Tag: scam

Brutally Hot Podcast

A man got one year and six months. I was suspended for four years. Now so, I don’t know, do you get

it then? If your sentence is suspended and you don’t do anything wrong, you don’t get in trouble,

nothing actually happens. There is a one million yen fine connected to this.

Because when you read the articles in the news, they always say one year, six months prison time

for the crime he’s committed. But then if it’s suspended, you’re not really getting anything.

So I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about saying he got a year and six months

if it’s been a suspended sentence. But anyways, we’re not going to worry about that. The reason

all this happened was a complaint was filed in 2024 by Kadokawa and Toho. Toho is the company

that most famously makes Godzilla movies. All throughout history, all the Godzilla movies,

except for like the one or two American ones they made, were produced by Toho Cinemas.

Now this guy was writing spoiler heavy articles. He wrote an article that had a full summary of

Godzilla minus one. It was 3000 characters in length. So you remember a 500 word essay would be,

I think that was like two, three pages. So this guy is doing 10, 15, 20 pages of text based on

explaining the plot of the movie he’s watched. His summaries included plot, dialogue, and plot twists.

So he’s taking every element of the movie that he can recall. He’s putting it down into writing and

then posting it on the internet. And Toho Cinemas is saying that this, the level of detail is so much

that it counts as an adaptation. Toho argued that the level of detail was such that it counted as an

adaptation. Can’t say adaptation, adaptation, adaptation. Toho argued that the level of detail

achieved was so much that it counted as an adaptation of the film. So if you do something

that’s an adaptation, you get, have to get permission from the copyright holder, Toho Cinemas,

to actually do it. I do a movie channel called CMCB IMDB on YouTube and I take old movies and I make

fun of them. But the fact that I’m not using the entire film, so I’m not giving away the entire plot,

that every scene I’m using has me talking over it, transforming it, makes it a reaction video,

or something like that, maybe satire. That is legally protected. Now, a lot of movies I post,

you get the copyright strike and I send in my dispute to the copyright strike. And legally speaking,

I should win that every time because there isn’t enough transformational things happening in the

video I’m making. But these big companies, they don’t even look at it often. They just say no.

If I get the response like in the same day, I know it’s essentially automated or they have

someone whose job it is just to say no, enter, no, enter, no, enter. So I don’t really fight those.

It’s not really worth fighting. They do go up on the Chunk of Beef Test Patreon. Should you be

interested in those? There’s some extra stuff there for Patreon exclusive for the stuff I’m not

allowed to post on YouTube. Which now that I think about it, the fact that I could potentially make

money off, it probably makes it worse. But I’m going to worry about that when I actually make some

money off something, which the way it’s going is never going to be a problem for me.

The sticking point seemed to be that the website was monetized. So it’s almost as if he had done

this for free. If he had done this for the love of film, if he was just writing and not making any

money off it, that it wouldn’t have been much of a case. But the fact that he was making money off it

meant he was making money off the copywritten material that was owned by Toho. And so that is the

bit that actually got him in trouble. It was too much. So he ended up with one year and six months

in prison that he’s not actually going to go to prison for. And again, I feel a little about that.

It almost feels like, what’s the point of giving him prison time if you’re not actually going to

give him prison time? Prison. Prison. What’s the point of giving him prison time if he doesn’t

actually spend any time in prison? But at the same time, I understand this isn’t a violent offense.

He hasn’t hurt anybody. So just tell him not to do it again. But if you do it again, you’re going to

get in trouble. Extra trouble. Super trouble. Godzilla level trouble.

A survey is done regularly of the most sleep deprived country. People not sleeping is often

taken as a point of pride where I think that attitude shifted. It used to be like, I don’t

sleep. I work 2 million hours. But there are all those like rise and grind guys. Like I wake up at

4am and do three workouts before you even get out of bed. And I’ve run 10 companies and invented five

more by lunchtime. That is kind of the same mentality. Like essentially, what time are you going to bed so

that you’re able to wake up at four o ‘clock in the morning is an interesting question? Because

are you sleeping more or less than everyone else? Is there a benefit to… Because my schedule when I

came to Japan, I went to bed at two and I woke up at 10 every day. But because I was going to work and

then I was going to judo after work, I would get home at midnight and I would still have to eat some

food or, you know, take a shower or take some time to like decompress. And then I would go to bed.

But because I worked late, I woke up at 10. I was still only sleeping eight hours. I wasn’t sleeping

more than in this case, anybody else would assume if you sleep an average of eight hours.

Was I being lazy? Was I being worse than the guy who wakes up at four? And I assume goes to bed at

930. So that is the bit I would actually like next time I see one of those rise and grind things. I

actually want to find out what their bedtime is, not what time they wake up.

But Japan, it is a very work heavy country, you know, where work is the main focus of your life.

The US and UK average seven plus hours a night. China hits seven hours a night. The average in

Japan is six hours and 23 minutes a night. And so that I think is bad. I think you do need to get

enough sleep. I think if you want a healthy country, healthy people, healthy mindset, you got to get

enough sleep. On Sunday, last Sunday, I was going to go to the gym. And then on Thursday, I’d had a

real tough fight at judo. My body was still sore. I laid down for like five minutes, slept for two

extra hours in the afternoon, woke up, felt great. That changed probably the whole week for me because

I could go to work the next day. I wasn’t sore. I woke up this morning. I was able to go to the gym

today because I wasn’t still suffering from a lack of sleep or a lack of recovery time. I think

recovery time is something that’s really important that people don’t take as seriously as they should.

In this survey included some other interesting statistics. 26 % of people felt their supervisors

cared about their health. That means a good 74 % feel like their supervisors do not care about their

health, which I think is very realistic. Supervisors don’t often see people as people. They see them as

resources. And if the resources aren’t showing up to work, well, what good are you anyways?

62 % felt, oh, 62 % of people have never taken a day off for fatigue. So I get X amount of

days I could take off every year. It’s just part of my remuneration package, which is a word I have

almost never said right until I learned how to say it and then realized I don’t think anyone says it

right. Because we usually say remuneration where it’s remuneration. I’ve done this on the podcast

before at some point in the past, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it. But it’s a word that

is very hard for me to say. I think it’s hard for everyone to say. And I think everyone says it wrong.

I think we should re -spell that word. Ah, but I get X amount of days off a year. And I will try not to

use any and then take off, let’s say one a month or one every couple months so that I can just take

a day off and do nothing. Maybe I catch up on podcasts or movies or I just sleep or do something.

But I try to do something that is not stressful and that is really just a recovery from fatigue day

for me. 57 % of couples sleep in separate rooms. This I have found out is a very normal thing in

Japan. I am an incredibly light sleeper. I don’t think you need to know about my personal life,

but I actually sleep in a separate room for my wife, but not because like we’re distant as people.

She wakes up at five to five 30 and I’m a very, very light sleeper. So if she woke up,

she would wake me up and then I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again. People in Japan

need to get more sleep. And this would indirectly go into the Japan is not having enough babies thing.

If everyone is too tired, if everyone is too sleepy, if everyone has no energy, you’re not making babies.

You’re not doing that. That’s something you need energy to do. It’s supposed to be fun. I mean,

if you do it right. So I actually think that might be the first step is make sure everyone gets enough

sleep. Make sure people, I mean, my common thing has been they work too much. They spend too much time

at work, but that feeds into they don’t sleep enough. So if you spent less time working,

you’d spend more time sleeping, you spent more time sleeping, you have more energy,

you add more energy, maybe you’d make some babies. As I was just turning on my air conditioner and

complaining, this is still pretty early in the spring, but I think my room gets a lot of sunlight

in the afternoon. So it gets pretty hot. They have terms, the Japanese like weather bureau has terms

that they use for summer days. And it’s to talk about like, is this going to be a particularly hot day?

They have added a word, a descriptor that they haven’t had to do since 2007. So let’s go

through those, the common ones. The first one is a Natsubi, which is a summer day, which is about 25

degrees Celsius. That is a very nice day. It’s actually probably hotter than that. It’s probably

hotter than that in my room right now. Manatsubi is a midsummer day, and that’s going to be about

30 degrees. And that’s hot. But if it’s not that humid, which it gets pretty humid in Japan,

it’s not too bad. Then we get into the gross days because this is just temperature. And actually,

it’s temperature plus humidity is what really, really gets you, which is one of the more old

man things I tend to say. So it’s not the heat to get you, it’s the humidity. If it was 40 degrees

and dry, I’d be okay, which I wouldn’t. I mean, I just was not built for heat.

But Moshobi is an extremely hot day, and that’s when it’s 35 degrees.

So that was introduced in 2007. They had to come up with a new one. And it’s, they did a survey and

a vote for who has like the best idea. And they ended up on Kokushobi, which is brutally hot day,

which is not something I’m looking forward to. Now, a brutally hot day is 40 degrees or more.

They’ve been keeping track of the temperature since 1872. And there have been 108 times the

temperature has gone above 40 degrees or 40 degrees and above. But 41 of those, so basically,

40 % of those happened between 2023 and 2025. So anyone who’s arguing about climate change not being real,

the statistical data is telling you that it is real. And the people are saying like natural shifts,

natural shifts don’t happen in this timeframe. That would be my counter argument. Like a natural

shift would be change over time, yes, but it would be years and decades, not a two year period where you

have more 40 degree days in the summertime than in the entirety of the previous hundred some years.

August 5th last year hit 41 .8 degrees in Isesaki, which was one of the hottest days on record in all

of Japanese history. And I would love to be able to say we’re not going to outdo it this year, but this

is a record we are absolutely going to break. Last time we talked about the blue ticket system for

bicycles. And we talked about bicycles, some of the crimes that could, and infractions that could get

you a ticket. And the expensive one was riding while looking at your cell phone. That’s 12 ,000 yen,

two people on one bicycle, bicycles walking parallel, being dangerous. All these things can get you

tickets. It took less than a week for people to start trying to scam other people with fake blue

tickets. So I have a variety of stories because apparently you introduce a new system and every

scammer in the world jumps on it. A 13 year old boy in Hokkaido was riding his bike and he came to a stop.

I’m assuming a stop sign. It wasn’t maybe a red light. A man then walked up to him and said,

that’s a violation. Now, if you’re 13 years old, an adult shouts or says that’s a violation to you,

you’re a little put out of place. You don’t know what’s going on. This is an adult or just

generally authority figures, which is a little one. This kid though had it together. I mean, he had it

way more together than I would have at 13 years old. He started demanding from the kid a certain

sum of money. I think it was like three or 5 ,000 yen. So he was like, you got to, if you can pay me

5 ,000 yen right now, I’ll let you go. Otherwise you get a ticket. Uh, we’re going to have to talk

to your parents. You’re going to get in trouble. The fake cop was wearing a bucket hat, sunglasses

and a backpack. Now the one that stuck out to me is a bucket hat. Cause I don’t think anyone looks

good in a bucket hat. I once put on a bucket hat and I looked over at my daughter. I go, huh?

Cause you know, you want to look cool and young and hip and all these other words that they don’t

use anymore. Um, and my daughter just looked at her, looked at me and went, no. And I was like,

yeah, you’re right. No, I think Brad Pitt wore a bucket hat and something and he looked good,

but he is a level above anything I ever would dare to dream to achieve. So I don’t think most people

look good in a bucket hat. And I think if you’re trying to fake a cop, a bucket hat, isn’t giving

you the authority. See, he must’ve just been wearing his normal clothes and gone like, Hey,

here’s an opportunity. I’ll give it a shot. And you know, worst that can happen is I get arrested

for impersonating a police officer. The kid, 13 year old kid demanded to see his badge and to get

his badge number. And the man took off running. So, you know, good on you for kid. You’re awesome.

I don’t think at 13 years old, I would have had the wherewithal to ask to see a badge or identification

of a presumed authority figure. I also wouldn’t have had any money. So if he demanded money, I’d be like,

you have to give me the ticket because I do not have any money. And he pulled the like,

you have to go to the ATM and get it. I was like, dude, there’s no money in there either.

You’re actually attacked. This is one of the problems of maybe trying to rob me until I was

in my mid twenties. I didn’t have any money to take. Like I wasn’t poor as in dying or starving,

but I didn’t have any extra money that people could take away from me. In Hiroshima, uh, they took 2000

yen from a teen in Oyama. Also two men came up to a cyclist and demanded 15 ,000 yen, uh, because the

man rode his bike across a crosswalk. They claimed he ran a red light, which is fine at 15 ,000 yen.

Uh, you can pay now. And then the guy hesitated. And then the two guys who are pretending to be

cops go, if you don’t pay right away, we’re going to arrest you. Now that’s not the way tickets work.

Uh, you get the ticket and you pay it at a convenience store, the post office or a

co -bond or something like that. You pay it somewhere separated from the police actually. And this is of

course, to keep you from accidentally bribing a police officer or a police officer taking advantage

of the system and taking bribes. It’s actually just stop exactly what’s happening right here.

Someone trying to scam you out of money. When they stopped him, the victim flagged down a patrol car

to check because he had gotten, he’d actually received a fake blue ticket. And then the cop said,

like, that’s not how any of this works. Police in Japan will never take money directly from you.

You always go to a place to pay. And I think it’s a post office or a bank or something. You do a

transfer. You do not ever had money to a police officer. Uh, yes. The last line is that cops don’t

ever collect fees on the spot. So if this ever, you come to Japan and someone claims to be a police

officer and says, give me money. The answer is no. And if they say, well, we’re going to arrest you,

like, please go ahead. So you’re a lawyer and you represent a real estate company and the real

estate company sues Google to get reviews removed from Google Maps. So we are going to, let’s give

the benefit of the doubt and say these were negative, unfair, unrealistic reviews that should

be removed. So that’s why the company went through the effort of hiring a lawyer, going all the way to

court, going to get Google and saying, suing Google and saying, Google take down these fake

negative reviews. They lost in the district and the high court, but you’re a lawyer and you still

want to prove a point and you think it’s unfair and wrong that this is happening. What do you do?

And I do love the, the gumption of this young lawyer. I don’t know how old he is. I just,

I like to imagine he’s young. You create a website that reviews judges. So Saibankan map. So it’s like

Google map, but judge map, Saibankan map shows the names of judges in high profile cases. It gives

explanations of their ruling and the research papers they’ve written and users can rate and post

reviews of the judges they’ve interacted with. So I know there was a real website called rate my

professor where students could rate the professor. People don’t ever think of rating their judge.

So I’ve only had one interaction with the court system in Japan and the judge basically said

nothing to me at all. It was just all the lawyers and he just sat there looking very stone faced,

which was honestly very cool. So my review of him would have been impartial or seemed impartial

or did not care about anything I had to say, which also might’ve been true, but I didn’t have a positive

or negative experience, which actually is very appropriate for a judge in this situation.

I think the judge is proving his point. I think there’s going to be some judges who get pissed

off when they start getting negative reviews and then they’re going to want it taken down,

but then they have to go back to this ruling, this precedent that’s been set that you don’t take down

these negative reviews. You don’t do that. You have no say in this. Bye bye, sir. My website that

that judges judges is going to stay up. So a cop is doing sort of regular,

god damn if it’s speaking, a cop is doing regular patrols with a married woman.

That’s the euphemism I came up with. The husband finds out about these regular patrols and extra

personal attention from the police officer to his wife and he decides to divorce his wife.

So he’s like, you know, you’re having sex with this cop. I’m not cool with that. I want a divorce.

I mean, honestly, she clearly likes the cop better than her husband. Her husband is like a divorce.

It didn’t make it sound like it was too messy. It was like, oh, if you’re going to do that,

I don’t want to be married to you. I want to go find someone else who maybe doesn’t do that with

police officers behind my back. Or maybe you should have invited me. I don’t know what the

actual situation is. But if they had a very reasonable solution where they just kind of

dealt with it like adults, you wouldn’t be on Ninja News Japan. You then, as a police officer,

conspire with the woman to threaten the man with a knife to not divorce her. Now that to me is not

a convincing way. So you are going to stay married to your wife or I’m going to kill you.

Or I’m threatening to kill you if you threaten to go through with this divorce.

How long is that marriage going to last? Like the damage has been done. You’re not coming back from

that. So what did they actually think the real result was going to be? I do really, really wonder,

like, let’s say he scared the guy enough into staying married. I guess this is very much like a

cuck situation where it’s like, okay, you just sit there silently. You pay the bills for your family

and you stay married and then we’ll keep doing our thing on the side. Or maybe he just says like,

you stay married and I’ll step away. But the man wasn’t satisfied with this. He knew the other man

was a police officer. The husband knew the man was a police officer. So he went to the police and

reported him, which is a ball move to do. I like that. He reports him to the police officer. The police

officer was given his 10 % salary reduction. And then he quit the same day. But I think

threatening to kill people is a crime. I mean, maybe he didn’t say I’m going to kill you, but he

took a knife and he said, stay married to your wife. That is a threat. I think the threat there is if

you don’t stay married to your wife, I’m going to kill you with the knife that I’m holding at you

right now. There’s an implied threat there. You’re not going to hold a knife at someone and say stay

married happily. Like that’s just not what that means. I think there’s a level of interpretation that

could be happening there. So I’m not happy with the fact that this cop got to threaten someone’s life

after ruining the marriage and then turning around and not getting in trouble officially.

Let’s say he stayed a cop, a 10 % reduction in his pay. That’s nothing for threatening to murder

someone, which is, let’s be clear, what he was doing. 17 year old boy was doing what every 17

year old boy does, making spears by attaching a knife to the end of a pole. I don’t remember ever

doing this as a youth. If I’m being honest, I don’t know if this is a more common thing now. I don’t

think it is. I think this might just be a case of this kid has a lot of weird hobbies because he’s

making spears at home for fun. Police were called to the house by the mother of the kid who said that

the boy was acting violently. If he is constructing spears in his bedroom, this is not someone you want

to have acting violently in your house. So I absolutely understand the concern and the desire to call the

police and make sure that you are not in mortal danger. Three cops entered the house and the boy

was coming down the stairs and threw the spear at the cops in front from three meters away. So the fact

that he missed is already, shouldn’t be dealing with a spear if you don’t know how to throw a spear.

But he threw the spear down the stairs. Three meters is not that far. I’m six foot, which is 1 .83

centimeters. So almost two meters. That’s my length in a little bit more. And he missed the cops, which

is very lucky because this is goes from assaults or attempted murder to actual murder. Once he

actually stabbed someone, when the kid was arrested, he said, I did not intend to kill, which I have my

doubts about because why did you make a spear and then throw it at the cops? If you didn’t intend to

kill him? I mean, spears are pretty famously only for one thing, and that is for finishing off

whatever’s at the business end of the spear. Maybe he was just showing off his super sweet spear and he

wanted to show his super sweet spear skills and he threw it at the cops so they’d be super impressed by his

super sweet spear skills that he’s just demonstrated. But I don’t think that’s actually the case.

It’s normal to not like your co -workers. I’ve had lots of co -workers over my time in life and there are

some that I don’t like and some that don’t like me and sometimes it’s justified and sometimes not, but

whatever. Not everyone can like anyone. But I can say I have never hit the depths of fury that this

person must have hit to actually follow through on the actions here. A woman in her 20s stepped away

from her desk and a co -worker, a male in his 30s, poured urine into her open bottle of tea.

This always puts me in the mindset of the criminal.

