ThonTaddeo comments

These Dinii charlatans have both a "tip" (5000 yen) and an "Oshi yell" (3000 yen) added to a bill of 50,000 yen, which means a total tip of 16% of the bill. With the restaurant already adding 5000 yen (10%) as a "time charge" plus another 5000 (10%) as some kind of nebulous "service charge", they're really tag-teaming the customer here. What is that 10% "service charge" if not a built-in gratuity?

Stop devaluing the yen. It all began there. Bring back the stable prices of the 2000s and you will have a happy society again.

Hosaka hopes prices would stabilise around 3,000 to 3,500 yen - a level Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba also hopes would be palatable for voters.

What a colossal sense of entitlement from this guy. He, and the LDP, think the public should accept paying 70 to 100% more than rice cost just a few years ago! The LDP are out of touch with working people's expenses, but this farmer, who knows full well what the cost of living is like, just wants to gouge people!

@fallafel, the funding isn't given to anyone; it's competitive. Not as much as it once was, given the decline in the number of postgrad-age people in Japan, but then again, the subsidy itself is much smaller than it was a generation ago.

As a former postgrad student here (not on this scholarship; I worked and paid my own way), I'm disappointed to see this development. Attracting foreign researchers to attain their doctorates here can be a huge boon to Japan if they stay here and continue working and researching at Japanese institutions. And if they arrived after completing undergraduate education, Japan gets their talents without any of the expenses that normally come with raising and educating someone up to that age!

It also prevents researchers who are already living in Japan and paying taxes from being eligible simply because of their nationality - to say nothing of zainichi people born and raised in Japan to foreign parents. Just a shortsighted move all around.

I often wonder why seemingly the vast majority of TV dramas set themselves in Tokyo when there's an entire country to make use of, full of cities large and small that would love to take pride in a major piece of media being set there. Is it just because all the studios are based in Tokyo and it's easy and cheap to film there?

@Hope, indeed, today's woes really began back then. Until 2012 (and even for a few years after, before the yen really began to plummet), Japan's economy was ideal for working people. Steady prices so your wages bought the essentials of life without worries; housing was very reasonably priced, unlike in many countries. If you were older or disabled or otherwise without a lot of leverage in the job market, and couldn't expect your pay to rise, you could still count on that wage keeping you afloat.

Then the indebted government, run by politicians who have no idea how the working class lives, decided to monetize their massive debt at the people's expense, knowing that they'd get what we're now seeing. But those people are insulated from inflation, so they don't care.

I love Ito En's green tea, particularly the "strong" (濃い) type, and would probably drink it regularly if I returned to the US and if its price were not too high. I've seen it there for $1.60 per half-liter bottle, which is more than a two-liter bottle costs in Japan, even after multiple recent price hikes. Here you could get 2 liters for 132 yen and now it's 170 at best; often more.

Sell two-liter bottles for the Japanese price of $1.20, like flagship soda brands do, and people will drink it. As it is now, people who love it are stuck paying the price of a 2-liter bottle of sugary soda just to get half a liter of healthy green tea.

"Nominal" right there in the headline; practically screaming that they will use inflation to make the GDP number go up while making the people who actually earn all that money poorer. These people are absolutely shameless.

Ishiba said that while giving priority to ensuring that wage growth consistently outpaces inflation, his Liberal Democratic Party will seek to achieve an over 50 percent increase in average income in the same time frame.

So, cumulative inflation of 49.9% over the next 15 years? And that 50% increase in income won't be evenly distributed. It'll be the upper echelons of society getting it all while those without the leverage to demand higher wages (the under-educated, the disabled; the "ice age generation" who will be approaching retirement age) keep on getting hammered by inflation and seeing their quality of life plummet.

All by design.

There's something to be said for economic stagnation of the 90s-00s-10s. Prices were stable.

