Month: June 2015

by

Curb Your (Sexual) Enthusiasm

http://theothermccain.com/2015/06/29/curb-your-sexual-enthusiasm/

 

In case you haven’t noticed, feminists are (a) trying to increase the number of rape accusations by (b) changing the concept of “consent” in such a way that (c) any unhappiness with a sexual encounter justifies a woman claiming that it was coerced or otherwise less than fully consensual, as part of (d) an obvious effort to make heterosexual activity less common, if not altogether illegal.

People think I’m joking or exaggerating when I refer to “Feminists Against Heterosexuality,” but it is becoming difficult to ignore how the anti-male ideology of feminist gender theory is reflected in “rape culture” discourse. Consider what one web site calls “101 stuff about consent”:

  • Sexual consent is an active ongoing process that involves free, non-coerced choice and shared responsibility about when, whether, and what to do sex-wise.
  • Consent has to be clear, explicit, communicated well and checked in on a lot.
  • Enthusiastic consent is mandatory before engaging in anything of even a mildly sexual nature.

Have these lunatics consulted any sane adults about how normal sex actually happens in the real world? Or do you see how, because “feminist gender theory . . . requires the de-normalization of everything,” this insistence on “active” and “explicit” consent is part of an agenda that seeks to inspire impressionable young people with a paranoid hostility toward normal sexual behavior? Note well that enthusiastic consent must be obtained before even “mildly sexual” activity and it is “mandatory” that there be an “explicit” negotiation process toward a sort of verbal contract as part of this “active ongoing process.” Yet any normal person who has ever had normal sex knows quite well that if two people are genuinely “enthusiastic,” no such negotiation is necessary. It is an insult to the intelligence of any sexually experienced adult to pretend that this is how sex normally happens, and it is disturbing to think that young people are being lectured in this manner.

Do young people no longer have desires, instincts, urges? Have words like “passion” and “seduction” and “romance” lost all meaning? Does anyone expect hormone-addled teenagers parking in the moonlight on Lovers Lane to conduct their adolescent trysts like diplomats negotiating a trade agreement? Is there no longer any expectation or hope for spontaneousmagic in human sexual behavior? What kind of dingbats are giving kids this wretched advice about sex?

QueerTips
The best queer sex ed class you were never offered.
Run by the kickbutt people of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes’ Out For Health initiative.

This is a Planned Parenthood initiative in upstate New York, with offices in Tompkins County, Chemung County, Schuyler County and Steuben County — an area in and around Ithaca, site of Cornell University. Is anyone surprised to find this perverse “Queer Tips” nonsense being promoted in the vicinity of an Ivy League campus?

In the 21st century, where elite universities are hives of LGBT activism, we would be shocked to learn that any student at Cornell was interested in normal sex. Cornell students are highly intelligent, and only an extremely stupid student would attempt to engage in normal sex on an elite campus in the current climate of “rape culture” hysteria. A heterosexual male can expect to be expelled from Cornell if a partner claims rape two monthsafter their drunken hookup, on the basis of an administrative tribunal in which he is deliberately deprived of the due-process rights that the Constitution guarantees any common criminal.

Ah, but he is not a common criminal! He is a heterosexual male on a university campus, where heterosexuality is seen as inherently oppressive to women, and males are denounced as oppressors. And where, of course,Feminism Is Queer as I explained:

 

[T]his is not “fringe” feminism or “extreme” feminism. This is simply what feminism means for university students in the 21st century. Feminism is Queer is a 2010 textbook whose author, Mimi Marinucci, is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University.

 

If anyone wishes to argue that I’ve dredged up an example of feminism that is not “mainstream,” let them make their arguments to the legislators and other officials who sanction the propagation of this ideology in America’s universities. Let the defenders of “mainstream” feminism examine the syllabi, textbooks and faculties of Women’s Studies programs and see what students are actually being taught and by whom.

If anyone is skeptical about this agenda, let them turn their attention to“Introduction to Feminist Theory” as taught at the University of Buffalo, where a student was overheard to exclaim: “Every time I walk out of this class I just become more sexually confused!”

