Come Visit Us - Tokyo Vs. Kanagawa

a A study in the contrasting whimsies of adjoining prefectures. The Tokyo Metropolitan District, via World Order(best in wide screen view)Kanagawa Prefecture, via AKB 48 It is an unfair competition. Tokyo has its mountainous interior (not depicted) while Kanagawa has both the Tanzawa Range and the Shonan Beach scene with hotspots Kamakura/Zushi, the Miura Peninsula and Manazuru. While Governor Kuroiwa Yuji's performance in the Kanagawa Prefecture video does not dispell my impression of him as a complete dufus, gained from having had to listen to him hold forth at the bar during his television anchor years, I can entertain the possibility that he is a not-entirely-uncool complete dufus.Tips of the hat to tips to Michael Rofe and Eleanor Warnock for the links.

Image - The Tokyo Shimbun Against The Official Secrets Act

aA whimsical graphic, perhaps not very impressive...but below is a reproduction of the entire Saturday, 26 October 2013 Tokyo Shimbun (please click on the image to see it in full). I have blocked out in red articles or opinion pieces on the Official Secrets Act, submitted to the Diet the day before (I have blocked out advertising in yellow, for the sake of...oh...just for the heck of it). The story takes up a lot of of the real news real estate:To what extent does the editorial board of Tokyo Shimbun dislike the official secrets bill?-- All of the news space on the front page not devoted to the weather is devoted to the bill (the weather stuff was sort of important: two typhoons were sweeping past the country that day).-- 17 articles and op-eds are on the bill (this is not including the reporting on U.S. spying on the communications of Europeans and their leaders, which one might want to include as a corollary of the official secrets bill) -- the editorial cartoon is on the billThe editors did not even feel a need to pile on: the editorials are on the proposed Industrial Competitiveness Act and the falsification of population data in Aiichi Prefecture.