Sondrak's Gulch regularly posts about upcoming rocket launches. Today's post mentions StriX. Never heard of it so I go looking. It's a relatively small Japanese satellite. The central box measures about a yard on each side. Looks like it is going to in a LEO (low earth orbit), about one hundred miles up. It's going to be looking at the Earth.
Found this impressive block of bureaucratic psychobabble on the Synspective website:
StriX is a small, innovative, and low-cost Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite that was jointly developed by Synspective, the University of Tokyo, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The technology originated from the Impulsing Paradigm Change through Disruptive Technologies (ImPACT) Program, a Japanese government-led R&D initiative.
This piqued my interest because my niece and nephew are in the fishing business. Those are some big halibut, but where's Iturup? It's an island northeast of Sapporo, Japan:
Google Maps failed me. Pull up Iturup on Google Maps and it shows you the island, but no cities towns or roads. If you ask it for one of the three airports, it will show it to you, but then it won't shut up about it and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. New and improved for your viewing pleasure, and for most people, most of the time it probably works very well. Not for me. I might have to start using one of the other free, online, maps of the world.
東京サラダボウル PR動画 - Tokyo Salad Bowl PR video
NHKスクエア【公式】- NHK Square [Official]
Effervescent young woman detective inadvertently solves crimes that stump the police department big shots. Don't ask how someone so young and bubbly has become a detective. She has enlisted (dragooned) the support of the most stone faced man in the world. He used to be a detective but something bad happened and now he works as an interpreter. He's seen it all and he knows that most everybody is lying most of the time. And oh yeah, our girl has green hair and likes to eat the weirdest food she can find. The first show has her eating scorpions on a stick and ox penis stew and she apparently enjoys it all. Very entertaining.
Interpreting languages is a recurring theme. Slang causes all kinds of problems. Our interpreter used to frequent a bar and his visits there would keep him apprised of Chinese slang. But he stops going and now he's no longer up-to-speed on the current slang, which means he has to fall back on literal translation and you know that isn't going to go well.
In another episode we hear that Vietnam uses Kanji characters for peoples names, though the pronunciation is completely different. A couple of guys working in a nursing home use the same characters for their names, but the Vietnamese guy is called Tien and the Japanese man is called Susumu.
『MISS KING / ミス・キング』本予告｜9月29日(月)よる8時ABEMAで無料配信
ABEMA ドラマ【公式】
Miss King is basically a Japanese version of Queen's Gambit. We've got a disadvantaged young woman taking up the game of Soghi to exact revenge on her estranged father, the current champion.
Our girl's father named her for the rook piece from the game - Asuku. Her father inexplicably abandons her and her mother, her mother contracts cancer and dies, our girl gets framed for stealing at her job and evicted from her apartment. Freeloader and former Soghi contender Seigio drags her into his local hangout where the landlord gives her a place to stay.
Seigio and Asuku find they have something in common - hatred for Asuku's father - so they embark on a course of revenge. Seems Asuku, at the age of six, was a bit of a prodigy, which might be why her father left. So Asuku resumes playing the game and starts competing, working her way up through the ranks of competing players until she can finally challenge her father.
I really enjoyed Queen's Gambit and Miss King. I have no particular interest in chess, but these stories about the players are pretty great. We have watched several Japanese shows this year and while they were passable, this is the first one that was actually very good.
I have played chess, but it seemed like a lot work for not much reward, other than the thrill of victory, which won't buy you a stick of gum, much less a cup of coffee, unless you get to the top of the heap, and how likely is that?
I always thought Chess was international, and I suppose it is, but there are variations out there and Soghi is one of those. It's a little more complicated with the ability to add captured enemy pieces to your own forces.
I'm reading Idoru by William Gibson (a great story) and on page 260 I come across this passage. Laney and Yamazaki are in a van that Arleigh is driving:
"I guess it must be capable of it," Laney said, as something under her seat began to clang, loudly and insistently. "But I don't think that means it'll necessarily happen. What the hell is that?"
"I'm exceeding the speed limit," she said. "Every vehicle in Japan is legally required to be equipped with one of these devices. You speed, it dings."
Laney turned to Yamazaki. "Is that true?"
