(upbeat music) Yoshi Zawaj Yo.
It was a famous Japanese guy.
I’ll be really honest.
I don’t know who he is.
I had to look him up.
Just because I don’t keep
track of famous people generally.
So he was in common ride
or Gintama, bleach, kingdom.
A lot of movies, dramas,
but the real money in
Japanese media, if you
are famous, is in advertising.
So you can get on TV.
You won’t make that much more.
You can get movies, you
won’t make that much money.
They don’t put as much money into
TV and movies as they do in advertising.
You can watch shows and the ads just have
a higher quality editing video quality.
It’s just everything about it’s just better
than the actual show you’re watching.
And it’s not an unusual experience.
You get used to it pretty quick.
One of the things people notice when
they come is there’s a lot of panel shows
where it’s people sit down and there’s
a topic and they talk about the topic
and then they have a
conversation and there’s a comedian
and they say funny stuff and
there’s these famous people
and they say maybe just serious
stuff or maybe they’re funny who knows.
Why are there so many of those shows?
Well, they’re very cheap to produce.
You can sit down with that group of people,
film for two hours, change
their clothes, film for
two hours, change their
clothes, film for two hours.
That’s like six episodes in one day.
You could do the same thing
over the course of a week
and film an entire season of
people just doing chat shows.
That is why those shows are popular.
The other very popular show that foreigners
when they come to Japan are very
shocked by is the amount of eating on TV.
The irony for any sensible
media consumer is the
knowledge very quickly that
they can’t say the foods bad.
So if you are on a Japanese
TV show, you’re gonna go into
a ramen restaurant with
someone else, probably comedian.
I sit down and you’re gonna order
the ramen, especially and you’re like,
“Oh, this is the most
amazing ramen I’ve ever seen.
” “Oh, it smells so
good than you idiot.
” “Ah, this is the best.
” And they freak
out every single time.
It’s not a problem, it’s just
as a foreigner, as a Westerner.
It gets very boring and
very repetitive, very quickly.
So I stopped watching a lot of Japanese TV
because I don’t need to see
someone eat ramen and say it’s good.
I would like to see someone
eat some ramen and go,
“This is fine, this is
mediocre, this is not very good.
” That’s not what
the show is doing.
It’s really just a filmed chat
show in a different environment.
So that’s kind of Japanese media.
So if you wanna make money
in Japanese media, pop culture,
whatever, you have to
do ads, beer, ads, car ads,
insurance ads, whatever,
ads are where the money is.
So this guy, Yoshizawa Ryo, he got drunk.
Yeah, it happens, people get drunk.
I get drunk on occasion.
I’m very much a day drinker now.
Like, I don’t drink at night.
And I realize I enjoy drinking
in early day, not morning.
It’s a bit risky, I think.
I tend to be a lunch
drinker and then in the
afternoon, if I can feel
like a headache coming out,
I was like, “Oh, I’ll
just drink some water.
” And then I don’t wake
up with hangovers anymore.
And I realized this is a
much more sensible decision,
which is the kind of thing
you do when you’re old.
Make sensible decisions
even for your drinking periods.
But you should try it.
Like, next thing you’re
like, “I’m gonna get ripped.
” Get ripped in the
mid early afternoon.
Eat lunch and get ripped while
eating lunch and then do your thing.
And then as you start to come down, you
be like, “I’m just gonna drink some water.
” And you’re not pounding water
to try to get rid of the headache.
And then you get to a nice sleep.
I guess I shouldn’t be
recommending day drink.
You shouldn’t be
recommending drinking in
general, but at the same
time, you’re gonna drink.
It was this guy, obviously, did
not have the same self-control I do,
or that I have just recommended
from an interview with Japan.
On December 30th, he went into the
wrong apartment and the dorm was unlocked.
It’s funny that a lot of people
started to come to his defense.
Like, well, the door was unlocked.
How is he to know that
it was not his apartment?
He just like was he drunk?
He went into an apartment.
He laid down and go, “Slee,
we shouldn’t punish him for that.
” I’m like, “Mm.
” The fact that the
door was unlocked
is not made that this was
now an accessible apartment.
Does not mean it was okay to just
go in and like make yourself at home.
