TOKYOMANGO

Traveler to Japan measures radiation on planes, near Fukushima (news flash: planes are much worse!)

A Silicon Valley exec recently traveled to Japan for business. He took a Geiger counter with him and measured radiation throughout the trip--including on his flights to and from Asia. Steve Jurvetson posted a graph on his Flickr stream. He writes:

One of his destinations was 50 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As a precaution, a colleague gave him a Geiger Counter so he could make sure it wasn’t getting dangerous as he approached the plant.

Maybe they assumed he would turn it on when he hit the ground… Instead, he logged the whole trip, and you can see the relative peaks of radioactivity.

jurvetson's Flickr via Sean Bonner's Twitter

Love Exposure, a four-hour movie about Christianity, panties, and love triangles

I just discovered this trailer for the movie Love Exposure, a four hour film about a love triangle involving a guy whose job is to take photos of women's panties and a woman whom he mistakes as the Virgin Mary. Four hours is a looong time... but it has pretty good reviews. If anyone's seen it, let me know if it was worth your time!

via @nmillions

Earthquake preparedness graphic in May issue of Wired

In case you missed it, the May issue of Wired has an infographic I worked on showing the history of earthquakes in Japan, plus the legal, societal, and architectural reforms that followed each one.

Quake-Ready Japan: A History of Seismic Science

Figure skating duo wins competition with Mario act

Watch this video of Russian figure skating duo Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov, who won a silver medal at the World Figure Skating Championships this past weekend. The competition was supposed to take place in Japan, but it got moved to Russia after the earthquake.

(Thanks, Paul!)

Taiga Ishikawa is Japan's first openly gay elected official

A big hooray for Taiga Ishikawa who--two Sundays ago--became the first openly gay elected politician in Japan. The 36-year old writer/activist published a book titled Where is my Boyfriend? in 2002, and runs a non-profit that hosts events for gay men. He just won a seat in the local assembly for Toshima Ward.

I know many gay Japanese men who moved here to San Francisco because of the lack of support and acceptance back home. When I grew up in Tokyo, gay men in the public eye were mostly just parodies of themselves on variety shows, or cross dressers, or just totally below the radar.

Ishikawa's a great advocate for LGBT issues in Japan because he can talk about them without alienating the more sexually conservative masses. In the video below, for example, he distinguishes between transsexuals and gays in a very colloquial, non-preachy tone. "I don't want to wear a skirt," he says with a friendly laugh. "I just want to love men as men." And then he talks about how he discovered he was gay, felt scared and closeted for a long time, and then eventually found out about others like himself on the Internet.