Popular in Japan

Pink Tentacle blog has the lowdown on publisher Jiju Kokuminsha's ("Free Citizen") recently released 2009 installment of its annual sixty most popular Japanese phrases list and, as always, the entries are a little strange. I had a good chuckle earlier this year at #3 on the list ("...to Venus on a UFO"), the one that talks about Prime Minister Hatoyama's wife being a loony alien abductee, and got major cred when I told people I knew what a "grass eating boy" was (#5, sōshoku danshi). But really it's #39 that takes the cake for me.

The Yamba Dam project in Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo, is a massive construction project costing over $5 billion that's been on the drawing boards since just after the cessation of WWII. Or, rather, it was. Hatoyama and the DPJ kept their campaign promises to eliminate pork from the budget and this overpriced, unnecessary dam was damn near first on the cutting block. One major problem with the dam--at least you'd think it was an issue--was that the lake it would create behind the dam would inundate an entire town, Naganohara. Oddly enough, the people of Naganohara aren't praising the cancellation, they're ruing it. You see, to keep costs down and public support high the contractors hired local residents to work on the project, ensuring plentiful employment and prosperity in the town. Now, with the contractors out of work the people are also out of work, so the citizens can't help but want back the thing that would have destroyed their town.

This is life in Japan, folks: they getcha coming and going.

--Matt