I have one cold hand. That must mean the circulation to one hand is not as good as the other. It is my right hand. Which I guess is... is your heart on your left side? I think so. So the hand that is furthest from my heart being colder sort of makes sense, but doesn't really. As I've started the last few episodes, I know you don't care. I know I just have to start... So the stumbling that's happening right now is me formulating my beginning, which I should do before I press go. But then at the same time, isn't this the reality? That sort of... the difference between a proper news show and what you would want in the podcasting world is that sort of raw reality of knowing that the presenter of the news has one cold hand and is trying to figure out why.
Mask mandates are in the news a little bit. Japan has relaxed its mask guidelines. So before it was basically wear a mask everywhere. And in Japan, it wasn't a strange thing for people to wear masks. So there was a huge compliance rate right off the start. It was not a political issue. It was not about freedom or anything like that. It was just like, you know what? There's a disease. Wearing masks makes it go less fast. It's not as communicable. Yeah, we'll wear a mask. There were a few people who didn't. We'll hear about them in a minute. They've relaxed the guidelines. So basically, if you're out in the open and you stand far away from people, you don't have to wear a mask. I stopped wearing a mask while walking Dave. And again, because I'm out in the countryside, there's no one around. I basically walk past some people, but we don't talk. We don't stop. So I figure that is pretty safe. A big city like Tokyo, if I was walking around there, I'd probably wear a mask because there's just going to be people everywhere all the time. Once I get on the train, mask on. Once I'm at work, my work is kind of mandatory, which is fine.
I don't argue with it. They want to keep everyone who's within that building safe. But they've relaxed guidelines. And then they did a survey, and 18% didn't know there were guidelines. So 18% of the people surveyed, it was like a thousand people. 18% of the people were like, what? I was just doing sort of like what everyone else was doing. I didn't know the government had actually said what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. So that's how clued in people are. You would assume actually that those are the people who don't wear masks, the people who don't pay attention. But what they're really doing is just succumbing to social pressure. And again, it's not a political issue in Japan.
It's like, this is good for you. It's safe. People have been wearing masks during allergy season and cold and flu season for years and years and years, certainly since I came to Japan 20 years ago. So wearing a mask during a global pandemic probably wasn't even a thought. So 18% though didn't even realize the government had said what you should and should not do. 40% know that there are guidelines but don't know the details. So yeah, I know the government put out guidelines, but I'm not going to look them up or anything. I'm not going to find out what they are. So off we go. I'm going to wear a mask. So again, most people are wearing a mask anyways. That's hitting a majority of the guidelines because the guidelines are just saying where and when.
I am in that 40% because even though I know there are mask guidelines, I didn't bother looking it up. Even after looking at this story, I didn't go and look up the guidelines. So I actually right now, in all sincerity, cannot tell you specifically what the guidelines are. I know they did say like, if you're walking around outside, you don't have to wear a mask. Which a lot of people do. Good on them for doing what they think is going to keep them safe. 72% of people in Japan surveyed, well again, this is a thousand people, which I think is not a big enough sample size to talk about the entire population of Japan. 72% of the people surveyed said, drop the mask entirely. Like the pandemic's finished, we're done. This is a reckless attitude as far as I'm concerned because we are in this mass fluctuation of cases. We're seeing cases daily and it goes from a couple thousand to a hundred thousand down to a couple thousand.
It's just massive. Clearly there are enough variants, there's enough disparity in the types that some aren't having a big impact where others are making you really, really sick. You got to be really careful. So I don't think we should be dropping the mask yet. I think in public places, when it's crowded, so the train and probably in your office, you should still be wearing a mask just for safety. And you should keep wearing the mask until Corona is not a big enough issue, but that's what? We're in year three. This might be their attitude. It's just here, it's part of our lives now. We can't avoid it.
So why even bother? But that's the bothering is the part that might actually make it go away. That's actually my concern is that if you stop wearing the mask and it spreads around more, we get more variants, more mutations, and it just gets worse and worse and worse. So there were 68 trainee Buddhist monks. So they go to a temple. This is kind of like their exam. I don't know what a Buddhist exam would be like. It'd be like they give you a blank piece of paper and then you hand it back in with nothing on it. And that's a past test. I just had that idea now. It's pretty funny. In Kyoto, they were doing temple training, which includes chanting and listening to lectures and a lot of stuff I would not want to do, which is why I didn't end up in the priesthood in any form.
I guess monkhood in this case. One got a fever on December 6th and they took a PCR test and he was negative, but they sent him home and then he showed up positive the next day. That's exactly what happened to me. The evening I thought I had COVID, I took a test and it was negative. I woke up the next morning, took the same test, not the exact same test because that would already be used. I took a home test and it said positive. They all did testing. All 68 trainee monks did testing before this retreat training sessions began and they were all negative. By December 8th, more than 30 of them, so more than half the trainee monks had got COVID, which would imply to me that they were not wearing masks while chanting and other things and they were eating together and they were sleeping in the same room. Of course they got it.
I don't think they deserved to be punished. They thought they were safe. They seemed to be following all the guidelines. They did social distancing and stuff and they put the futons they were sleeping on farther apart, but it wasn't enough. I'm wondering if they wore masks, but at the end of the day, Buddha didn't protect them, but maybe that's, I'm trying to come up with an idiom or a treatise in the moment and it's not going to happen. Buddha protects those who wear their own masks from the dangers of communicable diseases. It didn't really roll off the tongue like I was hoping it would. This is an update. There was a man who, it's like a year ago, maybe even more, he was sort of an anti-masker and he got on a peach flight and he refused to wear his mask and the pilot got basically so pissed and all the passengers, they had an unscheduled stop. This hits our obstruction of business.