You cannot blame teenage college students for this kind of confusion, when they are being bombarded with with radical ideology. Sexual confusion is everywhere, so that Planned Parenthood — a taxpayer-funded organization most people think of as a provider of contraceptives — now offers “QueerTips” on how to negotiate “enthusiastic” consentbefore doing “anything of even a mildly sexual nature.” Evidently people in upstate New York are so stupid they don’t even know how to fornicate without advice from these self-appointed “experts.”

What is being lost is the voice of common sense. Feminist ideologues, gay activists, legal authorities, education bureaucrats, academic theories — these are the people controlling the discourse about sexual behavior, and all of them in one way or another have their own personal and political axes to grind. The voices of normal people happily leading normal lives, and who hope their children can also grow up to find this kind of normal happiness, are silenced and marginalized because common sense is dismissed or derogated by the cultural intelligentsia. Remarking on the effect to enact the “yes means yes” or “affirmative consent” standard as legislation, Judith Shulevitz of the New York Times observes that “criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores”:

It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. . . . It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication. . . .
“If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

 

What neither Shulevitz nor Gertner nor any of the other intellectual critics of “affirmative consent” are willing to acknowledge that it seems specifically targeted at punishing heterosexual males. The feminist purpose, we can perceive, is to make the risk of a rape accusation so high that men will become afraid of sexual involvement with women under any circumstances. Already on most campuses, any male who expresses sexual interest in a woman is subject to the accusation of “harassment.” Should he actually attempts to initiate romantic activity — a kiss or a hug — this can be construed as “sexual assault” if the woman finds his advances “unwelcome” or “unwanted.” Yet even if she welcomes his interest and appears to be a willing participant in sexual activity, the man is still at risk that she will afterwards decide she was raped. Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit against Columbia University argues quite plausibly that Emma Sulkowicz was in love with Nungesser and that she falsely accused him of rape as an act of spiteful revenge because he was not interested in a romantic relationship with her.

Many young women are now full of such insane rage against males — really, you need to read my Feminist Tumblr series –that it is difficult to imagine why any boy smart enough to get into college would dare so much as speak to any of his female classmates, much less try to have sex with one of them. This climate of sexual fear and hostility has been deliberately incited by campus feminists to enhance their own power and influence, as well as to create a political issue that can be exploited by Democrats. One would have to be absurdly naïve to think it a coincidence that “rape culture” emerged as a topic of controversy at the same time Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign began gearing up for 2016.

Love is dead. Feminists killed it.

Having made it impossible that men and women could ever love each other — for how can the helpless victim of male supremacy be expected tolove her oppressor? — feminists are now determined that sex should also be eradicated. Nevertheless, even while the feminist crusade to abolish collegiate heterosexuality reaches a fever pitch, students are being told it is “mandatory” to negotiate “enthusiastic consent.”

Somewhere at a university this fall, a boy and a girl will step outside a crowded frat house party and embrace beneath the autumn moonlight. She will nod her assent to his suggestion that they should pursue the matter further. Then the young man will look into her eyes and say, “Well, we could go back to my place. However, before we do, the university’s affirmative consent policy requires me to tell you exactly what I’m going to do to that hot little body of yours . . .”

That should make for an interesting conversation. Who knows? They might fall in love. It’s not illegal yet. Not even at Cornell.

 

 

by

Diet handed 1.7 million signatures of opponents to security bills

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/06/30/national/diet-handed-1-7-million-signatures-opponents-security-bills/#.VZHluflViko

A Japanese civic group led by scholars, lawyers and journalists submitted signatures collected from 1,658,955 citizens who support its anti-war agenda to both chambers of the Diet on Monday.

The Anti-War Committee of 1,000 seeks to collect signatures from 3 million people by the end of July.

At a press conference in Tokyo, author Makoto Sataka, one of the group’s leaders, said, “I believe an increasing number of people will come to think that a set of national security bills sponsored by the government are problematic.”

