kohakuebisu comments

I agree with the above comment that the article lacks information and more importantly, any interesting photographs that might encourage us to buy the book. With tourism thriving to Japan, it would be nice to see a revival in publishing about Japan. I have a lot of coffee table books (by Tuttle, Kodansha etc) about Japan and Japanese culture, but most of them are out of print and date from twenty-thirty years ago when there were hardly any tourists.

The guy met her in person and could DM her, so there is a high chance she has led him on.

Her ranking on the livestreaming app corresponds to at least one million yen a month, so she could have paid him something back as demanded by the civil court. It sounds like such courts are powerless in reality.

I do not condone what he's done, but I doubt he'll get life for this. It'll be manslaughter or similar.

Like the Guru, I was expecting things like no more water dispenser with bottled water, a sudden change in coffee that now tastes like dishwater, pork shabu shabu at the bonenkai, various irate customers turning up and berating the secretary who claims the boss is out and not hiding in a cupboard, stuff like that. Not sexual harrassment.

I'd like to see him get off the plane, blind drunk and start abusing people.

You know, like a real star would.

Legend has it that the record for most beers on a flight between the UK and Australia is held by Aussie cricketer David Boon. He downed 54!

I know baseball players are now on eleventy billion dollars, but a free bar is a free bar. It's MOTTAINAI to not indulge.

This is one the Japanese media won’t be talking about for long

Yes, only three short paragraphs.

Foreigners doing this in Japan would get at least ten paragraphs from Sora News!

I presume a Japanese company could come up with a form of online gambling Japanese would like if it were legal. Japanese tv, pop music, video games, etc. are all popular. Japan is not very reliant on foreigners for entertainment. Therefore the idea that online gambling is illegal because Japanese elites wouldn't benefit from it is dubious.

I fully support online gambling being illegal. Society does not improve when mothers and fathers sit at the dining table gambling away the family budget in front of their children. The damage from extra gambling will vastly outweigh any benefit from it. Since lots of wrongs don't make a right, I woudn't be opposed to shutting down pachinko etc. either.

I'm time and cash poor at the moment, but if I can rectify them, I'd be up for going. We went to the Nagoya Expo when my missus was pregnant with our first child, and it would be nice to go again with the kids to complete the circle.

I'm actually a total sucker for science-fiction type depiction of future utopias. The Crystal Palace in Victorian Britain or the Epcot things at Disney World. That song "I.G.Y" by Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, its a nostaglic look at 1950s techno optimism, makes me want to cry when I hear it. Not many songs or forms of nostalgia do this.

What a beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free

It's disappointing to see a full EU member, Hungary, fail this woman so badly.

It's arguable the extent to which the Japanese embassy failed her too, but they only enter the picture due to the failures of another first world country to protect a woman's safety. Embassies don't have to ability to investigate whether DV allegations are true, making this a tricky subject. fwiw, I wouldn't be surprised if the UK embassy in Japan has no passport issuing ability, especially for children whose existence might be news to them. You have to send ordinary passport applications and renewals to the UK itself.

Lots of rest areas on the expressways have signs moaning about the amount of garbage they have to collect.

The fact that everyone has to pay big to use the expressways, several of which should now be free according to the original law that built them, doesn't seem to matter. Some of the garbage is from people buying drinks and other stuff at the rest areas themselves.

But the rise in nominal wages was outpaced by a 4.7 percent increase in consumer prices used for the salary data, according to the labor ministry.

If you consider food prices, inflation is probably higher, but I seem to recall other articles quoting other government inflation numbers that are (much) lower than 4.7%.

I've kind of given up on seeing any big picture from published salary info in Japan, since half the time it only refers to seishain. However, as someone who has gained wealth through wages and not investments, I reckon that doing this is now increasingly difficult for the next generation. They get much lower wages in real terms, as suggested in the article.

Fwiw, the families of five mentioned above, assuming the kids are 12, 10, 8, 6 and 3, would get 110,000 a month in child benefit. It's now 30,000 a month for the third and later children. You now get 10,000 a month child benefit for kids in SHS. Until 2024, it stopped at JHS. If one of the kids is a baby, the family would get slightly more.

Hyperloop self-contained, not open air, thus no public access,

The Shinkansen is ugly enough as a 1000km long concrete bridge. It would be even uglier if enclosed. Passengers would also have no windows to look out of, so grim to ride. This is what awaits with the linear one.

As far as I am aware, the Shinkansen only has "public access" for trespassers, such as those who've entered an emergency staircase. You cannot close off access completely, due to earthquake risk for starters.

Anyone 50 or older will likely remember their family's car having lots of dead bugs on its windscreen/windshield. This hardly happens any more.

I doubt its a very well funded segment of research, but what has been done has found the same.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

Isn't it a "satchel"? The Wiki entry for "satchel" shows German kids carrying something very randoseru like on their backs.

I have faint memories of "randoseru" being a loanword from Dutch.

Diversity cuts both ways. It is both "recognize me and how I'm different" and "I'll recognize all of you and how you're different".

The article doesn't specifically mention it, but it should be obvious that being among petite women (and men) could cause self-confidence issues for physically larger western women in Japan. Just as being short and skinny can cause inadequancy issues for young men in Western countries. It can be pretty bad being a man too. Or modern Korean beauty standards causing Korean women to turn to plastic surgery and huge spends on makeup. Since modern consumer society runs on people buying goods and services, the message it tells people is "you need this to make yourself better". It does not want people to have self-esteem, because those who do are less likely to buy things.

