//beconfused

TOKYO (Reuters) - With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.

The author of “Yakuza Moon,” a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.

“The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before,” she told Reuters in a recent interview.

Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organized crime.

“They’re being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away,” she said. “All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard.”

Being a gang member is not illegal in Japan, and until recently the gangs were known for openness. Their offices even posted signs with their names and membership lists inside.

Gangs cooperated with police, handing over suspects in return for police turning a blind eye to yakuza misdemeanors, but this broke down after organized crime laws were toughened in 1992.

Read more at Reuters article “Gangster daughter sheds light on Japan underworld” (Image from Reuters)

I always thought the Japanese Yakuza is kinda cool. Anyway Shoko Tendo’s book “Yakuza Moon” is in stores now.

The following contains spoiler for the Bible. If you have not read the Bible, you might not want to continue reading this: (more…)

This post contains Harry Potter spoilers, if you’re not interested (unlike me), please do not ever scroll down because you’re be sad for the whole month. Read more if you wish to know the spoiler. (more…)

More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as “indecent” due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.

Bible drawn into Hong Kong sex publication row

A spokesperson for Hong Kong’s Television and Entertainment Licensing authority (TELA) said it had received 838 complaints about the Bible by noon on Wednesday.

The complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site — www.truthbible.net — which said the holy book “made one tremble” given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest.

The Web site said the Bible’s sexual content “far exceeds” that of a recent sex column published in the Chinese University’s “Student Press” magazine, which had asked readers whether they’d ever fantasised about incest or bestiality.

That column was later deemed “indecent” by the Obscene Articles Tribunal, sparking a storm of debate about social morality and freedom of speech. Student editors of the journal defended it, saying open sexual debate was a basic right.

If the Bible is similarly classified as “indecent” by authorities, only those over 18 could buy the holy book and it would need to be sealed in a wrapper with a statutory warning notice.

TELA said it was still undecided on whether the Bible had violated Hong Kong’s obscene and indecent articles laws.

But a local protestant minister shrugged off this possibility.

“If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it encourages those activities,” said Reverend Wu Chi-wai. “It’s just common sense … I don’t think that criticism will have strong support from the public,” he added.

Source: Yahoo! News

It would be a sad day for Christianity would the Bible be classified as indecent. The thought haven’t cross my mind when reading the Bible. I think of the Bible as something like a history textbook, I’m a Christian, I’m probably a little bias. What do you think?

read more | digg story

Back home again. I’ve stayed in the army camp since Wednesday, next week. It’s one of the longer times I’ve stayed in camp. I feel kinda bored there sometimes but never too bad. I rushed back home to do a post before I’m out again.

Most of my items are intact, things are just as messy, the wires are still unkept, papers all around. I guess that’s the way I like it. I have quite a lot of work at home still. What made me really happy is a cheque from the nice people at Google for advertisement. (Sorry, I don’t wish to disclose the sum.)

And I borrowed some really cool books for someone, it’s some philosophy type of book but it’s interesting and it keeps my brain working and thinking. Now I have a lot of books unread, about 1 fiction book and 8 non-fiction books. I’ll start with the ones I borrowed.

Oh yes, the hamsters! I left it at my friend’s and I’ll be bring it home. I hope the hamsters’ teeth won’t be as sharp too.

[I am having some problems typing the alphabet 'd'. Sometimes the alphabet comes out, sometimes it just doesn't!]

You know, you shouldn’t really trust the photographs in your magazines. I have seen lots of pictures of cute girls in Singapore magazine 8 Days or local tabloid The New Paper. They’re on the pages begging you to call them at a 1900 number. You think you’ll really be calling the girl on the photographs? Dream on! You’ll probably end up calling the inconsiderate auntie who hangs her wet clothes outside the apartment above yours. Yeah, she’ll report that she’s sweet seventeen (with a sore throat) or something.

I always wonder if they had gotten those images from Japanese pornography websites. Maybe she’s just a lingerie model or lesser-known celebrity from Taiwan.

_(This photo shows a blond girl next to the slogan: “Deutsch ist Geil!” or “German is Hot!”)_

A german magazine, Objektiv, got into bad press after they feature a photograph of a girl with the text - German is Hot.

German right-wing extremists had hoped to lure teenagers to their cause in Cologne with a new youth magazine. The nationalists even had an ad with an attractive young girl next to the slogan: “German is Hot!” The only problem? The model turned out to be a Czech erotic model.

…the photo in question is of an attractive blond in a tank top and short skirt next to the slogan: “German is Hot!” But in an embarrassing faux pas for the German nationalists, it now it turns out that the Teutonic hottie is actually a Czech lingerie model. So much for offering a “free-patriotic point of view,” as was supposedly the remit of the less-than-objective Objektiv.

Source: Spiegel Online via BoingBoing

See! These people don’t give a damn where the girl comes from. I doubt the local magazines or newspapers bother to check if the models on advertisements are gotten from some teen who regularly jerks off at some Japanese websites.

Well, speaking of images, take a look at this amazingly huge piece of pixel art.

Well, nobody knows if it’s true or not. The Japanese are always looking for something original. I guess they are running out of ideas.

Heard about the guy who had a sex-change after his girlfriend said she’s a lesbian?

“Harukarin Blog,” the hot bestseller, tells the supposedly true story of Harukarin Nakagawa, a 23-year-old who claims to have undergone a sex change operation that made him a woman because his girlfriend of several years decided she was a lesbian and would prefer he was female.

“Harukarin Blog” is comprised mainly of excerpts taken from Nakagawa’s blog entries detailing her transformation from man to woman and has sold steadily since it hit bookstore shelves in May.

But, though “Harukarin Blog” has attracted a fairly large fan base, it’s also been slammed by Japan’s online community, which says the story is too good to be true.

“The whole story of a guy’s girlfriend of five years telling him she’s a lesbian and asking him to become a woman is just ridiculous,” one online critic says.

Nakagawa claims in the blog that breasts started to bud soon after starting the female hormone injections, a point that fueled another “Harukarin Blog” naysayer’s opposition. “It’s medically impossible to develop a bust as fast as the writer claims,” the skeptic said.

Source: MSN Mainichi

True or not, I’ll just leave it for you to decide. Perhaps Ang Lee can make a film out of it and call it Fuji Mountain or something. It’s okay if it fails, after all, it’s an art film right?