Shoutout to Lone Listeners [00:00:16]
I don’t check the stats on this podcast very often because, honestly, you get obsessed with the numbers going up or down, and it makes you feel really happy or sad. But I was interested, I was just looking through the numbers and it was showing me where people are from. The ones I find most interesting, it’s when it’s like a single person from a place is listening. So you think of an entire country, and in that entire country, there’s one person who’s listening to Ninja News Japan. So if you are from Oslo and you are listening to this podcast, you are the only person in Oslo listening to Ninja News Japan. And I personally would like to say thank you, single person in Oslo, for listening to Ninja News Japan. Because that’s kind of cool. You’re there, I’m here, talking about Japan, having a good time. I love you. I don’t know what your feelings are about me, but if you want to let me know, that’s fine.
There is one person in Paraíba, Brazil who listens to Ninja News Japan. Now, last month they only listened to one episode, but that was enough. I mean, I got the one number from you and I’m like, hey, I don’t speak Portuguese, but if you’re listening to the podcast, I assume you speak English. If you don’t, this is a very weird sleep aid you have going on. But, drink one for me.
And the final one I wanted to reach out to, there are two people in Punjab who are listening to Ninja News Japan. And I would like to say, hey, I enjoy you and I hope you can continue to enjoy me. I hope I make my enjoyment possible for you. I don’t know what I’m saying right now. But what I really want to say is thank you, Oslo, Paraíba, and Punjab for taking the time to listen to the podcast. I think that’s really cool. If you’re in a country where there’s a whole bunch of people listening, meh. That’s such a mean thing to say. But it’s kind of neat. All I want to say is thank you for listening. It’s just one of those things where it’s places, cities, countries I haven’t thought about people listening to this podcast that are. It is the beauty of podcasting. The beauty of podcasting is you are sending out your message to the world and someone in Oslo is picking it up. Someone in Paraíba in Brazil is picking it up. Someone in Punjab is picking it up, and I think that’s kind of cool. I just want to take a moment and say, I would love for a single listener in every country. More than a mass of people listening in one place, I think it would be extra funny if it was just one person in every country listened. That’d still be like, what, there’s 300 countries, 300 listeners? Not bad.
Fukuoka Assembly Members’ Gold Pins [00:03:00]
Fukuoka assembly members used to wear 18-karat gold pins. Now, this is something that if you come to Japan, you’ll notice maybe that guys wear suits, and on the suits, they’ll have a lapel pin, a little usually circle, something like that. And it’s the company they work for. And those can be made of brass, but the high-level ones, expensive, rich companies, they make them out of gold. Well, assembly members in the government, they made theirs out of gold because they’re fancy people. You get them for being a lifetime employee, you get them for being on a certain contract type that says you’re dedicated to this. You get it for passing the bar exam and being a lawyer, that kind of stuff. Any sort of membership will have this kind of thing.
I’m going to be really honest, the first time I knew about them, I learned about them was actually after I’d come to Japan, and it wasn’t from living in Japan and seeing people wear them, it was from the Yakuza games. No, it was Judgment, Lost Judgment. That video game, they make a very special “I’m a lawyer” move where he like flips over his jacket and you can see the pin to prove that he’s a lawyer and not just a private investigator. And that was the first time I really like looked at them and tried to find out what they were. So I’d lived in the country for a long time, seen them before and just like, ah, it’s a pin you get for the company you work at, who cares? No, it’s kind of a bigger deal than that because it represents that you are dedicated to that company in some way.