The group is calling on the government to cancel a Cabinet decision last July on the reinterpretation of the Constitution for allowing the country to exercise the right to collective self-defense and to promote diplomatic policies and efforts to help solve conflicts based on the spirit of the pacifist charter, and not to establish laws or sign treaties enabling Japan to join wars.

Between January and May, the group sought signatures from people who support these arguments across the country.

Sataka criticized Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, Komeito, saying, “The ruling camp completely lacks a stance of listening to public opinions.”

At the same press conference, Hosei University professor Jiro Yamaguchi noted, “Abe has said that he had decided to extend the current regular session of the Diet in order to ensure thorough discussions on the security bills, but no substantial debates have been taking place.

“The government and the ruling camp are to blame for the lack of full-fledged debates,” he added.

The 150-day Diet session, originally scheduled to end last Wednesday, was extended by 95 days until Sept. 27 as the government and the ruling bloc aim to ensure the passage of the security bills, which are designed to expand the scope of the Self-Defense Forces’ activities abroad.

Last year, the civic group submitted about 2.57 million signatures opposing the July 2014 Cabinet decision to the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors.

by

Abolish Marriage: Let’s really get the government out of our bedrooms.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/readme/2003/07/abolish_marriage.html

JULY 2 2003

Critics and enthusiasts of Lawrence v. Texas, last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating state anti-sodomy laws, agree on one thing: The next argument is going to be about gay marriage. As Justice Scalia noted in his tart dissent, it follows from the logic of Lawrence. Mutually consenting sex with the person of your choice in the privacy of your own home is now a basic right of American citizenship under the Constitution. This does not mean that the government must supply it or guarantee it. But the government cannot forbid it, and the government also should not discriminate against you for choosing to exercise a basic right of citizenship. Offering an institution as important as marriage to male-female couples only is exactly this kind of discrimination. Or so the gay rights movement will now argue. Persuasively, I think.

Opponents of gay rights will resist mightily, although they have been in retreat for a couple of decades. General anti-gay sentiments are now considered a serious breach of civic etiquette, even in anti-gay circles. The current line of defense, which probably won’t hold either, is between social toleration of homosexuals and social approval of homosexuality. Or between accepting the reality that people are gay, even accepting that gays are people, and endorsing something called “the gay agenda.” Gay marriage, the opponents will argue, would cross this line. It would make homosexuality respectable and, worse, normal. Gays are welcome to exist all they want, and to do their inexplicable thing if they must, but they shouldn’t expect a government stamp of approval.

It’s going to get ugly. And then it’s going to get boring. So, we have two options here. We can add gay marriage to the short list of controversies—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty—that are so frozen and ritualistic that debates about them are more like Kabuki performances than intellectual exercises. Or we can think outside the box. There is a solution that ought to satisfy both camps and may not be a bad idea even apart from the gay-marriage controversy.

That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I’ve got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let ’em. If you and your government aren’t implicated, what do you care?

In fact, there is nothing to stop any of this from happening now. And a lot of it does happen. But only certain marriages get certified by the government. So, in the United States we are about to find ourselves in a strange situation where the principal demand of a liberation movement is to be included in the red tape of a government bureaucracy. Having just gotten state governments out of their bedrooms, gays now want these governments back in. Meanwhile, social-conservative anti-gays, many of them Southerners, are calling on the government in Washington to trample states’ rights and nationalize the rules of marriage, if necessary, to prevent gays from getting what they want. The Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, responded to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision by endorsing a constitutional amendment, no less, against gay marriage.

If marriage were an entirely private affair, all the disputes over gay marriage would become irrelevant. Gay marriage would not have the official sanction of government, but neither would straight marriage. There would be official equality between the two, which is the essence of what gays want and are entitled to. And if the other side is sincere in saying that its concern is not what people do in private, but government endorsement of a gay “lifestyle” or “agenda,” that problem goes away, too.

