With a One Piece theme park already made, ideas are being thrown around to create the going merry, the ship used by characters in the super popular series One Piece.

Citizens from the town of Kumamoto prefecture Japan have been pushing a plan on the local town goverment to create a replica of the going merry. If the goverment agread to the proposal the the ship would be constructed at Karashima Park in the prefectural capital of Kumamoto City, which also happens to be the birthplace of Eiichiro Oda the creator of One Piece.

Assembly Member Seiichi Nishi asserted that the plan will stimulate the local economy. Kumamoto Governor Ikuo Kabashima expressed his approval of the plan and his willingness to explore ways that the prefectural government can support the civic group’s “dream.”

The local TKU television station noted in its news coverage of the assembly meeting that it airs the One Piece anime every Saturday. It also noted that the most recent volume of Oda’s original manga set a Japanese record on March 4 with a first printing of 3 million copies — topping Harry Potter. 185.6 million copies of the manga have been sold so far.

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One Piece volume 57 has sold 1,690,932 million copies in its first week of release. It broke the old record which was set by yet again One Piece, One Piece volume 56 sold 1,363,868 copies in its first week. This new record set was not just for just manga, but for all books.

One piece volume 57 also broke another record, most copies in its first printing.

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Funimation is now deliberating if  the Dance in The Vampire Bund dvd release will be unedited or not. Dance in the Vampire Bund will also be streamed on the Funimation’s site/ affiliate site, the streamed version will have minor edits done for sure.

Funimation’s statement:

In the days since we announced the acquisition of the anime “Dance in the Vampire Bund,” we have been following the varied responses from within the anime community to our decision to edit specific scenes from its streaming and later home entertainment release.

First, out of concern for our distribution partners and advertisers, we will continue to make minor edits to the episodes which are available via free streaming and television broadcast due to the readily accessible nature of these platforms. We will be careful to keep such edits to a minimum.

However, FUNimation is — as always — committed to bringing the best anime content to the United States in its unedited form on home video. Therefore, we are evaluating the release of the series in unedited and uncensored form for home video. Since only 7 episodes have broadcast in Japan, final determination must be reserved until all episodes can be reviewed to ensure compliance with current U.S. law.

We would like to thank everyone in the anime community for the feedback provided to us on this matter — your opinions count.

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A truck driver by the name of Kenichi Ikeda was caught in Nagaski with over 260 undies;

Kenichi Ikeda of the city of Nagasaki has carried around three bags and a secret he could not tell his family at home — inside the bags were hundreds of women’s undergarments that he had stolen over 10 years, police said.

Police arrested the 36-year-old truck driver, who allegedly had stolen about 260 pairs of women’s underwear and kept them in bags behind the driver’s seat of his truck. “I couldn’t leave them home because I have a wife and children,” Ikeda was quoted as saying by police.

Ikeda, who works for a transportation company, allegedly stole the lingerie from self-service laundries in Saga Prefecture before leaving on trips to the Kansai region for work, police said.

On March 2, he was arrested on suspicion of stealing the underwear of a 32-year-old woman at a self-service laundry in Kohoku, Saga Prefecture. Police tracked down Ikeda through the license plate number of his truck.

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A possible ban on Virtual child porn in Tokyo is now in the realm of the possible;

A legislative proposal was submitted on February 24 to amend Metropolitan Tokyo’s youth welfare law on child pornography to include sexually provocative, “visual depictions” of characters who sound or appear to be 18 years old or younger. In addition to clauses that restrict the depictions of “nonexistent youths,” the amendment has clauses to restrict the Internet use of minors through filtering software and services in net cafés and on mobile phones.

According to a March 4 Twitter post of legislator Yukie Nogami, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly’s General Affairs Committee plans to deliberate on this proposal on March 18 and vote on it on March 19. If the proposal makes it out of the committee, it will face a vote by the entire assembly on March 30. If the assembly passes the legislature, it can go into effect as early as October 1.