Like this was prepared in advance. Like you don’t just have a container of tea. Like you don’t ever

just have a container of urine available to you. You had to consciously stop and say, let me get some

urine. Let me get this container to keep it in. I hope it’s a nice container. And then you have to

fill it up and then maintain that around your person until the opportunity arises for you to exact your

plan to pour the pee into the tea, making pee tea. The woman came back to her desk and immediately

noticed the change in taste, which means she actually tasted some of it, which God, I cannot

imagine. And then she immediately called the police, which is the right thing to do. I mean, there’s no

way this is okay. In court, the man denied a sexual intent. So this is one of those things that happens

in Japan and they put stuff into a woman’s drink and they want the woman to drink it. And this sort

of helps them get their jolly somehow. Again, I am far enough away from those kinds of fetishes that I

don’t understand them. And I don’t know where, how you got to this point in your life. That is actually

maybe the thing I don’t understand, but he’s really trying to get out of two charges because one is

tampering with someone’s food, which is some form of assault, I’m sure. The second is sexual aggression

or sexual assault or something like that. So he’s trying to take that what could be two charges and get it down to

one by saying he did not have sexual intent. So he admitted to putting the urine in the tea. He said, I put it

in the tea with the intention of getting revenge. So I wonder what this woman did to make him want to get

revenge on her because I’m betting the whole thing is in his head. Like maybe if I’m going to like

hypothesize he’s 30, she’s 20, I’m going to put money on, she’s attractive to him. He asked her out.

She said, no revenge. But someone rejecting you does not deserve revenge. This is a workplace.

Maybe she took credit for some of his work or she messed up some of his work or she made his work

increase in number or because she caused a problem and then he’s going for revenge. But I’ve never had

someone interfere in my work to such a degree where I was like the only possible solution is I’m going

to put urine into something they drink and then watch them drink it and feel a great deal of

satisfaction that they drank urine. I actually don’t think I would get that much satisfaction

from it either. The only way you get satisfaction from that is if they realize they’ve drunk urine

and I guess maybe part of it’s if they drank your urine. But I don’t think that would be the kind

of thing that would satisfy me. I want my, if I’m ever going to go for revenge, it’s going to be

applicable in the ways that you’ve been causing me trouble. So if you cause me trouble professionally,

you’re going to get revenge professionally. If you cause me trouble personally, I’m going to find a

way to get revenge personally. And I’m going to be, you know, slightly creative about it because I want

this to be satisfying for me. So I’m going to put a lot more thought into it then, oh, I’m going to pee in

a cup and put the pee into your tea and you’re going to drink the tea. Ha ha ha. Because to me,

that’s like a child. There’s, there’s no sort of finesse there in getting your revenge. The last

question I, I’m going to offer to you, the listener, if you want to write into chugmcbeefchest

at gmail .com or speakpipe .com slash chunkmcbeefchest to leave a voice message. Have you ever been pissed

enough? Ha ha, get pissed. Have you ever been pissed enough at someone to actually want to spike their

drink with your urine to make pee tea?

Sweet Potato Podcast

We have an update from two weeks ago. We had the guy who was drinking at a bar with a woman,

and he started getting her really drunk. And clearly, purposefully, he had her drink 32 shots.

And if I remember correctly, it was in a 90 -minute or a two -hour period. It was way

too short a time to be drinking that much. And I thought, like, 32 shots is a lot,

but how much is that? Because I have no idea. So I went and did the rough math, and it turns out

it’s two bottles of tequila. So he had this woman drink two bottles of tequila, and then when she

was getting sort of blackout drunk, he was dragging her essentially to a love hotel. Now, he claimed

when he was arrested that he was taking her to a love hotel so that he could take care of her,

where I think we all know the reality of what he was doing. He was getting her blackout drunk,

and he was fully intending to take advantage of the situation. He called the police because he

realized something’s gone terribly wrong. This woman is in a lot of trouble. So as a result

of this forced drinking, now the thing is, I don’t know how to say it. He forced her to drink,

but he didn’t force her to drink. He got her drunk, and then once she got so drunk,

she, of course, was more susceptible to drinking more. And she drank so much,

she actually died a few days later. I said at the end of the story that it’s clear what he was

intending to do. This was planned out. And as far as I was concerned, this was murder. Maybe not,

you know, first degree murder. I don’t actually know the Japanese system and what kinds of murder

they have in Japan, because I know America, North America has manslaughter, third, second,

and first degree murder. So manslaughter is essentially by accident. Third degree murder would

be in an act of passion, so not planned out. Second degree murder would be sort of premeditated,

and then first degree murder is like you’ve set up the whole situation. This was planned well in

advance. It was clear you had full intent to do the thing. He had a plan, which is why I think it

should certainly be something greater than manslaughter, probably second degree murder,

because he planned to get her that drunk. He didn’t realize he was going to kill her,

but he did plan to get her that drunk. And I said it would be a really good thing if he gets

severely punished. Now in Japan, a lot of these crimes, a lot of these guys, they kind of get away with it

because Japan’s very light on these crimes, but it seems to be taking small steps forward because

this man was given 14 years in prison. And the judge said it was because it was very clear that

he fully intended to rape this woman. But since he clearly intended to do this, this was all planned,

and so he should get severely punished. Prosecutors were asking for 16 years, so the judge didn’t give

him the full sentence, but he gave him a pretty good amount. It is very possible that you have heard of

Punch the Monkey. I have not talked about Punch the Monkey on Ninja News Japan because Punch the Monkey,

little monkey, very cute. Yeah, great. But not much of a story there. People love tragic little animals.

Punch the Monkey was rejected by his mother. And so the group, the family, the clan, I don’t know what

you call a pack of monkeys anymore. The group of monkeys had kind of rejected him. He was getting

a lot of sympathy for him. Fair enough. He’s a cute little monkey. It turns out last week, Punch got a

girlfriend. He was seen hanging out with a female Makau Monkey, just like nuzzling each other and taking

care of each other. And then one of the adult monkeys is actually sort of taking him under her

wing. So he’s actually getting some affection. Now, I did see a thing on the internet saying like,

Makau Monkeys are very strong. And if they wanted to actually hurt or kill Punch, they would have.

So they’re not doing as much as they could. If they wanted to hurt him, like really, really hurt him,

he would have been hurt. So they’re actually saying like, yes, this is social integration.

This is problematic. It’s tough. But they’re not actually like rejecting him to the point where he’s

actually in danger. But that’s all irrelevant because of course, with popularity on the internet

comes scams. And it’s just a very natural sort of one, two things. So Punch the Monkey got popular.

Therefore, people are like, how can I, as someone not related to this, take advantage of Punch the

Monkey and his popularity? And maybe I could make some money off it. Well, fake Instagram accounts

popped up. Fake X accounts popped up. Fake lots of accounts popped up. And they’re trying to get money,

basically. So the first one that came up was Instagram. And it was the care. He claimed to be

the caretaker of Punch. He says, I am the devoted caretaker of Punch. Here are pictures of Punch and me.

And it was all just recycled images from maybe the zoo or the news or things like that so that you

could actually get some pictures up there. Quickly increased to 80 ,000 followers. And there was a link.

And if you click the link, it was a link requesting donations to Punch, which was going to go directly to

this non -Punch related person who was then fully taking advantage of Punch. And then,

the first two stories may be very sad about people. Like a monkey can’t even be happy

without someone trying to take advantage of it. Can’t try. It’s bullshit.

Leave Punch alone. Don’t try to capitalize on Punch. Just leave the little monkey alone. He’s had a hard

time. The zoo is saying like, we’re not setting up this kind of account. If you want to donate,

you can donate to the zoo. That money goes as much to Punch as it does to every other animal in the zoo.

But we will never put up like a fundraising thing for a person. The implication of the Instagram

account was like, if this person, the caretaker got enough money, they were going to take Punch

out of the zoo and like raise them at home, which seems worse. Like monkeys should be raised with

monkeys. I had another question. I was reading all these stories and I was reading stories about Punch.

And I kind of had a sudden thought. I was like, why would you open a zoo? It seems like a weird

thing to open. Like just sitting around and be like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to

get animals that don’t belong in this climate and I’m going to bring them here. I’m going to,

it’s going to be really hard to take care of them, but I’m going to do that. Like I understand

devotion to animals and I understand science and things like that, but zoos, the more I think about

zoos seem like a really bad idea and not particularly beneficial. Like I guess, uh,

safari parks would, it would be better where the animals can roam around and stuff.

I went to the Nagoya zoo once and it had, uh, timber wolves and Nagoya in the summer,

like every day is like 32, 35, maybe 40 degrees. That’s really normal in the summertime. And it’s

super, super humid. I as a Canadian think I’m going to die constantly in the summer in Japan.

Timber wolves were not having a better time than me. They didn’t belong in this climate. They didn’t

belong any, any of these places. Just absolutely do not take timber wolves out of the mountains of

Canada and bring them to the hottest, one of the hottest summers in the world and just leave them

out. Cause they were just lying on the ground like, Oh my God, I’m going to die. I wish I was dead.

It was that kind of thing. I felt so bad for those timber wolves. A 63 year old, uh, government

employee submitted a time off request. Very normal thing to submit. You want to take some time off.

It’s your right as an employee, certainly as one of the government of Japan. Uh, he wanted more than

100 days off to take a cruise. So you can see where the issue is. This guy’s like, Hey, I want to take

off a big chunk of the year, like one third of the year so that I can go on a cruise that goes around

the world. Uh, his supervisor apparently seems to have lost his mind over this. The supervisor

verbally warmed him a super, his supervisor verbally warned him twice, issued two written warnings and

advised him to quit twice. So he’s had at least six meetings where his supervisor is like, no, I don’t

want you to take a hundred days off. No, you’re not taking a hundred days off. Here’s a written piece

of paper that says, do not take 100 days off. And I I’m telling you, it would be better if you quit

than to take a hundred days off. Do not take a hundred days off. This guy’s like, you know what

I’m going to do? Go take a hundred days off. He said this man, I will not submit a resignation letter.

And then went on his holiday. He’s like, yeah, you can fire me if you want to fire me for taking a

hundred days off. But the fact that you want me to quit actually tells me you probably can’t fire me for

this, which means I can take my time off and there’s very little you could do about it. And

we all love to kind of stick into supervisors. Those supervisors comes up like, that’s what you

get, man, because I don’t care about you. I’m taking my cruise around the world. He went to 10

countries, including Singapore, South Africa, and the United States. So you can see like he was kind

of doing like a Southern hemisphere tour around the world. That’s pretty cool. He had a four day work

week. So this is a man who, when he hit 60, retired and was hired on essentially part

time. But four days a week is like very, you know, it’s more than just part time, but he’s

got a four day work week. So he has a four day work weeks taking that into account. He

has accrued vacation days. So in total, when he returned, he had taken 109 days off in total,

but it only missed 14 days of work. So the question then is, can you actually fire someone

for missing 14 days of work? Now in America, where it’s like at will kind of stuff, you could

probably fire him for sneezing at the wrong time. In Japan, you have very strong labor laws. So you

can’t just fire people. You need to be able to prove things and justify it. It’s actually very

difficult to fire an employee who has had multiple contracts. This guy has been working at this

government agency for 20 years, making him a long -term employee, making him very difficult to

fire. And so they’ve decided that he’s going to finish out his contract this year. But when it gets to

the renewal, so when you get past 65 and you’re rehired in this kind of situation as a retiree,

you get a one -year contract that gets renewed every year. They have decided to not renew his

next contract after this fiscal year. The man, when they spoke to him said, these are the facts

and I do not intend to dispute them. So he’s like, yeah, I took a hundred days off because I wanted

to take a hundred days off. They want to fire me for that. They want to not hire me back.

Man, I’m retired anyways. I don’t care. Trump wants Japan to send ships to the Strait of Hormuz.

And I mean, this is, he wants everyone to take care of this problem that he’s created.

The Japanese prime minister, Takeiichi, just recently went to America and spoke to the

president. He made that really weird Pearl Harbor joke, which I don’t think was a joke because it

wasn’t funny. I don’t think he gets what humor is. The people who defend him who say he’s making

jokes. I’m like, I don’t think you guys get jokes. He’s not, he’s just saying offensive things.

That’s not a joke. That’s not humor, but I don’t know what to do about that.

The problem really is the Japanese prime minister is bound by rules. So it seems like America

with Trump in charge has done away with the rule of law. So he, Trump just does what he wants. He

started this war without Congress’s approval. That would never happen in Japan. And that is one

of the things I like about Japan. It’s just previous story where we had like, there are legal rail

guards on how you can and can’t fire people. And there’s protection for workers’ rights. And that’s

why people can keep jobs even when they have a disagreement with their boss or something like

that. Those are good for society because it means that people just average people don’t get abused as

much, which is a good thing. Abusing the military is a very similar situation. You have Trump. He’s

start taking troops, airplanes, whatever, sent them to the Middle East. And he’s just like

killing kids by blowing up schools. I do like the way they claimed that they didn’t blow up the

school with the missile that they own that probably no other country has. Certainly not one in that

region. When Takeuchi comes, she would actually have to get permission. She couldn’t just like move

ahead without the permission of the government. She couldn’t actually like, she would have to get a

vote to actually make something like this happen. If she wanted to send, let’s say, destroyers to the

Strait of Hormuz and actually like aid in America’s efforts, which she, I would bet deep down inside,

doesn’t want to do. Because while America and Iran have a very negative relationship,

Iran and Japan actually have a relatively positive relationship because they buy a lot of oil in

Japan from Iran directly. So they’re good customers and they don’t want to mess up that relationship.

Some Japanese oil tankers have been allowed to go through the Strait of Hormuz, whereas American

tankers would not be able to go. And again, that is the soft power that Japan is trying to build.

A lot of Asian countries are now, strong Asian countries are trying to compete in soft power

politics. So China is doing a lot of like rebuilding of infrastructure in Africa. Japan goes around,

does a lot of humanitarian and aid projects because when you get to a situation like this,

they’re like, oh yeah, we’re going to blow up any American tanker that comes through. We’re trying

to get America’s oil. And then they’re like, oh, but those Japanese guys, they were really nice to

us before. We’re going to let them go because they’re cool. And that’s what soft power is. When you get to a

situation like this, you have the ability to sort of deal with the political difficulties of having

two of your associates fighting. Takeji was noncommittal and said, no decision has been

made on whether to send any destroyers, which is basically the closest thing to saying we are not

going to send any destroyers. The other interesting part is this is also the same government that actually

took real time to discuss the legality of should the self -defense force in Japan be sent in should

a Godzilla -like occurrence happen, like incident. So if Godzilla came up, are we legally allowed to

use the self -defense force was an actual discussion they had. Now that’s hypothetical. It’s just for fun,

but they were actually saying like the real legalities of it because the self -defense force can only be

deployed against an invading attacker, someone with intent. And as Godzilla does not represent a nation,

he is not attacking in that way. So legally the self -defense force should not be deployed.

But if you take in a different way of thinking and see Godzilla as a natural phenomenon,

the self -defense force, the self -defense force can be deployed to actually, you know, support and

fight back against, you don’t really fight back against tsunamis and tornadoes and storms and stuff.

But in this case, you would actually, you could legally justify it by saying that Godzilla is an

act of nature. But the fact that they had that kind of conversation defining the legalities of this

completely irrelevant situation shows how seriously they take the actual issues of legality, which again

is one of the reasons why Japan is at this moment a better country than America.

Train delays happen in Japan all the time. It’s very frustrating. I actually had the

trains on the route I take to go into work reduced, which is very frustrating because sometimes I have

late shifts and then they’ve actually, some of the routes, they only have two trains an hour.

And it’s just, it’s just killing me because I either have to show up super early or just on time.

And I don’t like that. I like to have a little buffer, but of course I don’t want to go in 30 minutes,

40 minutes early just because it’s the only way I can ensure I catch a train.

Train delays though are usually storms, weather. The trains do stop a lot. Like you get heavy rain

and the trains will stop. It’s very frustrating. 7 .30 at night, a 56 year old man was frustrated.

A 56 year old. Again, we hit this number. All these stories, it’s 50 year old dudes. 50 year old

dudes are losing it. I’m in my 50s and I’m thinking, I’m waiting for the day. I just lose it. And I think

my behavior is okay. And I’m just doing something absolutely insane. And then I have to sit down at this

desk and then do a story about myself. That would be super interesting. Like talking about

how I did something because I’m an insane 50 year old man. He was frustrated that the train was delayed

and to express his frustration, he didn’t, you know, send a message because that’s not going to do

anything. He didn’t do a protest or anything. He did what any sensible person would do. He took an

exacto knife and started slashing the chair he was sitting on because damaging the chair is of course

going to make the train go faster and get you home on time. He was arrested and then stated,

I’ve done it 50 to 60 times. Now, Ninja News Japan, very famous for giving criminals advice. But if you

are arrested by the police on a charge of one thing, do not then turn around to the police and

start bragging about how many more times you’ve done this. Because it turns out there have been 300

incidences of chairs being slashed on the train, the seats of the train being slashed. So this guy

just claimed that he alone has committed 17 % of all the vandalisms on trains when it comes to seat

slashing. Because he admitted it, they’re going to take that as fact. Like maybe he’s exaggerated the

number, maybe not. We don’t know. But at the end of the day, the police will be like, well,

you’ve admitted to 50 to 60. So let’s take you with the low number 50. And now you’re going to get 50

charges instead of one. Keep your mouth shut. But this is again, sort of the issue with these 50

year old dudes is they’re never, they think anything they say is okay. They’ve just got this mindset

that what they can do no wrong. So they’re always running their mouth and saying stuff they shouldn’t

say and getting themselves in more trouble. And I think we need collars on every 50 year old man in

the world that we can just start zapping them when they sort of get out of hand.

So there’s a 12 year old kid, and he’s hanging out. And he is a mutual friend who is also friends with

a 22 year old member of the Marine Self -Defense Force. He works on a submarine. And he tells this

acquaintance, hey, you can park your motorcycle here. And then the motorcycle gets removed by the police

because you’re not allowed to park it there. So at two, between 1 .30 and two in the morning, the 22 year old

Marine Self -Defense man goes to the kid and says, I want you to go to an ATM and get 300 ,000 yen out.

That’s like a month’s salary. Get 300 ,000 yen out and give it to me as sort of compensation for the

motorcycle being taken. Not his motorcycle, by the way, this other person’s motorcycle. And then I had

this weird thought when I was reading it, like, what is this kid, 12 year old kid doing out at 1 .30 in the

morning in a park, having an altercation with an adult? Like, he should be at home in bed and not out at 1 .30

in the morning. There seems to be some parenting issues going on. But the kid doesn’t seem to have

actually done anything wrong. He was just, he said something and that something turned out to not be true.

I think that’s still on the adults in the picture. The guy who has the motorcycle clearly is old enough

to have a driving license. This guy’s 22 years old. They’re technically adults, even though they’re

clearly not acting like adults. So he says to the kid, give me 300 ,000 yen. Also, my boss is a Yakuza.

So if you tell the police about this, we will burn down your house and kill your parents. So that’s

very threatening. The kid does a very sensible thing. He goes to his dad and says, hey, this guy

says I need to give him 300 ,000 yen or he’ll burn down our house because he’s a Yakuza. So the dad does

the very sensible thing of calling the police and the man’s arrested. When the man was arrested,

he said, I don’t remember clearly, but I think I did say something threatening, which again, my man,

dude, don’t say that. Go like, I’ve never spoken to this kid. I’ve never said any threatening to this

kid. There’s no record of what you did and didn’t say. So don’t admit you said something threatening.

