The Observer's Blog

Of Contraband and Atomic Bombs

My officemate just got back from a conference in Japan. In his jet-lagged state he began to tell me and my other officemate about the trip. By way of introduction, he pointed out that he went literally everywhere on the island of Honshu. I asked him if he went to Hokkaido (the site of an 11-episode Japanese soap opera I recently got caught up in), but apparently that was the only place he didn't go. The first thing he actually started talking about was pornography: its ubiquity and its many manifestations in Japan. In addition to manga books, it apparently also appears randomly in mainstream magazines; this is the form which he naively described as "women just looking for a good man." He also pointed out that its a common practice for teenage boys to go to convenience stores after school to peruse magazines with these pictures in them. (This observation implies something sort of disturbing if you notice.)

After he told us everything he could think to tell us about the pornography (oh yes, apparently its illegal to bring foreign pornography into the U.S.), he started talking about the atomic bomb. There are apparently some interesting "artifacts" left over from the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, including the shadow of a seated man imprinted on a rock (he absorbed the rock-color-altering radiation) and a building that stood directly below the blast. The building wasn't destroyed because it was apparently only pushed downward instead of being hit by a largely horizontal shockwave like all the surrounding buildings. He talked about the bomb some more and then went home.

Coming soon . . . "Design My Office" with a prize to be awarded.