Maaan.
Talk about gullibility.

Start: EST 16:50.
Challenge: print off, certify and post a statutory declaration so it gets to Adelaide by Tuesday. Not to mention how to do all of the preceding and find the locations of all relevant places…and the fact I had no map and had zero familiarity with Melbourne CBD. Bonus: find the gold express post box!!

Highlights: finding out that Melbournites are quite accomodating when “WHERE’S THE NEAREST POLICE STATION?” is screamed into their faces, being sent on a wild goose chase by shop staff who just want to get rid of the asian lunatic begging to use their computers/printers, getting ripped off by the Indian convenience store owner to use his computers/printer, sprinting all around Melbourne and nearly chucking my guts out onto the pavement.

Didn’t manage to make it in time before the main post office closed at 5:30, but then realised (saw express post advertisement in the window of this little store run by a Korean dude who was nice but refused to let me use his computer/printer - “it’s inconvenient”, he said with a little smile which is asianspeak for “you’re crazy, please get out of my shop”) could still post by using the gold express post boxes - deadline 6pm. Thus….30mins to do all of the above!!!

Managed to post at 6:04. Hung around waiting for post office van to make sure I wasn’t late. Mail collected: 6:14.

…and after all that, I still don’t feel safe. I mean I didn’t even get to check the stat dec/certification before I chucked it in the box. Plus the police seem to certify just anything - he didn’t even ask me for photo ID… probably because he saw I was desperate?

So…I’m flying back to Adelaide this Sunday early morning 6:30 (cheapest flight …$50! woohoo~).

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The stat dec is a document I have to lodge with the Legal Practitioner’s Board, or something, in Adelaide by Tuesday. Had posted it on time before but there was a very MINOR mistake that I made due to a technicality I didn’t know about.

Since I’m not confident that the one I mailed in a rush yesterday night was 100% correct, I’m flying down to lodge a 100% certainly correct one, and if that is not correct at least I’ll be in Adelaide to wash, rinse, repeat.

I am a courier, hear me roar.

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UPDATE: Forgot to mention that my mobile with net access was invaluable. No one seemed to know with any certainty where it was, and they’d point off vaguely in any direction. Yesterday was wild goose chase day, I tell you! Then I remembered I had net access! I have a SE K800i (3G) and together with the Opera mini browser I could quickly find the website of the Victorian police and lookup the addresses of police stations in the city. I heart web access on my SE, I heart Opera mini!

Episode 2 begins with Kurosaki bumping into his old high school friend, Satoshi. They have a drink and reminisce about old times, ie how Kurosaki was a bit of a loner, and always hung out on the roof top ledge of the school building. Satoshi would play basketball on the roof and one day climbed over the fence surrounding the roof to lie down where Kurosaki was on the ledge too.

Tsurara moves into her new apartment which is coincidentally next door to Kurosaki’s. And Kurosaki is the landlord too! (Whoo, explains how his apartment can have a secret room).

Kurosaki buys info off that creepy old guy again, and it turns out that the target is an Akasagi/Shirosagi - a marriage swindler who also has a touch of Shirosagi too. And she’s the older sister of Satoshi, who is in the marriage swindling business too.

So Kurosaki puts on the character of a wealthy university student who had fallen in love at first sight with the target…and wants to open a flower shop with the person he marries.

Amongst other things, it appears that Satoshi is currently swindling Yukari since she’s rich. Satoshi and Kurosaki start to hang out again, and Satoshi reveals that he’s a marriage swindler. He urges Kurosaki to do it too as it’s easy money.

At the same time though, Kurosaki is already setting up to swindle Satoshi’s sister anyway. Satoshi’s sister suspects Kurosaki but goes along with it anyway as she thinks she’s better. In the end Kurosaki wins through some interesting e-banking mojo.

Kurosaki helps Yukari get her revenge on Satoshi, and she gets back her money, which is part of the money Kurosaki defrauded from Satoshi’s oneesan. Kurosaki says some sort-of kind words to Yukari and she develops an annoying crush on Kurosaki. Actually I feel more sorry for Satoshi/sister than Yukari. Satoshi’s parents died a couple of years ago so they swindle for a living. And Satoshi was really happy he found his best friend again. Whereas Yukari’s just an annoying way too genki sort of girl. During one of their conversations, Kurosaki also secretly videotaped Satoshi confessing to swindling. And that his sister did it too. He sent it to the police and they nabbed both siblings. Satoshi spots Kurosaki waiting outside his apartment beyonf the fence, and basically asks him why he betrayed him (aha, fence imagery again). Kurosaki says that he did it because he didn’t want to see his friend swindling. Tough luck though, couldn’t Kurosaki have found a better way? From my impression of Japanese companies’ views of convicted criminals…I don’t think Satoshi will find it easy to ever get a decent salaryman job. Basically, Satoshi is definitely doomed to a life of dishonesty now…