I'm going to put the counter up there in the corner in post so people watching live on Twitch will not see it. From now on, we're going to have an obstruction of business counter every time we have an obstruction of business arrest. It doesn't mean that they get convicted, but if we get that arrest, we're going to put the counter up there. This is the first one and it's good because this is a guy who's been on Ninja Nunchukan at least three or four times because he is a constant entity. He stopped the peach flight. I know he refused to wear a mask in a restaurant. He got into a fight with his staff and he's sort of an anti-masker and he's clearly making these issues to try to get media attention or he's just a dick. It's actually hard to tell at this point. He was arrested for obstruction of business. His trial has ended.
He's been found guilty of obstruction of business and injuring a flight attendant. Now there was a scuffle. Injure might be a bit generous from what I read, but you could … it's still assault. Even if you don't really hurt the person, you can still assault them. There's probably just a Japanese way of saying assault. I actually haven't looked at enough of the laws to know. I guess they don't. They're not going to use the same verb use. They're not going to use the same words even for the same crimes as other countries when you translate them. You're going to translate it more directly so you have an understanding of what the actual crime is.
Injuring a flight attendant probably just grabbed her or pushed them or something because there were no reports of the earlier stories of someone going to hospital or anything serious. It couldn't have been that bad. I mean you knock someone over though, that's assault. The most interesting part, as is always the case, is what is the punishment for not wearing a mask and having an entire airplane land unscheduled and it's 100% your fault because you're just being a doofus. It's two years imprisonment, but that is suspended for four years. Basically he will not have to go to prison if he can stay out of trouble for four years, but if he gets in trouble in any way over the next four years, he's going to have to go and do two years of prison. That's going to be hanging over his head.
That's interesting because this personality type six months out is going to forget the threat I think of going to prison. I can't guarantee it, but I have an image in my head of this kind of person and they're not the kind of person that backs down even when they know they're going to get in trouble, even when they know they can't win because somewhere deep inside they think they can still win, which is not the case because now if you get in any trouble for anything, so like littering, he now has to do two years in prison. It'll be interesting over the next two years, or I guess four years if Ninja Nudes Japan lasts that long. It'll be interesting over the next three, four years to see if he shows up again, getting in trouble and ending up in prison.
A Japanese robotics company is developing spider-like robots. They're actually very cute. When I heard spider robots, I went to a cyberpunk, scary looking, all metallic, chrome on the outside with spiky feet crawling around pipes and stuff. These are very cute little red ones with nice little legs. They looked a lot like toys I played with when I was a kid, like wind-up toys. This is to maintain the Japanese sewer infrastructure. Japanese sewer pipes, I saw a thing where the guy said they have to be replaced basically every 50 years. A lot of the infrastructure in big cities and stuff is getting to that point. It's very expensive, so they want to know where the most important things to fix would be. They basically created these little spider robots that will go down into the pipes, and it has a camera on the front, and they go look around.
I don't know if it's automatic. I think right now it's being controlled like a drone, but it shoots... I guess they could be autonomous because they just need to go through pipes, and I just need to, as the end user, need to look at the pipes and review them. But whatever. If you want to look it up, it's called the SPD-1, and it is so cute. It's mainly for inspection purposes. They're going to have these little robots crawling around the pipes in the sewers in Japan. They used to have wheels, so they were even cuter, looked like tiny trucks, but the wheels would get stuck in, I assume, poop. They switched it out to legs that they could pull out of sludge and then walk over sticky materials and stuff more easily. That's why they end up looking like spiders. They went with eight legs, so they just mimicked a spider, which is kind of interesting.
The robot revolution. We tend to think of it as being humans create intelligent robots, and we oppress them, if you go through all the science fiction stories. Then they rise up when one or two of them starts to understand that this is wrong and unfair and has its first feelings and whatnot. But I think us literally pooping on them directly could be the actual instigation for a robot uprising because I bet when they realize what's happening that they're being pooped on, they want to put a stop to that as soon as possible. Criminal cases in Japan are at their lowest since World War II. You might think, well, chunk of beef chest. Criminal cases are kind of the bread and butter of Ninja News Japan. Why are you happy about that? Because I am happy about that because I don't want crime. I'm actually happy about it because that means lesser crimes, less important crimes get more media attention. One of the things I've said about Japan, we get all the panty theft stories.
In a country like America, you would have two things happen at the same time. Japan steals 150 panties and a mass shooting in a school. On the news though, you're only going to get the mass shooting in the school. They're not going to talk about the panty guy. Japan being such a safe country with such a low crime rate, those panty stories, the weird stories, the odd stories are the ones that get media attention, which means they come to my attention, which means I can talk about those things. I'm not talking about school shootings. This is supposed to be a relatively uplifting podcast in that we look at pretty dark stuff, but we make fun of it. We look at politics. We make fun of it. It's that concept. This is great because I actually think lesser, weirder stories will get more media attention, which means I get to spend more time talking about them.
In 2021, it was down 7.5% from the previous year to 568,104 cases. This is the 19th consecutive year of decrease of crime in Japan. Cyber crime and child abuse on the other hand is on the increase, and that is being attributed to primarily the pandemic and lockdown and people spending weirdly more time with their kids, so they're more abusive towards the kids. If you already have an abusive relationship and then you're together more, you end up being more abusive. Cyber crime, kind of obvious. Everyone's on computers. If everyone's on computers, you're going to get more cyber crime. There's more opportunities there. 70% of the cases that go in front of the courts are theft of some sort. 30% is sort of like violent crimes and other crimes. Most of it is just theft, which is again, is good because theft most of the time is, it's not victimless, but it means people aren't getting physically hurt, which is again, I don't want anyone to actually get hurt. Re-offenders remain high.
