When a giant earthquake and tsunami ripped through Japan last March, many husbands and fathers lost their families. Japan is now having to tackle a family crisis – one that is not accustomed to seeing and supporting single fathers.

In a country where gender roles are traditional, mothers tend to do the care-giving while fathers are in the workforce, bringing home money for the household. When Japanese men operate outside of this model, by choice or by chance, society doesn’t support them.

In November of 2009, a group called Single Father Japan was started to bring together and help these men living outside this gender norm. In June of 2011, Single Father Japan went to the Ministry of Health and Welfare to discuss an extension of bereavement pensions for men who lost family in the March 2011 earthquake. Evidently, these benefits are currently available to mothers.

And benefits are available to women because there are fewer in the workplace and typically have lower salaries than men. Oh snap!

If you want to read more, get your sauce on below.

Sauce: IPS

Move along, “Teen Mom!” On July 27, MTV UK and Ireland will start a series that follows six young fathers in the United Kingdom. The first-time fathers were all taped for three-months as they experienced the good and bad parts of fathering children young.

It’s interesting to see MTV choosing fathers over mothers in the UK. MTV’s “Teen Mom” series is popular in the United States – did they do some research that found the UK to be more interested in fathers? I got a hold of the PR people that deal with “Teen Dad” and unfortunately, I’ve been waiting for a reply all week about why fathers were chosen over mothers. All MTV Networks Europe could do was send me a press release describing the six dudes the show will follow.

The UK’s office for National Statistics says that last year, 41,325 teenage boys in England and Wales under the age of 18 became fathers. This helps make the UK the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.

U jelly, American fathers? The UK is far more interested in hearing a dad’s story than the US. Sucks to be us, bro.

In some of the least surprising news ever, scientists at Prague’s Charles University found that men are more likely to cheat on their partners if their fathers had.

InB4 “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and “like father like son.”

The article goes on and on, but let’s be honest – this isn’t news, right? Sons learn the ways of the world from their fathers. Just like the trend that teenage mothers tend to give birth to girls that end up being teenage mothers, cheating fathers tend to create cheating sons.

In other news, father athletes tend to make their kids into athletes. And in other news, alcoholic fathers tend to make their kids into alcoholics. And yet, in other news, Godzilla somehow created a Godzilla Junior.

The study somehow also found that women were relatively unaffected by their mothers’ cheating.

Sauce Daily Mail

Yahoo Sports has been a source of fatherhood articles for us lately, if that gives you a scary idea of the article pool we’re working with. But hey, it’s Friday and a holiday weekend…

Yahoo contributor Mark Paul presents for your consideration, the “best” father-son combos in the MLB.

I don’t know much about baseball, but I don’t know why the Ripken family didn’t make it on the list. I was pretty into Cal Ripken Jr. back when I was in little league. On the other hand, I pretty much used Sandy Alomar’s baseball cards to practice throwing cards like Gambit.

Sauce: Yahoo Sports

Yahoo Sports has a list up of the five best and worst fathers in sports movies. I don’t want to ruin the surprise about who’s on the list, but Ray Kinsella from “Field of Dreams” is on the Worst list. BAM! Take that, Costner!

Also, Rocky Balboa didn’t make the Worst list – though he seems to be on-par with Kinsella. Everything seems to work out for Rocky in every movie, but he sure mindscrewed his kid along the way.

Dr. Peggy Drexler’s got the most recent fatherhood-tagged post on ol’ HuffPo – and she brings up a complicated topic: whether fathers are able to affect daughters just by being around (and then scaling upward the better they are). Her argument is that – yes, fathers shape daughters’ lives, but that just saying it “lacks dimension.”

I think giving things dimensions sometimes cheapens nature’s finer designs.

England’s National Health Service released a publication for medical centers and hospitals outlining all the wacky and wonderful information that, well, they wanted to health care professionals to know. Here’s a zinger: “To help overcome anxieties about giving birth,” the manual states, “planned hospital visits can be valuable to give expectant parents, especially fathers/partners, practical information about such matters as car parking and cafés.”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to child birth in England, which I now can’t imagine without the Benny Hill theme song.

In case you missed Lisa Gates’ story “Do Men Need to Act Like Women to Succeed as Fathers,” give it a read. Gates talks about how – if you need a TLDR – fathers can’t catch a break. In related news, the font the Forbes uses is inappropriately large.