kohakuebisu comments

Good. Then all Sanseito supporters should start working the Konbinis and construction work. Go ahead and eliminate the need for foreign workers.

Exactly.

This is not like Europe, where foreign policy disasters have destablized Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran (with sanctions), Libya, .... and created millions of asylum seekers and economic migrants headed Europe's way. Japan only takes in people to fill worker shortages. Foreign labourers are labouring and contributing to the economy.

I would be more convinced of this being a terrible problem if media showed me more than the same old three or four locations in photos. This one used here is right next to Kiyomizudera and was just as crowded/lively in the 1990s. Essentially no Kyoto locals will have to pass this spot on their way to work or school.

I've not been this century, but in Arashiyama, all you had to do to get away from the vast crowds (of Japanese) was walk about 200m upriver from the bridge. Walk further outside autumn leaves season and you'd be on your own.

Depends what you mean by "over the years". Go back far enough and you have James Brown advertising Cup Noodles to the sound of Sex Machine ("Misoppa!") or Madness giving it "Honda! Honda! Honda! Honda!".

Compared to them, recent ones are all terrible.

The majority of the crews on Japanese merchant ships, including their captains, are foreigners. There is a shortage, as in many other industries, of nationals for the work.

Ships are the dirty underbelly of the economy. Many ships won't be registered in Japan. If they are, it'll be for taxpayer subsidies. The crews will be anyone who will do it as cheap as possible.

Recruit the employment agency reckon there will be a labour shortage of 10 million by 2035. What we've seen so far is child's play. It's going to hit pretty much every sector of the economy. People may fear, dislike or resent foreigners all they like, but using foreigners is increasingly going to be the only way to get stuff done.

The press seem desparate to make Sanseito a thing. Just like the BBC did with Nigel Farage. He would be polling 4% for the Brexit Party but the BBC would put him on high profile shows like Question Time and Newsnight without fail every month. Gotta keep the people rage viewing or rage clicking.

Its the same with the press reporting everything Trump says on Twitter as headline news.

If anyone knows what the "get your extra free g@ijin welfare" office is called in Japanese, please let me know and I'll pop in some time this week. In nearly 35 years here, I've not been able to find it.

I'd have been tempted to buy a season pass if I lived locally. It was 24,000 if bought early. Multiple short visits with pavilions all reserved in advance sounds like the best way to do it. You could also avoid peak hour travel to and from the site.

Its okay to count season ticket folks multiple times by visits, but counting staff visits, even if commonplace, is a bit sneaky.

Dinii’s Oshi Support allows customers to look at a list of profiles for the restaurant’s waitstaff and use it to select an extra payment to be given to the server of their choice.

So you can pay someone who didn't actually serve you? Wtf do you need a server's "profile" for? Just gimme some better food than we can make ourselves. This simple task is beyond many restaurants.

Our daughter (19) works at a hotel. If it starts listing her and her colleagues up as pretty things to throw money at, I'll suggest she leaves and gets another job at a place that does not encourage stalker-like behaviour. If you are going to list up your servers, why not also make them wear low cut tops and write "Hooters" on them? If her looks or demeanour are going to be treated as an asset, she might as well pour drinks in a snakku and get double the pay of waitressing.

Kura are designed as storehouses, and for that reason do not face the light like a kominka does. They are almost always very dark inside and are usually sold as accommodation using nighttime photos of moody lighting. Modern digital cameras have auto exposure, so they make interiors look way brighter than they are in reality. Natural light won't matter if its one night on holiday, but I wouldn't want to live in one.

This is great. The sea is a hard taskmaster.

32 million yen of Uniqlo clothes will physically be a lot of stuff. Its 6500 items that cost 5000 yen, but likely a larger number of smaller items. That is an industrial level operation.

Ratched usually gets a mention in discussions of the greatest villian in movie history. Fletcher's contribution to the movie is huge and is a big omission from the article.

The Kesey novel is very psychedelic, has the Chief as the narrator, and is better than the film.

If hot weather continues, rice prices are unlikely to fall. Hot weather affecting the harvest is what happened last year.

That's before La Nina would happen though. What La Nina tends to mean is a snowy winter. Snow is a complex phenomenon though, and this past winter brought record snowfall to many places in spite on not being La Nina. The three years before all were.

