Japan news - the great and the embarrassing (if you're British!)

One of the blogs I've been following for a few years now is one written by an Englishman living in Tokyo as it gives an often whimsical insight into life there. Anyway his latest blog article covers two items which have made the headlines in Japan, but I expect have hardly been noticed elsewhere (specially the second story below).

The first story is entirely serious - basically the fact that this year's Nobel Prize for Physics has been won jointly by three Japanese scientists for:

... their groundbreaking theoretical work which investigated the hidden symmetries among sub-atomic particles. Judges praised them for their outstanding contribution to the scientific world regarding their exploration of the nature of matter, and for making significant progress towards answering questions about how the universe began.

- no doubt followers of the Nobel Prizes in the scientific community will have been well-aware of this, but I don't recall it having been mentioned in the UK in the non-scientific media. Congratulations to the three!

Now on to the real 'meat' of this article, Englishman's second theme, which is about a story about a westerner (thought to be British, although one of the commenters to his article wonders if he was Spanish) who took a dip, in the nude, in the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace in Tokyo - obviously people were bemused and the police not amused. I'm embedding the AP video news report below for your amusement, but I do urge you to visit Englishman's article too, as he has a lot more pictures with some of his trademark 'bubble' comments and they are quite funny:



(It so happens that this is the only part of Tokyo that I have even a passing acquaintance with as when in that city I always stayed at the Imperial Palace Hotel, just across the park from the moat outside the Palace, as the office was very close by.)