If I leave my door unlocked and you come
into my house, there’s a beaten happening.
I don’t know if it’s gonna be you or me,
but I’m gonna do my best
to make sure it’s on you.
I have been told that perhaps I
leave the door open on purpose
and the hopes that someone
will intrude into my house
so I get to fight them so that I can test
my skills and that may or may not be true.
I actually think I just
don’t think about it
because I don’t mind if we have to
go there at some point in the future.
I don’t know what this
conversation just happened.
Riosi Zawa gets drunk, goes into
the wrong apartment, gets in trouble.
Fair.
He loses his advertising deal with Asahi.
The makers of Asahi, he’s super dry.
I think he had a special drink he was doing
with them, like a certain drink campaign.
Who cares?
It’s just all shit beer.
Beer companies make beer
and then they make light
beer and then they
make beer adjacent drinks.
That’s the big push right now
for beer companies is things
that are not beer that could take
the beer space that used to be.
They’re not gonna be successful.
Beer has an image that goes with it.
I’m not a big beer fan, but
that’s, again, I’m not judging
people who do drink beer,
although I absolutely do judge them.
They are looking for the thing.
So this was supposed
to be one of the methods
is they get this guy,
he’s a fairly popular actor.
I don’t know what their base, they were
demographic they were trying to appeal to.
I also don’t care.
You can’t have your
beer ironically associated
with someone who gets in
trouble while they’re drunk.
I think that’s the
whole irony of this story,
is that this alcoholic beverage
is being represented by
clearly a fan of alcohol, by
clearly a user of their product.
Now, I actually generally, if I know
someone who advertises something
as an actual user of that product,
their opinion would go a little further.
If they came up and they
were advertising a phone
or a car or something and
I knew they had that phone,
I knew they had that car be like,
well, they believe in that product.
And introduced a pen,
doesn’t really do any
advertising, ’cause I don’t
have that moral dilemma,
but I’m pretty sure I would
sell out almost instantly.
My morals are very shaky when
it comes to the need for money.
And I think that’s actually
true of most people.
So if, but I actually,
this is not an opportunity
that’s gonna come
my way anytime soon.
But if I actually was
gonna advertise something,
I’d wanna use it
and if I didn’t like it,
I think the tone of the
ad might get that through.
So that would be something.
I consider the people listening
to News, Japan to be like,
they have a more subtle
understanding of media consumption.
And they would get the message that
I really use this product versus I don’t.
Like I think someone
goes, I really use this.
That’s actually like, do you?
Or are you just saying that?
Because you really don’t use it,
but you need people to believe you do.
Anyways, irrelevant.
So he’s lost his beer money.
I don’t know if this has gone so
far he’s gonna lose his other money.
We have another guy, one of the
guys from SMAP, just gotten trouble.
It turns out he paid 90 million
yen to a woman to solve troubles.
No one’s gone so far as to
say what the troubles are.
I’m sure that’s gonna
come out in the next week.
So that’ll probably be
in next week’s episode.
But it’s one of those
things where people are like,
okay, this guy’s losing
all his shows is that okay.
And it’s like, well, the fact that he,
perhaps, again, we don’t
know what actually happened,
but it’s bad enough that
he felt it was acceptable
to pay 90 million yen
to keep this woman quiet.
Is it okay for someone
who’s famous just to do
bad things and then pay
money and then stay on TV?
And this is a real moral quandary
because the companies he’s famous,
a lot of people around
him are getting paid.
Do those people deserve to lose their job?
No, they can get other jobs for whatever.
This guy has enough money.
If he’s been sensible with his money,
he has way more than 90 million yen.
That’s nothing to him.
There is a question
coming as to how much
this guy loses and
therefore deserves to lose.
It’ll be one of the
conversations sort of Japanese
entertainment news over
the next couple of weeks.
I know he’s going to be removed from shows.
The question is, is he going
to be removed from shows
for a couple of weeks, a
month, years or forever?
That’s actually the way it goes.
There was this story.
Are you getting a lot of
reminiscing of old Japanese stories?
Becky was very famous.
She was on every TV show for a little while
and then she just disappeared
and I didn’t know why.
And it turns out that she
had been having an affair
with a very famous
guitarist who was married.
So she was the mistress.
