This morning the news had a short piece about a group doing their practice emergency drone flights. I missed the location, but this is an area that has had some kind of major disaster in the recent past. The guy was showing us pictures from that -- looked like a flood or mudslide, might have been an avalanche? And he was explaining that one of the ( Read more... )

I think I'm missing something. One of the news items we have recently had here in Japan concerns a young couple and their child. They apparently went to the government, trying to get the child added to their family record, as is customary here. That's where the trouble started. Apparently the government so far is arguing that they cannot register ( Read more... )

Okay, now that's amusing. I may not have the figures exactly right, but basically...from the news last night.

One of the small towns here in Japan hit by the earthquake and tsunami last year has carefully converted a lot of the trash into a pile of woodchips, ready for slow burning. Let's be honest, it was more like a small hill of woodchips. ( Read more... )

Do you know where your cell phone has been?

Or who else knows?

The lead-in for a news piece this morning bothers me.

It was really simple. It started with a woman with a cell phone in her hands saying, "Oh, he forgot his phone." Then she tapped on the phone, and followed the path that it showed her... To where a man was embracing another woman!
( background... )

I'm not sure how much of this made it to American news. This last weekend, Japan got clobbered. Typhoon number 12 rolled over most of Japan at a slow, deliberate pace, which meant we had heavy rains for extended periods of time. Today's news is full of video of towns and villages that have been flooded, overrun by mudslides, and so forth. Plenty of ( Read more... )

One of the news items today here in Japan was rather sad. Apparently a young man died because the rest of the group he was with teased him into jumping or diving. 8 meters (roughly 24 feet) into water that was roughly 4 meters deep. I'm not sure from the news report whether he hit the side going down or simply didn't know how to dive. This was not ( Read more... )

First, like many cities, Osaka has some sculpture out on the roadways. In particular, there are some dancing young women on the sidewalk downtown. Just sort of cheerful random art ( Read more... )

The news people get various questions, and often answer them. But the weather reporters rarely get questions. However, this morning, they had a question from a viewer! The question was simple: why do we sometimes have rainfall in the sun?
( Why does rain fall with sunshine? )

More Odds and Ends from the Japanese News ( Read more... )

4/22 ( Read more... )