The result:
Japanese pop group The Keeper Girls on mission to help wombat Fuku find mate
An all-girl Japanese pop group has taken on the task of raising funds to help a lonely Tasmanian wombat find new love.
Fuku the 11-year-old wombat is originally from Tasmania and has lived at the Satsukiyama zoo in Osaka since 2007.
He moved to Japan with his intended breeding partner Ayaha, but in 2010 she died after a long illness.
Satsukiyama zoo's deputy curator Kozo Sejima thought it was time Fuku found a new love...
That's where pop group The Keeper Girls came to the rescue.
The all-girl group partnered up with the zoo to raise the estimated $AU50,000 required to transport a female wombat from Australia.
In an effort to do this, they wrote a song about the lonely wombat and planned to perform and sell their CD and merchandise...
"I decided to become an idol as I heard about the crisis at the zoo and wanted to do something for the city and zoo," Hamada said.
OK. If the clue isn't seen in the very name of the unit "The Keeper Girls," it takes 30 seconds in wikipedia and on their homepage to work out that they are employed by the zoo as a PR stunt.
I do like the idea that you can become an idol just by deciding to.
So, a taxpayer funded journalist is either doing zero research and just copy-pasting a PR screed because it fits in with the whacky Japan image and is a heartwarming story, or she knows what the game is and is complicit in preserving the presentation of the whacky Japan image to her readers, together with a constructed heartwarming story. Either case makes her a crap journo.
I do not recommend that you view the video in the link.
Always nice to see the spread of one sentence paragraphs.