Gold has hit an all-time high, not just in Japan, everywhere. So in 2018, a single gold badge, this little pin that you put on your lapel, 32,400 yen. That is way too much money for a pin. Like I’m just going to be really honest, like you could make it out of a way cheaper material, it would look just as good. In 2022, because the price of gold had gone up, and 2022 was the last time they made them, it was 66,000 yen per badge. That’s a PlayStation. So they’re wearing a PlayStation in just that little pin on their chest, which is really dumb. The next time they have to make the pin is going to be two years from now. The assumption is the price of gold is going to go up between now and then, which will make it even more expensive. How many pins do you have to actually make? You have to make one for every member and old members and things like that, like people who are still connected to it, maybe alumni, that kind of thing. That means the pins are going to cost 30 million yen total. So you’re not buying, it’s not like 66,000 yen is one pin, that’s one pin per person and there’s lots of people who are in the assembly. So 30 million yen, and they’re like, we’ve now hit a point where we can’t make them solid gold, that doesn’t make sense. So we’re going to go from solid gold to plated gold and it will bring the price from 30 million yen down to 2 million yen, which is very sensible. This is actually responsible government. This is guys going like, yeah, we’re big fancy people who do a big fancy job, but at the end of the day, we’re using taxpayer money to pay for these little badges. These little badges, they don’t need to be pure gold. They can be plated, they could be gold-coated of some sort. 30 million yen is silly, let’s bring that down to 2 million yen. It’s a way sensible thing. It shows that there are actually some sensible politicians out there.
Japan vs. OpenAI [00:06:10]
Japan versus OpenAI. Now, this has happened already because it had OpenAI had that whole trend basically last year where it was like, you put in a picture and our AI will turn it into Ghibli-style art. Ghibli-style art, the style cannot really be copyrighted so clearly. So you can copyright an art style, and so Ghibli has basically done that since then, which is probably why that trend went away. But, Japan versus OpenAI. Now last year, there was a big trend of you take your picture and you put it in OpenAI and it will change it into Ghibli-style art. Now that Ghibli-style art, that art style is technically copyrighted, but it’s very hard to prove because it’s hard to copyright a style. You can copyright characters, you can copyright images, you can copyright, you know, I have done copyright on this thing, but style becomes a much harder thing to copyright. So that’s kind of where this was a little in a legal gray zone.
The Japanese government’s been like, no, you guys are going too far because what you’re actually doing is taking away from Japan. Japan’s art, this is a piece of Japan that you’re ripping off. So they’re talking about mainly manga and anime, and they don’t want OpenAI to be able to replicate manga and anime. Sam Altman has said that OpenAI has a huge debt to the remarkable creative output of Japan. So basically saying that, oh, we took all the stuff Japan made, we stole all that, put it in our AI, and now we’re able to replicate all that stuff. We owe them a huge debt, one we have no intention of paying. Like we’re not giving anybody any money from that country that produced all the stuff that we can make really cool stuff with now. The Liberal Democratic Party has said that this is a serious legal and political problem, as in they as a country are now going to go after OpenAI if they keep doing this. Article 16 of the AI Promotion Act says they can demand disclosure of Sora 2 specifications. So basically they’re saying, if you keep ripping off our artwork, we’re going to force you to let us look at the specifications, the internal workings of your AI, and then we can rip that off. So basically, you rip us off, we’re going to politically force you to let us rip you off, and then what happens? What’s going on, buddy? And I actually think that’s a very interesting tactic to take. We’re not going to sue you for money, we’re going to sue you for your technology and then have access to your technology, and then Japan will be able to make a technology that will maybe outdo OpenAI or something else. But OpenAI wants to be the one and only, and they can’t be that if they get sued by Japan the country, and then Japan the country’s like, you now have to, if you want to function within our borders, let us look at your specifications.
Japan’s New Prime Minister on Work-Life Balance [00:09:20]
Japan recently got a new prime minister, and it’s a lady-type prime minister. Woo! Now, at first, I was kind of excited about having a female prime minister, and then I realized like she is way more conservative than most other people. So I actually think that our new lady prime minister might be bad for ladies. It’s a very interesting predicament to be in because I want to support women, but I want to support women who support women, not women who will end up oppressing other women. It’s a weird spot because I don’t know enough about her politics. I only know the most shallow version that I get from the news. And this is an interesting thing that I know that the new prime minister, Takaichi, is very conservative. And one of the first things she said is, “I will throw away the phrase ‘work-life balance.'” And then immediately said, “We should relax limits on overtime.” So right now, the limit on overtime legally is 45 hours a month or 360 hours a year. There’s a cap. And she’s like, let’s remove that cap. And she said, “On the premise of maintaining physical and mental health and respecting employee choice.” As in, employees should decide if they want to ruin their mental health. Employees should decide if they want to work themselves to death. And the thing is, this is a country that is already working itself to death. And I don’t think there’s the benefit from it. So like, people in Japan work massive amounts of hours. People in Japan work themselves to death, but they don’t actually produce the wealth that they claim to be producing. Japan as an economy has not been growing, and obviously this amount of work hasn’t been doing it. And then you have the baby population issue with a declining population and not making enough babies. And I think, as a non-expert, that that is directly correlated to the fact that people work themselves to death.
