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Archive for the 'Sports' Category

12/25/2006

Draft horse racing

Draft horses, dragging heavy loads, being exercised last week at the racetrack in Obihiro
Japanese Draft horses
A Horse-Racing Tradition Lumbers Into Its Final Stretch
New York Times, December 25, 2006 / OBIHIRO, Japan— It was one of the last contests of the day at the draft-horse racetrack in this rural corner of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. The spotlights glimmered in the snow-streaked evening sky as the gamblers, who had been inside huddling around strategically placed portable kerosene heaters, took their spots alongside the track.more

Japanese draft horse racing may be fading but thoroughbred horseracing and offtrack betting still holds many older men’s wistful dreams in Japan. The Japanese thoroughbred superstar, “Deep Impact,” retired on the 24th, winning his final race. Despite his drug scandal after the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe last October, (Wiki ref.), it has been ages since any Japanese horse could run this fast this long. Deep Impact will still be in the money as a stud but the 4-year-old failed to give Japanese horse racing the respect Japan it has long been hoping for—Maybe draft horses are the answer?

Posted by Taro in General, Society, Sports | No Comments »

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12/16/2006

The true spirit of Japanese sport — ‘Gambarism’

“The Running Fish Gutter” an Asics shoe commercial is the faux life-story of Kenshi, fish disembower–a guy who guts fish for the market— and his Olympic quest. It makes light of the often silly/obsessive extent the Japanese take their cultural value of “gambari” (頑張り) tenacity/endurance/never-say-die to absurd lengths. This often futile attitude that one must keep going no matter what—Gambarism (ガンバリズム ) gone bad.
Link thanks to Mulboyne


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12/9/2006

40 year old bodybuilder beats Japanese for the gold

Hong Kong's Chan Yun bodybuilder

40-yr-old has best body!
The Peninsula On-line, 12/9/2006 3:29:52 ::: AGNS
DOHA—
Hong Kong’s Chan Yun To, the reigning Asian 75kg bodybuilding champion, easily outclassed his competitors to win the gold medal [in the 15th Asian Games]….
Chan finished with a score of 10 in this evening’s final to win the top prize, ahead of Japan’s Yoshihiro Yano [age 42], who earned silver …
…at the age of 40, Chan showed his body is still in top form with his muscle definition and body symmetry far surpassing his opponents.more

At first this sounds odd—a 40 year old and a 42 year old taking the gold and silver in bodybuilding, respectively.
But actually, a bodybuilder’s biggest challenge is keeping the motivation going. The life of self-discipline to realize goals but that can be tough. On the other hand, these bodybuilders have results they can see late into life, unlike many sports where being 23 years old means retirement. I once met the four-gold-medal Olympics sprinter, Jesse Owens, at a Chicago promotion for PUMA shoes—He loved to repeat his sage advice about getting too wrapped up in sports: “A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.”

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12/3/2006

Team Japan teaches cleavage to Musilms

Doha, Qatar’s largest city, is boring. However, today Team Japan helped make it a hell of a lot less boring….

Japanese girl's volleyball's  bikinis


Yahoo! News Photo, via AP News,
Sat Dec 2, 1:46 PM ET—

Japan’s Satoko Urata returns the ball during the 15th Asian Games beach volleyball competition against Iraq in Doha …Beach volleyball’s penchant for bikinis has touched off a bit of a cultural clash in this conservative Muslim city...more...
Butt cleavage Team Japan — butt thanks to CNN

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10/10/2006

Beckham bends it like the Buddha

David Beckham is a God
Tonight - October 9, 2006
David Beckham is a God, according to his wife Victoria. The former Spice Girl claims her Real Madrid footballer spouse is worshipped
like a deity in Japan and there is even a temple where his followers got to pray to him.
Victoria told Harper’s Bazaar magazine: “There is a temple there where the Japanese go to pray to a statue of David. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true.”….On the island of Awajishima, in western Japan, a bronze statue of the footballer has been erected…Japan is not the only Far Eastern country that ‘worships’ David. At the Wat Pariwas Buddhist temple in Thailand a golden statue of the former Manchester United player….more...

If this report stinks like a dead fish–It sounds totally make up. If this report is true, the “temple” (Buddhist) is more likely to be a just a commerial good-luck shrine (Shinto). A quick search of Harper’s Bazaar magazine shows no mention of “Beckham“. However, the Beckham Buddha in the Thai temple’s is true and was reported on by the BBC.
 Thai temple's Beckham Buddha

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10/7/2006

STRIKE OUT! Japan shut out of the igNobel Prize!

2006 IG NOBEL PRIZE So far, Japan has not won any the 2006 Nobel prizes yet. See the official website at nobelprize.org.
fraud, Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats 2005 ig Nobel prize for NUTRITION
Much worse is unlike previous years, Japan has not won any the IgNobles for zaney research. In most the past years, Japanese have won an IgNoble such as the 2005 prize for NUTRITION to the wacky fraud, Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats, of Tokyo (pictured grinning with his prize) who took a photo and analysed every one of his meal for 35 years (including poops) or the 2004 Ig Nobel PEACE prize to Daisuke Inoue for inventing karaoke. See the: “ig-Nobel past winners.”

