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Not great at policing

Maybe it’s a trend, I don’t know, but there seem to be a lot of “cop gets arrested” stories in Japan lately. Maybe because the crime rate is kind of low they don’t have enough to occupy themselves, they they start getting mixed up with nefarious activities.

I always think that since their job is to catch criminals who have messed up they might have a slightly better sense of how to commit a crime – without messing up. Apparently, I am expecting too much.

A 35 year old police officer at a police box in front of Tokyo station was handed a wallet. Not exactly the highest level of crime, but easy enough to get away with if you take into account a few things. Firstly, that when people lose a wallet and they get handed into a koban you should expect a little time to pass before taking the wallet as people do tend to try and find their lost items. They do this by coming to police boxes and asking about them.

Second, the money in the wallet has value, in this case about 40,000 yen. The money will be more difficult to trace than the whole wallet. The wallet, not so much on both counts.

Apparently this level of thought was beyond our gentle officer as he just took the whole thing home and when the owner came asking about it people figured out pretty quickly what had happened, the other people around being proper police officers.

If he had waited to see if anyone arrived he would have missed his opportunity to pilfer, but wouldn’t have been caught. If he had just taken the money out of the wallet and said that this is how it was turned in only the best version of CSI could have figured the case out. Still, our protagonist was caught.

In Hokkaido they have some pretty low standards as a sergeant was arrested for the second time. Apparently you can get arrested and still be a cop in Hokkaido. His first instance was buying pot from “an acquaintance”, which I guess didn’t stick. The second time it was for leaking to the same “acquaintance” that the vehicle following them was a police vehicle.
Turns out the acquaintance was a friend from high school, so at least you know that in Japan the bro pass is in full effect.

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How not to handle ticks

As you grow older in life you don’t get smarter, you really just collect a long list of things you have seen that come under the category “bad ideas”. This way you can avoid doing those things in the future and everyone thinks “gee whiz, that guy is well smart.”

One of the things I have listed in the “bad idea” category is keeping things that could kill me around. My house is free from vials of virus’ and poisonous animals.

See this? This is not in my house.

This could also be extended to lesser threats, but unfortunately some officials in Miyazaki decided that illustrating their point was a far more important than the general safety of everyone around them.
There had been some outbreaks of tick borne diseases in the area so during a press conference they decided the smartest thing they could do would be to bring one of the little buggers along with them to show the press just how dangerous these things are.

They brought one that was dead and one that was alive. When attempting to lift up the one that was alive with a pair of tweezers the wily tick absconded.

Just as hard as it looks.

This left the government officials and the press corp in the unpleasant situation of having to crawl around and look for the tick themselves.

Sadly, this bore no fruit as the tick remained elusive. After the conference was over the room was sprayed with insecticide.

All I know now is that if there is ever a press conference on airborne diseases, radioactive materials, or vampires, I will not be in attendance.

The dead tick remains in custody.

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The Blair Witch of Tokyo

Everyone gets annoyed by kids. They’re loud and fall down a lot after doing dumb things and then think it’s someone else’s job to fix things. I get frustrated with kids sometimes, but I have never hit the level of Takeshi Inaba who decided the best way to fix the problem of children existing was to go Blair Witch on them.

What got him noticed was a 12 centimeter doll that he put on a pedestrian crossing knowing the kids in the community would have to pass there. Attached to the doll was a note that read “To all you damn elementary school kids, jump off and die.”

When police investigated he admitted “I did it after becoming irritated by the annoying voices of the children,”

About 30 other, not super friendly, messages have been found around a local park and train station which are now being ascribed to the accused.

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Sony Playstation Credit Card

Play video games? Live in the US? Need a credit card? Sony Playstation has you covered with their new credit card. You won’t be getting crap like air miles, which you don’t need since you don’t leave the house. You won’t be getting merch that you don’t need. No, you’ll be getting more of those sweet sweet Sony dollars to spend in their virtual store.

Sony Reward Points can get you games, DLC, Sony products or be applied to pretty much any Sony based subscription.

The card promises rewards such as games, DLC, electronics and more. If you use the card in the Playstation store you get 5x points.

The important thing to know is that there is no annual fee and 0% APR for the first year. After that is going to be between 15 to 25%. Love the idea of committing to a card with interest rates akin to gambling.

Honestly, since I do spend a dumb amount of money on games, this isn’t the worst deal.