When she said, “I will throw away the phrase ‘work-life balance,'” I don’t think she meant for the country. I think she was trying to say like, I am going to work so hard for the country that I am not going to consider work-life balance a thing. I am only going to work. I’m going to work the LDP like a workhorse, is one of the phrases she said. The next day, with a big smile, she says, “I encourage everyone to have value, a work-life balance.” So, I think there is sort of a misinterpretation. So she was saying, “I’m going to work my team to death to try to make this a better country.” But she wasn’t saying that for the whole country, but then she turned around and said, “I want to have a proposition that we remove the cap we’ve already put on work-life balance.” So it’s very unclear what she actually means. I think what she’s saying is, yes, I’m a conservative politician, I want companies to exploit the worker. This is what a lot of politicians think, and I think we should be honest about it. And that’s her premise and that’s her platform, and if you support that, okay. I don’t support that. I actually think there should be caps on how much people work because people work themselves to death and that creates all the problems that you have in the modern Japanese society. But, she didn’t, when she made the statement, “I’m going to throw away the phrase ‘work-life balance,'” I don’t think she actually meant everybody. I think she meant for herself. I think she was saying, “I’m going to work super hard.” And this is one of the problems with the misinterpretations and back and forth of modern media and one of the problems you should be aware of it. So when you read stuff about politicians and what politicians say, you need the context of what they’re talking about. But then also look at their policies, and her policies actually support the negative thing she just said. So where are we now? I still don’t know. I pretty much don’t like her, let’s put it that way.
Sexual Harassment Case Involving “-chan” Honorific [00:12:46]
That said, I don’t really like any politician most of the time. This is a story that just hit my feed over and over and over again. And it was a company employee harassed a younger coworker by using the honorific “-chan.” So, I think you know if you’re into Japan in any way, you know about, you know, “Ah, Mariko-chan,” and it’s a nice way to talk to a girl. And it’s usually young girls. So when you have kids, you have “-chan” is girls, “-kun” is boys. So I would be Chunk of Beef Chest-kun, and then my the girl my age, I could refer to as “-chan.” As the children, it’s all very innocent. Now, when you start dating, you often refer to your partner as “-chan.” So I have my girlfriend, and I would go, “Girlfriend-chan,” and she would be like, “Oh, he’s using this like cutesy way of talking to me, and that’s really nice.” It can happen from older people to younger people, but it takes on a slightly creepier feeling because you’ve, you’re not talking adult to child anymore or superior to like a lower, inferior person. You are talking to someone who is fundamentally an equal because you’re both working at the same company and you’re both like adults who are working. But it’s because you go through that phase in your teens and 20s and 30s where you refer to your sexual partners as something-chan, that is the issue because it changes the tone of that word.
The feed said that this guy got sued for using this and this was sexual harassment. Now, that alone legally is not enough to constitute sexual harassment. Now, because of what I just said, it can have a sexual tone, it cannot have a sexual tone. So his defense would be like, “I meant it in an innocent way. I wasn’t saying anything else. I was trying to be familiar. I apologize,” end of story. Now that’s, of course, you need the more details. So there’s a great website called Bengo4.com. Bengo4 means lawyer, and it’s lawyers talk about political issues. I’ve actually only been able to get into this website recently and actually find some of the details. They were talking about this. What makes this sexual harassment? Sued for sexual harassment because he referred to girl plus “-chan” is a great headline because that’s going to catch a lot of attention. But it’s of course not, that by itself is not enough. So what else did he say to constitute this being sexual harassment? Well, he said, “You have such a great figure, while I’m so skinny.” So, commenting on someone’s physical appearance in that way is, could be constituted sexual harassment because it depends on how it makes the other person feel. You might think you’re complimenting someone and they are made uncomfortable by it, that is sexual harassment. That’s actually pretty clear-cut. He also said, “I can see your underwear.” Now, we don’t know how what he meant by this, like you’re wearing white clothes and black underwear, I can see your underwear through your clothes. I can see the outline of your underwear, your unsightly panty lines, that kind of stuff. How this is said is also could be or could not be sexual harassment. Like, “I can see your underwear” might be actually like, “Hey, just to let you know, I can see your underwear, maybe you want to be more careful next time.” That could be good advice or helpful. But I think combination “-chan” plus “your figure” plus “I can see your underwear” is clearly a pattern of sexual harassment. So that sets up the pattern, that makes it sexual harassment, that’s what makes him guilty.