The guy, so this is two
people, did the exact same thing.
He cheated on his wife.
You could even say that Becky was
more innocent because she wasn’t married
and you could maybe pretend
she knew, she knew he was married.
But she was the other woman.
She lost everything.
She lost all of her shows.
She lost all of her contracts.
She couldn’t do anything anymore.
She was just gone that week.
The guitarist, gone for
about two, three weeks
and then came back
as if nothing happened.
And that was one of those things that sort
of tells you a lot about Japanese culture
and society and the patriarchy and all that
stuff is still alive and well and going.
I think it is changing, but
it’s a very slow process.
I think if she was punished that much,
she should have been punished that much.
I just think the punishment should have
been equally distributed and it wasn’t.
And that was, even again, with
my own personal biases, I was unfair.
I never liked her so I don’t miss her.
Asi had to put out a
statement and they said,
“The Yoshizawa Ryo
incident isn’t a fact
as an alcohol company
of which we can approve.
” If this guy who’s representing
our alcoholic product
is going to get drunk and then
walking to other people’s houses
and then something sooner
or later something worse
is gonna happen, we can’t
have that reflecting back on us
so we’re gonna cut ties with him,
which is a very understandable position.
I do still part of my brain goes,
but I know he was an avid user.
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There’s a new lot.
We’ve spent this year, 2024.
The last part of 2024
talking about host clubs a lot.
There were rules changes,
other laws that were
crackdowns, there were
things, a lot of people,
a lot of stories about people
getting involved with hosts.
Dee Dee Cha, the whole deal.
She made millions of the
yen off ripping off people
and scamming and stuff
and she gave it all to a host
so she didn’t even make
any money off that in the end.
Okay, so this is a huge
problem in Japan and there’s
been under, in the CD
underbelly of Japan as a culture.
Well, now it’s starting
to catch up with them
because what happens is
the host gets you into debt.
And they say, if you wanna get out of debt,
you have to do this like
essentially adult services.
If you wanna get out of
debt, we’re gonna make
a movie, we’re gonna
sell you to other people.
They’re basically doing
their best to get these
women into debt so they
can then abuse them more.
So now there’s a new
law targeting specifically
host and host as
clubs, host clubs mainly.
Businesses suspected of engaging in romance
trade could be shut down completely.
Romance trade is now the term
that they’re going to be using
for I get into, I’m a host and
we start to form a relationship
or professional one as
the host and the customer.
And then I trick you
into falling in love with me
and I try to exploit you with dangling
the idea that you could be my girlfriend
or we could have a relationship
or something like that.
That is now going to be
classified as a scam or a crime.
It hasn’t actually been classified yet,
but it could get the entire
establishment shut down.
So it means all the
other host lose their jobs.
All the management, they lose their jobs.
They get shut down for that.
A criminal penalty will be attached to
this for coercing customers into sex.
This doesn’t mean sex with the host.
It will be into like any sort of sex work.
So this could be pornography.
This could be selling them to people.
Anything like that, any
sort of sex work will be at
least six months in prison
and one million yen fine.
Now that actually doesn’t sound like much,
but again, this is supposed
to be the first step
in a deterrent and it should
stop it from happening.
But then they’re also
talking about shutting down
the establishment a whole
bunch of people will lose their jobs.
This might make them more cautious,
or at least give the police more
ammunition to go after them.
A 55 year old civil servant was fired.
That’s not an unusual story.
What did he do?
Well, let me tell you.
He left his shift to go to
the gym and like that’s bad.
You shouldn’t leave your working
hours, you shift your job to go to the gym.
I think we can all agree with that.
I mean, you go on your lunch break.
It’s your breaks.
You’re not really at work anymore.
So obviously he was
leaving during work hours.
An anonymous call was made
that this was happening regularly.
So they had found out
he kind of did it once.
There was a phone call.
The anonymous call is
coming up fairly regularly.
Let’s not often, but it happens at
regular intervals where we get these like,
this person was reported
by an anonymous phone
call and then the
company or in this case,
the government did an investigation
and found out some awful thing.
Like it’s always been like, the last
one I remember was this teacher
was working at a soap club or
this employee in the government
has a second job that
is a little bit suspect.
So they get an anonymous phone call,
which made me realize a long time ago.