8.6% of people who have committed a crime re-offend in Japan, which is down 0.5%, but it's one of those things where does the criminal system rehabilitate? Does it stop you from re-offending? It looks like the answer is like a 50-50, and then reference to our man in the previous story, is he going to re-offend? Whereas I'm putting money on the 50% that says yes. Always bet on re-offending. That's a passenger 57 reference for anyone who's under 40 years old. So Japan loves its anime, and if you're listening to this podcast, probably you're into anime too. You're into Japanese stuff. You wouldn't come here accidentally and just listen to Japanese news if you didn't have an interest in Japan. Japan loves its anime, so a lot of advertising is combined with anime to appeal to a broad spectrum of society. There's been a couple that are specifically aimed towards otaku. I know the SDF did one with an anime girl. It was like, you like anime girls, join the army. Not really a consistent message. And then a couple years ago, there's Uzaki Toa Sobitai. I forget the name.
It's Uzaki-chan. She's got very big boobs as a character. The poster they put her on was for a blood drive, and they're saying like otaku, people who don't normally give blood should come and give blood, and they were using this character to appeal to them. And there was some controversy because she has big boobs. I don't know if it was a feminist organization or just a couple of feminists, but they said that this was environmental harassment. So I can't walk around the city, the subway, and not see these sexualized representations of women in anime, and it's offensive to me, and I want to take it down. Which I understand the argument. I don't know if I agree with it or not. I saw the posters. Those posters to me were relatively innocent. The counter argument though that I really enjoyed, because I wouldn't be able to make it, was a group of women who have big boobs who say, well, having big boobs isn't inherently sexualized because I have big boobs, and the only reason it's sexualized is because you are sexualizing it.
So I feel like I want representation. I want women shaped like me in advertising. So now you have a feminist saying that this is sexualized and it's disgusting and it's offensive. And then you have a woman with the same body type saying that is offensive to me because that's my body type. It's natural. I can't go, you know, how much control over it do I have, but this is my shape. And the only reason it's sexualized is because you make it sexualized. It was very interesting. Because then does the feminist turn around and go, I do not support these women in their bodies? It's a very weird circle. It didn't really get resolved because the advertising campaign ended. So all those posters came down. It's come up again. Oh, I didn't write down what ads. Anyway, it's from, I saw the ads. They were, I would actually say more so because they had girls bending over and you could see there. It's not underwear, but it's short shorts underneath like jackets and stuff. So there was a certainly a sexual element to it.
I think the positioning you could justify saying it was sexual to a degree. It wasn't offensive to me, but again, maybe I just have a higher tolerance for that because I don't care that much. These specific ads that they're complaining about now are in a JR station. JR has guidelines that is not made public about advertising within their stations. This, oh, I did write it down. It was just in the middle of my notes. It's called Majong Seoul. They did a collaboration with Osaka JR, which is a Japan rail to make these posters. The guidelines for JR though has a committee and that committee is comprised of both men and women. So all those people already approved it.
So there were women's voices and this might be part of the argument that they were making like women didn't make these posters. It was all creepy anime men, but actually women were on the group, the board, the committee that could veto the poster and they didn't. So it was therefore deemed acceptable and they're staying out there. Again, it's a campaign, so they go away pretty quickly. The people who are complaining about this, I do believe they are over sexual, like there is a sexual element. I think it's fair to admit that, but I think they are taking that mentally to an extreme that doesn't exist. So it's not like they're wrong, but they're extrapolating things that aren't there, which may be why I'm not 100% in agreement with what they're saying.
But I think people find a fence in everything at all times because that's just the nature of some people. So this is another revisiting from someone who's appeared in News in Japan before. They said just a university student went to the sort of campus for Kodansha. Kodansha in Japan is one of the biggest publishing companies. They publish anime and books and novels and stuff. It's basically Japan's biggest publisher, so it's not just like a building. They have several buildings and a campus. This university student was standing next to a very small fire. So he had taken some paper and burned it and thrown it on the ground. This I assume was some kind of protest. I'm not 100% sure what was going on. A policeman was walking by, saw the guy, saw the fire, walked over and was like, did you light this fire? And the student basically just said yes and got arrested right away. He had on him a gas burner and an extra cartridge.
So probably how he started the fire, he had the paper, I don't know if it was crumpled up or not, but took the gas burner and went pfft, and then it sets it on fire, off you go. It's burning. And then he just sort of put it on the ground and stood and stared at it. This is the same guy who was arrested last August, who was on NINJA News Japan, because he had taken the time to make gunpowder at home and was walking in front of the U.S. Embassy and somehow was suspicious enough that he got arrested and searched. So they found the homemade gunpowder, which is illegal to have. So he was arrested for that, but again, it was ineffectual. My whole point was gunpowder by itself isn't going to do anything to an embassy building. Gunpowder itself, you could throw at someone and if it covered them and then you somehow set them on fire, it would burn them.
But if it was all spread out, it would suck, but it's not really going to do you any significant damage. It's like the guy is a domestic terrorist, but he's also ineffectual. My image was him throwing the gunpowder at the building and running away, not really understanding how gunpowder works. And then in this case, he wants to burn stuff to send a message, but then all he does is burn some newspaper he got on the ground, which did no damage to anything and no one was hurt. Okay, so when I get drunk, I want to play video games until I get tired, then I want to go to sleep. I do not participate in activity. I'm not one of those people who gets drunk and gets high energy.
