{ Jon Berkeley’s How China Sees the World, The Economist, March 2009 | Enlarge | full story | Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue, New Yorker, 1976 | Enlarge }

Until quite recently in rural Japan, yobai, or “night crawling” would have been an introduction to sex for many young people. While a young woman slept, a silent intruder would creep into her room, slide behind her and make his intentions known. If she consented, they would have discrete sex until the early morning, when he would have to slip out of the house as stealthily as he had slipped in. (…)

In many cases, yobai would be conducted entirely with the knowledge of the girl’s parents. In fact, it was sometimes a prelude to marriage - parents would turn a blind eye the first few nights a young man secretly visited their daughter, but then he would be “caught”, and a more public courtship would begin. (…)

Yobai still happens in the more remote areas of Japan, and there seems to be nostalgia for the practice elsewhere. The seduction of sleeping women is a popular theme of Japanese pornography, and some image clubs offer special yobai services - providing prostitutes who pretend to be asleep while the client slips into their futon.

{ Japan for the Uninvited | Continue reading }

photo { Christophe Kutner | via ponyXpress }

Chopsticks were developed about 5,000 years ago in China. It is likely that people cooked their food in large pots which retained heat well, and hasty eaters then broke twigs off trees to retrieve the food. By 400 BCE, a large population and dwindling resources forced people to conserve fuel. Food was chopped into small pieces so it could be cooked more rapidly, thus needing less fuel.

The pieces of food were small enough that they negated the need for knives at the dinner table, and chopsticks became staple utensils. It is also thought that Confucius, a vegetarian, advised people not to use knives at the table because knives would remind them of the slaughterhouse.

By 500 CE, chopstick use had spread from China to present-day Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. (…)

Traditionally, chopsticks have been made from a variety of materials. Bamboo has been the most popular because it is inexpensive, readily available, easy to split, resistant to heat, and has no perceptible odor or taste. Cedar, sandalwood, teak, pine, and bone have also been used. The wealthy, however, often had chopsticks made from jade, gold, bronze, brass, agate, coral, ivory, and silver. In fact, during dynastic times it was thought that silver chopsticks would turn black if they came into contact with poisoned food. It is now known that silver has no reaction to arsenic or cyanide, but if rotten eggs, onion, or garlic are used, the hydrogen sulfide they release might cause these chopsticks to change color.

{ California Academy of Sciences | Continue reading }

related { How to use chopsticks }

Developed by Koreans for the Japanese, Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is the first arcade game that combines of assaulting assholes and fortune-telling. You select from eight characters like “Mother-in-Law,” “Con artist,” and “Child Molester” and then, steel yourself for this, you ram a giant plastic finger into an ass that protrudes out from the arcade unit next to the words “HAVE A FUN!! ENJOY.” As you poke, spank, and probe, the game plays an animation of your victim wailing in pain, and then the game rates your sexual virility based on the impact of your finger against its virtual colon.

{ Sean Baby | Continue reading }

{ Toilet knee pads to prevent pee from splashing | House Doctor | via Tokyo Mango }

{ Exhibit of bowls and vases by Viennese artist Lucie Rie at the Issey Miyake gallery in Tokyo | Press release | PDF }

Countries around the world began tightening their border and immigration controls Tuesday as the number of confirmed cases of swine flu continued to rise.

The number of deaths believed attributable to swine flu climbed to as many as 152 on Tuesday — all of them in Mexico — as news agencies reported the number of confirmed cases of infection in the United States stood at 50 after further testing at a New York City school.

Spanish Health Minister Trinidad Jiménez on Tuesday said Spain had confirmed a

second case of swine flu, in the eastern province of Valencia, but that the patient was recovering well.

Israel’s Ministry of Health on Tuesday reported the first case in the country. (…) Russia and South Korea each reported a suspected case of swine flu on Tuesday. (…)

Two people in Scotland — the first known victims of the virus in Britain — were said by hospital authorities on Tuesday to be recovering after contracting the flu while on honeymoon in Cancún, Mexico. (…)

Suspected cases have appeared in Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand, but confirmation is slow because most nations’ laboratories lack the test kit the C.D.C. is developing for the new virus.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Swine Flu Cases Worldwide | graphic }

Hong Kong, the epicenter of a SARS outbreak six years ago, announced some of the toughest measures anywhere on Sunday in response to a swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the United States. (…)

Ever since the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hong Kong has used infrared scanners to measure the facial temperatures of all arrivals at its airport and at its border crossings with mainland China.

Dr. Thomas Tsang, the controller of the Hong Kong government’s Center for Health Protection, said Sunday afternoon at a news conference that any traveler who had passed through a city with laboratory-confirmed cases and who arrived in Hong Kong with a fever and respiratory symptoms would be intercepted by officials and sent to a hospital to await testing.

