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F You Doritos

So I’ve been following the Gassy story and if I’m being really honest I’m

losing interest in it.

I’m losing interest in it because he’s not doing anything.

There has been an interesting development.

So Gassy said, as I said last week, I would follow up if something happened.

It kind of happened.

Gassy is not, he’s losing my attention.

Let’s put it that way.

Gassy said he would come back to Japan and apologize as per the rules if you

don’t attend for X amount of time in the government.

Now he’s decided he’s not coming back

to Japan and he’s not going to apologize.

The statement he made was a little confusing because he said it was too

early and his safety

was not guaranteed.

Now the reason he doesn’t want to come back

to Japan is because he thinks if he comes

back to Japan he might get arrested or murdered because his YouTube channel,

the reason

he got famous, was exposing celebrity scandals and some politicians.

So he’s actually saying some politicians want to come back to Japan just so

that he can be assassinated.

I think Gassy might be holding himself to a higher…

I actually don’t know because Gassy is a famous Japanese YouTuber and I’ve

never followed

any Japanese YouTube.

So I don’t know how big he is in Japan.

What I did find out though.

So they’re saying he doesn’t have to worry about getting arrested because

lawmakers have immunity during diet sessions.

Which essentially is saying a lawmaker could commit a murder during a diet

session and they could not be arrested

until after that diet session was finished.

Diet… Weirdly I shouldn’t have to explain this.

The Japanese government is called a diet.

It’s not like they.

That’s even a dumb joke if I make it.

I regretted as soon as I started.

I’m actually even finding I’m regretting

a lot of things as I start saying though.

I guess it’s just modern society.

But this actually… That is a very weird rule though.

Like you can do crimes.

You can commit crimes.

And you can’t be arrested during when the government is active.

Which is pretty often.

Nah, I’m a little torn on that one.

Anyways.

Gassie is now facing exposure from the government.

Which I think I could have predicted.

I said like my initial…

The reason I was interested in this story initially was because Gassie was

governing from abroad.

It wasn’t who he was that made me interested in him.

It was the fact that he was doing something

that really hadn’t been done before.

He was going to live in Dubai and govern Japan from Dubai which seems

completely possible to me.

And I was interested in how successful it was.

I didn’t realize even when it was introduced

that he was a controversial person.

But the reason he lives in Dubai is so

that he can’t be extradited back to Japan.

So you can see there’s a whole other layer of stuff that I didn’t actually

know about.

The governing was actually the secondary issue.

So he’s now facing expulsion from the government.

The leader of the NHK party, the party he’s a member of, which is a single

platform party.

They just want to abolish the NHK.

To take responsibility for this he’s going to step down.

I don’t know.

The leader of the party didn’t do anything.

Gassie was voted in.

He was voted in on their platform.

So I don’t think he’s done anything wrong.

Maybe putting him in that position, he’s taking responsibility for that.

This isn’t interesting.

Also side note of Japanese politics.

I don’t know if I agree with this or not.

But they quit every time something goes wrong.

Japan went through a five, ten year period where they had seven, eight prime

ministers because it was every three months to six months.

There would be a new prime minister and something that would go wrong and

they’d quit taking responsibility for it.

But then they never actually fixed any of the problems.

They’re just like, I take responsibility, I quit.

I’m out.

So it seems like kind of a cop out.

I think you should have to stay fixed the problem and then you quit after

the problem’s fixed.

Unless people want you out, I don’t know.

The problem with politics is there’s always going to be like 50% of the

people want you out

anyways.

So maybe it’s just a good excuse to bail.

The fallout from this is very weird to me.

They’re going to change the name of the NHK party.

So it’s not going to be a single platform party anymore or it is and they’re

just changing the name to Say Jika.

Say Jika?

Am I writing so bad?

No it’s Say Jika Joshi, Yon Juhachi Pati.

So the Say Jika is the female, Say Jika Joshi is female politicians, 48

party.

And I was like, why, why 48 is this like the AKB 48?

Is this is what they do now?

And if they are, that’s such a dumb thing.

So they’re going to try.

So and is it all going to be only women politicians?

I don’t know.

This little tack at the end has taken the story in a different direction.

So Gassi I no longer care about.

We’ll just put that out there.

He’s going to get expelled from being a government, the leader of their

party stepping down.

And they’ve made it the name, they’re going to change the name of the party

to this like girl group sounding party of female politicians.

Is it therefore only going to be female politicians?

This is now the more interesting part.

Are they going to use this gimmick to move their party forward?

Or is this like a real platform they’re going to have?

I don’t know.

I’m going to look into the Say Jika Joshi Yon Juhachi Pati.

I don’t know if they say 48.

I think it’s AKB 48.

I don’t know if they say AKB Yon Juhachi.

But that’s irrelevant.

Because I’ve only ever read it.

I haven’t actually heard anyone say a lot of the research I do for Ninja

Ninja Japan is just articles.

So I read them.

Sometimes the name, I don’t know if you say 48 or Yon Juhachi.

Anyways, it’s irrelevant.

What we have now is the formation of a new party which might be really

interesting or might be really stupid.

We can’t tell until the party actually does something.

So I will try to look into when they change the name.

Will their policies change with it?

Is this a new party?

Or is this just some kind of like gimmick to try to keep them in some sort

of relevance so they don’t all lose their positions?

I don’t know.

All we do know is Gassie has been a massive waste of time.

Nine social media influencers.

Social media influencers.

So I do this.

I do podcasts.

Even if popularity is relative, even if I

got like massive, I don’t think I would ever

call myself an influencer.

And then if I did Instagram and Instagram, it’s a different mindset.

I’m old.

So that might be part of it.

But the idea of the social media influencer is very ethereal to me.

I don’t really know what it is despite the fact that there are like them all

around all the time.

I maybe it’s because I have never been

influenced in this way by social media.

I have been influenced.

Everyone gets influenced by stuff around them.

But social media influencers do not have a significant impact on me.

So I don’t consider them influential.

Might be the issue I’m actually having.

There were nine social media influencers, all women in their 30s.

They failed to declare nearly 300 million in taxes for up to six years.

This was one to 30 million for each person.

And they are now being hit with 85 million yen in back taxes.

You’re not escaping the government.

This was all mainly from affiliate marketing.

So they would go on their Instagram or their TikTok or something.

They’d be like, “Oh, here’s my new lipstick that I would like.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, I’ll show you how to put it on.

Maybe something to do like a makeup tutorial, let’s say.”

And then to be like, “This makeup is really good.

You should buy it.”

That’s affiliate marketing.

They were paid for that.

That means you got to get taxed for it.

I did actually find out if you make more than 200,000 yen from any sort of

like secondary income.

So let’s say I have my main job, I’m a teacher.

And I make my main salary and that’s taxed.

And let’s say I do an engine in Japan.

People donate money or people give me money or I do affiliate marketing.

If that exceeds 200,000 yen, I have to start paying taxes on it.

I have to make sure I pay taxes on it.

Getting under that, maybe if I don’t declare taxes, it’s not going to make a

big deal out of it because the taxes would be quite small.

But it’s 200,000 yen for the year.

So that’s important.

So if I made like 200,000 yen a month,

that’s going to be X amount, well, times 12.

So 2,400,000 yen for the year, that would

be significant and I would have to pay taxes

on that.

But if I make 10,000, I don’t know what

would, let’s say 20,000 yen a month, that

would be sort of more close on the borderline.

I have to be really careful.

I would probably have to declare taxes on that, even though it’s like 20,000

yen, like it’s 200 bucks.

So I get $200 from an affiliate marketing.

Doritos, if you’re out there, I would take 20,000 yen a month to market your

product, which is a product I believe in, the Doritos chip.

Only the original flavor, none of this

like cool ranch, any of that other shit.

You have nacho cheese, not boom in nacho cheese, whatever fucking stupid

name you come out with.

It’s nacho cheese, not nacho cheese only, the original stand by.

I will promote that product.

I have a certain amount of integrity.

I will take product, I will take money to promote products.

I have to at least understand that the product is good and cool ranch.

I know there’s a lot of people out there like it.

I don’t, so therefore I’m not promoting cool ranch.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

This is like a free ad for Doritos.

So fuck you Doritos.

I’m not going to even advertise you.

You offer me money now.

I will still take the money because I’m poor.

But I’m going to be grudgingly doing it.

How did that happen?

Oh, we’re talking about taxes.

I did, through a video the other day and it was about like, we were talking

about taxes.

That’s exciting.

Taxes do lead us to very interesting places

because now we’ve hit a moral spot for me.

When would I and when would I not take money?

And for the most part, I’ll take your money.

I was listening to another podcast and they were talking about like better

help and how that they’re not very good in

stitch fix and all these like things that

advertise on podcasts.

I was sort of interested in that as a concept.

And apparently every company now that’s advertising on podcasts is pretty

much a shit company.

So the stitch fix has a limited amount of clothes they can pull from and so

they’ll send you the same clothes over and over again.

So it means they actually have very limited options.

So you’re not actually looking at you and your preferences and sending you

stuff and making

you look good and being really stylish.

Your personal stylist of course has a

finite amount of time to deal with you.

So they’re just picking stuff like from boxes, like checking boxes and that

just gets thrown into your next stitch fix box and the better help people.

Okay, they don’t really want to help you that badly.

They just want to run through the system.

It’s too bad.

These are of course the birthing pains of the Internet format advertising

and companies trying

to find new ways to do things like therapy

online seems like a really good idea.

So let’s say I, let’s say I live in Japan.

I’m an English speaker.

My Japanese isn’t very good and I needed therapy.

I couldn’t go to a Japanese therapist and expect it to really work out

because I can’t express myself well to them.

I might not understand what they say to me.

So me doing therapy online would be a really good idea because I would get

an English therapist

and maybe they’re more sort of in tune with who I am as a person.

Apparently that’s not a very good system.

So better help would have to offer me a lot

of money to screw over the mental health

for another person.

Like a lot of money.

Like I could retire money.

So we know they’re not offering me that much.

I honestly don’t even know why I’m talking about this.

YouTube and Instagram influencers have been hit with back taxes.

You got to be careful with your taxes.

Don’t try to screw the government.

They will come for you as these nine influencers have found out.

There’s a rocket that Japan wants to send to space.

Talk about astronauts last week.

Well how did they get there?

They get there on the rockets.

The new rocket is the H3 rocket.

It was up in the air and it was signal to self-destruct after several.

So they had several delays.

They were having problems with the rocket.

They got the rocket up in the air and then like, ah, something’s gone wrong.

Press a button and it explodes.

This was their second attempt and this is obviously going to cause them

certain problems.

I wrote down a…

I started trying to like pre-plan jokes and

it’s so much worse because then I read them

and I go, “That’s stupid.”

So basically you’ll get stupid jokes on this podcast.

Anything I make, you’re going to get a couple of dumb jokes.

And I was like, “Oh, it would be funnier if I planned out the jokes in

advance, you know, like a proper show.”

And then I read the joke and go, “That’s

so dumb, I’m not going to say that.”

Because the H3 rocket, well there’s also the H3 podcast.

And I was going to make a connection there

and go like maybe with less time on their

podcast and more time on the rocket it

wouldn’t have had to explode in the air.

But now as soon as I read that I’m like, “Oh, that’s dumb.

Why would I say that?”

But it would be dumb if it happened spontaneously.

It would be funny if it happened spontaneously.

It’d still be dumb.

But it would be dumb and funny if it happened spontaneously when you write

it down and you think about it.

It’s not worth doing anymore.

So I kind of have given you a look into the back process of, “As I tried to

develop Ninja News Japan into a better

show because I do want to try to make small

improvements all the time.

I am trying to plan out humorous elements.

But then in the moment I’m now thinking my

own sense of humor is so shit, I don’t want

to do it.”

The rockets crashed into the water around the Philippines.

North Korea is absolutely pissed that Japan’s sort of taken their thing of

shooting rockets into the ocean.

They’re all jelly.

They’re like, “Hey dude, that’s our stuff.

We shoot rockets into the ocean.

Stop copying us.”.

The H3 rocket costs 5 billion yen.

But if you want to look at this in a positive, 5 billion yen is half the

price of the previous rocket and it has

1.3 times the satellite launch capability.

I actually didn’t understand that last part of it to be really honest.

Does that mean it can carry 1.3 more satellites?

Because a 0.3 satellite doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Or can it be used, I guess it’s 1.3 times the payload, so a satellite plus

other stuff?

Or can it be used more often?

I don’t know.

The all the goal of all the rocket systems now, all these companies that are

making things that shoot stuff into space is try to make reusable.

So what SpaceX is all about is making a reusable rocket.

Which is really cool.

Because right now, rocket goes up, rocket

comes down, you have to build a new rocket.

Very expensive.

You could use that rocket multiple times.

It becomes a cost-saving measure, even if that rocket is more expensive

initially.

It’s a bit of a kick in the nuts for the space program in Japan that their

rocket did not work.

The way they wanted it to.

And I feel bad for them because I want the Japanese astronaut space thing.

This is when I should have sounded sort of smart.

This is the benefit of scripted things.

The smart bits will sound smart because you can write in advance.

The downside is the humorous bits when you write them down sometimes don’t

feel as humorous.

I should not write out the dumb jokes.

I should write out the smart bits.

Underestimated my own abilities.

Because I think, ah, I can be smart in the moment.

I should write that down and increase the humor versus the intellect.

The reality seems to be, I’m funny in the moment if I just let it go.

Whereas I am not as smart as I think I am.

And isn’t that just the reality?

I’m completely lost today.

Our water heater may or may not have a leak.

So waiting for the water heating guy to do this.

I’m sort of a little distracted.

It’s going to cost me a ton of money.

It’s going to cost like a hundred bucks for this guy to come out and look at

it and say there is no leak.

And if there is a leak, it’s going to be fixing replacing.

I realized one of the biggest problems.

Japan doesn’t have basements because we have earthquake.

Which means like a thing like a water heater

is outside the house but space is so tight

they’ve created the sliver of space between our house and the next door

house and there’s

like a little fence making it incredibly awkward to get to the water heater.

And that’s got to cost us a ton of money.

So I’m kind of actually just thinking about my own circumstances.

So, ah, if Doritos would like to sponsor

this podcast and give me a ton of money from

my water heater, I’ll promote Cool Ranch.

I mean, I don’t know.

Cool Ranch, I was not saying I don’t like them.

They’re fine.

I would always choose the original.

The original Doritos are way better.

Basically once a year, I get a really

bad craving for Doritos original flavor.

They have a Japanese tacos flavor.

It’s just not as good.

It’s almost, it’s just not quite.

I have to go to the import store and buy the original flavor once.

I don’t know.

I missed a number in my notes.

It’s been a tough, tough couple weeks for no real significant reason.

And that’s where I am right now.

So, mentally, I think the problem is, I want to do these podcasts.

I want to keep them consistent, but then I

keep having other sort of real life things.

This is, we don’t know who needs better help.

I just do a podcast and therapist myself.

Yeah, I think what I’ve been looking for.

So, it’s not like I’ve had any losses.

You got to pay money for this.

I got a lot of money trouble, but not like real life trouble.

How do you explain it?

We have a lot of things that are going to be expensive.

We have a lot of stuff.

Our house is like, no, what, 13, 14 years old.

Things are starting to break or need fixed and it’s all very expensive.

So, that’s just resting on my mind a lot.

We’re in no way in financial difficulties.

We’re just, I basically will not have an

entertainment budget for X amount of time.

And then yeah, the water heater broke.

It’s not broken.

It’s actually working fine.

And we check the, the, the, the, because to check for a leak, you get the

like water meter.

And you like check the number and you come

back an hour later and check the number.

Has the number changed?

If it hasn’t changed, it’s not leaking.

It doesn’t seem to be leaking, but there is water coming up from under it.

Maybe that’s just condensation?

I don’t know, man.

Anyways, I’m going to pay like 70 bucks,

100 bucks for some dude to come out and look

at it.

I’m hoping I’m spending 70 dollars for this guy to say that it’s fine.

The story I was going to do before my brain

got in the way is that there was a lawyer

and he was an anti-sexual harassment campaigner.

He was trying to stop sexual harassment.

Given the title, a lawyer who campaigns against sexual harassment, what do

you think he was

accused of?

I do enjoy irony.

I enjoy police committing crimes and getting caught, especially if they’re

really stupid crimes.

I enjoy lawyers getting in trouble for not knowing the law.

This was a sexual or anti-sexual harassment campaigner.

Of course, he’s been accused of sexual harassment.

He represented an actress against the stage director back in 2017, which

actually showed

that he knew that the woman he was about to attempt to sexually harass was

litigious.

She was not going to just shy away and fade into the background and keep her

mouth shut because of the embarrassment.

He knew because he represented her, he knew she would step up and make the

claim and sue the person.

He’s like, “Perfect.

I will sexually harass that person.”

He represented her back in 2017.

They worked together several times and then he kept trying to call her and

get her come over and he coerced her and

he touched her inappropriately and all this

other stuff.

It sounds like he pressured her into actually having sex.

She wants 11 million yen and damages and she said, “I wish to demand he not

work as a lawyer.

for the rest of his life,” which is if he

is representing people in sexual harassment

cases and he is a sexual harassment dude, I think that’s fair.

So basically she’s saying she wants some deep art.

I don’t know if they use the bar at the same

terms in Japanese, but since I’m translating.

even English, I guess it does make sense.

She wants some deep art so that he can’t be a lawyer.

He might think it’s time to switch sides and become a defensive turn, which

is a really awful thought, but it would make sense.

There was a survey given to people and it’s the question of, “Have you given

up on marriage?”

It was broken into men and women.

Men in their 20s, 64% said, “No, I have not given up on marriage.”.

So there’s a 30% let’s say.

I just round off the numbers.

25, 30% are saying, “I still, I have, I

think marriage is not going to work out.

I’ve given up my 20s, I’ve already given up.”

55% switches in their 30s, 55% yes, I have given up.

So I’m trying to do the majorities.

And then people in their 40s who are not married, they say 71% yes, men in

their 40s have given up on marriage.

Women in their 20s already 54% have said yes, I’ve given up on marriage.

Men has this weird idea that you have to get married before your 25, which

is really young.

It used to be normal.

Again, teenagers used to get married and have babies and stuff.

But in Japan, they have this idea like a woman should be married by 25.

And it’s culturally still prevalent.

It’s not like it’s forced or, and I think people understand, you’re like 26,

27, 28, you’re

not married, whatever.

But it’s still there and it’s still part of the cultural zeitgeist, which is

a problem.

Women in their 30s, 52%, so it actually went down by 2%.

So it was 54 if you’re in your 20s, 52 in your 30s.

So 2% of the women between 20 and 30 change their mind.

I mean, I know this doesn’t really work that way.

It’s because it’s right now in their 30s.

They have not given up on marriage.

So 52% yes, I’ve given up on marriage,

but it’s actually the number dipped down.

And then when they hit their 40s, 70% said

yes, I’ve given up on marriage completely.

Some of the reasons for men, it takes time, money and effort to find a

partner, a Tokyo male, 27 years old.

That is true.

And we have over the last like four episodes or five episodes talked about

the declining birth rate.

I have prostilatized many times about my beliefs that Japan and society

needs to change.

It’s work, life, balance, culture if they

want the population to increase at all, but.

that is talking about a complete cultural shift in thinking, which is

probably not going to be possible in a single generation.

It’s going to take multiple generations.

And the danger there is there aren’t going

to be any generation numbers to pick up the

slack in the future.

So even if you make the changes, it might not be successful.

Because I don’t have confidence in my appearance was a man 39 years old

because I don’t feel

qualified enough to get married and a man

39 years old because I want to make the most

of my time alone.

A man 39 years old, which is interesting.

So there were some of them were like, I’m not good looking enough, I’m not

confident in myself, I can’t get married.

So I’ve given up.

There’s other guys like, I just want to be alone.

I want to have my time.

The next one I thought was very interesting because there’s no guarantee.

that I’ll be happy.

But he’s saying that if I get married, I have to be guaranteed happiness.

But that actually implies that you don’t have to put the work in.

So I actually think he’s a little, he

slightly misunderstands what marriage is.

Man 43, I don’t see the benefits.

Man 43, I simply don’t have any connections.

Man 47, my income is too low, which in Japan,

when they talk about marriage, the women

will initially talk about income before happiness and then before love.

I think a lot of people in a lot of other

cultures, they’re not so honest about it.

But a lot of women what they’re looking for is a certain level of comfort

and security.

And they are not shy about it.

So they want, I want a man who makes that amount.

The problem is there’s unrealistic expectations.

The average Japanese salary is between four and five million yen.

And then if you serve a woman, this is

way, I could probably find it, but it’s way

way back.

How much do you want your partner to make?

And they were like eight, nine, 10 million yen.

So the average man was just off the table at that point.

Some of the women’s reasons for giving

up on marriage are pretty interesting.

I did enjoy a female 28 said because there’s not a single advantage to

getting married.

So she’s, she’s really decided that there are no benefits at all.

Now there are tax breaks and stuff, but again, I think that might be not

what she’s talking about.

I got tired of it after my parents objected for the first time.

A female who’s 30.

So she came close to getting married.

Maybe a guy proposed to her, her parents objected and then she’s like, I’m

not doing this again.

Which is very interesting.

There’s a very clear story, singular history there.

I couldn’t find anyone I wanted to marry.

Female 34 years old.

I think that is a very good reason not to get married because if you don’t

want to marry them, that kind of goes back

to the no guarantee of happiness of the

previous.

This guy, but I can’t count on the other person to make me happy.

I have to make myself happy.

I think that is a very legitimate reason because the other party is never

enthusiastic.

39 years old female.

So basically the she’s saying that men don’t want to get married and that is

dampered my desire to get married because

I want someone who’s excited to marry me.

I think that is also pretty fair because I want to work woman 41 because

marriage isn’t everything in today’s world.

Female 41.

So those two women are saying marriage

is just not as relevant as it used to be.

I want to work.

I want to have my own life because I lost the desire to re-marry after

getting divorced.

Female 47.

So basically she had a bad experience.

It doesn’t want to do it again.

100% think that’s a legitimate reason.

I mean, any reason not to get married is

legitimate because what you’re doing, yeah.

If you’re not confident in the idea of

getting married, you who not get married.

It does sounds like that overall Japan is a culture.

People are not confident in getting married, which is again sort of leading

to the population to decline in several

Pro Penguin

(clock ticking)

I don’t know, I was very busy today.

My son graduated junior high school,

so I went to his high school graduation.

Normally I record this in the morning, it’s now the afternoon.

I don’t know if that’s gonna make it more

rushed or more rambly or maybe better.

I don’t know.

I did prep my notes though.

We are good on the notes.

We’re good on the information.

Oh my God, high school graduations in Japan are dower.

It was, everyone marched in like a funeral procession.

They all sat down and then everyone had

to get up and like, they gave little speech

and then everyone was called by name to

stand up and it was just, there was no joy,

no clapping, no like, woo, nothing.

It was just painful to watch.

And then half an hour in, I had to pee.

So for the hour remaining, probably more,

probably an hour and a half, I was just pent up.

I was like, I hope there’s over and there.

It was speech after speech after speech.

The mayor of the city came, that was kinda cool.

Mayor of the city came and he gave a speech.

Some guy came up and talked about baseball which seemed really unrelated.

Then a teacher got up and started to

cry and then all the kids like shuffled out

like they were being taken to prison.

They were like, okay, that’s cool, it’s over now.

And then they’re like, oh now we’re gonna

show a video and have another speech.

So I got up during the video and went and peed.

It was absolutely ridiculous though.

So that was more than half my day gone already.

That said, we’re here for the news.

That’s my personal Japanese update.

I know people do wanna, they wanna get

a little something about my life in there.

Sometimes they find that the human relations aspect

of the podcast which I think is important.

If you’re watching the video, Dave has a new bed.

You can see his little face stuck in the corner.

I moved the camera to make sure you get that little face

just right there in the corner.

Gassy, we’ve followed the Gassy story.

Nothing is really happening and it keeps popping up

every week like an update on Gassy.

I’m always like, should I talk about it?

But Gassy is a YouTuber in Japan.

Well, actually not in Japan.

He’s a YouTuber about Japan, from Japan.

And he like broke celebrity scandals.

Now currently he lives in Dubai.

He decided to run for government.

He runs on the NHK party, which is actually the anti-NHK platform party.

It’s a single policy party.

Like they have one thing they wanna

do and this is essentially abolish the NHK.

Which I’m not against.

I just don’t think it’s worth having a whole party on for.

Gassy, when you become a policy maker

and assemblyman or whatever, you have to show up.

Now he’s like, I can show up virtually.

And at the time I was like, yeah, he was voted in by the people.

They knew he lived in Dubai.

They knew he would have to attend virtually.

He’d have to vote virtually.

But we’re living in that kind of time now where that’s acceptable.

What’s the big deal?

They have a rule you have to show up in person to vote every now and then.

And then Gassy’s like the problem is

because I’ve pissed off so many celebrities

and some politicians, if I show up in Japan, I’m gonna get arrested.

Now he has agreed and they said, well, if you don’t show up in Japan,

you’re gonna lose your job as an assemblyman.

So he’s agreed to come to Japan and apologize.

So there’s nothing really has happened right now.

But I’m giving an update for anyone who has followed along this story.

After he shows up, if he gets arrested, if something bad happens,

I’m going to follow up on that story.

If nothing happens, I might mention it and move on.

Because then it’s been a whole bunch of harafer nothing.

I was very, very interested in this

because he was voted in under a very certain set of conditions

and the government is saying that’s not acceptable.

His first proposal should be you should be able to govern remotely.

Because I actually think we’ve gone to a stage

in the world where you don’t have to be

physically present to do most jobs like this.

Like if it’s a policy job, if it’s an opinion oriented thing,

where it’s things where you brainstorm

and give ideas or write code, you don’t need to show up.

If you got to pick something up and move it somewhere else,

if you have to dig something, construction,

you got to show up for those jobs.

But if you are designing, computerizing

stuff, you don’t need to be present in person

to do those things.

And again, government, I think as long as you have

all the information, you’re doing things properly.

It’s actually should be fine.

But that’s a question of should they change the rule now?

This being Japan, they absolutely do not want to change the rule.

And I think they’re looking for a way to just get rid of Gasey.

So we’ve talked about Japan changing its defense policies

and the changing defense policies has been primarily like.

We need counter-strike capabilities,

but their version of defense is North Korea

to shoot something at us.

We should be able to shoot the thing that

shot the thing at us in the first place.

And they’ve made a step towards that.

So they’ve increased the budget.

They said they were gonna take it from

cigarette companies and corporate taxes.

So it wouldn’t affect the average person,

although inflation has gone up a lot.

I’m wondering if that is maybe related to this.

Policy change that requires billions and billions of yen.

Japan plans to buy 400 Tomahawk missiles.

Kishita didn’t mention how much they cost per missile.

These are for counter-strike capabilities

and they have a range of 1,600 kilometers.

And what I wanted to do was get a map

up and actually measure 1,600 kilometers.

So we could see what Japan would be able to hit.

Now far away is Pyongyang from Tokyo.

Tokyo.

Oh, it is 1,281 kilometers.

So the 1,600 kilometer strike zone

fits the North Korean capital squarely in the middle.

I may, if I can get some time, actually follow up on this next week.

And then for people who are on the video,

I can throw a picture up on the video

to show what they technically could hit.

If something shot at them from this place,

it would have to be in this 1,600 kilometer ring.

What they could hit back.

And then for the audio listeners,

I could actually mention a few sort of distinct places.

But Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea,

I bet would be the main focus of what they’re looking at

and talking about defending from.

That sentence making any sense?

I, whatever.

(phone ringing)

So last year, do I have the dates?

And last year, they said they were gonna look

for some new astronaut candidates in Japan.

And I was like, I should apply for that.

Ha, ha, ha.

I actually would just like to go through

the exams and the training, not actually.

I don’t really, like I would love to go to space,

but I think doing the training to go to

space would be actually just as much fun

even if you didn’t get to go to space.

And then I found out they were taken,

the guy that my thought was, I’m too old.

So they’re not gonna take me.

And I’m not Japanese, but actually, maybe.

Turns out one of the guys they took was 46.

He’s only a couple years younger than me.

They had applicants up to like 72.

So I may have had a shot.

I think me not being Japanese actually would have been the biggest concern.

They have selected two astronaut candidates

from the pool that they had that applied.

One is a world bank employee.

And the second is a surgeon.

Now the 28 year old surgeon, female, is very impressive.

Just being a surgeon, 28.

I mean, the having of a giant has very little to do with that.

Unless you’re in Japan, where as we had the scandal last year,

where the women’s scores were knocked down.

So if you, my theory at the time then, was that every female doctor

was actually superior to every male doctor.

Because you had to get, if you got a male got 100% on a test,

and a female got 100% on the test, the female

actually had to get like 120 on the test

because they systematically brought those scores down.

So I only wanted female doctors after I read about that.

So like they made it sound like, this is unfair.

And I’m like, yes it is, but also it makes me think that every woman

is a better doctor in Japan than every man.

Jade is putting the chat, “I wish I could go to space I do too.”

That’s actually why I’ve been so deep following this story.

As they are anyways, mm-hmm.

Okay, I don’t know if I want to give full credit or not.

My dog, two years ago I got real sick.

I was in hospital for a month.

My doctor, he was weird, but he was a very

good doctor because he kind of giggled.

And in bedside manner, I don’t know if they actually train that,

but one of the things you don’t want your doctor to do is giggle ever.