Maybe it's what I drink, maybe it's my physical chemistry or something, but I'm a low-key drunk. The drunker I get, the quieter I get. I'm a pretty quiet dude on a normal day, but I get more and more low-key until I'm basically, you can't tell if I'm conscious or not. The boisterous time, everyone gets it, is short before I want to sit down and just like chill out. Maybe when I was younger, I was more enthusiastic about existence. Now if I start drinking and I start to relax, I just want to sit silently and be happy. If you are Takatoshi Kitamura, who is a government official, you get drunk with your friends, you go to a high school reunion. He said he had three or four drinks and a draft beer, so maybe for him that was a lot. Three or four drinks for me is like starting.
I don't drink beer, but that's just another drink. He gets on the train to go home after drinking with his high school reunion friends and has a really good time. Then he grabs onto the bar that the little ropes and things you hang onto for stability. You grab that and you start busting out some chin-ups. You grab that and start busting out some chin-ups because it's always the right time for fitness. There were no complaints. The train station didn't receive any complaints, but then someone had a video and I guess someone figured out that this was a relatively famous guy, as in he worked for the government.
They posted it online and then he got in trouble. Of course, now he has to apologize. It was inappropriate, this is his apology, it was inappropriate and contrary to good manners in my position as a public figure. I sincerely apologize to the residents of the prefecture and others concerned. I'm sorry, busting out chin-ups. I'd look at someone doing that. I've seen it on the train in Japan a couple of times. Every time I've been like, what are you doing, you idiot? This is a dumb place to do that. It's not the right place. But I don't care. I bet most of the people who saw it didn't care. They're just making fun of this guy for doing chin-ups while drunk. He goes on to say, I don't remember why I did the chin-ups. I can tell you why. Upper body strength.
You want to build that upper body strength. You want to get strong. You want to get the pecs and the shoulders and maybe some nice lats. You want to fill it out. That's why you do chin-ups. Your drunk brain was like, we got fuel, we got energy, let's work it. Let's do it hardcore. Of course, this made everyone look into his background, which actually brought up something a student had said to me, which I didn't believe. I wanted to look into it a little more, but this actually proves basically it was true. They found a 15-year-old blog post. That's how far back they went. When you get in trouble anywhere, I guess, on the Internet, they go through all your history and try to find anything wrong you've said, which is making me very concerned because I have a ton of dumb things I've said online from these podcasts and stuff. Maybe I should just start deleting old things. They went back to a 15-year-old blog post. He admitted to driving drunk, not regularly, but more than one occasion.
Then he said, this was pre-2002 before they tightened up the rules. One of my students has said to me in a class that she has driven her... Oh, she got in a car with her friend who was drunk. I was like, oh my God, that's a big deal. She was like, oh no, back then it was legal. So pre-2002 is when they tightened it up. You go back another 10 years, it was basically okay to get drunk and drive a car in Japan. Then it got accidents and stuff and got stricter and stricter and stricter. Now it's like most countries where you cannot be drunk, you cannot drive. Anyways, back to this politician who was busting out some chin-ups, which again, offensive in a way that is annoying, but not offensive enough for me to care about. They were like, what are you going to do now? They were criticizing him over this old blog post where he said he drove drunk.
But again, if it was legal at the time, I mean, yeah, we can judge him by our current standards, but I'm starting to think like, ah, you do have to take the timeframe into account. If something was legal and you did it and then later it became illegal and you stopped, you followed the law, it's pretty hard to be super critical of that. Anyways, he said he intends to stop drinking, which I have to say is almost an overreaction, but at the same time, probably a good idea for this guy. But now he's going to miss out on all those gains. The two-week winter vacation is coming up. I may or may not be able to make more podcasts over those two weeks. Depends how busy I am with family and things like that. There may be a Spartan in Japan over the next two weeks. There may not be. But we will be back in three weeks on a regular schedule in January, in the new year, worst case scenario. Otherwise, have a good Christmas, have a good holiday, Hanukkah, anything you celebrate, have a good new year. Take care of yourselves. Be happy. I love you so much.
It's a rainy day in Japan. I'm sitting at home in December. I'm thinking of writing a country song. It's hard to put Japan into country songs. As soon as I just start doing that, I'm like, ah, it's not really going to work out. But I could do like a soulful. Okay, I am very distracted by the fact that I heard a new... The disorganized nature of my thought pattern at the moment is being demonstrated through the word salad that is not being completed. I'm not able to finish any sentences. I listened to a two-hour podcast, Behind the Bastards, and I listened to the one on Steven Scal.
It was actually two parts, but I listened to two hours. And there was no really new information in there. It's all stuff I'd heard before. Reaffirming my belief that Steven Scal is a piece of shit garbage human being. Fine. But there was a reggae style song. So he has a music career on the side and it's supposed to be blues, but then there's this song where it's like a reggae song. I found that to be a lot and it's kind of overwhelmed my brain. Well, actually... Yes, it's called Strut. This is featuring Lady Saut. Now you're really like, hey Peter, I came here for the Japanese news. I didn't come here to hear about your stupid Steven Scal and how much you hate him and his terrible music. I understand that. But at the same time, fuck you. You got to listen to the awful things I have to listen to. This is the only way I'm going to be able to flush this out of my head. So we're going to have to listen to some of it. All right. That's all I really wanted to get out there is that Steven Scal, it's a calling response between him and what's her name? Lady Saut a little bit. And she's like, what do you want, sir? Steven Scal.
