Stuffed
For the second year in a row, Japanese competitive eating champion Takeru Kobayashi, 30, lost the Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest to 24-year-old American Joey Chestnut. The match, held in Coney Island, New York, went to overtime after both men scarfed down 59 franks in the 10-minute regulation period.

The farm ministry announced its intention to boost Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate to “over 50 percent” from the current 45 percent.

A 58-year-old Tokyo business executive and his son were among ten people arrested for their roles in a Ponzi scheme involving shrimp farms in the Philippines. Officials recovered some ¥700 million, including ¥100 million found in a family tomb in Gunma.

Get your kicks
The sales director of a Nagoya real estate firm who hadn’t made a single sale after four months on the job won a court case against his former boss, who had kicked him in the leg out of frustration.

A senior official at the Atsugi Taxation Office in Kanagawa was busted for helping the owner of a leasing company evade ¥50 million in inheritance tax.

A book written by Sakie Yokota, whose 13-year-old daughter Megumi was abducted by North Korean spies in 1977, will go on sale in the US next year. The work is titled North Korea Kidnapped my Daughter.

A man and an 18-year-old boy were arrested for posing as a police officer and a lawyer to trick a Kanagawa woman into posting bail money for her son, who the pair claimed had been arrested. The scheme netted ¥4.5 million.

Well, duh
A group of Japanese scholars analyzed 97,032 suicides from 2004-2006 and found that the top five risk factors were depression, family trouble, debt, physical ailments and “hardships of life.”

Kansai University officials announced that they had expelled a senior engineering student who was on trial for selling marijuana.

Prosecutors in Tokyo were ordered to return some ¥30 million that they had seized from the wife of a murder convict during their investigation.

Thanks to rising gas prices and an inability to speedily shift manufacturing from trucks to cars, Toyota saw its sales plunge 19 percent last month.

Headline of the Week: Cop Tried to Cover up Blunder over Fuel-soaked Man who Ignited Self During Questioning (via the Mainichi Daily News)


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