Just say, oh no, he must’ve misinterpreted what I was saying. He’s a little kid. He’s out at one

o ‘clock in the morning. Maybe we could like turn the, uh, reframe it that way. Like, why is this kid out

here? And maybe I’m going to get off when I get charged with my 50 year old crime. I think I’m

going to be able to get off by just not saying any of the things I’ve learned that these guys have

said. He absolutely thought he was the main character. He absolutely thought he could just

say whatever you want and get away with it. He thought he could get a 12 year old to give him

300 ,000 yen. There’s a very good chance that 12 year olds don’t have 300 ,000 yen. They might not even

have a bank account yet. Uh, you get like Christmas money and stuff, but he might be one of those kids

who just spends it and doesn’t have a penny to his name. I don’t know what you’re thinking.

A 17 year old girl posted on social media saying she was looking for papakatsu. Papakatsu

is the, I was about to say Japanese tradition. It’s not. It’s when it’s, it’s called compensated

dating. It’s like, I’m old, creepy man and I pay a young woman money and she will go on a date with

me. And that date does include certain expectations is maybe the nicest way to say it of what will

happen. This girl posted, you give me a hundred thousand yen. We’ll go to a hotel together.

And I think again, the implications there are all you need to know. That is papakatsu.

This 36 year old guy says, yeah, let’s do that. Let’s meet and then do things. And then they did

and they met and they did things. Uh, but then he didn’t pay the money, which puts the woman,

the girl puts the girl in a weird situation because she’s had the transactional part, but she hasn’t

actually gotten paid for her services. So she goes to the police and tells them I was not paid

by this man. Uh, the man was arrested. He admitted to it violating the child prostitution law. Uh, but

then there was no mention of what happened to the girl. And I’m assuming because she’s underage,

she was not punished at all. Maybe warned. Maybe they told her parents, maybe something like that.

But 17 is like almost an adult. So it’s weird for her to get away with it. So I actually,

I kind of want to know, like, I don’t know what I think should happen here.

Like, should the girl be punished? Maybe that’s something for the listeners. So send in,

do you believe there should be punishment for the girl? Maybe counseling. All the girls who do this

seem to be just in it for the money. They, they, they don’t actually care about the relationships.

They just want money and they find this is the easiest way to get money. Yeah. Re -educated. So

counseling therapy. I agree. I don’t think she should be like punished, punished, but I think

there is a big problem there. And this is a really common phenomenon in Japan. Compensated dating is a

really common thing. And it actually, again, takes people down some really sort of dark alleys of life.

And if we could turn that around, that would be really beneficial.

Money really is tight, even for kids.

Okay. So that’s off topic before I start this story. Uh, it is, and it isn’t. The thing is they

primarily do this to buy luxury goods. And in this story, I didn’t actually mention it,

but she said she wanted the money to go to underground idol concerts. So she wanted to

basically support bands that she liked. So she would go to the concert, pay for the concert,

and then buying goods supports the band. And this is why she was doing this compensated

dating. Yeah. So like you want a new phone, you want a bag. I mean, a lot of this is about fashion

stuff. You want clothes, you go on compensated dating. They do again, like the guys, I don’t

know if she’s actually going to get a hundred thousand yen, but they agree to that kind of

number. What happened to part time? Uh, again, these kids that, how much money are you going to make

it a part -time job at, uh, at seven 11, let’s say it’s not going to be a hundred thousand yen

in a two hour period. It’s that kind of problem because the money’s there and the creepy old men

are there and they’re the ones who have money. I mean, that’s actually, I think the scariest part

is the creepy old dudes who have money. Speaking of creepy old dudes, stalking cases have been a

record high in 2025 and 2000, they introduced the anti -stalking laws in Japan. So before that,

before 2000, if you had a stalker, there was no law actually saying that was a problem,

but they’ve actually found it was a problem. It was growing. So they created this law in

two, 2024, there were 205 cases in 2025. There were 1 ,546 cases. Uh, tasers would be illegal.

That’s actually one of the problems. And so this, this massive increase in stalking cases is actually

showing, uh, mace. I believe there’s basically anything that’s designed to hurt another person

has significant legal restrictions in Japan. I can’t tell you the law off the top of my head.

I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to walk around with mace. You’re not really supposed to walk around

with anything that dangerous to other people. A couple of times I’ve said on the show, you’re not

allowed to walk around with a knife unless you have a purpose. So if I have a knife with me for,

let’s say, uh, fish gutting, I would have to be going fishing or going to a restaurant to gut fish

to be legally allowed to carry that knife. If I just had a knife in my bag, that’s illegal. So

self -protection in Japan, isn’t a good enough reason to carry any sort of offensive weapon.

I’m a little torn on that one too. Cause I do think women need like me. I think mace, pepper spray,

women should be allowed to carry that. I think maybe let’s say men can’t, but I don’t know. Is that,

is that okay? Is that enough? It’s the creepy men I’m worried about having done this show for as long

as I have now, I’m more worried about creepy men than I am about anyone else. Uh, so my question

for the stalking increase is, so if it went from 200 to 1500, it’s a massive, massive increase,

like multiples, exponential increase. Is it, are there more stalkers or is it people are more comfortable

reporting stalkers? And I actually think it was a combination. I bet because of social media

and the way people can form parasocial relationships with people and they think they know each other,

they are, there is probably more stalking cases and technology is making it easier to stalk people.

But also I think because the anti -stalking laws are now getting more media attention,

people are more comfortable going to the police and, you know, trying to get people to stop stalking

them. Uh, illegal entries into home, which is connected to anti -stalking laws, went from 428 to 2 ,171.

Restraining orders top 3000 for the first time, uh, last year they went, or 2024, there were 622,

2025, there were 3037. So again, I think this is a combination of it’s happening more, but people

are also fighting back more, which is good. And not using the legal system this way is the way it’s

supposed to be used. In 2024, oh, this is totally unrelated. It was just another number that threw out

there. In 2024, they introduced a law that you’re not allowed to ride your bicycle drunk.

23 licenses were suspended for cycling drunk. And in 2025, it was 1507. I recently got a bicycle and I’m

going to be very careful about not drinking and riding my bicycle. And also I’m going to do my best

not to stalk anybody. It’s my resolution for 2026. A sweet potato van was driving with a sweet potato van

driver. Uh, and what a sweet potato van is, is a van. It’s like a food truck in the back has a thing

that cooks the sweet potatoes. So you can basically, they drive around towns really slowly and they play

a song. It’s like, Hey, come out and buy your sweet potato. Come out and buy. I don’t know what the song

is. Uh, I was just going to do a sweet potato song for you a little bit, but it’s just going to get

worse. So they drive around town. There’s a little jingly bell. Come out, buy your sweet potatoes,

come get some sweet potatoes. People come out, truck stops and they get the sweet potato. It’s

nice and hot because it’s being cooked in the back. They’ll have like a festival. They’ll stop at the

festival, cook the sweet potatoes right in front of you. Great sweet potatoes. Everyone loves a sweet

potato. They’re sweet. Unfortunately, that means there’s like a heating element in the back of the

truck. And this sweet potato truck was driving around and the back caught on fire. Now it was,

it seemed like it started on the highway. So I’m actually wondering if the wind increased the heat

and started the fire. And then because they were driving, the fire picked up. We have amazing video

of this sweet potato truck barreling through the city because the driver was like, well,

I got to do something. I can’t just like let my sweet potato van burn. And he drove as fast as he

could to the nearest fire station. And in that fire station, he was able to park the firemen. Hey,

this is what we do. They came out to put the fire right away. Now the back of the truck is actually

ruined and all the sweet potatoes are gone, but no one got hurt. So I’m trying to decide if that was

the right thing to do. The fire department said, what you have to do is pull over, get out of the

van and try to make sure everything’s safe. But if you’re in a city and that fire somehow spreads to

the houses, you can actually start like a multiple house fire. So did he do the right thing? Did he do

the wrong thing? I don’t know. So there’s now two questions I would like listeners to respond to.

And this one is, do you think the sweet potato driver did the right thing? Driving the van on fire,

massive flames to the fire station, or should he have pulled off and then called emergency services

and have them come to him?

Golden Crotch

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.

Political Missteps

(upbeat music)

So Ninja Ninja Japan is here.

We have not disappeared.

We have not disappeared because we
have not been crushed by an earthquake.

We haven’t been crushed by an earthquake
because the prediction by the mangaka

that on the 5th, the 4th, 5th, I
forget, that’s how unimportant it is.

On the 4th or 5th, that there was
going to be a massive earthquake.

So if you remember in the last episode,

we talked about there was
a manga and in her manga,

this woman had dreams and
she would just draw her dreams.

And she predicted the Fukushima disaster.

She predicted the earthquake
and it would be a big, big disaster.

Then she predicted that this year on
the 5th, there was going to be another one.

And it was going to be at
four o’clock in the morning

and it was going to make
Fukushima look like nothing.

Well, guess what happened?

Nothing.

So this is maybe one of the problems
is when people make predictions

and those predictions
are coincidentally accurate,

other people see that as
something they should believe.

People from Hong Kong, specifically in
Taiwan, were canceling their flights to Japan

because of this prediction that was made
in a manga that this weekend on the 5th,

there was going to be a massive
earthquake and destroyed Japan.

Like the way it made it sound like
Fukushima was just like the warmup.

This was going to be the big event.

And then nothing happened.

But people don’t remember the prediction
where it doesn’t actually come true.

They just move on and
they look for the coincidences

and the prediction
where it actually happens.

So what you should do is
not believe any predictions or I

should just make a new job
where I start making predictions.

And eventually you make enough volume.

You’re going to get one
or two that are accurate.

And then people will think you’re prescient

and you can actually
tell the future and stuff.

That’s really dumb.

Don’t believe any of that.

(upbeat music)

That being said, don’t
believe in something.

I don’t believe in like
tarot cards or readings.

I don’t believe in astrology
or any of that stuff.

It’s very hard to say
that like everyone born

at the same time has
the same personality traits

because I have met people
born within the same timeframe

who did not have the same
personality traits as I do.

But one of my students actually said
that she has a friend who can read auras.

And I’m really interested.

So I said, can you take my
picture and then have my aura read?

And then I tried to make sure
I had a completely flat face.

No emotion, no expression at all.

So that I could get a completely
neutral reading of my aura.

I’m very excited to see what
my aura actually ends up being.

I don’t know how long this will take.

This is certainly not going to
be a priority in my student’s life.

They may just forget.

They might look in like I
have a really weird picture

of my teacher on my phone of him
just staring blankly at the camera.

But should that occur, I’m very
excited to find out what my aura is.

I have, I did for a while.

The problem was I actually
watched one on TikTok.

It had a tarot reading where they’re
like, oh, if you came across this video,

it was just, it was the
universe reaching out

and has a message for you
and they’d read your tarot.

And I found that interesting,
completely inaccurate.

So I don’t know if I
actually get the results.

Should I get the results?

I will share the one in his new
Japan, and I’ll let him actually said this.

And then if you’ve listened
to an in his new Japan

for the last 350 episodes
or however many we’ve done,

you can then say like,
I’ve gotten this sense

of what Chonk maybe have
just is as a person who he is.

And then is the aura reading
accurate in my opinion or feeling?

Or maybe it like brings
out some dark inner secret

that you don’t actually know about.

That would be
interesting in itself as well.

It is the beginning of a political
season in Japan and Japan.

They do their politics in, there’s
good points and bad points.

The good points is it’s
a very short set period.

It’s like a couple weeks.

You can do sort of your speeches.

You can put up your posters.

You can do it during
this period and not before,

and not after, and
otherwise it’s sort of illegal.

That is good, keeping it limited.

So in America when it’s
like a two, three year long

process leading up, it
means like politicians

who are supposed to be
in doing their jobs politically

are actually like campaigning
and stuff half the time.

That means they’re not doing their job.

So Japan’s kept it down to a couple
weeks a month or something like that.

But the bad side is it
means they give speeches.

Those speeches tend to
be standing on top of a van

make with loudspeakers just completely
annoying everyone around them.

I’ve actually been in
the office where I work.

The way the political
speeches work in Japan,

they get on top of a van,
they get loud speakers,

and they just boom,
those as loud as they can.

Because almost seems like
there’s no noise laws in Japan.

Because I’ve been in my
office in like three blocks away,

you can hear the speech happening on
the corner with some low level politician.

Also, they drive around
and they don’t say speeches.

They have these vans, they drive around

and they just say the politicians
name over and over again.

And they go like,
“Toshio Suzuki.

” “Toshio Suzuki.

” “Toshios,” they just do that
over and over and over again.

And again, with these,
we’re incredibly familiar.

This is the closest I’ve
wanted to come to getting a gun

to shoot something ’cause I
would love to shoot those speakers.

I guess the idea is that if they
can get a name into your head

when I go to vote and I
don’t have a particularly strong

political stance, I’ll just vote for
the name I remember the most.

I’m hoping that’s not how politics works,

but it does seem to be, since a
lot of the parties are very similar,

it does seem to be like
the very small differences

between the differences
between the groups.

But since we have
speech time, the other good

point for an engineer’s
Japan as a podcast means

we have comments by
politicians trying to get attention.

And I don’t have to finish most of these.

I could just start them
and that would be enough.

And weirdly, all the controversial comments

seem to be coming from the
right side of the political spectrum.

But we have the Democratic
Party for the people.

I find the names of the
parties to be kind of dystopian.

It’s almost like if I was going
to write a dystopian future story

and I needed political party names,

I would use the names sort of
like the ones they have in Japan.

The Democratic Party for the people leader

was asked why his party
receives little support from women.

I don’t think I need to go much further
for you to actually like fill in the blanks

for what a Japanese traditional
conservative right-wing person

is going to say, but
we might as well say

it ’cause we might as
well get it out there.

I think our policy is good, not
only for men, but also women.

But I think it’s very difficult
to understand for them.

So, so the dude is saying, why
don’t women support your party?

And he goes, well, ’cause
they’re kind of dumb.

And then he wonders why this is a problem.

So of course the next day he had to come
up with a apology saying he like misspoke.

I regret that I used a poor expression.

I had no intention of being misogynistic.

Well, it’s an interesting
thing ’cause I don’t

think misogynists ever
intend to be misogynistic.

I think that’s just where they go.

He did say I’m not good in English.

So he does have a little out.

These comments specifically
were made in English.

And he’s saying he’s not good in English.

So he’s actually made a mistake.

But I’m gonna go ahead and
say, if you’re not good at English,

you should not be making political
statements with any sort of subtlety.

But let’s move on to
some other political parties.

We have the leader of the Sensato Party.

And he decided to one up our previous
friend from the People’s Democratic Party.

He was saying that only
young women can have children.

When I say it, some people call
discrimination, but it’s just biological fact.

This is a very Japan first party.

They are against
immigration and they are very

worried about the decline
in population in Japan.

Now it was interesting.

They had a YouTube channel going
and as he started making these comments,

the YouTube channel
just went to a colored bar.

So it’s like they had
an issue with their feet.

But then what it actually, they claim
it was because of the extreme heat

because they were
actually filming this outside.

And it’s very hot in Japan.

I actually just said, I’m
very hard trying to start.

I’m very hard trying to start.

I’m very hot trying to
start the podcast today.

Of course, they came to follow up.

I think this might have been just a court
some controversy to get some attention.

That’s actually what I feel happened there.

So he started making
controversial comments.

They cut it off.

Made it seem like maybe
someone else cut them off.

But then of course,
someone came up a reporter

came and actually
challenged him a little bit

and he said, you know, with
modern medicine and care,

women into their forties can
quite easily still have babies.

Four women in their 60s and
70s, it remains extremely difficult.

Which I would say is factually correct.

There is another issue.

I don’t know.

I don’t want to speak for
women in their 60s and 70s,

but certainly as someone in their fifties,
I do not want to start having children now.

If I had a child now, I would be in
my 70s when that child turned 20,

which means you know,
throughout my 50s and 60s,

I’d be doing the young
energetic time for children

and the teen times
when it’s maybe difficult.

If I was in my 60s and 70s, that’s not
when I would want to start having kids.

So again, I don’t want
to speak for other people,

but I think a lot of people at the same
age might be sharing a similar opinion.

Now pop that baby out, make that happen.

  • Dude, it was just, it’s the
    exhaustment, the exhaustion, exhaustment.

I’m not even doing English good today.

I’m like that guy in the previous story.

It’s the exhaustion of
having newborns and babies

and little kids in the
energy that goes with it.

I don’t think people in their 50s,
60s and 70s want that anymore.

I want to just relax.

I’m really glad my kids are of age
where they’re leaving the house now.

The interesting part is,
even though he’s doing this

in a horrible way, he actually
had some points I agree with.

And the points, and this is again, trying
to differentiate, you know, controversy,

opinion, reality, fact, things like that,
he was saying, we need to make a society

where young women are
comfortable having babies.

And I think that’s true.

I just want to take out the young part.

I think if you want to have babies,

we need to make a
society where you are

comfortable and feel
supported in having babies.

I agree with that aspect of his statement.

I just don’t agree with what or how
he was saying any of the other stuff.

Let’s move on, NHK party.

NHK party has been a fan favorite on Ninja
New Japan because they created a party.

It’s kind of a 50% joke
party, 50% serious party.

So they’re always doing stuff.

The leader of the party
last year was attacked with a

machete, not by a foreigner,
but by a Japanese citizen.

He said, oh, he put on a mega hat.

So that’s already giving
you a sense of where he is

in the world, and he started his
speech with, “I’m afraid of foreigners.

” There’s a problem now.

I realize if I’m doing quotes

and someone clips the bit
with the quote and no context,

I could actually get in trouble,
but I’m afraid of foreigners.

You might not feel as
much fear with white people.

So that was like his intro to his speech.

You know it was gonna
get better after that.

It’s scary when groups of black people

or people with Islamic
background gather and frolic

in front of the station, I do have
to admit, I like the word frolic.

I mean, I gotta admit, people
frolicing sounds like a good time.

He says they don’t understand Japanese,
you don’t know if they understand Japanese,

so it’s scary to have those kind of
people hanging around the station.

This is a man who has
promoted genocide as a solution to

overpopulation, but he’s also
part of a non-serious party.

So it’s really hard to take
any of his statement seriously.

I think again, he just courts controversy

by just saying whatever
he thinks he can say

and get away with, just
saying stuff to see what sticks.

This is the same group
that last year was like,

let’s put up porn posters instead of our
regular posters to try to get more attention

and they sold their sort of
advertising space to people

who just wanted to put up
pictures of their dogs and stuff.

And that actually created a new law
where you’re not allowed to do that.

So that actually might be the strategy.

Let’s just see how far we can push the
limits and then see what happens after.

One more speech we have
to look at and that is the

conservative party of Japan
talking again about foreign people.

There is a big concern.

And the big concern is
that the Japanese population

is in decline and we
need to fix that problem.

But the one thing we don’t
want is foreigners coming in

and actually intermixing
with Japanese people

and Japanese culture and
having babies and stuff like that.

They don’t want me because I came
to Japan and I produced two offspring.

So if you take myself and
my wife out of the equation,

we’ve actually produced one child
to replace my wife and one child extra

because I don’t count
because I’m a foreigner.

But we have increased
the population of Japan

and they’re like,
that’s not the solution

because those kids,
they’re not pure Japanese.

They don’t understand Japanese culture.

This is the irony is that
these kids who are born

and raised in Japan are
as Japanese as kids get.

That’s not the point of
what we’re talking about.

The conservative party of Japan

really bland title compared to
all the other ones, but whatever.

Foreign people disrespect Japanese culture,

ignore the rules, assault
Japanese people, and steal.

