Okay, so we got almost the end of the Gassi saga.
So I keep saying I don’t want to talk about
Gassi anymore, but then something happens
that makes it vaguely interesting.
This time it’s pretty interesting.
And so the only final part will be if he
ever ends up back in Japan and actually has
like an interaction with the police.
So Gassi has been expelled from the government.
This is the first time this has happened in the last 72 years.
There were 236 votes cast, 235 people voted to get rid of Gassi.
The only holdout was a fellow party member,
which is pretty sad when you got like one
person who’s like standing up for you.
Then as soon as Gassi was expelled, the police went and started like putting
out warrants for his arrest.
The accusation is that he has swindled people
out of money claiming he could introduce
people to BTS.
So he’s running this kind of like weird, fame adjacent scam saying if you
give me X-Money Yen, I will introduce you to BTS.
On Thursday last week, police secured an arrest warrant for intimidating and
defaming celebrities.
So in a weird way, he was actually right.
He said, “I don’t want to come back to Japan because the police are going to
arrest me.”
We found out that if you are a member of the government and the government
is in session,
you actually can’t be arrested, which
I’m finding to be a very weird, weird rule.
Because government members… Check just
as if I call them bathrooms or washrooms.
I call them bathrooms.
I don’t know why, but yeah, I call them bathrooms.
In Japan, this is totally going to be off topic from the podcast.
In Japan, the toilets and the bathroom are separate rooms.
So in the West, when I had apartments and stuff, you would have like a
bathtub and a sink in a toilet all in one room.
I think that’s really, really normal.
That’s your bathroom.
In Japan, you have an actual room for just the bath and it’s got a shower
and the best part is you can spray water everywhere.
The whole room is the shower room.
Then in a separate room to that is a sink.
So that’s where you brush your teeth and stuff.
Then there’s a separate room that’s just a toilet.
In Japan, it makes way more sense to say toilet than bathroom because they
would actually different places in the house.
That’s a very valuable question though.
Do you call bathrooms washrooms?
I’ve said washrooms.
I think you say washrooms when you’re trying to be like more polite maybe.
So we found out that if you’re in the government, you cannot be arrested.
So as soon as the session was finished, as soon as the diet session was
finished, Gassy was going to get arrested.
So he was actually right.
And this was the most interesting bit to me is that he was right about what
he was saying.
They have confiscated his passport,
but they haven’t actually confiscated it.
They just nullified it because they didn’t take it away from it because they
didn’t see him.
And then they put him on the international wanted list.
So this got what I thought was going to be a weird little story about a guy
who was being
a politician from Dubai and is that going to work
out or not to now that he’s now an international.
criminal.
So when they see like when you watch a movie and they do interpool and they
have a list
and they have pictures of all the like
most wanted in the world, Gassy might be on
that now for realsies.
So he’s believed to have threatened three people and conducted one instance
of obstruction of business, which is Ninja News Japan’s favorite crime.
As we know, the party went from the anti-NHK
party to the politician girl’s 48 party.
They had a press conference with some of the
new members they were putting forward and
they’re all relatively attractive women.
So this is obvious their new platform and it makes it a little harder to
take them seriously as politicians.
The anti-NHK party was already a bit.
But now it’s like, oh, we’re just going to
put girls forward and see if you’ll just vote
for girls.
And since this is a real political party and with real reporters, the
reporter has asked
a couple like fairly not like hard-hitting
questions, but asking about taxes.
The lady politician they put forward goes, oh, that’s a tough question.
I’ll pass.
Getting sort of the level of quality of the politician they’re putting up.
I mean, it has nothing to do with gender.
It’s just they’re trying to use gender to get seats.
It’s dumb.
I mean, let’s face it, this whole party now is just one of the dumbest
things I think I’ve seen in Japan.
And yet weirdly, because they’re putting up a bunch of girls, it’s probably
going to work.
In 2022, so last year, 3.997 billion yen was turned into the police
lost and found in Tokyo.
Not all at once.
This is the entirety of the year.
So it could have been like 10,000 yen at the time.
3.997 billion yen, again, you do the quick math.
