Alejandro S. Arashi comments

M3M3M3, you've got the pulse of the matter

To add info: it is usually said that getting Naturalized is easier than getting PR. The reason is that the PR system is handled by the nasty people at Immigration whose mission is to turn away people, while Naturalization is handled directly by a Justice Department section whose main mission is to welcome new Japanese citizens.

Good move. Almost came out of nowhere!

lol, amateurish, but funny.

Gaijinheiwa, the "70% of Japanese corporate entities are exempt from tax burden" you're talking about is a tax loss carry forward (http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Tax_loss_carryforward) and it's standard accounting procedure not limited to Japan. It's just a temporal distribution issue between profits, losses and taxes.

Neither is tax carry forwards related to cronyism.

While you're at it, cronyism has nothing to do with "the bad boys in biz" not folding when they "naturally" should. The real culprit is Japan's conglomerate system, where profits from one business (e.g. Sony Pictures) subsidise losses from another business (e.g. Sony TVs) so that businesses that would have folded were they stand alone entities continue to exist as zombie operations that are a drain to the conglomerate. This is the main reason why conglomerates in total have less value than their component businesses added together.

IT industry was never the topic, Uniqlo and Don Quijote was.

Wage growth is a % increase and wages are a ¥ amount.

Setting aside taxes and cost of living, at what percent South Korean wage growth am I willing to settle for a 5 Million Yen South Korea salary versus a 10 Million Yen Japan salary with about 2% expected salary increase yearly?

You can plug in specific cases' figures but that's the kind of trade off you'll be looking at.

The Japan Today article was talking about Uniqlo and Don Quijote, it wasn't talking about IT workers leaving Japan.

The IT industry in Japan is expansive and has its own dynamic separate from Uniqlo and Don Quijote. I'm in IT and I know for a fact that there are many opportunities in my part of the industry (finance), for people with the right experience, timing, temperament and language skills. Furthermore, from what I know of my industry, IT in Japan is paid a premium over Singapore and HK jobs of similar level. I would venture a guess Japan IT jobs are much better paid that South Korea's by orders of magnitudes. There are legion of Indian, Chinese and Southeast Asian IT engineers trying to crack the Japan IT market.

Wow. The connection is still tenuous but I would like to see this as initial proof of my theory that optimism and pesssimsm are powerful drivers of Japan's fertility rate, and that better future expectations will drive more Japanese to have children.

Japanese are polite people with very short attention spans.

People who don't live in Japan think all all this subtextual analysis is somehow meaningfully damaging to Japanese' self perception is in for a surprise: Japanese will have their laughs then go on to the next cool thing.

Japanese have no time and patience to feel insulted by anything you can throw at them.

I think that it's a shame that Japan doesn't do enough to promote democracy and the rule of law in China via supporting Tiananmen activists and Taiwan independence movement. Sometime in the future japan will look back at how shortsighted its human rights, democracy and rule of law policies towards Beijing were, and that this shortsightedness has decreased not increased Japan's security.

Clearly Japan is not "diplomatically isolated" as the usual fifty-centers in these pages would insist.

Most expats I know who've lived in Tokyo, HK ang SG say that Tokyo lifestyle is the most pleasant and convenient (outside of affordable maids and affordable international schools).

Most expats who leave Japan leave because their jpbs have been transferred (mostly to HK as it is easier to fire), they got promoted, or they're retiring to a country with cheaper price level (Thailand).

I agree with TumbleDry somewhat but there is a time for everything and now is probably the time for lawyers to protect herself, prevent RIKEN from just washing their hands if her, and creating enough yoyu space for her to be able to concentrate on phase 2: Prove (or disprove) that there really are STAP cells.

The joint statement is a very big thing.

Acknowledgment that TPP is not yet done but is moving forward is s big thing. We forget that the EPA with Australia dragged on interminably for 7 years, then got agreed all of a sudden.

The TPP will eventually get signed because the TPP is integral to both countries' hedging strategy against China. However, both sides need the "theatre" of tough negotiations to convince their domestic constituents.