"Of course," Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging.
"And people don't just disconnect them?"
"No,” Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. "Why would they?"
Japan started working on the Nakajima Ki-87 well before the B-29 appeared, but they only managed to construct one prototype before the war ended, so it never saw combat.
Tagusari Brothers is a Japanese crime drama starring Masaki Okada and Shota Sometani. The story follows two brothers who join the police as a detective and a medical examiner. Acting as police officers, in each episode they investigate a new murder. On their own, they continue to try and unravel the mystery of their parent's murder that happened thirty years ago. Curious characters, curious cases.
Why have they waited this long to start investigating this crime? Near as I can tell, they were prompted by a new law that declared a statue of limitations on crimes committed before some date, or after some date, I was never clear about exactly what changed. In any case it was enough to prompt these two to start investigating their parents murder. They didn't start before then because the police were investigating and the brothers, being good Japanese citizens, do what they are told and leave the investigation to the police. This unquestioned faith in the police is exactly what got their father killed.
Their father worked in a machine shop. One of his coworkers has a wife who needs an expensive operation, so he takes on a side job of making some guns for the local mafia. The guns are made and they just need to be delivered. Right then, the sick wife collapses at the machine shop. The coworker entrusts delivery of the package to the boy's father. Everything would have been fine as long as the father doesn't open the package, but he does, and then he compounds his error telling everyone within earshot that he is going to report this to the police. The mafia is not happy and so mark him for execution.
It turns out that when the assassin arrives to kill the parents, they are already dead, or on their way, having been poisoned. The assassin knows nothing of the poison and the parents are still breathing, so the assassin follows through on his mission and kills them.
So who poisoned the parents? The pawnshop owner. Her father was also killed by the mafia because the gun deal went bad. Seems a little extreme, but maybe dealing in guns makes people super paranoid.
No trailer, but here's a couple of items of interest.
The Mitsubishi Zero is a long-range carrier-capable fighter aircraft. It was operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1940 to 1945. The Zero got its name from 0 being the last digit of the imperial year 2600 (1940) when it entered service with the Navy.
In early combat operations, the Zero achieved an outstanding kill ratio of 12 to 1, but by mid-1942 a combination of new tactics and the introduction of better equipment enabled Allied pilots to engage the Zero on generally equal terms. By mid 1943 the deterioration of fighter pilot training in the IJNAS contributed to making the Zero less effective against newer Allied fighters.
By 1944, the A6M had fallen behind Allied fighters in speed and was regarded as outdated but still capable if operated by trained pilots. The Zero continued to serve in a front-line role until the end of the war in the Pacific. During the final phases, it was adapted for use in kamikaze operations. Japan produced nearly eleven thousand Zeros during the war.
The Mitsubishi G4M was a twin-engine, land-based medium bomber operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1940 to 1945. It was commonly referred to by Japanese Navy pilots as Hamaki ('cigar', literally 'leaf roll') due to the cylindrical shape of its fuselage and its tendency to ignite after a hit. The Allied reporting name was Betty.
The G4M boasted good performance, excellent range and was considered the best land-based naval bomber of the time. This was achieved with flimsy structure and almost total lack of crew protection, with no armor plating or self-sealing fuel tanks. The G4M was introduced in 1941, but its problems resulted in heavy losses.
It was the most widely produced and most famous bomber flown by the Japanese during World War II, and it served in nearly all battles during the Pacific War. Attacks by G4M and G3M bombers resulted in the sinking of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse, the first time capital ships actively defending themselves were sunk solely by air power while in the open sea. G4Ms and G3Ms were also credited with sinking the heavy cruiser USS Chicago during the Battle of Rennell Island. The G4M later served as mother ships that carried the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka, the anti-ship suicide weapon. Of the 2,435 G4Ms produced, no fully intact aircraft have survived, though several airframes exist as unrestored wreckage or in partial states of restoration.
Probably the best-known incident involving a G4M in the war came during the top secret mission to intercept the aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, resulting in Yamamoto's death. On 18 April 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightnings shot down a G4M1 carrying Admiral Yamamoto.