I completely agree; life was far better for the bottom 90% of society than it is now. Other commenters were saying that Japanese customers were 'spoiled' by not having their government devalue their currency and their corporations greedily raise prices for years. I think 'spoiled' is the wrong word -- that's how a developed society that takes care of its people should be: stable, steady prices and affordable goods for all classes, with no danger of falling behind if you're at the mercy of what your employer pays you. The rich were still rich, but everyone else wasn't becoming poor.

Japan was a more prosperous, and fairer, society for those decades. Now we're back to the top X% living well and telling everyone else it's their own fault they're falling behind while the government and corporations are the ones making them poorer.

I know of several mid to large companies that changed their policies and basically forced employees to sign new employment agreements that reduces their salaries after they reach 50 unless if they don't reach at least a certain level in the upper management.

I've seen this as well. Another wrinkle is when a company offers a pension that stops accumulating years of service after a number of years unless the employee reaches upper management; my employer does this. It's another side of the multifaceted squeeze of this generation.

Jack Welch-style stack/forced ranking is now much more common than it was in the past, and we're seeing this bifurcation between people on the upward track and those who get pushed out. When today's seniors were young and middle-aged, this wasn't normal; companies took care of the people who devoted themselves to their jobs. Now we have a generation who put all the work in -- often having to try a lot harder just to get a job than their elders ever did -- but is for the most part getting tossed aside and impoverished.

It's been so long since a Canadian team won a Stanley Cup, and the Oilers haven't done it since Wayne Gretzky was playing for them 40 years ago. How great would it be for Edmonton if their team could finally win it again?

This generation (of which I am a member) is getting absolutely shafted from all directions, particularly by the LDP and government. Born too late to make money in the bubble era, but early enough that older generations who didn't grasp the new economic reality accused them of just not trying hard enough, and now too old to have much bargaining power as their salaries get destroyed by inflation and young fresh graduates are making as much fresh out of school as these 20/30-year veterans worked all those years to earn. You could see this coming more than a decade ago when the government pledged to devalue the yen and support big exporters at the expense of working-class savers. And now a generation that should be in its prime earning years is instead trying desperately to avoid poverty.

We all do with our taxes, 62 million yen divided by around 100 million people paying taxes mean everybody paid 0.62 yen for this problem in September.

So seven yen per person per year, a trivial amount, but the media sees yet another chance to drum up anti-tourist sentiments.

Japan's fixed prices for medical treatment (of which we insured people pay 30%) are already reasonable even when it's a non-participant paying the full 100%. Have them pay before they leave the hospital. Most tourists are going to have credit cards; charge them.

If they're going to enforce all these rules against bicyclists, they at least have to enforce the rules that govern cars. Next time you see a bicyclist on the sidewalk, look over to the road next to them: I guarantee you'll see at least one parked car (maybe with hazard lights, maybe without) taking over the bike lane and preventing cyclists from riding where they're supposed to.

For years the LDP tried to bamboozle the public into thinking that inflation was somehow good for working people -- remember the "while deflation makes goods cheaper, it causes consumers to postpone purchases" line trotted out by LDP shills in article after article during the Abe administration?

Now we're seeing what was probably the plan all along: have inflation swallow up all the working people's productivity gains while the value of the massive government debt goes down as the people (working harder than ever) see their wages fail to keep up the rising prices that were engineered by a government that us supposed to be serving them. And it's a double whammy for anyone without the "marketability" to demand a raise or change jobs, as we're seeing with the big raises given to Gen Z fresh graduates by some companies while people 10, 20, 30 years older than they are are making less.

@Aly - agreed. The impoverishment of Japan's working class (and enrichment of the elites) really got into high gear when Abe got elected and committed himself to inflation and to devaluing the yen. People weren't suffering back in 2011 when consumer prices were stable and the yen bought a lot!

The price of the Japanese staple has roughly doubled from a year earlier,

You know what else has doubled recently, Mr. Ishiba? The consumption tax. Somehow your government got by with taking 5% on top of everything we bought until a few years ago when suddenly you needed 8% and now 10%. And yet somehow we can't even go back to the consumption tax rate of the 2000s and early 2010s?

