Darren White comments

That's really messed up ...

... I'm surprised that people who watch commercial Japanese TV noticed the repetition ; most of it seems to be on an endless loop of about 4 programmes anyway.

The bids are up to US$70m ... That's 6 billion yen !

People in Tokyo are that little bit more selfish, which is why it was really important to stop the press creating hysteria and panic. After hearing stories about people wasting bottled water on things like washing dishes (wtf?) it wouldn't surprise me if there were some people buying bottled water for their pets and not thinking about the people who need it most.

As I have a 4-month-old baby, I'm really grateful that a lot of shops placed limits on how much water each person could buy and local authorities responded very quickly to supply water to mothers, even though the risk was miniscule. There is a very strong group mentality in Japan, but people, especially in cities, often forget which groups they belong to when no-one is watching. Those AC commercials have been really annoying, but very effective in reminding the Japanese who they are ; on the whole kind and considerate ; it's just that they sometimes forget.

Good ...

Japanese fans may be interested in something fresh and sophisticated

Yeah, cutting-edge music like Mr Big, right ?

I also think that major factors are that people drink so~~ much coffee here during the day to keep up that frenetic "I'm so busy !" appearance that they have major caffeine crashes later on.

Then they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time watching brainless late-night tv when they could be getting a good night's sleep.

Sounds like someone doesn't know the difference between causation and correlation.

Isn't it because only fat people drink diet sodas ?

Hang on, the Prime Minister of Japan led a large "rally" ? Aren't rallies usually for people who don't have any real diplomatic power ? .... oh

Doesn't he mean Budō, or is is a book about grapes ?

I think that they will take years, make a lot of lawyers very rich, and eventually be settled amicably with cross-licensing agreements. It's the nature of modern technology.

A suspended sentence ??

I hate the double standards, where airlines are extremely stringent with baggage allowances, but not with body weight. You get the occasional passengers who have the equivalent of a couple of extra suitcases in subcutaneous fat around their body.

The best set-up would be to weigh everyone during the security check ; it's less of an invasion of privacy than full body scans, and the machines could probably be re-calibrated to also measure body fat. Overweight passengers would be made to pay an excess fee, and then be herded into a special "economy plus" section.

Another alternative would be to check a passenger's width, similar to the way they check the minimum height for rides at amusement parks. All passengers would have to crawl through a tube of some sort. An added bonus is that they might lose a bit of weight during the process.

The flight attendants should also have to go through this as some of them are jumbo-size, and you often get hit with their large behinds if you are sitting in the aisle seat on flights on US airlines ..

Wow ! This picture doesn't look staged at all ...

"..but how we should put this into shape hereafter will be fully discussed’’

... kind of sums up the majority of things that Japanese politicians say.

"countries such as the United States and Europe" ... I didn't realise that Europe was a country ..

"the premier" ... Japan has a prime minister.

Did a child write this ?

alcohol

Hey, why the long face ?

@kyoken

I find myself increasingly avoiding the comments section of the major U.S. papers I read online I do the same with JT recently.

With you there ....

easy-to-use, and intuitive

... not a phrase that I'd usually associate with recent Japanese hardware.

Can somebody explain - what does Paris Hilton actually do ?

Betsu ni ...

@Limbo in Japan

Has anyone actually read the article?

Judging from the comments on here it looks like a lot of people tend to read the headline, skip to the last paragraph, then cherry pick the "middle bit" to suit their opinions.

Somebody please go to the conbini and get Miss Japan a sandwich ...

I've seen more meat on a butcher's pencil

What, there are people still using fax machines ??

Very good article ! It's nice to know about anyone in Japan with any concept of "artistic integrity" as they seem to be very few and far between.

Well of course they don't work ... the problem in Japan is that there are very lax advertising standards, allowing marketing companies to make unsubstantiated claims, and the majority of Japanese, bless 'em, believe just about anything that they read or see in the media.

Every couple of months there's some new fad diet - natto, bananas etc, that is ultimately discredited, but people keep falling for the same con over and over again ...

eat less / move more : It's not rocket science ...

Legend !

I don't think that it actually means "half Japanese" ...

I used to really hate the term, but realised that the fact that they say "quarter" for someone with a gaijin grandparent means that it's "half gaijin", right ?

I think that it does annoy some people because it sounds a bit like "half-caste", and other old-fashioned casual-racist terms in English from less enlightened times.

I'm sure I've read somewhere that ハーフ is on a list of words that are banned from broadcast on NHK, but I asked my (mixed race) son about it a while back, and he doesn't really care - it's just an easy way to explain because most Japanese don't really understand the concepts of multiculturalism / multinationalism bless 'em. C'mon, they still believe all of that rubbish about blood types, and their world geography is shocking anyway ...

Wow ! Okada's smiling ...

Eating competitions are disgusting and this guy is childish. Resisting arrest with the yank cops, he's lucky he wasn't tazered.