The Japundit links to a story in which recently-elected leader of Japan's Democratic Party Ichiro Ozawa suggests “that visits to Yasukuni shrine are the main cause of problems with Japan's neighbors,” a view which Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi rejected.

Next up is a review of writer Hillary Raphael's first novel I [heart] Buddha: “Set in the late 1990s in, yes, Tokyo, the novel tells a very interesting story of a group called “the Neo-Geisha Organization,” and yes, as you might have guessed, it's a kind of sex-and-death cult with hedonist ideology,” which, the blogger writes, “reads like manga, sounds like hard techno, and feels like some kind of fetish. Weighing in at 192 pages and retailing for around US$15, it's a work of postmodern chick-lit literature worth looking into.”