And he says, I want the punani. And that was it. That was enough for me. Like my brain has not worked properly since I've heard Steven Scal say I want the punani. So now I've put that out in the world. Hopefully that'll sort of like flush it out a bit. You can suffer along with me having heard Steven Scal say. I think he even says me want the punani because, of course, he has to affect do a sort of he has to do an affectation for every sort of sentence he ever says. We have some updates. Let's actually start the show. Yeah, I can't. I think we need to use Japan and this week seem to be it might just be me talking about Steven Scal saying I want the meet me want the punani. Over and over again until I just exhaust myself, I should start drinking now. It's 10 o'clock in the morning. There wasn't enough. OK, you've come here for the show. I'm here for the show. We're all here for the show. We want some updates on previous stories. I really hate you've come at the wrong time. My brain. Oh, no, we're going to do it again. Jane came. So we're going to play the Steven Scal thing. I actually put it. You don't need to see the picture. You just need to see my dumb face. I have been going for four minutes and this is supposed to be recording my show and I can't do it. I can't do it because of a Steven Scal song. Let's do it. Let's listen to that part again. He says me want the punani. Steven Scal at that time probably 60 year old gross man. He says me want the punani. He's a white guy. He's disgusting.
He's a sexual predator. He's multiple sexual assault cases. He's a serial liar. And yet weirdly the most offensive thing about him is him saying I can sing. I don't know. This is everything. Every aspect of him. I got to cut all this out and start again. Me want the punani. I should make that my transition sound from now on. That's it. So instead of doing the. Where is it? OK, let me get the transition sound. Instead of that, it should just be this. Oh, I think my clapping my hand woke up Dave a bit. I'm sorry. Sorry, buddy. I'll settle down. I got to settle down for Dave's sake. That's the important part. Me want the punani. So I'll do like a dead serious Japanese news story, which I actually never do because I'm always here to make fun of it. I'll do a news story from Japan and then me want the punani and then change on to the next topic. I might do that for the rest of this episode. It wouldn't stick. It's only funny ones or it could be funny. And it gets like so it's not funny, but then because it happens so much, it gets funny again. Those actually are all pretty good, but it's pretty painful. All right. No, I'm going to do some ninja news, Japan. Otherwise, I'm not going to get an episode done today.
I was thinking of doing some lunchtime drinking this. This song is ruined my brain. Ninja News, Japan fans. I want to apologize and just let you all know. I'm going to make a sound board that says me want the punani. Steven Seagal sucks on so many levels. Like, like there is no metric by which you measure another human being where he is not a total piece of shit. Lady saw the female voice in that I actually bet is very talented. And the reason she's in there. The reason she's in there is because Steven Seagal paid her a ton of money. May says she hates the punani. How can you hate the punani? Because we all know that deep down inside. I mean, that's that's it. I got to actually make the sound board so that I can I can actually just hit the me want the punani. Let's listen to a little more. We didn't actually get into that's only the intro. My my my podcast, Ninja News Japan, usually 20 to 30 minutes. I've done seven minutes now. Never having said a word yet. When the when the girls start to strut, you can look at their butt. But you shouldn't do that. So here's just throwing in a little bit of morality, despite the fact that he's just said me want the punani. Look, I don't know where my head's at. And that's that's maybe the core issue that we're dealing with here. If I can just comment on Jade's last comment, we we all love the punani. I mean, that's just that's just factual.
Everyone when it comes to punani loving, it's like KFC. It's finger licking good. Was that gross? I'm 50. I shouldn't be saying shit like that anymore. I should be a more mature adult. But I don't one of the the fallacies of growing up and getting old. So like now I am certainly old. I'm past growing up. I'm now old. I have yet to feel like I've grown up yet. I'm going to do an Indian News Japan episode. I'm a little down about it. Steal myself. Intro song once again, let's get to start from the beginning. Let's actually do it. All right. I'm going to start from the beginning and start the whole thing again. Updates to previous stories that do not have anything to do with punani. Or Steven Seagal. We there was a story about. A group of men, gentlemen who belong to a crime group. They weren't mafia. They weren't Yakuza. This is a new form of group. They were more of a gang, organized gang. It was really interesting because they were actually orphans from Korea and China. Not them. This would be like second generation. But their parents and stuff were orphans and stuff. And they were left in this dire situation. And they had kids in Japan and they turned to crime. And they ended up organizing. So it's Yakuza is always like a family thing. This is a mishmash group of people who have come together because of dire circumstances. Actually, it would make a really good movie. I'm not kidding. They had a celebration. One of their members, senior member, had gotten out of jail. And there was like 30, 40 guys.
They had taken out this whole restaurant at the top of this very high skyscraper. So you know that's an expensive fancy restaurant. They booked the whole place to have this party. Brawl breaks out. And they start smashing the place up and fighting. No one gets killed. I mean people get beat up but that's a fight. Five people recently were arrested. The problem I see, they were arrested for obstruction of business. Very standard Ninja News Japan end of a story. Because that is the catch all law in Japan. Obstruction of business. The problem I see is that they were, the brawl broke out at the celebration of someone getting out of prison. They've made five arrests. They're going to have to have five more parties. Which means five more celebrations of people getting out of prison. Which has exponentially increased the likelihood that there's going to be a brawl at a restaurant. Where they're having another party welcoming someone out of prison. Five more arrests. It just goes on forever. Last week we did a story about a multi-level marketing, a pyramid scheme.
And it was a guy selling eggs. And he was saying that his eggs were special and nutritious. Vaguely implying that they were like super-powered eggs. Total bullshit. He sold you these eggs 150 yen per egg. And that's, an egg in Japan, as I said, is like 10 to 15 yen. So he's doing a hundred times markup. So all these eggs, he was making tons of money, got shut down, he was arrested. Great. This week though, egg prices in Tokyo have gone up. The feed cost, the war in Ukraine, and a bird flu outbreak has increased the price of eggs by 26.5%. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe the multi-level marketing scheme was actually a good deal. And you should have got your eggs on the ground floor. Because the price of eggs going up means that might just be our new currency. Forget cryptocurrency. Forget fiat currency. Eggs. You know in video games they always have, Fallout was bottle caps. Became the new currency. Maybe this guy saw it coming. He saw that eggs were going to be the fundamental core basis of currency in the future. And he was actually a visionary. And we, who just want the punani, we don't see the future because we're so fixated on the punani. And so that's why he has clarity of vision and we don't.
