Here is an interesting story:

Mie Univ. associate professor arrested for breaking mobile phone
TSU, Japan - An associate professor at Mie University was arrested Tuesday for breaking the mobile phone of a woman at a bar in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, the police said. Satoru Yamamoto, 50, an associate professor at the university’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, suddenly snatched a mobile phone from the 18-year-old employee of a tailor’s shop and broke it into two at about 9 p.m., the police said. (Kyodo News)
Japanese source: 三重大准教授を逮捕＝居酒屋で女性の携帯折る−県警

This guy was a professor so he must deal with 18 year olds every day. I wonder how he treats students in class when they attempt to use a cell phone?

I once heard of an foriegn English teacher who got so annoyed by a student talking on her cell phone that he took the phone away from the student and threw it out of a four story window. I don’t remember the teacher ever getting into serious trouble over this …

How do you deal with annoying people with cell phones?

Update: This entry was first posted on June 26. In early June about 10,000 police files were leaked onto the Internet. This included many violations of individual privacy, for example the names of rape victims and so on. According to the Yomiuri, the officer who leaked the files has been fired:

Cop who leaked data via Winny dismissed
The Metropolitan Police Department dismissed a 26-year-old senior policeman at Kitazawa Police Station on Friday for leaking MPD investigative data on about 10,000 cases to the Internet via Winny file-sharing software on his private computer.The MPD also reprimanded a 33-year-old police sergeant who supervised the fired officer with a 10 percent pay-cut for one month for letting him copy the data …      

While I am glad to see strong actions taken in this area, I want to point out that so long as actions like this are ad hoc and arbitrary, they will not solve the problem. There needs to be a system set up of random audits to check individual computers along and with pre-determined punishments for those who don’t respect the relevant privacy rules.
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Suicide in Japan …

2007/07/05 — I’m going to open a thread on this topic and begin commenting a little when I see articles related to this. Today there was an article in the Yomiuri discussing the Center for Suicide Prevention which was established last year in Tokyo by the central government. Clearly the central government must feel they have some responsibility in this area, or they would not have opened up the center. This new center is now planning to conduct surveys of families of those who have committed suicide, and then on the basis of these surveys recommend policies that will help alleviate the number of suicides in Japan. So my question for today is this, is the problem of suicide really the government’s responsibility? Let me share with you my opinion …

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The Yomiuri has an interesting article about copyright piracy. I want to comment on this but am pressed for time, so will update this entry later today or tomorrow with some comments! Below is a small excerpt …

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Nova issue … just updating this entry to include two articles about possible tie up with HIS travel company.

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Interesting story at the Japan Times:

Nightclub hostess world still seen as one where profit trumps visas, safety

This article is very notable because a Welsh TV reporter does some undercover investigative reporting.

Undercover invetigative reporting? Fantastic. Let’s see some more of this please.

The murder Lindsay Ann Hawker is an important topic.

I noticed an good article detailing current happenings in the case at Times Online today.

Would you like to help out?

Debito has posted at his blog how you can do so — Caroline Pover’s T-shirt campaign to find Lindsay Hawker’s murder suspect; there you can find out how to purchase T-shirts with the murder suspect’s face on them; hopefully, this will help people capture him. Please check this out. (TPR has mirrored the message here.)

For very good coverage and updates on this topic I recommend Japan Probe.

This is an entry about 965 government employees falsifying records in Osaka, along with my opinion about that.

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Fresh Opinion:

2007/06/22 — Reading the news this morning the biggest question is if any one violated the law. I’m guessing that in an obvious sense, no one did. There’s probably no law that was specifically broken. Analysts are saying that spa safety measures are a weak spot in government regulation. So there probably was no specific criminal negligence. To build a case I think the police would have to show there were clear industry safety standards that weren’t being followed, but that might not even be the case. Now, as long as the company was following the law, do they bear some kind of responsibility for what happened? Should the government bear responsibility for not having had safety laws in place? I’m guessing that safety laws encourage unscrupulous businesses owners to only follow the letter of the law, while self-regulation actually encourages real compliance to promote safety. Let’s see what happens …

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Another false confession …

2007/06/21 Retrial opens to clear man wrongfully convicted of rape, The Yomiuri Shimbun; “The retrial to prove the innocence of a 40-year-old man who was imprisoned after being wrongfully found guilty of rape and attempted rape, opened Wednesday at the Toyama District Court Takaoka branch. … The defense counsel also made a statement and severely criticized the faulty investigation, saying: ‘By prejudging the defendant as the assailant, [the police] arrested and detained him and, after a long, coercive interrogation, forced the man to make a fictitious confession and falsely charged him as a criminal.’”

Nothing new here …

According to Alec Dubro and David E. Kaplan seminal study Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld:

Central to Japan’s success is the remarkable fact that most suspects brought to court sign confessions during interrogations by police and prosecutors. Indeed, confession rates have run as high as 89 percent.

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