Like if you’re going to work
one job and they do something
else that would inhibit that
first job, so any sort of sex work
or any sort of ripping
people off or anything,
you have to keep the people
around you really happy.
You can’t piss them off because
they’re going to rat you out
because they have this anonymous
system where they can call in
and just get you in
trouble, get you reported.
You have to keep everyone around you happy
somehow to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Because to me, the anonymous
phone call actually means
one of his coworkers who
either has to pick up his slack
and then it gets pissed
off and gets the guy fired.
Or one of his coworkers like
need something or need some help
in this guy just like disappears
for a couple hours a day.
Then he doesn’t, then
he has to do more work.
He’s burdened by that.
You have to make sure that
guy stays happy somehow.
Or he notices you’re screwing off and then
he doesn’t really care for a long time.
So he doesn’t report you,
but then you piss him off,
you say something rude or
you’re condescending or something.
Then he reports you that is
always going to screw you over.
So if you’re going to, this is maybe my,
I need advice to criminal jingle, I think.
This is not really crime, but my,
the Ninja New Japan advice segment,
maybe I need to create something for that.
If you’re going to do
anything, even a little suspect,
you have to be very polite, very kind
and very helpful to the people around you.
And that might be
counterintuitive to the whole fact
that you’re scamming or committing
a crime or doing something untoward.
But it’s important because that anonymous
phone call could be your downfall.
As it was in this case
for this 55 year old men
and a 55 year old dude getting
fired from the government,
it’d be very hard for
him to get another job
because he’s got another
decade before retirement
age and he’s like
pension and stuff kicks in.
So he’s got to find other work,
which is going to be very difficult.
The investigation went back to 2021 to 2024
and they found he went 633
times to the gym in 800 days.
So my first image is like,
this guy must be huge.
Like he must be like, he
gets up, goes to the gym,
goes to work, goes to the gym, goes to work,
goes home, goes to the gym, goes to bed.
Like his whole life is the gym.
He must be super jack, 55 year old dude,
must be in great shape or
maybe he’s like a marathon
runner, he’s on the treadmill,
going, no, he spent a majority
of that time soaking in
the bath or stretching.
So they have on the
sands, they have bath tubs.
He went, he would stretch,
he would get in the bath
and that’s how he would
spend his hour at the gym.
So he wasn’t even working out in
my concept of version or working out.
I know stretching can
be considered a workout.
Yoga is very good for
you, that kind of thing.
He wasn’t even doing that.
He was maybe doing a
little of that 10, 15 minutes
then getting in the bath for the rest
of the time, then going back to work.
I’m sure at work he was a very relaxed man
or because he wasn’t in the bath relaxing,
he was actually really pissy at work, which
is how the anonymous phone call happened.
They calculated this
was 633 times in 800 days.
So that’s giving you a sense
he was going almost every day
to the gym and not to work
out to just sit in the bath.
So he wanted to sit in the
bath in the gym every day.
He said because he had numbness in
his arm and it really helped with his arm.
I bet you could get a
doctor’s note of some
sort to get some sort of
accommodation for that.
If it was true, I don’t know if it’s true.
I don’t want to make
aspiration cast aspersions
towards this man because
I don’t know enough.
I only got the information
from the article.
But they calculated to
658 hours and 36 minutes.
So he was going about an
hour every time he was going.
He’s gotten fired, it’s not like a crime.
So he’s not going to
get charged with anything
but the company could
sue him for the lost wages.
So he has to pay back 1.8
million yen for the hours he was
being paid while at the
gym soaking in a bath.
His statement at the end was, I overdid it.
I regret it talking again
about doing too much.
A 21 year old woman was arrested for
making 670 calls to the fire department.
Now the last few times we’ve
had this, it was the person was
lonely or wanted to talk or
didn’t feel anything or was bored.
They tended to be older people.
So older people, they got this
time, they don’t know what to do.
So they start calling emergency services
to get attention or something like that.
This woman, she had a different reason.
She would call up and say, you’re noisy.
If you come again, I’ll kill you.
I’ll crush the ambulance.
I don’t know how big or strong
this 21 year old Japanese woman was
I’m going to go ahead and bet
she couldn’t crush an ambulance.