As part of the negotiations for the surrender of Japan, two demilitarized G4Ms, given the call-signs Bataan 1 and Bataan 2, flew to Ie Shima, carrying the first surrender delegations on the first leg of their flight to Manila. The G4Ms were painted white with green crosses and were escorted by American P-38 fighters.
A small group of people carefully prepares everything they need to sell a piece of property they do not own. Their preparations begin with a scout who locates a piece of real estate that might work with their scheme. Then they prepare artfully forged documents and a carefully rehearse a chump to play the owner.
We only watched a couple of episodes. The show does a good job of showing the technical aspects of the fraud, but we never got attached to any of the characters.
How a Cincinnati Toolmaker Built the Machine That Made American Factories Automatic
The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy
Great history of Cincinnati Milacron, though when it gets toward the end he starts ranting about who's to blame, which is kind of pointless now. Those who study history and are smart enough will learn something without it being pointed out.
Note that Cincinnati one N in the first Cin and two Ns in the 2nd Cinn, and Milacron has only one L. YouTube videos always include the name of who posted the video and a link to their YouTube page, except this one. The link for The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy, the purported makers of this video, goes nowhere. The Tool Archives does have a website.
Why didn't I know about CNC machining until the 1980s if it had been around since the 1950s? Maybe I had heard of its existence but I never ran into any of it. Kind of irritates me now.
【本予告第一弾】大迫力の乱闘シーン公開！衝撃のクライム・アクション・サスペンスが再び。｜ インフォーマ -闇を生きる獣たち- 11/7(木) ABEMAで無料放送スタート
[Official Trailer #1] Explosive Brawl Scenes Revealed! The Shocking Crime-Action-Suspense Saga Returns. | Informa: Beasts Living in the Shadows — Free Broadcast Starts Nov 7 (Thu) on ABEMA
ABEMA ドラマ【公式】
Complicated crime thriller. Not too bad, but certainly not great. We've got three main characters:
Mishima, young, inexperienced, foolish and naive, hence Kihara often calls him an idiot. His one redeeming trait is that he seems to be able to hold onto a camera.
Kihara, slightly older, much more savvy, but arrogant and obnoxious.
Hirose, the cute girl who provides some glue to this awkward trio.
There are also half a dozen villains. Hirose seems to be the only decent, competent person of the lot. Since she doesn't screw up, she doesn't get much screen time. The two guys get plenty of screen time acting out their foolish incompetent bravdo.
Everyone, which includes our gang, a Thai gang led by a former Japanese detective, a gang of thugs operating under the direction of the totally corrupt Japanese Deputy Director of Public Safety, and who knows who else, is after the McGuffin, a computer chip inside a glass vile that supposedly holds files documenting all the evil deeds those in power have done for the last umpteen years.
The story starts in Japan but quickly moves to Thailand where we encounter a multitude of heavily tattooed thugs who like nothing better than beating the tar out of each other. We have several large scale brawls and at least one big shootout that leaves dozens of men dead on the ground.
You can get English subtitles by clicking on CC and then on the six toothed gear (six pointed star?) to get to settings where you can click on:
No trailer. Another very slow paced show, mostly about people dealing with the after effects of violent crime. Leading characters are all likable, actor portraying the villain does a good job making him reprehensible.
Four kids, maybe 12 years old, go out in the woods after school, even though they've been warned there is an armed criminal on the loose. They discover one kid's father, a policeman, dead on the ground. He and the criminal shot each other and both are dead. The pick up the cops gun, put it in a cooler, and bury it.
23 years later all four are back in the same town and the manager of a grocery store is shot and killed. Forensic evidence says the gun that was used to kill him is the dead policeman's gun, the one who was killed 23 years ago. The four kids go dig up their 'time capsule' and discover the gun is missing.
Three of the four have possible motives for killing the manager, and their alibis are terrible. Nobody can tell the truth, for reasons. Place your bets on who's guilty and who gets blamed.
Eventually, the guy and girl get together and all is well.