Specifically, Japanese negotiators need to convince Japanese farmers that these negotiators fought tooth and nail for the Japan farm lobby, before throwing the same under the bus.

I hereby invent the term "historical terrorism" for these tactics of the Chinese Communist Party.

Civil suit, my foot!

This is just theatre, eventually Japan will get into TPP because both Japan and the US' China hedging strategy depends on it.

Japan's farmers already know that, eventually, they will be thrown under the bus. JA cooperatives have been busy trying to market their products abroad as high end produce. Farmers are also part of the group pushing for guest workers, deregulation to increase the size of agricultural plots, as well as being ready for the end of subsidies designed to decrease the acreage planted to rice. A little delay with the TPP actually benefits Japan so the above policies have more time to work.

In addition, gaiatsu has traditionally been the most mercenary way the government pushes unpalatable reforms. In terms of political optics, Abe wants it to look like he fought for the farmers till the very end, but gaiatsu was just too much so Japan eventually gave in.

Imperfect though Abenomics may be, the DPJ has still to put together a lucid and credible economic plan.

Lol@thunderbird

Oldman_13, you make so much sense.

Eventually people in South Korea will improve once they get more information from other sources.

China will improve once the CCP is overthrown and the whole of China becomes a giant Taiwan: A very pleasant, polite, prosperous, condiderate people to interact with.

Japan should learn how to divide China and South Korea.

Japan should change its formulation from "Takeshima is Japan's territory" to "Japan has a claim on Takeshima (Dokto in Korean) but the islands are effectively being controlled by South Korea".

Japanese textbooks and diplomats should take every opportunity to steer the topic away from who owns what into who is trying to use force to change what.

Personally, this is such a minor issue in the general scheme of South Korea-Japan relations.

Just give it a second English name or note than in Korea it is called something else.

Time to move on.

Both sides are just posturing to get the best possible deal, for their constituencies, and the best possible deal overall is where everyone is equally unhappy. This "theatre" is just to set those expectations.

Japan should continue on working on its strategic goal: a diversified source of baseload energy.

This would mean an efficient, effective and safe combination of nuclear, fossil and renewable energy sources.

This is very good news to countries in the frontline of Chinese bullying in the region.

First customer should be India buying US2 search and rescue sea planes. Next should be the Philippine Coast Guard for more orthodox ships, maybe an LCS and maybe a US2.

Finally, the bigger prize: Supply Taiwan and give the first ever Chinese democracy in 5,000 years a fighting chance to defend itself from Beijing's smothering embrace.

加油台湾。 我们爱台湾！

It would be a great PR coup if Japan were called on to host the World Cup in an emergency.

The Japanese have the physical and human facilities already in place, and are polite, dependable and systematic so probability of successful games can be maximized.

Whether other candidate countries are better than Japan I'll leave to others to discuss. But if push comes to shove and Japan ends up with an emergency mission, I'm sure it will deliver.

Japan would gain a lot from welcoming moslem tourists, and I have met a lot of moslem tourists who were fascinated enough to come back for another visit.

This is a problem even it happened in a Japanese only detention facility. Please investigate and get it sorted fast.

The real underlying issue is China using its historical education system to teach Japan-hate to its young people.

All this talk about world war 2 victims and historical revisionism ignores one very powerful counter example: The Philippines.

The Philippines was one of the worst affected countries in world war 2. It was the site of the Bataan Death March and hand to hand fighting between the Japanese and Filipino American forces resulted in Manila becoming the second most devastated city in world war 2, after Warsaw.

Yet Filipinos do not hate Japanese. Neither do Filipinos hate Americans who killed almost a quarter of all Filipinos during the Filipino American War at the turn of the 20th century.

The reason is that Filipinos do not teach historical hate to its children.

If you wanted to see an alternative reality of what would happen if China and South Korea stopped teaching historical hate to its children you have to look no further than The Philippines.