Women are disadvantaged in Japan, but I wouldn't judge it on the number of CEOs or female MPs. It is clear that other women make little effort to vote for female candidates. What matters is life for millions of ordinary women, not how well the small female elite do vs. the small male elite.

One obvious barrier to female activity in the workplace is spousal dependency under shakai hoken. It means SOH and part time working married women get a free pension so long as they do not earn too much. This free pension is funded by full time workers, including full time working women, who may be single or married. Since female life expectancy is 88, the average housewife can get close to 20 million yen (23 years x 800,000 a year) funded by someone else. The idea of ending spousal dependency has been suggested, but would be extremely unpopular, especially with older women whose husbands are more likely to be on shakai hoken giving them the free pension.

I like Japan and Japanese people but some Japanese people online can be remarkably nasty.

Every day on Japanese roads, literally millions of Japanese will stop their cars to give way to cars that do not have the right of way. This can cause confusion and potential accidents, but is essentially just people being nice to each other. To placate nasty people online, perhaps we could get Elon Musk to build a space laser to instantly evaporate any car that ignores the rules of the road in this way. An extra powerful one could be used on people breaking the rules to help others.

Major General Curtis LeMay famously said, “If we lose, we'll be tried as war criminals” in reference to the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II.

McNamara, who did USAF management and logistics, was happy enough to admit the same direct to camera in The Fog of War documentary. This will probably be downvoted like the above comment, because some people don't like the truth.

The humane response to this anniversary would be recognize how terrible bombing is and stop the bombing of Gaza.

This will not happen, because the people in charge are not humane.

how Japan entered the war.

Yes, by a false flag attack by Japanese themselves in Manchuria. The "Incident" seems to have been two officers' idea, not authorized by the army, to say nothing of entire military (there was big rivalry with the navy) or the government, but only happened because Japan had troops there in the first place. From 1928 or whenever it was.

The yen is up 6% in forty odd days since Trump took office. The way things are going he'll have Japanese stuff 20% more expensive in the US by summer without tariffs.

This is clearly the Asian century. Japan increasingly does not need the US and should turn to its neighbours.

As pointed out, other countries too are facing drastic fall in demography so it is not concerning Japan only. Hence my above more general factors expressed.

Seducing women and having kids shall be well considered, not despised by society.

Yes, essentially the more "modern" a country is, the lower its birthrate. Japan got to modernity/the future earlier than many other countries, but they've all caught up and overtaken Japan, which shouldn't be surprising given Japan's socially conservative (e.g., I want to be a housewife") underbelly.

I am a strong believer in work to live, not live to work. While I have a successful one, I am not especially proud of my "career" and see the word as a mirage. Few jobs in society would be worth doing every day for free, my own job included. People raise their own children for free because its worth it. People, here women, should not base their self worth on something they need to be paid to do. There are much better forms of validation.

How much do you want to bet that Musk sends a bill to the government to pay for it?

Coincidentally or not, this popped up on my twitter a couple of days ago. It sounds like it is standard procedure for the government to pick up the tab for space junk. While I say "standard procedure", this is not something they tell you about, and many would disagree with it.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-dropped-space-junk-on-my-neighbors-farm-heres-what-happened-next/

Performative cruelty in the name of discipline once again.

"Mr. Baseball" in the '90s was pretty good.

Underrated film. Also very funny.

The device measures 114 centimeters in width, 109.3 cm in height and 65 cm in depth

I would have guessed two meters high from photo. The boxes in the middle with the controls must be very small, much smaller than audio equipment, for example.

If I bought one, I'd have the world's most accurate clock, but would still misread the tiny characters on the display and struggle with the fiddly little knobs.

Lammy has to be the most dense Foreign Secretary in the history of the UK.

Most of the Labour cabinet, including Starmer, should be in the Tory party. They are thick enough, corrupt enough, and have the same principals.

The lack of people standing up for ordinary folks pushes them toward Reform. Just as the same in the US pushed people toward Trump.

People who have the means to pay rent shouldn't be forced into engaging in subterfuge in order to find a place to live. 

Just based on my experiences with two of our kids recently, but when renting small/old studio apartments, we had to buy "pay the rent" insurance. If occupied during the contract period, the landlord will get the rent paid. It is not a case of whether you "have the means" or whether your "have the means" is fraudlently demostrated through fake documentation.

Landlords now also automatically get a cleaning fee regardless of how spotless you leave the apartment. I used to hear people boast about deep cleaning their apartments and getting their entire deposit back (basically to blame anyone whose (not as nice) landlord had withheld money for any reason), but this is now impossible. You are contract bound to pay a high cleaning fee even if you don't actually move in.

Actually they showed this on the news the other night. It was a little sad and unsettling to see an elderly woman eating this for dinner as a substitute for expensive rice. But she said it was tasty.

Yep, Jagarico shouldn’t be your main carb!

Our youngest loves these, so we're going to try this. They taste too oily for me normally, so I'm sure heat will improve them. I much prefer Pote-Long, which hit a weird nostalgia note for something I ate in the UK as a kid.

Also they used yo have reasonably priced products from abroad

You can say the same about Costco Japan. Its the result of having a weak currency. The frozen tilipia fillets, great for fish'n'chips, used to be 1300 yen. They're now 2800. The bulgogi bake, a big and super tasty philly cheesesteak style bread-shaped calzone thing, used to be 400 but is now 880.

The price of plain udon has over doubled in ten years, from 17 yen or so to 40 to 50, so its not just imported items.