Yes, yes, marriage is about more than sleeping arrangements. There are children, there are finances, there are spousal job benefits like health insurance and pensions. In all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring. It would be possible to write rules that measure the real factors at stake and leave marriage out of the matter. Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do. None of this would be easy. Marriage functions as what lawyers call a “bright line,” which saves the trouble of trying to measure a lot of amorphous factors. You’re either married or you’re not. Once marriage itself becomes amorphous, who-gets-the-kids and who-gets-health-care become trickier questions.

So, sure, there are some legitimate objections to the idea of privatizing marriage. But they don’t add up to a fatal objection. Especially when you consider that the alternative is arguing about gay marriage until death do us part.

Michael Kinsley is a columnist, and the founding editor of Slate.

by

“HARPING ON: The Hypocrisy and Lies of Randi Harper, Part 1”

“Set yourself on fire.”

“You’ve made your bed, now get fucked in it.”

“Fuck your feelings.”

To most, these will sound like the words of an online troll, or at the very least someone with what in the 1990s we used to call “anger management issues.” And that’s probably an accurate assessment.

Yet these are not occasional, one-off outbursts, but rather part of a pattern of behaviour from perhaps the most darkly fascinating person currently causing grief on social media. They are the words of Randi Harper, an activist who runs a charity set up to prevent online abuse. Yes, you read that correctly.

This is the story, in three parts, of how Harper rose to prominence, how she has gotten away with such outrageous behaviour for so long while maintaining friendships with influential media commentators, activists, and journalists, and how she treats those who disagree with her far-left, hardline feminist politics.

It is the product of dozens of interviews with friends, former colleagues, and objects of Harper’s vindictive social media crusades. Almost all of them refused to speak on the record for fear of reprisals from Harper and her band of social media supporters.

The fact that so few people are willing to speak out about this new wave of progressive trolls perhaps tells its own story.

Our interviews reveal a deeply troubled, hateful, and damaged human being in desperate need of help. They also expose just how tolerant to hatefulness the authoritarian left-wing establishment in America has become, provided the abuser in question has the right sort of opinions.

“Randi Harper is probably the person doing the most harm to the cause of feminism on the internet today,” a well-known progressive journalist confided last week, on condition of anonymity. “Ordinarily we could dismiss her as a mess. But she has become a damaging force.”

Harper herself apparently believes she has something to hide: shortly after being notified that this story would appear, she swapped the names of her two Twitter accounts,@freebsdgirl (on which the majority of her hateful invective had been published) and@randileeharper. She has since made the @freebsdgirl private so that only users she has approved can see her past tweets.

more at http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/29/harping-on-the-hypocrisy-and-lies-of-twitters-most-notorious-anti-abuse-activist-randi-harper-part-1/

by

Lack of venues drives artists elsewhere

http://thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=4&art_id=158553&sid=44752635&con_type=1&d_str=20150630&fc=2

The lack of a large concert venue as well as the limited availability of existing venues is affecting Hong Kong’s appeal to international artists, according to Alan Ridgeway, president of the International and Emerging Markets section of Live Nation Entertainment.

“It is becoming a less competitive market compared to some of the others that have developed in Asia,” Ridgeway said, giving as an example Manila, which has three arenas, with the newest having a capacity of 50,000.

He said although Hong Kong is a market that interests artists, the limited options are driving them to places with more concert-friendly infrastructure like Japan, Singapore and the mainland.

“To reach a certain level of revenue in a much smaller-sized venue, ticket prices tend to be higher than you would ideally like them to be,” he said.

“The scale and production of these shows are getting bigger and bigger … it puts additional demands on the venue,” Ridgeway said.

He cited the example of a concert by K-pop sensation Big Bang that featured a catwalk, further reducing the number of sellable tickets.

The Coliseum in Hung Hom is usually booked 12 months in advance and the primary function of AsiaWorld Expo as an exhibition center limits its potential to hold concerts, he said.

Florence Chan Suk-fan, chairwoman of the Performing Industry Association, said the government should consider accommodating concerts as well as sports events in the proposed Kai Tak stadium.

Chan said, so far, the PIA has not had discussions with the government on the design of the stadium and she hopes that better communication will help meet the demands of stakeholders.