Even if the law is passed by the committee it is highly unlikely to go in effect as early as October 1st.

The ban will put end end to lolicon and other “2d art’/game’s which might be seen as inappropriate. Also note, this law will only take affect in Tokyo not all of Japan.

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A follow up the first part of the story which you can read in full here;

A three year old from Tennessean, shot herself in the abdomen with a handgun and died; the child had been playing a Nintendo Wii video game, County Sheriff Terry Ashe said. The game’s controller was shaped like a gun that looked very similar to the real handgun, which her stepfather had put on a table in the living room. Ashe said the girl pulled the gun off the table and it went off.

The gun which many believed including myself was something like this:

Ending up looking nothing like the regular store bought wii gun’s:

The gun above is the Wii gun, and the gun below is the actual gun which the three year old mistook for the Wii gun. The Wii gun pictured above is manufactured by HAIHONGCHANG Electronics Company in China. The gun can be bought off ebay and other online stores for about $7- 15 dollars. It was also previously stated in the first article that the father had been using the gun to scare away dog’s, but a recent update states that he was using it for trespasser’s:

Cheyenne’s stepfather, Douglas Robert Cronberger, said he believed someone was trespassing on their property, so he stepped outside with his semi-automatic gun. When he returned inside, he placed the gun on a living room table

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Evangelion has been surpassed;

Mamoru Hosoda and MADHOUSE’s Summer Wars film has sold 54,000 Blu-ray Discs since March 3 to top Evangelion: 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone (Evangelion Shin Gekijōban: Jo) as the #1 anime Blu-ray in first-week sales.

Evangelion: 1.11 sold 49,000 copies in its first week of sales last year. Summer Wars is now the #2 Blu-ray overall in first-week sales; Michael Jackson’s This Is It music documentary film is the only Blu-ray Disc to sell more copies than Summer Wars.

Not that suprising that Summer Wars was able to top Evangelion, Summer Wars is a great movie and can appeal to many people. Summer Wars was also won top awards at the Tokyo Anime Fair.

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This list is of the most played Wii games is as of March 1st, 2010. Surprise surprise Super smash bro’s Brawl is still the most played game.

The list is almost exactly the same as it was 1 month ago, the only change is that Harvest moon has made it to the top 10 while Lego star wars: The complete saga has dropped from the top 10.

in a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good, though it is obviously biased toward users who hook up a Wii to the Internet.

List compiled by Kotaku

This event was pre- planned a while ago, and the entry fee was about $22 US which included a pair of flying panties;

The Gigazine website has posted a report with photographs and videos from Saturday’s Sora Fes! — a festival for homemade model aircraft, including many inspired by the flying panties seen in the Sora no Otoshimono television anime series. In addition to the 160 paying attendees, Sora no Otoshimono anime director Hisashi Saito, Award-winning science-fiction author Housuke Nojiri (Rocket Girls, Usurper of the Sun), Kazuhiko Hachiya (the artist best known for developing OpenSky’s life-size jet-assisted glider inspired by Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind), and TBS television announcer Jun Suzuki appeared at the event. During the event’s final session, over 100 rubber-band-powered flying-panties models were launched simultaneously.

The flying panties are pretty good at keeping air, so its not just their unique looks that make them worth while.

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A three year old from Tennessean, shot herself in the abdomen with a handgun and died;

Wilson County Sheriff Terry Ashe said the girl’s stepfather had taken out his gun to try to frighten off dogs that had been hanging around the home.

The child had been playing a Nintendo Wii video game, Ashe said. The game’s controller was shaped like a gun that looked very similar to the real handgun, which her stepfather had put on a table in the living room. Ashe said the girl pulled the gun off the table and it went off.

The girl’s parents were at home at the time of the shooting, the sheriff said.

It’s not know for sure if the child mistook the Wii gun for the real gun, but its possible. In any case why in the world would the parents leave a loaded gun in the presence of a 3 year old is beyond me.

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