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GeGeGe no Kitaro


GeGeGe no Kitaro (GeGeGe no Kitarō) is a manga series created in 1959 by manga artist Shigeru Mizuki. It is best known for its popularization of the folklore creatures known as yōkai, a class of spirit-monster to which all of the main characters belong.

 It has been adapted for the screen several times, as anime, live-action, and video games. A new anime series has been made every decade since 1968.

The title of the original story is Hakaba no Kitarō, literally meaning "Kitaro (of the) Graveyard". This story was an early 20th century Japanese folk tale performed on kamishibai.

The name "Ge Ge Ge..." was applied to Mizuki's particular telling of the Kitaro story when his manga became an anime. In January, 2008, the original manga was finally adapted into an anime, running in Fuji TV's Noitamina slot.

Kitaro is a yōkai boy born in a cemetery, and aside from his mostly-decayed father, the last living member of the Ghost Tribe (yūrei zoku).

He is missing his left eye, but his hair usually covers the empty socket. He fights for peace between humans and yōkai, which generally involves protecting the former from the wiles of the latter. When questioned in the 2007 movie, Kitaro responds that he is three hundred and fifty years old.

Nezumi Otoko is a rodent-like yōkai-human halfbreed. He has been alive for three hundred and sixty years, and in that time has almost never taken a bath, rendering him filthy, foul-smelling, and covered in welts and sores. While he is usually Kitaro's friend, Nezumi Otoko will waste no time cooking up vile schemes or betraying his companions if he thinks there's money to be had or a powerful enemy to side with. He claims to be a college graduate of the University of the Bizarre (Kaiki Daigaku).

Nezumi-Otoko first appears in the story The Lodging House (Rental manga version) as Dracula IV's minion.

In the 2002 Kodansha International Bilingual Comics edition, he is referred to as Ratman.

Suikawari

Suikawari (Watermelon Splitting) is a traditional Japanese game that involves splitting a watermelon with a stick while blindfolded. Played in the summertime, suikawari is most often seen at beaches, but also occurs at festivals, picnics, and other summer events.

The rules are similar to piñata. A watermelon is laid out, sometimes on a tarp, and participants one by one attempt to smash it open. Each is blindfolded, spun around three times, and handed a wooden stick, or bokken, to strike with. The first to crack the watermelon open wins. Afterwards the chunks of watermelon produced are shared among participants.

In Japan, farmers of the Zentsuji region found a way to grow cubic watermelons, by growing the fruits in glass boxes and letting them naturally assume the shape of the receptacle.

The square shape is designed to make the melons easier to stack and store, but the square watermelons are often more than double the price of normal ones. Pyramid shaped watermelons have also been developed and any polyhedral shape may potentially also be used.

Watermelon is thought to have originated in southern Africa, where it is found growing wild, because it reaches maximum genetic diversity there, resulting in sweet, bland and bitter forms.

Alphonse de Candolle, in 1882, already considered the evidence sufficient to prove that watermelon was indigenous to tropical Africa.

Though Citrullus colocynthis is often considered to be a wild ancestor of watermelon and is now found native in north and west Africa, Fenny Dane and Jiarong Liu　suggest on the basis of chloroplast DNA investigations that the cultivated and wild watermelon appear to have diverged independently from a common ancestor, possibly C. ecirrhosus from Namibia.

McDonald's to Snuff Out Smoking in Japan? 

McDonald's, the maker of cookie cutter hamburgers and golden French fries, is set to clamp down on at least one human vice: smoking. McDonald's Holdings Co. (Japan) Ltd., the largest restaurant chain in Japan, doesn't plan to accommodate smokers, chain or otherwise, when it revamps a chunk of its some 3,500 stores over the next several years, according to Japanese daily, citing sources close to the matter.

Would you like a cigarette with your golden arches? Not a likely possibility at a slew of renovated or new McDonald's outlets in Japan, according to a new no-smoking policy to be instituted over the next several years.

Most of the estimated 1,050 newly renovated or replaced stores will be subject to the ban, except for outlets that draw heavy smoker traffic, like stores within a plume's distance of a train station. McDonald's Japan didn't respond to requests for comment, but if the move comes off it will be despite forecasts that it will lead to a drop in sales in a country where smoking is still widespread for the time being, reflecting Japan's glacial-pace shift towards becoming a more smoke-free society.

Whereas smokers long enjoyed the freedom to spark up nearly anywhere at will, the number of public places where people are allowed to smoke is gradually dwindling amid a growing chorus of government and public voices citing cigarette-related health concerns in recent years. The trend even prompted the dominant cigarette maker here, Japan Tobacco, to develop and market an increasingly popular smokeless cigarette system that allows users to beat the clampdown.

On April 1, Kanagawa prefecture instituted the first total ban on smoking in such places as government offices, schools and hospitals. McDonald's already instituted a non-smoking policy at all of its 298 Kanagawa-based restaurants from March 1. Narita International Airport imposed similar restrictions in all its restaurants at its two passenger terminals as of June 1.

But smokers were still allowed to have a puff at restaurants with smoking areas that are completely enclosed, said Narita International Airport Corp during the announcement in late May. In addition, the airport operator said it will maintain the 34 existing smoking areas at the airport.

Such exceptions to the rule reflect Japan's ongoing addiction to the flammable cylindrical stick and the country's piecemeal approach to stubbing out where smokers can light up. Local governments have increasingly set up designated outdoor areas where smoking is allowed, creating a new visual phenomenon. Forbidden to smoke on train platforms since 2002, crowds of Tokyo commuters in the central Chiyoda ward now pack into a narrow box for one last drag before darting off to their final destination and tired shoppers in need of a fix huddle around the silver ash-collecting canisters set up outside the upscale Takashimaya department store in Tokyo's congested Shinjuku neighborhood.

But such outdoors restrictions may be a smokescreen for what happens behind closed doors. The nicotine-hungry are in large part still able to smoke freely in cafes, bars and restaurants -- and it is not commonplace for restaurants to have partitions set up guarding the nonsmokers from those who do.

Still, change may be on the way, at least on smoking in the workplace. In late May, an expert panel of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, submitted a proposal for the government to consider whether to require businesses to impose a total ban on smoking in workplaces or install smoking rooms. The proposal was part of a report set to serve as the basis to deliberate revising the current industrial safety and health law.