In Northern Kanto, there
are towns that are no gosones.

I now absolutely want
to find one of these no

gosones and go to them
because as a foreigner,

I might be able to go there
and go to the no gosone.

But these statements under Japanese law

because they are so clear actually
can be construed as hate speech.

So the leader of the conservative party may
have committed hate speech in his speech,

which may actually end up getting
him in real trouble down the line.

(upbeat music)

It’s good to learn about scams.

It’s good to learn about scams because
know that what scams are out there

and how the scams work
and how they kind of get you.

So there is a, it’s called the
adult site cancellation fee scam.

And I hadn’t actually heard about this one.

So what happens is a man saw a thumbnail
on his smartphone and he pushed the button.

And that was probably his first mistake.

And you can only go, you can go to
trusted sites if that’s what you’re into.

I’m not actually like King
Shaming or judging anyone

for their sexuality or
their viewing habits.

If you wanna look at
that and it’s all legal and

above board, I got zero
problems with it, you do you.

But gotta be careful.

The adult site cancellation fee
scam means you’ve pressed a pop up.

Oh, you’ve pressed a
thumbnail and then there’s a

pop up and the pop up
says registration completed.

Now, in that there is also another sub
button that says accidental registration

and then you click that button
you’re provided with a number.

Well, that number and
you say I have accidentally

registered at your site
to cancel your registration.

You have to temporarily register

and then you can sort of
unregister your registration.

And this costs 450,000 yen.

Now, I would take a pause right there

because if I pushed a
button on the, on my phone,

there is a, I guess a suspicion that
maybe they got my credit card number.

But there’s no way they’re
gonna get a 450,000 yen

charged through and then there’s a promise
of a full refund after the processing.

So basically you give them 450,000 yen.

They then cancel your
membership that you just

created and then you
get your 450,000 yen back.

If it’s 450,000 yen, that must
be the best porn in the world.

So I actually, if I was getting
told that this is a 450,000 yen

thing that I’ve just registered for
and I haven’t actually paid anything

and I could call my credit card company
and I actually blocked that payment.

I might wanna take a look around
and see if there is any actual porn.

Worth 450,000 yen in that
website, which I’m betting or isn’t.

But what of course happens then?

The victim goes through the
450,000 process, sends them e-money.

So again, they didn’t ask for
money, they didn’t ask for credit card.

They were like, go to
the convenience store,

get Apple pay cards or some
other kind of Amazon pay cards.

450,000 yen worth and then read
us the numbers over the phone.

So if anything, if they’re not
doing through credit cards,

I think that’s it ’cause they
don’t have your information.

If they need you to go buy
a card and then send you the

information on that card, they
don’t have your information.

So that should be the
first piece of information

we send out into
the world right there.

If a scammer, you don’t know their
scammer, you think they’re legitimate.

But if they’re asking you
to send them money via

cards, it means they
don’t have your information

which means they can’t
get any money from you.

There’s also the question of like, if
an older person or this person comes in

and goes to buy 450,000 yen worth
of cards from a convenience store,

the staff should be like, whoa
dude, you’re getting scammed.

Now there’s been a couple of
really sort of feel good stories

of convenience store workers
or banker workers and stuff

and they’ve actually
stopped scams this way.

Yes, unfortunately a lot of
older people fall for these,

but that means if an older person,
again, we can’t make people do this.

But if an older person
came to a convenience store

and said, hey, I would like
450,000 yen and Apple pay cards,

you might wanna stop and go,
hey, I know it’s none of my business,

but what for because
I think you really need

to rethink who you’re
sending this money to?

Now the reason the porn scam
works more than anything else

is because the porn scam
comes with the shame

of anyone finding out
that you look at porn.

I once got one of those
emails, when it was a

new thing, I got one of
those emails that said,

hey, we accessed your
webcam while you were jerking off

to porn, we have the
video if you don’t send

his Bitcoin, we’re going
to release the video.

I actually told to my wife
saying, look at how bad this is,

and she goes, yeah,
because if they actually got

a porn video of you jerking off to porn,

you would have no problem with it
being disseminated on the internet.

Like, there’s no way I’d pay for that.

I actually might actually tell my friends,

hey, I got caught in this
porn, everyone check it out.

So she actually was like, yeah,
they’ve tried to scam the wrong person

with the wrong thing because you’re
just like, yeah, go ahead, man, I’m down.

I would just post the link on the internet.

It would be in my link tree the next day.

I have thought about
putting an engineer’s

Japan on only fans,
’cause I stream it, right?

And I can do a stream.

I stream on Twitch and Kick.

I have actually been thinking like,

maybe I should like try
stream Twitch Kick in OnlyFans,

which would just be funny, not because
I think I would actually get footing there.

I don’t get footing anywhere, but it
would be funny just to have that happen.

Maybe someone watches on OnlyFans.

It would be fun to have only fans account.

I think that’s actually more than anything.

Maybe I should drop, ’cause I
don’t wanna overwhelm my internet.

That’s actually the thing that I
would be most concerned about.

So I should stick with Twitch,
’cause I have a core group of friends

that are actually on Twitch,
that I actually do enjoy talking to,

not Carson Uw, I’m not
really done with that guy.

But starting an OnlyFans and
have people come in from OnlyFans

would be really funny, but
we’re not gonna do that right now.

It is something that’s popped
into my head more than once,

so you know that actually
seed has been implanted.

They call back the next day saying
they haven’t received the refund.

The next day, the scammer
demanded 400,000 yen saying

they had been registered
at a different site,

so they actually had to
make an account on that site

so then they could process the refund
and then get them the actual refund.

This is one the guy was like, look,
I’m clearly being scammed at this point.

Maybe the first one was legitimate,

but then just asking again
and not giving my money back

before, I’m being
scammed, goes to the police.

The problem is, they can’t catch him.

Because he sent the codes from the cards,

there’s no way they
can actually trace that.

So in this case, the
person actually got away,

I don’t want to embarrass
the person who actually was

the victim of this kind of
crime of victim of scams,

but I think it is really important for
scams to be disseminated information-wise,

so everyone can recognize
when a scam is occurring.

(upbeat music)

Another way to recognize a
scam is when you’re talking

to an incredibly famous
person and then they ask you

for money because
it’s weird if they’re that

famous and have that
much more money than you.

A man and a father posed as Shohei Otani

to try to scam an 80-year-old
woman out of money.

Shohei Otani has more money
than anyone else in the world.

That’s not true, it’s an excited,
but you know what I mean.

Shohei Otani is probably one of the
highest paid baseball players in the world.

So him asking you for any
kind of money is problematic.

There’s no way he’s going
to be asking you for money.

He doesn’t need money,
he doesn’t need your help.

So the way they did this,
they found her on Facebook

and then they connected to her via Facebook
and then got her to move over to line.

Line is the chat system on your phone.

They talked to her over several
months, so they were putting the work in.

I mean, most scammers are very lazy and
they bailed really quick if it doesn’t work.

But, someone is willing to put in the work.

I mean, you gotta have a little
respect for the dedication to the scam.

They said, as Shohei
Otani, I’m the best in the

world, so my insurance
premiums are really high.

I’ve paid tens of millions
of yen, but it’s not enough.

I want you to pay me 1
million yen in premiums.

Why would Shohei
Otani ask an 80 year old

woman for a million yen
to cover his premiums?

It just doesn’t make sense.

Now, there’s older woman,
don’t know her situation.

She might just be enjoying the attention.

She might actually believe it.

She might be in some stages of dementia.

There’s no way we
know the actual situation,

so I have a lot more
sympathy for the victim

in this place because it might
have just been the connection,

the attention that she
was just desperate for,

which is how you get a
lot of these older people.

She called him.

She, so online has a telephone
function, so you can actually call people.

She tried to call him multiple times.

They would avoid it by
saying the game is about

to start, so I can’t answer
the phone right now,

because of course, these
were not Japanese people,

so maybe their Japanese
wasn’t going to be as perfect

as Shohei Otani, so if they
actually got on the phone

and she heard their voice,
this scam would be up

because it’d be like, “Hey, you’re
clearly not a Japanese person.

” Maybe these big
Japanese really really well,

but they’re gonna have
an accent or something,

and they were very scared
to actually get on the phone.

This got so far that they
said, “We’re going to send one

of my managers to your house
to pick up the million yen,”

and then that’s how they got caught,
because when the guy showed up,

one of the relative was around the area and
saw something going on and went to check,

and then they called the
police, and the police were able

to pick up this person, turns
out to be a guy and his son.

It was the son doing this scam,

but the father supported
him because they had to

trade off the phone, I
guess, every now and then.

The father and the mother are
the owner of a Nepalese Curie shop

that since COVID had
sort of decimated the

business, and they were
in great financial straits.

This is the big problem
for them as a family.

We don’t know if the mom was involved,

but the father and son
obviously came with this scam

to try to supplement their
income and have been arrested.

(upbeat music) A Lamborghini.

That’s already already,
like Lamborghini, man.

If you have enough money
to buy a Lamborghini,

don’t get in trouble
’cause you’re a stupid car.

I tried to get in and out of a Lamborghini,

I’m quite tall, so getting into a
Lamborghini was really difficult.

I did not enjoy the experience.

And then getting out, I look really stupid.

I’m never going to be able to just,
like, cooly step out of a super car

’cause they’re so low to the ground,
especially my knees are not getting better.

A Lamborghini was modified to
shoot flames out of the tail pipes.

I mean, if you’re the kind of person
who goes to buy a Lamborghini,

I bet you think flame shooting out your
tail is really important, so they did that.

They also did the undercarriage
lights, which of course,

I didn’t actually think realized
those are actually illegal in Japan.

Shooting flames out of your car
is an illegal modification to Japan.

Japan’s very strict about it,
like tinted windows and stuff.

They are very strict
about that kind of stuff.

But then the undercarriage
light kit is also illegal in Japan.

Six people ended up
getting arrested for this,

which is crazy how
many people got arrested

for the modifications, but it’s
because this car was brought

to an inspection site, and
so passing the inspection

means there was fraud committed on
the manager of the inspection site shop.

There’s the guy who put in the illegal mods

and probably his crew, and
then there’s the owner of the car.

So you’re looking like four
people just right up there.

There’s the owner of the
car, the modification guy,

the guy who does the mod,
and I assume one or two

of his employees, and then
there’s the guy who owns the shop

that does the inspections, and
he just was like writing stuff off.

And this is all fraud for bypassing
the regulations on cars in Japan.

If you have enough money, they’re probably
able to pay the fines, but I’m wondering

if they’ll pay the fines for everyone else,
or if you actually lose your licenses.

This being Japan, I bet they end up
losing their licenses and their stores.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So there’s a really famous night
view place on top of a mountain.

So if you’re the city, you want
to encourage people to go there.

This brings tourists to the place.

They can come and go
up and look at the lights

of the city on the
top of this mountain.

It’s very romantic, but you
also want to make it kind of fun.

Maybe I have something for the kids.

What you do is you create
a 30 meter slide, 30 meters.

It’s like 60 feet.

I’m just going to go with quick
double, but that’s not correct.

Anyways, a 30 meter slide sounds super fun.

Turns out they had to close it
because four people broke bones on it.

So not very romantic, not really fun.

Turns out one employee
used it before it even opened.

So if you have an employee’s like, hey,
I’m going to go test out the new slide.

Maybe they weren’t supposed to do that yet.

Slide down and they break a bone.

That might have been
an indicator right there.

Maybe we shouldn’t be opening this slide
that’s breaking people’s bones and bodies.

98.5 feet.

Do you want to make that into slang terms?

Is that a ton of feet?

So there should have
been already a question.

Before we’ve even
opened this up, a couple of

our crew tried it and
one of them broke a bone.

Then it turns out a two
year old being held by a sister,

they went down the slide together,
a two year old broke his bone.

A 70 year old man went down
the slide and he broke a bone.

This came to light
when a tourist in their

30s went down the
slide and broke their shin.

So I don’t know if
this was too steep or it

went too fast or like
you stopped too suddenly.

They don’t actually
say, but four people got

done by this slide and
they had to close it down.

It was getting everybody
because it hit all the demographics.

It hit employee, which I don’t
know what that person was.

It hit a female tourist in her 30s.

It hit an old man in
his 80s and it hit a little

kid in the twos hadn’t
even hit broken double

digits yet, but they had
already broken a bone.

October 2023, a live
streamer got drunk and

fell asleep in the street
and then was sleeping.

But the stream was still going
and then some thieves came along

and stole a smartphone
with the stream still going.

Then they went and they
reported back to their boss,

that they had stolen this
phone and been really successful

and stealing from this guy
who was sleeping on the street,

which counts as a confession
because it was captured on stream.

Now, the police didn’t
have who these guys were.

Maybe they didn’t like turn
the camera to their own face

or anything, but they
do have, they are thieves.

They know who sort of they were talking to.

They had a lot of information.

They were able to connect this to a crime.

The priming that was broken this year.

So this is 1.5 years later,
you’re actually getting this

information was being
held on to so they could

then connect a couple
of different crimes.

Just recently, the head of a
crime syndicate was arrested

because he was leading a group
that targets passed out people.

And this is, okay, so my views,
yeah, who used to be very romantic.

I was grew up in the ’80s
watching movies in the IKEA

who were like a really
consistent set of bad guys.

And they were all super powerful
doing really big scary crimes,

lots of drug running and people
trafficking and stuff like that.

And so like stealing smartphones
off drunk people who’ve fallen

asleep in the street, really
sort of like overdoing engineers

Japan, in my opinion of the
IKEA has diminished significantly.

But this is the kind of
thing it makes me go like,

should you even really be calling
yourself IKEA Coos anymore?

So what they would do is
they’d find past out people.

They would take their
wallet and their smartphone.

And if they could, they
would use the wallet.

Oh, sorry, I got to take a
break and watch Dave settle in.

I like him settling it
under his own portrait.

Doo doo doo doo doo doo.
Oh, oh, oh, go the other way.

Come on, buddy. Oh, there you go.

Settle. All right.

What they would do is
they would take the cards

and try to use the cards
and then buy luxury items.

And they were maybe
buying items from their

own pawn shops just to
get money moving around.

Then they would try to open
other cards based off those cards.

So trying to like open new credit cards

so they could use those
as quickly as possible.

It was interesting because we
got a bit of a Japanese slang.

So the people who were
falling asleep in the street

were referred to as
maguro, maguro is tuna fish.

And it’s sort of what you use for sushi.

So maguro is a kind of sushi.

But these then referred
to themselves as fishermen.

So they were maguro fishermen going out
finding the tuna and stealing from them.

Just I found that really just a cultural
point that these guys use that terminology.

The police when they were
able to connect these guys

to the live stream from
a couple of years ago,

then had enough evidence to be
able to go in search of their houses.

They found items stolen from 456 people,
which means they were keeping the stuff.

So I mean, this is one of those things

where once you’ve used
it, you gotta get rid of it.

Again, Ninja Ninja Pan, quite
famous for giving advice to criminals.

So if you are a thief
and you’re stealing things,

if you are a maguro fisherman and you’ve
been successful, don’t keep the stuff.

Like you gotta get rid of it.

So if you steal cell phones,
get everything you can’t

off the cell phone and then
get rid of the cell phone.

If you’ve got the credit
card, use the credit card,

but once you can’t use
it anymore, get rid of it.

They seem to have been keeping
these like trophies, which is ridiculous.

Do not keep stuff from your crime.

But then again, there’s a
reason I’m not a criminals

’cause I would have thought
of something like that.

(upbeat music)

This should be maybe
the warning, the last

story is always the
weirdest, gross, sexual one.

So if you’re not into that, stop now.

But of course, if you’ve come to
the end, you’ve probably come for this.

There was this girl live streaming.

They don’t say on what,
so I’m like Instagram

or TikTok or something,
live streaming on.

They said social media.

Live streaming in Japan
usually is Instagram or Twitter.

I guess I should start saying X.

Or maybe one of the Japanese sites.

I have no idea.

They just said streaming on social media.

A spiritual medium sent
a message to the woman

who was watching streaming on
social media and said in the comments.

So I never get the comments like this.

You are possessed by the living spirit
of a man and are in a dangerous situation.

It is surprising that you are still alive.

You cannot be exercised in
an ordinary temple or shrine.

And then of course, made an
offer that I will exercise you.

They then made arrangements for the man,

the spiritual medium to meet at
her apartment to perform an exorcism.

So let’s just be clear.

If you’re on social
media, if you’re streaming

and people start making offers and
whatnot, don’t let them come to your house.

Don’t let them come to your apartment.

If you’re going to do an
exorcism, do it somewhere else.

Somewhere public.

I mean, let’s face it.

Since you’re already into streaming,
you might as well stream the exorcism.

That’s 100% what I would do.

If someone said to me,
“Hey, shall I leave chest?

” You’re possessed by a spirit.

You need to be exercised.

I’d be like, great, let’s meet somewhere

and let me stream the exorcism
so we can actually happen.

What I want to do is
actually go to one of those

McDow Joe martial
arts things where they do

the no touch kung fu and
actually take the guy on.

I would 100% want to do that.

No, the camera will interfere,
but you don’t tell them.

This is the schemy part of me.

This is where I am
able to give advice to

criminals because I do
have the criminal mind.

I just know the crime is
not worth it most of the

time because you just
can’t make enough money.

So it’s not worth actually doing the crime.

But I do have that element
and that element put together.

I could be the scam buster.

I wish I had more time and I had enough
money to actually do stuff like this.

Because I would love to go get
someone to try to exercise me

and I would, you know, set it up.

And yeah, the camera will continue.

You hide the camera.

So she’s already made a ton of mistakes

in the social media landscape
because you don’t have strangers

from the internet come to
your house for any reason.

So you started out reading sutras.

Now, if you’re not spent any time in
Japan, not familiar with Japanese culture.

Sutras are when the
priests in the temple go,

another saying stuff, I do
not have the Japanese skill

to hear what they’re saying,
but it is something that you do.

I remember when I had a
child and we took them to

the temple and we had
them blessed and they went,

did they read some sutras and then in
the sutras you could hear your kid’s name.

So the only bit I could
pick out is when they said,

said my son’s name,
which was really interesting.

And they wave some like
branches over their head and stuff.

It was a bit weird because
they blessed my child.

And then went over and
blessed a minivan, which I felt

sort of diminished the value
of the blessing on my child.

So it’s one of those
things like, if you’re gonna

bless children, get a new
branch to bless the car.

I mean, just ’cause, I
don’t know why it’s just,

it took a down a notch for
me and then I leaned over

and I asked my wife, can
you get anything blessed?

And she was like, yeah, I
mean, it’s just a blessing.

So it doesn’t really matter what it is.

And I was like, so can I bring in
my PlayStation and get a bless?

She’s like, you pay them
the money, they will bless it.

And I was like, I could have
the priest come over and go,

“Shall my name, no head shots, head shots,
some run, no, no, “Choke McBeaf Chest.

” Get back to the story.

He was reading sutras
and then started sexually

assaulting the woman saying
that I can’t exercise you,

I can’t exercise the
spirit unless I use my body.

So he was hoping she
was so locked into this.

She would actually let him do
whatever he wanted to do to her body.

She was not pleased by this.

Apparently he tried like three or four
times and she rebuffed him multiple times.

And then called the police,
when he was arrested,

he said, I left salt in
the house and read

sutras, but I never
engaged in sexual acts.

Now, here’s the semantic aspect of this.

I bet he could mentally justify it by
saying, those were not sexual acts.

It was part of the exorcism.

It was a religious act.