The woman wanted to sue him for 5.5 million yen, which is a lot of money. She got 220,000 yen. So basically, again, the lawsuits in Japan are not like the lawsuits in America where lawsuits in America, they try to take you for millions and millions of dollars and you’ll get millions and millions of dollars for like all the mental anguish you’ve suffered. In Japan, it’s punitive, but to a degree that is reasonable. It’s punishment for the thing and no more. She went into a depression, she quit her job, she sued the guy. The guy had not touched her or anything, so it was only verbal, but he was the cause of the source of this pain. So he said, so the judge granted 220,000 yen. Now, the company did not stop him from saying this. So the company also got sued and they got, they had to pay 700,000 yen for not creating a safe workspace. So that’s another interesting thing that the company actually got punished more than the actual individual who was doing the sexual harassing because the company is responsible for stopping the man, punishing the man, telling the man not to do this anymore. If she had reported to it, I assume she had said something to someone, otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten any money. If she had just kept this quiet, she could have sued the guy, maybe got some money, but again, you can see, not very much. But she must have reported it to a company and that the company didn’t do anything about it, so she got more money from the company.
Smuggling Gold in Underwear [00:17:30]
A former Osaka police, we got two stories about cops who should have known to stop while they were ahead. A former Osaka police officer impersonated a Kyoto police officer for a very classic scam where they call up someone, usually an older person, in this case it was a man in his 70s, and they said, “Your cards, like your debit cards, your cards that you’re using for your credit cards, have been used in fraudulent withdrawals. We are going to send a police officer to your house. He’s going to get your cards and he’s going to cut them, cut the magnetic strip so they can’t be used anymore.” So this guy pretended to be a Kyoto police officer. He knows the how you’re supposed to talk, how you’re supposed to act because he used to be an Osaka police officer. So actually, you think he’d be really good at this scam. But he made a point of saying, “I’m going to cut your cards, cut the magnetic strips so they can’t be used anymore.” And then he cut the cards in front of the 70-year-old man, but he didn’t cut the magnetic strips. And I was like, ah, he shouldn’t have drawn attention to it. He should have just said, “I’m going to cut your cards so they can’t be used anymore,” cut them and then not cut the strips. But because he drew attention to it and then didn’t do it, the 70-year-old man was like, “There’s something suspicious about this.” He called the police, found out that this guy does not work for the Kyoto police, and then the man was arrested. Now, he is a police, a former police officer, so he knows what you, I’ve complained many times about criminals in Japan who just come out and say like, “Yeah, I did it and I did this and I did all that.” You’re not being a good criminal then. You have to keep your mouth shut. So, when asked for a statement, this former Osaka police officer said, “I’ll think carefully before I speak.” Chef’s kiss, that is the perfect response. I’m not talking to the cops because I know you don’t talk to the cops. Doesn’t matter what country you’re in, do not talk to the cops. I don’t care if you’re innocent or guilty, they’re trying to pin something on you, do not help them do that.
