A Japanese sushi chef who served Kim Jong-Il claims North Korea’s current leader has no intention of waging war with the United States.

The chef, who goes by the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, told a Japanese tabloid magazine he was invited to Pyongyang last month for the first time in almost four years, and that Kim Jong-Un himself picked him up at the airport.

“I was surprised when I looked at the driver’s seat,” Fujimoto was quoted as saying in a piece written under his byline in the weekly Shukan Gendai.

“Field marshall Kim Jong-Un himself was driving, he’d come to check up on me.” Fujimoto, one of the few non-Koreans to have met the young leader, said that he arrived in Pyongyang on April 12 to have dinner with Kim, who greeted him with a hug and asked about feelings in Japan towards the secretive state.

Fujimoto, who is said to carry business cards emblazoned with the words ‘Kim Jong-Il’s chef’, reportedly replied “with blunt honesty: it’s terrible. Since the start of the year there have been nuclear and missile tests.” Kim, whose plans to expand North Korea’s nuclear arsenal were formally endorsed this week at Pyongyang’s first ruling party congress in nearly 40 years, offered a conciliatory response.

“The reason we launch rockets and missiles is the United States,” the 33-year-old ‘supreme leader’ said, according to the report.

“When we begin talks with the Americans, they soon make unacceptable demands with difficult conditions. Although our relations with the United States remain perilous, I have no intention of starting a war,” Fujimoto claims Kim added.

Fujimoto, who has a 24-year-old daughter by his Pyongyang-resident North Korean wife, also revealed that Kim had been on a recent drinking binge.

“I emptied 10 bottles a few days ago and my stomach feels a little bad,” Kim said at a dinner attended by some 20 senior North Korean officials, according to Fujimoto.

“Although maybe one glass won’t do any harm.” Fujimoto, who claims to have been jet-skiing and motorbiking with Kim Jong-Il, lived in Pyongyang in the service of the first family for ten years.

He says he fled the regime during a shopping trip to Japan in 2001, and has since made his living from media appearances, lectures and writings about his days in the isolated country.

Fujimoto only ever appears in public wearing aviator sunglasses and a bandana, precautions he insists are necessary to shield his identity, and says he wears a bulletproof vest in Japan, fearing for his safety.

Manila – At least 10 people died across the Philippines in election day violence on Monday, as gunmen attacked polling stations, ambushed vehicles and stole vote counting machines, police said.

However authorities described the violence as isolated incidents and that the overall conduct of the elections – which will see tens of millions of people cast their votes for president and 18,000 other positions – was peaceful.

In the worst attack, seven people were shot dead in an ambush before dawn in Rosario, a town just outside of Manila known for political violence, Chief Inspector Jonathan del Rosario, spokesman for a national police election monitoring task force, told AFP.

In Guindulungan, a small impoverished town in the strife-torn southern Philippine province of Maguindanao, where warlord-politicians have their own private armies, a voter was shot dead inside a polling station, police said.

A bystander was also killed when a grenade was launched at a market in Cotabato, a major city in the south that neighbours Maguindanao, as people were casting their votes, police said.

In the nearby town of Sultan Kudarat, a stronghold of the nation’s biggest Muslim rebel group, 20 men forced their way into a voting centre and carted away voting machines, police chief Senior Inspector Esmael Madin said.

In the northern province of Abra, infamous for politicians killing each other, armed supporters of rival mayoral candidates shot at each other, leaving one person dead and two wounded, provincial police spokeswoman Marcy Grace Marron told AFP by telephone.

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AFP, Reuters

Police arrested two men and two women with guns after the fighting in the mountainous town of Lagayan, 350 kilometres (217 miles) north of Manila, Marron added.

Still, elections commissioner Rowena Guanzon said the violence would not impact the result, noting they had taken place in known “hot spots” where extra security forces were in place.

Military spokesman Colonel Noel Detoyato also voiced little alarm.

“There are isolated incidents. (They) had minimal effect on the conduct of the elections,” he told AFP.

Fifteen people had been confirmed killed in pre-election violence since the start of the year, according to the national police poll monitoring taskforce.

Political violence is a longstanding problem in the Philippines, fuelled by lax gun laws, corrupt security forces and political “dynasties” that often have their security forces.

Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking mayor of southern Davao city, is the favourite to win the presidential elections after campaigning on a platform of killing thousands of criminals that critics say will incite more violence.

Tokyo – A Japanese artist who makes objects shaped like her vagina was convicted Monday after a high-profile obscenity trial, in a decision likely to reignite accusations of heavy-handed censorship.

The Tokyo District Court slapped Megumi Igarashi with a 400,000 yen ($3,700) fine, but the penalty was half what prosecutors had demanded as she was also cleared of one of several charges.

Igarashi was arrested two years ago for trying to raise funds online to pay for the construction of a kayak by disseminating a coded 3D image of her genitals that would allow users to make copies.

While Japan has a multi-billion-dollar pornography industry, actual depictions of genitalia are banned and the artist was charged in July 2014.

Igarashi who calls herself Rokude Nashiko – slang that loosely translates as “reprobate child” – was released days later following a legal appeal and after thousands of people signed a petition demanding her freedom.

But several months on, Tokyo police arrested her again for distributing “obscene” items – displaying decorated plaster figures moulded in the shape of her genitals and sending and selling CD-ROMs containing the computer code.

Vagina kayak artist arrested in Japan

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Reuters, AFP

On Monday, the court convicted Igarashi for distributing material that was deemed obscene.

Igarashi and her supporters scoffed at the fact her genitals were the focus of a court case.

“I am innocent because neither the data for female genitals nor my art works shaped like female genitals are obscene,” she told the court last year.

Prosecutors, who did not ask for jail time, had called for Igarashi to be fined 800,000 yen.

Japan’s prolific pornography industry caters to all imaginable tastes, but tough obscenity laws ban the showing of actual genitalia, which normally appear pixellated or blacked out.

Images of male and female genitals can be found throughout the country, however.

Last month, revellers carried giant phalluses through the streets of Kawasaki, near Tokyo, to worship the penis and pray for fertility in an annual festival.