
wall very well there’s like palm fronds on it i actually hate that i was going to cover it up with
soundproofing but this is not worth the money or the effort but more just to have this complete black
aesthetic is actually what i was thinking of but there is a place where this sort of
very outlandish uh wallpaper gets used very regularly and those would be love hotels
so the question then suddenly became is this politician doing a zoom meeting sort of press
conference from a love hotel with his wife but if he’s with his wife why would he go to a love hotel
when they could just behave that way at home so now the question is is he doing a press conference
from a love hotel with his mistress in the background and is that a good idea well let me tell you it’s
not of course because it’s easily verifiable you could actually go into the guy’s house and see if
the wallpaper is the same uh you can maybe if you frequent enough love hotels you actually could
recognize the style love hotel rooms do have a distinct style if you’ve ever been in one that feeling
is similar across all of them there’s an aesthetic that they use then someone’s like look i’m gonna
call your house if you don’t come clean with what’s going on right now and he had to admit that he was
at a love hotel with his mistress he was demoted and got a six month suspension uh and then he probably
had to go home and tell his wife why he was suspended for six months uh if she didn’t hear the story directly
and that’s got to be a really rough day so plans are a very weird thing in japan i’ve never been to one
so i’m never gonna go to one uh what it is is you go in it’s usually directed towards men and you get
a massage and it’s like you get like oil or sort of a lotion massage and the videos you’ll see the the
documentaries life videos you see on the internet generally have a nude or near nude woman rubbing her
body up and down on you and that’s the uh nude nude massage if you want to look up that category
i i never saw that as being good i the thing is i’m always got a certain amount of physical pain
so i actually want a real massage and if i choose a masseuse i’m going to choose like the biggest man
with the biggest man hands there so that he can massage me properly so for me massage is not really
a sexual thing that often for me it’s it’s like a real pain relief thing to try to get my body back in order
but this is a very popular thing now people will tell you the the massage ends in intercourse of
some sort but then that seems a lot like prostitution you pay for something you get something else things
happen bodily fluids are exchanged exchange i don’t know uh but the way they get around this is
very gray so what happens is you pay for the massage and the idea is that the woman likes you so much
she has sex with you voluntarily so the sex part isn’t being paid for because that’s voluntary it’s
the massage is what you’re paying for and this very legally i think we all know that’s not true
very legally counts so that’s how these companies these soap and places have been able to basically keep
going year after year after year because they’ve been around for 30 40 50 years who knows now there is
the reason this became a story is a woman went to work she had a 39 degree celsius fever so that’s
like 102 degrees fahrenheit for american friends and uh she’s like look i’m sick i’m trying to tough it
out i’m going to it was a training thing i don’t know what kind of training you would actually do
because i don’t expect these to be professional masseuses because i think that’s why no one is going
there so i don’t know what they were training in maybe just like customer service that kind of thing
or how to make sure you get around the rules because that’s actually very important if you’re
actually running this business but then the person training them said like look you are clearly sick
you should go home so they went home but then someone else from the same soap line calls that’s
not acceptable you’re fired so they got fired so what does she do well she wants to get her revenge
because she was sent home by the person training her fair enough then she calls the police and she says
i didn’t have sex because i love my customers so much i ended up having sex with them because i was
getting paid and that was the whole thing and now the police can actually go in and arrest
they arrest the guy who’s running the soap land 55 year old man and that’s one of those things where
you realize you have to keep even if you’re angry at your employees if you’re doing something illegal
you got to keep everyone very happy because it only takes one person to flip to turn on you to ruin the
whole thing and that is exactly what happened because he was rude to one of his employees
a police box is a very common thing in japan it’s uh on corners and cities and stuff there are these
very tiny tiny police stations usually like a room in the front maybe one or two rooms in the back
they’ll have a meeting room and uh like a break room or something like that they’re not big buildings
they’re just everywhere so that the police are readily available to you in your town or city or
whatever there’s always police around they received an anonymous tip that a male in his 30s and a female in
her 20s were having inappropriate relationships at the police box because the police box only has
two three maybe four police officers in it at any time and they’re there almost 24 hours a day so
you know at night it’s sort of peak hours you might have the most people but when it gets quiet
you’re only gonna have one or two cops there they found out that they had boinked actually wrote boinked
uh in a room that was set up for the police officers to take naps they also had boinked in a room that was
the storage room uh and it also found out that they had had a relationship going back a couple of years
they’d worked together in a criminal division then they were both at the same police box and
he was married she was single but she knew he was married so they’re both kind of guilty of what
they’re doing here both apologized and then resigned uh and again that kind of relates back
to my previous statement if you’re going to do this kind of thing if you’re going to behave this kind
of way you have to make sure the people around you either don’t have a problem with it or you keep
them happy enough that they won’t say anything because the instant someone says anything it all falls apart