ART OF EUROPE
Sea of Japan Files Sexual Assault Charges Against City of Kobe
China Reuters Associated Press | 12.07.03
KOBE, JAPAN. The Sea of Japan, the large body of salt water lying between Japan and that country that cheats at football, has filed sexual assault charges with prosecutors at the Hague in Germany and the IHO in Monaco against the western Japanese port town of Kobe.
"It's always harrassing me with bad pick-up lines, telling me how great its beef is, and humping my leg, always humping my leg, and then trying to play it all off like there was an earthquake or something, like I'm dumb enough to fall for that," an irate Sea of Japan told agency reporters in an interview conducted through a conch. "And the people at the IHO weren't much better. When I went to them for help, all they did was make fun of me, offering to 'send Rear Admiral Barbor to get to the bottom of things.' That's exactly the kind of lewd, offensive line Kobe used to lay on me whenever a Gekkeikan freighter was in port."
Kobe Mayor Yada Tatsuo responded almost immediately, calling "the Sea of Being Japan's North Korean Fishing Vessel Free Bitch" a "god damn dirty whore."
"Do you have any idea how many sailors have been in the Sea of BJNKFVFB?" Yada asked Japanese and European reporters while nonchalantly Agincourting their North and South Korean colleagues. "Why, just last week it was brought to my attention that four Thai sailors drowned off the coast of Tsushima. I mean, the bitch swallows seamen. Whose word you gonna believe? Hers?"
The South Korean comfort retreat of Jeju Island which, like anyone else who wants to, lies in the Sea of Japan, is petitioning the city of Kobe for "a simple apology," which anyone with a dendrite and a half left in his fucking skull knows is never going to happen.
Shortly after Yada's remarks, former Japanese Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro suggested that the Sea of Japan drop the charges, disappear for awhile, then return to the area under a different name, "so's no one would have to know." South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoon Young-kwan immediately suggested as possible aliases: "the East Sea," "the Eastern Sea," "the East Sea," "the 東海," and "the East Sea," amongst others, the remainder of which were simply invariant repititions of "the East Sea."
Mori's suggestion has met with general outcry from Japanese educators, who couldn't point to Yoon Young-kwan on a map, but did try. Only last year Japanese publishers, bowing under international pressure, had to recall maps in several of the nation's most popular geography textbooks. "That was over 5 million books we had to recall," said Kodansha spokesman Kubota Yuichi. "So what if we spelled Manchuria Manchukuo and Tokyo was the only city in East Asia represented by a circumscribed star? We should be as free to miseducate our youth as people in America or the Falklands are to miseducate theirs."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's suggestion that Japan and the Koreas compromise by referring to the body of water as "the Sea East of Japan" has not met with any more enthusiasm, despite which the Labour Party has announced plans to call for a general referendum on whether or not to implement the proposed change in British textbooks, and then to implement said change in said textbooks regardless.
US Secretary of Education Rod Paige, while commending Blair's "feeble attempt at autonomy" and expressing a certain degree of pride in the educational system since "an old lap dog can learn new tricks," has insisted that US textbooks will only recognize the former Sea of Japan by "its authentic and democratic name, the Sea of America Number Seventy-Two," though "the Sea of America #72" is "an acceptable abbreviation thereof."