The stadium will have a capacity of 50,000, complete with a retractable roof as well as a 5,000-seat sports ground and a 4,000-seat indoor sports center.

Avex International Holdings president Kenji Kitatani said international artists are keen to hold their shows in Hong Kong because of its history, culture, security and economic scale.

by

Youth pastor charged in sexual assault of teen girl

it’s always one of these cultic Pentecostal, charismatics, born again, rapture ready, right wing evangelical types not real churches like Anglican, Lutheran, eastern Orthodox, Coptic etc. I can’t tell

http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/youth-pastor-charged-in-sexual-assault-of-teen-girl-1.2445908

TORONTO – A youth pastor working at a Toronto church is charged in the alleged sexual exploitation and sexual assault of a teen girl.

Police say the incidents took place between Jan. 1, 2012 and March 31 of this year.

The alleged victim is now 17.

Police say the accused worked at the Keys of the Kingdom Ministries Life in the Spirit Fellowship Church in the city’s northwest.

Jan Rober Ostonal, 35, of Mississauga, is charged with three counts of sexual exploitation and three of sexual assault.

He is due in court Aug. 6.

by

EXCLUSIVE: Rachel Dolezal was raised in a cult-like home

Rachel Dolezal was raised in a cult-like Protestant home by a hard-line father who ordered her not to read books and spoke to her in tongues.

The race faker’s dad Larry and mother Ruthanne were former hippies turned evangelists who believed that Christians could see into the future and miraculously heal each other, according to her brother Joshua’s memoir.

Larry read an entire chapter of the Bible before each meal, even if it meant their food went cold, and refused to buy a TV for the house.

Joshua claims that he and his sister were both born at home in Troy, Montana, and delivered by their father who put on the birth certificate that Jesus Christ was the sole witness.

He also says that his father’s take on The Bible was filled with apocalyptic doom and he would tell them that even close friends would ‘deceive every one his neighbor, and they will not speak the truth’

The account is the fullest insight yet into the mind of Rachel, 37, who has been forced to resign from her post as leader of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington amid the row about her posing as a black women for years even though she is white.

It also puts the spotlight onto Ruthanne and Larry, who have until now claimed they are innocent victims of their daughter’s ‘malicious’ lies.

They claim that Rachel is trying to ‘destroy her biological family’ and that she has been lying about her identity for years.

A different story is laid out in ‘Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging’ in which Joshua, 39, tells how he gradually moved away from his family’s unforgiving beliefs and found his own identity.

He is now an associate English professor at Central College in Pella, Iowa and did not respond to an email asking for comment.

In the memoir he says that his mother was a child of the 60s and that at 15 she was learning Joan Baez songs on her guitar and putting daisies on her dress – until she found God.

His father spent his youth working at a lumber mill in Libby, Montana when he met up with an old friend who introduced him to the Bible.

Larry moved to Seattle where he lived in a commune and one night when he was meditating upstairs one day he ‘felt a peace steal over him’.

Joshua writes: ‘Suddenly his lips were moving and he could hear himself whispering in words he did not understand.

‘Then he knew what it was and he heard a voice again saying: ‘I’m filling you with my Holy Spirit now, and then I will teach you about it in the days ahead’.

‘Now when he opened the Bible the words came alive. He had a testimony, a story to tell…he didn’t care if people mocked him for a fool or just lowered their heads and shouldered buy. He believed.’

Joshua described that when his father spoke in tongues in front of him it sounded like ‘jibberish’.

On another occasion Joshua writes: ‘Glancing through his (Larry’s) Bible once I was surprised to find nearly every passage highlighted or underscored multiple times, with occasional exclamatory notes.

‘It was the palimpsest of his mind as a much younger man, when he wrote my mother twice a day from Seattle, where he had begun speaking on tongues.

‘I have seen photos of him then with shaggy hair, a purple silk shirt with pearl snaps, and sandals on his feet’.

Home life in the Dolezal family revolved around God 24 hours a day and Joshua’s memories include crowds of people hushed in prayer in his living room.