Anyway 2 things interested me about this episode. Partway through either Tsurara or Yukari state that the Japanese police can’t help normal citizens when it came to swindling. If Japan really has no laws on dishonesty or deception…it must have a really crap criminal code. Perhaps they were talking about the practical effect of the swindling, ie the company disappears and there is no one to charge the crime with. I guess that means it’s not so much of a defect in the laws, it’s more a statement of the effectiveness of the police! I wonder just how much of this show is an accurate portrayel of Japanese society…

The second thing that perked my ears was when Satoshi’s sister said that the tape Kurosaki secretly filmed was inadmissable as evidence. That’s quite true (in Australia). In fact, we dealt with that point recently in Civil and Criminal Procedure/Litigation Practice.

Firstly, Satoshi was talking about his involvement in swindling, and also his sister’s. Now that can be admitted as evidence against Satoshi, because it was Satoshi talking. But it can’t be admitted against his sister because then it would be hearsay evidence.

Secondly, just because it was taped secretly doesn’t mean the prosecution can’t admit it. Firstly, there are strict laws governing how suspects should be treated while interviewing them. After forming a reasonable suspicion that they committed the crime, they have to caution the suspect - you have the right to remain silent, but anything you say may and will be used against you. So if the police were the ones interviewing Satoshi, obviously he hadn’t been cautioned. It would be extremely prejudicial to the accused to allow such evidence to go before a jury. Also, since the common law right to avoid self-incrimination is so strong, having the police allow you to shoot your mouth off leads to an unfair trial through unfair procedure carried out by the police.

Anyway, this is a bit of a moot point as it wasn’t the police who secretly taped it; there was no wrongdoing on the police’ part. So by accepting the evidence, the court won’t be seen as condoning sneaky behaviour on the police’ part, which would be an affront to public policy.

The court has a discretion (see Bunning v Cross, Swathfield and Pavic) to exclude evidence where there are public policy concerns, or where there may be an unfair trial (the emphasis is not so much on unfairness to the accused). Based on the caselaw in my course, there is none because most of it is based on police incorretly collecting evidence. Hmm, but actually I haven’t come across secretly-taped videos done by private citizens…I would assume there wouldn’t be a problem though.

Anyway yeah, poor Satoshi will have more damning evidence against him.

Under South Australian law.

Conclusion: if you’ve done a crime, don’t be a big mouth. If the police ask you questions, you don’t have to answer. They can’t make you answer any questions, either before or after they form a reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed a crime.

Oh yeah, I just remembered another thing. Right at the end, while Satoshi is appealing to Kurosagi, the police guy comes and smashes Satoshi’s head against the fence. While it probably didn’t hurt Satoshi very much…it’s pretty unprofessional, and it would definitely be a cause for complaint here.

Well, I don’t know how much that applies in Singapore though. Apparantly some police torture is permissable in interrogation of suspects in Singapore. What a police state. Blah.

Mouseover thumnails for captions

Yamashita Tomohisa’s new drama started recently just 2 weeks ago!

Also known as YamaPi by his fans, he’s one of those up and coming J entertainers. He’s the leader of NewS (Johnny’s entertainment), now on hiatus, and has done a couple of dramas most notably Nobuta wo Produce which I really loved.

Anyway I just watched the first episode today. Thanks to Kioku-LS fansubs for subbing this!

Okay so basically Kurosagi is a drama about a conman (Yamapi) who only cons other conmen. And then he gives the proceeds to the original victims. Basically a bit like Robin Hood.

Warning, spoilers ahead.
mouseover for captions

The first episode starts off with a short animation sequence introducing the different types of conmen - Shirosagi (white swindler) lies and cheats people out of their money. Akasagi (red swindler) uses affections and feelings to cheat. And Kurosagi only eats Shirosagi and Akasagi.

After that, he coincidentally meets the victim of Shinkawa (hmmmm unlikely coincidence?), who is about to commit suicide because he’s been cheated and he thinks its the only way out (jeez, what is it with Japanese and suicide…). Kurosaki saves the man, but in the resulting hulla balloo, the man’s niece or something or other (haven’t figured out relationship), Tsurara, gets pushed off the platform onto the path of an oncoming train. She gets saved by Kurosagi too.

Anyway, the long and short of it is (short, because I got tired of recounting the episode, go watch it yourself) that Kurosaki offers to swindle back the money from Shinkawa, the man in indecisive, his son is suffering, and Tsurara is an annoying busy body who constantly tries to lecture Kurosaki on the wrongness of swindling, even if it’s swindling swindlers.

