Did you hear about…?

Did you hear about these recent Japan-related news items?

• Takeru Kobayashi, the hot-dog eating champion from Japan who won the annual Fourth Of July Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York City six times just won a pizza-eating contest in California.He ate 5 ¾ pizzas in six minutes. Just beating American Joey Chestnut who ate 5 ½ pizzas.

  Kobayashi and Chestnut are always rivals at the hot-dog eating contests in New York every year. Joey Chestnut beat Kobayashi the last two years at the hot-dog contest.

  They both said that they will attend the hot-dog eating contest this July to continue their rivalry.

• The Japanese ambassador to America offered an official apology from the Japanese government to a group of American WW2 veterans who were held POW by the Japanese military and forced to work in a labor camp.
• A 20 year old Japanese man who had been drinking all night on Saturday and was still drunk on Sunday morning fell off of a train platform at a train station in Tokyo…and, as he was falling, grabbed onto the arm of a nearby 59 year old female commuter.They both fell off of the platform onto the train tracks.

  Luckily, no train was coming at the time.

  The man sustained minor injuries. The woman, though, broke her pelvis.

  The man is currently in police custody while they investigate whether he really did fall and pull the woman by accident…or if he jumped and pulled her intentionally.

雷！

Yesterday I took my two youngest daughters to a shopping mall that’s a short train ride from our home because they wanted to buy some things that they “really needed“.

I agreed to take them…but only for a short time because it looked like it would rain. And when we left the mall, that’s what it did. Really hard!

First there was thunder and lightning, then the rain came pouring down. But it was a summer shower…so it ended soon after it started.

Actually, we got lucky. It started raining soon after we boarded our train home, and stopped just before we got off the train. So we didn’t have to walk in the rain at all. Perfect timing!

Anyways, there are many summer festivals and fireworks shows in Japan this time of year. And many people wear 浴衣 (Japanese summer kimono) and 甚平 (Japanese traditional summer outfit) to these events.

At the mall, we saw a couple of girls who were probably going to a festival or fireworks show after the mall (it might have gotten rained out, though). I saw them browsing in a CD store.

It seemed like it’d make a good photo. So here’s the photo I took of them:

Here are some videos I took of the train ride while looking out the conductor’s window (a couple of them are from the ride home, so it’s raining hard):