This is stippy’s fourth part in a series (see also part 1, part 2 and part 3) about one foreigner’s experience of being put in a Japanese prison (留置場 or “ryuchijyo”, a prison for locking up people for as long as 23 days until they are convicted, or cleared of a crime). Below is the [...]

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Matushita Nao (松下奈緒) the girl behind E-Mobile When you go home tonight, you might notice some new ads starring Matushita Nao (松下奈緒) for a cool looking PDA. But contrary to popular belief, this is not Softbank’s X01HT which has been receiving a lot of bandwidth in the comments section of stippy.com. Nor is it part [...]

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Japan’s extreme sensitivity over its royal family was laid bare yesterday when it reacted furiously to an unauthorised biography of its most famous – and controversial – princess, entitled “Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne; the Tragic True Story of Japan’s Crown Princess” (Click title to see the book on Amazon.co.jp). Japan’s Imperial Family, [...]

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Last Friday night, Australian rock band Jet played at the Nippon Budokan, one of Japan’s most historic and revered event venues. The first foreign rock band ever to play there was the Beatles back in 1966 in a performance memorable for all the wrong reasons, and Stippy.com was there last Friday to find out whether [...]

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This is stippy’s third part in a series (see also part 1 and part 2) about one foreigner’s experience of being put in a Japanese prison (留置場 or “ryuchijyo”, a prison for locking up people for as long as 23 days until they are convicted, or cleared of a crime), for a misdemeanor – a [...]

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The Japanese government has just released their crime statistics for 2006, which show crimes by non-permanent resident foreigners in Japan are down 16.2% from a record high logged the year before. Unfortunately not everyone was impressed with these figures. A few days ago word broke out on foreign activist and anti-racism campaigner Arudou Debito’s site [...]

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Earlier this week Nepia, one of the nations largest manufacturer and distributor of domestic paper products released a very limited number of what may be the most expensive tissue paper in the world. Nepia very shrewdly made their new product available only through their internet shop at mid night on Friday, by the time the [...]

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Back in the day, when Firefox didn’t have yakushi-mouse (a translation function built in to the cursor) and Babelfish referred to something in a Douglas Adams novel, not a search function on Altavista, translators had very little choice for efficient computer based dictionaries. I was an active translator back in the 90s and swore by [...]

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Stippy.com Book Review: Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan The good thing about the mob (or the Yakuza) in Japan is that they rarely involve innocent bystanders in their sometimes violent dealings, so it’s easy to forget the fact that they are still active on nearly every [...]

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Yesterday morning at 10am in the well-to-do area of Tokyo’s Nishi Azabu, a member of one Yakuza gang (the Yamaguchi-gumi, 山口組) shot and killed a very senior member (a 幹部 or kanbu, which roughly translates to “director”) of another Yakuza gang (the Sumiyoshi-kai, 住吉会) on the side of the main road between Roppongi and Shibuya, [...]

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