youth culture

No Halloween for “stupid foreigners”

Sophie Team Observers — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:27:49 +0100

Photo posted here.

For some years now expats and travellers in Tokyo have been piling into metro carriages on October 31 to celebrate Halloween. This year however, the masked partygoers were stopped in their tracks by groups of exasperated locals.

As has become the tradition, the event was advertised on an online forum, GaijinPot (gaijin means foreigner in Japanese). The open invitation asked participants to board the 21:06 train on the Yamanote line at Shinjuku station. The instructions are simple: "Wear a costume, sing, share booze, talk to strangers, dance and take photos".

When they arrived on Saturday night however, a group of nationalist activists were waiting to greet the "gaijin". Their message was clear. One board reads "Get out stupid foreigners". Others were even less polite and even more politically incorrect (see photos below). Their efforts seem to have worked. According to Japan Probe, no more than 15 dressed-up foreigners got on the train.

Women can't drive, but children can

Team Observers — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:46:25 +0200

Women are strictly forbidden from driving in Saudi Arabia. So you can imagine how Susie, an American expat living in Jeddah, feels when she sees boys barely older than ten cruising at the wheel of their flashy SUVs.

Saudi Arabia has one of the highest road accident rates in the world. According to the Saudi transport ministry , there were 485,931 accidents on Saudi roads in 2008, 6,458 of which resulted in loss of life.

Six-year-old dreams of becoming a "corrupt official"

Sophie Team Observers — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:56:47 +0200

Looking on the bright side of going "back to school", one Chinese journalist decided to ask a group of infant school children what they want to do when they grow up. Most of the answers are pretty standard, but the last one comes as something of a surprise.

The video was filmed by a Southern Metropolis Daily journalist and posted on the paper's website. Following a torrent of reactions, the paper eventually decided to remove the post.

No library near you? Luis’s donkeys will bring one

Sophie Team Observers — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:33:33 +0200

Photo : Diana Arias. Posted on the blog elbiblioburro.

Luis Soriano, an unemployed Colombian schoolteacher, spreads knowledge and literature to places where no librarian has ever set foot. He brings his books by donkeys to Colombia’s poorest and most isolated provinces.

After loading his donkeys back with books, Luis Soriano criss-crosses the desolate Nabusimake Valley in Colombia’s Magdalena province. To achieve his goal of giving peasant families and their children something to read, he invented “Biblioburros” (Library-donkeys), mobile libraries carried on the steep and narrow paths in the region on sturdy donkeys. Luis’s territory is also that of armed rebel groups but, according to him, the media coverage his initiative has received has meant that he is relatively safe from attacks.

The idea occurred to Luis in 1998 when he lost his job as a school teacher in the city of La Gloria. Although he came from a poor family, he owned one of the largest private collections of books in the country. He decided to share his ‘wealth’ with those who had never had access to a book in their life. After buying his first donkey, Alpha, he set off on his country’s least-travelled paths.

With the help of several NGOs and private businesses, Luis expanded his travelling library to 22 “Biblioburros”, led by a team of volunteers. His initiative reaches well beyond his home province. His sudden fame notwithstanding, Luis continues to cover eight country schools near his hometown himself.

Iran election: 'This time… we have to vote'

Sophie Team Observers — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:48:40 +0200

Image posted on Flickr by "Faith Today".

Iran's tenth presidential election takes place this Friday and the race is heating up. Current president Ahmadinejad and reformist Mirhossein Mousavi, both running for president, clashed in a televised debate last Wednesday, causing protests and street-fights on Saturday. Unlike in previous elections however, Iranian expat students say they won't boycott the vote this time.

Jessica Bogus is a 21-year-old French girl currently studying in Lund, Sweden, where many Iranians study abroad. While eating some traditional Gaz (nougat from Esfahan), Jessica asked her Iranian friends, the majority of whom boycotted the 2005 election, what they would do this time.

Diary of a young woman campaigning for reform

Sophie Team Observers — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:42:37 +0200

Young supporters of Mirhossein Mousavi don themselves in green.