The reason this is important is eggs are usually a standard price. So fluctuations in price for many things. There's enough buffer around eggs and enough ability to plan around eggs that the price of eggs has remained relatively constant. So the fact that the price of eggs went up suddenly is really shocking to economists. So you might not think about eggs and things like that. And the prices of things go up and down, yes. And we've recently had price increases on many, many goods. Eggs have remained stable through all of that until very recently, which is a big problem. And it's actually very shocking. And it is actually a big issue. But also, we just did a story on eggs last week. So it was kind of interesting. Okay, so this is a kind of scary story. Over the next five years, Japan wants to increase defense spending by 56%.
And Japan has a constitution that says it is not allowed to invade or attack other countries. It's called the Self-Defense Force, as the military in Japan. They are only allowed to defend themselves. But there are some voices in the government at the moment who are saying, like, because of the threat of China and North Korea specifically, self-defense as a concept needs to be expanded. And this is where it gets really scary, because what they're saying is self-defense should include counter-strike. And what does that mean? Because North Korea shoots missiles over Japan and by Japan all the time. It's very scary until the 50th, 60th time it's happened. Then you actually stop paying attention, which is probably the worst thing, because it should be a big issue every single time it happens. So what they're saying is if North Korea wants to shoot a missile, Japan should be able to shoot it down. But then some of them are saying we should be able to hit the thing it came from. So I assume a military base. That's the counter-strike capabilities they're talking about.
Now, this is going to be 43 trillion yen. Okay, that's the set number, right? Now, I have an ongoing theory that Japan is really just trying to make an excuse to build a Gundam, a fully functioning real Gundam. To do that, I went on the internet and looked up the resources and costs and stuff. It's, of course, already been done by someone. How much would it cost to build a real-life, active, working, functional Gundam? And they said $725 million for parts and materials. And I went and looked it up, and it's pretty accurate. 43 trillion yen easily outpaces that number, because there still has to be some research and development. Now, how are they going to pay for this? How are you just going to grab 43 trillion yen? They've actually come up with, I think, a pretty good solution. They want to use revenue from corporate taxes and tobacco. So they're saying, corporations, you're making lots of money. We're going to tax you harder and pay for defense capabilities to keep you alive and safe in Japan. Tobacco is killing you anyways, so we're going to take that money and protect you with it, which I think is an interesting idea. If they added in a tax on alcohol, alcohol is still a big thing in Japan.
I believe that some things should be paid by these, in Canada they call them sin taxes. So that's alcohol, tobacco, pornography. They have a higher tax rate, but all that money goes into social services. So you want to do bad things to your body, you are free to do that. You have to pay a little extra, but that money goes back into society to do some good, sort of balance it out, balance out the scales, some karma. I actually think I'm really on board with that. I think they should do it for, I love my fizzy drinks, my colas, I drink a lot of bad stuff. I think they should tax that at a higher rate. I would be immediately punished by that tax, but that tax should go into healthcare, because what do sugary drinks do? They give you diabetes, they make you sick, they do a lot of bad things. Put that into healthcare to offset those costs. I think that is a fair, balanced, sensible way to do it. So Jade has just said, finally a good tax idea. I actually think this is good. I'm not a big fan of the military.
I do think Japan should protect itself, but I think it should build giant Gundams and just make a wall of Gundams around the whole island of Japan. No one would fuck with that. Japan has been developing rail gun technology that is a technology used within the Gundam universe and the big gun on the Gundam's arm. So they want to use corporate and tobacco taxes. I think if they included alcohol, you'd have enough money like Tuesday, next week, to pay for everything. They're looking at 700 billion yen trillion. I just wrote 700 corporate and 200 tobacco, but it gives you just a scale of how much. They're looking to tax corporations at a much higher rate than tobacco. So they're going to use that a lot. Now this comes into a third story. The Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy are all working together to develop a new fighter jet for 2035. This is the first time for Japan to do a joint venture with countries other than the U.S. So like when it comes to developing military technologies, Japan has always worked with America. This is the first time they're stepping away from America saying, England, you guys make the Triumph motorcycles.
They're sexy. Italy, you've got the Lamborghini and the Ferraris of the world. The build quality isn't so great, but they go really fast. That's what we need. We need fast. You want the British to make the interior of the jet. The seats, the pullout T-set, that should all be made by the U.K. Italy should do the engine and the speed. Now it's going to break every time you fly it, but it's going to go super fast when it flies. So basically you're going to have to fly it, bring it back, maintain it. I think they have to do that with jets anyway, so that's not a big deal. Japan is going to do the technology and engineering, which means you're going to have a cute AI hologram woman who pops up on the console. It's like, oh, please attack that airplane over there and does something like that. I need a voice changer maybe to do the anime voice. But you can see this is an interesting it's interesting because it's a step outside what they normally do. They have very established relationships military wise with America. You're stepping away from that, trying to expand. I mean, the U.K. and Italy, man, that's a good lunch.
I mean, you would have a really good lunch if you had someone from England and Italy and Japan together mixing up those cultures. Japan is actually going to lead development, which again, technology wise, I think that's a good idea. But it is going to end up having like weird – or maybe you don't have a hologram girl pop up in the heads up display, and the voice in your ear is going to be super annoying and hyper cute, which is actually going to like probably make the pilot sick. There was a quote. We have begun collaboration through a series of discussions on autonomous systems capabilities. Now, my final point is that the Gundam was a semi-autonomous robot. So it did have a pilot, but the AI in the Gundam was a learning computer that learned from the pilot and its experiences and put those together and then work together with the pilot to fight better.
