Hatoyama Resigns!

Three months shy of his first anniversary as Japan's Prime Minister, Hatoyama resigned over the handling of the US base relocation in Okinawa.

Read More Here.

Wow!

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has won the elections in a major landslide, taking 302 of the 480 seats, leaving the main opposition party (and the de-facto party since 1955) Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with just 112 seats (the rest of the seats going to smaller parties). DP leader Hatoyama Yukio (pictured) is slated to become the next Prime Minister as Aso Taro had stepped down in defeat.



[Bloompy has been away, true, and has yet to come up with a replacement blog now that he lives away from Japan; perhaps this one should continue to cover things Tokyo and Japan.]

Abe Resigns (Finally!)

A year marked by scandals among his ministers was enough to erode his public support. Written off by fellow politicians and the media, his days were numbered, and finally, today, Abe Shinzo resigned from his post as the Prime Minister of Japan.

Photo credit: Hanai Toru for Reuters

Election time

The Japanese election this year coincides with the first voting of the French presidential election, on April 22, 2007 (today). Last week I would hear mini vans or mini trucks passing by with loudspeakers announcing the candidates and their platforms. Then today, on the last day of campaigning, I ran across a politician with his entourage, campaigning old style: two people with banner flags at the front and at the back, flanking the candidate who walked in the middle. A "spokesperson" carried a megaphone and made announcements. They went in and out of the alleys, back to the main streets, all smiles.


I noticed the absence of candidates plastering the city with their posters and piling in their brochures in people's mailbox like in the United States. Instead, a week ago or more, each neighborhood erected a board, within which it was divided into blocks, with each block containing a number. In the following days, candidates would place their posters in the corresponding "districts;" very typical of Japanese: neat and clean, tidy and orderly. I bet tommorrow all of these boards will be taken down promptly.

Airing Dirty Laundry

Seen somewhere in downtown Amsterdam during the Queen's Day celebration. The "I am" is taken from a current Amsterdam citywide campaign for tourism, called "I AMsterdam"

More pictures of the Koninginnedag (Queen's Day) celebration is available here

Internet Site Non-Grata in China

Since my arrival in Shanghai, I have not been able to access my own blog. I could write, edit, publish, but I could not see the result. I tried accessing other blogs, such as stilleggplant.blogspot.com, but could not do it either. I think we all know what is happening here. The website filtering in this country is effective. Sometimes I just forget that I am in China, especially when Shanghai seems very cosmopolitan, wordly, and like other modern and progressive big cities.

Gone, All Gone

*sigh* My laptop is back and the hard disk is replaced, but a small chunk of my life is gone. I said earlier that losing the hard disk somehow did not sadden me because at the time, the US election did not go my way, but as I got my laptop back and started rebuilding, I realized how much I had lost. Did I not back-up my data in another disk? Yes, I did, to a hard disk with a capacity of 320GB! But alas, that darned LaCie Big Disk was corrupted just few days before the laptop incident. As a result, some files were damaged, including my photo and music collection. Thank goodness there was the desktop back-up. Now I do what I should have done long time ago: back-up onto CD-ROMs and DVDs; lesson learned...*sigh*

I have fallen off the NaNoWriMo and BlogMo wagon, but I am going to see if I can catch up. ...doubt it, but maybe I can make it a LoDecWriMo and LoDecBlogMo (Local December Writing Month and Blogging Month). Any takers?

But the Dog Ate My...

On the depressing day of the 2004 US election, my laptop hard disk was loose. Subsequent tinkering with it did nothing. The election apparently not going my way, I decided to go to Apple Ginza to have my laptop examined and was informed that I had lost the disk; completely lost it. Thank goodness it was still under warranty. It just happened that a few days before, the external hard disk that acted as a back-up system was experiencing problems too. Somehow, these two incidents paled to the news of the election; I was surprised to find myself at peace with losing the 70GB of stuff from that laptop and risking losing 160GB of data from the external hard disk... Needless to say, I will be without a laptop, and that NaNoBlogMo and NaNoWriMo will have to wait till my laptop comes back as I am typing this on a borrowed computer.

Australian Embassy Attacked

Poor Indonesia, like she needs another terrorist attack. This secular country, widely thought of to be an Islamic nation, suffers another blow just eleven days before its upcoming election on September 20. A friend of my cousin's had just passed the area when he heard the explosion behind him; he was all right. Another cousin thought that a mighty lightning had just struck because of the sudden blinding flash. Details are coming out as I write this.

BBC: Massive Blast at Jakarta Embassy
CNN: JI Claims Jakarta Car Bombing
MSNBC: Islamist Group Appears to Claim Jakarta Blast

The accompanying photograph was lifted from the Wikipedia.org website