It’s like $4 million.
We’re actually lost and turned into the police.
So people in Japan, this is actually saying like, if you are going to drop
your wallet or
going to drop money anywhere in the world, Japan’s a pretty good place to do
it because they’re not just going to leave it there.
They’re going to pick it up and they’re
going to take us as a cops and turn it into
the cops.
We’ll try to get it back to you.
On that point, police managed to return 2.95 billion yen.
So let’s say it was $4 million, they managed to return about $3 million.
So there’s still a million dollars that essentially went missing because of
lost items.
The unclaimed money, so after the year, they hold it for an X amount of time
and then they just like, well, it’s our money now.
That claims money gets turned into the metropolitan government.
So if you lose your money in Japan, in Tokyo specifically, I guess, in this
case, and someone turns it in and
you don’t claim it, they don’t get it back.
The person who found the money doesn’t get to keep the money.
The money goes to the metropolitan government which is kind of a shaft.
I think I should get the money.
If I found the money and I’m a good person,
I turned it in and gave me the money.
I’m okay with that.
There were 3.43 million lost items turned in last year.
And that is up 21% for 2021.
Now, of course, last year we were in the throes of COVID.
It actually, the numbers have gone way down last yesterday.
They had 2,600 cases of COVID in Japan, the country.
And that is great because I used to be just one or two cities would have
that many easily.
So it’s not finished, but it has gone
way, way down, which I’m very happy about.
So this actually demonstrates the 21% increase of lost items and people
turning them into the
police means there are more people just doing stuff because you have to be
out of your house.
If you’re in your house all the time, you’re not really losing stuff and if
you do lose something in your house, it’s not getting turned into the cops.
So that’s neat because basically COVID meant there was less things lost and
less things turned into the police.
From 2015 to 2019, it was about 4 million items a year.
So Ron Track, weirdly, for pre-pandemic numbers of lost items in Tokyo for
the year, which is a good thing.
Oh, so they do this every year.
They do a survey of what kids want to be when they grow up.
And it’s always a bit shocking because of the attitude of children.
It’s always really weird because it’s Japan
and different countries because you ask a
kid where they want to be.
What did I want to be when I was a kid?
I wanted to be like space ranger.
I actually for years and years and years want to be a truck driver.
I really like trucks.
I think cowboy and cop were in there for a while.
They do this in Japan.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Boys uniformly want to be company employees.
Now last time I did this, which was last year I was making fun of because it
was like, hey little boy, what do you want to be when you grow up?
I want to be a businessman.
A businessman.
I want to be a businessman.
It’s a really weird thing to want to be because again, little kid’s concept
of businessman is not very realistic.
But junior high school and high school girls
also just wanted to be company employees.
Between elementary and middle school girls, they wanted to be manga artists,
which is pretty cool.
It’s artistic.
Scholar entered the top 10 for boys who were in high school in junior high
school and girls in high school.
I honestly don’t really know what a scholar is.
I guess that’s just like a lifetime student.
What is a scholar?
Because I think you have to be more specific.
But together young, their kids in high school and stuff, they might not
really know what scholars are.
I don’t.
I’m 50.
I have no clue what a scholar would be.
And that’s not really a job, is it?
I guess professor at university is, which is scholarly.
I’m not sure.
The comments on the Internet were interesting because some were lamenting
the lack of aspirations.
Because it’s like, when I was young, I wanted to be a rock star.
I wanted to be the number one.
I wanted to go to the Olympics.
I wanted to be the best dude in the world at something.
And they’re saying these Japanese
kids, they don’t have those kind of dreams.
They have, I want to find a good solid company and hunker down and be a
company employee for 40 years.
And then I want to retire and have no drama in my life.
And it’s not exciting and it’s not interesting.
But then a whole bunch of other people were saying, like, is it better to
have a dream that’s unattainable versus a dream that you could actually get?
So like, my real dream when I was younger was to be a writer.
I wanted to write novels.
I wanted to write books.
I wanted to do, you know, I wanted to
be like a cliche, pretentious artist type.
I wanted to write.