Oh yeah, and Kurosaki’s background appears to be that his father was swindled too a couple of years ago, so he decides to kill his whole family (??!!), but somehow Kurosagi escapes death and now he’s vowed revenge on the swindler. But Kurosagi is currently buying information to cheat other swindlers from the original Shirosagi who swindled his father.

Yamapi’s back to the stoic cool acting, which personally I hate. Nothing against him doing it in particular, I just hate that sort of character in general. Unfortunately that sort of character seems to crop up pretty often in Jdramas. It’s good that with Kurosagi he has to play lots of different characters, so at least he doesn’t stay faux cool all the time. I think he’s a good actor and he can handle all the different sorts of roles though, and he handled the slightly geeky salaryman character reasonably well. It was cute, and reminded me of Akira in Nobuta.

The plot seemed a bit unrealistic in Ep 1 though. Just a few pointers:

The villian says “give me 10million, and I can loan you 5 times that amount interest free because it’s a Japanese government grant”. The victim says okay, doesn’t get the money, business disappears, police says they can’t do anything.

Problem 1. What victim is going be so stupid as to do that. You should always seek independant financial/legal advice.

Problem 2. Who says the police can’t do anything. This is fraud right? It is square in the middle of criminal law! Either that or Japanese police are useless. If the way they are portrayed in dramas, anime, manga and movies is any indication though…maybe Japanese police *are* really that crap. Australia’s Federal Police has a fraud squad by the way.

Problem 3. you could always conduct your own private investigation to find the swindler (since it looks like the woman is operating a big thingo…and employing lots of people) then sue her socks off. Very hard to follow the trail of money, and lawyers are expensive too, but it’s something you could always try if you’re out for revenge.

The second issue I had with the series was the law. Nobuta Tsurara is a law student and in one scene (as I’m sure she’ll do a lot in other eps) she discusses this swindling situation with her classmates. A sempai says that swindling is an area with the most amount of loopholes. What the…huh? Totally vague statement. Also, it’s not hard to prosecute or sue a person who swindled you, per se. It’s getting any damages/compensation that is the problem. Even if you find the swindler, often the money would have disappeared. So it would be like suing a “man of straw”.

Oh yeah, in one scene Shinkawa can’t believe Kurosagi is offering to invest 200 million in her company (when he’s doing his swindle), and she checks his compay. She finds out that it has been around for 10 years, and has a healthy bank balance, and is satisfied with that alone. How careless. That is certainly not enough!! If she checked properly, she would have found out that the company itself was already closed down/bankrupt, and only the name remained.

Anyway. Loopholes in plot aside, this is probably the sole drama series I’ll be following for now. It would be interesting to watch Tsurara’s discussions with the other law students - it would be nice to see what Japanese law is like. Hopefully I’ll be getting an accurate picture. Along with Dragon Sakura, I wonder if Japan is going to do more legal in-sort-of flavour shows? That would be fun. A Japanese Ally McBeal? Or The Practice? Wooooo…..

Actually the best ever law-related show I have ever watched was called “Murphy’s Law”, and Australian production, and the most realistic legal drama I’ve seen. Too bad it was cut short so quickly!!

1. Bowl tilted with all the veg shoved to the side, dipping each piece of salad again in dressing before eating. This ensures each piece of vegetable is as saturated with as much dressing as physically possible.

2. With Paul Newman’s Caesar Salad dressing

3. In front of a jdrama. As you can see, I’m watching one starring Takuya Kimura of SMAP (hot!). It’s called “Good Luck!”. It’s basically about a commercial airine pilot. Its a pretty light hearted dorama. I randomly downloaded this depsite its cheesy title. Good thing I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Being a commercial pilot would be so cool o.o
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Other recommended dramas:

1. Orange Days (very moving. the characters are seniors at university. The romantic relationship between the two main characters is very powerful. Stars ?Tsumabaki Satoshi. He’s really good.)
2. Dae Jang Geum (period, Korean. epic story).
3. My Little Chef (a cooking drama, about the struggle to make a success of a little french restaurant).
4. Lunch Queen (yay! I found another cooking drama! Starring some of my fav j-actors.)

Recommended anime:
1. Trinity Blood (post-apocalyptical japan. vampires v the vatican, and the mysterious rozen kreuz terrorist group. dark. kinda confusing sometimes)
2. Speed Grapher (dark, a photographer with special abilities. shows just how evil power, money and corruption can be)
3. Emma (victorian era england. it’s a romance between a main and a member of the gentry. it’s very peaceful, very sweet. i love the ost)
4. Honey and Clover (about students at an art school. i love the portrayel of the student life. maybe it’s because i’m one myself…)

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Hmm. i’m running out of space on my external hdd. so fast~~ >__>
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I bought more toys. photos here.

But the flickr search function appears to be down at the time of writing. Oh well.