Alexander Miller comments

Actually when reading this I thought I remembered reading something in the news... yes here it is...

http://www.sponichi.co.jp/society/news/2012/09/09/kiji/K20120909004079770.html

Shikoku need not wait much longer.

It's ridiculous how much overlap there is right now. Since day one Hashimoto has been closing prefecture owned facilities that he saw as overlap or a general waste of money. He also cut wages of the thousands of komuin who work for the local government and told them to approach their work as if they were employees of a bankrupt company. For sure everyone will not agree with his decisions but it's hard to argue with how he brought Osaka from the brink of financial collapse to a balanced budget in such a short span. This is something that the national government will no doubt need to emulate unless Japan wants to be the next Greece.

Timeon - if it was really the Rose, you were tricked. Even at a cheap store, a Rose should cost 3 times that.

The problem is not the jet lagged tourists. There aren't that many of them. It sounds like a good idea but how many people are really up to a fish market in the middle of the night after flying halfway around the world? The problem is the drunkards who roll straight from Roppongi clubs to the fish market because there is nothing else to do. I saw some video of white guys riding on the back of forklifts and licking tuna. I was really embarassed to be associated with them.

TrappedNTokyo, do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Just look at "DJ Ozma" in the top right of that picture. Does he look like he wants "street cred"? He is a comedian. The guy is the lead singer of a band called Kishidan. He obviously got bored and created this alter ego called DJ OZMA which he has had fun with and will now retire. Look up his band Kishidan and you'll see that that band doesn't take itself very seriously either. So chill out.

I think Juliana's was more like 5 years before parapara. The place actually didn't even open until the end of the bubble era and closed well after the bubble had ended.

Moderator - so many Japanese words contain the English "S word", like the one I posted above. You might want to turn off the filtering feature for that word.

I live in Shinjuku about 10 minutes where this incident took place. I walk by the koban on the way to work everyday and am always observing new things about how the police act.

For the most part they are quite well behaved. They of course spend most of their time helping people find whatever store they are looking for on the map. However, after dark "shokumushi.t.sumon" - asking to see ID and searching bags is very common. They also stop people on bicycles constantly and check the registration numbers. This applies to Japanese as well. In fact 90% of the time I see this happening it is a Japanese person (which is about right for the population ratio).

It is not pleasent for anybody, and you have every right to question it, but it is the status quo and you should not feel hard done by because you were a foreigner or unlucky or whatever. Personally, if stopped (which I haven't been) I would definitely voice my discontent but I would not refuse to cooperate with police in Japan. I think you are quite lucky to have escaped without further punishment.

Let's not forget this though -

Drinking a diet cola is a big reduction over a regular one. If someone replaced a daily 500ml intake of Coke with one of Coke Zero this would save as many calories as about 20 minutes of good aerobic exercise.

Of course the exercise offers more health benefits, but I think it's hard to argue against switching to diet cola being productive in the diet of a cola drinker.

0.8 kcal per 100ml. That means you would have to drink something like 20 litres to equal a small bowl of rice! Maybe not fat, but definitely bloated!

I think this article is misleading, especially the picture included. The picture seems to indicate that Coke and Pepsi are offenders. But looking at the nutrition information on the back of this Japanese Coke Zero pet bottle, 0kcal is very clearly indicated. I can understand misleading names, but if Coca-Cola were lying in the nutrition information section this would be a very serious offence.