And I was, I was in really bad shape.

So when he giggled it was very off-putting.

Anyways, we’re talking about astronauts.

This lady, 28, she’s a surgeon, she’s awesome.

Like she’s just straight up, she’s awesome.

The guy, 46, he’s a world bank employee.

I was like, what are they gonna go to the moon and do some accounting?

I was a little down on that.

But then one of my, I’m like one of

my, I’m like basically an English teacher.

So if they’re gonna take a world bank employee,

like a finance guy, still skills don’t relate.

Maybe they’re gonna take me, I’m a good communicator.

I could play that up.

So that actually made me think I did miss my opportunity

because they weren’t looking for pure, feasible, usable skills in space.

Like a surgeon, you get hurt, a surgeon can help you.

You go up into space, this guy could not, he could fix your finances.

I don’t know what that means.

So it means they were taking people

where the skills they had were not directly applicable

to going to space, which means that actually meant

I did have a chance because my skill set,

has nothing to do with space.

But then if this guy can go, maybe I can go.

So now I just roll that around on my head and go,

I think I missed my chance to go to space.

They are going to do two years of training.

The man is 46, he’s the oldest applicant.

He’s the oldest person they’ve accepted into the program.

And the lady is the third woman they’ve accepted into the program.

One of the goals they have is to put the first woman on the moon.

So we’ve had women in space.

We’ve had men on the moon.

We haven’t had a woman on the moon.

So Japan’s like, oh, here’s an opportunity.

We could put the first woman on the moon.

I think this lady, perfect choice.

I mean, I’m jealous that she’s going at all,

but if she’s gonna go, let’s support her to go all the way.

I wanna see her go to the moon and be the first woman standing on the moon.

I think that’s awesome.

The available age of current astronauts is an average of 52 to 53 years old.

So the average age of an astronaut in

Japan is already two years older than me.

And they retire at 60.

They actually force in retirement.

You can’t keep going, which I understand.

So it means next time they go for

applicants, it’d be like two years from now.

I’m gonna be 52.

And then if I get it, I would be 54.

So I think I’ve actually missed my opportunity to go to space.

So let’s face it, I’m gonna take my dreams.

I’m gonna put them on this woman.

I’m gonna take her dream and I’m gonna inflate them.

If she succeeds, I succeed.

And that’s what I want.

I want her to go to space.

I want her to land on the moon.

And I want her to be the first woman on the moon.

And in a way, I will have gone to space.

And I will have been to the moon.

And I will also have been the first woman on the moon.

(upbeat music)

The baby decline.

God damn it.

This is really downer.

This year, or last year, 2022, they had less than 800,000 babies.

That is the seventh consecutive drop in the number of babies in Japan.

It is down 5.1%.

In 2017, because of the trends, they predicted that this would happen,

the less than 800,000 number would happen in 2033.

So we are a decade ahead in the number of babies dropped.

Not physically dropped.

The numbers of babies born down.

I guess they’re always kind of born down.

Gravity takes place.

The number of babies not born.

The numbers of baby born is the lowest number consecutively.

But they predicted that less than 800,000

was going to happen in 2033, 10 years later.

COVID contributed, financial issues

contributed, all these things contributed.

Last week, we did the story on what the government official saying

that the problem, the low birth rate is

because of Japan’s weak romantic power,

which I agree with, except I don’t think you can define

romantic ability or romantic power.

So that’s a little bit problematic.

They said there are many factors, including financial and security

and less social encounters.

And the less social encounters because of the pandemic

is absolutely true, because people are meeting less people.

The number of deaths was 1,582,033.

That is up 129,744.

And this got Elon Musk to prompt a comment

that if this keeps going, Japan will disappear.

So Elon Musk has a fundamental understanding of math

and numbers that go up and numbers that go down.

So he is a genius.

I said I’m going to say, thank you for this.

He solved the problem.

He said if this keeps happening, Japan will disappear.

We don’t need to worry about it anymore.

Elon fixed it.

I mean, we’re done, right?

This is interesting.

So Kishida got in trouble, the prime minister of Japan got in trouble.

Japan’s ban on the same sex marriage is not discriminatory.

Is what he said.

And this is sparks and criticism.

I think it is a very fair statement to say,

it sparked criticism and it deserves some examination.

Kishida came out and said, I have never stated, I’m against it.

Which I would like to break down that sentence.

So first of all, what is discriminatory is the first thing.

And I would say discrimination is when you take a group

and you apply a set of rules to them, that is unfair.

And what we’re looking at is marriage and what is a definite marriage.

And definition is probably the issue because

in Japan it’s defined as a man and woman.

Actually, maybe I wrote it down.

Okay, no, I didn’t write it down.

It is stated somewhere that a marriage in Japan

is actually sort of a cis traditional heteronormative male, female union.

Whereas I’ve always thought marriage is financial if we’re being honest.

Like you do it because of love, but you’re really what you’re doing it

as far as the government is concerned,

is for tax purposes to bind your taxes,

to take your two estates and put them together

so that if I get sick or my wife gets sick,

you know, they have access and back and forth,

that union has very little to do a gender.

It’s all as far as I’m concerned, finances.

When it comes to the government, when you

come to a religious ceremony or a ceremony

or anything like that, that’s all about

love and the union of two people and stuff.

But as far as the government concerned, this is about taxes and money.

And so I don’t see how a man and a woman,

a man and a man, a woman and a woman

makes any difference when you’re talking about binding your finances.

So that’s again my view.

What I was interested in though is Kishita

said, I have never stated, I’m against it.

I’ve never said out loud, I have never spoken the words, I am an against it.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t against it.

I personally have never stated that I’m against fucking penguins.

I am, let’s just put that out there right now.

But because I never said, I’m against fucking penguins,

doesn’t actually mean I am or I’m not.

That just actually means I might be really pro fucking penguins.

But I know it’s socially unacceptable

to say it, so I’ve never said it out loud.

So coming out and saying that I have never

stated that I am against fucking penguins,

doesn’t mean I am or I’m not.

So you actually have to come out and say it.

This is actually the problem with politicians.

What I want to do is make statements.

I do always, as many times in an English New Japan,

I’ve talked about a politician making a statement

that offends people and then they retract that statement.

And I’ve always felt like that doesn’t actually

do or mean anything because the thought is still in their head.

He’s saying I’ve never said, I’m a discriminatory piece of shit,

but that doesn’t mean he isn’t.

Jay has now put it in apparently a quote by a very famous man,

I have never said I’m against fucking penguins, which is true.

Up until this podcast, the entirety of my life, I never made that statement.

So you could have tried to make the claim.

He is pro, you could have tried to make the claim.

He is against.

It is unsure, everyone is unsure until I actually make a statement.

But stating that I’ve never stated it doesn’t mean anything.

And that’s the bit I actually really enjoyed more than anything else.

Japan is the only G7 nation member

that doesn’t have anti-discrimination laws.

So this will be an interesting one going forward

because there are small groups like in, like there’s a prefecture,

and not prefecture, an area in Tokyo, a ward, I think it’s Shibuya,

and they allow same-sex unions, but that isn’t seen as universally accepted.

So what does that mean?

You could actually get married in this place.

I guess as long as you don’t leave that

place, you can have your same-sex marriage.

It’s very difficult to understand

because what is the point of having one area in a city

where it’s okay and the rest of the city is not okay?

As soon as I leave that area, are we not married anymore?

It’s gonna cause legal complications down the line,

but at least it’s showing that there is a place in Japan

that is thinking forward to thinking that

this is acceptable, that this is the future.

And if two people want to bind their lives

together, maybe you should just let them.

(phone ringing)

72-year-old teacher, so this guy’s been teaching a hopefully a long time.

He wanted to show that there are useful bacteria, common in daily life.

Teach the kids about your gut health and that kind of stuff.

So he mixed some yogurt and milk, and he

took it home and he put it in the fridge.

And then he brought it back to school

the next day, this milk yogurt mixture,

and he gave it to six students.

Two had a headache and nausea and had to go eat taking it to the hospital.

One went to see a doctor after they got home from school.

And two of the, oh, and two staff vomited when they got home.

So I think what we’ve actually learned is

you shouldn’t drink milk yogurt combinations

created by your teacher and brought into school.

It’s funny ’cause here’s the thing, the

reality is, you have this guy, he’s a teacher

and he wants to do something really practical

and show students something and really teach them.

And this is the kind of stuff we want teachers to do.

And then he just totally duffs it.

He takes it and he makes all the kids sick.

Actually, it sounds like only three of the kids, three out of six got six.

So this is a 50% shot rate.

Two staff got six or two staff should, just I don’t know, homemade stuff,

you probably should not be drinking.

I mean, that’s just the short version.

Don’t drink stuff that some dude has made at home.

(phone ringing)

All right, so our last two stories, I’m going to get a drink of water first.

Oh, that’s old man hot water right there.

Not hot water that came from an old man.

I can’t, I really feel like I always have to be very clear.

That is an old man drink.

Old men tend to drink things like hot water.

I’ve really taken a hot water and my golden ears.

What was that sound?

Which one?

You mean the slurping?

Swallowing and then, we can break that up into, you can make a beat.

(claps)

Oh, good lord.

Okay, we got two stories about people having trouble at work.

I bet it was the swallow.

This microphone, I actually was having a

conversation on Reddit about microphones.

This microphone, oh, the, mm, I mean,

that’s the sound of pure satisfaction of an old man.

That is an old man.

See, I don’t get gratification the way you young, young folk do.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t cut into this sexual gratification.

I don’t, I don’t believe in these, these, these drugs

and the alcohol and the, the jazz cigarettes.

I like the purity of flushing out my colon with some piping hot water.

(groans).

Ah, I can’t remember where I heard jazz

cigarettes recently and really enjoyed it.

Anyway, we got two guys who got trouble at work

and I really enjoy people getting a trouble at work.

A city employee was fired for getting 1.54 million in overtime pay.

Dude, I have an end of my story.

It’s such a nightmare.

I suppose I could tell, I’ve told it on the loss of podcasts

which is now essentially the fun podcast.

So I’m gonna hit this story soon, really.

I, forget why.

Oh, I was gonna have the camera shove down my butt

and I had to go to the doctor to do it

and they wanted me, my voice just got a little quieter

’cause I’m talking about my butt.

So they gave me this stuff to drink.

It was like a two liter jug and I got about halfway through

and then I started throwing up and we called the hospital

and I say like, I’m drinking this stuff

but I can’t keep it down, it’s just something about it.

And then the lady on the other end goes,

but it’s the mild stuff and we’re like,

that’s relevant if I’m throwing it up, I’m throwing it up.

So they’re like, okay, we’ll come in and we’ll take care of it

and we’ll take care of it as already an issue.

So we go up and then she gets this like,

it was basically a little bigger than this.

It was like one of those 500 milliliter cans of Pepsi

but it was full of like water and saline solution

or something, she goes, I’m gonna put this up your butt.

Not the thing it had a tube and I was like,

ah, that’s never going on my butt and she’s like,

no, no, it will, I’m like, I’m not like,

I’m on your side on this one but I’ve just never put

anything on my butt before so that volume

is probably not gonna go up my butt successfully.

And then she’s like, okay, well,

I’ve done this a million times, I’m the experienced nurse,

I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna shove this up your butt.

And I was like, all right, you know, I am rooting for you on this one.

She has me rolling on my side, me arguing with her,

I don’t think was really what she was used to.

So she put on the lube, ironically not gently,

the lube is supposed to make that kind of thing better.

She just, and I got in, and she was like,

woo, and then she kind of went up and started doing it

and we got most of the way down and then it started like,

eh, it wasn’t all going up and I was

like, mm, I’m not gonna say I told you so

’cause I don’t really know how to say that in Japanese

but I think my face says it all,

that in weird discomfort ’cause I’ve never done this before.

So then they’re like, okay, well, we have

as much water up your butt as we can.

So you go over and you know, poop it out.

And I was like, great, where?

‘Cause I assume right here right now is how it’s gonna happen.

And so I’d actually, I kind of forgot

to say, I had to put on a diaper before.

The thing is the diaper in Japan, you either

have like tiny people size or sumo size,

there’s no in between.

So I had sumo size diapers on, Ignatius

put in the trick is to clench really hard,

believe me, we’re getting to that part of the story.

So then I’m like, okay, well, I’ve pulled up my not summarize size,

my sumo size diapers, where do I go to the toilet?

‘Cause I actually assumed it was not in the diaper.

And she’s like, yeah, across the hall,

there’s a bathroom, so go in there and go in.

I was like, okay, great.

So I’m clenching as hard as I can.

I have my giant diaper on.

My wife is sitting outside, she sees me walk out

and I’m like literally going, should I pull up my shorts?

This is summertime.

Over my giant samurai, not samurai.

Over my giant sumo diaper, where should I just go through my diaper?

Both equally embarrassing.

Like I’m just feeling humiliated.

This time, masculated, it’s great.

She starts laughing her ass off.

She’s just like, at this point just go.

It doesn’t make a difference.

I go to the toilet, it’s occupied.

And I’ll just let that sit with you, just like it sat with me.

Only there was a lot more pressure on me as I stood kind of doing the like,

it’s like the little kid I have to pee dance,

but it was I have to poop out a cola bottle

of liquid with giant sumo diapers on.

Clenching as hard as I can, ’cause I really don’t wanna poop in my diaper.

And I think this is a preview of what life has in store for me.

Now it’s now back to people gotten trouble at work

and didn’t have problems at hospitals.

A city employee was fired for getting 1.54 million yen in overtime.

The thing is they were not actually doing the overtime.

This is Japan, what he was doing, he was getting the overtime form,

waiting till his boss left, going into

his desk and getting the little stamp,

and then approving his own overtime, and putting it in.

What they found was they could see him leave.

This was the problem with not having invisibility powers.

They could see him come and go.

They realized he wasn’t coming and going

when his time sheet said he was coming and going.

The boss didn’t remember approving so much OT

and then they sat down, figured it out and he got fired.

So I get my problem with crime and stealing stuff.

It’s just the plan seems so poorly thought out.

You’re gonna take your boss’s stamp, you’re gonna do overtime.

You could do a little bit.

I bet you could do an hour or two every month and not get caught.

But when you get to the 1.54 million yen Mark,

you’re going to realize that everything is, you’re gonna get caught.

(clock ticking)

An employee was told to wear a mask.

This was a very normal thing because this was last December

and masks sort of mandates by governments is still in place.

As a country, Japan doesn’t have mask mandates

but it’s sort of a social pressure thing and people are doing it.

Companies do.

So your company’s telling you government absolutely does.

If you work for the government, you have to wear a mask.

This guy clearly did not like wearing a mask.

He was reminded mid-December, so around December 15th,

please wear your mask and he got pissed and

it sort of stewed and he just sat there.

On the 20th, he decided to delete files on

a shared server related to tax collections.

And I was like, “Did he get revenge by saving a bunch of people taxes?”

I know it probably isn’t that simple

’cause they’ll just find the taxes they’re missing and go get them.

These tax agencies don’t mess around.

They always find you.

But it showed to me the attitude of what was going on.

This is a very disgruntled employee

and you know he’s particularly disgruntled

when all of a sudden mid-January, you

get to evaluation period in most companies.

He went to his section chief and he said,

“Consider yourself dead if my evaluation is poor.”

You know what, his evaluation wasn’t poor, he was fired.

And that, I think, is appropriate.

(upbeat music)

[Music].

Bacteria Soup

(upbeat music)

Spy balloons, balloons, bubbles, pop news.

Spy balloon news, goddamn.

All right, spy balloon news.

China has said that the spy balloons are not their balloons in Japan.

The government has said if we have a balloon

in our airspace, we’re gonna shoot it down.

We’re gonna pop that balloon.

Then China said, don’t attack China’s stuff.

And we’re like, hey, you just said it

has not your balloon, so if we blow it up,

it’s not as cool, man.

Clearly, people don’t realize the contradictions we’re making.

But I’ve been following a very weird story.

A giant metal orb has washed up on the shore of Japan.

It’s a 1.5 meter metal ball has washed up on a beach

and resident discovered it on a morning walk and called the police.

‘Cause now we have so much circular oriented,

terrifying news.

It must be a spy device.

Another person rolled up and said, “It’s been there for like a month.

“I tried to push it back in the water.

“It was too heavy.

“Is it a UFO?

“No.

“Is it a spy balloon?

“No, ’cause it’s metal, so it’s not gonna float.

“Is it a gorilla egg?

“A Godzilla egg is one of the ideas.

“Is it some people were speculating “that it was a Godzilla egg?”.

And then some people were very worried that it was a mine.

World War II bombs.

World War II mines still show up in Japan.

Like they were excavating to build a new

building and they found an unexploded bomb.

This has happened like recently in like the last year.

Turns out they, so the police show up.

They’re all real stressed out about this.

They show up and they’re like, “What is this metal ball?”

And they X-ray it and it’s hollow.

So it’s just like a magic metal ball.

No, it’s not.

It’s just a boy.

A buoy, if you wanna be very technical.

This of course, has gotten everyone all freaked out

because anything now that is circular and just not accounted for,

basically it was a buoy from the ocean, it got free and it floated around.

That’s it.

That was an entire week’s worth of news.

that people did not seem to logically think through.

But further, balloon-oriented news.

Japan has a commercial space viewing tiny bubble.

And so what they have is this little bubble.

It’s also 1.5 meters in diameter.

It’s actually the same size as the ball

from the previous story, which is a little coincidental.

I don’t know because it’s not.

It is coincidental.

Basically it’s a little ball.

They’re gonna connect to a balloon

and fly you up into space so that you can view space.

You’re not gonna leave the atmosphere,

but you’re gonna get into, I believe, the stratosphere.

So when you look out, you’re actually gonna see the earth.

You can see the curvature of the earth.

This will, I actually wanna get flat

earthers into this bubble and bring them up

and then see what they say when they come back down.

But you’ll be able to see, sorry, Dave’s on my lap.

You’ll actually be able to see space.

So this is the kind of thing I is like a science fiction fan

and really into, I would really love to do this.

It’s safe, economical and gentle for people.

It has two seats, one for a pilot and one for a passenger.

Its airtight cabin can go up 25 kilometers.

It’s the balloon’s gonna be powered by helium.

So you’re gonna be able to float up into the sky,

gently float back down as the idea.

This is gonna cost 24 million yet at first.

Now the plan is to bring it down.

And the guy said, two several million yet.

The average salary in Japan is four to five million yet a year,

which means for the normal person, this is unavailable.

This is going to be half a year salary to be able to fly up into space.

Now if it gets really popular and really common, maybe it does get cheaper.

The thing is, so this is a 1.5 meter diameter.

I am 1.84 centimeters tall.

I don’t believe this is designed from my comfort.

I think this ball has been designed for by Japanese people,

kind of for Japanese people.

I don’t think they’re taking size into account for other people.

I just look so tiny.

And then my thought is, it’s a ball suspended by a balloon

and it goes up and there’s a problem with the balloon.

I assume it has parachutes?

I don’t know, man, it’s terrifying.

I don’t think I’m ready for this.

Even if it is like, as they say, perfectly safe.

And very gentle, ’cause you’re gonna float up

and float back down.

I don’t know.

I just, for me, it was too scary.

I don’t think I’ll be doing it.

(clock ticking)

There was a year bookmaker and they did some surveys

and they found that 40% of kids want their pictures photoshopped.

So we didn’t have Photoshop when I was in high school,

which makes me think, what do we do?

What do we do?

But 80% of parents don’t want their kids pictures photoshopped.

Which means there’s 20% to do.

I guess 40% who want their pictures photoshopped is not.

That’s the minority.

60% don’t care.

But what they’re actually saying is most pictures

in the yearbook, like sort of not planned,

just out in the wild photos from your school year.

All the kids are gonna be wearing masks.

You’re not gonna be able to see their faces.

So I’m wondering what they’re saying is,

I’d like my face photoshopped onto my own face

so that you don’t have a picture of me wearing a mask.

‘Cause over the pandemic, every sort of photo.

of kids that would go into a yearbook

has actually had all their masks on.

Which is kind of sad.

It’s something I hadn’t thought about.

That’s actually why I found this story interesting.

‘Cause it’s kind of sad that these kids,

most of their memories are going to be with a mask.

Which is pretty crap.

But your books are kind of becoming a thing of the past.

80% of students use social media for memorable moments.

So what they’re saying is, they take pictures of them and their friends,

they stick it on social media.

The problem with social media is it’s designed.

for you to be adding to it, adding to it, adding to it.

My wife, my family, they take thousands of pictures

and they don’t do any organization of them.

They’re just like reams and reams of pictures.

And when you ask someone to show you a picture,

they always take like five minutes to find it.

So Booty Scratcher 4 just says, “I have a three year old son

“that I’d hate to make him cover his face in photos.”

Yeah, and when he gets older and goes to school,

he’s, I guess, maybe in the next couple of years,

’cause the mandate for masks in Japan is going away in March.

Which means you don’t have to wear a mask.

But thing is, I’m thinking about pandemic kids.

The kids who have just spent the last three years.

My daughter’s 13, she has spent three years.

And three years of your life when you’re 13

is a significant portion of your life wearing a mask all day every day.

She’s actually gotten very used to not showing her face.

And I think she might prefer to wear a mask

’cause she’s self-conscious about it now.

So we have this whole generation of

kids now who grew up during the pandemic.

We have what I’m essentially calling pandemic babies.

Kids who were like three or four when the pandemic started.

And they spent one or two years essentially an isolation with no interaction

or physical contact.

When we get those, like, I work at an English teaching school,

when those kids get any sort of physical contact, they get super excited.

Because they just haven’t been, you

know, they don’t wrestle, they don’t touch,

they don’t like high five,

they don’t do any of that anymore.

So any physical contact to them is super, super exciting

and encouraging.

Yeah, I’m thinking there’s gonna be this generation of kids

it just has a very different way of thinking about human interactions.

And with the stories of Japan’s declining birth rate

and stuff, actually, it’s one of the stories coming up later.

Like, their whole world is gonna be different.

Oh, my heater.

Sorry.

Oh, sorry Dave.

Dave freaked out when I had to press the button.

All right, all right.

No, Dave’s not gonna sit down again.

You’re gonna go down.

I have to make a decision now.

We have to pause the podcast so that Dave can decide

if he’s gonna sit down again or get down.

I cannot do the podcast with Dave’s just standing on me.

This is something I’ve realized.

I have to now put my entire life on pause.

Dave is, yes, Dave is adorable,

but Dave is also a huge pain in the ass

’cause Dave often doesn’t make good decisions.

Look at the camera.

That’s he, nothing.

Dave is an independent king in the world.

and takes commands from no one.

All right, what he does like those getting his head scratched.

Look at that.

Oh, okay.

All right, Dave.

I have tried to play Elden Ring with Dave and I can play the game.

I cannot fight a boss.

I cannot fight a boss with Dave standing on me.

It’s too hard.

All right.

Buddy, the whole point in me doing this is I can get it done.

So I’m gonna have to.

Ah, are you keeping him or her unneutered on purpose?

Like, so you can have babies or is this just like,

’cause it’s a young dog.

What, Dave just went mad?

I’m afraid I’m choking him.

But he didn’t react so.

We’ll do a little scratch break and then I’ll get on to the next story.

Okay, still too young for that.

That makes sense.

We got Dave, Dave was already like five when we got him.

He’s got like an epic backstory.

His origin story is awesome.

All right, Dave, though, you gotta get down.

Nah, I mean, it’s worth doing.

You don’t wanna have accidental babies.

That’s actually gonna be the worst thing.

Okay, Dave, can you get down?

You sit in front of the heater.

All right.

Now he just stands here.

He just stands here pushing against my chest.

I think it’s ’cause it’s warm, but then we were so settled.

What about,

good?

Now he’s gonna walk around and piss me off.

All right, now I gotta get, I gotta do the podcast.

We got people in the world who wanna know about Japanese news.

Where were we?

80% of students use social media from memorable moments,

which I actually find kind of sad

because to me, social media seems almost impermanent.

60% of the kids use Instagram, 58% use line.

Line is a messaging service that’s in Asia.

It’s not necessarily popular in North America.

It’s a good service, but it’s one of those ones where they have everything.

I think all the meshes in service, I

think all the services now are the same.

They all have photo sharing, they all have messaging,

they all have different kinds of things.

Twitter and TikTok was 13.5%.

Yeah, there’s a whole generation of kids growing up now

that the pandemic has affected the way.

they see their own face because they’ve

spent all their public time with a mask on.

So what point do you like?

They’re gonna have to almost force them to not wear masks

so they get used to not wearing a mask

when they’re hanging out with each other

because a lot of kids are actually saying that they’ll wear a mask,

they’ll actually be more comfortable out in public

with a mask on them when they’re mask off,

which is a whole different sort of way of thinking for me.

There’s been another rush on products in Japan.

So I gotta get the name out.

Ryu Kaku-San is a herbal candy.

And apparently this happened a couple weeks ago

with a Pavaron-Pavaron cold medicine.

So basically there’s some kind of medicine

in Japan and there’s a rumor in China

that this is really effective against coronavirus

and then Chinese people come to Japan and they buy it all.

It’s not, it’s like cold medicine

so it will help with a cough, it’ll help with symptoms

but it doesn’t actually prevent coronavirus.

But the way it’s being sold on social media in China.

is that it actually will defend or help against coronavirus

so they buy it all because they’re also terrified of coronavirus.

They’ve just stopped the like zero COVID policy in China

which actually means they’ve gone through

a little burst of coronavirus.

So this has happened again this week.

I’m gonna have to get rid of the dog if I want to run a successful podcast.

That is what I’ve learned.

That is the only thing I’ve learned from this experience

is that if you have family or an animal or anything,

they will absolutely interrupt you when you try to run a podcast.

I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of episodes

and the only problems I’ve had have been my children, my wife and the dog.

Yes, we’re great friends.

Can you just stop?

Go to sleep.

Okay, yeah, you wanna go out, go out there.

Okay, go.

You?

I can keep them out, he’ll be back in like two minutes.

(swooshing)

So Ryukakusan, herbal throat candy and Ryukakusan,

it actually sounds like a moving street fighter.

Ryukakusan, throat refreshing tablets.

These are herbal remedies.

So of course they’re not going to stop coronavirus.

They’re designed for coughs and sore throats.

And even the manufacturer says these are not medicine.

It’s just like a candy that helps soothe your throat.

But a rumor’s gone around in China

that this is going to stop coronavirus.

So Chinese people will come to Japan

and they’re actually buying it all up.

It’s good in that, you know, this company’s making a ton of money,

but it’s bad in that, you know, Japanese

people can’t get their throat candy.

I am a foreign resident in Japan.

I’m a permanent resident because I’m married and I have kids.

So they gave me a permanent visa.

That’s actually interesting.

‘Cause a lot of people like it’s hard to get, I don’t want citizenship.

I don’t wanna lose my Canadian passport or my British passport.

Whereas Japan, you can’t have dual citizenship.

So I would not actually want to become Japanese,

which some people like kind of want to do.

But because I’m a permanent resident of Japan,

but not Japanese, therefore I cannot vote.

So it has come up, should, this comes up almost every couple of years.

Should foreign residents be allowed to vote?

Not vote for like prime minister and stuff, but vote in like referendums.

So basically I pay taxes,

but as a permanent resident, I pay taxes,

I work here, I pay income tax, all this other stuff.

So do I get to vote in anything?

The answer is no.

In the government, only 16% of assembly

members even wanna have the conversation.

So not only do Japanese people, government-wise,

wanna have foreign people have their input,

only 16% even wanna have the conversation.

You can assume that 16% is the ones that actually think

that foreign people who live in Japan should have a say.

Everyone else, the 74%, or is it 84?

Yeah, 84% don’t even wanna have the conversation.

Because it gets to a point where it’s like,

well, if they pay taxes and they live here

and they do all the stuff they’re supposed to do,

shouldn’t they have a say in how society is run,

whereas their actual feeling is no.

But then they have to come out and say no, which makes them look racist,

and you can’t look racist anymore.

There was one I came to Japan.

It was perfectly acceptable to just come out and say,

I don’t believe foreign people should have

basic human rights in Japan because they’re not Japanese.

So it should be Japanese first, four and a second.

Now society has shifted enough that that’s

not acceptable for a politician to say.

So a bunch of politicians have gotten in

trouble for saying vaguely racist things,

and then going like, what, it’s just foreigners?

So when they talk to the other percentage

that didn’t even wanna have the conversation, 50%,

56% said, I can’t say why we shouldn’t have the debate.

Because if the second part that they don’t say,

’cause if I say what I think, I’m gonna sound racist.

24% say they don’t think we should pursue it further,

’cause this is already a settled thing, why should we talk about change?

And that’s an interesting position for a politician to take

that we should not even consider change.

And about 2% of the Japanese population in Japan right now is not Japanese.

So when I came to Japan, it was 1% of the population was non-Japanese.

That’s actually mostly Chinese and Korean people.

They come here for work and whatnot.

There’s a lot of Filipinos as well

in the healthcare sector.

But it’s doubled, I mean, 1 to 2% is not very much,

but it has actually doubled in the time up in Japan.

This is a civil rights issue.

And then the people who are arguing for it

are saying like, this is about, you know,

you’re right to have your voice heard in society.

This is about civil rights.

But again, the average Japanese person

doesn’t consider a foreign person as having a civil rights.

as a reasonable request.

‘Cause if you want that, you should go back where it came from.