"I believe rice prices should be in the 3,000 yen range

You believe rice should cost 50% more than it did just a few years ago? Do you have any idea at all about what it's like to be a working wage earner?

a tax cut for food items would be universal, benefiting high-income earners, he said.

Well, yes, it would benefit high-income earners, but it would benefit the working class more, because working folks spend a greater portion of their income on essentials like food. Without food, living things die. Taxing food means forcing people to pay the government just to remain alive. If there's one thing that is absolutely immoral to tax, it's food. And yet the LDP just keeps raising and raising and raising that tax.

I appreciate the new laws that require full-time employees to take at least 5 days of leave each year. I'd rather see a greater cultural acceptance of taking time off when one needs it rather than the entire nation taking off at the same time, sending prices for anything relating to travel skyward while also leaving underprivileged service workers laboring harder than usual to support them.

The latest kick in the teeth for the lost, or "ice age" generation, is coming right now as corporations, flush with earnings in devalued yen, are raising pay for fresh graduates but not for senior non-management employees. I've been seeing stories on the news of big corporations paying 320, 340, 360k yen per month to new grads while interviewees on the street in their 40s and 50s lament how they're not even making that much now after two or three decades of diligent labor and upskilling.

At least when the Lost Generation was poorer than their coddled Bubble elders 20 years ago, it was only an exacerbation of the "old rich, young poor" divide that many societies have; now they're getting the short end of the stick both in their youth and in their middle age.

Police said Kawazu has admitted to the allegation and quoted him as saying “She was my type."

WTF???

@Aly - I'm sure Kawazu didn't spontaneously say something this ridiculous, even if he is a molester who can't control his urges. It was probably a confession that the police had prepared for him and made him sign.

平和堂。Peace Party.

Very small correction, but it should be 平和党 (Heiwa-tō), not 平和堂 (Heiwa-dō), which is a supermarket chain in Kansai. But seeing Heiwadō , I think society would be better off with her behind a cash register at a Heiwadō supermarket than trying to enter politics.

Everybody is bashing this guy, but the article doesn't say what kind of document the man was looking for and only implies that it's something about an American passport. What if the document is something for his dual-citizen child (proof of birth in Japan, perhaps, or proof of residence in Iwakuni) that he needs to submit to the US embassy to get his child's passport? Something that no single-nationality Japanese person would need, so the City Hall staff had no idea how to handle?

most of the right leaning people are just crying that they had to stay home and actually let some poor people have some money for once

I'm a little confused by this line. Worldwide government responses to the pandemic have been harder financially on the poor than anyone else: catastrophic inflation plus job losses hit them the hardest. The whole situation has been a giant funneling of wealth from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich.

"Mr. Baseball" in the '90s was pretty good. Real ballparks, lots of references to things that really happened in Japanese baseball history.

Gold medalists Utana Yoshida, left, and Masaya Morita

Isn't Utana the woman on the right?

Moderator: Correct. Thanks for pointing that out.

I almost never see soon-to-expire food selling for less than half the sticker price, even if there are only hours left before that date. Let stores recover something from it; even 80% off is better than throwing it away!

Also I'd like to see the public understand that 賞味期限 (the date by which the taste is guaranteed) is not the same thing as 消費期限 (the date by which something should be consumed), and that you can still eat things the day after the best-by *shōmikigen.*

We close the lid before flushing. No sense in having bacteria flying all over the place and breathing it in when you flush.

I agree on the irreverent tone, and this line in particular stands out:

Fortunately, only the two pedestrians and the motorcyclist suffered injuries and none of them appeared to be severe.

Sure, only the people who weren't protected by the metal armor of an automobile were injured! How "fortunate"! Let's not think about the nightmares and flashbacks they might endure following being hit by a reckless automobile driver.

I would feel differently about the tone if she hadn't hit any human beings with her car and had just run into a pole or ditch. As it is, it's a little insensitive.

I bought Microsoft Office 2008 during my grad school days for a nice cheap price and don't ever want to lose it in favor of some subscription-based nonsense. I'm actually holding off on updating my Mac past OS 10.11 just because I like using the Word and Excel I paid for.