Sometimes she would make silent calls.
She would just call up and
just stay silent on the phone.
But this inhibits the
ability for other people
to actually make phone
calls to the fire station
or emergency services to get
the help they might actually meet.
So she’s obstructing business.
She sometimes made up to 50 calls a day.
It’s not hard.
They can trace phone calls.
So I mean, it’s not a hard thing to do.
I actually thought like when
the calls became an a nuisance,
like when she started calling, I
was like, how the fire department
guy should have gone, OK,
tell us where your house is
and we’ll make sure to turn
off the siren when we go by.
And then if she goes, oh, that’s good.
She’ll tell you her address.
And then you actually know where she is.
So you can just call the police.
It is awful that they had to
wait till it got to like 670 calls
before they actually could
get something actually done.
I’m wondering if that’s
because her calls were
too short or they
weren’t able to trace it.
I don’t know enough
about actually tracing calls.
So that’s actually maybe the first issue.
But it sounds like it’s actually
slightly harder than it is on the TV.
Final story for today.
I’m actually doing this a little early
because today’s a national holiday.
And I have to work tomorrow to
make and I’ll make that day up later.
But that later won’t be Tuesday.
So I won’t get an episode
in Engineers Japan out.
And I know you are desperate
for your Japanese news.
And just to hear my voice
for the few people who I know
listen to this when they
go to sleep, you know, I’m
trying to keep an even
tone and not get too excited.
But just so you get that sound in your
ears when you go to bed, my appreciate you.
This is an update.
We had this story.
I actually may have done
this on a Seamick B though.
So I actually have to check which episode.
If you want to go back and
get the all the details, I’m pretty
sure it was a Seamick B.
This was a very serious story.
There was a group of girls who beat
up and abused and bullied another girl.
And then they got to the point
where they got her on a bridge
and they pushed her off
the bridge and killed her.
This case was being investigated.
Now it’s a murder.
It’s a homicide.
But it wasn’t being
investigated by the homicide
department, which
is already suspicious.
And it turns out the cop
investigating the murder was
involved with one of
the girls involved in this
group who was doing the
bullying and the murder.
The girl, she’s already on trial.
This police officer has lost his job.
This is just a really short update
as to what happened to him.
He was having a relationship
with the suspect in a murder
investigation and the case was
investigated by not the homicide
department, which is
already to me like he’s pulling
strings to try to get her
out of the investigation.
So she doesn’t give, he’s
essentially trying to cover up a murder.
The cops that parted
with her, so basically she
worked at a bar and all
these cops went to this bar.
They’re saying she was
actually a confidential informant.
She was like a CI.
She was giving them information.
And this cop who was working
with her got too close to her.
And I was like, that sounds like a bunch
of cops trying to cover for another cop.
But he was found out
because one of the cops
in this group actually
reported his behavior.
So there were some
good cops out there being
like, dude, I think this
guy’s going too far.
And then when the murder investigation
comes up, it’s like holy crap.
Now you’ve gone way too far.
I need to report this.
The police officer was
married with children.
So that just adds another
layer of Iq to this whole story.
They’re saying she was a CI.
They got too close.
They were working together.
And then he sort of, but
the fact that a lot of these
police were involved in making
sure this didn’t get to the
right department to the
homicide department that this
wasn’t investigated properly
shows that there is sort of a
level of corruption that was
going on in the department, which
I actually think that would be
the next step of investigation
because all those other cops are
going to be like, take a step back
and be like, well, now that he’s been
caught, we had nothing to do with it.
And they’re all just saying,
oh, she was a CI and stuff.
I don’t believe any of that.
I believe they were covering
for that guy they work with.
The thing is he hasn’t been
prosecuted for anything.
So there’s no, it has he committed a crime.
That’s actually the
question that I’m left with.
So he’s been fired.
He’s no longer a police officer.
But he was part of a cover up.
Maybe he interfered with an investigation.
Absolutely.
But is that provable?
So that becomes a whole
other set of questions.
Again, we don’t have
the information for this.
But it does seem like
this cop interfered with an
investigation has a crime
occurred or has he just
made some bad choices
ended up losing his job?
We don’t know.
It would have been better if you went to
the gym and just spent his time in the back.
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