(upbeat music)

Talked about low-key racism in Japan a few times.

I actually wanna have a conversation with

one of my other friends who lives in Japan.

about it like our experiences.

‘Cause I’ve never had that many direct racist experiences

but low-key in society, it’s just there bubbling under all the time.

We have a couple of exciting arrests.

This is a thing called specialized fraud,

which is a thing I’d never heard of before.

And it’s where you gain someone’s trust using remote means.

So basically that you either contact

them on the Internet or on the telephone.

This was interesting to me because it was different

from just fraud where you just go out

and straight lighten people to their face.

You gain their trust first and then you sort of have like a whole,

it’s more like a calm I think, is specialized fraud.

But this was a 15 year old girl called up an old lady

who was in her 70s impersonating a municipal employee

saying, “You have a government refund coming.

We need to make a new bank card for you.

So we’re gonna have a representative show up at your house

and they will help you make a new card.”

And then using that, we can get you your refund.

So then the 15 year old dressed up in a suit

went to the old lady’s house, got her original bank card

at an ATM information, went to the bank and withdrew half a million yen.

The police are looking at this as like a

ring, but I’m wondering, ’cause this is not

so the information they gave.

When you’re not of legal adult age, the

police don’t release any information about you

because you’re under age.

But also in Japan there’s almost no punishment.

So she’s gonna get a slap on the wrist.

She’s gonna get introuble, but she’s actually not gonna go to prison.

She’s not gonna be punished properly because she’s a minor.

And I’m thinking maybe there’s a ring of people

who are now kind of recruiting underage people

to commit these crimes because they don’t get punished

the same way as if let’s say I as an adult did it,

I would go to prison for X amount of years.

And that might be like a new style crime

because you now have the stratification of society

where you have really, really old people,

which is a majority of the people in Japan.

You have young people who are facing limited

options and what they can do for work.

Turning to a life of crime while you’re

under age, actually because of the leniency

of the Japanese criminal system is not a bad idea.

I hate that I do this so regularly on Ninja News Japan.

I give good criminal advice, but it’s

’cause I think about it in a logical way.

And if you’re gonna commit a crime in Japan,

you should absolutely do it while you’re under age

’cause you basically won’t be punished.

And then when you turn to an adult,

that gets expunished, your record doesn’t exist anymore.

(phone ringing)

I enjoyed this one weirdly.

A man was arrested because at a company

party, so they had some kind of like,

let’s say a New Year’s party or something like that.

A woman got up from the table,

so this is probably like one of those ones where you sit on the floor.

She got up and she went to get some more food or something.

A man reached over, grabbed the back of her

pants and pulled them down to her knees.

Now she was of course embarrassed.

She, the man started laughing.

All the other men at the table started laughing.

And I was like, what is the crime here?

Because it’s clearly actually,

you should not be like ripping off other people’s clothes,

but of course them being a group of men who were probably drunk at the time,

they all thought it was hilarious.

The man is being brought up on sexual assault charges.

And I’m really glad she pursued this because this is, again,

when I talk about low-key racism in Japan as a society,

low-key sexism is right on its heels.

Like as much progress as they may have made, it’s not very much overall.

The man’s defense though is a classic Japanese man’s defense.

It’s, I didn’t do it.

I was drunk and I don’t remember.

Now those are actually conflicting statements.

I was drunk and I don’t remember conflicts with I didn’t do it.

Because if I was drunk and I don’t remember,

that means there is just as much chance

that I did it as I didn’t.

I don’t remember, isn’t complicit with being drunk.

I know they often go together,

but I think what’s actually happened is he remembers doing it.

He remembers getting the big laugh

and everyone thinking he’s awesome for about two minutes

and then he remembers the police showing up

and telling him he’s sexually assaulted a coworker.

It’s gross.

It’s gross behavior, but of course in

the moment, everyone thinks it’s hilarious.

But at a company function, there’s no way he should get away with that.

His boss should have actually torn him a new one

and I bet his boss was sitting there laughing with everyone else.

I was wondering though if there could be a secondary charge.

because it’s not sexual harassment if they all sit there and laugh.

So maybe officially the police would struggle to do anything with that,

but the company could actually come down pretty hard

on anyone who found that amusing, which would be interesting.

I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

(phone ringing)

One of the bigger stories this week, just the last couple days.

This is Ryokan.

Ryokan is an old-style Japanese hotel.

They are often connected with hot Springs.

Now, I knew that hot Springs overall were not actually pumped in

from a real hot spring going through a volcano and stuff.

I knew it was like, “Go through machines,” and whatnot.

But I didn’t think about this.

So the Ryokan has only been changing its hot spring water twice a year,

which means that essential bath water gets pumped in,

gets pumped out, goes through a heater, gets pumped in again.

And I always thought, “Ah, you sort of think,

“it’s hot enough, it’s gonna kill anything in the water.”

But that is obviously not the case, otherwise it wouldn’t be a news story.

Legionella is a bacteria, and it was 33,700 times the legal limit.

in the water at this Ryokan, which means you are bathing in bacteria soup

if you get in that.

And this is actually really put me off.

the hot Springs, because what assurance do I have?

They say, since 2019, they’ve been telling everyone,

“Oh, we changed the water regularly, it’s clean.”

We put the proper amount of chlorine in it.

They haven’t.

So they haven’t been changing the water, and

they haven’t been putting in the chlorine

to kill everything.

They have been accused of lying.

They came out with an apology.

I think it’s really, really hurt.

Last week on “Injoon-Japan,” we had the creepy, gross men

who would go up in a mountain and get a telephoto lens

and video women bathing in public baths.

This, now you have a combination.

Not only could I be naked in public and someone actually videos me,

but I could be bathing my body in a bacteria soup,

which now has made something I really enjoyed.

I really used to enjoy going to public baths.

One of my most positive experiences in Japan

was getting a private hotel with a bath on the balcony.

So it was called a hot spring, but I know it was just a bath.

And now I might not want to do that again.

And it’s so gross, but it is also just the reality

of shared bathing.

That place is probably gonna get shut down.

I can’t see anyone going there again in the future.

(phone ringing)

Japanese study on the climate impact of cow-burps.

Now I mentally thought, “Ah, cow-burps,

“I mean, you mean farting’s bad, burping’s bad.”

But this is just cows, this is nothing.

Turns out that one cow can equal 1.7 cars.

So the cow, the methane they produce through burping and farting,

could be a major cause of global warming,

’cause we all eat a lot of meat.

And so they’re trying to find some way to offset

the climate impact of the methane that cows produce.

So they’re designing stomach sensors.

And they put these sensors into the cows.

They’re gonna use AI to monitor methane emissions made by cows.

And the goal is to cut cow methane emissions by 80% by 2050, which is great.

I didn’t think about any of this.

I didn’t realize any of it.

So this is actually all new information to me.

How they come up with this solution is amazing.

Cashew nut shells mixed into cow feed

produces a healthy acid in the stomach and not methane.

So basically if they take cow feed and mix in cashew shells,

the cows are not going to be burping and farting methane.

They’re going to be producing this acid in the stomach,

which helps them digest the grass better,

which means it that alone just mixing in cashew shells, not even the nuts.

So you got to have a company that produces cashews.

They shell them, sell the nuts, and then sell or give the nuts

to farmers and they’re essentially solving climate change,

or at least the impact that cows have on it, which is shocking.

And it’s this combination of science and technology

and innovation that on something that I didn’t even know

was a problem and they’re already fixing it.

I love science.

I love the stuff they do and I want to support them

anywhere I can. So good on you cow scientists.

The kids are, look, last story and it’s low birth rates.

And we’ve done this a button million times.

And I have always known what the solution is.

But of course, politicians can’t admit what the real problem is.

so they can’t figure out what the real solution is.

This is almost the opposite of the previous story,

where I know the problem and the solution,

they just don’t see it the same way.

An assemblyman gave a speech and he said,

the reason we have low birth rates in Japan

is Japanese have low romantic ability.

Now my first thing is how do you define romantic ability?

Because that phrase doesn’t seem to mean anything.

So he’s asked for an analysis of Japan’s low romantic ability.

So how do you measure it first of all?

What is it?

It’s problem number one.

Problem number two is how do you measure romantic ability?

He wants surveys and then there’ve been some other surveys

we talked about like problems with relationships.

And people have responded, I don’t have confidence

and I can’t get along with the opposite sex.

The reason you would have low romantic ability

is because you do not interact with the opposite sex enough.

Now I have held true that the Japanese education system,

Johnny Bravo called it mojo, that is absolutely 100% correct.

But Japan needs more mojo.

But where does mojo come from?

This is actually, you’ve actually hit on the point.

Mojo comes from interacting with people.

Not even the opposite sex, just getting the skills,

the natural skills to interact with other

people in a positive and friendly way.

And that applies to both men and women,

regardless of your sexual orientation.

If I interact with a lot of men, I’m gonna know how to interact with men.

If I interact with a lot of women, I’m

gonna know how to interact with women.

But core problem is that they’re people.

Japanese school education and then work culture is set up

that you actually have very little time,

socially to interact with other people,

and in a natural way.

So I remember my high school.

I was a terrible student.

I didn’t get my shit together until the very last year

of high school when I actually realized

if I don’t get good scores, I’m not going to university.

My son is currently finishing his.

high school exams.

And so he’s gonna graduate from junior high school,

do these exams and that’s gonna decide

what high school he goes to.

And that’s gonna decide what university goes to,

which will essentially decide the path of his future.

He’s 15 years old.

He doesn’t interact with girls because he’s studying all the time.

So I’m, now my son, he’s my son, so he’s

got a certain sort of, he’s got it going on.

But for a normal kid,

because you’ve never interacted with the

opposite sex or people you find attractive,

you don’t know how to interact with them.

So when you hit your 17, 18, 19, 20,

when you would be dating pretty seriously,

you don’t know how to do it, which means approaching women is hard.

‘Cause you have to go through the like, I

have to approach women and get rejected,

I have to learn how to do it.

That is, I guess, your romantic ability.

So the low romantic ability for me

comes from that the system designed through

education, the system designed for work,

makes it so that the average Japanese person.

does not interact with people in a social way.

Therefore, it never learns the social skills.

So they’re gonna be talking about dating,

meeting people and this romantic ability.

He’s what he’s saying is that, again, just like Johnny Bravo called it mojo,

Japanese people don’t have mojo, but you’re not gonna have a class

where you teach mojo successfully.

You have to have people spend free time interacting with each other,

which means we have to get, work-life balance has to be rebalanced in Japan.

Education system has to rebalance in Japan.

So that people in Japan have time to be people in Japan

and hang out with other people in Japan,

and not learn how to date from a class or the Internet or something,

which as we’ve probably all learned is not where you do it.

Weirdly enough, here I am on the Internet

telling people what they need to do.

But what I’m actually saying is,

don’t learn how to date from a podcast like mine.

Don’t learn how to date from a course you

took that’s sponsored by the government.

Learn how to date by actually hanging out with people.

I’m not even saying date, really.

I’m saying hang out with other people,

hang out with women, hang out with men,

hang out with mixed groups.

Just learn how to manage those social interactions.

But Japanese school is set up so that you have to study

and then after you go to school, you

have to go to Juku, which is cram school.

You go to Juku, you get home at 10 o’clock, you go to bed.

You’re probably studying before you go to

bed and then you get up and do it all again.

You’re not being a kid.

And then in high school, you’re not being a high school,

a teenager.

And then when you get to university, you got a couple of free years.

That’s usually when relations have happened.

But now I’m so awkward ’cause I’ve never done it before.

I can’t get a good relationship.

So I give up, then where do I end up?

I get a job that has me working 500 hours a week.

Yeah, of course the birth rate’s going down.

You need people to go out and be people and have lives and stuff.

And that is the sun’s shiny note we’re ending Ninja News Japan on.

But Japanese government needs to listen to my podcast.

Pay attention to what I’m saying.

We need to revamp the entire system.

I know that seems overwhelming, but it would be a new boon to Japan

if we could actually get it right.

So actually there is a glimmer of positivity

in there in the end because what I’m saying is,

it can be fixed and it actually wouldn’t take that much.

(electronic music)

(upbeat music).

The Spirit of Kanji

(upbeat music)

Kida Kida names.

Okay, so what is Kida Kida?

If I’m gonna use any Japanese, I figure I have to explain it.

Kida Kida is sparkly or shiny or something like that.

So I’m assuming like when you collect Pokemon,

there’s Kida Kida Pokemon and special shiny Pokemon.

A Kida Kida name is therefore an unusual name.

They have rules in place about what names you can use for children.

Primarily comes down to the kanji.

Kanji is the Chinese characters.

So I wanna name my child.

There’s essentially an approved list of names that I can use.

I can’t call my kid demon.

I can’t use offensive or derogatory words.

That’s always been in place.

There have been over the last few years.

I remember some of students that I have

making a presentation about Kida Kida names.

And it was a lot of stuff from anime.

So it was like some kids name Pikachu,

some kids name Naruto, some kids name like Luffy, that kind of stuff.

So these were anime fans who decided that their anime

fandom was so important that they would

actually name their child after anime.

The Japanese government’s like, “Mm, we’re not cool with this anymore.”

Because they are saying that these kind

of weird or fancy names are bad for kids.

So they wanna make some new rules.

Basically names that make other people

uncomfortable are not going to be okay.

So if you wanna name your kid Pikachu or not like an anime character,

when you meet that person in real life.

So hello, my name is Peter.

The other one goes, “Hello, my name is Pikachu.”

I go, “Oh, fuck, that’s weird.”

That name might not be approved by the government.

You cannot use names that are easily confused by the kanji reading.

So basically you have different ways

Chinese characters can be read in Japanese.

And so you can play with those sounds.

So I’ll choose this one and this one.

And I’ll use this sound in this sound.

It’s very complicated actually.

So I can make a sound that means the

opposite of the words you’re looking at.

That’s not okay.

So let’s say I want, my name is Peter.

When I came to Japan, of course one of the first things

I wanna know is how do you write Peter in Japanese?

So they use katakana, which is a phonetic sound in Japanese.

So my name is Pita, which is fine, it’s pretty close.

But then not really understanding the system,

I’m like, well, what kanji would be used for Peter?

Peter doesn’t mean anything in Japanese.

So there is no kanji, there is no Chinese character that would relate to it.

So my students, you know, they were just having fun.

They’re like, ah, well, the P, there’s this like this character,

kind of makes a P sound if you use it this way.

And this one is Ta, so you can use that.

And it was devil T and I was like, oh, that sounds awesome.

But you couldn’t use devil.

If you actually wanted to register this name,

you couldn’t use the devil part of that,

as part of my name.

So the example that I read, I think this was sort of news,

said like if you want to use Chinese characters

that make the sounds micaru as a Michael, that’s not okay.

Because it’s very easily misreaded because

the Chinese characters have set sounds.

And that’s not how they’re normally used.

Dave’s being an asshole today.

Here you go.

One.

I’m trying to record a show of millions of people are going to watch.

And you’re just being a dick and ruining it.

So get the fuck out or sit down and shut up.

Those are your choices.

I’m going to put you out and then you’re

going to come on and come back, right?

Give me a flood, boy.

Dave thought I was going to follow on.

He’s probably really upset right now.

I’m going to have to wait.

He’s going to want to come back in.

Realize like having a dog that has been very coddled.

It’s very much like having a toddler.

It’s never going to grow out of being a toddler.

Okay, so that’s got to be the edit point.

Fuck, as soon as I get started.

Then come back in.

Sit down and shut up.

Come on.

(door opens)

It’s a lot easier for me to do C-McB with Dave on my lap

because most of that just comes out on my head.

The engineer’s Japan, I actually want to get quotes right and stuff.

I need my notes.

But whatever.

Okay, another edit point, but that’s just one bigger edit point.

(sighs)

So basically in Japan, you’re going to have to pick

from a list of kanji and there are sort of set readings

that you’re going to have to use

or those names will not be registered by the government.

That still means there’s thousands and thousands of names to choose from.

So over the next year, if this rule goes into place, the heads of family.

So when you have a house or a family and stuff,

you have to register the head of the household.

The head of the family is going to have to report

the family name so I’d have to write down

all the kanji, all the Chinese characters

that are used and how they are read.

And if I’ve messed around too much, those will not be registered.

So basically what they’re saying is, if I

don’t report my family’s names accurately

over the next year,

the government’s going to assign, so

I’d let’s say, so I’ve already had kids.

I’ve already chosen the Chinese characters for my kids.

Those have been registered.

What they actually want you to do is send

in how those are read to the government.

If you don’t do it within the next year,

the government will assign the reading to the name.

So you could actually have the government naming your children

if you don’t take sort of the initiative and actually report it yourself.

That’s an interesting problem.

So maybe my kid’s three years old, four years old.

He’s learned his name.

And then the government’s like, that’s not how you read those kanji.

That’s not how you read those Chinese characters.

You are going to have to call your child this other name

from now on because that’s how it’s properly read

because you didn’t register it properly

or you tried to play with the system.

There is no system that humanity is involved in

where they don’t try to like push the boundaries

or bend the rules to see if they can get away with it.

That’s just sort of human nature.

Japanese government, when it comes to names, they’re not messing around.

They are honestly just like, no, we’re locking it down.

You gotta do it this way.

If you don’t do it this way, we’re going to tell you your own child’s name.

(phone ringing)

Couple weeks ago, we talked about a Shogi player.

The Shogi player was not wearing his mask properly.

Basically he had his mask over his mouth, but his nose was sticking out.

That’s something that people who don’t really

like masks do to kind of gain the system

because they can technically say, I’m wearing

a mask because I have it over my face.

But my nose is sticking out, which of course

defeats the purpose of wearing a mask.

I think we all know that.

Who knew that Shogi players would be pedantic,

which kind of the phrase that runs through my head

every time I hit this kind of story?

He left the tournament.

He was actually booted out of the tournament

for not wearing his mask properly.

He said he would file a legal complaint.

He had three consecutive disqualifications

for not wearing a mask properly while playing Shogi.

And now he’s received a three-month suspension.

So this professional Shogi player, I mean, once you get disqualified twice,

you should realize they’re not messing around.

You’re going to get disqualified again, you do it again.

He did it again.

He again, sort of like the previous story, what are the rules?

Let’s push the boundaries.

Let’s see how much trouble I can get

into before I actually get into trouble.

He claims that the temporary coronavirus rules

do not say you must not expose your nose and even if you expose your nose,

oh, this is his quote.

So like, sorry, I’m kind of messed that up.

His quote is that the rules do not say you must not expose your nose.

And even if you expose your nose, there will not be any droplets

as you are not talking during the match.

The ruling is absurd.

So he’s saying that the rules don’t specifically say

that the mask must cover your nose.

Therefore, he can wear a mask that does not cover his nose.

This is again, spirit of the law versus letter of the law.

The letter of the law says you must wear a mask.

It does not say how you have to wear a mask

so I could put it on the top of my head.

Oh, I’m wearing a mask.

We saw a lot of this in America when the anti-maskers

were going around trying to like make fun of people wearing masks.

There were people wearing like lace masks

that had gigantic holes in them obviously doing nothing.

They called them face diapers.

I remember all that.

This guy’s obviously in the same genre of person, I guess.

But he is again talking about suing them, but I think that’s not gonna,

I don’t think he realizes like, this is not an argument he can win.

The rules said wear a mask.

They, the governing body of Shogi is going to decide

what is appropriate when it comes to wearing a mask.

You gotta wear a mask.

Weirdly, I am not surprised that Shogi players are kind of dicks.

I don’t know what that says about me or about Shogi players,

but again, to me, chess players, being pedantic and annoying seems on brand.

Is that me, a bad person? I wonder.

I wonder if what I’ve done is stereotyped chess players.

Jade is putting them in, nah, they’re dicks.

Which, okay, at least I am not alone in my

feeling about essentially pedantic people.

Okay, so we’ve also in every country now had a balloon story.

So spy balloon.

So America had found a spy balloon.

It was floating around, they shot it down.

Now it’s come out that there’s a whole bunch

that have floated around America in the past.

The same things happened in Japan.

We’ve seen spy balloons.

This has led to a couple of interesting statements by China.

China denies the balloons in Japanese airspace, we’re Chinese.

So they’re saying, yes, maybe you saw some balloons,

but they were not Chinese balloons.

Therefore, you should not be angry.

Japan said, like, look, we find stuff in our airspace.

We should be able to shoot it down.

So they’re actually now talking about what should they do?

We find a balloon in our airspace.

Are we gonna shoot it down?

How do we shoot it down?

You know, what’s the best way to shoot it down?

They have to get permission from the government

and that permission then has to get also

relate to the Japanese self-defense force.

But they’re saying basically, if there is an object

in our airspace and we can shoot it down safely,

we think we’re gonna start shooting it down pretty safely.

Like, they don’t want it to crash into like a town

or something and actually hurt somebody.

China then says, we are opposed to attacks against China without proof.

Now, they just previously said, it’s not a Chinese balloon.

Maybe it’s a North Korean balloon.

Maybe it’s a balloon from another country.

And Japan’s like, we’re gonna shoot it down.

They’re like, well, you would stop attacking China.

And they’re like, wait a minute, if it’s

not a Chinese balloon and we shoot it down,

we’re not really attacking China, are we?

So there’s a little dichotomy.

I don’t know if that’s really the right word.

There’s a logical fallacy happening in

the Chinese side of the arguments of this.

As in, it’s not a Chinese balloon,

but we really don’t think you should be attacking China by shooting it down.

So how is shooting down, let’s say,

Korean North Korean-Bulled Spi-Bulling down

an attack on China?

So it’s interesting that again, they don’t see any problem with saying

sort of contradictory statements.

Then they demanded that Japan stop following US propaganda.

Because of course, the Americans are saying

that the balloons that are floating around

are Chinese as well.

I’m assuming at this point they know whether it is or not.

(clock ticking)

From this point forward, we’ve done all the actual good news.

Almost everything else, you see, they’re violent or gross.

So this is your warning going forward, maybe a trigger warning.

It’s people beating each other up and gross men.

It’s all men.

I, okay, you wanna talk about sexism.

I, what I try to do with my notes is,

go from least amount of poop in sexual assault.

To most amount of poop in sexual assault.

That’s kind of the logic I use.

So I use all the stories we’ve just done

are relatively clean international politics.

And now it gets violent and dirty.

It’s either when people come here for or where they should stop the podcast.

But let’s go.

So I got two robbery stories.

There was a man robbed a convenience store.

He got 50,000 yen, let’s say like 500 bucks to do the quick math.

So I mean, that’s actually pretty good haul for convenience store robbery,

but also not really worth it in my opinion.

He then went around to three other convenience stores in a 700 meter radius,

which actually just really tells you how

many convenience stores they’re out in Japan.

And tried to Rob them.

All those people refused.

And he didn’t get anything else.

In one of the stores, he went to a different store during his crime spree.

And tried to pay his phone bill, but then didn’t have money or something.

When he was arrested, he said the reason he robbed these stores

is ’cause he was in a bad mood.

He, the literal translation I got from

the Internet was he was in a foul mood,

so he robbed convenience stores.

Now that is an interesting way to do some sort of anger management.

Because I guess it’s not anger management.

It’s just expressing your anger.

There was a second man, completely different story.

Went to the convenience store, he wanted to go to the toilet.

And someone else went into the toilet first and took too long.

The man comes out of the toilet, goes outside,

the dude cranks him in the face two or three times.

So he beats him up.

The guy’s wallet falls out, so he steals his wallet.

When he was arrested, he said, he didn’t

beat up the man in order to steal his money.

He beat up the man because he took too long to toilet.

And again, I tend to like look at these

stories and go like, let’s look at the logic.

Which is worse?

Is it worse to beat someone up to steal from them?

Or is it worse to beat someone up because

they just took too long in the toilet

and you were annoyed?

I feel like beating someone up for their

money is actually less worse because,

yes, it’s all evil and terrible, but it has a purpose, it has a reason,

whereas beating someone up because they took too long in the toilet

actually has no reason.

Like that’s how I feel about it.

Like there was no logic behind that.

You’re just like, ah, that guy annoying me so I beat the shit out of him.

Yes, so Jade is put in the chat.

I beat him up and happened to take his wallet because it was on the ground,

is what his defense is.

I’m wondering if maybe there is a secondary crime.

Like beating someone up is a crime,

but beating someone up and stealing from them is worse

because we’re actually found that many

times in the past in the Indian use Japan,

where they tried to say, I did A, but I did not do B.

So like, I stabbed him but I wasn’t trying to murder him

so that I get assault charges, not murder charges.

That kind of stuff happens a lot.

I’m wondering if this guy knows the law enough to know

that I beat him up is actually not as bad

as I beat him up and tried to steal from him.

So maybe he’s telling the truth.

Maybe he’s just trying to offset the actual charges he’s going to be given.

(clock ticking)

I feel gross.

I’ve done so many, this is like 200 some episodes in the Indian use Japan.

I have done so many sort of dudes being gross, sexually.

It’s such a common story in Japan.

I’ve actually started to like not wanna do them,

but then it is the bit that people find interesting

is just how many weird sex stories there are.

So these two are kind of together.

There was a Kyoto man who was arrested recently

and over 12 years he made a 150 million yen.

That’s $1.1 million.

And he claims this is how he made his living

and the way he made his living was between, well for the last 12 years,

he was taking upskirt videos and uploading them online.

So he was going up escalators.

He basically put a smartphone in the front of his bag.

So probably on the inside and cut a little hole

where the camera is and then he would hold it

so that he could take videos of the woman

standing in front of him on the escalator

and take those videos and then post them online for money.

And he made $90,000 a year.

Between 2021 and 2022, they now have him filming 112 different women.

So he’s been arrested because of the anti-newsense ordinance

because filming up people skirts is a nuisance.

I actually think that should be escalated to sexual assault.

I think that’s actually what he should do.

And they’ve given him a much stricter sense.

This year volume of it is what is disgusting.

I guess once is not any worse than 3, 4, 500 times.

But yeah, no, I’m stuck in a loop.

Is there one worse?

No, they’re both bad.

You shouldn’t do it at all.

Anyways, we all kind of agree.

You should not do it at all.

It’s the thing that he made that much money off.

He made a million dollars.

No, it was over 12 years.

But his salary annually is bigger than my salary

doing on his work, which kind of bothers me.

But I think the bit I’m confused by is like,

porn is free on the Internet and upskirt

videos as good as they may be are not good.

I guess my point is you can kind of see

whatever you want on the Internet for free.

Why are people paying this guy?

How did he make 1.1 million dollars?

Maybe 10 years ago, it was more of a unique thing.

But I’m guessing they’re not paying for the video itself.

They’re paying for the invasion of

the person, which is why this is so gross.

Because again, the upskirt video is not going to show you

very much, it’s not going to be particularly sexual.

What they’re paying for is the woman to

be violated, which is how gross men are.

So, J.D. is putting in the exclusivity and the fact that they don’t know

didn’t want it done exactly.

So that’s kind of exactly what I’m saying.

It’s the violation of the person is the thrill is what they’re paying for.

And I guess maybe again, it’s so confusing to me

’cause I’m like, it’s not a very good video,

but I am not into the concept or the idea

of violating another person for sexual pleasure.

But of course, in Japan, that’s kind of a thing.

Voyeurism is a thing and that takes us into our next story.

I’ll do the sound.

‘Cause it is a new story.

16 men were arrested for filming over 10,000 women

in hot Springs across Japan over the last 30 years.

So I don’t know how this thing came about.

They didn’t give us the background, but these guys basically, this one guy,

20, 30 years ago, he’s like, I like to look at ladies bathing.

That’s sort of a trope in Japan.

And it’s actually very hard to do.

So what they would do is they’d go up on mountains

’cause a lot of the hot Springs are in mountains.

They’d go up in the mountains and get

telephoto lenses and video or them from there.

And then they’d have little weird parties

where they would show each other the videos

and what they would do is cut them together.

So this was almost like a video editing skills group.

And they would put in like little dirty comments

and stuff which I assume get off the other

guys who were watching the videos with you.

The ring leader started about 20 years

ago, he connected with 100 other voyeurers

and all 16 men have been arrested.

And he 16 men include doctors, a doctor from Tokyo,

company executives, local government officials.

So yeah, they would get expensive telephoto lens,

have little porn parties and watch them together.

I assume in Jerk each other off, I’m not sure.

The resorts are very concerned about this because this story gets out.

They’ve already been hit by hard by corona.

They’re not getting enough a lot of people coming because of corona.

And now there’s the second layer of women might not feel safe

going into the hot spring when if it’s open air.

‘Cause one of the appeals, the hot spring is that

it’s out in the open, you’re kind of in nature.

They put a fence up but you can then still

enjoy nature outside but you’re in the hot spring.

It’s really nice.

They’re gonna have to put like essentially a dome

over it or something which is really sad.

Because I love going to the hot spring

and I’ve never tried to look over the fence

into the women’s side which again, it’s sort

of a Japanese trope and like kids do it.

But these guys have just ruined that for everyone.

And the thing, this sad thing is, they’ve kind of ruined bathing cultures

of big deal in Japan and I really enjoyed it.

I have tattoos so I can’t go to a hot spring.

So I always went to private hot Springs

and what the ones I really, really like

is you go to a hotel.

It has a bath on the balcony.

So in the middle of winter you get on the balcony,

you get in the bath, you’re sitting in the super cold,

looking out over like the seascape or mountains or something like that.

It’s really, really nice.

But knowing someone was maybe videoing me would ruin that experience.

