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Who are you again?

Like serious minded newspapers around the world, the Schweriner Volkszeitung of northern Germany gave a good deal of coverage to the Group of Eight Summit in Heiligendamm. Apart from news reports on the deliberations of the heads of government, and weighty analysis of the issues at stake, the paper ran brief profiles of the leaders accompanied by a mugshot of each. There was George, Tony, Angela, Vlad, Sarko, Prodi, the EU bloke (Barroso) the Canadian prime minister (I know it, don't tell me . . . Harper! Stephen Harper) and - making his debut at the G8 ball - Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

Sure enough, the face in the photograph was that of a middle aged Japanese-speaking Asian man with black hair, brown eyes, and a hesitant smile. He looked like a Japanese prime minister. He sounded like a Japanese prime minister. If one were to go as far as to remove pieces of his flesh and broil them in teppanyaki sauce, he would probably taste like a Japanese prime minister, too. But unfortunately, he was not Shinzo Abe.

He was Norihiko Akagi, recently appointed Japan's new agriculture minister, after the suicide of Toshikatsu Matsuoka who hanged himself a fortnight ago. An embarrassing balls-up by the picture desk of the Schweriner VZ - but does it also suggest something about Mr Abe and his leadership of the world's second largest economy?

Flying Seoul-o

Writing about foreign stereotypes last week, I made sceptical reference to the popular notion of Japan as a land awash in bizarre pornography, where every other salarymen spends his lunch break hunched over rape manga, downloading bukkake videos, and purchasing schoolgirls' underwear from his office vending machine. Japanese smut is certainly distinctive, I acknowledged, but if it really is more widely consumed than in the rest of the world - show us the evidence.

Committed Asia Exile reader Joseh Miller has taken up the challenge by sending me a link to this fascinating page on the website Internet Filter Review. It goes some way towards answering a profound question: who are the world's biggest wankers?

The answers will amaze and appal you.

Pride in the Swastika

The Awa Odori dancers are one of the better known exports of Tokushima, an otherwise obscure prefecture on the Japanese island of Shikoku. Every year, dressed in straw hats and colourfully printed cotton costumes, they perform in their annual festival, across Japan and sometimes abroad. The folk dances involve intricate hand movements; they are accompanied by traditional music on drums, gongs and the stringed shamisen. The dancers have become ambassadors for a region that few people outside Japan have even heard of.

This year a troupe of the dancers will perform in Germany, to support their national team in the World Cup and promote a new Japanese film. There is one problem - the image seen in red in the bottom right of this photograph (by Kyodo) of an Awa Odori dancer.

The Awa Odori dancers flaunt the swastika, the hated emblem of Nazism and a symbol of evil to people all over the world.