Chain mail causes headache for Japan Red Cross, Tokyo Hospital

Rich Pav 2 Comments

There’s a chain mail message making the rounds in Japan claiming that a three year old girl with leukemia at the Showa University Hospital in Tokyo can’t receive a life-saving operation because there isn’t enough type B rh negative blood. Both the Japan Red Cross and the hospital have been receiving so many calls that they both put up notices on their web sites saying that the mail is bogus. What’s more, the hospital’s message says that even if the child was a patient, they’d be legally restricted from revealing that information.

When I was growing up, all we ever did was make crank calls and tape record them. It never made headlines, but we laughed ourselves silly listening to them over and over for months.

Link

Here’s the original heart-wrenching message:

>>私の知人の三歳の子が急性リンパ性白血病になってしまって、昭和医大に入院してるそうです！
ＲＨマイナスＢ型の血液不足にて手術受けれない状態で、誰かＲＨマイナスＢ型の方いませんか！？
是非協力おねがいします！
１人の幼い子の命がかかっていて、とても危険な状態だそうです！
最寄りの献血センターで献血できるようなので、是非是非協力おねがいします！
分からないことあればいつでも連絡ください！
よろしくおねがいします！！
私の携帯
090-××××-××××
友達にまわしまくってもらって結構です。
是非そうしてください！
なかなかない血液みたいで、私だけの人脈だと間に合わないのでおねがいします！
〇〇　〇〇子!

What I don’t get is why a message like this serves as a call to arms to hundreds of people willing to help, but if you stand a 80 year old woman on crowded train, everyone who’s sitting down ignores her.

How many kanji do you need to know?

Rich Pav 8 Comments

There are a number of official lists of kanji. I’m not an expert by any means, I’m just going by information gleamed off the net.

  • 教育漢字(kyouiku kanji): The 1oo6 characters students must learn by grade 6. Essentially, knowing these characters is a good start, but you’re far from finished.
  • 当用漢字(touyou kanji): A list of 1850 characters published first in 1946 approved for use in public documents and the media. Many characters that were in use until then were simplified; for example, 學 became 学.
  • 常用漢字(jouyou kanji): Last updated in 1981 and the successor of touyou kanji, 1945 characters that basically you ought to know as a literate adult. Used in legal and public documents, newspapers, magazines and broadcast media.
  • 新聞漢字表(shimbun kanji hyou): A standard agreed upon among newspapers based on jouyou kanji, but removing some characters and adding others. The link is to a Japanese Wikipedia article, but the explanation and outline that appears there is possibly under copyright and could be deleted from the site in the future.
  • 人名用漢字(jin meiyou kanji): Characters approved for use in people’s names. As of 2004, when the government had a heck of a time trying to update the list, there are 983 extra characters than can be used in addition to what’s already in the jouyou kanji list, or that are variants of jouyou characters, and most of them are really, really hard to read. The only way I’ll ever learn them is if I get a chip implanted in my brain someday.

Incidentally, mainland China also simplified their characters sometime after WWII but for obvious reasons they didn’t give a rat’s ass about how Japan went about doing the same thing, so in many cases the two countries simplified the same characters but in different ways.

Summing up, if you’re pretty smart, my guess is that you know around 3,000 characters or more. Multiply that number by a few factors to approximate how many readings you’d need to know for all those characters.

As for me, when reading a novel in Japanese I have to look up an average of five characters per page, and I can get through around 15 pages in 2-3 hours when I’m reading to learn. It’s tedious, frustrating, labor intensive, tiring, and makes me feel learning disabled, which is why I avoided serious studying for far too many years.

Pinhead posts death threat for LOLs, gets arrested

Rich Pav 2 Comments

I don’t know how many people are familiar with popular websites in Japan, but 2ch is the most widely used online forum. The interface is absolute crap, but that’s par for the course when it comes to Japanese websites. Check out the Wikipedia article for more info. It’s pretty interesting, especially the story about Densha Otoko.

On the first of this month a 23 year old vagrant used his cell phone to post a message on 2ch saying that he was going to kill an elementary schoolgirl in Chiba Prefecture on Feb 15 at 3pm. As a result, over 15,000 community volunteers and parents in Chiba were mobilized to ensure the safety of children going to and from the nearly 1,300 schools in the prefecture. When the police tracked down the person who posted the threats, he said he wrote the messages because he thought the replies were funny. The authorities disagreed.

Link

Another link, so you can see what a typical 2ch thread looks like.

If you want to see how far and wide his threats reverberated through the net, Google this:  千葉の女子小学生を２月１５日１５時に殺しちゃいます

Guy hoping to die hits taxi driver with hammer

Rich Pav 3 Comments

Early this morning a 31 year old unemployed man sneaked up behind a 41 year old taxi driver taking a wizz in a public toilet at a shrine in Shinjuku and whacked him in the head a few times with a hammer. Two guys passing by heard the driver’s screams and held the attacker until the police arrived. The attacker said he wanted to die, and figured if he killed somebody he’d get the death penalty. Luckily the victim wasn’t seriously injured. Must not have been a sledge hammer.

Link

It’s random news week!

Rich Pav

The reason I haven’t been updating this here blog so often lately is because I’m spending all my free time reading and trying to learn as much Japanese as anyone who’s lived here as long as I have ought to know already. I’ve been here nearly half my life, I just turned 40 and my preteen kids read and write better than I can. I’ve slacked off for far too long.

So this week, and maybe from now on, I’m going to paraphrase news articles I read in Japanese and provide a link to the original for anyone who wants to read along. I’m not going to make any attempt whatsoever to use high-falootin’ words or accurately translate articles.

Tony & Andy’s favorite YouTube video

Rich Pav 1 Comment

I can still remember when Tony was a baby who only knew how to drool, eat, sleep and poop his diaper. Now he surfs the web all by himself. He even knows how to switch the keyboard to Japanese input mode and type out words in romaji. I have no idea how or when he figured that out. Kids amaze me. I wonder, if someone were to take the DNA from an ancient Egyptian and made a baby out of it, in ten year’s time would the kid be reprogramming the TV remote and doing all that other technical stuff preteens seem to be able to figure out instinctively?

Anyway, here’s the video the boys have been watching over and over lately. They found it on this site, which Tony can navigate through like you wouldn’t believe.

A post from my Japanese blog

Rich Pav 4 Comments

And no, I won’t tell you where it is. It’s super-secret.

Every time I see a woman doing her makeup on the train, I wish I could pull a battery-operated shaver out of my pocket and do my face. That’s an old joke, isn’t it. But today I really did forget to shave.

It got laughs.

I wonder if anyone has ever been seriously injured while doing their makeup on a train. Seems  like there’s a strong possibility of poking out an eye with a mascara brush or choking to death on lipstick. Wouldn’t that be fun to watch. How much do you want to bet that nobody would help.