Super-Kamiokande is located 3,300 feet underground in the Mozumi Mine in Hida's Kamioka area [Japan]. It consists of a cylindrical stainless steel tank 136 feet tall and 129 feet in diameter holding 55,360 tons of ultrapure water. The tank volume is divided by a stainless steel superstructure into an inner detector (ID) region and outer detector (OD). Lining the inner detector are 11,146 photomultiplier tubes (PMT), each 20 inches in diameter, that face the ID and (1,885) 8 inch PMTs that face the OD. A Tyvek and blacksheet barrier attached to the superstructure optically separates the ID and OD. - Simplified from Wikipedia
If you are an old person (i.e. your birth year starts with 19), you may remember hearing about this minor catastrophe:
On 12 November 2001, about 6,600 of the photomultiplier tubes imploded in a chain reaction, as the shock wave from the concussion of each imploding tube cracked its neighbours. The detector was partially restored from April to October 2002 by redistributing the photomultiplier tubes which did not implode, and by adding protective acrylic shells that are hoped will prevent another chain reaction from recurring (Super-Kamiokande-II). - Wikipedia
Looking for pictures of the catastrophe, I found this excellent video:
An Engineering Fairy Tale: Cascade Failure at the Super Kamiokande
Alexander the ok
Last Samurai Standing | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Evil plot to rid Japan of the Samurai. Perry opening Japan was the beginning of the end of the Samurai. From Wikipedia:
The Japanese realized that in order to match the industrial and military might of the Western imperial powers, Japan had to abandon feudalism for a capitalist economy with a strong central government. In November 1867, the unpopular shogun relinquished his authority to the emperor, who was seen as a unifying figure by the Japanese. Thus began the Meiji Restoration. Between 1869 and 1871, the daimyo (Japan's feudal lords) were stripped of their lands and titles. Their domains became prefectures subject to the authority of the imperial government. Some former daimyo were given government jobs, but most retired with lavish pensions.
The dissolution of the daimyo class made the samurai defunct as a feudal retainer caste, so the Meiji government began repealing their special rights and privileges. In 1869, the government reclassified high-ranking samurai as shizoku (warriors) and lower status samurai as sotsuzoku (foot soldiers). In 1872, the sotsu rank was abolished and the sotsuzoku were reclassified as shizoku. In 1871, the government banned the samurai topknot. From 1873 to 1879, the government started taxing the stipends and transformed them into interest-bearing government bonds. The main goal was to provide enough financial liquidity to enable former samurai to invest in land and industry. In 1876, the government forbade anyone outside the military to wear swords even if they were of samurai lineage, and repealed the right of a samurai to strike an insolent commoner with potentially lethal force.
So by the time of this movie the Samurai have been thoroughly disenfranchised, nobody wants them, but they are still out there rattling around and occasionally making trouble, so some big shots come up with a scheme to get rid of them. They'll stage a contest where the winner takes all. All he has to do is kill all the other contestants. Then when he comes to claim his prize, the big shots will only have to kill one man and they'll be rid of the troublesome Samurai once and for all.
It's a fairly stupid show, but we get boat loads of sword fighting and people getting chopped up, so, entertaining.
It's like watching a scandal unfold from behind the scenes. I'm guesstimating the whole thing unfolds over a period of a year, give or take any number of months. Somebody approves a grant and in exchange somebody becomes the owner of a substantial piece of property and only pays a fraction of its market value. At least I think that's what the scandal is.
Anyway, questions get asked, an investigation starts but is quickly squashed and it's all set to quietly fade away until the miscreants decide they need to cover their tracks. They put together a small group of guys and set them to work editing the records to eliminate any reference to the Prime Minister's wife.
Mr. Matsuda is hanging with the miscreants when they cook up this scheme and he files a formal complaint. Shortly thereafter his complaint is withdraw and he mysteriously falls ill and ends up comatose in the hospital where he remains for the rest of this story. His sister is The Journalist and she is distraught by what happened to her brother, but she has no evidence of what happened to him being anything other than an act of god.
Meanwhile the DCB (Dedicated Career Bureaucrat), one of the guys on the crew rewriting the records, is not happy about this work. He has always prided himself on doing a good and proper job that would be beneficial to the people, and this business of altering records has got him mentally crosswise. It gets so bad that he eventually kills himself, which causes a small scandal. What's going on with this guy? Happily married, career bureaucrat, commits suicide? He leaves a suicide note, but his wife keeps it quiet, for a while.
