Weekend News

Feels good to be back at my computer after my vacation to the Virgin Islands. My family is the same crazy people that I remembered when I was a kid, but they are really fun to hang out with — especially the stories from my aunts. While driving at the base of a hill I even spotted a Japanese icon represented in the small island of St. Thomas, but that’s for another post.

I had so much news to catch up with, so this week may be filled with a lot of posts. I figured that everyone would have already posted about some of this, but surprisingly lots of stuff slipped between the blogosphere’s cracks. So I’m going to get both you and me up to date. I also have noticed the increase in RSS readers. Hello to everyone that’s new. Last week’s posts were a bit scaled back due to me being on vacation and were lacking the fresh news that I try to find online. You can be sure that this week will make you hooked on reading.

So without further adieu, here’s the weekend news.

New 125 inch flexible plasma display

That 60″ TV you just bought not big enough? Here’s what you should have bought. Shinoda Plasma has just released a new, flexible, 1mm thick, 125-inch plasma display. However, since its a revolutionary flexible display, the resolution is a bit low for a TV. This sorta display is going to probably used in the advertising market. I’m sure this is just the start, and we will be watching something like this in the living room very soon.

20% of Japanese considered suicide

With all of the hydrogen sulfide suicides plaguing Japan right now, you have to ask yourself, “Why are Japanese committing suicide?” A recent survey has found that almost 20% of Japanese adults have considered killing themselves at one time or another. Females made up a higher percentage of potential suicide victims. 58.2% said movies and TV encourage people to kill themselves by making suicide seem like not a big deal. 76.1% said they favored regulating websites that encouraged people to kill themselves by offering how-to info.

Fake ID inspector steals vending machine cash

Hiroshi Yokokawa has been arrested in Fukuyama for impersonating a Tobacco Institute of Japan ID inspector and stealing about $5000 in cash from cigarette machines. He claimed to be checking up on the operations of the new Taspo cards. Taspo cards have recently been introduced on cigarette vending machines to combat underage smoking.

Woman fakes divorce papers for child

Ok, usually you will hear a story of a woman faking papers so that a man is indeed the father of a child for whatever reason. However, this story is the opposite. A woman has been arrested for faking her ex-husbands signature on divorce papers so that he wouldn’t be recognized as the legal father of her child. Under Japanese law, if a child is born within 300 days of a divorce, the previous husband is automatically recognized as the father of the child.

Poppy festival’s fields filled with illegal opium

Yep, that’s right. A huge field of flowers actually turned out to be illegal opium flowers that could be made into the very illegal drug. Apparently, the seeds were mixed in with imported poppy seeds. Growers thought it was a little odd that the red flowers they were expecting were actually purple. They called in narcotic officials who determined that one-fifth of the field was actually opium poppies. The flowers were ripped out of the ground and burned… or so they say.

Ramen shop owner posed as a policeman

Tetsuya Nakano, a ramen shop owner, has been arrested… again… and charged with abduction of a minor and illegal confinement. He convinced a 19-year-old female university student that he needed to investigate her bike because it had been reported as stolen. He put the bike in the back of his station wagon and held her captive as he drove around Tsukuba for about 30 minutes. She escaped as he went into a convenience store. Nakano has already been charged for abduction with indecent intent and another count of illegal confinement before this recent abduction.