And I’ve always, I actually now, over the last decade or so, I actually have
done a lot of writing.
I’ve done writing.
I’ve written articles and stuff.
I did games, journalism, I did stuff like that.
Last year, I did Montana LDablo, which was a choose your own adventure,
which is something that had been in the back
of my head for years and years and years.
So I have achieved that goal, but not, of course, the way, the way you think
of it as a kid is I’m going to write books
and becoming internationally famous.
And like, people are going to want to get with me because I’m so smart and
artistic and famous.
But that’s not actually the reality.
A working writer though, I would be happy with that job.
So this is realistically a very attainable job.
So is that a bad thing?
Like you could grow up.
Oh, wait, wait, the whole point is I failed.
I never became the famous writer that I wanted to be.
The last episode of “Seeming Be,” I actually
talked about some of my exploits into trying.
to become a writer and the sheer volume of rejection you have to go through
to not succeed in the end is pretty hard.
Yeah, a lot of other people on the Internet when they were commenting on
this article, what
they were saying was like, isn’t it better to have a dream you could
actually achieve and then achieve your dream?
Because you get that sort of sense of accomplishment, like you’ve done the
thing you set out to do,
isn’t that better than saying, I want to
be a rock star and I can’t because there’s
so few people actually end up succeeding in their desires to be famous.
So I’m a little torn because I think young people should be aspirational.
But having an element of reality in there, so maybe I want to be a musician,
but you need if you understand what a working
musician is, like you make jingles for
commercials, you
do background music for videos and stuff, understanding the reality of it
means you could
get a job doing something you like, but realistically, I think would be
pretty appealing.
Because I did games journalism and it actually was, it had really good
points and really
bad points, but I was doing, I was playing video games and I was writing
which are two things I love to do.
I would be very happy to do that for the rest of my life.
And yeah, I’m not going to be like super famous
or international or anything, but it would
be a low key constant satisfaction, which I
think is what people sort of don’t think about.
It’s like, do I want to be super, super successful or nothing or would I
like to be happy, maybe to a lesser degree forever?
So Prime Minister Kishito, we’ve talked about birth rates in Japan.
The last year they had less than 800,000 babies.
It is the lowest number of babies born in
the country in years and years and years.
I think since World War II, since they actually started keeping track.
So this is a really big problem.
Because the population of the country, it just keeps diminishing.
So you have old people dying, you have not
enough babies being born to replace them.
That’s actually bad for the economy, it’s bad for the country, it just means
your culture may disappear.
So slowly Japanese people are going extinct.
And then you’ve got foreigners like me coming in and making half babies.
Oh my God, that’s not cool.
So Kishito sat down, he said, we have a plan.
We’re going to make a plan for increasing the birth rate.
And it’s going to be assistance to employers who encourage male staff to
take child care leave.
Last year, 14% of the people who were eligible to take child care leave
actually took it.
So most men in Japan traditionally don’t
take any time off when they have a baby.
But they’re thinking, we make them or help them take more time off.
They’ll be more likely to have a baby to share that sort of burden.
More support for freelancers and self-employed workers.
So yeah, if I am self-employed and I have to take off six months to a year
to have a baby
and raise the baby for the first year, I’m
not working that entire period which makes
I have zero income for that time.
Very going to inhibit my desire to have a baby.
What I wrote in my notes and my kind of point from the beginning has been
this doesn’t help you get people making babies.
This supports people who have babies.
So what are they actually going to do to get people to actually have babies
in the first place?
Because really the problem is people, modern people, and modern society do
not find the idea of having children appealing.
Because I don’t make enough money.
I can’t support myself.
I can’t support a family.
So it’s better for me to remain single.
And this has been going around for a long time.
So what they need to do, when I’ve said this a bunch of times, I’m actually
thinking of like not talking about this as much now.
What they need to do is actually change the entire culture of Japan so that
work is not at the forefront of everyone’s lives.
And that is going to be, I think, an impossibility.
And it’s the one thing they refuse to talk about.
Because men and women need time to spend
time with each other, to date, to go out, to
form a relationship so that they can then
get involved enough to actually want to have
a baby in the first place.
