Hey all - been in Tokyo over the past weekend, and maybe if you ask nicely I'll tell you about it. ;P I'll save that for another time.
So I hear some craziness went down over at Virginia Tech - the media is simply a-flutter over here with everything too. My bosses heard that it was a Korean guy and were asking if he was an exchange student, sort of looking for a connection there somewheres. I see that he's been in the States since he was 8 though, so hopefully that's enough for them to stick with the fact that he's just a psycho that lost it and went postal and race/nationality has nothing to do with it. If you want to know my opinion, yes it's definitely a tragedy and I hope the families and friends of everyone involved are handling things ok. To put things in perspective though, how many people do you think died in Iraq that day? And by people I mean those on both sides, not just the casualty figures of the soldiers, since they're people too.
Moving along, some of the less reasonable people out there are using this to attempt to spark up the feud between Koreans and Japanese online as posted about here. I'd like to think said nuts are in the rare minority, but it's always those loud few that out shout the humble masses, right? If you don't know what I'm talking about with the whole J-K connection, then you must've missed the fact that Korea was colonized from 1910-1945 and all the atrocities that Japan threw Asia's way during that period. In addition to raping, pillaging and killing indiscriminately, I heard this one J-kid stole a K-kid's lunch and then said his mom had fat little stumpy daikon ashi legs. Things have actually been getting a lot better in the last few years, but every now and then people are stupid.
In other news, the yakuza have been rather busy out here lately. In the first yak-attack, the mayor of Nagasaki was shot and killed in broad daylight by a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, which is one of the top yak families. The originally reported reason? He wasn't happy that the city refused to pay to fix his car, which was damaged by some potholes. Shyeah right, and nihon-zarus might fly out of my butt.
As if that wasn't enough, today I hear some guy goes and shoots another yak then holes up in some apartment just outside of Tokyo. As of now the cops are still in a standoff with said dude. Now this of course means that those same internet nuts on their J-blogs are scrambling to make a connection to something, which in this case means mixing the VA shooting and yak shootings into one big anti-Korean jumble of badness. In case you didn't know, a whole bunch of zainichi Koreans and other people lower down the societal totem pole in Japan are at the head of the yak trees, so of course it all just makes total sense that Kim Jong-Il orchestrated the whole thing from his secret lair, then ordered a pizza topped with corn and mayonnaise because I hear that's how he likes it.
I kid, but seriously this kind of stuff gets a whole bunch of attention out here, basically since the violent stuff is the majority of the news that Japanese people get of the US. If all they hear about is school massacres and us invading Iraq/Afghanistan, of course they're going to think that the majority of the populace is packing heat on the way to the corner store. Boo Japanese media.
yak story 1
yak story 2
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