And I wouldn’t do it again.

These women have a right to not feel safe.

It sucks.

It sucks to take that away from other people.

And again, okay, this actually just

shows how my mind works pornographically.

And I’m like, in the quality of the video is not very good.

I’m all about video quality.

Which is really gross on my part.

But at least I’m like, everyone consenting,

get some good lighting, some makeup in there,

make sure everyone’s blemishes are taken care of, do some post production.

That’s my version of a good video.

I’m like these janky, these janky like

handheld videos just wouldn’t do it for me.

I want that, James put in, you want that 8K.

8K might be too much.

I don’t want to zoom in on anything.

I’ve never liked the get right in their

view for pornography and see the pores.

Yes, I would like to say, I like high definition.

I want to be able to really fully understand what’s going on.

I feel gross now for me, even though

I’m hopefully not saying anything that bad.

I think consent is the actually thing that makes it good for me,

is everyone’s having a good time.

Okay, our last story.

And of course that means it’s the grossest one.

There was a teen girl comes back to her bicycle

and finds that someone has pooped on her bicycle seat.

And then weirdly they found the guy really quickly.

So I assume again there was video of the guy

that he was still in the area, they found the guy.

She’s a teenager, he’s 28 years old and they arrest him for vandalism.

Hoping that girl doesn’t use her poop seat

anymore, but they arrest him for vandalism

and they say like why did you poop on this girl seat?

And he said it was because he liked her.

There is a very weird segment of society

that does not know how wooing works.

So the I liked her was a series of steps in his head.

to say how do I show her I like her?

Ah well, I will show her my most intimate moment

and present her with my own fecal matter

by pooping on the seat of her bicycle,

which is fucking horrendous really.

But it’s such an alien way of thinking.

And again, Japan’s gotten to this place where there’s so many people.

One of the surveys we did a couple weeks

ago is like, young people aren’t dating,

they’re not having relationships.

And I’m thinking maybe this is part of it.

Like people don’t know how to approach other people anymore.

They don’t know how to have human relationships.

So maybe they learn this weird stuff from the Internet

or they just got into this weird extreme

in their head where like, I know what she’ll like.

She’ll like my poop.

Now that’s the mental issues going on with the character involved.

There’s a physical one as well because

the poop wasn’t carried to the bicycle.

It wasn’t smeared on the bicycle.

It was deposited on the bicycle seat.

So if you think about a bicycle seat, even just an average, what’s gonna be,

we’ll have to say like three, four feet high.

He had to get up above that, pull down his pants.

This all has to be balanced.

Target the seat.

And then freely poop onto the seat while balancing.

This is like acrobatic stuff.

If you said to me right now, Peter,

there’s a bicycle I want you to poop on it on the seat.

And I want you to hit it.

I don’t think I could.

So what happens now is terrifying.

Jade is put in, I’m so quickly I pooped on her seat.

That is accurate.

And Botman says looking good chunk.

I think you’re probably looking at Dave right now.

My buddy.

Yeah, the last part, we’ve done a couple poop stories.

Ninja Ninja Japan was actually conceived from a very complicated poop story.

And this one is sort of follows the same

thing because the crime itself is terrible

and awful and disgusting.

I’m okay with that.

The physics involved, I find fascinating,

but they don’t tell you where the bicycle was.

So was it next to offense?

Did he balance on the fence and then poop on the bicycle?

Did he balance on the bicycle?

And then poop on the bicycle seat?

These are questions that we will never get answers to.

But my mind reels at the possibilities

of how physically capable this man must have been to poop on a bicycle seat

and yet how mentally incapable he was to realize

that that would not help the women find him attractive.

So you have maybe a balance of powers.

He is physically, weirdly capable, but mentally, incredibly deficient.

And that maybe is the problem with just modern society

is the people who have one ability.

They seem to be completely lacking in others.

I don’t know how to fix it if I’m being really honest.

Weirdly, my first thought was everyone should do judo.

‘Cause that’s what’s helped me balance out my life.

Maybe it’ll work for everyone else. I doubt it.

(upbeat music)

This is my solution to almost every problem is, you should just do judo.

I mean, that fixes all your problems.

It balances out your sort of aggressiveness.

It’ll balance out.

You learn Patience.

You learn that you can win and lose.

You have to Patience and never give up.

I do have one more story, but it’s just for video.

And it was just this poster.

I saw this poster.

Now this poster is an anti-terrorism poster

that’s gone up around, I believe, Tokyo.

And it just says, no terrorism, we need your will to eradicate terrorism.

And then it has a very attractive woman just standing staring at you.

So I’m wondering, who is this is aimed at?

Is this aimed at me?

Because I find women attractive.

Is this aimed at me?

And because she’s pretty, I’m going to stop terrorism?

Or is this aimed at terrorists?

Like, if you do terrorism, you’re gonna make this pretty lady sad.

Down at the bottom says, thank you for cooperation to understanding

of our police activity.

So basically they’re saying in this area,

maybe there are more an increased police presence or something like that.

Please don’t mind the police because this pretty lady needs to be kept safe.

I’m just confused as to the message this is supposed to actually said.

Japan, basically any topic, any issue

is handled with just sticking a pretty girl’s face on it.

As a cis man, I’m all for it, I’m good.

This is what I want.

Pretty girl faces everywhere I go.

But I want to say effectiveness,

I don’t think they’ve really hit what they’re aiming for.

My Mind is an Island

(upbeat music)

We have a lot of updates to old stories, which is cool.

The last couple of weeks we’ve had the Kai-ten terrorism Sushi.

It says Sushi terrorism, I think is what they were calling it.

So it’s the Kai-ten Sushi restaurants.

We had some kids act like Dix.

They lost a Sushi dough, one of the biggest Kai-ten Sushi chains in Japan.

A ton of money, ’cause their market share went down.

Another market share, their stock went down like 5%.

Caught some 12 billion yen in value.

So they’re having a reaction, they’re trying to like, we gotta step it up.

My family actually went to Sushi dough last week.

My father-in-law gave my wife money.

and just so that we could go out for dinner.

So went to Sushi dough, ’cause kids eat a lot now.

You could not, there was nothing on the,

so is the rotating conveyor belt.

There was nothing on it.

There was little placards with things you could order.

Basically it was just rolling advertisements.

Then we would order on the touch pad,

which is basically like a tablet.

And the Sushi would arrive on the conveyor belt.

We didn’t have any, there was no borders or anything,

but you could see like people were kinda checking.

I didn’t expect anything to happen, because again, this is a national story

that essentially involves three team boys.

So you gotta take that into like context.

Okay, anyways, the other companies are like,

again, this is risking their whole livelihood, the existence of the company.

So they wanna put up sort of guard barriers.

Only orders will come through,

that’s exactly the experience I just had.

There’s a company called Kura Sushi,

and they wanna put up cameras that use AI to scan for suspicious behavior.

So they’re getting super high tech.

The weird thing was the AI, if it sees something suspicious,

like I put my hand in and out of the

conveyor belt, let’s say too many times,

the AI will notify the head office.

The head office is then going to contact.

the individual restaurant where the suspicious behavior has happened.

Which I found to be a bit convoluted,

because you could cut out the middleman.

It sounds like you have a head office where

there’s a giant bank of television screens

that are being AI monitored, forces, suspicious behavior.

And then like a red light goes up over here in some city,

and then some guy gets on the phone and goes,

you gotta touch her!

Something like that.

I’m not sure what they would say.

They would probably come up, Sushi tetto, and something like that.

It seems like the AI could just notify the restaurant itself though.

So the staff could like walk around and check on stuff.

I don’t see the need for the head office,

or maybe they’re making a judgment call,

like they’re gonna review the video

and then call if they feel it’s necessary.

I don’t know about that.

I was just sitting there going like, just notify the restaurant,

cut out the person in the middle.

There may be a reason for it.

They didn’t explain it very well.

Like beyond that, so yeah, I can’t say that much.

(upbeat music)

We also have a former pro gamer and streamer

who has not been around for the last year,

because it’s actually more complicated than the story made it out to be.

Basically she said, she went on stream and she said,

men under 170 centimeters have no human rights.

And what had actually happened?

So I don’t agree with, you know, shitting on people like that,

although I should on people all the time.

So maybe I should.

I think if you pointed out my behavior or something, I would be like, sorry.

I don’t know, or not.

I mean, often I think like apologies make it worse.

I’m just going around in this circle.

A guy delivered food to her apartment, like

a door dash or a Uber eats or something.

And the guy recognized her and immediately started hitting on her.

She took negatively to that, went back to her stream

and basically started insulting the guy.

I bet as like a pro gamer, streamer girl,

she gets hit on by guys all the time and she doesn’t like it.

But at the same time in Japan, especially

you’re using that sort of like sexuality,

the attractiveness to gain your audience in the first place.

So the idea that they wouldn’t hit on you is almost unreasonable.

I don’t know, I don’t know where I land on that one.

If you use sex to get a primarily male audience

and then the male audience takes the initiative

and tries to talk to you, should you be offended?

She was.

So she said a couple of really shitty things about the guy

and he was maybe not that tall.

She likes tall guys.

So she started insulting him and then her gamer base got really upset.

I keep falling into these things where I’m like,

I flip flop back and forth like she’s getting hit on.

She doesn’t want to get hit on.

It’s annoying.

She just ordered some food, leave me alone.

That guy’s not being professional.

He’s delivering food and he sees someone.

He shouldn’t be hitting on them.

But then she shouldn’t go in like rip on him on stream.

It’s a very tough situation.

I think maybe everyone’s a little bit at fault

but she probably got the worst fallout.

She disappeared for years.

She was fired from her pro team

and she hasn’t streamed in the last year.

She tried to make a return to streaming.

She did come on and say it was my fault

for making discriminatory, discriminatory remarks.

We just fare.

So she’s saying, like I said some stuff,

I do think the context changes it a bit.

I think the guy showing up at her house

and then immediately hitting on her is also

wrong and he’s not getting any fallout.

So if there was fallout on both sides, maybe I’d be okay with it.

I’m sitting here wondering like,

is it okay to shoot your shot?

But I think I know the difference.

If I was the Uber Eats guy and I showed up your door

and you showed interest in me,

you still shooting shoot your shot.

No, as soon as I get to that point, it’s like,

I kind of want to start this whole story again.

He should not have hit on her.

That’s basically the idea.

I was trying to think back to when I

was a young man and I would hit on girls.

And if I ever like cross the line, I’m sure I did.

I’m sure every young man,

’cause you don’t understand boundaries yet.

And you learn the boundaries as you get older

and then by the time you’re old enough and mature enough

to not break those boundaries, you’re probably done.

Shooting your shots at girls like you either have

a long-term relationship or you know what you want

or you know how to get what you want or something like that.

And it’s not a big thing anymore.

I’m very torn.

I maybe need some input from other people.

I didn’t think this was gonna be such a gray moral zone.

I am falling firmly on the guy should not have hit

on her at the door.

That’s actually vaguely threatening.

She’s in her home.

So that’s really, really bad.

Should she have gone on stream and shit on ’em?

I actually I’m kind of okay with that.

Only because of the negativity of the way I view.

that initial experience.

Maybe she shouldn’t have said men under 170 centimeters.

Maybe she just said this guy and just kept it specific.

Like this guy just hit on me.

It was really gross.

It was really unappealing.

I think maybe I’d be okay with that.

As long as she didn’t like get him in trouble or docks him or something.

I don’t know.

I looked up a lot of it.

She said a lot of dumb shit.

So this is clearly how she talks.

I think maybe this guy set her off,

but she took it too far.

I don’t think she need to.

Again, these companies, they gotta fire people

if they’re gonna say dumb shit like that.

Once you become a professional and you represent a team,

you just can’t say things.

You can think ’em, you can feel ’em.

You can’t say it out loud.

That’s something that famous people gotta think about.

(phone ringing).

There’s irony abounding.

Dozens of people who were taking a digital literacy course

had their private information exposed to the Internet.

Why not exposed to the other people in the course?

Via LACS security, which I assume would have

been less than one is make sure you have

sort of network security.

So one of the students found that using this like procedure,

they could look at the text file with all the other students’ information.

And being able to do that,

they then had access to their email accounts and stuff.

So they pointed it out.

They got the names and emails of everyone else who was taking the course.

They pointed out, “That student passes the course.

“Digital literacy, they’ve got it, they’re doing it,

“they’ve got it right, they win.”.

The company on the other hand, unless this was the test,

this could have been one of those sort of meta tests.

We’re gonna expose your information, the students who find it,

who find out what we did and try to stop it.

They’re the ones who pass,

“I get the odd feeling that’s not what they were doing.”

And it’s just one of those really crap,

digital literacy courses that doesn’t mean anything.

(clock ticking)

We have two island oriented stories, which I found.

It’s always a weird convergence.

‘Cause if you said, “Hey, find two story news stories

“that are relevant and current about islands on any week.”

I probably couldn’t do it.

But here then they just two of them flopped into my lap.

There’s a company we talked about, I think last week or the week before,

and they were taking investments for.

a non-existent company that promised a

4% return every month on your investment.

Eight people were arrested for this fraud.

And the problem is, what they wanted to do was take the money

and buy a private island and create a resort on the island.

So it wasn’t even like they were just gonna buy a private island

for themselves and then just stay there.

They were actually gonna use it to try to make a business.

They wanted to buy a private island and a cruise ship

and then build a resort and then like,

they would drop people out to the resort.

It would be private, very exclusive, very expensive.

And then, but I was like,

“Wait, they got people to invest in their fake company.

“Couldn’t they just get the same people “to invest in their actual plan

“to buy a private island and cruise ship?”

‘Cause clearly the people investing in the fake company

where the fraud was committed are investing, they’re looking for things.

This as a business plan, we’re gonna buy a private island

to make an exclusive resort.

It’s actually not a bad plan.

The interesting thing to me, finding an uninhabited island,

so it just would be down around Okinawa.

There’s a bunch of little islands.

You can buy an island for 80 million yet.

That’s $610,000.

My image of buying a private island was in the millions,

just inherently.

You had to have millions and millions and millions of dollars.

I think that’s how Nicholas Cage ended up

getting into trouble with the tax and stuff

as he bought islands and he was just spending too much money.

That’s why he makes like 20 movies a year now

to try to pay off the taxes and stuff.

I don’t know if he still has a private island.

$610,000 seems achievable.

Like, if I didn’t have kids,

I would have not that much money, but I’d have a lot of money,

and if I invested that money properly, it looks like I as an individual.

might be able to buy a private island.

I would still have to build a house on it and stuff,

but if I had to have my own island.

Can you imagine this podcast if I was

literally in the middle of a deserted island?

Like doing it outside.

So I’d have to get like satellite Internet or something.

It’d be awesome.

So like I sit in my little room actually,

I would build a house that’s about the size of this room

plus a kitchen in like a shower area.

That would be the size of my, the scope of

my mansion would be like three tiny rooms.

I’ve realized I don’t need much more than that.

My mind is such an expanse that physical limitations mean nothing anymore.

I’ve gone off on private island man thinking,

which is the island is a relevant item on the island in myself.

Anyways, the eight people were arrested for the fraud.

They didn’t get the private island.

I still think that the issue was don’t try to cheat people

to get them into investing a company that doesn’t exist

so that you can take that money and transfer it to another business scheme,

introduce them to the original business scheme.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe people are like,

why would I invest in a private island cruise ship combo

when I could just invest in this company

that’s promising 4% return every month.

That 4% return every month is a lot

because you think that rules over every month.

It’s cumulative interest that kind of thing.

So that’s maybe they were over promising

it’s sort of a Ponzi scheme then

because they’re gonna take your money and invest it elsewhere.

And then maybe if they make enough money, they’ll pay you back probably not.

Anyways, I found out the price of a private island.

I was shocked at how cheap they were.

I know I don’t have enough money to buy a private island

but I was shocked at how cheap a private island was.

Second island oriented story.

So there was a woman went on social media, a Chinese lady.

And she was on an island.

And she said, hey, everyone look at this island that I now own.

Now there’s a couple of issues there.

Chinese people in China are not allowed to own land.

All land in China is actually owned by the government.

So land ownership is a very big deal.

So she was like getting Max cloud for this post.

So what has actually happened?

She didn’t buy an island.

There’s a very difficult for foreign people to buy land in Japan.

I own the land that my house sits on but

because I’m married to a Japanese person

and have two Japanese kids,

clearly when I die, that land is going to still be part of Japan.

I’m not gonna like try to take it away

or do something with it that was nefarious.

Japan is very worried about Chinese companies

buying Japanese land because they’re worried about like,

if they buy X amount of property, is that now part of China?

That’s kind of the underlying thinking.

I don’t know if that’s how it works but that is the underlying thinking.

So she went on social media said she bought an island in Okinawa.

It’s actually a company that was run by a relative bought the island.

This was very unusual.

So the beaches are owned by the government.

That consists of about 50% of the island.

The core island itself was owned by a holding company.

That holding company sold it to another

company that sold it to another company

that eventually sold it to a Chinese company.

So this is how the Chinese company got in

and was able to actually buy an island in Japan

which they’re probably not supposed to be able to do

is that it passed through so many hands.

I don’t know if this was quicker not but

because it passed through so many entities,

maybe the government lost track of it or maybe they’re just like,

well, this is just being passed around as an investment

and they weren’t paying as close enough attention.

So this woman is technically correct.

The core of the island is her.

The government maintains ownership over the beaches

which is going to be the most attractive part of the island.

It is a question of what are they gonna do with the core island?

Is she just gonna live there by herself

which would mean no one comes to the island

to play on the beaches, which means she has essentially private beaches

even if they are owned by the Japanese government?

Or is the Japanese government going to take the island away

from the holding company, the media company.

that has bought the island that is allowed her to use it?

That is a very interesting question.

I am very interested in this story because is this low-key racism

or is this Japan protecting itself from foreign investors?

Because foreign investors can be very dangerous

if you have a small country with not much land and they buy up all the lands

so the Japanese people can’t buy it.

So I’m interested in where this ends up

because it’s caused a stir in China because this woman now owns an island

which is a very attractive thing.

It’s caused a stir in Japan because

whoa, it’s China subtly trying to buy up all the islands

and all the bits of Japan that they can so that they can actually own Japan.

That is honestly a real concern for the Japanese government.

(upbeat music).

Balloon news.

I guess this was inevitable.

So over the last week, there was the balloon

that was floating around America, the Chinese spy balloon

and it was shot down.

And then it came out that over the last few years,

there’s been a whole bunch of Chinese spy balloons floating around America.

And then a couple days ago, America

shot down a Chinese spy balloon over Canada

and the Canadian military was going

out to try to find the bits of the balloon.

And China’s like, “Hey, give us our stuff back.”

And everyone’s like, “Fluid over our country.”

It’s not your stuff anymore.

So there’s a little bit of a tip there.

Japan came out admitted, “Yes, there have been balloons.

floating around Japan in the same way.”.

Primarily around the islands, just like we’re talking,

“This is technically a third island story.”.

But that’s where the military bases are.

So America has military bases in Japan.

China has been flying the spy balloons around them.

Now, legally speaking, because of Japanese

laws in airspace, they say that they can

shoot the balloons out of the sky.

But then came up to the practical issue.

of could they shoot the balloons out of the sky?

‘Cause this was interesting, ’cause the defense minister

said the first problem is you have to get permission.

So the self-defense force in Japan,

it’s gonna be really long and difficult for them

to get to the point where you can use weapons.

Because the whole point of the self-defense force,

the constitution that was written after World War II

is that Japan cannot have a military.

So the whole point is that they’re not

supposed to really do aggressive stuff.

Shooting stuff out of the sky is seen as really aggressive.

This is also part of the controversy over the last few weeks

where the Japanese government’s like,

self-defense lets expand the meaning,

which means we can shoot stuff in other

countries, as long as we don’t leave Japan.

That’s a really, really interpretive view of what self-defense means.

But what the practicality is, because the self-defense force does not enact

a lot of these things, the self-defense force

may not have the skills to actually shoot a balloon

out of the sky, which I didn’t think about.

‘Cause I saw the video of the American airplane

shooting it out, ’cause you just see the balloon pop.

You don’t even see like bolts or anything,

’cause of course this is like hypersonic stuff.

They’re saying that maybe Japanese pilots,

maybe Japanese weaponry doesn’t have the same skill level,

so they might actually not be able to do it.

Whether or not they want to or not becomes a secondary issue.

So I was thinking they should get the AI cameras.

from the Sushi restaurants and aim them

up with the sky, and if they see something,

they can actually notify the head office

of the Sushi restaurant, and then the Sushi restaurant,

the cough ruined my joke.

Well, sad now.

Since this is not scripted, I didn’t actually

know where that joke was gonna end up,

but I’m sure it was gonna be better if I didn’t cough,

so I’m just gonna abandon that joke now.

Just like Japan’s abandoned shooting down Chinese spy balloons.

(clock ticking)

A gibbon is a kind of monkey.

I’m not gonna get too deep into the details of what a gibbon is,

but anyways, there was a gibbon in an isolated enclosure,

and in February last year, 2021,

Momo, a 12 year old gibbon, got pregnant.

She was in the enclosure alone.

How does that happen?

Is this like one of those Jurassic Park things.

where life finds a way?

We have to figure out what happens, ’cause we wanna make sure,

I mean, it’s great that the gibbon got pregnant, to be honest,

because this is being kept in enclosure because of endangerment.

I just totally forgot that word for a second.

Turns out that at the time of pregnancy,

there was a male gibbon, Ito, was in the next enclosure.

Turns out there was a nine millimeter hole between the two enclosures.

They did a DNA test of the baby, so they

know that the baby is actually Ito’s child.

So Momo and Ito got up towards this nine millimeter hole

between the two enclosures and managed to do it.

Now, not particularly complimentary,

since we’re gonna do some penis shaming,

to Ito there on his member, but Momo was up for it.

Let’s just be factual.

Momo was up for it, backed up to the glory hole, they both got the job done.

There’s no way that didn’t happen without cooperation.

So this was a case of completely consensual sexual intercourse,

resulting in a child that is going to be loved

because the zoo is very happy that his baby’s out there.

It is problematic because you have an absent father.

And I think the reason of that is that Momo

was 12 years old, Ito was 34 years old.

So that age gap is significant.

So maybe we have a lot of different issues.

going on here at the same time.

There’s the age gap, the absent father.

The fact that this was conceived through a glory hole essentially.

What kind of environment is this baby being raised in?

Is really the question, but still people seem happy.

And if you wanna rip on a given,

I was, I mean, the instinct is to make a joke about a nine millimeter hole

and getting your penis through there, but at the same time,

man, he probably had sex more than I did that year.

There was a guy in Japan, I didn’t write down his name.

He designed a Ferrari.

So he was one of the primary designers of this style of Ferrari.

He owns the Ferrari that he designed.

No.

Guess what he was arrested for?

It was not obstruction of his.

He was speeding.

He was arrested for speeding.

He was given an eight,

oh, I think it was, he was given eight months or four months

in jail time, but a suspended sentence.

So basically if he doesn’t get in trouble again, he’ll be fine.

He was doing 128 kilometers an hour,

going 88 kilometers over the speed limit.

The speed limit’s probably only 80.

So he was like easily doubling what the speed limit should have been.

And he goes to court and I was like, this guy,

clearly he designs fast cars, he loves fast cars,

he’s out in the open, he’s driving around in the car he designed,

he wants to open it up, lay it flat, see what happens.

I totally understand what really happened here.

As does the judge, but you don’t want to go into court

and go like, dude, I designed this car to go as fast as humanly possible.

I wanted to see how fast it would go.

You got to give him a story.

So the story he gives through his lawyer is he wanted to expose

the engine to fast moving air to cool it down,

which is a very technical engine oriented thing to say

and sounds almost plausible until you take into account.

or you could just slow down and the car would cool off.

It’s Valentine’s Day.

It is Valentine’s Day this day, the day of recording.

It is Valentine’s Day February 14th, 2023.

They have a practice in Japan called Gidey Chocol.

So basically you work in an office

and every woman in the office is obliged to give a tiny chocolate

to every man in the office.

Just says like, say, face, it’s just like a show.

So whether you like ’em or not, you kind of have to do it.

And then next month there’s White Day, the

men are supposed to reciprocate, but again,

because it’s obligatory chocolate, they probably don’t.

I always thought this was stupid.

Like if you like someone, not like in a sexual way

or a lover kind of way, you just like someone as a person,

I thought that would be cool, give ’em some chocolate,

and then next month they give you some cookies.

It’s just a friendship thing.

I was cool with that.

But the pandemic has had a lot of people work from home.

They sort of like, you know,

they don’t have as much contact as they did.

So it’s changed some of the mores and values

and it’s actually exposed some of the

cracks in the Japanese traditional systems.

A obligatory chocolate has fallen to the wayside over the last few years.

And 83% of women do not want to give gidi gidi choco this Valentine’s Day,

which I 100% am up and I’m bored with.

I don’t want chocolate that people don’t actually.

want to give to me, which is, again, also a weird thing they’re saying.

When people in Japan go on holiday, they

buy like boxes of chocolates or cookies

or some kind of souvenir from the place they went to,

and they give one to everyone in the office.

And I often don’t want them.

Like if someone goes to America and comes

back with like a peanut buttercup, 100%,

I will be eating that.

But a lot of this stuff, I’m just like,

I don’t want your dry fish cake from somewhere in Japan.

You can just keep that yourself.

But yeah, the tradition of obligatory

chocolate seems to be going to the wayside.

Maybe they’re not gonna be doing it as much anymore.

8.2% of women will give the gidi chocolate this year.

So that’s guaranteed.

That’s only 8% out of all the people they surveyed.

74.5% in the low 20s age group.

said they don’t want to.

As they got a little older, so in their late to 20s or early 30s and up,

it went to 80 to 90% said no.

70 year olds, so basically the older women get,

the less they wanna give gidi gidi chocolate, which I totally understand.

61.4% of men are not happy to get it anyways.

So you have more than half of the men are like me

and don’t want your gidi gidi chocolate.

You have a mass majority of women don’t wanna give it.

This seems ripe for, let’s just get rid of this practice.

This seems really silly that we’re still doing it at all.

(upbeat music).

It’s almost like it wouldn’t be in Indonesia, Japan, without a creepy story,

but this one had a lot of elements.

So I have honestly not stopped, but a less

creepy guy’s story is because most of them

are not giving me anything interesting to talk about.

We’ve actually hit, you have to do something really weird

now for me to actually notice.

Once we got to the 50 year old men section

for it was like six months or something,

it was 50 year old men doing something creepy,

we had the guy get down on his hands and knees and lick a girl’s shoe,

just like apropos of nothing.

That’s now my new barrier.

If you can’t be weirder than that, you don’t get on the show anymore.

So someone, some 50 year old man out there

is really like, well, what can I do to get really weird

to get on the Indonesia, Japan?

A polyamorous 74 year old man,

he has eight ex wives in total who all live together.

So I assume in the same house.

Didn’t kidnap a girl, they attempted to brainwash a girl.

There was a bit vague on the age.

So that makes me feel like she’s probably under 18.

This was in order to commit sexual assault at a later date.

So they convinced this girl that they were psychics.

and they said, come to our house to consult a fortune teller.

They lured her into the house and showed her images of aliens

and told her that she would be abducted by aliens.

if she didn’t comply.

The girl believed them said, I will come back at an undisclosed later date.

Talk to her family about this experience she had

and how worried she was probably about getting abducted by aliens

and she had to go back and bang this 74 year old man

to make sure the aliens don’t abduct her.

Family and friends are like, maybe that’s not true.

You should call the police.

She did and then the police showed up.

I don’t know enough about brainwashing to know how this works.

I think luring the woman in to consult a fortune teller

already demonstrates a certain mindset of believability

because if you said Peter, come get your fortune told.

I might do it for entertainment but I would not believe it.

Whereas this sounds like this young woman actually believes

in fortune telling which means she’s equally likely to believe

in other fantastical things like aliens.

in which case she maybe is more susceptible to being brainwashing.

But this didn’t even sound like brainwashing.

It sounded like they’re like weird threats,

weird vague threats and if you don’t come back.

And again, I would like to know my first question would be like,

how does banging you the 74 year old man

stop the aliens from coming to abduct me?

Just explain the relationship there.

Is something you do to me make me make the aliens averse

to abducting me in the first place?

Do you imbue me with a chemical or some kind of super power shield

that stops the aliens from abducting me?

It seems like banging a 74 year old man isn’t going to stop aliens

from abducting me at all.

It seems like these two things might not be related.

I’m glad that she didn’t get abused.

I mean, they were already pushing it just getting her in the house

was already really risky and stuff.

But I think the sentence polyamorous 74 year old man

who lives with 8X wives and his current wife, 9 women in total,

I don’t want to take a look at him.

Is he stylish?

Is he cool?

Because a lot of times these like cult

leaders, this is one step away from cult.

These cult leader dudes, they’re all shaggy and weird looking.

But they must be convincing.

They must be charming somehow.

Oh, have you seen the picture?

I guess it’s 74 year old.

Just not pulling like you used to.

I guess if you hit the point where you have to brainwash people.

Mr. Warman’s just putting the chat, he’s fat bald and ugly.

I mean, you just described me.

It is the charisma element.

I’m always interested in that part of these stories.

Because what is it about them that makes them attractive?

The 8X wives are still hanging around.

That is already too weird to me.

That you would have 8 women who all finds you attractive enough

just to stay in your presence.

Because normally there would be tension between the women.