“Until that test is negative, we won’t allow him out,” he said.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Pork producers question whether the term “swine flu” is appropriate, given that the new virus has not yet been isolated in samples taken from pigs in Mexico or elsewhere.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Swine influenza has killed 149 people in Mexico so far and infected many more worldwide. So how many pigs have died in the outbreak?

No more than usual.

{ Slate | Continue reading | Swine flu: What you need to know }

related { Risk communication before and during epidemics | The etymology of epidemiology and the cultural fears of worldwide disease }

more { Taking care of a sick person in your home during a flu pandemic | The “swine flu fiasco,” 1976 | Fighting swine flu with the power of design }

Falling demand for cashmere among recession-hit shoppers in the West is cutting into earnings among nomadic herders in Mongolia, whose goats produce the soft fiber used in high-end sweaters, scarves and coats. The result: herder loan defaults.

Mongolians are calling the current situation a financial zud, invoking a local term for unusually harsh winters that devastate herds. After Mr. Sodnomdarjaa couldn’t pay back a $2,700 loan, he says bank officials pressed him to sell his livestock — which he used as collateral. The bank says he misrepresented the number of animals he owned, which he denies. Now a judge has ordered the seizure of Mr. Sodnomdarjaa’s family home — a tent — if he doesn’t come up with the rest of the money soon.

“We don’t have any animals,” says Mr. Sodnomdarjaa, sitting in his tent, heated by camel dung burned in a cast-iron stove. “How can we pay?”

Mongolian nomads’ troubles show that the ravages of the economic crisis have spread to even the most remote parts of the world. More than a quarter of the households in Mongolia — which has a population of about 2.6 million — earn a living raising animals.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

With a population of 35m, greater Tokyo is the world’s biggest metropolitan area. (…) The railway rules. Every working day a vast ganglia of 45 bullet, main and suburban-overground lines, with another 13 underground, channels 4.1m swipecard-carrying commuters into Tokyo’s central wards alone, with clean and exceptional precision. (…)

Every year 2,000-plus train chikan, or perverts, are arrested for groping women and schoolgirls—the vast majority during the morning rush hour, causing minor delays. For years, females just put up with the indignity of groping, either out of embarrassment or out of fear that their claim would not be taken seriously. But habits are now changing, and women will hold up the offender’s hand and shout “Chikan!”. Several lines also have women-only carriages for peak hours. A few men’s lives have been broken because of false accusations. (…)

The only thing that can be said with confidence is that Japan has found original ways to make money out of people’s sexual predilections. Little more than a stone’s throw from the huge Shibuya station is the “Shibuya Pink Girl’s Club”, which on its varied menu offers a chikan densha, or pervert train.

The “groper’s course” starts at ¥12,000 ($130), where the connoisseur picks out from the menu the girl of his choice, dressed either as a schoolgirl or office receptionist. This girl then beckons him through the window of a mock-up train carriage, which not only broadcasts station announcements, but even shakes and rattles. For the next 45 minutes the connoisseur is under no risk of arrest as he gropes to gay abandon—before joining the slumberers on one of the last real trains home.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

{ This little truck, called A Place for Venting Anger, is a special space for smashing and throwing plates to relieve stress. The sign advertises that it’s 200 yen ($2.20) per session. | Tokyo Mango }

Despite its reputation, Beijing’s autocracy is anything but absolute. The government long ago abandoned real communist ideology, and its current leader, Hu Jintao, a cipher with a background as a rural bureaucrat, has about as much revolutionary charisma as Bob Dole. And while China’s security apparatus is sophisticated, the country is too large, with too many educated, Internet-savvy people, for Beijing to brainwash its citizens the way Kim Jong-il has in North Korea. Most urban Chinese I’ve met are knowledgeable about their leaders’ strengths and flaws, and certainly don’t see them as some kind of gods, the way Mao was viewed in the 1950s and 1960s.

So, since the late 1970s, when China’s leaders began opening its economy, they have placed their bets on their ability to deliver continued economic growth. (…) For the most part, their gamble succeeded. For three decades, China has posted annual growth rates of over 10 percent, and this nominally communist country now seems more capitalist than Wall Street. Even in small provincial cities like Lanzhou, where I visited last year, massive malls, open-air markets, and new skyscrapers dot the downtown. (…)

Since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s urban middle classes have bought into this growth–and the regime.

Exports constitute nearly 40 percent of China’s GDP–far too high a figure. (By comparison, in the U.S., exports account for about 10 percent of GDP most years.) And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China’s Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008. Gordon Chang, a leading China analyst, estimates that 20,000 more will shutter by the end of this year. In the third quarter of 2008, Beijing also reported its fifth consecutive quarterly drop in growth, and several private research firms expect a sharper slowdown next year. Additionally, unemployment is skyrocketing; in Wenzhou, one of the main exporting cities, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs, Reuters recently reported.

{ How the global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government | The New Republic | Continue reading | Previously: Geopolitics of China }

{ How do you keep your nails trim if you’re a gyaru with inches-long gemstone-encrusted fingertips? }