William Gibson was right when commented on linking to this story, "Nobody, but nobody does cults like the Japanese." Members of a cult named "Panawave Laboratory" believe, amongst other things, that humanity will be destroyed May 15th by massive earthquakes. They also think saving Tama-chan, Japan's "celebrity seal" will save humanity. Saving Tama-chan from what, I'm not sure, but there is a separate story about Tama-chan getting hooked in the eye by a fishing line. Tama-chan has more than a passing resemblance to a number of anime characters which I think better explains the characters than Tama-chan's celebrity status.
Gibson tried to link directly to a story but appears Mainichi Daily News uses some kind of dynamically generated URLs so his link didn't work. Currently there a couple of stories on their front page, including a nice photo essay layout, but it appears you can use their search box to look for "panawave" and have good results.
A number of other snippets of text caught my eye, most of them because it's suprising to me that they're considered "Top News."
"Hard-up gangsters turn to Tokyo to flex muscles" [I'm not picturing what a down-and-out Yakuza would look like]
"Naked teen-age boy dies in apartment fire" [Why did they include the "naked" part in the headline?]
"Grass-eating hikers fall ill" [That's odd to see anywhere]
"Schoolgirl goes on deadly arson spree" [ditto]
"Tokyo Electric Power has been forced to shut down all of its nuclear power plants pending safety inspections." [Now that's news! Scary on a couple of levels, especially to someone like me who's more pro-nuclear power than most people]
"'Project Kaisei' A mystery novel on Japan's nuclear conspiracy." [This is weird because it's a link to Amazon appearing right below the above story!]
"Congratulating the people of Poland as they celebrate their National Day. (May 3) ... Congratulating the people of the Netherlands as they celebrate their Queen's birthday. (April 30)" [No way would a U.S. media outlet be that international and polite. Holy crap, this is like a regular thing, congratulating nations on their National Days and having blurb written by some representative of the state in response! That's kind of nerdy but cool.]
Comments (1)
I read "Project Kaisei." It's a damn good novel. What's more, it really shows what has gone wrong and can go wrong in this silly game of violence we as Americans are engaged in.
Posted by Joe Jordan | June 28, 2004 10:40 AM
Posted on June 28, 2004 10:40