Connected to this, an ex-Tokyo cop, his job was inspecting fire investigations. So there’s a fire, he goes there, he looks around the building, he tries to figure out, was this arson? Was this for insurance fraud? Or was this just an actual accidental fire? And he going around the house, he stole cash. Now, he did this while he was on the job. He did it eight times and he got 9 million yen because again, lots of older people in Japan, they still keep cash. Now, this is the opposite of our previous cop where our previous cop said, “I’ll think carefully before I speak.” This guy, once he was caught, decided he was just going to spill the beans everywhere. He said, “I was worried about money, and when the money appeared in front of me, I was tempted and thought, ‘If only I had the money.'” So basically, he’s going around a burnt house, he’s finding where these probably older people are keeping cash in a box, in drawers and stuff. He’s checking all the things. He’s like, “That’s a lot of money. I know someone who could use money. This guy.” And then they’re going to think the money’s been burned up in the fire, they’re going to get the insurance, they get their money back. Victimless crime, who gets hurt? Well, you do when you get arrested for stealing money. He said, “There’s a saying that goes, ‘The net of heaven is wide and loose, but nothing escapes it.’ I knew that if I kept doing this, I’d be found out someday.” Which actually is true because he kept doing it and then he was found out. But he wasn’t found out for any of those massive sums of money that he must have been stealing from houses because to get eight times and 9 million yen means like for a couple times, he was getting more than a million yen per theft. Like I don’t remember how much a million yen is in actual money, but it’s like a big sum of money. The thing is, a firefighter saw him take 1,000 yen from a pouch. We’re talking like $7 and put it in his pocket. So during the investigation, he was walking around, there was a little pouch of money, there was 1,000 yen in it, he pulled the 1,000 yen out, he put it in his pocket, a firefighter saw him and reported him for that, and that led to the investigation that got him caught for this other 9 million yen. I mean, guy, you just got to, I mean, why even go for the 1,000 yen? It’s not worth it. It’s not worth stealing 1,000 yen to get caught when you’ve already taken 9 million yen and you were home free. You just had to stop. And this is the problem with every criminal across the board, you have to know when to stop.
Smuggling Gold in Underwear [00:21:48]
As far as knowing when to stop, this is interesting. Four people were arrested for trying to smuggle 8 kg of gold, which I just said recently hit an incredible high. So that’s actually our first story was how about they’re not using gold in these little badges anymore. 8 kg of gold is worth 98.7 million yen, and they were trying to get it from Hong Kong to Japan. I think the market for selling in Japan might be better, which is trying to smuggle it in. Like you think you would, the value of gold is pretty universal, so selling it in Hong Kong makes a lot of sense. So it must be a reason to actually bring it in. It’s 8 kg, so each person had to bring 2 kg of gold. And I’m like, wow, like a 2 kg bar is probably not that big, but it’s going to be very hard to hide on your body. But what they did is they had powdered gold, so it was gold powder, and they had sewn it and filled in their underwear. So they were wearing 2 kg of gold in their underwear that they were then trying to go through security with and stuff and walk naturally. And I would just, I now want to get myself, not gold, but a pair of 2 kg underwear and see like, how do I walk that day? Is it distributed evenly? Like 2 kg is not a lot, but it’s also right around your groin area wearing as underwear is a lot. This one guy recruited three women, said they were going to get so much money and he was going to pay for tickets and stuff. They all got caught. We have a beautiful picture of the 4 kg of powdered gold, which I now know has been in underwear and around someone’s crotch, which actually makes it kind of gross, piled up and a display on a table that the police, they do this after they catch anyone with anything, they put out like a nice little display. There’s the guy who lays things out, that’s his job. But honestly, I kind of grossed out now knowing that was crotch gold.
“Stealerium” Malware [00:23:34]
You could not have a more on-the-nose name for malware than Stealerium. So, steal-er-ium. This is a thing that used to be a scam, it was like a phishing scam. You’d get an email, I got a couple of these, and it was, “Hey,” and it would have like your username or something that’s taken off some website, maybe get your real name from your email or something, and go, “I have hacked your computer and I turned on your camera while you were masturbating and looking at porn, and I have a video of you, and if you don’t want that video released, you have to get Bitcoin and send it to me or I’ll release the video.” The funny part was, if you got a video of me masturbating to porn and posted it on the internet, I would be like, okay, go ahead. Like no one cares. No one wants to see it. No one wants to see this in action. You’re not going to get any money from me. You’re not going to get any money from anyone else. You’re going to, I would actually probably tell everyone, “Hey, there’s a video of me.” This guy got a video of me and thought he was going to threaten me and put it on the internet. Everyone go look at it and maybe I could get some like internet clout out of it. You can watch the Ninja News Japan guy jerking it to weird porn. Like that wasn’t a threat to me. So you have to like have the right audience. But of course, it’s just like that was just inserting your name into an email and mass emailing millions of people hoping to get some response.