I don’t know if they’re as or not.

I don’t know what his household is like.

And yet here he is having these women

help him bring in more women to the fold.

So I’m interested in what that.

I said about it being like a cult to my wife too.

Yeah, it has to be.

I kind of want to know what the cult leaders do.

Because this story is so fantastical that it’s inconceivable to me

that someone would believe it.

But here we have a clear example of someone who did believe it.

And I think yeah, the opening the door is if you believe in fortune telling,

you’re going to believe a lot of stuff.

So then we can see how far we can push it

and see how easily you can be manipulated.

In the future, basically what I would like to say is aliens are real.

A fortune telling is not real.

So if someone tries to lure you with that, I just say no.

[Music].

Propensity to consume

(upbeat music)

Kaiten Sushi.

It’s really big in Japan.

It’s big deal.

People love it.

You sit your table.

There’s a little conveyor
belt that goes by.

Sushi’s on it.

You like the Sushi.

Take it off.

Eat it.

Feel good.

Everyone’s happy.

Couple viral videos though.

May have ruined that for everyone.

So in the viral video,

it was a young man, of course.

And he would lick his finger.

And then he would
touch some of the Sushi

that went by, which
meant someone else

who takes it off and eats it, is
of course, ingesting his saliva.

But it didn’t stop there.

There were the bottles of soy sauce.

and a young man licked the end of that.

So anyone who went to that table afterwards

would be using soy sauce
that had been contaminated

with the saliva of the previous young man.

And then there’s the little.

cup.

It’s covered.

And you take off the cover
and there’s a little spoon

and it’s the green tea and you put that in.

You put in some hot water.

You have some nice green tea.

The boy took the spoon from that
and then licked it and then put it back in.

So it’s just young men being gross.

Three incidences of young men
being really gross at Kai-ten Sushi.

They videoed themselves.

They videoed themselves
and then put that online.

This is massive outcry in Japan.

And the problem is people think it’s gross.

Now in Japan, when
people think stuff is gross,

they’ll stop coming to your restaurant.

The company, the main company is Sushi-toe.

And what they wanna do is,
it’s not what they wanna do.

The main company is Sushi-toe.

They have contacted the police.

They want to proceed with
criminal and civil charges.

‘Cause this is obstruction of business.

So put a little ding up there for
another obstruction of business.

It’s sort of endangering other people.

‘Cause if you have
coronavirus or anything else,

’cause it’s obviously people’s mind.

If I lick my finger and touch the Sushi,

if I have a disease, I’m
giving you that disease.

So that’s kind of the problem.

Now, the interesting fallout for this.

is there was a 5% drop in
market value of Sushi-toe stock.

Now it’d be interesting,
of course, it’s a giant chain.

So there’s one near my
house, there’s one near my work.

Like everywhere I go, I could
probably find a Sushi-toe.

A 5% market drop for
Sushi-toe is 12 billion yen.

Chinese news outlets are
actually reporting this story

and then people are
canceling their trips to Japan.

So tourism is being
affected by some, I

know he’s underage
because of something

that comes a little later.

Some underage, like basically a teenager,

being gross and stupid.

But when it affects your stocks,
when it affects national tourism,

you know you got a big issue.

So Sushi-toe contacted
the police, they

have security camera,
they found the kid.

Now, I know it’s a kid because
they received a direct apology

from the customer and this guardian.

So you know if they’re
talking to the guardian,

it’s not an adult, they’re not
responsible for themselves.

The company plans to continue with criminal

in this civil case.

So here’s the thing,
imagine you’re that kid’s mom

and that this company,
this nationally famous chain

has showed up at your door and said,

“Your kid licked some Sushi,
it has cost us 12 billion yen.

What are you gonna do?”

‘Cause the mom can
apologize, the kid can apologize.

I can pretty much promise you
that kid’s not gonna do this again.

But at the same time,

Sushi-toe could ruin this family forever.

Like that’s it, it could just
be like gone, you’re done.

They could take all the money you
ever have and will make for themselves.

It’s just that simple.

Now there’s also, hama Sushi,

which is a competing Kaiten Sushi chain.

They called the police,
’cause a customer

was videoed taking
Sushi off the thing

that had no wasabi
in it and putting wasabi

in it and putting it
back on the thing.

So when the people got it,
they got Sushi with wasabi

that was not supposed to have wasabi.

It’s spicy, so it’s a little
prank, but then again,

I don’t know how common
wasabi allergies are,

but I have no significant
allergies other than, you know,

like seasonal allergies
and I just take some drugs

and I’m fine, none
of its life threatening,

but you know people
with peanut allergies

and people with other food allergies,
like this is stuff that kills you.

So this other kid, he’s basically
on the hook for attempted murder.

I know they’re not actually
gonna charge him with that,

but that is kind of the severity of
the thing that’s actually happening.

So, the problem, okay, I hate doing this,

I do this every time and I gotta stop.

It’s weird instinct, but budding criminals,

you have to stop videoing yourself.

I understand that the clout
is what people wanna go for.

The sort of notoriety
is what you want,

but what you’re doing
is committing crimes

and if you video yourself committing
crimes and put it on the Internet,

this is how they get attention
and once they get attention,

you’re screwed, you got
nothing left ’cause there’s proof.

They already got
this kid because of

security cameras,
but videoing it yourself,

put it out there.

Jade has just posted
in, look, criminals

being dumb as how
the police system works.

In Japan, 100% yes.

I would actually say investigators in Japan

probably do less work than
any other country I can see

because half the time
people turn themselves in,

the other half they video themselves
doing it and post it on the Internet.

These guys basically
just have to surf the net,

go what’s trending, which
crime is trending today?

And then they just
go like, oh, let’s find

out where that guy
lives and go arrest him.

So, the fallout now is they’re
going to put acrylic shields

in front of the Sushi thing,
so you can’t touch it easily.

They’re going to install more cameras,

so if you do this, you’re
more likely to get caught.

But the fallout really is,
people are already going like,

I don’t wanna go to Kaiten Sushi,
I don’t wanna go to Sushi dough

because there is
the possibility that

some dumb, gross
kid is touched my food,

which was always
a possibility, but it

came to light, it
came to the forefront.

when this became national news.

And last week, this was honestly
100% number one, national news.

(upbeat music)

You work in a prison and the
prisons aren’t very full anymore

because you know, it crimes down overall.

And people in Japan aren’t
committing, actually, no.

My last story is about how
crime is up, but different crimes.

People aren’t going to jail
as much as they used to,

maybe it’s more accurate.

So this guy, he’s like, I got
a lot of free time at work,

I don’t have to abuse prisoners.

So I’ll bring my PS Vita to work.

So the guard brings his PS Vita.

Already, weirdly okay again, being
someone who plays a lot of video games,

my first slide is PS Vita.

I mean, you don’t have a switch.

So the PS Vita
though was very popular

in Japan, because it
had a lot of functions

that honestly the switch doesn’t have.

You could download TV
to it, I actually don’t know.

My son has a switch, but I’ve
never played with it seriously.

So I don’t know what its capabilities are,

but the PS Vita,
you could download

like MP4 files to it
and you can watch TV.

So this guy, he
brings a couple games,

downloads a couple TV
shows, sits at his desk,

he’s playing some games,
he’s watching a little TV,

but of course, it’s noticeable.

He’s the guy who’s
supposed to be doing rounds.

He’s supposed to do five rounds a day.

His reasoning was, I was bored
because there were so few detainees.

He played games, he fell asleep,

he did not do his five rounds.

He watched TV saved on the console
for at least an hour, probably more.

I would assume, if I was the
boss of this prison facility,

I would assume that if I
caught one of my prison guards,

not doing his rounds watching
TV playing video games

on the clock, that he would be fired.

In Japan, gets a warning.

I was really shocked by that.

Like your literal one job is to watch,

to make sure people don’t escape.

I am playing a video game
right now with Mr. Warman’s,

called a way out where
we escape from prison.

And it was surprisingly
easy to escape from prison.

It was a couple of really simple puzzles,

had to get a screwdriver out of
the workshops, it’s stuff like that.

But if there’s two people,

I mean, I can tell you getting
out of prison is dead easy.

I’ve run the simulation
twice and success both times.

Even went on a little bit of a shooting
rampage at the end of the game.

So, prison guards got to be on the ball.

The prime minister, one of
the prime minister secretaries.

So last week we had one of
the prime minister secretaries.

Now, secretary is not like a
personal assistant kind of thing.

It’s like a serious job, ’cause
you’re like secretary of stuff.

It was his son last
week, got in trouble

for the scandal of
taking a government car

around Paris and places
and buying souvenirs and stuff.

He claimed it was for official duties.

Everyone else is
saying it was just for him.

That pales in comparison to this
dude, who is, he got to learn to shut up.

So the prime minister secretary
told reporters off the record,

he hates to see LGBT people and
would hate to have them live next to him.

So he was fired.

I mean, you want to give some
credence to the prime minister.

He was like, oh my God,
that was a dumb thing to say.

Usually in Japanese politics,
they say something stupid.

The government in power
actually backs them up and goes,

oh, he didn’t mean that or he
was taken out of context and stuff.

This was off the records.

You shouldn’t even have heard about it.

They make excuses.

I actually am gonna
give Kishita some credit

’cause he literally just
went, now you’re fired.

If Japan recognizes same sex
marriage, people will abandon the country.

It was another statement he made,

which I was like, I don’t
actually see how that’s true.

Because what are you saying?

Are you saying that people born in Japan,

if they live around or
are with LGBT plus people,

they’re gonna leave the country?

‘Cause they’re already here and
people are not leaving the country.

So that doesn’t make sense.

I struggled with what
they were actually saying.

Because basically this guy’s just saying,

I don’t like it, I think
it’s the short version.

It did bring me to a secondary story though

of some of the hypocrisy that’s
going on in Japanese courts

because Tokyo court upheld
a ban of same sex marriage.

But the same court said
that the lack of protections

for same sex families
violates human rights.

So you can see they
understand, like if you are a couple,

whether you’re a man or a
woman, a woman, a woman,

or whatever, whatever
combination you wanna put together,

you should have fundamental
basic human rights

supported for you by the
government, regardless.

But at the same time, they
like, but you can’t get married.

So I think maybe there’s some confusion

as to what these protections
actually are supposed to mean.

Because a lot of times
my view of marriage

is that it’s primarily
for taxation.

It’s representation in taxation.

You get married for love, that’s all great,

but that has nothing to
do with the government.

As far as the government’s concerned,

two people come together
and bring their finances together

that changes the taxation or
the structure of their finances

and taxes should be done differently.

It has very little to do with love
or gender or anything like that.

So my view of the
law is actually really

simple in that whether
you are cis or LGBT,

if you form a partnership,
it will affect your taxation.

Because again, laws
shouldn’t really be

concerned with gender
politics in any way.

It should be
concerned with people

and how they live
their lives and fairness.

And so that being the case, I
fully support same-sex marriage

and any sort of combinations
that are out there.

I’m like, “Hey, man, if you are happy

and your partner’s happy,
I’m actually okay with that.”.

Because what we’re
really talking about is

how you should be
taxed by the government

when you’re talking about a marriage.

Marriage ceremonies and
stuff, they’re all about love,

religious ceremonies,
I can’t comment on

if they think it’s bad,
that’s up to them,

but I would not join that religion.

So it’s really that simple.

But I’m really
happy that I got fired

because normally
they wouldn’t fire them.

Normally they try to cover it
up, normally they try to deflect.

And this time he’s just
like, “You know what?

“Now what you’re saying doesn’t
reflect my beliefs “and you’re fired.”.

(clock ticking)

I got it.

Oh, last week we talked about Luffy,

who was running a crime
ring from a detention

center in the
Philippines in Manila.

And my question was, how does
this guy who’s in the Philippines,

who, how did he
get a cell phone and

how is he running a
criminal organization

from the Philippines with
just a cell phone successfully?

Well, turns out he had six cell phones.

There were four people involved.

I think I’m giving too much
credit to the Luffy character

because his name came to the
forefront, but there were four people

and they were kind of running
this mini criminal empire.

They had six mobile
phones and police

when they went and
searched their cells,

they actually retrieved phones and laptops.

So I’m wondering how they got a
laptop in without anyone noticing,

or are the prison facilities, the
detention center facilities in Manila,

just that generous.

So I found that to be very interesting.

I would like to know
more about that system.

There seems to be the scams racked
up nearly six billion yen worth of money.

So we’re talking about home
invasions, we’re talking about scams,

we’re talking about just
stealing money from people.

It’s insane.

One of four of the guys
may not be deported to Japan.

So this week and next week,
they’re trying to deport them to Japan

so they can actually answer
for their crimes in Japan.

But one guy, because he committed
assault, is on trial for the assault

and when you’re on trial in the
Philippines, you can’t be deported.

You actually have to stay
there and go through your trial.

After his trial, he’ll probably have
to serve some kind of punishment.

After that punishment, he
could be deported to Japan

to be put on trial again for
the crime scenes committed

while he was in detention
in the Philippines.

It’s incredibly complicated.

It’s insane that it’s actually
happening, but there you go.

I will keep you updated.

I’m really interested in what
happens when he gets to Japan,

when the sort of the main dudes
get to Japan and they go on trial.

I would love to have more details
about how they were organizing it.

It’s how they organized it.

So I understand the crimes.

Home invasions, in this
case, were quite simple.

We show up, we pretend
you have a package,

you open the door,
they kick in the door.

Maybe they beat up the person, but
they just want to steal some money.

Ski wise, not that
sophisticated, but at

the same time, simplicity
and effectiveness

often go together.

But how did he organize it?

It must have just been
through social media

and stuff, but how
do you organize it?

How do you get people to do it?

How does he collect his profits?

If I’m the criminal
who’s kicked in the

door and gotten,
let’s say, a million yen

from that household somehow,

what motivation do I have
to actually send him his cut?

Is a really interesting question.

There’s a lot of those
details I would really like

to know about because it’s the machinations

of the machine they’ve
created that I really want

to hear about because it’s fascinating

that this was as successful as it
was for as long as it was from, again,

a detention center in another country.

makes it just almost mind blowing.

The first time, so
this actually relates

to my verbal gaff sort
of at the beginning.

For the first time in 20 years, in 2022,

it’s the last year, nine as
2023, when we’re recording this,

crime increased in Japan.

This is primarily an increase in
street crime, but it’s up 5.9% from 2021.

Now that sounds like crime has shot up.

over the last year, which
is not the actual case

because every single
year since the end of

World War II, which
is when they recorded,

it started recording crime stats like this.

The number has gone down every single year.

So this is just a tiny self correction

because you had coronavirus
actually put everyone away,

crime decreased
significantly during that time

because during that time,
people just weren’t out and about

and it was harder to commit street crimes.

Primarily, now people are
out back on the street again.

Street crime is more possible,
more than anything else.

Again, opportunity is a big part of crime.

So this is up 5.9%
from 2021, but we’re

talking about a decline
every single year

for the last 70 years.

So it’s just a little blip
upwards, comparatively speaking.

So I don’t think people should freak out.

There’s a lot of very serious crimes

that you wanna talk about,
but I was very interested.

Bicycle theft is up 14.4%.

So if you ride a bicycle, the bicycle
is a very common way of transporting

yourself around Japan.

If you use a bicycle,
the last year was a lot,

but not surprisingly,
the ransomware, cyber

attacks, that kind
of stuff, up 57.4%.

Because criminals may be
are shifting from street crime

to cyber crime because
it’s probably more profitable.

It takes less investment.

There’s actually
probably less risk at first.

As long as you can
cover your tracks, it’s

very hard for people
to actually find you.

90% of the crimes we talk
about in Indonesia, Japan,

the people get caught,
it’s surveillance cameras,

see them, follow them to the train station,

they take the train home, the
surveillance, you now know where they lived

and they please just
show up at their house.

So again, I’m not talking
about like deep detective work,

like Jade said earlier,
these guys are one step away

from turning themselves in
if you do a crime in person.

So cyber crime,
computer crime makes

a lot more sense in
the current situation.

When talking about
real life dumb ass crimes,

we have a man who was
walking around a supermarket.

and he walked out and
he didn’t buy anything.

He got really frustrated.

So he kicked a glass door
and the glass door shattered.

And when he was a red, the
police, so the staff called the police,

Mandra calls the police
and the police show up

and they’re like, “Hey,
what are you doing?”

He goes, “I was really frustrated
that there was nothing here

that I wanted to buy so I kicked
the door and shattered the door.”

That is obstruction of business.

And he’s going to be arrested for that.

I don’t think too much is gonna happen,

but I don’t know,
again, you didn’t wanna

buy anything so
you kicked the door?

Like what level of
frustration are you feeling?

How badly did you wanna buy something?

Clearly just dumb ass.

(clock ticking)

Which takes us into our last story
which was sort of pretty interesting.

They do surveys about like
consumption habits and sales

and this is all important to the government

because it all talks about GDP.

One of the most recent,
I think last week again

on the news Japan, I talked
about how 50% of Japan’s GDP

is basically just consumption.

It’s just people buying stuff.

Like it’s huge.

It’s really important that
people keep the economy going.

People under 35, their
propensity to consume is weak,

which is really bad for Japan as a country.

‘Cause again, Japan’s
economy survives on

the fact that the
money is moving around.

But why are, this is under 35,
so it’s technically younger people.

I would say mostly people in their 20s.

Why are these people in
their 20s not spending money?

I would go ahead
and guess most of

them aren’t making a
lot of money to spend.

Everything just went up 4%.

And again, I’ve talked a couple times about

my electricity prices
doubled compared to last year.

I, not as a young person,
but I am spending less money.

I am suddenly being way
more cautious with my money.

I saw a cool little figurine
that I really wanted to buy.

It was 8,000 yen.

I was like, I cannot justify
spending 8,000 yen on this figurine.

So what are these kids
doing with their money?

It’s a 20% increase of young people
saying they want to save for retirement.

This is compared to 2007 to 2009.

So they do these surveys
over a couple of years.

So basically, young people are now saying,

I have to keep money so that
when it comes time for me to retire,

I have enough money to retire.

I don’t want to be working
indefinitely in perpetuity.

because I actually want to
have at least some point in my life

where I’m not bound to a
desk or doing some kind of job.

And they’re saying
that this is the root

cause of stagnation of
the economy in Japan.

It’s actually people, young people,

being so concerned and
so worried about the future

that they’re preparing for the
future by not spending right now.

So this is part of why the
government has made a call

for an increase in the
lifetime wages of people.

Because like I said, I have a job.

It’s pretty stable.

I make the same money
I made last year, though.

So actually, my take
home earnings value-wise

has gone down 4%
because of the force,

percent increase in inflation.

Electricity in these
things have doubled

in price, which I
have no control over.

I still have to pay for electricity.

So I now have to spend money there.

I’m not spending money on something else.

That 15,000 yen, so it
went from 15 last year

in December to 30,000
this year in December.

That 15,000 yen is not
going into the economy.

I’m not buying little figurines
or toys or entertainment

or stuff to keep the economy going.

That’s going directly to the power company.

They might be building nuclear power plants

or something else to make
power cheaper in the future,

but as an older person, that’s
not really going to benefit me.

Hopefully it benefits these
young people who are saving.

But they’re seeing stuff like this happen

and they’re thinking, “I
need to hold onto my money

“so I have enough money for the future.

“and paid does not increase
significantly in Japan.”

So I’m not going to
get paid a lot of money,

so I need to hold on
to as much as I can.

That, the problem
they’re not really realizing

is that philosophy,
that core kind of thinking

is going to continue with them
throughout the entirety of their life.

They’re not going to, at 35, something go,

“Ah, you know what, I
have enough to retire.

“I’m ready to go.

“Let’s just start spending money.”

These are going to be a generation
of people who do not spend money.

And if we don’t, like, because of the way

the economy works in
Japan, if they don’t get people

to have more money, then
they cannot spend money,

and then you get into
this cycle of decrease,

where I’m not spending
money, so companies make,

maybe offer less
salary, like salaries go

down because
products are going down,

and it just keeps declining
as if, and then, of course,

I’m making less
money, so I spend less

money, and it goes
down and down and down.

It relates to a very weird different story.

I’ve always, the Chinese foreign minister,

this is about four years ago.

He was this amazing guy,

because he was just so
blunt and straightforward.

And they said, “Oh, China,
they were interviewing him,

“and they say, “China’s investing
a lot of money “in Indonesia.

“Why are you doing that?

“Like, what is the focus on Indonesia?”

And he just looked at him and goes,

“Indonesian people are
too poor to buy our products,

“so we want to increase
their economy enough,

“so they have enough
money to buy our products.”

So then they become our customers.

But you can see what he was saying was,

there needs to be
a fundamental level

of wealth for people
to be able to spend,

so we need to create essentially an economy

where people can spend
or people do not spend.

And it’s the same, the Japanese economy,

almost internally, functions
very similarly to that.

If people aren’t making enough
money, people do not spend.

People need to be rich enough to
spend money to increase the economy.

And if they do
that, then it will build

up and up and up,
it’s the reverse cycle.

of what I was talking about.

I am interested to see
over the next year or two,

how many companies
actually increase their wages.

‘Cause I honestly believe a
lot of them at this moment

cannot, it’s not that they
would, it’s just that they can’t.

And then going further from
that, going into the future,

how do they make sure that
people have enough money

so that they can spend money
to keep the economy going?

Because we gotta get, this
is like one step away from,

we have to just start giving
people money to spend.

Will that work? Probably not.

Because what’s gonna
happen is this generation’s like,

anytime I get extra money, I need
to put it away so that I can retire.

Which is one of the bleaker endings.

I usually end off in Indonesia, Japan,

with like a creepy guy story,
so I can make fun of him.

And sometimes it goes wrong and I
feel really bad at the end of the story,

but I mean, I’m
literally just talking

about the demise of
the Japanese economy.

You can see the solution
is actually increased wages,

but the reality is, most
companies probably can’t increase

wages, I think I just killed Japan.

(upbeat music)

[Music].

This podcast sparks joy

(electronic music)

Let’s figure out a start
with some light, light news.

Marie Kondo, you may remember Marie Kondo,

she wrote a book and kind
of took the world by storm.

And the reason she took the world by storm

is because she was
like, does this spark joy?

So here’s my pen.

Should I keep my pen?

And she would say, well,
you hold it, does it spark joy?

Now, I had an issue with this
sort of philosophical practice

because there is
literally no physical object

that I hold that sparks
joy because I’m an old man.

So I understood what
you were saying though.

Like if it would need to be
rephrased for me, is this a necessity?

Do you consider this a necessity?

And that word, the
definition could be expanded

to be like, like
when I hold up my

video game controller,
is this a necessity?

Well, no, it isn’t, but it is deeply
connected to my entertainment time.

And I consider that important.

So yes, I should keep that.

Is there anything on my
desk that I don’t need?

Ah, my wedding ring,
’cause I’m not wearing it.

But, no, but this is it.

I think I’ve actually kind of
followed the Marie Kondo philosophy

because there’s everything in my
desk that I’m looking at has a use.

So the idea is minimize
how much stuff you have.

I could throw out some old clothes.

There’s clothes I don’t wear.

There’s clothes that don’t fit right.

So that’s probably where I
would make the first real effort

just throw out a bunch of clothes.

It’s just, it’s so hard for me to find
clothes that fit properly in Japan.

If I find something, I keep it.

Even if I don’t really like
it, I might wear it later.

So that’s again, a necessity.

But her whole thing was, everything
you have in your possession

should spark joy and
create a positive feeling

or you feel like you
have like warms around it.

She did an interview and
she said she’s sort of given up

on keeping everything clean and organized.

Which is kind of cool and
interesting, ’cause it’s like,

what drove someone who’s
built a career, a tiny, tiny empire?

She’s been on like Western TV.

I know she was on Stephen Colbert’s show.

What would drive
her to the point where

she’s almost given up
on her own philosophy?

She said, “My home is messy.

The way I’m spending
my time is the

right way for me at
this stage in my life.

What is important is enjoying
spending time with my children.”

And then you find out
she’s had her third kid.

So this is why her house is
messy, because three kids,

and I assume all pretty small still.

‘Cause one’s a baby,
’cause you got two other kids,

they’re a little older, but
then that means they’re like

toddler, so they’re just running
around, just making a mess.

That’s what kids do, and they have toys.

And the kids, if you say,
“Does this spark joy?”

They’re gonna go, “Yeah!”

‘Cause everything sparks
joy when you’re a little kid.

This is something I was kind of sad about.

I saw a kid who a train
went by and got so excited

that he did a little
like tippy-tappy dance.

I was like, I don’t know if
I’ve ever been that happy.

I don’t know if I’ve ever
been that at a point in my life

where I was did a little tippy-tappy dance.

I must have, and then at
some point that joy went away.

And it’s sad.

It’s sad that I don’t get excited
about things like that anymore.

So I’m gonna try to
find something that

would make me do a
little tippy-tappy dance.

And that’s gonna be like,
this could be the chunk

of beef chest philosophy of tippy-taps.

‘Cause when you
get to a certain point

in your life, you don’t
tippy-tap anymore.

Can we find the thing in our
life that makes us tippy-tap?

And if we can, then that gives
us a sense of what brings us joy.

And that’s maybe what I’ve lost
in my life, a certain amount of joy.

I wanna bring that back.

And then I was thinking, my
recondo’s version of messy

is probably still way
cleaner than everyone else.

So I keep my head, again,
if you’ve watched the video,

you can see there’s very little in my room.

Behind me there is the bed.

There’s the chin-up bar.

Down here in the corner,
there’s a little heater.

It’s a space heater.

Electricity doubled for me, last,
between last December and this December,

went from 15,000 yen to
heat my house to 30,000 yen.

That’s a big bite.

So we, the small rooms,
so my room’s quite small.

We got a little kerosene space heater.

We’re using that.

That’s basically all there is in my room.

There’s the two desks
with my computer

set up and another
desk with just nothing

so that I can do other stuff there.

I have a minimalist philosophy.

So I think overall,
my room is probably

less messy than
other people’s rooms,

because I only use things
that I consider necessary.

Maricondo’s whole spark joy thing.

She probably doesn’t have that much
stuff in her house in the first place.

She doesn’t have that much
stuff in her house in her first place.

Her version of messy is probably way better

than other people’s
version of messy anyways.

So I’m betting Maricondo’s state of
decay that she may be in right now.

It’s still 10 times better than
almost everyone else’s state of decay.

So you know, she’s got three kids.

She’s got a life.

I mean, I don’t, I hope she’s happy.

She says she’s happy.

She wants to spend
time with her kids and

then that actually
brings in a secondary.

This has nothing to do with
news anymore, I just realized.

She’s brought in a secondary
aspect of the philosophy

is that her philosophy has changed.

She went from everything
should be sparking

joy and clean in an
order and minimalist.

To I wanna spend time with my
kids and you know, enjoy that time

and enjoying that time with
kids, that’s gonna be messy.

You’re gonna have a lot of stuff.

You’re gonna have
toys all over the floor

sometimes, but that’s
actually pretty fun.

I remember, you know, just
toys everywhere for my kids.

It was pretty cool.

You know, I don’t have that in my
house ’cause my kids are like teens.

There.

They have basically a phone or a
device and that’s all they pay attention to

and I’m not criticizing that
’cause like, what do I do?

I play video games, I
make podcasts, and I

stream on Twitch
and stuff, and that’s it.

That’s my version is just a
bigger device at this point.

So I can’t be critical of
them, but I kinda miss Lego.

(phone ringing)

A very quick update.

So I think last week I did talk about China

and China denying visas to people
in Japan, being very hypocritical.

China has resumed issuing
visas for Japanese people.

That’s it.

I mean, there’s actually no,
because we talked about it last week

and the hypocrisy in there, and I
didn’t think it was gonna last very long.

I thought it was gonna go
longer than just a couple weeks

I talked about it because
China’s the kind of country

that sort of makes
a decision, stands

by it, even if it’s
the wrong decision,

but tourism is money.

Everyone wants tourists to keep
tourisming, and they want the money.

So Japanese people, you
may hate them historically,

but they’re gonna spend a lot of
money if they come to your country,

so you want them to
come visit your country.

(phone ringing)

There’s been a series of robberies.

They’re pretty awful, actually.

The interesting part is
that they were masterminded

by a man who’s being
held in a detention

center in the
Philippines, in vanilla.

So basically he had
a smartphone, and

he was directing
people how to break in,

how to basically do home invasions almost.

What they would do
is they come up to

your house and they
do a fake delivery,

and then they would force
their way into your house.

They beat up some
people, they accidentally,

they beat up a
90-year-old person,

and they died as a result of the injuries.

One of the home invasions used
seven people, so these are big things.

They talked about how much money they took,

but again, it’s how much
money you keep in the house.

I don’t keep any money in the house.

But Japanese people, older generations,

still tend to keep money,
physical money in the house.

Which, because they
don’t trust banks, and

then the banks,
interest rates are so low

that keeping money in
bank almost means nothing.

Sometimes you pay more in fees
than you would get an interest,

so there’s no benefit
to keeping you to bank.

I think it was interesting
that this guy had a smartphone.

He was arrested in
2021 being held in Manila.

He gave instructions via smartphone
how to set up the fake deliveries,

how to go to the houses,
how to pick the houses,

and he organized groups of people
in Japan to do these robberies.

He called him, they kept
referring to him as Luffy.

Luffy is a famous
criminal character in

Japan, from a manga
in anime and stuff.

And Luffy is the pirate.