Now we have Ryo, the handsome young college student, nephew of DCB, who starts to become politically aware and runs into Ms. Matsuda, The Journalist, whowants to interview his aunt, the widow of DCB.
DCB kept meticulous records of the alterations he made on the official records. He put his record of alterations on a flash drive and gave it to his supervisor before he died.
Ms. Matsuda gets hold of some dirt and gets the story published, This irritates the miscreants and they unleash an army social media warriors on her. The have a secure room full of cubicles with a couple of dozen people in there, all bent to the task of raising cain on social media.
6 episodes, 45 minutes each.
I'm watching this show and I'm thinking this is exactly what's going on in the US, and has been since forever. Shoot, the same thing is going on all over the world.
Cast
I've been thinking I should include the cast of characters from these shows, because we watch so many, and there are so many actors that some of them are bound to appear in other shows. But putting together a cast list is a fair amount of work. Most of the cast listings found on the internet give the actor's name and the character's name, which is great, but they don't tell you their role. With foreign films the character's name doesn't help much because they are mostly unpronounceable. We hear what they are calling other characters, but often times the spoken version of the name is just a breath or a grunt and are incomprehensible. When my wife and are talking, trying to figure out what's going on on-screen, we mostly refer to characters by the role they are playing - the fat thug, the skinny detective, the girlfriend, terms like that.
So I decided to ask Google: Can you tell me the names of the actors in the Japanese TV drama 'The Journalist', their characters names and their roles? And presto, this very cool list appears:
The cast of the 2022 Japanese TV drama The Journalist, available on Netflix, includes Ryoko Yonekura as an investigative reporter, Go Ayano as an elite public servant, and Ryusei Yokohama as a student intern. The series is based on the 2019 movie of the same name and the book by Isoko Mochizuki, but features different characters.
Main cast and characters
Ryoko Yonekura as Anna Matsuda (The Journalist): A determined and seasoned investigative reporter for the Toto Newspaper. She is known as a "maverick" in the news industry and is tenacious in her pursuit of the truth behind government corruption scandals.
Go Ayano as Shinichi Murakami: An elite bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. He becomes entangled in the government conspiracy.
Ryusei Yokohama as Ryo Kinoshita: A university student working as a newspaper deliveryman. He becomes motivated to uncover the truth and finds himself drawn into the scandal.
Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kazuya Suzuki (DCB): A public servant who was initially involved in the corruption but takes his own life after providing the original documents to the Ministry of Finance.
Shinobu Terajima as Mayumi Suzuki: Kazuya Suzuki's determined wife. After her husband's suicide, she joins Anna to expose the corruption.
Supporting cast
Yusuke Santamaria as Shinjiro Toyoda (nasty, creepy villain): A political public relations strategist and special adviser to the Prime Minister.
Tetsushi Tanaka as Tomoya Tada: An official who serves as the bureaucratic voice for the Cabinet.
Tokio Emoto as Daiki Sato: A former colleague of Shinichi Murakami.
Kaho Tsuchimura as Harumi Yashiro: A member of the opposition party in the National Diet who pressures for a reinvestigation of the corruption scandal.
Masato Hagiwara as Kohei Matsuda: Anna Matsuda's late father, also a journalist.
So maybe AI (Artificial Intelligence) has some use after all.
The Great Peace Prayer Tower is a cenotaph tower in Tondabayashi, Osaka, Japan. . . . The tower is 180 m in height, white in color, and built by the Church of Perfect Liberty in August 1970. - Wikipedia
Sendai Daikannon, officially known as the Sendai Tendou Byakue Daikannon, is a large statue located in Sendai, Japan. It portrays a woman, the bodhisattvaByakue Kannon holding the cintamani gem in her hand.
It is the tallest statue of a goddess in Japan and the tenth-tallest statue in the world, at 330 feet. The statue itself is 302 feet tall, while the pedestal brings its total height to 330 feet. At the time of its completion in 1991, it was the tallest statue in the world, but it was surpassed by Ushiku Daibutsu in 1993. - Wikipedia
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