I flew Heathrow-Haneda in April. The flight was 40% full and had few Japanese or re-entry lane folk onboard.

If ANA need more customers for international flights, they should lower their prices for Japan based folks. Not give foreigners bargain basement fares for domestic flights as an extra. I bet the taxpayer is subsidizing this one way or another.

For me the very age of the place is a great part of the attraction.

Yes, but you are talking about kominka, old folk homes.

The question posed here is actually about akiya, empty or abandoned homes. It depends on the area, but most akiya in Japan as a whole are not old folk homes. They are Showa era houses. A look at akiya banks across the country will confirm this. Most akiya have no ye olde charm because they were built in 1950 or later.

Conversely, many kominka are not akiya. They are still standing because people live in them and maintain them. The beauty of a kominka is completely independent of whether the building has ever been empty.

We live in a kominka. It wasn't lived in for maybe a year when we bought it, but I honestly can't remember the details on that because it wasn't important to me. I can't remember if anyone specifically used the word "akiya" about it. There was no online hype about akiya twenty years ago and no cool points for saying "we bought an akiya".

It's not only that he now only has two choices, he can move into housing that will be built for residents of homes who have been demolished, and after two years, he needs to pay rent, which could be expensive

My town built about twenty units of social housing for earthquake victims. The closest to us are 300m away. They are 70 square meter 3dk single story houses. They're insulated and are pretty nice. The rent is set by the town, the info is publically available, and is 30000 yen a month unless you're on a doctor's salary. I heard they cost over 30 million yen each to build.

I don't know who is telling your friend that the rent will be "expensive" but it is likely BS. My town is notorious for being kechi when it comes to social spending, young people move to neighbouring towns for better child support, so the treatment of earthquake victims will be according to national guidelines, not any generosity on the part of where we live. My town won't even fund a school bus.

The offending comment was "un-yoku Noto....", so the English translation is accurate.

Many lessons have been learnt from Noto, but it is clunky and insensitive to suggest that the people of Noto suffering has been fortunate for the rest of us. The luck we all want is for nothing seismic to happen for an unusually long time.

The computer system before Horizon was also faulty and caused errors which the Post Office knew about and was happy to blame on users, just as it did with Horizon.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366570413/Controversial-Post-Office-Capture-system-was-developed-in-house

The Post Office bosses, and any politicians who know about this, should be in prison.

Some folk spied a man in the buff

Who then disappeared, in a puff

The cops couldn't find

Till they looked down the shrine

And saw him still flashing his stuff

Good for these workers and I hope they become affordable with time.

You can buy jackets with fans in Workman and in most home centers. They work off any mobile battery for your phone.

I'd happily stay out of my garden but I have to keep watering it. I've got hoses, so its not physical work, just a pain. 2.7C above average for the last 30 days here. It also seems much sunnier than 10 years ago. We're in the mountains and I used to associate summer with haziness, not full sun beating down.

A decent chunk of this is folk with 3 million yen plus Hi Aces, or motor homes that cost more. It is not folk who "cannot afford accommodation". It is folk who've spent other folks' hotel budget on an extra expensive vehicle.

We used to go camping at Japanese campsites a lot when my kids were younger and I'm pretty sure we had the cheapest car and the cheapest tent. Half the people there had a Snowpeak tent that cost 150,000, plus a tarp, plus all manner of Japanese Coleman or Snow Peak chairs and cooking stuff. Many 500,000 yen plus setups, that would be packed away into a widebody HiAce with expensive alloys and an 100,000 yen plus Terzo rooftop box. If its your hobby, I'm delighted for folk to spend what they like. Spend two million yen on a rare guitar pedal or limited edition 40cm high Gundam for all I care. Just don't try to justify it with some spiel about saving money. Thrift is something else altogether.

Israel is an active platform for ethnic cleansing and genocide, not a hypothetical one.

Slap a 25% digital services tax on Apple, Amazon and Google. Nobody else. Do it tomorrow.

This "problem" will go away. I guarantee it.