And that’s the kind of
semantics that these guys

sort of like used to justify
all their behavior because

the police are saying, “Did
you commit sexual assault?

” He could say, “No.

” I committed a religious act.

And let’s just be clear.

If anyone wants to
exercise a spirit from me,

we can meet in the park, but I’m gonna
video it and you can absolutely try to,

I don’t think you can absolutely
try to sexually assault me.

I’m dumb.

That’s not how I wanna end this episode.

What am I gonna say?

I’m gonna cut that, cut that, cut that.

If you wanna exercise a
spirit from me, I’m ready.

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

(upbeat music)

Like a Frying Pan to the Face

(upbeat music)

This is episode 333 half the devil’s
number episode of Ninja News Japan.

‘Cause we do about 50
episodes a year once a week.

I don’t do every single week
’cause there’s holidays and stuff.

I will take a week off here and there.

But anyone who’s been
around for the last couple weeks

or the last couple months or
the last couple of years, of course,

thank you for hanging out and
listening to Ninja News Japan

and news from Japan
and my musings on being

a resident of Japan
and living in the world.

And I hope it’s brought you some
entertainment more than anything else.

Let’s get to our news.

First story’s kind of depressing.

Japan has dropped to 90 seconds place
of 116 countries in English proficiency.

So the overall level of English ability
of the Japanese people has gone down.

It’s the lowest on record.

Last year, they were 87, so
they’ve gone from 87 to 92nd place.

The drop has been
between 18 to 25-year-olds.

Lower than the overall average
compared to people who are 26 and above.

So people who are 26 and above,

the average ability in their
English proficiency is higher.

People 18 to 25, they are below average.

The government’s trying
to make excuses, I guess.

I don’t know.

You’ve got to come up
with a reason for this.

Why are these students, particularly low?

They’re saying these
students kind of lived through

coronavirus and has
affected their motivation.

So they are less motivated to study.

So they don’t study as
hard as they didn’t really

achieve the proficiency
that they would want.

It’s interesting, because someone

a representative said that
Japan hasn’t actually dropped.

They’ve just stayed the same
while all the other countries went up.

So really they’ve
maintained their standards,

but other countries have
improved their English proficiency

forcing Japan down, which is
an interesting way of looking at it.

Because I actually wouldn’t
have thought of that.

We look at lists, we look at numbers,
we look at things that go up and down.

You think of them as just being
relative, who’s done more, who’s done less.

If you maintain the
same in everyone else

advances, you actually
drop in your rankings.

So that’s pretty interesting.

If you’re interested in who is number
one, the Netherlands, six years in a row,

the Netherlands has been
number one in English proficiency.

Beating out.

I was about to say beating out America,

but unfortunately that
I might actually be true.

I don’t know what kind of test.

The test they administer there
is not going to be the same test

they would administer in America,
but it would be interesting view.

Gave English-speaking
countries like Canada,

Australia, New Zealand,
England, and America.

The same test to see where
they ranked in English proficiency.

I would actually be very
interested in those results.

I would like to take this test.

I have taken multiple
English proficiency tests

that students of mine have
taken, just to see how I do.

And it’s not always perfect.

I mean, I do well.

Let’s give me some credit.

I do do well.

But I am like Japan.

I don’t think I’m
improving my English skills.

I think I’m maintaining.

So if someone else is
improving, they would surpass me.

So that’s very possible.

And I hope that for you.

The highest ranked Asian country,

which is what Japan
wouldn’t be more likely to be

measured against Singapore,
they got number three.

So Netherlands number
one, the highest ranked

Asian country is
Singapore at number three.

So since we’re talking about rankings,

I thought, oh, wouldn’t
it be nice to have

a counter-ranking where
Japan has improved?

Well, Japan rises to 31st place
in global digital competitiveness.

What does that mean?

I’m not 100% sure.

There are 67 countries that get ranked.

And you might be like, wow, that’s great.

31 out of 67.

It’s an improvement of one from last year.

So the ranking assesses
the adoption and utilization

of digital technologies
that drive transformations

and government
business models in society.

So Japan recently gave up floppy disks.

They recently have tried
to push things onto digital,

which should have
been digital 10 years ago.

So I see Japan’s technology push is
catching up more than anything else.

This is published by the
Swiss business school.

The ranking is based on statistical
data and surveys of executives.

So this is based a lot on, I would
say, an older generation of people.

Executives do tend to be older people.

Singapore claimed the top spot this year

with South Korea Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and Nordic countries

such as Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, all ranking within top 10.

Japan remained 31st.

Although Japan was recognized
for its robust technological

frameworks and high
standards of higher education,

it ranked poorly in areas
such as business agility

and international experience among senior
executives where it placed at the bottom.

So an interesting thing of
what they’re saying is like Japan,

they’re teaching people well, their
infrastructure is good, their education is good,

but the people who are
actually using it implementing it,

the executives, the current
executives in Japan now

are horrendous, raking
at the bottom is bad.

Business agility, Japan is not
an agile business environment.

That is something I have
not worked in a bunch of

Japanese companies, but
I’ve seen a lot of these stories.

I’ve looked at Japanese
companies and things like that.

Japan’s traditional way
of thinking is not agile.

In its ability to pivot,
in ability to change,

they do things the way
things have been done before

because that’s the way
it’s been done before.

So that’s the right way to do it.

That is kind of the base philosophy of
most Japanese companies and people.

It is this utmost respect
for tradition and history,

which is respectable in
some aspects of life, but

then you turn it on and
go, maybe not everything.

And the second point,
the international experience

among executives, yeah,
Japan is very insular.

They don’t travel outside their country.

They don’t interact with other cultures.

They don’t do a very good job
of existing on the world stage.

And that is actually something I think

the next generation of people going up in
Japan, that’s where they need to look at.

Don’t look at just Japan as your market.

Look at the world as your market.

And what can you do to achieve that?

And that would actually change
the nature of Japanese business.

It would get you up in this ranking.

I don’t give a shit about
rankings if I’m being really honest.

But rankings do give you insight
into sort of comparative data

and that comparative data
can tell you where you’re weak.

And then you can start to improve
yourself if anyone took this seriously.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is where I was going to do the quiz,

but I didn’t manage to
arrange some of this week.

And episode 333 is, I think, might be
the baseline for how we move forward.

This is since I’m just did
a story where I’m talking

about, like, look at where
you need to improve.

This is what I need
to do with this episode.

Is, where do the failures in this episode?

How do I need to improve?

I need to figure out a way to
get the guest on more efficiently.

It means I have to do
the guest segment earlier

than the actual
recording of the episode.

I can’t have people sitting in the wings.

I got to work on other people’s schedules.

But this is where I
was going to do the quiz.

So I thought, ah, here’s the quiz that
I wrote that I didn’t actually get to do.

So I’ll just put it out there.

And then I’ll answer the question.

Maybe I need to come up
with a little thinking song.

The 65-year-old man came
to Japan with his family.

The problem is, this very
small story got massive push

on the news sites or that
talk about Japan news.

This came up like eight, nine times.

It’s one of those classic stories.

It’s fairly inconsequential.

But it’s got that kind of like
flavor that everyone enjoys.

It’s got that little bit of like, mmm,
oh, the little, all-genu, the little,

je ne se qua that everyone
loves in their news stories.

‘Cause it doesn’t hurt anyone too bad,

but a guy gets kind of
taken down for who he is.

My first assumption was anyone in
Japan would have heard this story.

If you pay attention to the news at all.

What crime does he commit?

So a 65-year-old man
came to Japan with his family.

What crime does he commit basically
on his first day walking around the city?

I gave four options.

Number one, he sexually
assaults a woman at a bar.

Number two, he got
drunk and gone into a fight.

Number three, he commits
a form of vandalism.

Number four, riding a bike
drunk and on his phone.

As you learned in last week’s episode,

riding your bicycle drunk
is now illegal in Japan.

Riding your bike while using
your phone is illegal in Japan.

Doing the boasts, accumulates those, takes
those two crimes and put them together

and gives you an extra big
fine and possible prison time.

So then we would have the discussion now.

Ask me some questions, turns out.

I mean, all these four
choices are pretty standard.

Stories of foreign people coming
to Japan and getting in trouble.

The last one’s the most interesting one.

That was kind of my, what
I put in there to make it the

most interesting one
because it applies to a new rule

that was just implemented
in the last couple of weeks.

The actual answer is
number three, vandalism.

He used his fingernails to
carve his family members’ names

into a tory gate, which is, okay,
if you’re gonna vandalize stuff.

I’m gonna give us, stop for a second.

I need a second camera
so I can turn to the camera

and actually talk to the
criminals in the audience.

If you’re gonna commit vandalism, so
this would be, we’d turn to camera three.

I don’t have three cameras,
I have one, but we turn

to the second camera
and we say, “Hey, criminals.

” If you’re going to commit
vandalism, don’t write your

actual names in it because
then your names will be connected

to the actual crime, which
would be connected to you

giving the police a very easy job of
figuring out who committed the crime.

Here’s a little story, I,
once committed vandalism.

It was in university.

I didn’t get housing my
first year of university,

which was a very
weird problem to have.

The fraternities offered housing.

So you could stay in their fraternity
house and pay rent, it was very low,

but you didn’t actually
have to join the fraternity.

So for almost 10 months,
I lived in a fraternity

house without being a
member of the fraternity.

That was a very weird experience.

Anyone else who was in a similar situation
in mind ended up joining the fraternity.

I was the only one
who didn’t actually join.

They had a balcony and it was all wooden.

It was very old and I was
just playing with my thumb,

just like this man
carved in with his finger.

He carved his name in.

I didn’t carve in my name.

I carved in fuzzy Zellweger, which
was a very old golfing, famous person.

I don’t know anything
about golf, so I don’t know

why that name came into
mind, but I knew immediately.

If I carved in my name, then
the crime I have just committed

is immediately linked to
me, and it’s kind of ever

self-evident who committed
this crime and I’m caught.

So you don’t carve in your own names.

So this man, you’ve
committed the first crime here,

was actually how stupid you
were in committing the crime.

That should be an addition
to the crime you’ve committed.

So he used this fingernail.

He carved in family members’ names.

I don’t know if it was just initials,
but he was caught pretty quickly.

Touring gates are sacred.

So we had a story a few weeks
ago, maybe a couple months ago,

of fitness influencer
came and did chin-ups

on the toy gate and
got just blasted online.

This is worse than
that, because you’ve

actually done physical
damage to the toy gate.

They’re not taking that shit lightly.

The vandalism was founded
11.20 AM at 4.30 AM that night.

So over the course of a single
day, the police went, found this guy,

went to his wherever he was staying in his
hotel on a resume at 4.30 in the morning.

They did not hesitate to arrest this guy.

He had to do the perplock
from the hotel to the car at 4.

30 in the morning.

All the pictures of him of
him with like a fuzzy hair,

and he’s just got like Ben
head and the stuff, ’cause he just

woke him out and said, throw on
some clothes you’re under arrest.

We haven’t got any information
since then of what’s actually happened.

My guess is that he was
just asked to leave and left.

First offenses in Japan,
especially small ones, don’t tend

to come with jail time or any
sort of actual real punishment.

They defer a lot of stuff and say like,

look, if you do this again,
you’re gonna get in trouble,

but if you’re a tourist, they’re like,
look, just go and don’t come back.

But if they wanna make
sure he doesn’t come back,

they charge him with the crime,
they find him guilty, and then

they send him away, then he
can’t come back into the country.

(upbeat music)

A record scam occurred.

Someone took eight
hundred and nine million yen.

That’s five million dollars in one scam.

What do you call it?

In one scam, it’s not one scam event,
one scam session, one scam, something.

I want another word in there,

but I don’t think there is, I
think it’s just in one scam.

My brain was going for another
word to make it like the event.

‘Cause it wasn’t a single instance.

This scam happened multiple times.

You got money multiple
times from the person.

So what would you call that?

It’s like it’s a sequence.

Ah, I need to, I have to look and see.

There’s gotta be some correct
verbiage for that, but anyways.

A Chinese national was arrested for fraud
because of investment scheme via line.

He impersonated a famous economic analyst.

So he basically put up ads saying,
I’m this famous economics guy in Japan.

It’s an ad saying like
if you want information

from me, you can pay
money, we can do some stuff.

I’ll make you super rich if you
give me your money, excellent.

So the appeal of this scam, I think, is
that they don’t go out hunting for you.

So they’re not looking for marks.

They let the marks come to them.

And then that gives the
person a lot more confidence

when they start actually
talking about the money and stuff.

This is one of the more
effective versions of

scams is when you get
the people to come to you

to give you money because
they’re already partially

convinced of your things legitimacy
if they show up at your door.

This is not showing up at anyone’s door.

This is all via the internet.

A 71 year old woman responded to
an online ad and added the line account.

So line is a chat kind of thing in Japan.

It’s one of the biggest ones in Japan.

So she sees an ad and it says,
add this line account and we can talk

about your investment
future, something like that.

She adds the line
account and starts chatting

with this person who she thinks
is a famous economic analyst.

Initially she gave 10
million yen in November

and the scammer’s
faked profits via an app.

So they made an app and
then they put her number in

and they made it look like that number
was going up so she would invest further.

She looked like she was making money.

Over the course of the time
she made 47 more transactions.

Many were cash career.

So she’s basically like,
meet me at this train station.

I will give you cash.

They dropped the cash off.

One cash drop was 83 million yen.

I don’t have any money.

I’m not a rich person.

I don’t have any money.

I have enough money to survive.

I’m not in any trouble or anything.

This woman had eight
hundred and nine million

yen to play with, to
use for investments.

She was capable of dropping
83 million yen at one time

and not really seeming to have
a significant impact on her life.

Whereas if you just
handed me 83 million yen

today, my life would
be completely altered.

It’s almost like these
rich people who I’m

gonna, I don’t know
anything about the lady.

They don’t release a lot of details

about the victim in this
case, which is probably correct.

But you can assume with the sheer volume
of money she was funneling into this thing.

She either is president of
a company or was president

of a company or this is
like generational wealth.

But she had a lot of money that she
could just play with in her personal life.

It’s almost like these super rich
people who clearly are comfortable

with super rich amounts of money,
super large amounts of money.

Don’t know how to use that money.

Because if she just took 83 million
yen or eight hundred and nine million yen

and redistributed amongst
poor people like me,

I don’t want to make it sound
like I’m poor, but I’m not rich.

It would have this huge positive impact
on my life and she’s just thrown it away.

This scammer just took her.

So after a certain amount of money,
eight hundred and nine million yen,

five million dollars later,
she started realizing maybe

something was up ’cause she
wasn’t getting her money back.

I don’t know, I feel weirdly
frustrated for myself

’cause I don’t have any
money to invest in anything.

But then I could get scam too.

I would do that because I would go
out hunting for something to look at

that would promise me a certain
amount of return on my investment.

And then I would invest it
and then you find out you’re

getting scam but they
always get you to roll in more.

But there’s an app that they say to look at

and the app’s telling
you’re making more money

and you believe it because you want
to believe you’re making more money.

I got a lot of sympathy.

Even though this is a rich person
who clearly had more money than since,

I do have sympathy ’cause they
don’t deserve to be scammed.

I just would like them to use
their money in a more sensible way.

As in bank rolling, the industry
depends next 333 episodes.

An 88 year old father, Chef,
and a 60 year old manager

who is the son of the same
restaurant got into a fight.

The father threatened the son with a knife

so the son hit the
father with a frying pan.

I don’t know why, but that was
enough for me to be into this story.

Like that was a cliche fight.

Like he whips out a
knife, he starts threatening.

The other guy picks up a pan.

Whoop, whoop, whoop,
have to make the sound.

Bong, they were both arrested.

The father said there is no mistake

that I threatened him by
holding a knife up to him.

The son said it’s true I
hit him with a frying pan.

So they’ve both admitted to their crimes.

Both were taken to the custody
and then both were related to release.

So I’m trying to figure out what
happened because I guess the

police were like, do you want
to press charges on each other?

‘Cause both have admitted
to the crime they committed.

Like you’re not supposed to
threaten people with knives.

You’re not supposed to
hit people with frying pans.

But maybe they didn’t
want to press charges

against each other
’cause it’s father and son.

And maybe they have
this kind of contentious

relationship and this is
how they just live their lives.

There’s a weird thing about chefs and the
chefs are all tough and violent and stuff.

And I’ve never seen chefs as
being that kind of personality.

I think it’s like a
persona they’ve put on

themselves, which is how
you get the Gordon Ramses

who like shouts and is
really mean to everybody.

I don’t think that’s a
good way to run anything.

But I’ve never run a successful kitchen.

So what do I know?

But then there’s an interesting thing
where police can send it to prosecutors

and the prosecutors can
choose to press charges

even though like the victim
doesn’t want to do that.

Like they can actually do it
on your behalf ’cause the crime

has been committed whether
or not you’re angry about it.

But Japan being Japan, since
they’re not going to get help

from the other person like
the son’s not going to like

turn on the father, the
father’s not going to turn

on the son, you’re in
this like weird situation

where they’re not
going to actually go after

each other when you
actually get to court.

And that’s actually what
the prosecution needs I think.

Japan has very famously a high probably,

like basically if you go to
prosecution, you’re guilty.

It’s 98%, 99% is massive number.

But it’s because if they’re not 100% sure

or they’re going to get
that, they cut you loose.

So I’m betting that’s
what’s actually happened

because they weren’t going to
get the two to turn on each other

like we’re not 100% sure this
is actually going to work out.

We’re going to kind of loose so
that our record doesn’t go down.

A small city that’s
proposed a tourist event.

It’s a very good thing to do.

You have to have lots
of events for tourists,

you have to have tourism,
tourism’s a big money maker in Japan.

So they have a meeting,
they’re like, hey guys,

we want to make an event
when I have a creative idea.

Then we have a lady over here
and she’s like, I have an idea.

Let’s make a competition where
people pretend to kill themselves.

And then acted out, the idea
came from someone who sold

and demonstrated toy
retractable plastic swords.

So it was a little sword
and you push it into your

body and it retracts
into the hilt of the sword.

Okay, so no one’s actually getting hurt.

You’ve seen those like stage
knives and kind of stuff in the past.

So what they’re like, we’re going
to, every city has a samurai tradition.

I mean, it’s one of those things where they
do like, ooh, samurai’s came from here.

Samurai’s came from everywhere.

This is not a big deal.

So like, but samurai’s
had to commit sepucca.

They had to kill themselves.

It’s a very dramatic thing.

They have to like, run
it across their stomach.

They have to die dramatically.

We’ve seen it and movies and that stuff.

Let’s have that competition.

And this went forward and
everyone thought it was a good idea.

So the posters go up.

And it said, seeking
participants, sepucca contest.

We are seeking participants for a
sepucca contest to be held at the

Don Don Terrace at Matsui City
Hall in December 14th, a Saturday.

After committing sepucca
with a plastic sword,

please demonstrate
your acting skills by

writhing around for 30
seconds to one minute.

So there’s like a timeframe of when you
have to die, which is pretty interesting.

The person with the most vivid
performance will be named champion.

The use of fake blood is prohibited.

Now that quite sensibly turned
out to be not the best idea.

So the city’s like, hey, no,
you’re not going to do that.

So then they had to do a retraction.

It was canceled.

I would like to apologize to the
involved party at City Hall for causing

such a disturbance from something
we intended to serve as entertainment.

On the other hand, we have also
received emails from people saying they

are proof of the idea and want to
participate, but we feel that holding it can

contribute to a loss of trust from City
Hall, so we are canceling the contest.

