No chance for ambiguity here. When you’re going to つ (津市), つ Station is definitely the place to get off.

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It started out innocently. Well, relatively so, anyway. I was looking for a clean copy of the 80s J-pop song “Sailor Fuku o Nugasanaide!” (for reasons that will become obvious if I ever get around to it), and while there are plenty of videos on Youtube, most of them either have terrible audio quality or an announcer talking over part of the song, or both. And none of the versions on US iTunes are useful.

So I ended up on Amazon Japan, where I found a recent CD collection from Onyanko Club that includes the song. But that wasn’t all that turned up in a search for “セーラー服を脱がさないで”…

It’s a concentration game based on memorizing the color of schoolgirl panties. Pick up a girl, look up her skirt, and try to remember which other girl had the same panties. The partial box cover shows it was released by Bandai in 1987, the year that Onyanko Club disbanded, so it may not have sold well. I’ll have to look for it next time I’m at a flea market in Japan, but I insist that I’d only buy it to find out if the figures were hand-painted, because Japan. :-)

Of course, there were a number of adult videos in the search results as well, and for this young lady (NSFW), losing her sailor suit is the least of her problems.

Seriously, kid, just run.

…is not to play:

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This sign spells out in detail the gender-based restrictions on eating at ConTERRAZZA in Shinjuku, claimed to be Japan’s first women’s restaurant. I suspect they’re not hip to the whole “57 varieties” self-labeling system(s).

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Okay, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest to see former Morning Musume member Asami Konno leading a parade of Pikachus, wearing a sash celebrating the success of the new Pokemon movie. Even if she weren’t an announcer for TV Tokyo, it’s the sort of thing you expect to find former idol singers at.

But what are she and her partner Moeko doing with their hands?

It’s not a one-time thing, either; there are half a dozen shots where they’re doing Babymetal’s signature fox-head gesture with one or both hands. I can only assume that Pikachu fans use it too. Which helps to explain this.

But nothing can explain this.

Then again, “kon-kon” is the sound a fox makes, although this Konkon usually makes more of a “boin” sound…

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I’m not sure this qualifies as a dance move, but it’s definitely a performance.

I’m linking to the Asahi Shinbun’s coverage rather than the more “excitable” story I first saw from The Daily Mail. Short version: a former employee at a home for the disabled went in with a knife and killed at least 19 patients, wounding many more. There’s already a Wikipedia page linking to random news stories about it, which strikes me as rather voyeuristic.

[Update: five months ago, he sent a polite letter to the government announcing his detailed plans and asking for official support. It’s not clear from the stories whether he wrote the letter and then got fired when the police investigated, or got fired first.]