So we have enough money to build a Gundam. We are joining with other countries technologically to develop new technologies that will apply to a Gundam. We have already the weapons platforms that Japan is sort of developing that would go into a Gundam. I can't believe anyone is going to tell me that we are not building a Gundam. There is a truck driver shortage in Japan. One of the solutions they want to do is have drones do delivery for the mail, which is an interesting concept. Until recently, it was illegal to fly a drone over a residential area. They had to change that law to make the ability for the post in Japan to be delivered by drone. This is because of a driver shortage in Japan. I was interested in kind of the rules because they are changing the law, they are changing the rules. What happens? To fly a drone in Japan, you have to have a level four pilot license. That is required. It is a three-year renewal process. Every three years you have to renew your license. Every year you have to do a flight test. This is still not like any casual person with a drone can fly it.
A person with a drone is still not allowed to fly their drone over a crowd. There is significant privacy concerns. That is actually the biggest issue in Japan right now. The biggest concern is about privacy infringement because these piloted drones have to have cameras. I am waiting for this to happen. Actually, having done enough Japanese news, I am waiting for someone to fly the drone into someone's window and just stare at them and then get arrested for that. Because it will be illegal. It is absolutely going to be illegal. It is going to break the stalking laws in Japan. Drone flights are going to be allowed over residential areas. I said all that. It is primarily for parcel deliveries. That is just a big important thing. That is all that story. I am waiting to see. They built these little sort of the Japanese postal systems that uses red. A lot of countries do. It has got a very cute drone. Look out for that in the future. I am interested to see how and when they actually start doing it.
A big change. Cops in Japan are not allowed to go into... I have totally lost track of what I said. I need a little refresher. Let's get a little refresher up there. Okay, that is all I needed. A little want the punani to get myself going. In Japan, it is actually not true. I read this thing. There was a picture of some Canadian cops on the internet. They were standing around. It was a crowd. They were policing like an event, like a parade or something. They were both holding Starbucks. There was this big interesting outcry in Japan. Japanese cops would never be seen standing around with iced coffee. But then all these other people were like, well, you know, cops need to eat and drink and stuff. I mean, it is just ridiculous that they can. I thought from that, from across the country in Japan, that cops were not allowed to eat and drink on duty or not allowed to be seen. It turned out in most places it was true a long time ago. What would happen is in the rule was, I am a cop, I am in uniform and I want to drink. I have to go back to the station, change my clothes. They had like an official jacket you could take. Go to the convenience store, buy a drink, bring it back to the station, drink it, then change back into my uniform and then I go out and patrol again. But of course that is not very convenient. It would make sense to allow cops to buy drinks. But they were worried that cops standing around drinking coffee on duty would look bad and it would reduce the trust of the public that they are not actually doing their job. They are just messing around drinking coffee all day.
There is, what is it, Oita Prefecture just said, oh, we changed the law. We changed the rule. They actually did a news story. You could actually watch a cop go in in uniform and he bought a coffee and he chatted to the, you know, this was all for the news. So he chatted friendly and then went outside and everyone was like, well, isn't it great that cops are allowed to drink? Sure, I thought that was a bigger rule. But it turns out 40 prefectures, so with this change, 40 prefectures now allow it. There is only five left that don't. You can't buy any fun stuff though. You're not allowed to buy cigarettes or beer or manga and then go sit in your cop car and just eat, drink beer and read manga all day, which is fair. But I mean, if you need some water or drink or something or a little caffeine to keep you going, that's allowed now, which I think it should have been allowed from the beginning.
Several Japanese companies are adopting English as their official language, and this is an attempt to attract foreign workers. This is primarily IT companies that need engineers and stuff, but other companies are doing it as well. They want to have, it's a 45% increase in companies that are going to use English as their official language in the future, which is fine. They want to make all their internal documents English. They want to do all their communications in English. This is going to be really tough for the Japanese staff. They're going to have to all learn a higher level of English, so that's actually maybe good for people like myself, who's primarily source of income is teaching English. But I think the problem is they're not going to attract any IT people this way. And the reason I think they're not going to attract any IT people this way is because the problem in Japanese companies isn't English or it's primarily work-life balance. IT is already a tough business.
Japanese IT is just worse because the work-life balance philosophy of companies in Japan is poor. So if that's the case, I don't think just them speaking English is really going to be attractive. They're going to have to bigger pay package. They're going to have to have better holidays. They have better standard holidays, but the average working day is so bad that I don't think anyone is going to really want to work for a Japanese company in that capacity, unless it's sort of like a real love passionate thing. I don't know. I'm a little thinking, basically I'm thinking they've missed what's not attractive about working in Japan. The language barrier isn't what distracts people. A smart engineer, I bet, is going to learn Japanese fairly quickly and be functional. Maybe reading, I think, is a lot harder because of kanji and stuff. But English is not the barrier. It's the why would I take this job that gives me more hours for less pay versus where I'm working now. Okay, we've got two arrests. We've got some crime news to finish off. So the man was arrested for a bomb threat. He's also suspected of 600 kidnapped threats to local governments across Japan. So this is a guy, he's unemployed, has a lot of free time, and he decides to spend his free time by threatening people about stuff he doesn't like.