So basically, yeah, some people were
like, hey, I want to show my acting chops.

I want to fake kill myself on stage. I
want to get everyone to look at me.

While I die for 30 seconds to a
minute, it’s going to be a great show.

Other people are like, hey, take a second
and think what you’re actually doing.

You’re pretending to kill yourself on
stage in front of a whole bunch of people.

Maybe that’s not the best idea.

Maybe that doesn’t really
represent our city well.

Maybe that doesn’t
represent City Hall well.

Maybe that’s not something
we should be doing.

A drunk passenger sleeps on the
subway car for five hours overnight.

So what happened is this
is a pretty normal thing.

People get the last train.
They’ve been drinking.

They’re really drunk
when they get on the train.

If you’ve ever taken the last train
home from wherever you are in Japan to

enter your home station, you have
encountered the extremely drunk person.

They fall asleep on the benches.

They take up too much space.
Maybe they fall on the floor.

The interesting thing is when the
cell phone or wallet falls out of them,

like people will pick
them up and put them on

the bench next to them
so they don’t lose it.

It’s one of those nice
things about Japan

where it’s like a relatively
honest place where

they don’t tend to steal
from you when you’re drunk

out of your gourd, which
is what a lot of people are.

The interesting thing is what happens
when you get to the last station.

So the staff have to wake
you up and get you off the train.

You’re not allowed to stay there. Since
it’s the last train, you can’t get home.

There’s a whole other set of issues
that you have to deal with as the person

who just kicked off the train.
You missed your stop.

Can you walk home sometimes possible?
Sometimes not.

You probably get a hotel around
the station or something like that.

Karaoke box, something like that.
Who knows? That’s your problem.

What happened here is
the guys on the end car.

The staff come in. They wake them up.
They’re like, you got to get off here.

It’s the last station. So he’s drunk.
He gets up. He walks off.

The station staff person
goes to the next car

to see if there’s anyone
else on those cars

or starts moving up the train.
Then they turn off the lights.

What happened is the drunk I walked off
the train. The station staff walked away.

He’s like, I’m too tired to walk to
the ticket gate and go out the station.

I’m going to go back in and lie down where
I was very comfortable 10 seconds ago.

He gets back on the
train and falls asleep

five hours later because
the first train’s like

six o’clock in the morning, five 30
in the morning, something like that.

Five hours later, staff come
and find him asleep on the train.

The driver of the first
train of the day found

the men asleep inside
the train at 5.20 a.m.

He was said to be intoxicated.

So this is a guy who had 12,
12, 31 o’clock. Whenever that

last train was, was drunk out of his
mind four hours, five hours later of sleep.

And he was still drunk
out of his mind when

they tried to wake him
up in the next morning.

So should you come visit
Japan? Don’t commit vandalism.

Don’t if you, okay, if
you’re going to commit,

this is again when I have
to switch to the camera

where I speak to the
criminals in the audience.

If you’re going to commit
vandalism, don’t write your name.

That’s just going to be straight up advice
from an institution who’s Japan to you.

Don’t use your own
name in your crimes.

That’s what aliases are for. But if you
come to Japan, don’t commit vandalism.

And if you do get super,
super drunk, know that if you fall

asleep in the last train,
they will kick you off.

And if you fall asleep, I
don’t know if it’s a crime.

I guess it’s trespassing.
So he doesn’t

seem like he’s actually been
arrested or gone in trouble.

But it is a good
thing to know that

if you’re on the last
train, they will kick you off.

Awwest Wawwent

(upbeat music)

  • So do you remember Sugar Baby, Lili Chan?

She was almost in obsession
with this podcast for quite a

while because she had one
of the more interesting stories.

Not only was she
scamming men out of tons of

money, she was also
actually proactive enough.

She wrote a book on how to scam
men and sold that on the internet.

That actually ended up being
her downfall because the people

she sold the book to didn’t
really follow the steps of the way

they were supposed to and
they ended up saying like,

“Oh, well, I shouldn’t take responsibility
for the fact that I scam this guy.

I got this book from this other chick.

You should blame her.

” And that was her downfall.

She made a million bucks
easy off these three guys

that she scammed,
the three sort of big fish

that she caught the whales as
the mobile industry would call them.

She had a million bucks
and she spent most of that

on hosts, so she would go to
host clubs and spend all her money.

She was arrested and
has just been prosecuted.

So her sentences come down.

Prosecutors wanted 13 years
in prison and a 12 million yen fine.

No, she had 155 million yen from her scam.

So I was actually thinking like proactively

if she had kept the money,
saved the money, put the

money away, hid the
money or something like that.

When she gets out of prison,
if she paid the 12 million

yen fine, she’d still
actually have 100 million yen,

pretty good nest egg
to set yourself up with.

I’m not saying again, crime pays,

but it certainly doesn’t pay if
you don’t save any of the money.

I guess I get a sort of
sensible fiscal responsibility

for criminals is not really
what I should be talking about.

The judge said this was
an especially heinous crime

because she encouraged other
people to commit the same crime.

So she’s like, I’m scamming people,

I’ll teach you how to scam people, we’ll
scam more people, everyone will get scammed.

It’s great.

And he’s like, well,
that’s actually pretty evil.

If you think about it,
what you’re doing is

trying to teach people
how to break the law.

The final sentence was
an eight million yen fine

and nine years in prison.

So she’s 25, she’s gonna get
out of prison when she’s 34.

I don’t know what kind of job
prospects she’ll have at that time

because she certainly won’t
have a hundred million yen

sitting waiting for her because
she spent it all on hosts.

And I’m sure those hosts in nine years

are not gonna put a
great deal of effort into

supporting her back the
way she supported them.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Dita,

but it is sort of an
interesting case of

watching someone really
reap what they’ve sewn.

Their own inability to think forward has
really come to roost for her in this case.

So I’ll set a calendar date and
see if I can follow up in nine years

when she gets out of prison, we can
see how sugar baby Dita is actually doing.

Today’s stories are all
about crimes and courts

and crimes and courts
and crimes and courts.

I’m trying to, if you listen to last week
episodes, you know I have family in town.

So I am carving out this time to make sure
that I don’t lose any sort of momentum.

I missed a couple of weeks.

I don’t wanna lose a month.

I’m just forcing myself to do it.

So I just want you to know that
I’m here dedicating myself to you.

I’m actually neglecting my
family that’s in town right now

just so I can record
this episode super quick.

So the courts are coming correct in Japan.

Nine years in prison for scamming dudes,

that’s pretty solid sentence
and the 12 million yen fine.

I mean, yeah, that’s a lot of money.

The operator of a pirate
mango website has been fined 1.

7 billion yen that he has to
pay to three separate publishers.

So he had this website, it was the biggest
manga pirating website in the world.

It was accessed 500 and some
million times or something like that.

And so they had calculated how much money

the publishers would
have lost by not selling

books to the people
who were on that website.

Now we know that’s
not actually how it works,

but I guess if you’re going to
create a punishment for pirating,

this is a fairly sensible,
logistic to base it on.

This is the largest fine of its kind.

So this is a first in history,
which is why it became interesting.

The actual story
itself, guy sets up pirate

website, guy gets arrested,
guy has to pay big fine.

That kind of writes itself.

You don’t really need to say much about it.

The morality of pirating,
it’s here or there.

It’s up to you.

I mean, I’m not going
to judge people for it.

I live in Japan, so I can’t
get a lot of the Western media.

I want streaming services
are super expensive.

I understand why people pirate.

I really do.

Also, I understand paying for stuff.

Because if I had the money, I
would pay for everything generously.

But that’s not always the case.

The defendant told reporters that
he was unconvinced to buy the ruling.

So the judge is like you owe 1.

7 billion yen to these three
publishers because of ABC.

And he’s like, no, I don’t
know if that’s correct.

I don’t think you get to be
unconvinced by the ruling.

This was a more interesting aspect of this.

We had the mayor of Guinan,
who got booted out and had to quit.

And his apology was like, I
don’t– I did sexually harass a

whole bunch of ladies, but I
don’t really know what I’m being.

What I’m in trouble for.

I don’t really know
what I’m apologizing for.

Like, did I do anything wrong?

And I was like, yes, you
sexually harassed people.

He’s like, yeah, but did I?

And they’re like, yes, you did.

This guy’s like, yeah,
pirate, it’s some mange.

Has that hurt anybody?

And they’re like, yes, the
companies that make the mange.

And he’s like, yeah,
but should I pay a fine?

They’re like, yes, 1.7 billion yen.

He’s like, really is that how much?

It’s an interesting set
of mental gymnastics.

Because at this point,
he’s still basically saying

he’s not responsible
for the actions he took.

But he also said he has no
regrets setting up the website.

But I think after you pay the 1.7 billion
yen, you might have a regret or two.

75-year-old man is taking a walk in a park.

Very nice thing for a
75-year-old man to do.

There’s some kids
playing soccer in the park.

Very nice thing for the kids to do.

Park is a shared space.

Everyone should have a good time there.

I think old people should enjoy the park.

I think young people should enjoy the park.

I walk Dave in the park.

I enjoy my park near my house.

So parks are a great place.

The old man, the 75-year-old man, walks up
to the kids, he goes, is this your trash?

See, see some trash on the ground.

Is this your trash?

Because it’s going to say no.

Now, you know this is not
the end of the conversation.

And it’s because you know
old people, you know kids.

And you know how this interaction goes.

But at the same time, it’s
a surprise how far it goes.

There’s the logic that kids employ, which
I enjoy very much in this conversation.

So is this your trash?

No.

And then the 75-year-old
man says, even if it isn’t,

if you see trash on the ground, you should
pick it up and then throw it in the bin.

Now, I knew, without
even reading the next part,

what the kid said in response,
I knew because I bet it

was the thing I would have
said as a child to an old person

giving me instructions who
has no real authority of over me.

This is one of the interesting
aspects of authority.

People’s authority over you,
often is perceived, not real.

And when you realize that, you can
decide if you give the authority or not.

So these kids are saying the
75-year-old man’s telling them what to do.

And they’re like, well, I
don’t know who you are.

I have no respect for you.

You have an earned my respect.

So I’m going to respond in the
most reasonable way possible.

He says, you see trash on the ground.

You should pick it up and throw it away.

And they say it to him, why don’t
you just pick it up and throw it away?

Now, the reason this story is maybe it’s

an industry panel is because of the
next set of actions that has occurred.

And the gentleman
who’s 75 years old thinks,

well, what’s the most
reasonable response?

They’ve actually presented
me with a logic problem.

I have said, if people,
in this case specifically,

you children, see trash
on the ground, your moral

responsibilities to pick it
up and throw it in the trash.

You should throw it away.

I’ve told them to do that.

And they’ve said, why
don’t you lead by example?

Why don’t you yourself,
instead of bothering us,

pick up the trash and
throw it in the garbage?

And he’s now got a moral conundrum.

Does he bend to the will of the children
and demonstrate that he’s telling the truth,

that pick up the trash and throwing
it in the garbage and showing them?

That is not what he chose to do.

Does he berate them?

He does he tell them
like, respect your elders

and this kind of stuff,
that is all, again, conceptual.

It’s not real.

Like, the respect your elders thing,
I don’t give a lot of credence to that,

because for all I know, my
elders are all like evil people.

So you don’t want to respect them.

You’ve got to know who
they are, but you’ve got to

know who someone is
before you show them respect.

I think that’s fair.

So he does the only final thing when he’s
been caught in a logic trap by a child.

He hauls off and punches an
elementary school girl in the face.

And I’m laughing
because the girl’s not hurt.

I mean, I’m sure it hurt, but 75 year
old dude, he’s not swinging hard anymore.

One of the girl’s friends has a smartphone
because these are modern children.

Calls the police and says, this is dude,
just like cranked my friend in the face.

Please come arrest him.

He gets arrested and he says, well,
I didn’t punch any one of the face.

I did warn them.

Did you warn them though?

Because the sort of transcript of this
conversation has no warning involved in it.

It’s just, here is a moral
quandary I present you with.

And the children were
like, well, the moral

quandary is just as
much yours as it is ours.

Why don’t you demonstrate
how to alleviate the

moral issue through an
example of your own behavior?

And then it’s when he decided to just
punch a girl on the face, a little girl.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.

It actually reminds me
of a bunch of stories

when I was like a teenager and
adults were really rude to me.

And I kept thinking like, I
actually now feel like I shouldn’t

respect adults, which is an
interesting place to live in.

And it’s probably the
basis for my disregard

of any authority whatsoever
from now until I die.

OK, there was a new scam out in Japan.

So the metropolitan Tokyo police are–

that’s the metropolitan
police department anyways,

the MPD, the metropolitan
police department.

This is the cops in Tokyo.

They’re actually trying to
warn people of this new scam

that is emerged in itself,
again, quite interesting.

You get a phone call.

And the phone call is
like, hey, I’m a police man.

And I’m telling you that
there’s a warrant for your arrest.

And you go, oh no, there’s
a warrant for my arrest.

I don’t want to be arrested.

Certainly not.

I don’t think I’ve done anything that
would justify a warrant for my arrest.

And so what they do is say,
well, let’s confirm that this is you.

And there is a warrant for your arrest.

A West.

There is a warrant for your arrest.

Go to this website.

Now, here’s the trick.

It’s not a real website.

And the person you’re
noting to, the person

you’re talking to, not
a real police officer.

So they sent you to this fake website.

And you have to put in a certain amount
of information to get into the website.

Because it’s going to
search for your details.

You have to give a certain
amount of details so it can search.

From those details, it
builds a fake arrest warrant.

Just like it generates one on the fly.

And then presents it to
you as a real arrest warrant.

Now, you can get rid
of this arrest warrant.

You can pay just a fine.

So you can just pay the fine.

And then the arrest warrant will go away.

That seems like a
pretty good deal if you

don’t want to have an
arrest on your record.

Then you will get a second
phone call, a phone call,

from a four mentioned,
not real police officer.

And he’ll say like, do
you want to pay the fine?

Or do you want to come in and get arrested?

But they do tell you that you can pay
money and you can have the warrant removed.

The most suspicious part, this
actually kind of makes sense.

Our cop calls you and says
there’s a warrant for your arrest.

And then you go to a website.

And then you go to that website.

And then you see an arrest warrant.

It pretty much confirms
a lot of the suspicions

that you have that this might
be actual factual information.

The interesting part to me
and the most suspicious part,

the part where it would fall apart, is
they send you the website via social media.

They don’t send it to
your like an email account.

And I’m guessing because
maybe that could be backtraced.

So they’d be like on Twitter or
Instagram or some other social

media website, they
will send you the link on

that so that then you
can access the website.

So there’s something suspicious there.

The cops using social
media to contact you and talk

to you on official business
seem suspect in itself.

So that to me would be the big red flag.

But it’s actually pretty small, if you
think the overall of what’s happened.

You’ve gotten a phone call.

You’re being sent to a website.

You put in your information.

That information confirms that
what the phone call said is true.

It all looks very official.

And then you get a follow up phone call

just saying you can pay certain
amount of money and this will go away.

I think it’d be pretty
easy to fall for that scam.

So that’s actually pretty
well put together scam.

They’re trying to warn people
which I think is pretty good.

Sometimes they ask for your bank details.

So if they get your bank details,

they’re actually going to try to
drain your bank account as well.

So if you live in Japan,
you get a phone call.

The best part about
being a foreign Japan is I

think I’ve actually
received scam phone calls.

And they try to talk to you,
but then I just keep talking

to them in English because
usually they’re speaking in Japanese.

It’s honestly just too hard for me.

So I’m like, I’m sorry.

I don’t understand.

I don’t say that in Japanese anymore.

I only speak in English on the phone.

And that really puts them off
because it’s like they can’t scam me.

If I can’t understand what they’re saying,

they can’t scam me if they
can’t convince me of anything.

And they can’t convince me of
anything because they cannot talk to me.

So this actually is
really a big advertisement

for English education in Japan because
you really want to scam more people.

You’ve got to learn multiple languages.

27 year old man was arrested
on suspicion of assault.

Now I do love in every article.

They never say he was arrested for assault.

They always say suspicion
because he hasn’t been convicted yet.

So the details of this were what makes
the suspicion of assault quite funny.

So that’s 7 p.m. a delivery company guy.

He just goes into the police station.

He walks around for a bit and he walks
up to a sergeant and the guy’s 41 year old

sergeant and the sergeant
looks quite pleasantly.

I’m going to pretend to
assume I have no idea.

Maybe he was very brusque.

When I went to the DMV in Japan,
they were very rude to me at first.

And then I was not a
problem and they actually

turned around and
were very nice to me.

So they needed that
like initial, they had an

initial bruscaness that I
managed to wear down,

which was quite good.

He said, “What can I do for you?

” So I see that phrase and I’m like,
“Oh, you know, do you need help?

Can I help you?

” The man, the delivery driver, he comes
in and goes, “I don’t know, I don’t know.

” And then he punches
the policeman in the face.

He was arrested on the
spot and then questioned.

The interesting aspect
of this, as I said, is

he’s been arrested
for suspicion of assault.

Despite the fact
he assaulted a police

officer and a police station,
it’s going to be on video.

Like, I’m sure it’s on video.

There is no suspicion there.

Unless of course the
police officer is like,

“This is a misunderstanding
and then the

person decides not to
prosecute or let him go,”

because then he’s not
being arrested for assault.

So I guess suspicion does make sense.

I’m now going full circle
and convince myself

that we should say suspicion until it’s
concluded, which is actually the case.

That’s what they’re doing in Japan.

But the news article is
I would say, like, here’s

a mountain of evidence
we suspect he did the thing.

While being questioned, he
said, “I’m sorry for doing that.”

And that in itself is not a big surprise
because I bet he is sorry for punching the

policeman in the face and
getting arrested right away.

Next week is Golden Week.

It’s going to be like 50/50
getting episode out, but I’m again.

I’m going to make
notes and then if I can

sit down and just carve
out half an hour, I’m

going to record at least one
or two podcasts next week.

So I will be trying.

I just want you to know again that I’m,
I don’t know, I’m trying to not give up.

Is that it?

I know if I took a month off of
you really hard to get started again.

So even this short episode is worth doing.

I think all this is just going to
get cut and I’ll just do the ends all.

Yeah, I’m just trying to get
my fucking life back together.

I realized what I do
is I feel like I have, we

had this super busy time at work
and I couldn’t do the things I wanted.

And then as soon as
that ended, my family

came and that takes
up all your personal time.

And I realized what I’m feeling
is I’ve lost control of my life.

I don’t get to do the
things I want to do because

I have to sacrifice
that for other things.

And it leaves you
in this weird position

where it’s like, I just want to
have control over my own life.

And I think this is what,
you know, why people

want to be rich is because it’s not
because like they’re greedy or anything.

It’s just they want to have
control over their time and their life.

And that is certainly where I am right now.

I’m innocent

(upbeat music)

Okay, I’ve got a bit of
a new setup, so I have

to make sure, you know,
the mic volume is right.

I’m not hitting my P’s, the plosives
in the wrong spots and things like that.

But I think we’re okay,
so we’re gonna get started.

The boy who was in trouble last week,

17 year old Canadian
boy visits a temple in

Nara and decides,
“Hey, I have a good idea.

“I’m gonna take my fingernail,
I’m gonna carve my name.

into this temple from the year 710.”.

Which is just the dumbest thing you do.

My point last week was,

don’t carve your own name in it.

And then when they say
like, “Did you do this?”

They go, “No, no, that was some
guy called Justin Bieber, “not me.