Iran has one of the largest female student populations in the world, and yet for the past four years this segment of society has been increasingly oppressed by the conservative authorities. The forthcoming presidential election is an opportunity for Iran's youth; women in particular, to make themselves heard. One of those doing just that tells us about her day campaigning for reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi.

Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world, with over 65% of its citizens under the age of 33. On top of that about 10 million of them are university students, and 60% of those are women. The majority of this mainly middle-class group, born in the country after 1979, has only ever known the Islamic Republic. They're not asking for dramatic reform, they just want a bit more freedom, says our Observer Hoora, a computer engineering student from Tehran.

Czech youths protest their leaders with eggs

Sophie Team Observers — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:53:33 +0200

For politicians in the Czech Republic, the European elections have turned the country into something of a sticky battleground. For the past two weeks the country's leaders have been faced with increasing numbers of attacks by egg-throwers. At first they tried to make a joke of it, but after the assaults became more violent, the politicians were relieved today to see the young activists put down their egg cartons.

In order to coordinate their efforts, the 5,000 activists set up a Facebook group on Tuesday. In four days they had already attracted 45,000 fans. Some of them blame the Social Democrat (CSSD) leader, Jiri Paroubek, for toppling the Czech government in the middle of their EU presidency with a vote of no confidence -- something widely considered selfish and unpatriotic. Others can't forgive him for supporting a violent police assault on techno party CzechTek in 2005 when he was prime minister. And then there are those who refuse to condone his cooperation with the Czech Communist Party, which, until recently, had been unanimously ignored by the Czech political establishment. To sum up, as it is expressed on their Facebook page, they don't like the "lies, anger, nastiness and arrogance of the Social Democrats and, first of all, of Mr Paroubek".

Not enough to incite violence, however. Today the activists put down their eggs for fear of the movement becoming too aggressive. They'll speak their minds in the polls now, they say, leaving the politicians to clean themselves up.

Prague 27 May. Paroubek is the one wearing the striped jumper. Posted by "ignor64".

Video caption reads "We don't want communists in Prague!" Posted by "Pepeee007".

Giving birth on the school field

Sophie Team Observers — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:21:20 +0200

This video of a UK teenager giving birth on a school field has been blocked by YouTube.

It looks as though it was filmed with a camera phone, and it's pretty convincing. That's why a local health service in the UK put it online. It's part of a campaign to shock teens into the realities of unprotected sex - a tough challenge in the midlands city of Leicester, where around five percent of girls aged between 15 and 17 become pregnant each year. In fact the scene is really played by actors. Despite the campaign's good intentions, however, YouTube decided to ban the video 24 hours after it went online on 14 May.

Playing video games – deadly dangerous?

Team Observers — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:57:15 +0100

A campaign that's caused outrage in the video game industry will be allowed to continue running after winning a battle against its critics. Its message is clear. If you let your children play computer games, they'll die early.

The alarming poster began appearing in women's magazines at the beginning of the year. It's part of a government and charity-funded campaign called Change4life, which was set up to fight the mounting obesity crisis in the UK. On March 6, the Market for Home Computer and Video Games (MCV magazine) filed an official complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), in which they called the printed ad "hugely unfair and unrepresentative of the positive effect video games have on the UK's youth", citing that hundreds of small businesses would suffer from the "grossly inaccurate" campaign. But on Wednesday, the ASA stated that it would not be taking any action against the campaign. In a separate development however, there are rumours that Japanese company Sony, which owns PlayStation, is considering legal action over the use of a controller which is similar to their own.

French thieves make headlines in Japan

Team Observers — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:23:38 +0100

Three French youths have given their country some bad press this week. Splashed all over Japanese TV, the tale of their thieving spree in a video game store has caused something of a stir.

The Fuji News TV network broadcast a report on the incident this week. The three youths, aged 16, carried out 18 thefts in several shops in the Akihabara area before they were caught. By then, they had run away with 92 video games and seven consoles, supposedly aided by the fact that Japanese shopkeepers are ill-accustomed to shoplifting. The three had found a way of stealing in one shop and then selling their booty next door, even though the stores belonged to the same owner (Sofmap). The youths reportedly sought to explain their crime by claiming that they needed the money to look better in front of their wealthier classmates at the local international school.