I was thinking of someone else.

Yeah, Luffy is the pirate.

Okay.

And I was like,
don’t give, police

should not be giving
criminals cool names.

And it turns out
that he called himself

that, which makes
him actually way lamer,

giving yourself a nickname of a cool
anime character that you probably like.

And then like, I guess making
other people call it, you that?

That’s, I don’t know.

It’d be like someone going, getting a
stupid name like Chunker Beef Chess

and trying to get
everyone to call him that.

I actually don’t want
people to call me that.

I have never insisted any of my friends

or people I’ve talked to actually
call me Chunker Beef Chess.

It is just a nickname.

I guess at this point, it’s sort
of a production company name

because I have a series of podcasts
and stuff all under the same pseudonym.

So maybe if I write stuff, if I
might use that as my pet name, but…

Anyways, this guy, it looks
like he’s going to be deported

in the second week of
February back to Japan.

So deported from the
Philippines back to Japan.

And when that happens, I do want
to see like what he’s charged with.

I’m betting these charges
are going to be pretty big

because there is at
least one death involved

and multiple, multiple
people have been injured.

What I want to know is what is the scope

of the organization he was
able to do while in detention?

Because you think the guards maybe
would have noticed he was using a phone,

but he was being detained, not in jail.

Like there’s a lot of
sort of like shady areas.

Why did he have a smartphone and
why do you have so much access to it

if he was being detained
for a full year at least?

More than that’s really
weird and interesting.

So I’m looking at sort of
the back sides of this story.

So you’re going to get all the, oh,
this is how much money was stolen

and there’s people who were hurt and stuff.

But I’m like, how did he get
this organization into place

from a detention center with a smartphone?

That’s the bit I’m more interested in.

The criminal proceedings,
I mean, it’s going to be big.

We’ll see what happens.

I will do updates on
this as they come along.

(phone ringing)

I’ve got like three or four stories
of, it’s all 40, 50 year old men.

There’s a 44 year old
man who is arrested

for producing
counterfeit, huggy pillows.

So you know those big pillows, body
pillows, and it has an anime girl on it.

He was arrested, he had 72 items of
12 characters from 10 different shows.

Now what he was doing
was taking these pillows

and modifying them so
they were showing more skin.

So you have the,
I know it was like

one of the characters
from Dead or Alive,

video game, sexy lady.

She’s lying on the
pillow, let’s say, like this.

Oh.
For people who are listening,
I just did a very sexy gesture.

I don’t know if he
was painting it, or

he was doing some
kind of modification

to make it look like she
was exposing more skin.

So it sounds like
what he did was took

an original licensed
picture, modified it

so it showed more skin and
then produced these huggy pillows.

And since they’re sexier
than the official ones,

the companies are like, this isn’t
cool when the police arrested him.

They found 600 more in his house.

Prosecutors are seeking heavy punishment

between 2018 to last
summer, he made 12 million yen.

So that’s towards like 18, 19, 20, 21.

So that’s four years 12 million.

He was making 3 million yen
a year off these huggy pillows

that is a lot of money, but also
it’s less than the average salary.

Now when I’m gonna
commit my big crime,

because it’s coming,
I like this age group

has made it very clear
that I am ripe for crime.

When I commit my crime, I wanna
make it so I don’t have to work anymore.

So it’s gotta be a big score.

This is why I will never
commit a crime though,

’cause I’m never
gonna hit a score big

enough where I wouldn’t
have to work anymore,

or it would be enough money
that I could just keep my job

and then just supplement my income.

Yeah, I guess I’m already
not a career criminal

’cause I’m smart enough
to know that like if I have

to keep committing crimes
over three, four years,

even if it’s just the exact same crime,

it’s the sheer volume
is going to make it

easier from the catch
you sooner or later.

It might be years, this
guy’s like three, four years.

There’s another story,
I actually didn’t do it.

There was a guy riding
a motorcycle and he

was riding his motorcycle
close to the car

in front of him so that
when there was a toll gate

to get onto the highway,
he would go through.

And they were like, he
didn’t pay not very much

like three, four, five,
hundred dollars worth of tolls,

but then he got arrested
because he’s been doing it

and they’re like sooner
or later gonna catch him.

He flipped up his license plate.

There’s a thing in Japan
where they take the license plate

and they bend it upwards
so you can actually see it

if you’re behind the motorcycle and stuff.

It’s a Yankee kind of thing to do.

It had a name, oh, I
forget what the name was.

But anyways, the volume of crime
increases the likelihood of getting caught.

So you want to commit one
crime and not have to do it again

or a few crimes in your life
very distant from each other.

So like once a decade
you commit a crime,

you’d have less
chance of getting caught

’cause there’s less for
them to put together

and figure out if you have
to commit a crime every week

or every day, the police are like, well,

we’re gonna find a pattern,
we’re gonna figure something out.

We’re gonna have all these
guys are getting caught

by a surveillance video if
we’re being really honest.

You’re gonna get surveyed
and then they’re gonna see

what you’re doing and then catch you.

They’ll probably just follow you home.

I don’t think I wrote this one down.

There was lots of crime stories this week.

There were actually too many,
but now they’re all in my head.

So I’m like, this is all interesting.

The links between them.

It was like two 14
year old kids like

smashed, did a smash
and grab basically

of jewelry store and the
police once they figured out

which way they left the
building just got on video

from different buildings
and just followed them

basically back to where
they live and arrested them.

But let’s get on to other old men
committing more crimes often poorly.

So we had a story a couple weeks ago

about a guy who was
just really exhausted

from work and I kinda
know how he feels.

He’s like, I don’t wanna
go to work anymore.

So he took a knife
and he put it up against

the wall and stabbed
himself in the back.

And then claimed he’d been,
there was an attempted murder

that he’d been attacked and then
he wouldn’t have to go to work.

And then they got the
surveillance video and found

that there was no other person
around and he just stabbed himself.

But seems that this
is not a unique incident.

There was a teacher who
said work was too tiring.

And I relate, like sometimes
you just get burnt out,

you’re tired, you don’t
wanna do this anymore.

What’s the solution?

My solution is usually,
if I can take a day off

and maybe the Japanese
solution is to drink

a lot and just burn
it out with alcohol.

Now this guy’s like, I’m
gonna call the school.

at 8 AM, so this is
before classes on the 25th.

This was the 25th, so
this is like last week.

And tell them, there
might be explosives

on the first and third
floor of the school

and in the gymnasium, if
classes don’t end by the morning,

you could be in danger, that is all.

This was not handled how I
thought it would be handled.

The school staff then searched
the schools and the gymnasium

and they concluded there was
no bomb and classes continued.

I would have called the police
because it’s a bomb threat.

And even if you know it’s fake,
you have to take it seriously

because there’s the off chance it is.

There was a package,
I think I’ve told

this like two, three
times on the podcast,

but how often does
this happen in your life?

There was a package in the
parking lot near my house.

And from my balcony, I could see it.

So I went out with my balcony and watched

as the police showed up
and it was pretty noticeable.

And the police were like,
this package had a note on it

and the note was vaguely threatening.

So they’re like, we don’t
know if this bomb or not.

And I watched them like, get the shield out

and the guy all armoured
up and he walked

up to it and like
poked it and stuff.

I couldn’t see very
well, was it night time?

But I could see kind
of like them approach

it and then back up
and then approach it.

Eventually a detective came to our house

and it’s like, look, we’re gonna
basically try to open this thing.

We don’t know what it is or what’s in it.

We could be a bomb, we don’t
think it is, but we wanna be safe.

So could you guys evacuate?

And we’re like, I can’t wanna watch.

But then of course
me standing on my

balcony and Shrapnel
hits me in the face

is one of the worst ways to die.

So I’m just like, okay, let’s
not like the way you die,

but the stories people
tell like this dumbass

was standing on his
balcony watching a bomb.

So we evacuated my family
like 20, 30 minutes later.

They’re like, it was just a
bag with some garbage in it.

And then again, the
note was just like some,

some person just put a note
on it to make it threatening

and has wasted
police resources so

they were gonna go
try to find that person.

Yada, yada, yada.

But they took it seriously.

This school did not.

The school’s like, hey, teachers
completely inexperienced

with actual bombs and
what they look like and stuff.

Let’s go take a look around
and see what happens.

And I guess don’t touch anything.

I don’t think that’s right.

The guy who called in the bomb threat,

he’d gone to a pay phone
relatively close to the school.

The police could figure out what
phone made the phone call, of course.

So they basically traced it back.

They got some security camera
found the guy making the phone call

and then him immediately
going to work afterwards.

He still had to go to work
and then he got arrested.

So his bomb threat didn’t
even give him a day off.

So not only is this a dumb
crime, it’s also poorly executed.

I am so judgmental of criminals
’cause if you’re gonna do this,

have a good plan and execute it properly.

I this might be why I’m
so fascinated with the guy

who was in Manila because
he’s organized a criminal empire

with a cell phone while in detention.

I don’t wanna show
any sort of respect for

him, but he clearly
knew what he was doing

and he kinda was doing it the right way.

I’m glad he got caught
and there got stopped

’cause I also, I
would like my crimes.

When I commit my crime, I want it
to be one where no one gets hurt.

I don’t wanna hurt another
person that commit a crime.

This might be another
thing that’s holding me back.

I’m not as cold-hearted as I need to be.

I would not want to
hurt someone else

physically for sure
to commit my crime.

I’m okay with threatening violence.

I’m okay with the threat of violence.

I don’t actually wanna hurt anybody.

You know what, this
isn’t about me and

that’s maybe why I
should just move on.

(upbeat music)

Okay, there was another
set of bomb threats.

So 300 schools and universities
received bomb threats

last week between Monday and Wednesday.

It kinda came through in waves.

Facts.

And that to me was the
only bit that I was like,

what, they facts the
schools of bomb threat?

They said it had a unique font.

Which I don’t know what that means.

I’m assuming they had to just put in a font

from some kind of plug
in on their computer, right?

‘Cause you’re not even, you’re not
getting, maybe they did print it out

and maybe they did the classic
like Pasting Magazine bits together.

Anyways.

It was facts to schools
from a number in Tokyo.

It demanded a ransom between
300,000 yen to 3 million yen.

I actually think maybe they
made a mistake on the first one,

’cause why would you
go with the low number?

They didn’t say how the person
was supposed to collect the money.

I think this was just a very
poorly thought out scheme.

And they hadn’t
thought through how to

actually, like should
they be successful?

I think this was more of a prank
than an actual attempt to get money.

I think they just wanted to be disruptive
because there was no plan in place

that we could see
or hear about where

the person actually
would end up collecting

if a school was going to give in
and actually give them the money.

So, man.

(phone ringing).

More threats?

Let’s just keep going.

It’s a theme.

This guy had a game on his phone.

It’s called “Majong Seoul.”

And he kept losing.

So he decided, you know, the way
to deal with when you’re losing it,

probably a very random game
that’s designed to make you lose.

A lot.

You should go to the
publisher’s homepage,

the computer game
publisher’s homepage.

And start sending
death threats, which

is a forcible
obstruction of business.

(phone ringing)

Hopefully you guys
watching on Twitch,

nothing happened,
but when I edit this,

I’m gonna put in a counter up there

in a little ding that says
obstruction of business.

‘Cause we’ve decided to
start keeping track of that crime

because it happens almost so much.

He confessed to actually
doing the death threats

because of his constant losses at the game.

I don’t know, man, you can’t invest.

I lost a lot of college duty.

You know what I did?

I stopped playing college duty.

‘Cause I’m mediocre at best.

I’m certainly not good.

I wasn’t gonna get any better
’cause I wanna put the time in.

So you stopped playing that game.

You’ll get some other game
that’s easier and more fun.

(phone ringing)

Okay, talking about angry people,

there’s a high school teacher
and he’s been suspended.

He’s been suspended for abusing
the handball team members.

And that’s terrible.

I don’t know why I find it funny.

I think it’s ’cause it’s handball.

And it’s not like I don’t
have any respect for handball,

but let’s face it, if you’re
gonna invest your life

into something and
get like abusive over it.

Choose a better sport.

It’s even saying that sounds shitty.

Handball is something you play for fun.

I assume there are professional
handball leagues and players,

but there’s a reason I’ve never
heard of them or thought about them.

Like there’s professionals
in almost every sport.

Not every sport gets
the same level of respect.

Okay, so there’s a handball team.

And this teacher has been assigned
the task of coaching the handball team.

He decides that the students
are making too many mistakes.

So he starts slapping
the students and

telling them to die
and calling the media,

it’s enthrowing the handball at their head.

Now, if you’re a really
good handball player,

you should either catch
or deflect that handball.

So that last one, I should not,

I don’t believe you should be
considered part of the abuse.

That should be just training.

Someone made an
anonymous call to the school

and the principal,
instead of actually,

dealing with this, decided
to give the teacher guidance.

And I think what that means
is they tried to cover it up.

This all came to light
very recently when

all six members of the
senior handball team

quit at the same day.

And then the teacher was called out.

And there’s been a press
conference and the teacher had to say,

I became frustrated by
the repeated mistakes.

And my first thought
was, dude, it’s handball.

Just let them have a good time.

This is a different philosophy.

It’s maybe cultural.

My daughter was doing
gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics.

And she was having a good time.

She was a little kid.

Troll the Baton.

I actually liked really playing
with the ribbon on a thing.

You could wave it around.

I really enjoyed that.

So I would do that at home a lot.

She really liked it.

And it was really good for her.

And she was flexible.

And she was having a good time.

And it was athletic.

And then she got, I
think, I forget what year,

but it was like 10
years older or something.

They’re like, great.

If you want to go to the next
level, you have to come every day.

Now, we couldn’t
bring her every day

because we’re working
parents and stuff.

And we have jobs and lives.

And she also has other things to do.

We didn’t want her to dedicate
her whole life to rhythmic gymnastics.

We wanted her to go a couple of
times a week to do this healthy exercise.

That was fun.

So literally, they gave us an ultimatum

of it’s all rhythmic gymnastics
all the time or nothing.

So there was no sort of
class where you would go

for kids to actually just enjoy themselves.

You had to be dedicated to this to
become a professional rhythmic gymnast.

Which I assume is, I don’t know
if that’s the same level as him,

but I don’t know if there
even are professionals.

So we did the actually
only thing we could do.

We were putting an impossible situation.

We pulled her out.

So that gym makes slightly less money.

And I assume this happens regularly.

Like every time girls hit this
age, they’re giving this ultimatum.

And a significant
proportion of them, it’s

not that they even
don’t want to do it.

The parents can’t commit
the level of that amount of time.

‘Cause okay, I go to judo,

means I can’t take my kid to
rhythmic gymnastics that night.

Which means I have a
choice if I give up my hobby

’cause I’m not a professional judoka.

I don’t do judo all day every day.

But it’s the thing I do
for my health and fitness.

I’m supposed to give
that up and just sit

in a gym and watch
her every single night.

Even if I swap off with
my wife, it doesn’t work.

It just doesn’t work for most people
to do one thing every single day.

But that’s like in Japan,
they have this thing

where you either have to do
it super seriously or not at all.

And I see, again, like I
just mentioned, I do judo.

And you can see the
kids with the parents

who aren’t there
to have a good time

or learn a martial art or enjoy themselves.

They’re just like, they want
their kids to be world champions.

And I can tell you, these kids
are not gonna be world champions

’cause they’re
hating every minute

of it ’cause they’re
being forced into it.

They make like judo,
they don’t like it every day.

And they certainly don’t like their
parents shouting at them from the sides.

And this is sort of the same
thing, rhythmic gymnastics.

To me in my mind is a
fun version of gymnastics

that’s incorporating
dance to have a good time.

They didn’t see it that way.

This was a lifestyle
choice you had to make.

And it was going
to make your life or

break your life and
it broke our lives.

And my daughter doesn’t do rhythmic
gymnastics anymore, which kinda sucks.

Very light last story.

It all had the abuse of
tendencies kinda sucks, huh?

The Prime Minister’s son is his secretary.

So the Prime Minister
was out in another country.

I think he went to America, he went
to, oh no, they went around Europe,

a couple places in Europe.

And while they were there,
they have an official car.

So he used the official
car to go and do things.

Now a news story came out, a
magazine came out, this is a scandal.

He said he used the
government car for sightseeing.

And the government then
turned around and denied it.

He said he used the car
to take publicity photos.

So he was going to like the Eiffel Tower.

And he took a picture of the Eiffel Tower

to put on the official
Prime Minister’s Instagram,

and I’d say I don’t know
what they actually were doing.

Maybe it was for
publishing materials or

something, but I’ll just
give you an example.

And then you could put
it on that and go look,

the Prime Minister is here in
Paris doing this important thing.

He went to buy souvenirs,
which is in Japan,

a very important
thing to do for work.

So you buy souvenirs for your coworkers.

He’s gonna buy souvenirs
to give to people politically.

So it’s part of his job.

He claims he did no shopping for
himself, didn’t use any tourist facilities.

And I was like, I got Japan’s,
this takes everything a step further.

I’d be like, well, if he was at a
tourist place, officially taking photos,

what would be the
problem with him buying

a snack or doing
something like that?

And that’s again, it’s
very different in Japan.

That would not be acceptable.

I did the story, forget when now.

It was like maybe a
couple months ago,

where it was cops in
Japan are allowed to go

to convenience stores to buy a drink.

Like that’s how it, that’s
before they weren’t.

It was like they couldn’t in uniform go in

and just buy a drink
because they were thirsty.

You had to go and change so that
you didn’t look like you were slacking off.

So they take that really seriously here.

It’s a different, I got
a different mentality.

And that mentality maybe needs to
be adjusted for a new modern lifestyle.

So that kids can do
rhythmic gymnastics for fun

or play handball and not get
smacked in the back of the head.

Or if you’re in a very exciting new country

and doing some work and
then take a little side step

and they’re like, oh, I’d like
to take a picture for myself.

Don’t have everyone freak out.

I did take a moment and think, imagine
the level of scrutiny a US politician

would be comfortable with.

They could never
survive in Japan because

the level of scrutiny
he’s gone through.

So again, I think he was
probably taking pictures

and then maybe took
a couple pictures for

himself, which I
would not judge at all.

I don’t think any Western person would.

He probably went and bought souvenirs.

And yeah, if you’re buying souvenirs

and then you buy one extra
with your own money for yourself,

I would not say that was a bad thing.

Oh, I’m gonna buy five boxes
of these Parisian chocolates

for my father, who’s the prime
minister for his some of his coworkers

or other politicians he’s gonna meet.

I’ll slide one in there and I’ll pay
for it myself separately for myself.

It’s 10 seconds more.

I wouldn’t, as long as he’s not
using government money for it,

I have no problem with that at all.

I would like to see that level of scrutiny

in other countries
would be really interesting

’cause imagine the stuff they
would be judging Donald Trump for it.

‘Cause he’s basically been
caught committing crimes

and stuff and it’s just nothing happens.

I am waiting to see, the
most interesting thing

about America right now
is will they bring charges

and if they do, ’cause we
all know he’s actually guilty,

would they actually put him in prison?

I know it would be
a cushy prison, but I

would love to see
Donald Trump go to prison

and they keep hinting
at that they’re gonna

do it and they keep
pushing towards it.

If they put his kids in prison, I
think that would be pretty good

’cause then he would
have to reconcile that.

And probably distance himself?

Yeah, that’d be funny.

That literally just to me would be funny.

So, do we have a positive note?

Because of my start
with Mary Condo and

our philosophies must
have just over time

to suit our circumstances, but
we still must find joy where we are.

My joy, that my tippy-tappy dance
is going to be Donald Trump in prison.

(upbeat music)

[Music].

Put some D’s in some V’s

[Music]

Anyone who’s watching the video
may notice there’s a new addition, a small

space heater in my room.

And that’s
because my electricity bill has doubled.

It seems like this is actually
having to do a lot of people.

We know prices have
gone up, but doubled is a bit of a shock.

Last year in December, for
my house, I spent 15,000 yen.

It’s like 150 bucks.

Okay, it’s a house.

So it’s going to use a lot of
energy and there’s going to be a lot of

leakage and stuff.

And it’s not going to be super-energy
efficient because we have windows.

So that was fine.

We used less electricity this
December and paid 30,000 yen,

which is a shock when that bill comes.

So that cut into all that, of course, this
month came out of my entertainment budget.

We basically have to re-jigger our
finances to make sure we can pay all our

bills and stuff.

We’re not in any trouble or anything.

It’s a big shock because
everything’s gone up by 4%.

I’ve noticed that
electricity doubling is a lot.

So now we have caracene heaters, which is
a very common way to heat a room in Japan.

So caracene is cheaper than electricity.

My associate Dave, he usually
sits in the corner of the bed in his bed.

That has been vacated.

His little bed has been put on
the ground so he can sit right in front of

the heater because Dave absorbs heat.

But at 4 o’clock in the morning,
he usually wakes up and gets really close

to my chest when we’re sleeping.

It’s very cute.

He generates a ton
of heat and it’s super nice.

But we’re not here for that.
I’m also in pain.

You’re not here to hear about this either.

I just have to
get all the personal stuff out of the way.

You’ll notice I’m sort of sitting like in
my arm is in a sling even though it isn’t.

Maybe I’m pledging allegiance to something.

I’m not, I have no allegiances.

I hurt my shoulder and judo yesterday.

I woke up
with a hangover but it’s not a hangover.

Hangover is really just a dehydration from
alcohol over consumption.

I was dehydrated from judo.
I drank water, ton of water last night.

Usually I would wake up in the middle
of the night and drink some more water

because I have a headache.

I would just walk up with a headache.
It’s basically a hangover headache.

It’s basically gone already.

I spent the
entirety of this morning drinking water.

I have some with me here
to keep my voice from being too gross.

I have to work today.

I thought I’ll get up, I’ll record
right away and edit right away and maybe

I can still get this up today.

I don’t
know if I have an enemy to be honest.

I’m pushing through. This is very
much a concerted effort on my part to get

this week’s ninja news Japan out.

I was just
going to skip and wait until next week.

Consider I’m just read or play
video games or something but you know what?

People really want to know
what’s going on with tropicana.

Tropicana in Japan last year in September.

I actually did this on ninja news Japan.

They had a melon drink and on the
label it said 100% whole fruit melon taste.

Written if I remember correctly in English.

Now that was a slightly deceptive
practice because it wasn’t.

When you see 100% on a
fruit drink you think fruit juice.

You don’t actually check the thing.

It actually had 2% melon juice.

98% was apple banana and grape juice.

So it’s still all juice.

There was a lot of juice in there.
It just wasn’t melon juice.

Melons are incredibly expensive in Japan.

So a 100%
melon juice drink would be like $5-10.

It’d be like going to Starbucks.

Oh god, sorry, just move
my fucking shoulder.

This might happen several times throughout
the podcast where I move and make

a small pain sound.

Oh fuck me.

Oh Jesus, I’m pushing it. It’s a bad idea.

Who?

Don’t, when you injure
yourself, don’t push on it.

And you’re probably going Peter, why?

Why did you push on it?

It’s kind of like I’m a
deep massage technique.

It hurts but that
feels better when you stop.

I guess any pain if you inflict on yourself
when you stop technically feels better.

But back to tropicana.

This is going to be the podcast.

It’s going to be me talking about
the pain I’m experiencing in the moment

and the news story flipping back and forth.

I will not be doing a lot of editing again
because I’m going to try to get

this out today.

The company then had to
redesign the package.

They were told by the
consumer affairs like this is deceptive.

They had a melon on it.

It was blocking out.

You could still see the apple banana and
grape.

It was basically blocking out.

So they were basically lying to
consumers trying to imply that it was 100%

melon juice.

So the company had to redesign the package.

And then the
Japan consumer affairs apply to fine of.

And this is why it’s
recent because just recent this week.

19,150,000 yen in violation
of the act against unjustifiable premiums.

That’s not what they’re in violation of.

And misleading representation which is
what they’re in violation of.

They calculate this.

This was maybe to
me the more interesting part.

This punishment was a calculation
of 3% of sales of whatever product has

violated this rule.

So basically if I make a product
and I put that product out and that product

violates this rule.

The way this is calculated is 3% of sales
of whatever the like the bogus product is.

So they’ve calculated all the sales.

The product.

I don’t know if it’s the profits.

It gets just sales.

So their profits aren’t going to be 100%.

So they’re taking 3% of sales
which is going to really read their profit

margin might be small.

It might be 5%, 10%.

I know it’s not.

Most products probably is 25% to 50%.

Profit margin.

Maybe that’s the stores.

I don’t know.

But I know 3% is a proper hit.

I mean that’s actually them doing
some real damage to the company in the

hopes that they can force them.

Cause them enough pain
so they don’t do it again.

I kind of liked this story.

So you know in america there’s
if you go on Twitter or something like that

and you look at like people who work at
convenience stores or sandwich shops

and stuff.

And they’re like, here’s
what we threw out today.

I went to my manager and said
can we donate this to a homeless shelter?

And they’re like no
corporate policy is that we throw it away.

And it was like Walmart or costco
or one of these big companies actually had

a guard by the garbage.

So that people wouldn’t steal
their garbage so that they could you know

sustain themselves off the stuff
that they were going to throw away and fill

up a landfill with.

Lawson is a convenience
store chain in Japan.

And they’re I don’t know if
you call famous but they have a lot of deep

fried chicken available.

American gas stations have
rolling hot dogs that I would never eat.

But apparently they’re not that bad.

There’s a couple people for some
reason I was reading on the Internet the

other day on Reddit or something.

A couple people liked them is because
they worked there and they knew how

fresh they actually were and
how long they actually put them out for.

Lawson donates chicken to children’s food
charity that are past the cell by date.

Now that sounds bad.

Now we know cell by
dates tend to be generous.

You throw it out before it really goes bad.

But this is something that has to be
deep fried and cooked so what do they do?

They deep fry it they put it on the shelf.

If it doesn’t get sold by the
cell by date they freeze it send it to the

children’s charity where it can
be defrosted and then sort of re-fried kind

of quickly.

And so and be pretty good.

So it really just comes down
to what is that cell by date?

How long does it sit out for?
The cell by date for the chicken at Lawson.

The carage specifically so carage is
like a ball of chicken that they deep fry.

And they’re quite good.
It’s a very common food item in Japan.

The carage cell by date is six hours.

So that’s when you realize the cell
because we think of cell by date as days

or weeks or whatever.

This is done in hour. So they deep fry
it they put it on that little shelf.

If it doesn’t sell in six hours they take
it off the shelf and they flash freeze it.

And then at the end of the
day that frozen chicken is going to go to a

children’s cafeteria so the
children can have something.

I mean not the most nutritious
food in the world but I can tell you the

chicken is good.

Being deep fried isn’t the worst
but I can tell you it’s better than some of

the alternatives of garbage food
that you might get in the same situation.

So I again I like the idea that food isn’t
being wasted.

I’ve always thought like I’m not
going to stop buying it so that I can go

stand by your garbage.

And I certainly wouldn’t be
angry about the idea of you taking food and

giving it to children who need food.

So good on your Lawson.
I’m very happy for you.

I’m very happy with you.
I’m very happy with you. I’m happy.

Except for my shoulder fuck.

We have an ongoing debate between
Japan and China. It’s really just China

debating a very one-sided thing.

So there’s been a recent outbreak. They
stopped with their zero covid policies.

What they were doing
was like one case of covid in a factory.

We’re going to lock everyone in
that factory until they all die or they all

get past it.

There was one it was like an
Ikea and it was like this flood of people

trying to get out of
the Ikea before they locked the doors.

And so it’s pretty scary.

They’ve stopped that
policy which is actually meant

that people are intermixing,
people are walking around.

So now they’re having their
first massive wave of covid.

South Korea and Japan are like oh shit.

So what we should do is have anyone
traveling from China to south Korea or

south Japan.

Do a covid test.

Last week was talking about I had
to do a covid test to come back to Japan

from Canada.

So this didn’t seem unreasonable to me.
The Chinese government on the other

hand saw this as being racist
and discriminatory and very, very unfair.

China recently said we’re
going to open China to tour groups from 20

countries from February 6th.

So we’re going to try to re-encourage
tourism to reinvigorate that industry.

They gave sort of a
side-eyed Japan and went but not you.

And not you south Korea. Screw
you if you’re testing people so they don’t

have covid and bring it into your country.

Which I actually thought is
this is very short-sighted.

Japanese and South Korean tourists
spend a lot of money when they go on

holiday, when they go places.

You’re just screwing yourself.

So I don’t consider the you have
to take a covid test 48 hours before you

travel to be offensive.

You could say it’s discriminatory because
it’s being applied to China

but it’s being applied to China
because they’ve had an outbreak of covid.

This takes US to the
second part of this story.

China also imposed
on Japan, america, south Korea, travelers.

Because you can still go there.
You can get like other visas and stuff. You

can still go there.

You have to take a nucleic acid test.
Now I didn’t look into it.

I wanted to look into it. Again,
because I have to work today. I didn’t

really have much time
to do any extra research.

Is it more
invasive or more difficult or whatever?

It’s a more severe test than
just your standard covid test. I assume.

And they said we’re going to continue
forcing Japanese, American and south

Koreans to take this nucleic acid test
until their discriminatory practices cease.

So basically they’re saying you’ve
discriminated against US. So we’re going

to discriminate against
you and until you stop your

discriminatory practices,
we’re going to discriminate.

They see no hypocrisy in what they’re
saying. This is just tit for test stuff.

But the statement they came out,
they said, you should base your rules on

science, not politics.