“I think the kid’s name was Justin,

“so I guess I didn’t work
out if he put Justin in there.”

Ah, flaws everywhere, you gotta
think your plans through criminals.

So, what the temple decided
to do was put up a sign.

The sign is in English
and Japanese bilingual.

The problem is,

Canadian kids aren’t the only problem.

As we have the guy in Italy,
I forget where he was from,

there was a guy who was in Italy and he
carved his name into the call to see him.

His name was Ivan, but I don’t
wanna be so racist in the case.

I think he’s from Belarus, I don’t know.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

It’s not an exclusively Western
English problem to be dumb.

It is every country.

So you can’t put up the sign in every
country in every language from every country.

So,

the priest from the temple said, “In the
future we would like to use pictograms,

“so people from all over the world can
understand, “which I think is a great idea.”

It says, “What is the
pictogram for don’t be a moron?

“Don’t damage the site, don’t carve
your name “into ancient temples?”.

I would be mostly concerned about curses.

You go in there and you
put your name on something.

and you put your name on the wrong thing.

You’re cursed forever.

I mean, that’s the first issue.

So another reason death note wise
to put someone else’s name on it.

Don’t stick your own name in an ancient
temple on any document and anything.

Maybe that wall you’ve written
your name on is the curse wall.

You don’t know because you’re visiting
the temple ’cause you’re not an expert.

If you were an expert, you would know

not to put your name on the temple.

This is this shows how
nice Japanese Buddhist

or Chinto priests or
whatever they are were

is they said, “This was
done without malice.”

I actually kinda disagree.

I think the kid knew it was bad.

That’s why he did it.

It is still regrettable and sad.

In Japan, if you damage
ancient stuff, I’m trying to decide,

should I go through all the
rules and stuff or make up,

get it’s kind of used my own
natural speaking languages,

you know, break an old shit,

the breaking old shit
law can be 300,000 yen,

which, wow, a lot of money
isn’t that much money.

Or five years in prison, that’s
on the other hand, is a lot of time.

So you gotta be real careful.

where you stick your name.

Again, I would be less
concerned about 300,000 yen

and way more concerned
about a curse on my eternal soul.

(upbeat music)

All right, so this is actually a big story.

It came up like five, 10 times
in different feeds this week.

And it’s because it’s a big deal.

It is something that
everyone loves story wise.

Certainly you don’t want this to
happen to you or someone you know.

False accusations, false arrests,
accusations flying back and forth.

Oh, it’s terrible.

But it is like the whole
true crime genre is based on

how we like to watch horrible
things happen to other people

and like just sit back with the popcorn.

A man was wrongfully
arrested in a revenge porn case.

A revenge porn is like, I
get newbie pictures of you or

naughty pictures of you and
meet together or something.

And I say, we’ve, our
relationship is sourdad

and I’m going to post them on
the Internet just to get back at you.

That is illegal in Japan.

I think it’s probably illegal in most
places, Japan’s taking it pretty seriously.

I’m assuming because it must
have happened a lot already.

Well, how did we get here?

A guy was harassing a woman.

He was threatening to take nude pictures
of her and post them on the Internet.

Now the pictures that he
sent to her via her Instagram.

were photoshopped.

Apparently, well, I guess, you know,
and the average person doesn’t care.

So she went to the police and like this
guy threatening to put pictures on me.

There were different accounts, but it was
clearly all coming from the same person.

The, some of the accounts
used this guy’s family name.

So she said to the police,
“This guy is sending me stuff.”

The police didn’t do
a lot of investigation.

They arrested him really quickly.

Now they said, because
of the urgency of the

case, we did not have
time to check the IPs.

The thing is, in total, they
held this man for 40 days.

In Japan, you can be held for 20 some days.

by the police without
actually being charged.

What they do is they have,

oh, we have this accusation.

We’re gonna hold you for 20 some days.

I think it’s 24 because of days
off or weekends or something.

It’s an odd number.

It’s not a number you
expect, but I’m just

gonna use 20 ’cause
that’s sort of the base.

Then he gets released and
they grab him again pretty

quickly saying like, oh,
there’s another charge.

We’re gonna hold you.

So they held this man for 40 days.

The whole time he’s insisting is innocent.

The problem is what a criminal is due.

If they listen to an incident in Japan,

they’ve learned that what you
do is like insist your innocent.

Don’t confess, make
the police do their job.

Problem is, you’re actually innocent.

You’re doing exactly what the criminals do.

So I had no intention of
uploading any revenge porn.

I don’t have any newty pictures of her.

The person sending the threats.

That wasn’t me.

What would a criminal say?

That’s what the police
are looking at you going,

what would a criminal say
in the same situation, buddy?

Exactly what you just said.
So we’re holding you.

40 days.

The lawyers for the guy,
they’re pretty accurate.

They’re saying this is hostage
justice to coerce a confession.

So I’m being held for
day after day after day.

I’m gonna lose my job.

I’m gonna have all these other issues.

I have no recourse.

If I want to solve this to end this,

confession is the fastest way.

They’ve had multiple cases in
Japan of people who have confessed

to crimes they didn’t commit
because of this very action.

The lawyers saying like, this is unfair.

It’s inhumane.

What I have learned, though,
and this is the part I actually do

enjoy about the
ingenuity of Japan is what

the things I learn
about police and justice.

And something people
need to know is that the

rules don’t, your rules
from home don’t follow you.

I’ve talked to several
Americans who seem to

think that American
law is international law.

Like they’ll talk about like they
have to read your, your Miranda rights.

And I’m like, well, Miranda
isn’t a thing outside of America.

So Japanese cops don’t
read your Miranda rights.

They just actually grab you
and take you and hold you.

Again, they don’t have to
actually charge you with anything.

It could be an accusation or a suspicion.

And they are legally allowed to
hold you for the 20 X amount of days.

And then they can do that for each charge.

So then they let you go.

And then as you walk
out of the police station,

they pull you back in and go,
well, we’re going to hold you

for another 20 days for another
charge, another accusation.

If we have 15 20 accusations, we
can hold you for 15 20 times, 20 days.

We just have to keep like
going through that cycle.

They can essentially
arrest you for nothing

for years if they have
enough accusations.

Like let’s say each email is
an accusation in this case.

They could hold him for
20 days for each email.

Now it turns out while he was being
held or while he was in one place,

uh, information was being
sent from another place,

that’s how they
realized this isn’t the guy.

But again, that would have been sort
of the first thing you should have done.

That’s actually part of checking IP
addresses when it comes to Internet cases.

And if they had done that right away,
they wouldn’t have held him for 40 days.

Maybe they would have held him for the
first 20 and maybe you could justify that.

But the second 20 days, it
doesn’t really hold up anymore.

And what I’ve learned though
is you can get 1,000 to 12,500

yen a day for each day
you’re held by the police.

Like if you don’t get actually arrested
for a charged with an actual crime.

The man who was falsely
arrested is asking for a senior official

to explain to his family
and go to his work

and explain to his work why he was
basically missing from work for 40 days.

So like this isn’t covered
in your time off policy.

Uh, you could lose your job because
they actually need you to come and do work.

This is one of the problems.

Weirdly, the police have stayed,

and this is we don’t believe there was
any wrongdoing on the prosecutor parts,

which of course is how the police think,
which is maybe one of the big problems.

But that’s also the
way the laws are set up.

So very technically they
haven’t done anything wrong,

but they’re also not held responsible for
interfering within innocent person’s life.

A group of youths,
which is an excellent thing.

I don’t want to use a group.

I want to have like a gaggle, a gaggle.

What would you call it?

A group of youths?

Uh, I was all about to say a conundrum,

but that just implies certain negativity.

I actually think youths are great.

Um,

a joy of youths.

Oh, that sounds nice.

Anyways, uh, in Japan,
adulthood used to be 20.

It’s now been taken down to 18.

These youths are now saying, well,
the rules say that if I want to run for

government, I have to be 25
or 30 depends on the position,

but let’s use 25 as our low end
to be like a perfectural governor.

You have to be at least 30 years old to
run for mayor or something else or a local

election. You have to be at least 25.
He’s like, well, if we’re adults,

then we should have adult rights,
which would be running for office.

Uh, I’m all for this.

Ninja Ninja Japan, if you listen for any
amount of time, I have complained multiple

times that we have way too
many 70 year olds in charge.

Way too many people who don’t understand
sort of the modern aspects of life.

Because they’ve been in
politics for the last 50 years.

So they only see politics in a certain
way and anything that’s come up in the

last 20 years, they don’t even
like think about it or consider it.

I think those guys need to be out.
I think we need some fresh blood.

I think youth is the way to go.

Would I vote for an 18 year old?
Probably not.

So again, this is where it
becomes a fair system, though.

Like if community in general thinks 18
is too young to be mayor of the city or

governor of the prefecture,
then they won’t vote for them.

But if the 18 year old is convincing
enough, people will vote for them.

So I think absolutely led 18
year olds run for office any office.

If the world at large things are too
young, they’re not going to vote for them.

It works.

But this is should be a legal right.

So a legal right.

So they’re filing with
the Tokyo district court to

be allowed to run for
office, certainly in Tokyo.

And I am 100% on board.

I hope they’re successful.

This goes to like drinking laws and stuff.

Everything’s just to be established
either in adult or you’re not an adult.

So like America, you’re an adult
at 18, but you can’t drink until 21.

What the fuck?

That doesn’t make any sense.

If I’m an adult and I can drive a car
and I can buy a gun and I can join the

military and I can kill people
on behalf of the government, I

think I should be allowed to
have a cocktail after all that.

But yeah, apparently their laws are
different and they don’t make any sense

to me.
Of course, here’s the other side of youth.

It’s nice to have a
balance between stories.

I do enjoy that.

There were four boys with motorcycles.

They’re driving around.

They’re like, you know what?

This is not exciting enough.

One of the four boys
is like, let’s call the cops.

The driver, there’s like
three o’clock in the morning.

What the kids do in
Japan, they’re in like a gang.

They drive on the wrong side of the road.

They go through red lights and they’ll
do circles around the intersection and

block traffic and they’ll be they’ll
ride like four or five motorcycles wide

so that no one can get past them and
there’ll just be shitty to other drivers.

If they’re out at three
o’clock in the morning.

And they’re like, this is not enough.

We’re causing trouble, but we’re
not getting all the attention we need.

Certainly not the attention we should
have gotten when we were younger,

which would have stopped
this kind of behavior.

Let’s call the cops on ourselves.

Now I have in my many years now of doing
the introduced Japan talked about bad ideas.

Calling the cops on yourself
and not expecting to get arrested.

It’s just a bad idea.

It just doesn’t make sense.

It’s not the way the world works.

So they call the cops the cops
show up and they get arrested.

Well, they all admitted to the charges
and they said we wanted to get the

thrill of luring a police
car and being chased by it.

And I guess you got that.

I don’t know how much
of a car chase this was.

It sounds like they got
taken down pretty quick.

Although in the news story, they
maybe have just cut that part out.

But at the end of the day,

don’t call the cops on yourself.

I think might be this week’s Ninja
News Japan advice for criminals.

In Japan, motorcycle, bicycle, sorry.

We just talked about motorcycles.

Bicycles are classified as light vehicles.

And therefore they must have a
belt just like a car must have a horn.

You could be fined though.

Well, there are some rules about
the bicycle belt that I didn’t know.

This is why I’m putting out this is
almost like a public service announcement.

Bicycles, you can, so
you’re riding a bicycle,

you could be fined
for continuously ringing.

You are a bell.

It’s a violation to ring the bell for fun.

So if you’re just feeling joyous
riding your bicycle and you’re thinking,

ding, ding, ding, yeah, 20,000,
you had to find for you, bitch.

It is prohibited to ring the
bell to get people who are

walking out in front of you,
like pedestrians out of the way.

So you’re riding, you
could ding a link, excuse me,

so I am passing through
20,000 in for you, bitch.

The thing is, I didn’t know this
law before and I know it now.

And I, couple times a week, do
quite long walks and there are a lot of

grannies out there who
do a lot of bicycling on the

sidewalk and they really don’t
want you to be in their way.

They feel like the sidewalk is their
personal highway and they ring the

shit out of their bell and
I’ve just learned that they

ring the bell at me for walking
20,000 yen for you, bitch.

There’s going to be a lot of
20,000 yen fines coming up.

And you just look out for me, grandma.

I’m coming for you.

And that’s the way it’s going to be.

Actually, probably won’t.

I bet by the time I call them
is not a police won’t show up.

This might not be worth it, but
if there is ever a problem, 100%

I’m trying to try to get
old lady pay 20,000 yen.

Not to me, unfortunately, but I’ll
maybe I could do super damages.

They don’t really do that Japan.

It’s too bad.

What do you do when you’re feeling lonely?

When I’m feeling lonely, I
get my little friend here, Dave.

I scratch him and we snuggle.

And that’s that’s really what Dave’s
purpose is, is to make sure that I

don’t feel lonely and go off the rails and
maybe call emergency services 2,761 times.

So I’ve never called
emergency services in Japan.

I’ve never had to lucky me.

That just means I’ve had a lucky life,
but also means I’m not lonely and bored

and thinking like, how
can I entertain myself?

I could ride around a motorcycle at
three o’clock in the morning, call the cops

and get them to chase me, or
I could just sit and over a two

year, nine month period, call
emergency services 2,61 times.

This lady was very, she
said the reason she did it

was she was lonely and I
actually find that quite sad.

I feel a little bad for
the lady because yeah,

she’s, she’s resorted
to this to get attention.

She’s got nothing going on.

And that’s a sad situation.

She would call up the fire department
and say, I have a stomach ache.

I took a large dose of
medicine, my leg hurts.

And she would ask the fire
department to dispatch some Ambulae.

Then when the ambulance arrives,
she would claim she didn’t make the call.

We just started out with a
revenge porn story where an

innocent man was held by the
police and abused by the police.

But this is the opposite
where the police are quite nice.

So it’s really, it’s tough because
I do want to give a balance view.

Most cops that I’ve met, I’ve known,
I’ve dealt with, have actually been

really good people and I feel like
they would never falsely arrest me.

And they would do a proper investigation.

But of course, that’s not everybody.

In this case, she was warned several
times to stop calling emergency services.

And she kept doing it.

And that’s why she’s in trouble.

Did learn about a scam.

There’s a lot of scams targeting older
people and it’s usually on the phone.

And what they do is call you and
try to get you to transfer money,

trying to pretend to be
a relative or something.

But those guys, if they
work in an office, it’s

actually quite easy to
track where they are.

A computer and stuff, IP
addresses, much like again,

our first story of the
day with a revenge porn.

So how do you deal with that?

You get in a car and from eight
o’clock in the morning to 8 P.M. at night,

you stay on the highway and that makes
it much harder for the police to find you.

They can’t ping cell towers as quickly
and it’s, it’s, you keep on the move.

You’re hard to catch.

This is actually some smart criminally.

The problem is if you’re working in 12 hour
shifts, they don’t want to stop the car.

So you got four or five people in this car.

You’re in the car for 12 hours.

You’re driving along the road.

You are pooing and peeping, peeping
in that car, which is really gross.

So I, I mean, I was thinking
about there were 50 cases

involved, which are total about
94 million yen and damages.

So 94 million yen, they’ve
scanned out away from people.

Is that is everyone in the car
getting an equal share of that?

I bet not.

I bet there’s a boss taking majority of
it and he’s paying these guys a salary.

When they say crime doesn’t pay,
this is kind of what I’m thinking about.

How much money am I getting paid to be
in a car for 12 hour straight to pee in a

bottle and maybe poop in
a bucket or something with

other guys in the other
guys are doing the same thing.

So this car is rank by the end of the day.

It is not a place I want to be.

How much money would you have
to pay me for me to do that willingly?

It would have to be a lot of money.

And I bet these low level criminals
are not getting the pay they deserve.

Which is why they should do denies.

I don’t think that’s going
to work out for anybody.

So this is the last interesting story.

This is public policy.

The mayor of Osaka has put
into place or he voted in a place.

He put it up.

Proposally.

He proposed a rule change and he

said that the this is
a really ballsy move.

I kind of like this guy.

He said that government officials
should get a public review and that

public review if it’s low enough,
they should have a salary cut.

So I learned that the mayor of
Osaka makes a million yen a month.

That’s 12 million yen a year.

The average salary is four
to five million yen a year.

So he’s making three,
four times more than

the average salary by
being mayor of Osaka.

Now that it’s actually less than
I kind of would have expected.

But I’m assuming to
get to be mayor of Osaka.

You already have funds elsewhere like
campaign or your rich family or backgrounds.

A lot of political people in
Japan, they’re institutional.

So like their parents were politicians
and their politicians, that kind of stuff.

So the way it’s going to work is they’re
going to do a survey of 3,500 residents.

And if you get a low enough number,
you get a 30% decrease in your salary.

Now you’re still going to be making
way more money than the average person,

but at the same time,
a 30% cut in your salary.

That that sends a message to anybody.

The current mayor has overwhelming support.

So that’s probably why he’s pretty confident
about this, but again, could change.

So I found that an interesting thing.

I think it’s a really nice idea.

I was thinking the way to really
make this effective because again,

you can use American
politics as the standard version

of politics because it’s
in the news all the time.

And it’s all very rich people.

I think if you get low enough
numbers, you should actually have your

personal funds reduced by X
amount of money and put that in.

So like a Trump, let’s say he’s in
office, he gets very low numbers.

Boom.

X amount of money goes from his
personal accounts into just the tax system.

And he has to pay for
a system he doesn’t like.

So if it was a Republican
and they get a low

score, they have to
pay for social services.

If it’s a liberal.

conservative Republican and Democrat, whoo,
forgot the word Democrat for the second.

If it’s a Democrat and they get a low
score, they have to take money from

their personal life
and pay for the military.

Probably pay for some
cluster bombs or something.

That would give you, you would want
to keep everyone happy, which is what

the politicians are really
supposed to be doing in theory.

So I’m interested in how this works out.

Again, the just the straight up idea of
this guy doing this is pretty cool to me.

So we’ll see if it has an impact on
other aspects of politics in Japan.

I was hoping that’s hoping you
get a view of Dave on my lap.

The problem is, if I do this and you
can see Dave, then you can’t see me.

anymore.

Part of me thinks Dave is the far
more appealing member of this team.

So you’re here listening to my voice,
but just seeing the little sausage Dave

in his little burrito thing here
would probably be more appealing.

I would, I bet I would get more views.

Because this, I put
this on YouTube that the

podcast version
wouldn’t actually matter.

I probably get more views.

What you were seeing was this, just my
lame chest, the talking mouth at the top.

I actually might do that next week.

Give this a shot.

This might be my new format for YouTube.

Because you don’t see my head.

You just see my mouth talking.

And then you get to Dave here the
whole time because he’s just chilled out.

And if I, if I get him up and scratching
and stuff, it’s almost like SMR.

This might be my new, my new scheme,
my new plan, but then you can’t see the

Domo Coon up there, which is sort of the
secondary appeal of my desk at the moment.

I could move Domo Coon down here.

I mean, that’s empty space right now.

So certainly some things to think about.

I moved my desk around.

Just try to clean everything up.

New format would be pretty solid.

I think I might, I think I might really try
to capitalize on the Dave aspect of the.

Lost Dream Jobs

Okay, so we got almost the end of the Gassi saga.

So I keep saying I don’t want to talk about

Gassi anymore, but then something happens

that makes it vaguely interesting.

This time it’s pretty interesting.

And so the only final part will be if he

ever ends up back in Japan and actually has

like an interaction with the police.