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Amaki Sally – Normal Person

It shouldn’t be newsworthy, but the fact that someone from the anime world it a normal well adjusted person appears to be news.  This video from a livestream of seiyuu Amaki Sally is blowing up the twitter.

She is pretty charming, though.

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Poison Frog Solution

With all the tension in Japan, North Korea firing missiles overhead, tensions with China, there is need for something to unite Japan with its Asian brethren. What better way than to breed poisonous frogs?

While Japan may have a human breeding problem what it doesn’t seem to lack are the skills to breed poisonous frogs. Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo has successfully bred green and black poison dart frogs, yellow banded poison dart frogs and the golden poison dart frog. They’re breeding those things like Pokemon.

In Taipei you could color them impressed as with the techniques created by the Maruyama Zoo Taipei zoo was able to successfully breed blue poison dart frogs. They should be growing from tadpoles to full fledged frogs any day now.
Because of shrinking rainforests a lot of these poison dart frogs are endangered, so the breeding program is great. If it just so happens that they could be mechanized and used against North Korea in possible conflict, is that bad?

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Crime Wave

Crimes seem to come in waves. Certainly the reporting of crimes comes in waves. The problem with this most recent crime wave is that it is one of the grossest waves possible.

First up is Tooru Miyazaki who splashed “bodily fluids” on the legs and skirt of a 12 year old girl who was walking around JR Kanamachi Station. The bodily fluid isn’t specified, which totally indicates what it was. Neither was the container, but I can make some educated guesses.

Miyazaki’s reasoning as to why this would be a good idea was “I did it to satisfy my sexual desire. I feel that middle schools girls uniforms are sexually stimulating.” To be honest, we didn’t need that statement, we already knew that. Police are pretty sure they have the right guy as he is also under investigation for a separate incident with another schoolgirl that happened 10 minutes later.

Miyazaki’s spirit animal is Yutaka Ugajin from Yokohama, who also splashed an “unspecified fluid” on a woman going up an escalator but since it was carried in a “contraceptive device”. It doesn’t take a great detective to figure out what’s going on. The incredibly sound reasoning here was “I liked her buttocks.” and “I did it due to work and family stress.”

Luckily being arrested is also known to be a great way to reduce those stresses as you will probably no longer have a job or a family afterwards. This is pretty much assured as he copped to doing the same thing in up to 8 other cases.

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Anime AI

There have been warnings about Artificial intelligence. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking…other smart people… have come out and said we have to be really careful how we move down this path. Mainly they are saying we should be real careful about sticking guns to robots and letting them roam around independently, but what these guys lack is real vision.

Like the ability for an AI to make a cute anime character with but the click of a few buttons. Yes, thankfully some productive Chinese students have seen the real potential of AI and put it to good use, really taken the reigns off and created an AI powered anime girl generator.

 

The results of my first try.

As you put in the information what is the AI actually doing? A random face generator couldn’t be a very difficult thing to do for a computer programmer to do without AI. It basically happens with NPC characters in video games.

No, it’s collecting your preferences to use against you in the future. Like in the movie Ex Machina where the robot’s body was designed based of the subjects porn searches. Your downfall will be the moe that comes for you, the one you cannot resist. It will be so cute, you die.

Here are the results I made with the above settings, and one completely random one.

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How to sell a game

The Japanese commercial for massive video game Destiny came out.

No gameplay, not story information, no content of worth except dancing.

I went out and bought it the same day.

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One Piece Pirates Arrested

Japan is often quite generous when it comes to laws, leaning more towards warnings than all the paperwork that comes with actually arresting people. Pirating and torrenting off the internet is often handled with a letter letting the delinquent that they have been spotting and should cease their offending ways before the situation escalates.

That changes when you bring the world’s most popular manga into play. So far 5 arrests have been made in the case of pages of One Piece being posted to the internet before the comic was released to the public.

A joint task force was created between Kumamoto and Akita police departments to nab Ryoji Hottai, Yo Uehara and three unnamed others. The pair were getting copies of Shukan Shonen Jump from shops that would sell them before the official release date then uploading scans to the internet.

One may wonder why such efforts would be made for what would only amount to internet fame, but the ad revenue from Hottai’s website generated 350 million yen since 2014. To put that into perspective, the average Japanese salary is somewhere between 3 to 4 million yen a year.

These Pirates don’t cotton to Pirating.