Stealerium is malware that does that actual thing. So it comes in an email with an attachment, and if you open the attachment, it can actually install malware on your computer that can turn on your camera and give the other person control as to when it turns on. When you go to an adult website, it logs your login information, which probably includes your credit card, which is what they probably really want more than anything else is your credit card information. But it can turn on the camera while you’re looking at the stuff and probably screen capture that stuff and send it back. So this thing that used to be just a phishing scam has now turned into, like inspired someone to make real malware that actually does the thing that they were threatening to do in the first place. All you have to do though is not open any attachments and you’ll actually be safe from it. But this is a real thing that’s happened that actually came from a story. So be careful on the internet.
AI Deepfake Pornography Arrest [00:25:48]
A 31-year-old company employee has been arrested for creating deepfakes porn with AI using famous women as sort of the base image. He’s been publishing them online. So he’s made 20,000 images of 262 different celebrities, and you could subscribe to his channel. I they didn’t actually say what channel it was on, like was it an OnlyFans or some Japanese version of that or just some porn site. But you could subscribe to him between $1 a month and $100 a month, and he would accept requests, I think at the higher tiers, for custom jobs. So, I don’t know if he was good at this. I didn’t actually get to see any of the porn. I’m not particularly interested if I’m being really honest. But the problem is, AI deepfake pornography is new technology, so there’s no laws actually on the books. So if he had actually followed Japanese laws and actually maybe, I don’t know about copyright laws with using someone’s image, if he had actually stuck to that, because there’s revenge porn laws, but this isn’t technically revenge porn, so he’s outside of that. He might be getting copyright issues for using a famous person’s face, but it’s very hard for a famous person to copyright their image. If an image is out on the internet and it’s like distributed everywhere and then you use it for something, it’s actually very hard for them to catch it and sue you for it. And then the actual deepfake, the porn part, if he’d followed Japanese laws, he’d actually might be safe there. But he was doing full nudity in his AI porn, which is illegal in Japan. So he’s not getting caught for the AI part, he’s not getting arrested for the deepfake part yet, because they’re actually working on laws on that right now. He’s getting arrested for making illegal porn in Japan. And then producing it and distributing it are all other laws and other rules as well. That’s all going to be a whole other thing.
But this is not a professional guy, he’s not like a tech guy. They arrested him and found out that he basically used tutorials online to get the images and put them into the AI and use the prompts and what prompts you should use to actually make the AI porn. And then he was actually making money online. He made 1.2 million yen. They didn’t really say over what period of time, but he was trying to start a business. So this might have just been the initial launch, this might have been just the first bunch. But 1.2 million yen just out of nowhere for having AI tools do a whole bunch of stuff for you, that’s free money as far as he was concerned. This has pushed up a lot of the attention for AI in Japan. This has pushed up a lot of what do we have to make rules about, what do we have to make laws about? There’s going to have to be protecting people from deepfakes. It’s going to be protecting people from having their image used in pornography. It’s going to have to be the pornography that’s produced, is that acceptable using AI? That kind of stuff. This is all stuff that’s hitting Japan now. If you remember Johnny Somali, he’s actually in trouble in Korea because they already have deepfake rules on the books. So he’s actually getting in trouble for creating a deepfake of him kissing another streamer that didn’t actually happen and distributing that on the internet. And that’s actually a big problem. That could be seven years in prison in Korea. In Japan, it’s a little bit behind, but now this kind of case, bring it to light, 262 famous people are on the other side, they’re going to have lawyers, they’re going to go after this guy. Those laws are going to come into place really soon. I’ll be really interested to see what kind of rules, punishments they make for AI deepfakes going forward in the future. You should do the opposite of what I’m doing right now and not put your face out on the internet. But I mean, again, sort of like the previous story, no one’s going to want to see this do that thing, so I think we’re okay if you’re an old dude on the internet, you’re safe from deepfake porn.