This year’s 2006 IG NOBEL PRIZE for MEDICINE went to Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage”; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.”

2006 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony– Watch the webcast.

Read more about the charming fraudster of Japan, the previous 3Yen report, Dr. NakaMats of Japan wins a Nobel Prize!

FYI: the Japanese Ig Nobel Prize laureates are:

1992
Medicine - F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta, and O. Nakata of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering research study “Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour,” especially for their conclusion that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don’t, don’t.

1995
Psychology - Presented to Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.

1996
Biodiversity - Presented to Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than one thousand other extinct “mini-species,” each of which less than 0.25 mm in length.

1997
Biology - Presented to T. Yagyu and his colleagues from the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, the Kansai Medical University in Osaka, Japan, and the Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech Republic, for measuring people’s brainwave patterns while they chewed different flavors of gum.

Economics - Presented to Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan, and Aki Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.

1999
Chemistry - Presented to Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands’ underwear.

2002
Peace - Presented to Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.

2003
Chemistry - Presented to Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.

2004
Peace - Presented to Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

2005
Nutrition - Presented to Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).


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9/26/2006

Japanese ‘Tai Fu’ - not Kung Fu


Check out the website
RED BULL Tai Fu‘.

From July to September each year, Japan lives in fear of Tai Fu or typhoons that are capable of taking lives and devasting coastlines. This year tow-surfing legend Ross Clarke-Jones … harnesses that energy and surf a typhoon in Japan.
surfing 20 foot waves in Wakayama  Japan during Typhoon Loke

There were 27 typhoons last year, but this year has been rather quiet with only two larger typhoons and not a lot of surf for these “tai fu” surfers. As the Red Bull website says it’s difficult to get in, “sync with the forces of nature to pick out the right typhoon at the right time - it will be part science, part prayer…” The Red Bull had to wait 6 weeks before they could take videos of their surfing 20 foot waves in Wakayama during Typhoon “Loke”. They say their final film/video will be out in November.

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9/25/2006

Look out Nathan’s hot dogs! She’s gonna eat you alive!

Look out Takeru Kobayashi, the 6-time world champion, hot dog eater of Nathan’s.
Here’s Fujisaki-chan, a Japanese junior high school girl eating hot dogs.
Japanese junior high school girl eating hot dogs

DEAD LINK: http://www.youtube.com/v/PjpiDUdkEmE

UPDATE: Those Japanese hot dogs sure were fishy. That is, sadly google felt those
with “farinaceous filler” were not fit for general consumption even though the video did not show any nasty bits. Everyone will now have to use there imagination to figure out how “farinaceous” this video was, hee, hee.

Japanese fish hot dogs Yes, this Japanese “Strawberry milk fish sausage”.


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9/15/2006

Japanese JOBA(tm) vs RodeoBoy(tm)

Joba, the Japanese word for horseback riding,exercise machine manufactured by Matsushita

Moving saddle without horse hot in Japan
TOKYO, Sept. 14 (UPI) …The Joba, the Japanese word for horseback riding, is manufactured by Matsushita, and sells for $700. Its popularity has grown so much, there is a 3-week backorder wait for the saddle, complete with stirrups…Recently, the Joba made its U.S. debut on the Panasonic Web site and through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. It is bigger [fat-ass version] than its Japanese counterpart more...

Back in Novemeber of 2004, gadgets.3yen.com first reported about “Rodeo enters Japanese living-rooms” featuring the JOBA(tm) horseback riding machine by Matsushita/Panosonic.

horseback riding machine exercise The JOBA(tm) must be a hit because the RodeoBoy(tm) is being advertised 24/7 on my TV Direct network on the cable/satellite channels for only 29,800 Yen ($54 USD). On the righthand side of the webpage you can watch a video of RodeoBoy in action in their infommerial.
RodeoBoy(tm) horseback riding machine exercise horseback riding machine exercise
“Why?”
You might ask, Why?” would Matsushita want to market a $700 to $2,000 fitness machine that a rodeo style gallop when most Japanese whine all the time about having a “stiff neck” and lower back-pain. I suppose Matsushita is thinking of a fighting-fire-with-fire solution to get rid of this back discomfort, hee, hee. Then again, if you saw how terrible Japanese posture is, the lack of home furniture with any back support and how crappy Japanese workplace ergonomics is, you would understand. Also, this horseback-riding machine exercise is perfect for geezer market in Japan where the majority of peole are over forty years old (in my ritzy Denenchofu neighborhood it’s closer to sixty years old).

Finally, here are some lame videos of horseback riding machines in action.

 RodeoBoy french bulldog


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9/7/2006

Japanese long jumpin’

Blind jumper visually impaired, at the World Championships Athletics

Yahoo! News Photo (AP_ Sept. 6, 2006…Yuji Imai of Japan stumbles over a marshall during his first try at the long jump class F11, visually impaired, at the World Championships Athletics for athletes with a disability in Assen, the Netherlands, Wednesday

Blind jumper visually impaired,  World Championships Athletics Enlarge.

Hee, hee, this sure looks funny but I’ve done worse at sports meets.
And of course, I just have to mention that the “long jump” is pronounced the “[w]rong jump” and misspelled in all sorts a fun ways in Japanese-English.

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