And all these financial systems and stuff.
These are great after you’ve had the baby.
But you have to put people in a position where they want to get together to
have a baby in the first place.
And that is the one thing they don’t want to talk about.
Because that would mean we don’t work 12 hour days anymore.
We don’t dedicate our entire lives to the
company like Japan has since World War II.
We change contract types so that people get
more free time and deep prioritizes work,
which is 100% against the current Japanese philosophy of life and existence.
Tattoos.
So I have a couple of tattoos.
I have one on my shoulder, one on my back, but they’re very small.
And that means that I cannot go to a public pool.
I cannot go to a public onsen with my tattoos exposed.
So I just wear one of those swimming jackets, rash guard things.
And they’re covered so no one says anything.
It’s fine.
Because you can actually tell there’s
the guys walking around with rash guard on.
Like I probably has tattoo.
So a survey was done should tattoos be allowed in hot Springs.
So again, if I go into a hot spring, if it’s public, I’m actually not
allowed to go in with a tattoo on my shoulder because everyone can see it.
It basically changes by age.
So younger people are more accepting.
Older people are just 100% against it.
But 43.9% say that tattoos should be 100% banned.
If you have a tattoo, you shouldn’t be
allowed to bathe in an onsen in a hot spring.
33.7% say it should be handled case by case.
So I’m a foreigner.
I have tattoos.
And they’re very small.
That clearly shows that I am not a Yakuza, which is what this is all about.
This is all about the Yakuza showing their gang affiliation.
And I’m clearly not affiliated, certainly not with a Japanese gang.
And my tattoos are not like the full body one.
So they don’t have the same sort of impact or feeling.
And I think as soon as people see that I’m a foreigner, they’ll think, “Oh,
it’s just a fashion thing for foreigners.”
So they’re saying like, “Yeah, so if I come in and I have a tattoo, it
should be okay.”
But if a Yakuza comes in and he’s got the
full body thing, that should not be okay.
22.5% say hot Springs need to change with the times.
Which I think is actually pretty sensible.
And you know, most of the 22.4% who said that were really young people who
are probably getting tattoos themselves.
Well, this was actually, I don’t know if other people would care about this.
You can see, if you watch the video, if you watch the YouTube video, you can
see in the background I have a chin up bar.
I haven’t been using it lately because I hurt my shoulder in judo.
But it is something I’ve always, as an exercise, I’ve always enjoyed it.
And I’ve always enjoyed it because if I’m
ever hanging off a cliff, I want to be able
to pull myself up physically so that I can climb up the cliff.
So at the end of an action movie when someone’s hanging, you know, if you’re
not physically strong enough to pull yourself up, that’s when you die.
Whereas I want to be the guy who like pulls
himself up really impressively in one go.
So I’ve always enjoyed chin ups.
This guy named Kenta Adachi, he works for the Japanese Coast Guard.
He’s 35 years old.
He has taken the world record for dead hang.
So it’s like you get on the chin up bar, you hang with both hands, you just
hang there for as long as possible.
Previously, a Norwegian guy did it for 16 minutes and three seconds.
I think I maxed out once at five minutes.
So maybe with training, I could actually get it, but I’m a big dude.
So it might be harder for me.
I’m not sure.
That was back in 2020.
So Adachi came in and he’s like, I’m going to kill this record.
Oh my god, did he kill it?
Not only did he beat 16 minutes, he did one hour and 20 minutes and 41
seconds.
So he took it, took the 16, beat it by four minutes and then put another
hour on top of that, which to me seems inconceivable.
But this guy is also holding the world record for the most consecutive chin
ups, which is 651.
So he now has two world records.
I mean, very related, obviously his upper body strength is off the charts.
Either that or he’s incredibly light.
I don’t know which is, which is probably both.
He’s probably a very svelte man, but with massive shoulders and chest.
But good on him.
I mean, he didn’t just beat that record.
He absolutely destroyed it.
And I will, after this podcast, go and try
to see how long I can do a dead hang for.
I mean, there’s so much shoulder.
I’m assuming it’s only going to be like eight seconds.