But science would tell you if a
country is having an outbreak of covid, you

should test the people from that
country before you allow them into your

country as tourists.

That would actually be pretty
solid science.

Science
often involves testing things.

China is saying that these countries, so
Japan and south Korea and stuff,

they’re making political responses to the
situation, not scientific ones.

I would disagree. And the
thing is their response to all this is not

scientific. It’s incredibly political
based. It’s very emotional almost.

And I think maybe my
respect for the China, how do I say it?

The Chinese government, because
it’s the same thing all the time. This has

been my thing with dictatorships
in the Chinese communist party and stuff.

They make a statement and then they
do the exact opposite of the thing they’re

saying other people should do.
And that they don’t understand the problem

And they’ll tell you what to do
and then they’ll do the opposite of that.

So this is, I guess it’s just the
hypocrisy. And it’s hard to formulate into

words that sound like anything
other than stop being hypocritical.

But yeah, saying you should base
your decisions on science, which I think

they, I mean, it’s not scientific, but you
find out this country has lots of covid.

We should test those people. I wouldn’t
call that scientific, but it’s sensible.

But if you want to talk to scientists and
say, hey, we have people coming

from other countries into our country.

And this set of countries has covid.
What should we do? The scientists are

going to say you should test those people.

Because if they don’t have
covid, it’s fine. If they do have covid, we

should quarantine them. Maybe
they don’t understand what science is.

Again, it’s not, it has nothing
to do with reality. That maybe is what i’m

trying to struggle with.

North Korea and China, a lot of
times they make statements and it doesn’t

have anything to do with the real world.

It seems to me like a very emotional
response. And I guess that’s what you

can get away with when you
have a basic dictatorship.

Last week I talked about wage increases.
Everything’s gone up 4% inflation

and it’s going to go up again a
little more or more products in the future.

So basically, everyone in Japan
has just lost 4% of their salary if their

salary does not increase.

So the government’s like, hey,
companies, please increase your salaries. A

bunch of big companies have said,
yep, we’ll do what the government says.

But then this week it came out 70% of
small to mid-sized firms have no plan

to raise wages.

And I would bet it’s not because
they’re malicious. I bet it’s because they

can’t. We’ve all
gone through this pandemic together.

Company profits are not going to be high.
Where is this money coming from to

pay these people if you don’t
pass on increased prices?

But if you do increase prices,
which most companies are, then that money

should go to the worker.

I guess this is again my very socialist
idea of an increase inflation should

not line the coffers of the rich leaders.

It should support the working class
so that they can compete with inflation.

Whereas companies don’t think that way.

Companies think in profits. I actually read
an article and it was an American thing.

And the guy said he’s been waiting for
a big jump in inflation so he can

raise prices and he’ll make tons of money.

Which
implies I have no intent to even

consider the idea of
paying my workers more.

So 70% of small to mid-sized
firms have no plan to raise wages.

Small to mid-sized firms make up 99%
of the companies in Japan.

So yes, these big companies like
Toyota, they will probably raise wages of

their main companies.

But a lot of the stuff they actually
do is working with Toyota subsidiaries.

They are going to be
small to mid-sized firms.

Those companies are not raising their
wages. And again, I think because they

can’t right now.

They might be able to maybe one sort
of the economy settles and they’ve got

this new price structure.

They could then, but the problem is by
that time they’re like, well, i’m

making more money.

Why would I raise the wages
of the worker and lose money in my pocket?

And this is kind of like a working class,
ruling class kind of problem.

But one of the, a couple of
things I’ve learned about economics is the

strongest countries economically.

All the money is in the middle class.
And it’s because if you have all the

money focused in a small group
of billionaires, which is sort of what’s

happening in america.

When the economy has a problem when
it changes, they actually, because it’s

a small group, cannot spend
enough to fix the economy.

Like if I’m a billionaire and I
buy stuff, I’m really buying like even if I

buy like a supercars and yachts,
that doesn’t impact the economy the way it

would be if millions
of people started spending more on food.

So like if I have enough money, I
might buy higher quality food, I might buy

more food, I sort of
buy a lot more chocolate.

So it’s the flexibility the economy
depends on the middle class being strong.

So you actually want to get your poverty
group up into the lower middle class.

So they have money to spend so that
they start spending money because a

small group at the top who has all the
money actually can’t spend fast enough.

That’s the problem. Like that’s the
issue with the economy and having like a

small group of billionaires have all the
money because it means when there’s

like a downturn, there is no middle
class to support the economy anymore.

And you rich can’t spend enough or enough
variation to actually fix it.

So really we shouldn’t have billionaires
because billionaires it’s not that

they don’t want to they can’t
fix the economy. They don’t see a problem

because they’re going to be fine.

But when the world
collapses around them, I guess they move.

Ah fuck, I just want to get my drink.
My shoulder is ridiculous.

It’s probably going to be fine by tomorrow.
I accept I’m old. It’s probably

never going to be fine again.

God, I’m a sold hot water. It tastes great.

Okay.

Anyways, that’s chocolate beef
tests, little Ted talk about the economy.

It’s very socialist sounding but
it’s actually because socialists, republics

and whatnot tend to
do better during economic downturns.

So the government is going to have a
debate going to they’ve actually been

talking about this for a long time.

They’re going to have a proper
debate about the low birth rate in Japan.

My guess is it’s
going to be a bunch of old

Japanese men in a
room talking about work.

And they have some good ideas but okay so
really they’re going to have a good time.

So you have to have
like koshita, the prime minister of Japan.

He has his son stand up and say, okay,
how do we get some d’s and some v’s?

You know what I’m saying?

Everyone else is like,
yeah, yeah, we know what you’re saying.

They start talking about economic support
for houses with children. Money is good.

But that’s after you have the kid.

So support is important because it helps
people with kids support their children.

It might make having children
more attractive to families and whatnot.

But that doesn’t get people
fucking, which is the core issue here.

How do we get more people to fuck
and have a baby and then like have that

baby come out and they take care of it?

And so that’s their issue is
always they actually tend to focus on the

economic aspects of it.

And I’m not saying that’s not important.
That’s actually incredibly important.

They should do as much as possible
to support women especially because it

has to be women who want
to work and have a family.

So like flexible work hours, work
times maybe like half shifts for jobs and

you have two higher two women to do it.

So one in the morning, one
in the afternoon so they can like swap off.

All that kind of thing flex
hours are really important.

But that doesn’t get a d in a v.

So where does the d come from?

And it’s the work, man.

Where do Japanese penises come
from is a phrase I didn’t think I was going

to be saying today.

The d is in the man. It’s not in the man.

If you don’t understand physiology,
you would know it’s not inside the man.

But well, if I had a touch pad
thing, I would draw a human male right now

and explain where the penis is but I don’t.

So you’re not going to get that.

The d is connected to the man and the
work culture in Japan has the man at

work 90% of the time.

And I’ve said fairly regularly
that this work life balance, this work

culture in Japan is the core
issue that they do not want to deal with

because that is what
sustaining the economy or so they think.

The economy in the world has changed.

And I know there’s a lot of
people who go to work, like I know a lot of

Japanese businessmen and they’re
like you can’t leave until the boss leaves.

But that means if you’re done
your work for the day, you just sit there

until the boss leaves.

You’re getting
paid, you’re probably salary.

You’re surfing the Internet,
you’re looking like you’re working.

And then the boss leaves you can leave.

That’s Japanese work culture. 408 00:22:28,000 –> 00:-22:-10,-280 and it’s very
problematic because it means my life is work, my life is not 409 00:-22:-10,-280

–> 00:-22:-4,-200 family and my life is not time with my partner, which is
how you end up with 410 00:-22:-4,-200 –> 00:22:42,000 some ds and some v’s.

So where does the d come from?

It actually comes from being available and energetic. 413 00:22:52,000 –> 00:-21:-46,-570 no time off
means you have no energy. A lot of Japanese businessmen you talk 414 00:-21:-46,-570 –> 00:22:58,000

to, let me go like what do you do on your day off? 415 00:22:58,000 –> 00:-21:-41,-950 basically I
sleep the whole day because I’m so tired from the entire work 416 00:-21:-41,-950 –> 00:23:03,000 week.

So you need energy and that requires sort of recharge time. 418 00:23:08,000 –> 00:-21:-31,-790 you need free time so you can spend time with a
partner and form an actual 419 00:-21:-31,-790 –> 00:23:14,000 connection with them. 420 00:23:14,000 –> 00:-21:-26,-290 so that the v wants

the d in it so that you want to put the d in the v 421 00:-21:-26,-290 –> 00:23:20,000 because you have an actual relationship. 422 00:23:20,000
–> 00:-21:-16,-970 so much so that you actually want to produce a new baby which may have a d 423 00:-21:-16,-970 –> 00:23:28,000 or a v.

I think maybe
I’ve stretched this premise to its limit.

So I believe that it should be wages and time off. 426 00:23:37,000 –> 00:-20:-59,-550 I think the best way to increase the birth rate would be to essentially go 427 00:-20:-59,-550 –> 00:23:46,000 to a four day work
week. 428 00:23:46,000 –> 00:-20:-55,-710 if you want to work these long hours during the day that’s fine but a four 429 00:-20:-55,-710 –> 00:-20:-51,-610 day work week with the same salary, no salary drop, which

means people would 430 00:-20:-51,-610 –> 00:23:57,000 be very happy to take that day off. 431 00:23:57,000 –> 00:-20:-42,-910 and then they’d actually spend some time with their family in a invigorated 432 00:-20:-42,-910
–> 00:24:04,000 state which is very important for the d. 433 00:24:04,000 –> 00:-20:-35,-710 now they might pay attention to their partner which is very important for 434 00:-20:-35,-710 –> 00:24:09,000 the v.

And then you might get more babies. 436 00:24:11,000
–> 00:-20:-27,-350 it’s a long term prospect

though. It’s not something that’s going to happen 437
00:-20:-27,-350 –> 00:24:17,000 quickly or over it.

But they’ve been struggling
with this for years.

The population decline in Japan has been constant.
440 00:24:22,000 –> 00:-20:-16,-790 and it’s in

the news constantly and they keep trying to figure
out what to 441 00:-20:-16,-790 –> 00:24:28,000 do.

And it’s basically they’re just like well give more money to families. 443 00:24:30,000 –> 00:-20:-11,-950 I’m
like but you’re not the problem is you’re not making the family in the 444 00:-20:-11,-950 –> 00:24:33,000 first

place. 445 00:24:33,000 –> 00:-20:-7,-600 if you’re not making the family in the first place giving those families
446 00:-20:-7,-600 –> 00:24:40,000 more money isn’t going to solve the problem of not enough d’s in not enough.

These in not enough v’s.

Last or we have no
creepy guy story this week.

I should maybe make a sad sound for that last one. It’s rare. 450 00:24:55,000 –> 00:-19:-45,-780 I think maybe the ones that happened this week I just did
not find 451 00:-19:-45,-780 –> 00:25:00,000 interesting enough. 452 00:25:00,000 –> 00:-19:-40,-330 but we are talking about covid last or they’re saying

in spring they’re 453 00:-19:-40,-330 –> 00:25:06,000 going to downgrade covid to flu status. 454 00:25:06,000 –> 00:-19:-34,-310 so right now it’s a class
two virus or sickness and it’s going to be brought 455 00:-19:-34,-310 –> 00:25:15,000 down to class five because the death rate has dropped significantly.

Which means you’re not going to have to wear masks indoors. 457 00:25:19,000 –> 00:-19:-22,-730 you already
don’t have to wear masks outdoors. So essentially you don’t have 458 00:-19:-22,-730 –> 00:25:22,000

to wear masks. 459 00:25:22,000 –> 00:-19:-18,-960 and I was talking to some of my coworkers and
stuff and I was like well are 460 00:-19:-18,-960 –> 00:25:27,000 you going to stop and I was like.

Personally I’m going to wear a mask on the train for sure. 462 00:25:30,000
–> 00:-19:-9,-470 just probably in perpetuity probably from most

of the time from now on all 463 00:-19:-9,-470 –> 00:25:40,000 wear
mask on the train unless covid just becomes a non entity after a while.

Because viruses do often tend to die out. They tend to just sort of stop. 465 00:25:47,000 –> 00:-18:-53,-170 probably if I was like downtown or something I might wear a mask when i’m 466 00:-18:-53,-170 –> 00:25:54,000 walking around in our office it’ll be on and off. 467 00:25:54,000 –> 00:-18:-46,-550 I’ll keep one with me. We do have a lot of coworkers who cough
a lot and i’m 468 00:-18:-46,-550 –> 00:26:00,000 not confident that they’re not sick. 469 00:26:00,000 –> 00:-18:-40,-780 so I would probably wear it then I’m going to wear a mask during allergy 470 00:-18:-40,-780 –> 00:26:05,000 season probably all day. 471 00:26:05,000 –> 00:-18:-36,-330 it’s just good. I’ve actually gotten to the point where now it’s good

that 472 00:-18:-36,-330 –> 00:-18:-33,-710 if we don’t have to wear a mask and I choose to wear a mask it’s not going 473 00:-18:-33,-710 –> 00:26:12,000 to like be a thing. 474 00:26:12,000 –> 00:-18:-27,-300 I think before if I wore a mask before the pandemic because it was common in 475 00:-18:-27,-300 –> 00:-18:-24,-800 Japan it’s common in Asia to wear a
mask during allergy season or when you 476 00:-18:-24,-800 –> 00:26:20,000 have a cold. 477 00:26:20,000 –> 00:-18:-21,-560 but it would have been like what’s wrong with you what’s going on to just 478 00:-18:-21,-560 –> 00:-18:-17,-300 now it’s just going to be like he’s got allergies or someone around him 479 00:-18:-17,-300 –> 00:26:28,000 maybe coughed once.

So he’s wearing a mask to be safe. 481 00:26:30,000 –> 00:-18:-9,-970 so I actually like that because it’s become now more of a choice without any 482 00:-18:-9,-970 –> 00:-18:-6,-810 stigma attached to it at all and I don’t have to explain it because I hate 483 00:-18:-6,-810 –> 00:26:40,000 explaining why I’m wearing
stuff. 484 00:26:40,000 –> 00:-17:-59,-350 I hate explaining my choices because they’re my choices just leave me alone. 485 00:-17:-59,-350 –> 00:26:47,000 that’s actually my feeling about a lot of stuff. 486 00:26:47,000 –> 00:-17:-53,-750 the problem is when you actually look at the facts we’re sort of in our 487

00:-17:-53,-750 –> 00:-17:-49,-330 eighth wave in Japan it’s it’s really up and down the numbers are really 488 00:-17:-49,-330 –> 00:26:56,000 really up and down every day. 489 00:26:56,000 –> 00:-17:-43,-450 but we are having a record number of daily deaths and that’s maybe from 490 00:-17:-43,-450 –> 00:27:03,000
actually the last wave seven. 491 00:27:03,000 –> 00:-17:-38,-620 it’s people have had covid for a long time and their bodies just giving out 492 00:-17:-38,-620 –> 00:27:07,000 might be a lot of older people. 493 00:27:07,000 –> 00:-17:-33,000 they didn’t get into the demographics or statistics but technically speaking

we are now in a record
number of deaths for covid.

What a horrible way to end a podcast.

Optimistically so I want to end on a positive note if I can. 497
00:27:24,000 –> 00:-17:-15,-440 if we don’t have to wear a mask I

plan to grow a beard again which some 498 00:-17:-15,-440 –>
00:27:33,000 members of the community have said my beard is amazing.

Some don’t like it. 500 00:27:34,000 –> 00:-17:-6,-350 the people I what I found is it’s
very divisive. People who like the beard 501 00:-17:-6,-350 –> 00:27:40,000 absolutely

adore the beard. 502 00:27:40,000 –> 00:-16:-59,-590 the thing is the best thing ever. People
who don’t like the beard absolutely 503 00:-16:-59,-590 –> 00:27:45,000 hate the beard.

But that strong positive reaction is enough for me to want to grow. 505 00:27:50,000 –> 00:-16:-50,-920 I usually before I would grow a beard every winter
and then shave it off and 506 00:-16:-50,-920 –> 00:27:55,000 then growing you another beard. 507 00:27:55,000 –> 00:-16:-45,-600 it’s been a couple of

years because the mask when I found I was wearing the 508 00:-16:-45,-600 –> 00:28:01,000 mask the beard didn’t work out so well. 509 00:28:01,000 –>
00:-16:-33,-160 so yeah the positive aspect of covid being downgraded is that your friend, 510 00:-16:-33,-160 –> 00:28:15,000 Chuck mcviv-test, may grow a beard.

[Music].

Cover your Orifii

(Electronic music)

Now let’s talk about the economy.

Woo!

If you’re here for the news, you know
you like to talk about the economy.

I’m gonna take it down a notch after that.

I was gonna start with a
song, but then it sounded racist.

Because I was gonna do a reggae style song

like a certain unmentionable
man had done in the past.

But I guess it was probably racist
when he did it, so me copying him

would make me racist,
so I’m not gonna do that.

We’re just gonna talk about the economy.

Prices in Japan are up
4% compared to last year.

And I have noticed that.

I actually have noticed
I’m spending more money

on just like the things I
used to buy used to buy.

Every Tuesday, so today is
Tuesday, I wanna record this.

I’m at home, kids are at
school, boy there’s a work.

I make dinner, so I would
go and buy stuff for dinner.

I’ve noticed that it is more expensive
just to buy basic items for dinner,

which has made me more conservative.

And that’s not a unique
thing to have happen.

Household spending
overall in Japan is down 1.2%.

If everything’s 4% more expensive, but that
means people are buying 1.2% less stuff.

This is problematic.

Because private spending
is nearly half of Japan’s gdp.

So basically Japan’s economy, if
Japanese people aren’t spending money,

then the gdp inherently goes down.

So this increase in
inflation is a bigger

problem than just things
are more expensive.

It means people are spending less money.

If people are spending less money,
the gdp of the country is decreasing.

Now this is led to government calls.

I believe we’ve actually
talked about this before.

Government calls for increases in salaries.

I thought this might
be like an endless cycle.

Inflation goes up, salaries go up,
but then that doesn’t mean anything.

It almost cancels each other out.

And then you can just do that infinitely,

but then you get into a
situation where like 1,000 yen,

which is sort of again, the really
quick equivalent would be $10.

You gotta use 10,000 yen equivalent to $10.

Inflation goes up, prices
go up, salaries go up.

It means nothing.

So part of my brain goes, why
don’t you just not do the inflation?

And then you don’t have
to give the salary increases.

Because if we do a pricing,

inflation of 4% and then a salary increase
of 4%, let’s say, it’s equivalency.

Just don’t do that in the first place.

I know economics is not that simple,
but economists often make it seem like

infinite growth is possible when it isn’t.

This is a problem with
the video game industry

and they think that
they basically are saying,

everything has to be more
successful than the previous thing

to count as successful, the problem being,
there’s only actually a finite of people

who play video games.

So you can only extract
so much money from them.

Therefore, there is not an infinite
well of money you can pool from.

So you have to actually start looking
at as what’s our upper limit, not infinite.

Anyways, they’re
calling companies are

being called to look
at their pay structures

as social responsibility.

Because if the workers don’t have
money, they’re not gonna spend money

’cause they need to save.

If they need to save, then the gdp
of Japan as a country goes down.

That’s the infinite loop
that we’re in right now.

This is being called new
capitalism by some corners, growth,

and it’s a growth and
redistribution policy.

Companies should monitor prices
and improve momentum of wage raises

so that people can continue spending.

The problem is this
isn’t how companies work.

Companies don’t tend to
work on social responsibility

or worry about the gdp,
they worry about themselves.

Companies in a capitalist
society are inherently selfish.

So if the government wants this
to happen, they have to force it,

but if they force it, they’re gonna
be overstepping their balance.

That is sort of the core
issues we’re dealing with

with this problem of
inflation versus wages.

Uniglo.

It’s actually a weirdly positive company.

So they come up as an example a lot.

Uniglo is looking to raise their
annual salaries by up to 40%.

Now that up to is very
important as a lot of heavy lifting.

Whenever something says up to, what
you actually have to read is less than,

I once had a juice that
had up to, it was like a drink,

and it had up to 10% real fruit
juice, but up to 10% could mean zero.

So when I looked at it, I was immediately
like, there may be no actual juice in this

because that is up to 10%.

It was a very interesting
way of wording it.

So that may be concerned.

So university grads, if
you get a job at uni-glow,

right now your base salary will be 255,000
yet, which is pretty close to average.

They’re gonna raise that to 300,000.

That is 16%.

So that’s probably most of their workers.

University graduates
get maybe a little bump,

but you can see what they’re doing is like,
okay, we’re gonna give the average worker

15 to 20% raise.

Store managers currently making
290,000 yen, they’re gonna get 390,000 yen.

That is 100,000 yen increase.

That is significant.

So uni-glow has taken on this sort of,

I don’t think they did it
because of the government,

but they realize like if we
want our workers to flourish,

they have to have money to flourish with.

There is an interesting, it
was spun very positively.

Ntt, the biggest mobile
communications network in Japan.

I said they’re going to move
from a seniority-based system.

So Japan is still very
much like the longer you stay

at a company, the more money
you make at that company,

even if you’re not very good at your job.

But that’s irrelevant because
if I’ve been here for 50 years,

maybe I’ve like absorbed
knowledge in it, something like that.

I don’t know.

They’re gonna change
to a merit-based system,

and I was like, “oh,
that sounds really good.”

And I thought about it more.

What does that actually mean?

Because what’s happening right now is
companies have this base salary system,

depending on how you’re working.

And if it’s going to be impacted by
inflation, so if inflation goes up 4%,

and the company I work for has to
raise my wages by 4% to match inflation,

that’s just less to say,
that’s the new standard.

And that’s not actually
what’s gonna happen.

My company’s not giving me a raise forever.

But let’s say that is what happens.

That’s going to affect your raises
and what not, based on inflation.

You don’t wanna have to react to inflation.

So if you make your raises and
payment system merit-based,

you can ignore the greater economy.

You can say, look, you’re getting paid
this much because of your performance.

If you’re a high performer,
yeah, you do deserve money.

That’s great.

But the average worker
probably will get nothing

because we don’t wanna reward averageness.

So I think, they’re framing
this as a very positive thing.

We’re doing away with the old system.

We’re going to a merit-based system
and everybody loves merit-based systems.

And then I was like, I think
this might be a way of them

to say, we aren’t going
to react to inflation.

We’re going to just
change our pay structures

so that we can
do it all internally

and then turn around and say,
no one has performed well enough

because of inflation, all
our profits have been down.

So that means no one’s
performed well enough.

Therefore, nobody gets a pay raise.

And that seems like the very sad state
of the economy in Japan at the moment.

(Phone ringing)

So you think that’s fun?

Now we’re gonna do international politics.

I gotta come up with
little theme songs now.

I realize that.

I need an economy song.

It gone me, the economy.

And then I need an
international no politics.

I seem to have a very scaw-based
sound for my theme intro, jingles.

I gotta take a little drink of
hot water before I move on.

Mm.

If you’re watching live, this is the
content that gets cut out everywhere else.

This is the stuff on twitch
that you come here for.

It’s the real raw look at
what a podcast construction is.

Mm.

Hot water.

Go smooth down the throat.

Get those sweet sounds out.

I think in about five minutes that
sun’s gonna come through my window.

So I’m gonna take care of that early.

This is the pump-a-do
section of the

podcast where you
get a look in behind like,

how does this magically come?

What does he do to block out the like?

He takes a work shirt and
he hangs it over the window

’cause the window above
my computer has no curtains.

So gotta make sure there’s a
sleeve, not in front of the camera.

All right, so we’re back.

We’re talking about international politics.

The work shirt as blinds, okay, I,
Jade, you’re one of my favorite people,

but you have to, okay, so you can see
in the back there’s blinds on the window.

I’m gonna give you a
little tour of my room.

Before I go on to the sorry,
since I’m like halfway out.

There’s blinds, there’s a big window there.

It’s really nice has curtains.

Little tiny window right
above the computer, nothing.

So what am I supposed to do?

And then the sun around
10 o’clock is 10 o’clock,

comes over that and then just
look at how bleached my face is.

So if I move over here, oh, this is sweet.

Look at that.

Like the camera can’t adjust for
this much washed out whiteness.

I am so white.

This is it.

This isn’t what nightmares are made of.

You can see the uv cut in my glasses.

The blue light cut is the yellow.

And then you can see how
much I need to fix my teeth.

(Laughs)

Uh, I am.

Sorry.

I am of the, oh, no, no, no, no.

I, not, white does not
even describe what I am.

I am the archetype of where
white people came from.

The gene pool, if the gene
pool was like one of those,

you know, on computers when they have like,
like, like, programs for like Photoshop

and they have that thing
is it’s white in this corner

and then like probably like a red in this
corner and then down here would be gray.

Here’s like, I’m up there.

I’m up in the corner that is just white.

I’m almost translucent.

I think you could make a lighthouse
by reflecting light off my face.

Okay, but I’m gonna go back to the podcast.

Ugh, that’s hot in my room.

It’s, we’re in this weird,
it’s like it’s cold outside.

But if I turn on the
heater, it’s too hot inside.

I’m pure as the dripper.

Snow is not pure.

Let’s be really clear about that.

White is the driven snow.

Yes, pure, not a word I would use.

Okay, international politics.

That’s the edit point.

For continuity, I shouldn’t have a sweater

that suddenly appear
’cause all this will get cut out.

I actually know on
YouTube I’ll leave this in.

It’s the audio part that’ll be cut out.

Then no one’s gonna see anything so.

International politics.

I have been framing international politics
throughout the entirety of this podcast

as high school drama, which
has been pretty descriptive.

And it’s because we’re dealing with
boisterous nations like north Korea.

Now this one isn’t north Korea as
China, but China does take a stance.

It seems like communist parties and these
sort of dictatorship-oriented countries

really feel free about
condemning other countries

about stuff they clearly do themselves.

China has gone through a big wave of covid.

In Japan, they just finished
their seventh or eighth wave.

I stopped counting.

It’s not really waves anymore.

It seems very random.

When I check the Tokyo
numbers, it is like 500,000, five.

Like they’ll do, they’ll like
fluctuate that much in a day.

So Japan said, look, China’s going
through a really big covid wave.

We’re going to have people who
want to go from China to Japan.

The covid test, have a negative
covid test before you leave.

Probably, when I went
to Canada and came back,

it had to be two days before I returned.

I needed a negative covid test.

China said that this is a discriminatory,

China said until discriminatory entry
restrictions against China are lifted,

China will stop giving
visa to Japanese

travelers, which is a
bit of an overreaction

because Japan’s not saying you
can’t come from China to Japan.

Japan’s saying, if you come,
you need to take a covid test,

which to me seems very
reasonable because I had to do it.

I came from Canada, which you would
consider a very friendly country to Japan.

Now, it was more short.

I guess it was, it wasn’t peak pandemic.

It was this summer, last summer break.

But I didn’t feel like that
was an unreasonable request.

I didn’t enjoy it.

I didn’t want to do it.

I didn’t want to spend the
$250, which turned into $500.

I had to do one for me and my daughter.

But I was like, yeah, you
don’t want to bring covid.

The whole problem is people traveled around

and that’s how covid got
around in the first place.

So my new Zealand did a fairly good job
because they were locking down the border,

so I didn’t want to end.

I said to do that at the
beginning, but Japan didn’t listen.

The government of Japan
doesn’t listen to this podcast

and that, I think, might be
one of the bigger problems

we have because I have solutions.

So the Japanese foreign minister,
he’s opposed to the Chinese restrictions.

The problem is the China, you being unhappy

with another country’s
decision is irrelevant,

but they always get, this is a
phrase that comes up all the time

and I’ve realized it’s just like a
standard phrase, extremely regrettable.

The Japanese foreign minister
finds the decision of China

to remove the possibility of visas

for Chinese people going to
China as extremely regrettable

and it seems like the harshest
language diplomats can take.

So really this is just a Chinese Japanese
foreign minister going like, fuck you guys.

And then north Korea uses
extremely regrettable for everything.

And the second thought is
they should actually lower the,

so extremely regrettable is
their strong version of language.

They should pull it back and I’m a
father and I’ve realized that’s a father.

So if I get really
rambunctious or voiceiferous

or I make a lot
of noise and stuff,

the kids don’t take me seriously.

But if I get quiet and sorry,
I go, not happy about that.

That has a big impact
and there was a story I read

and it was about world war ii and
they dropped f-bombs constantly.

So it was like, get your fucking gun,

get your fucking kit, get
your fuck fuck fuck fuck.

So fuck was a normal
part of an everyday order.

But when someone came to
the room and said, get your gun,

that had impact because dropping the f-bom

out of the sentence
meant that this was serious.

So on a normal day, a
normal order, you’d say fuck.

But then when it got
serious, you dropped it.

So I was like, oh, what
depends, what they need to do.

It’s actually drop back the lame.

So it’s not extremely
regrettable, you go, that’s too bad.

And sound disappointed, but then
they’ll be like, oh, what does that mean?

I think that actually
might have some impact.

It’d be interesting to see what happens.

(Phone ringing)

Still on international politics.

The ex president of Russia, the
Japan, the prime minister, kishita,

he said, I’m gonna go to america, we’re
gonna have a little meeting with biden.

You gotta, you know, work shit out.

‘Cause we’re gonna solve problems.

And they said, man, if Russia
nukes Ukraine, that’s bad.