So Gassi has been expelled from the government.

This is the first time this has happened in the last 72 years.

There were 236 votes cast, 235 people voted to get rid of Gassi.

The only holdout was a fellow party member,

which is pretty sad when you got like one

person who’s like standing up for you.

Then as soon as Gassi was expelled, the police went and started like putting

out warrants for his arrest.

The accusation is that he has swindled people

out of money claiming he could introduce

people to BTS.

So he’s running this kind of like weird, fame adjacent scam saying if you

give me X-Money Yen, I will introduce you to BTS.

On Thursday last week, police secured an arrest warrant for intimidating and

defaming celebrities.

So in a weird way, he was actually right.

He said, “I don’t want to come back to Japan because the police are going to

arrest me.”

We found out that if you are a member of the government and the government

is in session,

you actually can’t be arrested, which

I’m finding to be a very weird, weird rule.

Because government members… Check just

as if I call them bathrooms or washrooms.

I call them bathrooms.

I don’t know why, but yeah, I call them bathrooms.

In Japan, this is totally going to be off topic from the podcast.

In Japan, the toilets and the bathroom are separate rooms.

So in the West, when I had apartments and stuff, you would have like a

bathtub and a sink in a toilet all in one room.

I think that’s really, really normal.

That’s your bathroom.

In Japan, you have an actual room for just the bath and it’s got a shower

and the best part is you can spray water everywhere.

The whole room is the shower room.

Then in a separate room to that is a sink.

So that’s where you brush your teeth and stuff.

Then there’s a separate room that’s just a toilet.

In Japan, it makes way more sense to say toilet than bathroom because they

would actually different places in the house.

That’s a very valuable question though.

Do you call bathrooms washrooms?

I’ve said washrooms.

I think you say washrooms when you’re trying to be like more polite maybe.

So we found out that if you’re in the government, you cannot be arrested.

So as soon as the session was finished, as soon as the diet session was

finished, Gassy was going to get arrested.

So he was actually right.

And this was the most interesting bit to me is that he was right about what

he was saying.

They have confiscated his passport,

but they haven’t actually confiscated it.

They just nullified it because they didn’t take it away from it because they

didn’t see him.

And then they put him on the international wanted list.

So this got what I thought was going to be a weird little story about a guy

who was being

a politician from Dubai and is that going to work

out or not to now that he’s now an international.

criminal.

So when they see like when you watch a movie and they do interpool and they

have a list

and they have pictures of all the like

most wanted in the world, Gassy might be on

that now for realsies.

So he’s believed to have threatened three people and conducted one instance

of obstruction of business, which is Ninja News Japan’s favorite crime.

As we know, the party went from the anti-NHK

party to the politician girl’s 48 party.

They had a press conference with some of the

new members they were putting forward and

they’re all relatively attractive women.

So this is obvious their new platform and it makes it a little harder to

take them seriously as politicians.

The anti-NHK party was already a bit.

But now it’s like, oh, we’re just going to

put girls forward and see if you’ll just vote

for girls.

And since this is a real political party and with real reporters, the

reporter has asked

a couple like fairly not like hard-hitting

questions, but asking about taxes.

The lady politician they put forward goes, oh, that’s a tough question.

I’ll pass.

Getting sort of the level of quality of the politician they’re putting up.

I mean, it has nothing to do with gender.

It’s just they’re trying to use gender to get seats.

It’s dumb.

I mean, let’s face it, this whole party now is just one of the dumbest

things I think I’ve seen in Japan.

And yet weirdly, because they’re putting up a bunch of girls, it’s probably

going to work.

In 2022, so last year, 3.997 billion yen was turned into the police

lost and found in Tokyo.

Not all at once.

This is the entirety of the year.

So it could have been like 10,000 yen at the time.

3.997 billion yen, again, you do the quick math.

It’s like $4 million.

We’re actually lost and turned into the police.

So people in Japan, this is actually saying like, if you are going to drop

your wallet or

going to drop money anywhere in the world, Japan’s a pretty good place to do

it because they’re not just going to leave it there.

They’re going to pick it up and they’re

going to take us as a cops and turn it into

the cops.

We’ll try to get it back to you.

On that point, police managed to return 2.95 billion yen.

So let’s say it was $4 million, they managed to return about $3 million.

So there’s still a million dollars that essentially went missing because of

lost items.

The unclaimed money, so after the year, they hold it for an X amount of time

and then they just like, well, it’s our money now.

That claims money gets turned into the metropolitan government.

So if you lose your money in Japan, in Tokyo specifically, I guess, in this

case, and someone turns it in and

you don’t claim it, they don’t get it back.

The person who found the money doesn’t get to keep the money.

The money goes to the metropolitan government which is kind of a shaft.

I think I should get the money.

If I found the money and I’m a good person,

I turned it in and gave me the money.

I’m okay with that.

There were 3.43 million lost items turned in last year.

And that is up 21% for 2021.

Now, of course, last year we were in the throes of COVID.

It actually, the numbers have gone way down last yesterday.

They had 2,600 cases of COVID in Japan, the country.

And that is great because I used to be just one or two cities would have

that many easily.

So it’s not finished, but it has gone

way, way down, which I’m very happy about.

So this actually demonstrates the 21% increase of lost items and people

turning them into the

police means there are more people just doing stuff because you have to be

out of your house.

If you’re in your house all the time, you’re not really losing stuff and if

you do lose something in your house, it’s not getting turned into the cops.

So that’s neat because basically COVID meant there was less things lost and

less things turned into the police.

From 2015 to 2019, it was about 4 million items a year.

So Ron Track, weirdly, for pre-pandemic numbers of lost items in Tokyo for

the year, which is a good thing.

Oh, so they do this every year.

They do a survey of what kids want to be when they grow up.

And it’s always a bit shocking because of the attitude of children.

It’s always really weird because it’s Japan

and different countries because you ask a

kid where they want to be.

What did I want to be when I was a kid?

I wanted to be like space ranger.

I actually for years and years and years want to be a truck driver.

I really like trucks.

I think cowboy and cop were in there for a while.

They do this in Japan.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Boys uniformly want to be company employees.

Now last time I did this, which was last year I was making fun of because it

was like, hey little boy, what do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be a businessman.

A businessman.

I want to be a businessman.

It’s a really weird thing to want to be because again, little kid’s concept

of businessman is not very realistic.

But junior high school and high school girls

also just wanted to be company employees.

Between elementary and middle school girls, they wanted to be manga artists,

which is pretty cool.

It’s artistic.

Scholar entered the top 10 for boys who were in high school in junior high

school and girls in high school.

I honestly don’t really know what a scholar is.

I guess that’s just like a lifetime student.

What is a scholar?

Because I think you have to be more specific.

But together young, their kids in high school and stuff, they might not

really know what scholars are.

I don’t.

I’m 50.

I have no clue what a scholar would be.

And that’s not really a job, is it?

I guess professor at university is, which is scholarly.

I’m not sure.

The comments on the Internet were interesting because some were lamenting

the lack of aspirations.

Because it’s like, when I was young, I wanted to be a rock star.

I wanted to be the number one.

I wanted to go to the Olympics.

I wanted to be the best dude in the world at something.

And they’re saying these Japanese

kids, they don’t have those kind of dreams.

They have, I want to find a good solid company and hunker down and be a

company employee for 40 years.

And then I want to retire and have no drama in my life.

And it’s not exciting and it’s not interesting.

But then a whole bunch of other people were saying, like, is it better to

have a dream that’s unattainable versus a dream that you could actually get?

So like, my real dream when I was younger was to be a writer.

I wanted to write novels.

I wanted to write books.

I wanted to do, you know, I wanted to

be like a cliche, pretentious artist type.

I wanted to write.

And I’ve always, I actually now, over the last decade or so, I actually have

done a lot of writing.

I’ve done writing.

I’ve written articles and stuff.

I did games, journalism, I did stuff like that.

Last year, I did Montana LDablo, which was a choose your own adventure,

which is something that had been in the back

of my head for years and years and years.

So I have achieved that goal, but not, of course, the way, the way you think

of it as a kid is I’m going to write books

and becoming internationally famous.

And like, people are going to want to get with me because I’m so smart and

artistic and famous.

But that’s not actually the reality.

A working writer though, I would be happy with that job.

So this is realistically a very attainable job.

So is that a bad thing?

Like you could grow up.

Oh, wait, wait, the whole point is I failed.

I never became the famous writer that I wanted to be.

The last episode of “Seeming Be,” I actually

talked about some of my exploits into trying.

to become a writer and the sheer volume of rejection you have to go through

to not succeed in the end is pretty hard.

Yeah, a lot of other people on the Internet when they were commenting on

this article, what

they were saying was like, isn’t it better to have a dream you could

actually achieve and then achieve your dream?

Because you get that sort of sense of accomplishment, like you’ve done the

thing you set out to do,

isn’t that better than saying, I want to

be a rock star and I can’t because there’s

so few people actually end up succeeding in their desires to be famous.

So I’m a little torn because I think young people should be aspirational.

But having an element of reality in there, so maybe I want to be a musician,

but you need if you understand what a working

musician is, like you make jingles for

commercials, you

do background music for videos and stuff, understanding the reality of it

means you could

get a job doing something you like, but realistically, I think would be

pretty appealing.

Because I did games journalism and it actually was, it had really good

points and really

bad points, but I was doing, I was playing video games and I was writing

which are two things I love to do.

I would be very happy to do that for the rest of my life.

And yeah, I’m not going to be like super famous

or international or anything, but it would

be a low key constant satisfaction, which I

think is what people sort of don’t think about.

It’s like, do I want to be super, super successful or nothing or would I

like to be happy, maybe to a lesser degree forever?

So Prime Minister Kishito, we’ve talked about birth rates in Japan.

The last year they had less than 800,000 babies.

It is the lowest number of babies born in

the country in years and years and years.

I think since World War II, since they actually started keeping track.

So this is a really big problem.

Because the population of the country, it just keeps diminishing.

So you have old people dying, you have not

enough babies being born to replace them.

That’s actually bad for the economy, it’s bad for the country, it just means

your culture may disappear.

So slowly Japanese people are going extinct.

And then you’ve got foreigners like me coming in and making half babies.

Oh my God, that’s not cool.

So Kishito sat down, he said, we have a plan.

We’re going to make a plan for increasing the birth rate.

And it’s going to be assistance to employers who encourage male staff to

take child care leave.

Last year, 14% of the people who were eligible to take child care leave

actually took it.

So most men in Japan traditionally don’t

take any time off when they have a baby.

But they’re thinking, we make them or help them take more time off.

They’ll be more likely to have a baby to share that sort of burden.

More support for freelancers and self-employed workers.

So yeah, if I am self-employed and I have to take off six months to a year

to have a baby

and raise the baby for the first year, I’m

not working that entire period which makes

I have zero income for that time.

Very going to inhibit my desire to have a baby.

What I wrote in my notes and my kind of point from the beginning has been

this doesn’t help you get people making babies.

This supports people who have babies.

So what are they actually going to do to get people to actually have babies

in the first place?

Because really the problem is people, modern people, and modern society do

not find the idea of having children appealing.

Because I don’t make enough money.

I can’t support myself.

I can’t support a family.

So it’s better for me to remain single.

And this has been going around for a long time.

So what they need to do, when I’ve said this a bunch of times, I’m actually

thinking of like not talking about this as much now.

What they need to do is actually change the entire culture of Japan so that

work is not at the forefront of everyone’s lives.

And that is going to be, I think, an impossibility.

And it’s the one thing they refuse to talk about.

Because men and women need time to spend

time with each other, to date, to go out, to

form a relationship so that they can then

get involved enough to actually want to have

a baby in the first place.

And all these financial systems and stuff.

These are great after you’ve had the baby.

But you have to put people in a position where they want to get together to

have a baby in the first place.

And that is the one thing they don’t want to talk about.

Because that would mean we don’t work 12 hour days anymore.

We don’t dedicate our entire lives to the

company like Japan has since World War II.

We change contract types so that people get

more free time and deep prioritizes work,

which is 100% against the current Japanese philosophy of life and existence.

Tattoos.

So I have a couple of tattoos.

I have one on my shoulder, one on my back, but they’re very small.

And that means that I cannot go to a public pool.

I cannot go to a public onsen with my tattoos exposed.

So I just wear one of those swimming jackets, rash guard things.

And they’re covered so no one says anything.

It’s fine.

Because you can actually tell there’s

the guys walking around with rash guard on.

Like I probably has tattoo.

So a survey was done should tattoos be allowed in hot Springs.

So again, if I go into a hot spring, if it’s public, I’m actually not

allowed to go in with a tattoo on my shoulder because everyone can see it.

It basically changes by age.

So younger people are more accepting.

Older people are just 100% against it.

But 43.9% say that tattoos should be 100% banned.

If you have a tattoo, you shouldn’t be

allowed to bathe in an onsen in a hot spring.

33.7% say it should be handled case by case.

So I’m a foreigner.

I have tattoos.

And they’re very small.

That clearly shows that I am not a Yakuza, which is what this is all about.

This is all about the Yakuza showing their gang affiliation.

And I’m clearly not affiliated, certainly not with a Japanese gang.

And my tattoos are not like the full body one.

So they don’t have the same sort of impact or feeling.

And I think as soon as people see that I’m a foreigner, they’ll think, “Oh,

it’s just a fashion thing for foreigners.”

So they’re saying like, “Yeah, so if I come in and I have a tattoo, it

should be okay.”

But if a Yakuza comes in and he’s got the

full body thing, that should not be okay.

22.5% say hot Springs need to change with the times.

Which I think is actually pretty sensible.

And you know, most of the 22.4% who said that were really young people who

are probably getting tattoos themselves.

Well, this was actually, I don’t know if other people would care about this.

You can see, if you watch the video, if you watch the YouTube video, you can

see in the background I have a chin up bar.

I haven’t been using it lately because I hurt my shoulder in judo.

But it is something I’ve always, as an exercise, I’ve always enjoyed it.

And I’ve always enjoyed it because if I’m

ever hanging off a cliff, I want to be able

to pull myself up physically so that I can climb up the cliff.

So at the end of an action movie when someone’s hanging, you know, if you’re

not physically strong enough to pull yourself up, that’s when you die.

Whereas I want to be the guy who like pulls

himself up really impressively in one go.

So I’ve always enjoyed chin ups.

This guy named Kenta Adachi, he works for the Japanese Coast Guard.

He’s 35 years old.

He has taken the world record for dead hang.

So it’s like you get on the chin up bar, you hang with both hands, you just

hang there for as long as possible.

Previously, a Norwegian guy did it for 16 minutes and three seconds.

I think I maxed out once at five minutes.

So maybe with training, I could actually get it, but I’m a big dude.

So it might be harder for me.

I’m not sure.

That was back in 2020.

So Adachi came in and he’s like, I’m going to kill this record.

Oh my god, did he kill it?

Not only did he beat 16 minutes, he did one hour and 20 minutes and 41

seconds.

So he took it, took the 16, beat it by four minutes and then put another

hour on top of that, which to me seems inconceivable.

But this guy is also holding the world record for the most consecutive chin

ups, which is 651.

So he now has two world records.

I mean, very related, obviously his upper body strength is off the charts.

Either that or he’s incredibly light.

I don’t know which is, which is probably both.

He’s probably a very svelte man, but with massive shoulders and chest.

But good on him.

I mean, he didn’t just beat that record.

He absolutely destroyed it.

And I will, after this podcast, go and try

to see how long I can do a dead hang for.

I mean, there’s so much shoulder.

I’m assuming it’s only going to be like eight seconds.

A woman thinks that her boyfriend is cheating on her.

I did enjoy the word thinks.

Not there was any proof.

She just suspected her boyfriend was cheating on her.

So she calls her friend, a guy friend.

And then the guy friend comes over with two

other guy friends and they call the girl’s

boyfriend to the girl’s apartment and he shows up.

And then they threaten him with a knife.

They punch him in the face.

They handcuff him.

They say, let’s go to the bank and get some money out.

And then they take his keys and they take his Lamborghini.

That’s a lot.

Like, there’s accusations and there’s confrontational behavior.

But we think you’re cheating on our friend.

We’re going to beat you up and take all your stuff.

I think there’s only reason I found this interesting is because that’s not

going to fix it.

Like, okay, you guys need to break up.

That’s one thing.

But we’re going to steal all your stuff and

now I’m going to go to prison for years.

That is a disproportionate response to the issue at hand.

And I think maybe that’s why I found that one is interesting it is.

Also they took a guy’s Lamborghini.

There’s no way Lamborghini is a standout.

There’s no way you’re going to be driving

that around and the cops don’t figure out.

It’s the stolen Lamborghini.

Okay, and this is the last ones for all the creepy dudes who have this like,

a lot of weeb sensibilities about Japan.

Japan’s changing and all you weeb dudes may not be as welcome as you think

you are anymore.

Japan is raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 and recognizing coercion

without violence.

So since 1907, the age of consent in Japan has been 13 years old.

And it’s never in the last 20 years I’ve been in Japan.

It’s not actually been accepted like if I talk to a 13-14 year old and they

agree to do it, it’s still not okay.

So everyone kind of socially knew this wasn’t cool.

But I do remember a few sort of weird nerdy

dudes online using this as a justification

for coming and trying to hit on basically kids.

But then of course they’re the kind of people who never actually leave their

basements.

So they never actually come to Japan.

They just use it as a justification for their own perverted desires.

Baby is going to be defined by more than just violence.

So previously, if a man raped a woman and

the woman didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape.

And it’s really disturbing.

So basically if I drugged a girl or I got a girl really, really drunk and I

got in a position

where she didn’t fight back physically,

then a court would not call that rape.

They would say that she knew she was drinking.

I could maybe say that I didn’t know there were drugs and she was accepting.

There were a lot of excuses that could come up.

And that has been now been taking into account.

So coercion without violence is now included under sort of the rape clause.

I think they might actually be changing, you know, the word rape in Japanese

is being redefined.

So violence is not the sort of defining factor of what a rape is.

So if you use alcohol drugs or power.

So if I’m in your boss and you feel like

you have to do it or if I’m in like, I’m.

really rich, dude, any sort of position where it’s like power harassment,

that is now going

to be classified as rape in Japan, which is actually a really good thing.

They’ve also started looking at other stuff like circulating images online.

So revenge porn or taking up skirt photos,

which is a really common problem in Japan.

That used to be you get in trouble, but you didn’t go to jail because it

wasn’t technically illegal.

It’s sort of like taking pictures in public,

but then there’s privacy issues in Japan.

It’s very big on privacy.

So I’m surprised this one went for as long as it did.

If I take pictures, that’s illegal, but if I circulate them online, that’s

double illegal.

So I get two illegal things in one go.

And that’s actually one of the things they’re trying to really, really crack

down on is these guys who are creepy and stuff, sharing them is maybe worse.

And at first, I was worried about Ninja News Japan because I need to get all

these news stories so I can do the content.

But now if there are more arrests, it means more creepy, weird stories will

actually come out.

Because right now, there’s a whole bunch of people they get in trouble, they

get caught by the police, but it’s not technically illegal.

So we don’t hear all the details, so we don’t actually get the story.

So now, I think we’re going to have more crimes come to the forefront, which

means more content for Ninja News Japan.

So at least for a little while, I think we’re going to be getting a lot more

really creepy dude news.

But let’s face it, if you come to listen to Ninja News Japan, that’s

probably what you’re coming to listen for.

You creepy, creepy weirdo.

[MUSIC].