A woman thinks that her boyfriend is cheating on her.
I did enjoy the word thinks.
Not there was any proof.
She just suspected her boyfriend was cheating on her.
So she calls her friend, a guy friend.
And then the guy friend comes over with two
other guy friends and they call the girl’s
boyfriend to the girl’s apartment and he shows up.
And then they threaten him with a knife.
They punch him in the face.
They handcuff him.
They say, let’s go to the bank and get some money out.
And then they take his keys and they take his Lamborghini.
That’s a lot.
Like, there’s accusations and there’s confrontational behavior.
But we think you’re cheating on our friend.
We’re going to beat you up and take all your stuff.
I think there’s only reason I found this interesting is because that’s not
going to fix it.
Like, okay, you guys need to break up.
That’s one thing.
But we’re going to steal all your stuff and
now I’m going to go to prison for years.
That is a disproportionate response to the issue at hand.
And I think maybe that’s why I found that one is interesting it is.
Also they took a guy’s Lamborghini.
There’s no way Lamborghini is a standout.
There’s no way you’re going to be driving
that around and the cops don’t figure out.
It’s the stolen Lamborghini.
Okay, and this is the last ones for all the creepy dudes who have this like,
a lot of weeb sensibilities about Japan.
Japan’s changing and all you weeb dudes may not be as welcome as you think
you are anymore.
Japan is raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 and recognizing coercion
without violence.
So since 1907, the age of consent in Japan has been 13 years old.
And it’s never in the last 20 years I’ve been in Japan.
It’s not actually been accepted like if I talk to a 13-14 year old and they
agree to do it, it’s still not okay.
So everyone kind of socially knew this wasn’t cool.
But I do remember a few sort of weird nerdy
dudes online using this as a justification
for coming and trying to hit on basically kids.
But then of course they’re the kind of people who never actually leave their
basements.
So they never actually come to Japan.
They just use it as a justification for their own perverted desires.
Baby is going to be defined by more than just violence.
So previously, if a man raped a woman and
the woman didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape.
And it’s really disturbing.
So basically if I drugged a girl or I got a girl really, really drunk and I
got in a position
where she didn’t fight back physically,
then a court would not call that rape.
They would say that she knew she was drinking.
I could maybe say that I didn’t know there were drugs and she was accepting.
There were a lot of excuses that could come up.
And that has been now been taking into account.
So coercion without violence is now included under sort of the rape clause.
I think they might actually be changing, you know, the word rape in Japanese
is being redefined.
So violence is not the sort of defining factor of what a rape is.
So if you use alcohol drugs or power.
So if I’m in your boss and you feel like
you have to do it or if I’m in like, I’m.
really rich, dude, any sort of position where it’s like power harassment,
that is now going
to be classified as rape in Japan, which is actually a really good thing.
They’ve also started looking at other stuff like circulating images online.
So revenge porn or taking up skirt photos,
which is a really common problem in Japan.
That used to be you get in trouble, but you didn’t go to jail because it
wasn’t technically illegal.
It’s sort of like taking pictures in public,
but then there’s privacy issues in Japan.
It’s very big on privacy.
So I’m surprised this one went for as long as it did.
If I take pictures, that’s illegal, but if I circulate them online, that’s
double illegal.
So I get two illegal things in one go.
And that’s actually one of the things they’re trying to really, really crack
down on is these guys who are creepy and stuff, sharing them is maybe worse.
And at first, I was worried about Ninja News Japan because I need to get all
these news stories so I can do the content.
But now if there are more arrests, it means more creepy, weird stories will
actually come out.
Because right now, there’s a whole bunch of people they get in trouble, they
get caught by the police, but it’s not technically illegal.
So we don’t hear all the details, so we don’t actually get the story.
So now, I think we’re going to have more crimes come to the forefront, which
means more content for Ninja News Japan.
So at least for a little while, I think we’re going to be getting a lot more
really creepy dude news.
But let’s face it, if you come to listen to Ninja News Japan, that’s
probably what you’re coming to listen for.
You creepy, creepy weirdo.
[MUSIC].