He describes the their church of 60 people, the Troy Christian Fellowship, as a place of ‘loud preaching and tambourines jangling’ where worshippers swayed with their arms in the air as the Lord’s spirit apparently moved them.

Joshua recalls how during one fire and brimstone sermon a preacher told them: ‘The love of a father is a jealous love, jealous for its own flesh and blood the way God is jealous for his chosen ones, ready to let loose his wrath on them if they waver in what they know is the truth’.

His parents saw their home as a ‘refuge from the outside world’ and his father banned television apart from during baseball season when he would borrow and old black and white TV set to watch games.

more at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3125638/Rachel-Dolezal-raised-cult-like-home-father-spoke-tongues-believed-miracle-healing-siblings-banned-watching-TV-reading-books-brother-claims.html

by

Alleged Canadian Hussein Bassam Abdallah pleads guilty to numerous charges associated with alleged Religion of Peace

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Man-accused-by-Israel-of-plotting-Hezbollah-backed-attack-pleads-guilty-in-Cyprus-407477?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Cyprus jailed a member of the armed wing of Hezbollah for six years on Monday after he pleaded guilty to charges of stockpiling explosives to attack Jewish targets abroad.

Hussein Bassam Abdallah, 26, who has dual Canadian and Lebanese nationality, was arrested in late May after Cypriot authorities found 8.2 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a potential explosive, in the basement of a house in the coastal city of Larnaca.

Abdallah pleaded guilty to charges of possessing explosives, conspiracy to commit a crime, aiding and abetting a terrorist organization and participation in a terrorist group, the state Cyprus News Agency (CNA) reported.

Authorities believe that the ammonium nitrate had been stockpiled in Cyprus since around 2011 and held in the basement of a home in a residential neighborhood of Larnaca.

In a statement to police, Abdallah said the fertilizer would have been used to attack Jewish or Israeli interests in Cyprus, CNA reported.

ISRAELI TOURISTS

Cyprus authorities have not speculated about the probable use or target, but the island is popular with Israeli tourists arriving by ferry and there is a synagogue in Larnaca.

Abdallah regularly traveled to Cyprus to check on the ammonium nitrate. His latest instructions before his arrest on May 27 were to find a warehouse to store it, and his handler gave him a forged British passport, state prosecutor Polina Eftyvoulou told Cyprus’s criminal court.

Fertilizer-based bombs remain the explosive of choice for many militant groups across the world and have been used in some of the most destructive attacks in recent years.

They were used in the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 and a year later in attacks on the HSBC bank headquarters and the British Consulate in Istanbul in which 32 people died.

“One kilo of this mixed with fuel can produce the equivalent of 0.82 kilos of TNT,” Eftyvoulou was quoted as saying.

by

METI plans bilingual app that scans sake labels

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/06/28/national/meti-plans-bilingual-app-scans-sake-labels/#.VZBpdflViko

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to develop a free smartphone app that scans sake labels to provide information in Japanese and English.

The app will display such data as alcohol content, the variety of rice used and recommended drinking temperatures, as well as information on where the breweries are located. It will also display videos about the sake-brewing process.

The move is part of the Cool Japan campaign, a government effort to promote Japanese culture overseas. The ministry plans to release the app in October.

The app will initially be tested on about 10 brands of sake, with coverage slated to expand in fiscal 2016 beginning next April, and beyond. The ministry hopes to eventually cover 1,000 or more of the 1,700 to 1,900 brands available in Japan, officials said.

Takakuwa Art Printing, which prints about 70 percent of the sake labels in Japan, will cooperate with the ministry in providing the data.

According to the National Tax Agency, sake exports in 2014 rose about 10 percent to ¥1.15 billion compared with the previous year, breaking the record for the fifth year in a row.

While there are no standards governing the use of sake labels or definitive translations of sake-related words. The ministry hopes that the app will address these issues and help raise sales overseas.

In another effort to promote overseas sales, the tax agency plans to define only sake made in Japan from domestically grown rice as “Japanese sake.”