Okay, that is the depth of
this statement they made.

If Russia nukes Japan, that’s bad.

That’s, I mean, I think they
said it in a more political way.

But the ex president of Russia, of Russia,

was like, this statement
is completely unacceptable.

You can’t tell US what to do.

You can’t tell US not to use your weapons.

You’re having a meeting with a country that
has just suspended nuclear weapons as US.

What do you get in all of
the up in our faces about?

So the Russian ex president says, the
Japanese prime minister should commit

a ritual suicide at the next
cabinet meeting in Japan.

That’s the only way he
could wash away the shame

of the statement,
the statement being,

please don’t use nuclear
weapons in Ukraine.

I was like, this is what I’m saying.

Like the level, is it hyperbole?

The level of theater these
guys use in their language.

Gets to the point where it’s nonsensical?

Like, nukes are bad.

You should kill yourself for that.

Apparently that’s what, but then,

so the Japanese do supposed
to commit ritual suicide, sipaku.

But you need to say
anything about the biden?

So the president, he’s like,
well, I guess they don’t have that,

I guess you have that in your
culture, so it’s a fair thing to say.

Like, so here’s a question
that I would love to have

someone ask him, do you
think he’s really gonna do it?

I mean, they don’t do that anymore.

It’s not a thing anymore, but
did you think he was gonna be like,

oh man, the ex-president
Roger said, I should go kill myself.

All right, at the next cabinet meeting,

I guess I’m gonna go kill myself
in the next cabinet meeting.

And then if you did it,
like, would you be like,

yeah, Japan’s washed away their shame.

I don’t know what this was supposed to do.

It just didn’t, it’s again, it’s, it
doesn’t make any sense to me.

That’s, I think that’s where
we are, international politics.

When we get to this level,
there’s so much theater involved.

I don’t actually know what
people are saying anymore.

I don’t know what people mean anymore.

That might be why I actually said it,

or recently, like, they
should bring it down a notch

so that it can actually
start to make sense again.

(Phone ringing)

We have talked about the
emergency services video function

that was added to
Japan’s emergency services,

services recently, it was
in October and November.

In October and November,
they read 622 calls,

and they weren’t calls,
they were video calls.

And the reason really for
doing this is young people,

generally, that’s how, if they’re going
to make a call, they make a video call.

So that’s how, what they know how to do.

So they’re like, we have to adapt.

And this is an interesting thing,

’cause you have two very
big sort of stradas in Japan.

You have old people who don’t
know how to use any technology.

And you have young people who kind
of only know how to use technology.

There was an interesting story.

It was in america, and
it was a guy got arrested,

and he didn’t know how to use a phone book,
’cause he’d only ever use the Internet.

So it became a legal right
that they had to have access.

So he’s like, you can
make your one phone call.

Here’s a phone book.

He’s like, I don’t know
how to use, what is this?

I’ve never seen this thing before.

This giant book you’ve
just put in front of me.

So the police were like, okay, well,
we have to let them access the Internet

to be able to contact someone.

So that’s when a phone
call became a broader thing.

It was like, you have to
be able to contact someone

so you can send an email or something.

I don’t know exactly
what the specifics were,

but they did broaden the scope
of what your one phone call

actually entailed and how
you can access the phone,

because they found
that it’s not really fair

if young people don’t know how to use a
phone book that you give them a phone book.

So this was about like since young people

know how to make video calls and
they want you helpful, let’s give it a try.

So they got 622 calls, which is awesome,

but they actually caught
some fleeing suspects

because while they were
on the emergency call,

the guy was like, well, pointed at
the car so I can see their license plate

and they got like a
screenshot of the license plate.

So they were able to catch
some people who did hit and runs.

The one I found most interesting, they
had a hiker who got stranded on a mountain

and they used the video
call to help identify the area

so the people could find them more quickly.

So it was really good, first of all,

that they had cell service,
that was the important part.

But the fact that they had cell service,
they were like, okay, take your camera,

I’m like, look around and then, oh,
someone’s gonna recognize that mountain

so you’re looking at
that mountain, so you’re

this way and then,
oh, look over there,

they could kind of
triangulate where they

were because they
could see the surroundings

and they helped save someone’s
life, which I thought was really nice.

But this did lead US to a couple
of other stats which are interesting.

There were 1.63 million calls to
the non-emergency number in Japan.

It was mostly drunk people asking for taxis

or people complaining
about traffic tickets.

1.6 million.

So I would not want to be the
person on the other end of that phone.

Let’s just make that statement out there.

When I’m looking for my job career change,

it’s not going to be the person
on the non-emergency line.

(Phone ringing)

Japan’s a very gun-safe country and I like
to illustrate that by the kind of stories

that make the news in Japan.

So a 56 year old cop accidentally,
okay, let’s actually just do the story.

Somebody has been bugging me,
his new story is lead with the bit

so you don’t have to read the article or
as I actually want to go through the steps

and then get to the bit.

So 56 year old cop is at the
Tokyo airport police station

and they’re, oh, it’s time to
take the bulls out of my gun.

So they go to take it out of
the hole so it holds your stiff.

So they yank it out really hard.

It bangs the table and goes off.

Now I was a little confused by that.

My understanding is that
guns are inherently designed.

So in the movies you drop a
gun and it goes off and kills a guy.

That actually happens quite a lot.

My understanding is that
in real life guns are designed

to not, if you bang though, just go off.

So I was thinking, was the gun cocked
and the table hit the hammer of the gun

and then it went off?

Or did the person pulling the gun from the
holster have their finger on the trigger

and then when he hit the
table pulled the trigger?

They didn’t explain any of that.

Well, the explanation
was the holster was stiff.

So I, when I pulled the gun out,
pulled it full force and hit the table.

But that makes me
think they had their finger

on the trigger as they
pulled out their gun.

So no one was hurt, nothing happened.

That’s it.

So like in other countries,
you’d be talking about

like a shooting in the airport,
how many people died in Japan.

Basically nothing happened.

And because a gun was
discharged, it became a news story.

And that is, honestly, one of
the reasons why I think gun control

works because that’s
the news story of the day.

[Music playing]

Ok, we’re getting to
local sort of smaller news.

But shogi players– now you would imagine
shogi’s a kind of chess, Asian chess.

I don’t know if it’s just Japanese.

I think it is, but I
don’t want to say that.

I don’t want to actually make a mistake.

Shogi players, chess players–
if you think about the chess

player personality, you would
think of a relatively pedantic person.

I think that is a fair thing to say.

Shogi players are no different.

They are very pedantic.

So this was a high level tournament.

They had like 6, 10, 7, 10.

I didn’t know what any of that meant.

But it’s the high level.

And then one guy goes, look, that
dude’s not wearing his mask properly.

He’s actually got a mask on, but
it’s covering his mouth, not his nose.

Now, anyone who’s wearing a mask properly
knows that it has to cover all the orify.

I do like pluralizing with the
eye more than anything else.

It has to cover all the
orifices on your face,

as in your mouth, and both your nostrils.

Not your ears or your nose or your eyes.

So he said, like, dude, please put
your mask on properly, cover your nose.

The guy ignored him.

So he did set it a couple more times.

The guy ignored him.

He calls a ref.

He’s like, ref.

Dude’s not wearing his mask properly.

And then the ref says,
dude, you got to wear a mask.

He says, I’m wearing a mask.

There is no rule that
bands exposing your nose.

So the rule is you have to
wear a mask, which would literally

mean interpretation wise.

I could put a mask on the
top of my head, cover nothing

on my face, and that
would follow the rules.

So again, these guys are being pedantic.

The ref being a little more
spirit of the rule rather than

letter of the law,
said, you’re disqualified.

Now, the guy left the venue
and he said, I understand.

I will follow a lawsuit.

If your behavior gets you
to a point where you feel you

need to sue people
for doing things like this,

there may be a moment in your life
where you have to stop and say, am I right?

So the actual– I did
look up the law, the rule.

And the rule is players must wear masks
during matches, except for brief moments.

And what they mean is, I’m wearing a mask.

We’ve been here for
two hours playing chess.

I can take off my mask and take a
drink, and then I put my mask back on.

So that’s the brief exception
where you do not wear a mask.

But this guy decided he
doesn’t want to wear a mask.

This is actually the second time.

It seems like showy
players are not anti-maskers,

but they– I guess they want
to have sort of their nose open

so they can breathe so
they can get more oxygen

or their brain so they
can be more effective.

Drink through the mask.

You could filter out all the bad stuff.

You put the mask on and
just open your mouth inside.

You’ll get some.

But it was just one of those
things that’s just ridiculous.

So I enjoyed that story, because I
just enjoyed the idea of showy players

being super pedantic about everything.

Traditionally, the last story in
ninja ninja Japan is creepy guy time.

It’s not even creepy
gender-neutral person time.

It’s a creepy guy time.

It’s always a dude.

I have put a kibosh on panty theft stories,

and a couple other things like
that that just show up too often,

only because they’ve become too repetitive.

But this creepy dudes– they always find
a new and interesting way to gross me out.

So I’m glad I can look at
that for the rest of my life

and know that I will never be surprised
by how creepy and gross guys can be.

Jr is Japan rail.

So it’s a train station staff.

And he was asked to guide
a visually impaired woman

to the platform, maybe back to the exit.

So just be a good person and help out
someone who struggles every now and then.

The woman then accused
him of sexual harassment.

What?

How is the even possible men
have never sexually harassed anyone

in the entirety of human history?

He claims that because he
had helped her several times

that they were just being friendly.

Now, I don’t want to judge, although
you know clearly I already have.

I don’t want to judge that
the man is overestimating

what is appropriate in
a friendly relationship.

I deal with people all the time.

And yes, I deal with people multiple times.

I sometimes make a racy joke, perhaps.

I don’t actually, because I get in trouble.

So I was like, ok, we got
to find out what he said.

What did he say?

Did he cross the line?

So was he being friendly?

Or was he sexually harassing?

So the first thing he said is, what
time are you coming home today?

Now that, I was like, oh, it
could be interpreted both way.

Like, oh, I’ll be around
when you come home.

So I will help you again.

Very nice thing to say.

Or it could be I’m a stalker and
I’m trying to find out your schedule.

Ok, he accidentally
didn’t say just that though.

He said, let’s go to a
new ramen restaurant.

That’s not ok.

So I think we’ve already crossed the line.

Like, he’s asking her to go with him.

Now, if you want to be generous, we don’t
have to be, because he ruins it later.

If you want to be generous, you could
say he is just recommending a restaurant.

And as a friend, he’s
saying, because they’ve

become very friendly,
let’s go to a ramen together.

I think we both all know that
that’s not what’s happening.

But I’m trying to give him
the benefit of the doubt

just so that his last line kills it harder.

She says, I’d like to go to the elevator.

And he said, oh, if we take the
stairs, I can give you a piggyback.

Piggybacks in Japan.

Now, you might be thinking
that that is weird thing to say.

You could interpret
that as kind of innocent.

Maybe a weird joke.

In Japan, piggybacks are sexual.

In anime and stuff, what you see
are usually girls who love a guy.

And then the guy– they
hurt their foot or something.

There is some mechanic in which they
have to– they have struggled to walk.

And the guy gives him a piggyback.

And then she’s laying sort of her head
on the back of his head or on his shoulder.

And it’s the closeness.

And in Japan, that is not sexual, but
it’s a precursor to a sexual relationship,

if I could put it that way.

I think the thing in itself is not sexual,

but it shows where
this relationship is going.

So there is a sexual undertone to it.

There’s a lot of things like that.

On in Japan, several times I’ve
explained the long distance kiss.

And it’s the idea that I
have my cup of hot water

to keep my voice smooth and romantic.

I take a drink.

And my lips have touched it.

And then I share the
drink with someone else.

And their lips touch the same thing.

So in a very metaphysical way, our
lips have touched in a long distance.

They call that the long distance kiss.

So you can see we’re not kissing,

but there is a sexual
undertone to these other things.

So not the indirect kiss.

That may be the case.

I heard it.

So the way it was explained
to me was long distance.

I just really like that term as well.

So indirect kiss– it means the same thing.

It means you’re not actually kissing,
but your lips are touching the same thing.

So I think we’re on the same page.

But at long distance, I
think I really enjoyed that.

So he said, like I’ll give you a piggyback.

Weird.

Again, has an already crossed a line.

But then the last line, he said,
was, isn’t your chest heavy?

I can carry it for you.

So as generous as we might want to
be, like let’s say we’re in a court of law.

And the guy says, oh, I
was just being friendly.

You could try to interpret
those first two examples

as just friendly and
maybe get away with it.

But isn’t your chest heavy?

I can carry it for you.

I think is not something that
friends would say to each other,

even if it wasn’t an on-set.

Like I’m sorry, I just did.

Again, like I said, he has
sabotaged his own defense.

If his defense was, I
was just being friendly.

His statements would have
had to remain relatively neutral.

And perhaps that’s why the
guy is gross and hitting on people

is because he doesn’t
know how to hit on people.

He doesn’t know how to formulate
that relationship in the first place.

Jadus put in, look,
he’s just being a homie.

Big boobs are heavy.

Back pain is real.

I actually do have some friends who’ve
told me that, yes, the back pain is real.

And yet, I never offered to
carry their boobs for them.

So I think with that beautiful sonata
playing around in the back of your head,

we’re going to end
today’s ninja ninja Japan.

[Music playing]

[Music playing].

Aggressive Self Defense

(Electronic music)

We have some education updates.

Yay.

The government has asked boards of
education to make revisions to their rules.

Now they have a thing in Japan
called black rules and black companies.

Black companies, basically a black company,
this is where it sort of originated,

the terminology it came from, is a
company that you know abuses its staff

and tries to cheat you out of money.

And it does all the bad things.

It’s a bad company.

So they’ve employed that
terminology for other things

and so they have the black rules.

Now we’ve done several stories.

There was the rule that
some high schools had

that part of the
uniforms that you had to

wear, white underwear,
which brought up the,

basically human rights issue or
privacy issue of, how do you check?

There was a school a little while ago who
basically got sued because when this girl

was in high school, the school said, you’re
not allowed to date, she started dating,

and instead of sort of dealing with
that, the court said like you have a right

as a board of education
to say kids can’t date,

but instead of sort of dealing with it, you
forced the kid to stop coming to school,

that sort of beyond
your educational purview.

Then there was the girl
with naturally brown hair

and the school rule is that
you have to have black hair

so it made her dye her hair black

and it actually did damage
to her hair and her scalp.

She sued the school board.

The government has said, please review your
school rules so you’re not being dicks.

Now they phrased it slightly differently,
but that is basically what they’re saying.

Please review your school rules.

84% of education boards are
reviewing the rules on white underwear.

The government asks boards
to make revisions themselves,

but that means the government
isn’t making them make revisions

and they’re not putting up national
standards of what appropriate rules are,

which leaves a percentage
of schools that are not.

So that’s actually, so
84% are specifically looking

at the white underwear
rule, how it’s been enforced,

hasn’t been enforced, maybe
we should just get rid of that rule.

I actually suggested when
I first talked about this,

very simple change to the
rule would be, don’t check.

So basically you make
the rule if I as a teacher

can see your underwear somehow
through your uniform, it’s inappropriate.

So therefore if I can’t
see it, it’s not a problem,

which is actually how underwear works.

And that solves the problem because
basically I can say as a teacher,

look, I could see the students underwear,
maybe I could see it through the uniform

or I could see like bits were sticking
up or something, I could see it, it’s bad.

But if I can’t see it, I
don’t know what color it is,

I assume therefore it’s
a hearing to all the rules.

That still leaves a percentage
of schools that are not,

because the government has
not made this anyway enforceable,

it’s just a recommendation.

This has meant there are
certain percentage of schools

that are not going to
check or revise the rules,

which means in a weird way,
good for an English-nus Japan,

’cause year from now we’re
gonna get another story

about some kids sitting at school for
something that is honestly quite stupid.

But that’s just what keeps me going.

That’s terrible, I don’t wanna, I
actually, in a weird way, like news.

So this is all, it’s not news parody show,
but it’s like I do light news for fun.

It would be really nice if I
could struggle to find the news,

and then I would have to shut down the show

because the world is
so perfect, but of course,

as never gonna happen, people
are always gonna be weird.

(Upbeat music)

Speaking of weird, you
might remember the guy,

he was a teacher, this is
sort of education related

which why stuck these two together.

It’s also an update.

You might remember the
guy who was a teacher,

he went into a convenience
store, he had a bought a condom.

I don’t know why it’s weird
buying them individuals weird.

He said to the staff, I
would certainly enjoy

a touch of masturbation
right now, sort of in the mood.

Can I use your toilet?

Staff said no, apparently this
wasn’t the first time he did it.

But what is the fallout from that?

So he was basically
booted out of the

store, they called the
police and were like,

you can’t come in here
and ask to masturbate,

there’s something
wrong about that.

He was fired.

So there was nothing
really to arrest him for

because all he did was make a
request and that request was refused.

So he therefore had to leave.

But this attitude, this pervasive attitude,
this sort of way of living your life,

didn’t mesh with the
education board in Japan

and the school board found
out because it was national news.

Guy lost his job.

I mean, yes, I think it’s okay.

I don’t think this is the kind of person
who should be working with kids anyways.

Although at the same time, I don’t want,

god, should I be, should I
be like defending this guy?

No, absolutely not.

He wasn’t abusive.

He just asked a question and
then was told no and that was it.

You could argue that that’s not so bad.

Asking and then having someone refuse and
then you actually accepting the refusal,

in a weird way is how
it’s supposed to work.

But I feel dirty saying that.

Like I actually feel dirty saying that,

’cause it’s not, in this case,
I guess it’s not okay to ask.

That’s the problem.

The asking is the problem.

‘Cause I think maybe the
asking has an implication within it

and then you also as the staff member
know what’s going on in the bathroom.

So maybe that’s it.

It took me a moment to get there, sorry.

Yes, okay, I think the problem isn’t

that he asked and was refused
and then it sort of behaved

appropriately by leaving and not doing it.

The problem is the asking in itself
has an inherent implication, which is not.

It’s don’t do that.

Okay, yeah, I think we’re
on the same page now.

I don’t know why it took
me that long to get there.

I think it was hard for me to.

To lose a date to express
coherently why this was wrong.

But it’s because it’s not just asking.

It’s asking and putting an imposition on
another person and that’s why it was fired.

(Phone ringing)

So Japan has come up with its
new sort of self-defense thing.

It talks about that last time.

Sorry, everything on my desk has changed.

I’m moving everything around.

So I’m trying to find a
place to put my notes

so they’re still in front of me
without hitting the microphone

’cause that’s been a problem lately.

We had the conversation a little while ago,

Japan is talking about
increasing self-defense

and this is basically
we wanna have missiles

that can shoot other
stuff out of the sky

if it comes into Japanese airspace.

But then if someone shoots a missile,
someone shoots a missile towards Japan,

we should be able to not
only shoot up down that missile

but also the place it came from,
that still counts as self-defense.

And a lot of people are like, whoa,
that is very aggressive self-defense

you have going on there.

And we all know exactly
who we’re talking about.

The way they wanna pay
for this is through corporation,

taxation and taxes on cigarettes.

It’s going to double military spending.

Apple Japan was just hit
with 14 billion yen in back taxes

which is essentially
now 100% military funding.

I wouldn’t do it if anyone
was ’cause I edit all this, okay?

So all this like dumb shit i’m
doing right now, I get to edit it out.

And I’m wondering if people
like who watch the YouTube

which is still only like four people.

People watch the YouTube if they’re like,

the editing must be insane
’cause it’s me sitting talking

and then just big cuts and
then me sitting with a dog

on my lap, oh he’s very warm though.

It’s quite nice.

You’re gonna try to
keep him here for a bit.

It means I have to look down at my
desk so I can’t hold my notes anymore.

No dude, just stay still.

Okay, where are we?

That 14 billion yen in back taxes,
I gotta set this up somewhere.

This is the next step is
to put my notes somewhere

like where they’re standing
up so I can just look at them.

Newsreaders put it like
it’s sitting under the camera

so when they read does that,
mm-hmm, mm-hmm, like that.

That’s actually what I need to do.

I was looking at teleprompter
programs like just go to the studio note

but then I just think put it in a
point form and just do it that way.

I still might try that.

But I read all my notes.

That’s all just written out by hands.

(Sighs)

I kinda wanna start again but
we’ve already done 12 minutes

and the editing is gonna be a nightmare.

Actually maybe that’s
why I should just start again.

Nah, let me keep going.

I like the power through.

The 14 billion yen in back taxes is
based on the improper duty free sales

of iPhones to foreign tourists.

So basically tourists were coming to Japan.

They were buying an iPhone
but they were not paying taxes

on it because foreign
people don’t have to pay taxes

but this is not, maybe
the way they were selling it

wasn’t appropriate so it wasn’t
supposed to be sold that way.

So they have to pay that back
taxes, they have to pay the back taxes.

The back taxes then
now will go to self-defense.

The self-defense being
the ability to attack facilities

in other countries which is really scary.

But then of course everyone
knows, including north Korea,

knows who we’re talking
about as north Korea.

North Korea of course could not let
this stand and had to make statements.

Now one of my favorite things is the
way north Korea phrases statements.

I don’t know how good, the
translations must be good.

I don’t know how good they
are but they’re always awesome.

So this is the North Korean government

government foreign
ministry made this statement.

Japan’s foolish attempt to
satiate its black-hearted greed,

the building up of its
military invasion capability

under the pretext of
north Korea’s legitimate

exercise of the
right to self-defense

cannot be justified and tolerated.

I love that because, okay,
Japan is getting all antsy

because north Korea keeps shooting
its missiles over and around Japan.

And so if they would stop, Japan actually
probably wouldn’t be doing this military

strike capability thing.

North Korea is using
the exact same argument.

We’re not attacking anyone.

We’re exercising our right to self-defense.

Whereas Japan’s saying
the exact same thing.

We’re exercising our right to self-defense.

But it’s one of these things,
these dictatorships and stuff.

They say literally the
opposite of what we’re doing.

Missiles shooting over
countries is not self-defense.

And I actually think that
missiles being able to hit places

that shoot missiles isn’t
really self-defense either.

It’s a pretty extreme
version of the definition.

North Korea continues.

Our country will continue
to take actions to show

how much we are concerned and displeased
with Japan’s unjust greedy attempt

to realize its wild ambitions.

Even just the way they say it,
it’s very poetic, I quite like that.

The other threat at the moment, I mean,
sorry, Dave’s making little happy noises.

China had to weigh in as well.

And the Chinese foreign
ministry spokesperson said,

“the hyping up of the
so-called China threat,

China has been flying
airplanes into Japanese airspace,

bringing boats in around the islands up
north, doing all the things you would do

if you’re going to
threaten another country.”

Hyping up the so-called China threat

to find an excuse for Japan’s
military buildup is doomed to fail.

So really, yes, I’m not
happy about any of this.

I’m not happy about this
because I don’t like to see

military buildup because military buildup

does mean that eventually
someone wants to pull a trigger

and that’s not cool, but
the saber rattling statements

from countries and the disingenuous nature

of all those statements
is always entertaining.

We talked about a politician.

He was a youtuber and he
left Japan to go to live in Dubai

where he could still YouTube.

And what he does is he
exposes celebrity scandals.

He says if he comes back to
Japan, he’s going to be arrested.

So he’s not coming back to Japan,

but he decided to run for
government from Dubai on the Internet.

And he won.

So officially, this guy named
gassi is a Japanese politician,

but he does not live in Japan.

Gassi has been asked to come
back for voluntary question,

sorry, gassi has been
asked to come back to Japan

for voluntary questioning for
inflammatory posts, which is also slander.

A slander is illegal in Japan.

So basically they’re saying you come back

for voluntary questioning
and deal with these sort of like

things you’ve been posting on the Internet.

Whereas he’s saying if I come back,
they’re absolutely going to arrest me.

So it’s not in my best
interest to come back.

Since he’s been elected
to the government,

some celebrities have
submitted complaints,

claiming slurs and extortion.

So there’s actually the
secondary complaint that maybe

he’s been like blackmailing people.

If you pay me money, I won’t
publish this YouTube video.

But it seems like gassi is on the edge
of not being in the government anymore,

because sooner or later he’s
either going to have to come back

and deal with this stuff, or
they’re just going to boot him out.

(Phone ringing)

All right, we got some
work related issues in Japan.

Get my notes, I’m holding a dog
and trying to get my notes together.

There was a man who was, he
said he was exhausted from work

and he didn’t want to
come into work anymore.

So at 1.20 A.M., he called the police.

He’s been stabbed and he’s like, oh
god, I’ve been stabbed in the back.

I can’t go to work anymore.

When the police checked video
cameras that were in the area,

what they saw was, there
was no one else around him.

He had just been magically stabbed.

He was really stabbed, magically
stabbed in the back by himself.

And what he did was he
put a knife up against a wall

and walked back into it really
hard to stab himself in the back.

And he did this because he
didn’t want to go to work anymore.

He said he was exhausted from work.

So he stabbed himself in the back.

Now honestly, the
extremity of what he’s doing,

I would say yes, he really
shouldn’t have to go back

to work anymore because
he’s clearly actually exhausted.

They didn’t say what he does.

I really want to know what job
has made this man so exhausted

that he actually thought
faking his own attempted murder

was the best solution to the problem.

But the result is that he’s actually been
charged with interfering with police duties

because he’s basically filed a false
report and had taken up the police’s time

for a murder that never actually existed.

But he should take some
lessons from the next two guys

we’re gonna talk about
who found ways to

sort of alleviate the
stress of work at work.

And nagoya civil servant has been suspended

for surfing adult sites
while earning overtime.

So he claims he did it for relief.

Which if we’re being honest, is the number
one reason why you would surf adult sites?

You do it for relief.

He apparently spent, so computers and
government agencies are well monitored.

He spent 114 hours of
non-work related sites.

Now that’s not all porn.

58 of those hours were on adult sites
and eight hours of those were overtime.

So basically he was staying late at work

and looking at porn on the
work computer in his office.

And seemed to, so it’s bad to
look at non-work related sites.

But I think everyone does it.

I certainly do a lot of reading to keep
myself sort of aware of what’s going on.

I do a lot of news and stuff.

I probably could get away
with saying it was work related

but then I would have to stop.

These are going to be working for
the government, very different thing.

So non-work related sites would be pretty
obvious if you work for the government.

But then the porn sites
are going to be obvious.

The eight hours of overtime though,

like staying late in the office
when everyone else leaves

and then looking at porn
on your office computer,

that is being monitors
because they all are.

Like let’s just be really clear.

Government computers
are all monitored all the time.

It’s actually amazing.

I guess it’s not because they weren’t
really looking for him specifically.

So once he got past the hundred
hour Mark of just surfing the Internet,

yeah, then it would be problematic
and it maybe would show up.

‘Cause you could also claim, like I could
walk away from my computer and leave it on

and claim that someone
else was looking at stuff

from my computer, so
maybe they would need also

to collect enough evidence
to make sure it was me.

So something to be aware of.

But you know, he was getting relief at work

so he didn’t try to fake his own
attempted murder so he’d get out of work.

But then we have our final guy.

A Yokohama government
employee has been disciplined

for spending 275 hours playing
games at work on a work computer.

So this is a 50 year old section chief
and he said, when he got in trouble,

he said, “I started
playing games to freshen

up as I thought it
would be okay to do so

for a little bit as it
didn’t affect my work.”

Between December 2021 and
August 2022, he played for 150 days.

Now that’s not 150 actual days.

There were 150 days he played.

But he played for 30
minutes to three hours a day.

And what actually, so it was
like, how did you get caught?

So like was this a, was this monitored?

Again, like the other guy
was the computer monitored.

This is important to keep
your coworkers happy.

So you may think like, I hate my coworkers,

I hate them all, I don’t
wanna like make anyone happy.

It’s important to keep
them happy to a degree

because another employee
actually reported this section chief.

I had heard the clicking sound too
many times, which I thought was unnatural.

When I observed him, he was playing games.

I’m betting he was playing sort of
the standard like solitaire mind sweeper.

The games that are already installed on
pretty much every computer by default.

So this man, he was caught playing games.

What is the punishment?

So he’s not actually getting fired.

What he’s gonna get is a
10% pay cut for five months.

Now I would like to work
out how much was he paid

for the 30 minutes to three
hours a day for 150 days

that he was actually playing
games instead of working?

Does that work out to
an equivalency of the 10%

pay cut for five months?

I bet it’s pretty close.

So basically the government is just saying,
okay, you’re gonna work exactly the same.

I assume you’re not
gonna play games anymore.

Therefore we make our money back and
you’ve learned not to play games anymore.

Which I think is a pretty fair punishment.

I mean, I think Japan
for whatever fault it has

as a culture, most of the
punishments are pretty fair.

It tends to be a lot
softer than other countries.

But again, should you lose your
job for playing games at work?

Probably not.

Honestly, he was ticking
around ’cause he’s 50.

I’m 50.

He’s ticking around ’cause he
probably doesn’t want to work anymore.

Like that other guy, man,
he’s just exhausted from work.

He just needs a break.

But yeah, three hours a day is a lot.

So what we have learned though
is if you’re gonna get a job in Japan,

especially working for the government,

just remember, government
computers tend to be monitored

almost more than anything else.

So just be careful with your
non-work related porn viewing.

Certainly don’t do it as overtime.

Your non-work related web searches
and your non-work related game play.

(Upbeat music)

(Upbeat music).