One theory is that nature has equilibria, but they are all unstable, meaning they can go off in weird directions when disturbed without returning to something we may see as "normal" nature. This would mean you could remove humans from a settled area, but it would not return to the pre-human state. It would likely head off in some distorted-by-humans direction. Useful but invasive plants and trees introduced by humans might thrive etc. We have forest near us that has been thinned and some of it clear cut, but it still has sugi and red pine growing from seed on it all along the logging roads the forestry folk built.

Population is increasing looking at peaking around 2060. Birthrates have crashed pretty much everywhere since 2015. The UN numbers widely quoted have weird assumptions like birthrates recovering not due to societal factors but simply because the researcher in question thinks the fall they have seen is temporary.

Asked him about Noto and he said many of the contracts awarded to take the lions share that money and charity has been won by, let’s say, the more unsavory side of the construction business, ie the professional crims.

Likely the demolition work and almost certainly the "hand sort the debris into gomi categories" will be being performed by foreigners on those "special training programs".

The place is getting milked like a cow he reckons.

Yes, that is highly likely. But this is happening because the government will be paying for site clearance of houses that are hankai (=saveable but quite badly damaged) or worse. It will likely run to four million yen per house to the taxpayer. With labour shortages and a desperation to get a move on, it is highly likely "mizumashi" (bill padding) will be going on like crazy. General contractors may be doing the same for road repairs and other civil engineering, but yakuza types will more common for simpler stuff down the food chain, like demolition.

I know this because we lost an outbuilding in a different earthquake, it was Chinese people who did most of the clearup, and we didn't pay a penny for it.

Since the government is paying for site cleanup, once again, the government is certainly not "doing almost nothing" for the victims.

Compared to other earthquake victims, the people in Noto have received almost nothing from the government.

What evidence is there? I see new roads built on cliffs to bypass now unusable tunnels, I see lots of people being put up in hotels (with the taxpaying paying), I see lots of prefabs, some of which had the misfortune to flood in record rains last summer. Those prefabs cost at least six million yen each.

That is a million miles from getting, I quote, "almost nothing".

This is just Trump shooting his mouth again. The president needs emergency powers to make trade policy. There is no justification for them here.

If he somehow manages this, say hello to paying more for your morning coffee. I do not see how this will make Americans more prosperous.

Britain leaving the EU single market, not just the EU as a political entity has been the largest own goal in modern history. It was chosen by old people. The vast majority of under 65 wanted to stay in the EU economically if not also politically. Liz Truss, who could not outlast a lettuce, was chosen by the elderly membership of the Conservative Party. So much for the "wisdom" of old people.

90% of Japan's rice growers during Heisei at least were part timers. They only grow rice on the weekend or after work at another job. Planting and harvest aside, its mostly just little stuff like chucking on chemicals, managing the water level, and weedwhacking the borders. It is these people who dominate JA, not the guys with 180 hectares.

A part timer with two fields using machines to grow grain will be massively inefficient. JA is also set up for the little man, so no discount for volume buying and cheap delivery even if you only buy one bag of fertilizer.

The farmer in the story with 180 hectares is completely untypical. The average for rice farmers in Japan is 1.5.

Small scale grain production doesn't make money. It fails to achieve economies of scale for the use of machinery. It is happening naturally thanks to the aging population, but Japan needs more land to be farmed by fewer small scale growers. Small scale should be for niche things.

The big takeaway from the Clarkson's Farm TV show is that his (huge) farm does not make money and needs to do stuff to get subsidies that keep it going. It is the same in the US and the EU. You can only blame farmers for surviving on government support if such subsidies are promoting stuff that is inefficient or harmful to people, like high fructose corn sryup.

All "investments" in real estate are location dependent. Most akiya are in undesirable places, so most will not be good "investments".

Many of the best real estate buys in the countryside are not akiya. They have been recently occupied but are still going for peanuts. Building materials aren't cheap, your time and effort shouldn't be either, so you should use them on a good property, not the cheapest akiya you can find. We have a kominka and the key point with them is to visit many and buy the best one, not the third or fourth one Google has found for you on the Internet.

I don't know about how important IT is in commercial builds, but expect more labour shortages going forward.

For all the doom and gloom we hear about the economy, its good to know there is lots of demand for commercial buildings.