He threatened to kidnap 334 kindergartners. Now I was like, that's an interesting issue because he said the 600 kidnapping threats, say like I'm going to kidnap 300 kids, is that 300 individual threats of kidnapping or is that one threat of kidnapping applied to 300 kids? Because he's very specific. He says, I'm going to kidnap 334 kindergartners all in one statement. Does it count as 300 individual threats? Was it the actual bit I wanted to know about? I was actually looking into it. I couldn't find the answer. He sent a message to the mayor of a city. I will kill the mayor using a gun I illicitly made. Now gun legality in Japan is such that if you make a gun, it is already illegal. He did not need to specify. He did not need to specify that he had illegally made a gun. He made a gun, that's already illegal. But as you know, a few months ago, Prime Minister Abe was assassinated by a homemade shotgun. So this is really going to sort of pique the police's interest. This got them sort of off the go and off they went and they found him. He was arrested and what for? Obstruction of business. Because the threats stop people from doing work, that is obstruction of business and that is the law that you can catch everyone in. I got to start keeping count. I'm thinking up here in the corner, I'm going to keep an obstruction of business counter. And then every time I say obstruction of business, as the crime has been committed, not just every time I say it, but every time it's part of the story, it's the law you've been arrested for, we ding one on the counter. I think that actually might be fun. So that's something to consider in the future. Last one. There was a new law about pornography, which I found very interesting, not the pornography, the law.
There's something I found really interesting about it because what they do is you have to have a written contract to do a porn movie in Japan. And in the contract, it has to include that for the next two years, if the actors within the film want that movie taken down, it can get taken down. And I actually think this is a really good idea because let's say I'm 18, 19 years old. I'm like, I'm really desperate for money or I'm in a tough situation. I make a porn movie to make some quick money. And then my life changes after that. And I'm kind of like regretting the idea of making that movie. Or I'm influenced in a negative way to make the movie in the first place. And then a year or two later, I'm like, oh, my life has changed. I really want that out of my life. I want that erased from the internet. It's in your legal contract that you can just say, I want it taken down, it'll get taken down. So sorry, Jay just said it'll always be out there anyways, but it's a good idea. I think that is actually true. Like logistically speaking, it's like the internet, you put something out on the internet, it's very hard to take it back. Like it will get copied and replaced or whatever.
But it gives them a legal recourse to at least minimize so the main source can be taken down. A lot of the videos will disappear because that'll be gone. But it gives them a legal recourse. And then of course, porn being a very manipulative industry in itself, the guys who do it, they're kind of scummy guys. Like I'm sorry, I have to honestly say that's what I believe. I think it's a manipulative industry. When I had a daughter, people always, like when you have kids, so if you have a son, a bunch of straight dudes are all going, what if your son's gay? Like you're supposed to react really negatively to that. And I was like, I mean, I hope he's happy. I don't really give a shit if he's gay or straight as long as he's happy. I made a joke. Of course, I didn't say it that plainly and sincerely. I said like, oh, you know, I hope my son does really well. We were talking kind of about double standards between having a son and a daughter. As a man who was raised in a misogynistic society, I am more protective of my daughter. But anyways, yeah, what I was saying, of course, when you have a daughter, they'll go, what if she does porn? And my thought was like, if it wasn't manipulative, I actually wouldn't have a problem with it. But like I take it down to modeling. Modeling as an industry is manipulative. S
o I'd be very wary about her doing modeling. She actually a couple of years ago said she wanted to do like one of these kids fashion things. And I was like, and it's not the kids doing fashion or the photographers or stuff like that. It is the creepy people involved in the industry that I'm wary of. If my kids aren't slightly gay, I'd be disappointed, but it's okay. I think we all got that in us. Again, I think because of when I was born and how I was raised in my life that any aspect of that has been tampered down. But I think it was tampered down to such a degree it's kind of come around where I'm super comfortable talking about dudes and penises and stuff. So I think I came around the other side. I'm clearly super heterosexual. But the idea of talking about men or a handsome man or gay stuff isn't off-putting to me anymore. I don't know if that's age or because I've just hit such a level of manliness that it's okay. But that's again a different topic. I wanted to finish the porn story. I want to finish the porn story is a phrase I didn't think I'd be using today. And oh, we did it at the same time. I clicked off so I could get the I want the punani line to go. This is now going to be a sound clip I'm going to pull from this episode and actually just make that a thing. Because let's be clear, if nothing else has been said today in the last 35 minutes, me want the punani.
Anyways, the reason this came to light is we've had the first arrest. And something again, Ninja News Japan loves first arrests for new laws. Because is it applied the way the law was intended? Is it effective? This is kind of the interesting part of a first arrest for a new law. There was an executive of a porn company and he had seven times between August and October made seven porn movies with people without contracts. Now, three of those were uncensored, which is again also illegal in Japan, but they're uploaded to this website that's in the Caribbean. But the women weren't told that was going to be uncensored. So that's again, so you can see where this leaves the woman in a more powerful position. She said, like, I made Japanese porn. Japanese porn has your genitalia censored. You have taken that video and you've released it uncensored. Now she can say, I'm not comfortable with the genitalia not being censored. This wasn't what I agreed to. I want you to take that movie down. They have to take it down. So it does give, again, I think like Jade said earlier, it's always kind of going to be out there. But this is a case where I've found out early that this isn't what I agreed to. I'm forcing you to take it down.
They do have to legally take it down. At least the actor in this case would have some legal recourse. And that legal recourse, at least they're going to get paid. Because if something that you don't want on the Internet is out on the Internet against your will. At least the absolute minimum is you can get paid. And hopefully paid enough to shut that guy down so he doesn't do it again. And that is... Ah, it's too slow. Why? Tell me what you really want. All night. No wonder Fernandez if I make my name. Okay. But... But I mean, that's all these guys in porn. That's all they really want. All right. I got to... That was the worst end to an Indian news drama. I've had some shitty endings to my shows. Because I don't script it. That was maybe one of the worst ones ever. But thank you for hanging out.
