Students to be Graded on Shyness

The Education Ministry has announced that from next year, students at high schools in Japan will be graded on their shyness.  Criteria will include reticence with strangers, blushing, and evasion of eye contact, and students considered insufficiently bashful will be held back a year, regardless of their academic performance.


"This measure is absolutely necessary in order to prepare students for life after graduation," explained Ministry spokesman Kazu Hashi. "In school, students can pick up bad habits such as sharing their feelings and opinions, which jar badly with the outside environment. Shyness is a fundamental life skill which students need to master so that they are able to assimilate into wider Japanese society."


Students are eagerly looking forward to the new challenge. "I used to enjoy meeting people and making friends," said Arisa Tanaka, a high school freshman in Chiba, "but now I see I'll have to stop. I'm determined to do my best to be the shyest in my class!"

Research Identifies Gaijin Gene

Researchers at Tokyo's Eugenics Foundation have made a historic breakthrough by finally isolating the gene responsible for gaijin. The ground-breaking findings seem to indicate that gaijin are more closely related to Japanese people than had previously been thought.


'We were taken aback at just how much genetic material gaijin share with we Japanese,' said Foundation chairman Jinshu Sabetsu. 'Not only that, but inserting the gaijin gene into the DNA of a racially pure Japanese mouse produced no discernible change in behaviour. The untrained observer might believe them not to be a separate species at all.'


Future research at the Foundation is likely to focus on finding a practical application for the knowledge. 'Important though it is, identifying the gaijin gene is only a first step,' said Sabetsu. 'We're still a very long way from finding an effective treatment.'