Chop chop

In the Lonely Planet guide book for Korea they had a little section about The Return Of The Noses. While Japanese soldiers were occupying that land they chopped off the noses of thousands of people, and kept them for some reason. This was a source of tension between the two countries because these body parts were actually being stored somewhere. At one point they had a Return Of The Noses ceremony (not sure the correct term for when people return thousands of severed human noses) and the body parts were returned and layed (laid?) to rest. While I was in Korea some men would sometimes go to some government office building and proceed to cut off one of their fingers in protest of some aspect of Korea/Japan relations. It may have been to do with the Japanese Prime Minister visiting some war shrine or something. And this morning I read the article below.


'Rightist' with abduction gripe lops off hand outside Diet

A man almost completely lopped off his left hand with a machete Tuesday in front of the Diet, apparently to protest Japan's policy toward North Korea, police said. The 54-year-old man approached the front gates of the building by car, stepped out, silently placed his left hand against the hood of the vehicle and swung the 40-cm blade down across his left wrist, Tokyo police official Hideyuki Yoshioka said. The man, who identified himself as a member of a rightwing organization, then mumbled a few words about the way Tokyo has dealt with Pyongyang's abductions of Japanese in the 1970s and 80s. Police seized the machete and rushed him to a hospital. The man "appeared to be in a lot of pain and his hand was hanging by a piece of skin," Yoshioka said.


The Japan Times: March 22, 2006